Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Don't worry, it hasn't had an impact...yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google's Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor.

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

"I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast,' how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?'" he says.

I would say that based on Matt's comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn't come right out and say that they definitely will. That said, making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so you might as well start optimizing it for speed anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you will have a head start on boosting your rankings.

Google has generally been pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites and potentially boost rankings and conversions. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages. Some of these, such as Page Speed and Closure tools come from Google itself. But there are a number of tools Google points you to from other developers as well.

Google News Italia Probe Expands

Google received a piece of bad news - and perhaps a laugh - today as we prepare to go into the long weekend. Here's the serious part: Italian antitrust regulators have decided to expand the focus of an investigation from the Italian version of Google News to the entire corporation.

Things began to heat up last week when an Italian newspaper federation claimed that Google would exclude papers from its normal search results when they opted out of Google News. Google Italy's offices got searched, and the concept of an $18.5 million fine was mentioned.

Now, according to an AGI article, Italy's antitrust authority has stated, "On the basis of inspections by the authority, it has been found that the management of the Google News Italia service, currently under a preliminary investigation, was handled by Google Inc."

What brilliant detective work, right? Sherlock Holmes has been reincarnated in Rome.

Still, given a choice between chuckling at obvious statements and not facing an inquiry, Google would probably pick the second option. The fact that this investigation's picked up speed in just one week isn't a great sign.

source:http://www.webpronews.com/

Facebook Pages to Get Click Through Rates

If you are the owner or an admin of a Facebook page, you are probably familiar with Facebook's Insights. This is Facebook's analytical offering that lets page admins see how fans are engaging.

BuzzMarketing Daily discovered that there is a blurb in the Fan Interaction Dashboard, which you can get to by clicking "learn more" from the Facebook Insights page, which talks about a couple of new metrics that are on the way (via Inside Facebook).

The new metrics are Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate for content that appears in the Facebook news feed. As described in the blurb, if a user clicks on one of your posts, it will be counted as "Stream CTR" and if a user likes or comments on a post, it will be counted under Stream ETR.

One knock against social media marketing has historically been its lack of measurable success. Metrics like this should be able to go a long way toward curing that.

With Facebook's Insights, you can already look at interactions (numbers of comments, wall posts, and likes), Interactions Per Post (average number of comments, wall posts and likes for each piece of content), Post Quality (score measuring engagement), Discussion Posts (number of discussion topics created on your page), and Reviews (number of times fans use the Reviews app to rate you page).

Suffice it to say, there are a number of things you can look at to gauge the success you are having with your Facebook page, and depending on what areas you are lacking in, you can take the necessary steps to try and improve - just like with any other analytics program.
source: http://www.webpronews.com/

Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn’t always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field.

So, if real-time results are based upon time/date, and the user’s query, it stands to reason that time and those queries are the most important components in getting your content found in these types of searches.

1. Use Keywords

This seems obvious, but use keywords in not only your content, but in your titles, and your updates. If you’re writing an article, you have to consider what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, whether this be Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

More often than not, they are going to include the title. If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in any ensuing tweets, Facebook updates, etc. If someone searches for those keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

The same goes for your own Tweets/status updates. Even if you are not sharing an article, if you want your update to be found, use relevant keywords. Again, obvious, but true.

2. Talk About Timely Events

Simply mentioning events that are current will put you directly into the results for any searches having to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are in play. This is a method that could and (surely is) being exploited by spammers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide legitimate conversation and simply put yourself on more people’s radars, without throwing links at them every time.

3. Have a Lot of Followers

If you have a lot of followers or friends on social networks, or even just readers of your blog, you are going to get more people sharing your content. The more people sharing your content, the more impressions of your content will be making their way into real time searches.

There is no easy way to instantly get a bunch of legitimate readers/followers. It will take some promotion. Provide useful content that people will link to and it will spread virally. Provide clear ways for them to follow you (like links to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on your blog).

4. Promote Conversation

Whether on your blog or on a social network, spark conversations. Talk about topics that people are interested in. This is tied to number 2. The more conversations you are involved with, the more retweets (and equivalents on other networks) you are likely to get. And again, this means more impressions in real times searches.

5. Include Calls to Engagement

I recently talked about why there is more to retweeting than meets the eye for businesses. I mentioned the use of buttons like Tweetmeme’s and Digg’s. These are buttons you can put on articles that show the amount of retweets/diggs that article has. They kind of act as a meter for engagement.

These buttons are certainly not all-encompassing. They only represent the conversation on 2 channels, and not the web in general. I’m sure there are other buttons that can be used in addition.

More importantly though, they provide a “call to action” to share the content. People can digg or retweet a story with a simple click, and you’re one step closer to being found in somebody’s real-time search.

