Google… one of the Internets MOST powerful search engines recently announced a new FREE service that makes it easier for you to improve your websites coverage within Googles index through its NEW collaborative crawling system.

On the down side though, Google does not ‘Guarantee’ immediate inclusion, But, is still good news for those of you who have just finished building a website and are ready to submit to the top search engines.

So, what’s this NEW service called that Google just released?

It’s called “Google Sitemaps”.

The real cool thing about “Google Sitemaps” IS it accepts RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds with the .XML extension as one of the accepted formats for submitting your websites Sitemap for inclusion in Googles index.

This is just one of the four formats Google accepts and is the one that I’m going to use for the rest of this article to show you how to generate your own .XML sitemap of your website for inclusion in Google.

It’s real easy to do so don’t worry about it being to complicated.

So, with that said, lets go to Step #1.

Step #1. Sign up for “Google Sitemaps”.

This step is easy, simply follow the link provide below and sign up for a Free account. It should only take you a few minutes to do, then once your done, come back here and go to Step #2.

Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Step #2. Generate your .XML sitemap.

In this step your going to generate a .XML sitemap for your website using a Free online sitemap generator.

This Free online generator will build you a sitemap up to 500 pages. If you have a larger website with thousands of webpages you’ll have to use a paid service and/or software to generate yours.

Go to: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Enter your required information on the form provided.

Step #3. Upload your generated .XML sitemap to your server.

Once your generated sitemap is finished(your generated .XML file should be called site.xml.gz) it’s now time to upload it to your server using your FTP(File Transfer Protocol) program.

This is very important that you do this before submitting it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion.

Step #4. Submit your NEW .XML sitemap to “Google Sitemaps”.

Now that you have generated your “Sitemap” for your website and uploaded it to your server all you have to do now is to go to “Google Sitemaps” and submit your sitemap URL.

(ex. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz)

That’s it.

Now, depending on Google, your sitemap should get downloaded within the next 24 hours, so be sure to check and see that it did and that there wasn’t any problems or errors.

Also, your going to want to be able to track your indexed webpages within the search engines, especially Google, so you can see how things are going, so I’ll leave you with one last resource that will do this for you.

Go to: http://www.uptimebot.com

All you have to do is enter your URL and click “GO”.

The results page will list the results from Google and 9 other popular search engines.

Well, there you have it… “4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles ‘Back Door’”.

Google has begun to roll out its “Interest Based” advertising engine (starting from March 11 2009). The new system aims to provide what Google calls “more interesting ads”.

AdSense Driven by Immediate Interest

AdSense Google’s current advert delivery system serves adverts on Google and its partner sites (Google’s Content Network). AdSense ads are flighted based on a surfer’s immediate interest. Google guesses the browser’s immediate interest based on the content of the current page being viewed.

Thus if you happen to be browsing a home improvements site and you land on a page that explains how to use a power drill, AdSense will display adverts with products and services based on home improvements and maybe even drills on special offer. This guesswork has a good chance of being correct.

But immediate interest is not abiding interest. Our surfer could be a lady executive looking to buy her husband a new drill for Christmas and the drill is only her very brief and immediate interest.

Interest Based Advertising Targets Your Abiding Interests

Core to the way the new system works is a profile of your interests. Google builds up your personal profile over time. Your profile is based on the kind of sites you regularly visit. Google then shows you ads based on your profile. This is called behavioural targeting.

Your profile is available to you at any time. Go to www.google.com/ ads/preferences to view your personal profile. You can also adjust your profile, by adding or removing areas of interest. You can also choose to opt out of having ads shown to you based on your previous browsing experiences.

This type of behavioural targeting advertising will give advertisers the capability to deliver ads that are filtered by various interest categories. Google has developed a web site that allows advertisers to login and manage their Interest Based ad campaigns.

How It Works

Let’s say you are a keen cyclist. Google’s engine will over time be well aware of your cycling interests, because you often visit sites like Cycling News and Cycling Today and Tour de France results etc. So not only will Google know that you are interested in cycling but it will probably be specific enough to know that you are a road cycling person and not at all interested in mountain biking.

Thus when your surf the net Google will consult your behavioural history and try to show you cycling based ads even when you are not browsing a cycling site.

