Tag Archives: Searching

Google Analytics’ “International Space Station” April Fools

meToo Google Analytics International Space Station April Fools

Thanks to the vigilance of Phillip J Rhoades and his obsession with HowToPhil.com‘s traffic, we’ve sorted out the April Fools joke perpetrated by the Google Analytics team — go check out your Real Time: Overview, and you should see this:

real time 1024x413 Google Analytics International Space Station April FoolsAnd since it is, supposedly, the International Space Station‘s control room, it moves across your Real-Time screen as it orbits — very funny but I think that Google jumped the gun because you didn’t assume that Phillip was keeping his eyes peeled like he does — he’s hyper-vigilant!

issCR Google Analytics International Space Station April Fools

For your information, there are only 3 crew members of the ISS and not 41 — 4-1? April 1st done in the American style.  Most of the world is saying, “41? What’s 4-1?” Because they write today’s date as 1-4-2013 and not 4-1-2013. Oh well, it’s an excellent — maybe too easy — tell.

Continue reading →

Google Adsense rewards quick server page loads

Anemometre1 Google Adsense rewards quick server page loadsMaybe the reason why you can’t even quite get into the top-five or number-one spot on Google search is because you’re not spending enough time or money getting the best Web host and Web server you can afford and then optimizing how your serve your Web pages, especially when your modern CMS is backed by a database.

I have a theory that both where you end up on search results as well as how much money you can make advertising AdWords ads via AdSense depends not merely on SEO or surfing the right trends or even finding the long tail sweet spot, but also on how quick, responsive, reliable, and durable the server that hosts your blog or site is.  The faster the page loads, the better your site will rank on Google search, all other things being equal. Take it to the bank.

When my server was really under-powered and unoptimized, I was averaging $4/day, then after moving stuff around and optimized, it went up to a more reliable $11-25/day. Then, the site started getting more popular from better ranking and then the reliability decreased and the daily take returned to $4-6/day or so.

Now, with more physical RAM in the box and some cloud-based back-up to handle big popularity spikes, I am seeing quite a few $15-$25/day pay-outs.That’s only one person’s experience, but that’s all I got.

What I am going to tell you is not hard science. I might even be recognizing the wrong patterns. And, my sample size is one subject over a long period of time, my blog, Because the Medium is the Message, which is a very big, old, blog with 6,894 posts, 4,631 comments, 4,244 categories, and 14,092 tags — all back-ended by a MySQL database and fortified with WP Super Cache on a dedicated server.

My blog gets about 50,000 visits-a-month and once-in-a-while I will get a spike to 20,000 visits in a day — for example, when I surfed the Royal Wedding coverage.  I serve AdWord ads on the site and I have been noticing that all things being equal, whenever my system administrator adds RAM memory, is able to optimize the database, increase uptime, and add either bandwidth or resources to the box that in some way makes the site quicker to serve, especially when slashdotted or digg-dotted from popularity, then Google rewards me with more advertising revenue.

And this happens not only during the days when I am being crashed by being mentioned on Mashable or retweeted by Guy Kawasaki, adding hardware and software resources to my dedicated server that adds to the box’s durability, reliability, and especially quickness and responsiveness is what does it on a daily basis.

And, I understand why Google does this. Isn’t this obvious? They are looking to provide their visitor, their users, their searchers, with a seamless and splendid experience. So, amazing user interface and quality of research and content cannot be enjoyed from a site that has repeatedly shown that it is habitually slow or unresponsive.

I honestly believe that the time a page loads is an important variable in the algorithm that Google deploys when it is indexing and ranking resource sites. You might have your user interface, site architecture and content completely sorted out; you might have organic link-tos and a PR of 5 or above; but at the end of the say, Google won’t send its searchers to a site that won’t load fast.

Cheap, slow hosting is fine when you’re new, but when you get as big as the Chris Abraham blog, with almost seven-thousand active posts and an open-season on comments, you really need to make sure your hardware can match your traffic, your popularity, your spikes, and your database requirements–and exceed them–or Google might give you ranking demerits and you might lose the trust and faith that Google had in you, resulting in their needing to either rank you down a few or off the front page so as to prevent a negative user experience.

Don’t forget that this is especially important for someone who is using Google on a smart phone. These folks are searching for timely information, especially when they’re on the road having a mobile web experience. After suffering through EDGE or 3G bandwidth issues just to reach Google, getting a “database cannot connect” from your site or blog doesn’t make you look good nor does it make the search engine that referred you.

What do you think? What are your experiences? Via Biznology

Continue reading →

Why your business should have a Google+ brand page

Google Plus Logo 150x150 Why your business should have a Google+ brand pageWith so many social networking sites out there, it’s nearly impossible to keep up, especially with the release of Google+ brand pages about a month ago. At this point, it may be hard to make yourself create and maintain another social media site for your business. Well, this one may be worth it because lets face it, it’s Google, and like we expected they’re integrating brand pages into organic search results in more ways than one.

Option A: Organic Search Results for Brand Page Updates

Choose your keywords carefully when posting updates to your brand pages because they’re popping up in organic search results. Make sure you’re optimizing your status updates to get the best SEO results. By using well thought-out key words, your brand page posts will increase in the Google ranking system, increasing your Google+ presence, and ultimately increasing traffic to your site.

Option B: Organic Search Results for Personal Pages

Now when people talk about your brand on their personal Google+ pages, it will show up as an organic search result. So make sure you’re always keeping an eye out for what other people are saying about your brand on Google+, because what they say may show up on the first page of a Google search for your brand. Create valuable and interesting posts that are share worthy to your Google+ viewers. Enticing people to share your post will get the right search results on the Google search page you want.

Thanks for the insight HubSpot Blog.

Related articles
Why your business should have a Google+ brand page

Google+ Introduces Community Guides for Organizations

What’s new in Google+?

Google just recently launched a series of community guides to help organizations, including nonprofits and companies to celebrities and athletes, to fully utilize the platform and effectively interact with other users.

google+ community guides1 300x284 Google+ Introduces Community Guides for OrganizationsOn the Google+ Community website here, Google organizes the communities into six main groups:

Each section breaks down the unique features of Google+ and its capabilities piece-by-piece, specifically tailored to the type of community user. For instance, the Google+ for Media section explains how target audiences can be managed with Circles or how users can share links to news articles that will show up on people’s streams.

Did you know that you can even claim authorship on Google search by adding an author tag to your content?

You’ll find case studies, strategies, and additional links on how to optimize Google+ for your personal or professional brand.

It can’t get any simpler than this. Google is really reaching out to the diverse group of Internet users and social networkers in an effort to build its community growth online.

Continue reading →