The first few weeks of college can shock your system. Many students are living away from their parents for the first time and their roommates are strangers. They may have visited the campus only once or twice before school started, are eating unidentifiable residence hall meals with the terror of gaining the “Freshman 15″ and they are entirely responsible for their own well being. And whether just starting college in a traditional campus setting or opting for the convenience of online education classes, there are ways to cope with the education transition.

Compared to high school classes, college courses require more independence. Students need to study more on their own than they did in high school, and assignments may come with less guidance from the instructor. Students are expected not only to answer the questions, but also to figure out, without necessarily being told by the professor, where to find their information. Suddenly, you’re supposed to be an expert researcher.

That may seem like a formidable request, but the good news is that it’s feasible. Even better, your transformation into a true researcher can be quick and fun. Your participation in social media can be excellent training for collaborating with your classmates to develop college-level research skills.

Common Research Difficulties

Many students are not even aware that their research techniques are inappropriate, or that they are not coming up with the most reliable information. Many students may not be using Google properly. They may not use the proper search filters or keywords, and search results are limited or from paid or unreliable sources. Students are also unfamiliar with academic databases.

Hard versus Soft Research

A great trick to help you figure out what research approaches to use is to determine whether you need soft research, hard research or both. Soft research is what you probably already do all the time when you need to look up a general idea. It is also appropriate when you need to write about people’s opinions that you might get from blog posts. In college, assignments often require hard research. Facts need to be specific, and you need to be able to point to a credible source for each fact that you include in your work.

Where to Turn

Librarians, online or on-campus writing centers and professors are all good resources for help with research. Students can also use social media to help each other improve research skills. They can create web-based files, such as in Google Docs, to compile helpful tips, resources and links to share with each other. Video chats and instant messaging let them brainstorm for resource ideas before starting their assignments.

Don’t let the thought of intimidating assignments prevent you from enrolling in college. If you’re already in college and you feel like you’re struggling, don’t get discouraged. Plenty of options are available to help you master the research skills you need, and one of your weapons can be to join forces with your classmates using your experience in social media programs.

One of the goals of every business is to make money. Sometimes turning a profit is a secondary or tertiary goal, but it’s always there and is always a motivating factor in every decision made by the people who run the company. How do you increase your profits, though? You can do it by cutting costs, certainly, but that can result in poor support or inferior products. Many companies would have a hard time remaining ethical and cutting costs, too.

If you run a business selling wheelchair accessible vans, you don’t want to potentially sacrifice any quality in order to make more money. What other options do you have if you’re a company that provides mobility to the disabled? You can increase your visibility and consumer awareness. By making your advertising efforts more focused and efficient, you can essentially cut down on the money you have to spend making potential customers aware of your existence.

Branding is the key issue here and everything from email newsletters to billboards and even search engine optimization (SEO) are used to support this single issue. It may seem odd to say that SEO is primarily concerned with branding, but it’s true. Even when you’re not engaging in keyword branding, you’re still working to build brand awareness and reputation. Once you realize that SEO is part of the branding process, you can form a more focused, driven SEO strategy that will aid you in the process and help you achieve your desired result: higher levels of consumer awareness.

Why Brand?

Your brand is how consumers identify your company, service and product. It’s encompassed by your logo, motto, name and the relations those aspects have to your customers and anyone else associated with your company. Regardless of what you do, you have a brand. If you don’t care to manage it, then you have no control over whether your brand is positively or negatively regarded. By developing a specific strategy for branding you can help guide consumers’ awareness of your brand and ensure that people associate it with a positive experience and an excellent product.

What Does SEO Do?

When you develop an SEO strategy, you’re also working on your branding. When searchers see your website consistently ranking at a high level in Google for their searches, they’ll begin associating you as a knowledgeable, quality company. Their trust in Google’s ability to weed out inferior products and companies is near absolute, which is why most searchers click on the first three search results.

How Do You Brand?

