Just a little over a month ago, Google announced its new search index: Caffeine. For those who have yet to do their homework on the announcement, the first thing to know about Caffeine is that it is not a rankings algorithm update; rather it is a new indexing system. According to the Google blog,

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need.

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we’ve built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Why is Google Caffeine good for me?

Underline it, highlight it, draw circles around it, asterick’s, star it…whatever …here’s the thing…fresh content is more important than ever! In a world of real-time, right now, in the the moment results brought to Internet users from Facebook,  Twitter, Foursquare, et al…. Google has to pay attention to providing most up to date results, especially if they want to stay atop the two social media giants

SEOBoy has this to say about what you should do:

* Sitemaps – As Google more frequently indexes information, make sure you’re updating and resubmitting your sitemap. For en e-commerce client who regularly adds products to their site, I like to generate a map 2x a month.

* New Content – I can’t stress this point enough. The more unique, fresh, and relevant content you have on your site, the better you’re going to perform in search. Managing a website is not easy. If you want to be an authority on a topic or product, and thereby rank better, you have to prove your worth with great content. There is no such thing as setting up a site and sitting back while the rewards roll in.

* More Activity: Not only will you need to generate more content on your website, but in order to succeed in the world of Caffeine, you’ll need to be active on the real-time sites as well, which means Twitter, Facebook, etc.

This last point leads me to think that Caffeine could actually bring some huge changes to the SEM/PPC industry. If you’re already a client of the third river marketing, then you already know we’re ahead of the “Google Caffeine” curve by utilizing WordPress as a CRM platform because it allows you, as a client, to easily make quick changes to your website and add fresh, relevant content very quickly. In addition, we’ve long advocated using your website as the HUB for all your social media, which is why we rarely, if ever design a site that does not incorporate and link to a clients’ Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Web 2.0 is all about being where the people are and engaging and interacting. Social Media is here to stay and just as a company as large and far reaching as Google has had to adapt their business model to it….your business needs to adapt to it as well.

If you have any questions about this or the whole idea of “Social Media Management”, feel free to reach out. We’re here and ready to help.

Sources: Official Google Blog, SE O Boy

Since we provide search engine optimization services for our clients, we get asked a lot of questions about how to improve rankings.

One of the steps we take to improve your search engine results is to make sure your meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords are accurate and descriptive for the key words and phrases that you are trying to get ranked for.  Now … what exactly do I mean by that?

I’ll review what each one is below;

Meta-Title:

When you do a search on Google, the title is what shows up in the search as the link to the website.  You can see the link above has the title of “Search Engine Optimization & Local Search | Web Design Salem Oregon“.   This properly describes what this web site and in this case the actual page on the web site is trying to get ranked for on Google.

More often than not we see titles that are not descriptive, include the company name only, or a simple page name like “Home” or “Search”.  You should focus on the “What” you do and the “Where” you do it.   Titles are one of the most important factors of your page content and structure that you should make sure are structured properly.

Meta-Description:

The description shows up in the search results as well, and in the above example starts with “We can help you with …”.  Descriptions should use sentence structure for the most part and should not be a list of keywords.   Again, focus in on what you do and where you do it.

Meta-keywords:

Keywords do not show up on the search results, but they can play a part in your search results… although recent things we’ve read suggest that the search engines are not paying as much attention to keywords that they used to.  Your key words are just a comma separated list of key words and phrases that describe, again, what you do and where you do it.  In this case above, we would want to use things like “search engine optimization, salem oregon, google rankings, …”.   You can use as many key words and phrases as you like, but you generally shouldn’t repeat them (you could get away with that in the old days, but search engines are much smarter today).

So, if you are looking to review your titles, descriptions, and keywords, you can do a search for the term and location that you want to be found for.  Check out what the top search results are using to get ideas of how to improve your own.  By the way, you can go to any web page and view the page source (the code behind the page) to show the keywords as well.   If you use Firefox for your web browser, you can right-click and View Page Source.  If you use Internet Explorer, you can right-click and View Source.  Here’s what it looks like:

If you are doing your own web site using a content management system or site builder, you will want to look for a SEO or Search Engine Optimization section for your site or (preferably) for each page.   It should look something this:

Getting your titles, descriptions, and keywords properly structured is definitely a positive step to help your search engine rankings.

If you’d like help with your search engine rankings to help you get your web site listed higher on Google, Yahoo, and Bing … give us a call at 503.581.4554.  We’d be happy to provide a free consultation on how you can improve your rankings.

As you can see, Yahoo, MSN and the others are distant runners-up. That doesn’t mean they are insignificant, but it does mean that by optimizing for Google, you will likely receive the highest ROI on your optimizing efforts.

So, where do you rank on Google? For what keywords? (the terms people type into the search engine) Do you know if these are the right keywords? And just how do you achieve high rankings in Google anyways?

These are all questions that we can help you answer.

Simplified, “Getting found on Google” aka “Search Engine Optimization” (or SEO) boils down to two main things;

1. Setting up your site so it has Google friendly structure and content.

2. Setting up beneficial, good-quality links both internally on your site and externally from other popular web sites pointing back to yours.

While this is an over simplified-view, it does give you the big picture of what it takes. Actually acomplishing high Google rankings, however, can be a difficult and time consuming task. How difficult it is to achieve success will depend on a number of factors including keyword competition, search volume, age of competing sites, links (and link structure) for competing sites, and much more.

Now with all of that said, it is also important to realize that “Search” is just one leg of your online marketing stool. In other words, you should NOT depend on search rankings alone to build traffic.

For example, looking at recent statistics from one of my client’s sites, we can see that a little more than 50% of traffic comes from search engines. The rest is coming from links from other sites and direct traffic – meaning someone typed in their domain name directly into the browser.

This will vary of course from site to site, but it re-enforces the fact that we also need to focus on optimizing other areas of driving traffic to your web site.

I wrote another article on online traffic building strategies that will provide further insight in this area.

Bottom line: There is a lot you can do to get found on Google and drive traffic to your website. We suggest you use a professional who knows that they are doing so you can maximize your ROI.

If you’d like to sit down over a cup of coffee or talk on the phone to explore your options, give us a call at 503.581.4554.