Wrapping Up

Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. You’re not ranking for relevancy. Really, you could hardly call it ranking it all. It’s about visibility. That means, you have to get people talking about your content/updates.

Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant to “right now.”

source: http://www.webpronews.com/

Analysis: Microsoft Gives Nvidia A Nod With Windows 7, DirectX 11

With its CUDA architecture, graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia (NSDQ:NVDA) found a way to leverage its high-power gaming processors for less intense graphics applications. In a nutshell, CUDA allows software developers to write their applications to utilize the processing speed and power of the GPU of Nvidia GeForce cards, in parallel with the CPU, which frees up the CPU for other tasks. Although slow at first, widespread acceptance of CUDA from the developer community has grown considerably.

This week, Nvidia announced that it has received Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL) certification for a driver supporting DirectCompute and Windows 7. DirectCompute is a new DirectX API from Microsoft that is a Windows-based alternative to CUDA but also runs on the CUDA architecture. Although earlier this year Advanced Micro Device's ATI publicly demonstrated a DirectX 11 GPU (the first ever) that takes advantage of DirectCompute, Nvidia's current lineup of DirectX 10 processors also will be able to support it.

Out of the gate, Nvidia certainly looks as if it has a leg up on the competition. With multiple GeForce processors already available, and now WHQL certified, OEMs and enthusiasts would be hard-pressed to not choose an Nvidia graphics card. In a recent press release, the company even claimed that "the world's largest PC vendors, including HP, Dell and Acer, have selected GeForce GPUs to help lead the transition to Windows 7."

Overall, DirectCompute is taking the idea behind CUDA and acknowledging its benefits. Nvidia did a great job nurturing the architecture and convincing developers to enhance their applications to take advantage of it, and with Microsoft joining in, the model is sure to become a de facto standard.

In the long run, as is usually the case, the playing field will likely level out a bit as ATI continues to produce compatible GPUs but, for the release of Windows 7, it looks like Nvidia is happily sitting in the front seat.

Resources: http://www.crn.com/hardware/219401050;jsessionid=FYG0WDN21IMTDQE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN

SEO Tips for Flash

Who Says Flash is Not SEO Friendly ?

People who say that Flash is not SEO friendly are absolutely wrong. It is just a myth that Flash is SEO unfriendly.

Creating accessible flash content for search engines is crucial for you to preserve your online presence and drive traffic to your site. Follow these Flash Optimization Tips to get most out of the major search engines.

Adding SWF content to your HTML source

An iron-clad way to guarantee that a SWF’s content is picked up and ranked by search engines is to extract the content and place it into the page’s HTML source. Tools such as Dreamweaver use SWF Object to embed Flash. The code view in Dreamweaver displays comments where you should add your alternative HTML content.

Keep your URL unique

If your site is just one big lump of Flash in an HTML template, your page is never going to refresh. Consider having a different URL for each page of your site’s Flash content. Each page would have its own HTML source title, “H1″ and body copy containing the keyword you want to rank.

Use source content dumping

A one-page HTML rich internet application (RIA) will not be SEO enhanced simply by adding the content for each section of the Flash application into the HTML source for this page. Doing this doesn’t establish any prominence of content, as there are too many competing terms. Keep extracted Flash content relevant to the page it’s on.

Keep an eye on new initiatives

Adobe has been working with Google and Yahoo! to make the Flash file format (SWF) search engine friendly. This will enable the engines to see what’s inside a SWF’s content and index it. However, the use of Flash Player technology by search engines is still developing and so can’t be relied on as the only step towards optimizing your project for SEO.

Add text to your Flash applications

A simple Flash SEO enhancement is to use Flash-generated text in your creative when displaying or animating type. You can do this instead of using text that’s a flattened bitmap. Flash text can contain keyword-based messages, which help increase traffic. Include this text in the HTML source of the page as well.

Remember that search engine spiders hate pop-ups

We’ve all visited sites that urge us to click to launch Flash content into a new window. This removes any chance of the site’s content being picked up and indexed by search engines. In addition to search spiders not being able to see them, pop-ups suffer from being blocked by many browsers.

Get robotic help

Robots.txt is a plain text file found at the root of a server. This tells search bots which content needs to be allowed or disallowed when it visits their website. If your Flash text content is the same as your HTML version, you could set the Robots.txt file to ignore the SWF content and push only the HTML content to the search bots.

Embed Flash content with SWF Object

SWF Object is a search engine-friendly way to embed Flash content. Alternative (non-Flash) content is produced first, and then snippets of JavaScript are used to swap out the alternative content with the Flash movies. This ensures that the content is indexed by search engines. Users without Flash will still see a working HTML page.