By utilizing branding keywords and gearing your SEO toward service-oriented keywords, you can ensure your business’s name stays at the top of results and that consumers begin to draw an unconscious correlation between your industry and your company specifically. By focusing your keyword choices on only the ones that will strengthen your brand in your niche, you reduce the potential keyword pool and make it easier to rank. Once you begin ranking on your chosen branding keyword you can branch out into supporting phrases with the strength of your brand driving your SEO tactics the entire way.

Here’s one more surprise from Google to celebrate holiday season. Type ‘let it snow’ in Google search, and you’ll see snowflakes falling down the page. Don’t miss out the opportunity to write your name in the frost. Enjoy and have a good holiday season

Whether you’re designing a website for personal use or to help build your business, you undoubtedly understand the importance of showing up in search results—the higher, the better. Whereas this was once accomplished with “black hat” tactics like keyword stuffing and spammy links, Google has made most of these tactics ineffectual at best.

Google’s Panda Update was unofficially aimed at “content farms”: “We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. […] As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms,’ which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.”

In essence, Google can now read at a 10^th grade level and is able to differentiate original, quality content from poorly written content with irrelevant links. When you add to this the newest algorithm update, tentatively called the Google Fresh Update, which rates pages based upon how fresh and up-to-date the content is, along with how often the page is updated, it becomes apparent that having your page rank highly in Google is no easy feat.

So what can be done to improve your site’s chances of success?

The first step to creating an effective website is to be sure your page is aesthetically pleasing, and that the words flow well. The best way to do this is to create a rapid prototype of sorts of your page, in order to be sure that it is easy to navigate and that all of the links are in working order.

By “rapid prototype”, I mean a tangible recreation of your page that can be seen from all angles, and moved around if necessary, without having to constantly rewrite code. Some do this with charts or graphs, while others prefer the more rudimentary Post-It notes on a whiteboard. Whatever your choice, by viewing your page in this manner, you will be able to spot flaws that may drive potential consumers away.

Once you are certain your site has met these standards, then it’s time to start taking the various Google algorithm updates into account. Is your content well-written and error-free? If there are links that have been placed in your text, are they relevant, or might they be construed by Google as spam, thus lowering your standing in rankings? If your forte is not writing, then it might behoove you to find someone to write your on-page content for you, in order to ensure maximum success with Google.

In addition to that, have you had the same page design and on-page content since your site first went up in 2005? The Fresh Update will demote your page for this! Take the time to re-do your page whenever you start to feel the itch for something new. Also, stay up-to-date with news that is related to your product or page, and add fresh, relevant content whenever you can, in order to rank as highly as possible.

Finally, once you are certain your page is at its best, request that Google recrawl your page in order to have the changes you have made noted accordingly. This way, you don’t have to wait to start seeing the fruit of your labor (even though this is a slow process that requires patience).  Over time, you will start to notice that your site is gaining traffic and rising in search results.

 As the world’s most popular search engine, Google has access to massive amounts of user data. Add to that the popularity of Gmail, Google’s email service, and the growth of Google’s social network, Google+, and it becomes clear that Google knows more about its users than nearly any other service in the world. Google uses this information to serve ads based on location, the content of email messages or the context of the page being visited.

Another action taken by Google based on its user knowledge is the tailoring of search results pages to specific users. Someone who has frequented the Klipsch website, for instance, will be more likely to have it return as a high result when searching for “home audio system.” Google+ is starting to have an effect on search results also. If someone’s friend shares a link to the Klipsch website, that fact will show up in a search engine results page for “floorstanding speakers.” Google knows that users are more likely to follow a link they have previously visited or was recommended by a friend.

Google+
Facebook’s ad network enabled businesses to target specific demographics, something that has not been available to Google because of its lack of pertinent user information. But the rollout of Google+ could mean big changes in advertising. With the phenomenal growth of Google’s social network, the search giant’s pool of data in its users is growing exponentially. Advertisers on Google’s network can already target specific keywords, but when users are signed into their Google accounts, they may soon be able to target specific users as well.