Choice is Yours

Google Says You Have Choice and Control. This means that you can go the preferences link (above) and add or adjust your preferences using Ads Preferences Manager. You can also opt out of the system altogether.

Opinion

The way the system has been implemented seem quite fair to me. I suppose that many observers will get upset by some perceived invasion of privacy issues. No other behavioural advertising systems allow you to view the data assembled about you. Nor is there one that goes so far as to provide tools for you to adjust how it interacts with you or and even allows for you to opt out completely.

I would be surprised if the system does not quickly become something we are very comfortable and familiar with. A system that we end up relying on to deliver us interesting offers and products that we would normally have missed out on.

References:
Official Google Blog: Making Ads More Interesting (11 March 2009)

As of 11 March 2008 Google began to roll out its “Interest Based” advertising engine. The new system is aimed at providing what Google calls “more interesting ads”.

AdSense Driven by Immediate Interest

AdSense Google’s current advert delivery system serves adverts on Google and its partner sites (Google’s Content Network). AdSense ads are flighted based on a surfer’s immediate interest. Google guesses the browser’s immediate interest based on the content of the current page being viewed.

Thus if you happen to be browsing a home improvements site and you land on a page that explains how to use a power drill, AdSense will display adverts with products and services based on home improvements and maybe even drills on special offer. This guesswork has a good chance of being correct.

But immediate interest is not abiding interest. Our surfer could be a lady executive looking to buy her husband a new drill for Christmas and the drill is only her very brief and immediate interest.

Interest Based Advertising Targets Your Abiding Interests

Core to the way the new system works is a profile of your interests. Google builds up your personal profile over time. Your profile is based on the kind of sites you regularly visit. Google then shows you ads based on your profile. This is called behavioral targeting.

Your profile is available to you at any time. Go to www.google.com/ ads/preferences to view your personal profile. You can also adjust your profile, by adding or removing areas of interest. You can also choose to opt out of having ads shown to you based on your previous browsing experiences.

This type of behavioral targeting advertising will give advertisers the capability to deliver ads that are filtered by various interest categories. Google has developed a web site that allows advertisers to login and manage their Interest Based ad campaigns.

How It Works

Let’s say you are a keen cyclist. Google’s engine will over time be well aware of your cycling interests, because you often visit sites like Cycling News and Cycling Today and Tour de France results etc. So not only will Google know that you are interested in cycling but it will probably be specific enough to know that you are a road cycling person and not at all interested in mountain biking.

Thus when your surf the net Google will consult your behavioural history and try to show you cycling based ads even when you are not browsing a cycling site.

Choice is Yours

Google Says You Have Choice and Control. This means that you can go the preferences link (above) and add or adjust your preferences using Ads Preferences Manager. You can also opt out of the system altogether.

Opinion

The way the system has been implemented seem quite fair to me. I suppose that many observers will get upset by some perceived invasion of privacy issues. No other behavioural advertising systems allow you to view the data assembled about you. Nor is there one that goes so far as to provide tools for you to adjust how it interacts with you or and even allows for you to opt out completely.

I would be surprised if the system does not quickly become something we are very comfortable and familiar with. A system that we end up relying on to deliver us interesting offers and products that we would normally have missed out on.

References:
Official Google Blog: Making Ads More Interesting (11 March 2009)

Google… one of the Internets MOST powerful search engines recently announced a new FREE service that makes it easier for you to improve your websites coverage within Googles index through its NEW collaborative crawling system.

On the down side though, Google does not ‘Guarantee’ immediate inclusion, But, is still good news for those of you who have just finished building a website and are ready to submit to the top search engines.

So, what’s this NEW service called that Google just released?

It’s called “Google Sitemaps”.

The real cool thing about “Google Sitemaps” IS it accepts RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds with the .XML extension as one of the accepted formats for submitting your websites Sitemap for inclusion in Googles index.

This is just one of the four formats Google accepts and is the one that I’m going to use for the rest of this article to show you how to generate your own .XML sitemap of your website for inclusion in Google.

It’s real easy to do so don’t worry about it being to complicated.

So, with that said, lets go to Step #1.

