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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

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.

Google is debuing their new much-anticipated Gbuy system today which has been refered to as the PayPal killer. Gbuy is Googles attempt to create an online wallet to save you time from entering the same finacial information into multiple websites.

Is this anything new?
10 years ago Microsoft created a simplified system called MS Wallet and you also have this ability with the Google toolbar so I have to ask, what is new about Gbuy??? The press seems to get their panties in a twist any time Google launches a new service, but will Gbuy really make a difference?

I am watching Gbuy with a close eye, but as of now I see no reason to celebrate this new “revolutionary” system.

This is a very good question that one of our readers asked us to address. Website speed is an important factor to not only SEO, but to increasing conversions.

When SE spiders come to your site to index it’s content they typically have a very limited amount of time to index your website. The faster your server response time the more information the spiders will get. One way around this for Google is to use the Google Sitemaps utility. Google Sitemaps is an XML file that you place on your server that tells Google where all of you pages can be found and how often they are updated. I suspect the other major SE’s are working on something similar, but we will have to wait.

Buyer conversion rates can also be affected dramatically by the speed of your server. The longer your website takes to process pages the longer your clients have to change their minds about making a purchase with you.

How do I find out what my speed is?
An easy way to see how well your server ranks in comparison to all other servers is through the Alexa Toolbar. Using the toolbar anyone can click on the more info button to read some interesting statistics on their website.

Comit Hosting is an affordable way to increase your websites visibility. Our servers are in the top 10% in terms of server speed and are SEO Certified!

Good Luck,
Spencer Hoyt

Keeping up with the ever changing Search Engines is one of the key challenges that every SEO professional must endure. In the quest to have the most relevant search results and the largest market share every search engine is always tweaking their algorithms.

You can spend over 80 hours a week studying these algorithms or you can just read the Google Blog. Google does a great job at keeping the general public informed about the changes at Google. I recommend that you visit their blog at least once a week to read the latest changes. If that doesn’t convince you also consider that Google has put together a great list of personal blogs that they are reading.

Give it a try!
Spencer Hoyt