Search Results
In a TED talk in March 2011, Eli Parser gave a talk about online filter bubbles in which he pointed out that Google looks at over 50 different cues to determine what results to display. Even if a user is not signed into their Google account, their location, browser, computer and other information will be used to tailor search results to meet what Google feels they want. When a user is logged in, this allows Google to go even further in their SERP tailoring. A user who has recently purchased home entertainment equipment via Google Shopping will receive a different set of results when searching for “low distortion speakers” than someone who regularly searches for information on professional audio equipment or someone who has never made that kind of search before.
The potential information that Google can collect on its users is staggering and the ways it uses that information are mind-boggling. The future applications of the company’s ever-expanding reach are incredible. All of the uses can be a little frightening and give rise to many concerns. How much information should users be giving to one of the largest technology companies in the world, the gatekeeper of the Internet? What if Google’s database was compromised somehow? Though Google’s intentions seem to be to provide a wealth of useful, free services to users, the potential for something darker is always there.

Building a brand requires time, dedication and a lot of hard work. Consumers have to trust and be engaged by the company trying to build or maintain its reputation. Ensuring that keywords chosen for a link or campaign are relevant to the business is key, as is ensuring the relevance to any site a link is posted on. Keyword stuffing, the process of loading a page down with links and “relevant” keywords, is not tolerated anymore. Sites that use such tactics face being ignored, down-ranked, or banned, all of which will result in varying levels of traffic loss.

Keyword Relevance

The keywords pointing to a site have to be relevant to the content on both the page the link is placed and to the site linked. Co-occurrence terms are important for the page, too. For instance, in order to rank for a phrase like “laptop battery”, a company might try to get a link that looks as follows:

As a university student, my laptop battery always seemed to be going dead. I hadn’t bought my Dell laptop brand new, but I did make sure to recharge my computer regularly. I ended up purchasing a new battery for my notebook computer in order to keep it running on battery power for more than 30 minutes.

The link relates to the content surrounding it and to the site linked. Further, other related phrases are used throughout, such as a major brand and the terms “recharge”, “computer” and “notebook”.

The Detriments of Keyword Stuffing

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guidelines enforcer, urges website owners not to take part in keyword stuffing (source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/). Users who attempt to artificially insert keywords into their web pages are severely penalized by Google’s algorithm. Those who try to hide their stuffing from users or present a different web page to users and crawlers are either penalized or, in some cases, removed from search results entirely, effectively cutting them off from the web community.

Content is King

In February 2011, Google unleashed its Panda algorithm update to quash low quality sites. The purpose of Panda is to find sites that don’t offer original, valuable content to readers and then reduce their value in search results (source: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-factor-than-algorithm-update-82564). The engineers at Google have attempted to make Panda match a human’s reading habits, in order to determine whether certain content is relevant and actually coherent. There are many sites on the web that post long articles which begin normally enough, but, shortly after the fold, devolve into machine-generated nonsense. Panda’s purpose, among others, is to rid results of those poorly constructed pages.

Google’s Panda update changed the way that businesses do SEO and branding. They can’t get away with dropping keywords in places that make no sense or overloading pages with every co-occurrence term possible. Those who do stuff keywords into their pages are quickly hit with penalties, resulting in their site being down-ranked or even removed from search results completely, depending on the severity of the infraction. Content has to be purposeful, valuable, unique and of high quality for Google to allow it to rank well in a search results page.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

This is the first colorful logo of Google. Google’s first name was Backrub. Backrub’s logo was simply a scan Larry Page’s hand from a flatbed scanner. Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google – a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. After the name change, the new logo is designed. The first logo looks like a ‘Wordart’.

The screenshot below shows how Google was in 1997.

]]> http://siteboat.com/the-first-google-logo/feed/ 3 http://siteboat.com/one-cheeseburger-equals-15000-google-searches-in-co2-emissions/ http://siteboat.com/one-cheeseburger-equals-15000-google-searches-in-co2-emissions/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 12:25:56 +0000 Erdem OZKAN http://siteboat.com/?p=2092

In January, one of the top stories of the Internet was that a single Google search generates 7 g of CO2. The story came out from an article published in The Sunday Times of London which focused on the enviromental …