Step #1. Sign up for “Google Sitemaps”.

This step is easy, simply follow the link provide below and sign up for a Free account. It should only take you a few minutes to do, then once your done, come back here and go to Step #2.

Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Step #2. Generate your .XML sitemap.

In this step your going to generate a .XML sitemap for your website using a Free online sitemap generator.

This Free online generator will build you a sitemap up to 500 pages. If you have a larger website with thousands of webpages you’ll have to use a paid service and/or software to generate yours.

Go to: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Enter your required information on the form provided.

Step #3. Upload your generated .XML sitemap to your server.

Once your generated sitemap is finished(your generated .XML file should be called site.xml.gz) it’s now time to upload it to your server using your FTP(File Transfer Protocol) program.

This is very important that you do this before submitting it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion.

Step #4. Submit your NEW .XML sitemap to “Google Sitemaps”.

Now that you have generated your “Sitemap” for your website and uploaded it to your server all you have to do now is to go to “Google Sitemaps” and submit your sitemap URL.

(ex. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz)

That’s it.

Now, depending on Google, your sitemap should get downloaded within the next 24 hours, so be sure to check and see that it did and that there wasn’t any problems or errors.

Also, your going to want to be able to track your indexed webpages within the search engines, especially Google, so you can see how things are going, so I’ll leave you with one last resource that will do this for you.

Go to: http://www.uptimebot.com

All you have to do is enter your URL and click “GO”.

The results page will list the results from Google and 9 other popular search engines.

Well, there you have it… “4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles ‘Back Door’”.

Have you paid for a yellow pages ad? I recently had a quote for a half page ad and it was $10000 for the year. With more and more people turning online to find goods the yellow pages seem to me to be a bit of a rip off.

If you are a local small business, you probably do some marketing offline to gain customers. So most small businesses owners figure they will just hire someone to make a website and you will be in business online.

No, this could not be further from the truth. Having a website online isn’t going to help your business unless it shows up in the top 2 pages of Google. When someone searches for any information online through Google the top ten most relevant search results will come up, this could be out of 1000’s.

Ask yourself when you have ever searched online for any product or service do you ever look past page 2 of Google, I know I don’t, I rarely look past page 1.

If your a researcher doing your thesis or something looking through thousands of pages is good. If you are marketing your small business online you need to rank at the top.

Since the average small business website is after customers online you need to get on the first page, the odds are extremely high that if someone looks up say Carpet Cleaners in Sydney and your business doesn’t pop up on the first page then they are not going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.

This does not matter if you spent $10,000 on your website if it isn’t in the first page of Google your online marketing is doomed, but it’s not all bad news. The good news is that you can work at getting your local business to the first page of Google and it does not cost much at all.

So, not only do you need a website, you need a website that will be listed in the top page of Google when someone searches for your type of business. Otherwise your just wasting your money getting a website developed.

Would you like to learn how to get your website to the first page of Google. Check out the final article of my three part series or visit my website.

High quality sites that link to your website can give it more credibility, increase traffic and improve your search engine optimization efforts. So, how do you get sites to link to you?

Most people contact the sites they want to link with and ask them for a link. If the Webmaster ever gets back to them they will often decline. This is a slow laborious process at best. Although this manual method does work, there are much faster ways to quickly increase the number of sites linking to you.

None of the strategies I’m about to give you should be used to do anything that violates the search engine’s TOS or Terms of Service. An easy way to stay in the good graces of all of the search engines without having to memorize their mile long TOS is to create high quality sites that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting and don’t do anything deceptive. It’s really that simple.

So, the Goal is to get as many “quality” sites linking to you as possible. So, what makes a “quality” site? Google has a rating system called page rank or PR. It is a scale that measures the “quality” of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being that the worst and 10 being the best.

The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites linking to the particular website. So in other words, it’s better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR link to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR.

So, that leads us to the million dollar question, what is better quantity or quality? The easy answer is both. You want to monitor the quality of links you are targeting but you don’t want to decline a link from someone just because they don’t have a PR 10.

The following are some of the fastest ways to build the number of inbound links to your site.

