Google Shareholder Meeting [yawn]

You’d think Google was a regional health care company with desultory stock. I’m watching the video(80 minutes) of Google’s recent shareholder meeting … almost nobody showed up. Eric Schmidt is gamely introducing board members to a nearly empty room and tepid applause. After the Starbucks annual meeting earlier this year, when the company experienced a near shareholder riot over a shortage of seats in a 3,000-seat auditorium, I thought annual meetings of hot companies were must-attend events. Apparently Google shareholders are more blase’ about things.
Anyway, Greg Linden has organized online all the slides from Google's first annual shareholder meeting. They're pretty interesting. Most interesting is this one, which details how Google divides its priorities:

Where's Blogger on this list? You'd think a service with more users than almost any other Google property would at least show up on the list of priorities.

Search Engine Ranking - What Works Now

Article By Dan Meiyers - SEO Pro
info@emarketingbooks.com

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.

GOOG Hits New Record High

Wow, I didn't even notice that Google stock hit a new record of $231.29 yesterday.
GOOG (GOOGLE)

231.29 11 May at 4:00PM ET

Google Toolbar 3 (and AutoLinking) Leaves Beta

Google has taken its latest toolbar out of beta. This version, the third, is best knows for the much-maligned AutoLink feature, which changes third-party text to links. Google has added to AutoLink some capabilities, hoping to satisfy its many critics. Links generated by AutoLink now have a pale blue background. Additionally, more choices are available for the user to choose which sites to link to for maps, book listings and vehicle ID numbers. Search Engine Watch reports that AutoLink is faster now, too. Will this silence the toolbars many detractors, or just ignite another round of Google bashing?

Google Buys Dodgeball

Google has bought Dodgeball, an SMS meetup service.


It makes more sense if you set it to music.

Dodgeball is a social networking service for mobile phones. Users sign in on their phones and notify the service where they are, which then lets friends know which friends are in the area. Basically, it lets you navigate your social scene. BoingBoing called it "social software for mobile phones". Basically, the killer app for Dodgeball is signing in, finding out your friend Joe has a friend Wendy who is at a newsstand two blocks away, and walking up to her and saying "I didn't know people actually named their kids Wendy".

Alex and Dennis of Dodgeball say in the their members that they are excited to now have the resources to make the service bigger. One can only wonder what Google's plans are for the service.

Some Have Hard Time Believing Web Accelerator Story

Some people are having trouble believing Google when it says it took down Web Accelerator because of capacity reasons. Jeremy Zawodny says, in a post title "BS Accelerator?":

...I never heard or ready anyone complaining that the service was slow. Or unreliable.

...I had always thought they knew how to build really big, scalable systems.

Was it announced as a limited beta? I don't remember seeing that anywhere. And I can find no reference to it.

I have a hard time believing that a company with that much infrastructure is having capacity problems with a service that's likely being used by a relatively small number of people, considering how many were scared away by the admitted information leaks and security problems.

Same for Ars Technica's Jonathon Gitlin, who says:

Given the negative buzz over their newest product, it is likely that GWA may be need a revamp before it's ready and acceptable for the prime time, although the company isn't acknowledging any of these concerns.

Google holding information back from the media? Never... or maybe..

Blogger To Make Some Big Moves

Blogger's Biz Stone told The Industry Standard that they are considering several enhancements to the service, including Enterprise blogging, privacy controls, and image hosting. The full list of proposed enhancements that may or may not make their way into Blogger, according to the article:

Native image uploading, so users can upload images to their blogs

Integration with Gmail

Enterprise version of Blogger, allowing companies to have internal blogs, much like Google's "Blogger In Google" service

Creation of privacy groups, so bloggers can limit access to the blog or to posts to certain persons

Biz also said that they have solved most of Blogger's performance issues.

Meanwhile, Blogger has resolved some performance issues Stone acknowledged in March that were affecting the service, including slow response times. "We really spent a lot of time working on that and overall performance for 95 percent of users is really great. We're continuing to work to make that last few just as good," Stone said.

And the Blogger seems really faster than a few days ago, so there are definitely some good improvments.

Google Mini available in Europe

Yup, it's finally there.
Google Mini is now also available in Europe (see here: http://www.google-store.com/appliance/product_info.php?products_id=1).
For the price of €2 995, you can buy the "Blue Pizza" and have the same performance as Google for your Internet (or Intranet) website.
Performance :
- Indexes up to 100 000 documents.
- 220 of different document types.
- Set-Up in less than an hour.
- The friggin cool look

Welcome message

Hey folks
Since I got fascinated by Google, I'll dedicate this blog to Google. So what kind of posts could you expect? New google stuff, the google labs, well...actually as many as possible. I'll try to keep this blog up-to-date by now.
Many ppl don't really know what Google is. If I would tell them that I could talk about Google for houres, they would probably look with a weird face at me. Google is just a stupid popular search engine, so what to tell about it?? That's often ppl's reaction. So I'll probably post some noob posts to give you a better idea of what Google really is.
I'm thinking about registering a new .com domain name .. soon, for everything about Google. Until then, I'll use this blog instead.
So stay tuned, lol.
Greetz, Laurent Van Winckel