spencerhoyt.com

Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving) is geared up to be one of the busiest online shopping days of the year. Google is trying to capitalize on this by offering rebates to users of Google Checkout.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=685

Understanding the services offered by Google is essential in running a successful website today. While Google commands a 60% search market share, this could be considered insignificant when you factor all of the other services offered by Google. While this list is not complete, it is a snapshot to some of the services that Google offers that any successful website must know about.
Google Services

• Adwords: Googles Pay Per Click system that drives instantaneous traffic to a website for a fee.
• Adsense: One of the many ways to monetize your websites traffic. These non intrusive ads have been proven to be one of the highest converting ad systems on the Internet.
• Sitemaps: Free service offers by Google to submit your websites pages to the search engine robots.
• Analytics: Free website reporting and analytics software used to understand where your websites traffic comes from and how they interact with your website.
• Froogle: Used for submitting your products or services into Googles price comparison search engine.
• Maps: Great resource for giving your websites visitors a way to find your physical location.
• Alerts: Easily be kept up to date with the latest trends and news in your industry.
• Checkout: Streamlined way to accept and process orders from your website. This system has no processing fees to AdWords users.
• Local: Offers new ways for potential visitors to search for your products and services locally.
• Many More…

Overwhelmed?
Sometimes it may seem a bit overwhelming to master all of these services, but it is a must in today’s business environment.

Good Luck,
Spencer

I found this on Tech Dirt today and it helps to emphasize why we believe in building 508 compliant websites.

Google today released Accessible Search, a Google Labs product aiming to rank higher pages which are optimized for blind users. Google asks you to adhere to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines if you want to make sure your pages are accessible (and thus, rank better on Google Accessible Search). I wrote a small tool to compare results of default and accessible results.”

I am traveling to Costa Rica next month for a week long and well deserved vacation. Over the last year and a half I have not traveled much due to the growing web presence of Comit Technologies, but I have finally found time to get way. As I plan my trip I can’t help but think of al the SEO possibilities in Costa Rica and I am afraid that my trip might turn into a working vacation.
My latest idea is to create a national database for Costa Rican Real Estate. CR does not have a centralized MLS service and my experience with real estate websites has me thinking that I could have one up and running in a matter of a week or so. Thus Costa Rican MLS was created.
I guess I won’t get much down time

Happy Friday Everybody!

It’s hard these days to talk about Google without bringing up something negative. In the last 4 months since the Big Daddy update Google has been scrambling to fix numerous problems. Well they did it again!

Barry Schwartz is reporting that Google is revealing some of their spam info in the cached versions of their results see below:

pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761
cpu-utilization 1.28
cpu-speed 2800000000
timedout-queries_total 14227
num-docinfo_total 10680907
avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552
num-docinfo_total 10680907
num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918
queries_total 1229799558
e_supplemental=150000 –pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100 –pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500 –parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 –pass_country_to_leaves –phil_max_doc_activation=0.5 –port_base=32311 –production –rewrite_noncompositional_compounds –rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers –scale_prvec4_to_prvec –sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors –servlets=ascorer –supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors –threaded_logging –nouse_compressed_urls –use_domain_match –nouse_experimental_indyrank –use_experimental_spamscore –use_gwd –use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg”

This is an excelent way to help understand how ranking actually takes place.