Articles

Webmasters are always hungry for fresh content for their websites and blogs. You can write articles that are related to your website or industry and post them on article directories. The article should contain a small bio about yourself with a link to your site. Webmasters then place your article on their sites and blogs on the condition that they leave your links in place. The best part is that most article directories are free.

Press Releases

There are online press release distribution services that will distribute your press release to thousands of online news outlets. All you have to do is create a press release that contains your important keywords along with links to your site and then submit it.

Once your press release is distributed, many of the sites who receive the release will appear as sites linking to your site.

Blogs

Be sure to include your link in your blog posts when relevant. Ask other bloggers to link to your site and reverence it. If you don’t have a blog you can get one. There are many free services.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) & Paid Links

An easy way to get links to your site is to pay for them. You can do this by purchasing a link for a set amount of time (day, week, month, etc.) or you can pay per click.

Link to Yourself

If you have multiple websites or domain names don’t forget to link the together. This is assuming that they are real sites and not just a bunch of UGS (Useless Gateway Sites) that you threw together.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs provide Webmasters with codes that they put on their website to track any sales that they refer. When a webmaster puts this code on their website it creates a link to the site they are promoting so as you are building your affiliate business you are also building your inbound links.

The above link building strategies are meant to give you a general overview. With a little well directed effort consistently applied, you will have an impressive number of sites linking to you in a very short time.

Google has gotten into the financial side of the web recently. Actually they have been in it for a while but it is still in Beta. Not to worry, it is still functional. Beta to Google is like 95% done to most companies. The only thing Beta means is that they are still coming up with new ideas and new ways to present the information easily to the average visitor.

One thing for sure is that Google will bring the strength of their search engine to Google Finance. I read an interview in SFO Magazine the other day and it mentioned that they will be trying to bring together stock market charts and news that possibly caused the move. This is done sometimes on other websites, but usually weeks later by someone writing an article on it. You can bet that Google wants it to be real time or as close to it as possible. This will make it easier for the novice to see that news and which type of news can make the markets move. This is especially visible with Currencies. There are between 4 to 8 news items a month that cause the Forex Markets to move suddenly.

Another cool thing that Google Finance is going to do is have much more information on OTC or Penny Stocks on the site. I can’t find it on there now but that’s one of the reasons they are still in Beta. Things come and go and come back better or easier. If it is true that will in itself be ground breaking. I don’t know of any of the major financial sites that even remotely have data and charting on Penny Stocks.

I like that the Euro and the U.S. Dollar information is right on the top right hand section. If you click on USD-Euro it will take you to a chart with News Items labeled A through Z on the chart itself. You can see that the news items moved the foreign currency market. I’ve always liked having that sort of information correlated, since it tends to be cyclical in currencies as I mentioned earlier. The chart is flexible also if you look at the bottom of the chart you can slide the viewer wider to show a longer time frame. Just another little neat item from Google.

All in all I look forward to Google Finance being completed and fully functional with all of the bells and whistles that Google has stated will be.

Check it out at http://finance.google.com/finance

Getting Google to use your website as a news source is quite difficult, this can usually take several ages and a lot of effort, traditionally this is unrealistic. However there are ways to get your website or product featured in Google news. One of the most effective ways is to have a grade forecast written that is searching the web engine optimized and submitted to appear in the news source.

Such articles usually hold links returning to products and or ones to gain traffic. This can vary depending on the website but a boost in income can normally be seen.

The aide of such exposure include: Your article making featured in many severe Internet searching the web engines as perfectly as in different critical news aggregators, such as Google News, Topix, Lycos and other shocker aggregators. Brining visitors to your site through the article

Also speedily Inclusion into Google search is gained along with extra going back links that can improve your sites performance. This can too impress clients and warn competitors this you mean business.

This can be beneficial to a whole margin of websites, including entertainment, business, humor, money. Although not every site is guaranteed, approximately all can be featured. Depending on the website subject an second boost of money can be received along with the ‘wow’ factor of making in Google news.

Getting Google to use your website as a news source is quite difficult, this can usually take many years and a lot of effort, usually this is unrealistic. However there are ways to get your website or product featured in Google news. One of the most effective ways is to have a quality article written that is search engine optimized and submitted to appear in the news source.