As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services. For more information or to share your thoughts, visit ourHelp Forum.

How Search Works

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNHR6IQJGZs&feature=player_embedded#!

Source: http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

Search Engine Optimization Singapore is the process of improving a website such that it best follows the Search Engine’s algorithm, and eventually gets the website highly ranked on the natural results, and thus more traffic.

Google has a complex set of 200 algorithms!

If you like to know how you could get yourself on the first page of Google’s natural results, look for a good Singapore SEO agency to advise you. Contact us at +65 9450-0295 or info@advantageseo.net

Related posts:

1. What is SEO?
2. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
3. Top 10 rank for Singapore SEO!

Top 10 for Singapore SEO!

Although only on the number 10 ranking for “Singapore SEO“, it was not by any means an easy task.  Comparing the nine other sites on the same results (SERP), in terms of Domain Age, we are the youngest site (slightly over 6 months).

Google ranks sites base on their “trust’ value of that site derived from over 200 algorithms. A few basic algorithm are : Domain Age, Site content and backlinks. The longer a site had been around, i.e. older domain age, its ”trust” value with Google increases and thus its ranking improves. Been a younger site, we need to prove lots more by writing good and relevant content and build quality backlinks, so as to win the “trust” value of Google.

While most of our time had been spent on helping our clients, I am personally thankful for the dedication and hard work of our team.

Well although we had not relied on this result for our growth, this result does helps to boost our spirits!

Thank you Team!

Adrian Ang, Business Director

P.S. > If you are keen to know how we can help your website achieve top rankings, contact us today at +65 94500295 or email http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

Related posts:

1. PPC vs SEO
2. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
3. How Google Works

We spend a lot of time thinking about search results, but we also spend a lot of time thinking about search queries. Today we’re announcing three enhancements to help you input your searches more quickly and easily: more localized Google Suggest, improved spell correction for names and auto-correction for 31 languages.

Feel at home with Google Suggest
Last year we launched localized Google Suggest by country, offering relevant popular search queries tailored for different regions. However, just as people in the U.K. often look for different things than people in U.S., we’ve found that people in Seattle tend to look for different things than people in Dallas. So last week, we rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S. You may notice that the list of queries beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than it used to:

• In San Francisco [bart] is probably not Bart Simpson; it’s probably Bay Area Rapid Transit:

• In Chicago it’s easy to find out about your local NBA team:

While saving you that unnecessary click, we make search that much faster.

Related posts:

1. Google Testing a Revamp of the Search Results Page
2. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
3. Google Combines Search and Real Estate

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

Apart from improving your site speed, there are said to be over 200+ algorithm that can affect your site rankings in Google.

Read more about our Singapore SEO methodologies and know-how or contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

Related posts:

1. Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010
2. Google Reveals Factors for Ranking Tweets
3. Site Speed May Soon Affect Google Page Ranking

Small businesses are especially close to my heart. When he retired from teaching, my father ran a small art company in Maine, and I saw firsthand how fulfilling — and how difficult — it was for him to realize his dream of running his own business. Unfortunately, his business closed its doors after just a few years. His key challenge: attracting qualified customers.

Many new businesses face similar challenges, but the power of technology can help business owners find the customers they need. Whether you’re a fledgling entrepreneur trying to turn your passion into a profit or an established enterprise trying to get to the next level, Internet tools like Google AdWords are the key to being there when customers come looking for you online.

To show what’s possible, we invited 53-year-old Jay Berkowitz to share his experience creating a business and using AdWords to help it flourish. Here’s what Jay has to say:

Like most first-time parents, my life completely changed when my daughter Hillary was born in 1993. My wife Janet and I decided that one of us should stay at home to care for her while the other continued working full time. Janet kept her engineering job, and I ended up quitting my job as a Wall Street bond analyst to become Mr. Mom.

Later, when Hillary started school, I had more free time. It seemed like the perfect chance to do something I’d always dreamed of: launch my own business and work for myself. I started selling themed plates and lunchboxes at New York City street fairs. Then in 2001, eight-year-old Hillary showed me (her non-tech-savvy dad) how to turn on a computer. That was the beginning of taking the business online, and realizing a whole new world of possibility. Janet and I worked together to build a website,PlatesPlus4Kids.com, and we started advertising online with Google AdWords. Soon, my little project became a full-fledged venture.

By advertising on the Internet, I was able to reach interested customers not only in my area, but all over the country. More and more people found my store through online searches. In no time, I had so many orders that I could no longer keep my inventory of themed cups, plates and lunchboxes on the kitchen table. The stock moved to the den, then the basement, and finally to a warehouse 20 minutes from our house in Little Neck, New York. Over the years, I’ve also expanded my product line and now offer children’s backpacks, umbrellas, flatware, snack containers and sandwich boxes. What started as a hobby now brings in about $500,000 in sales annually.

I only pay when people click on my ad and go to my website, so the cost of marketing is within my means. I increase the budget during the back-to-school season and the holidays (my peak periods) so my ads show above the search results during those times. I’ve also noticed that customers seem to be in a shopping mood on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I sometimes increase my budget on those days to make sure my ads show up more. Depending on trends, I create new ads to promote different characters and new inventory. For example, now that Yo Gabba Gabba is popular andbaseball season is starting, I’m making adjustments so that those phrases combined with words like “dishes,” “placemats” and “cups” trigger my ads. And of course, I have ads that mention items with princesses and superheroes — those are top sellers year-round.

What’s really great is that even though my business has expanded over the past seven years, it’s still a small family company. Two people work for me at the warehouse, but I work from home. Janet takes pictures of the products and works on the website on the weekends. I’ve had the freedom to be a hands-on parent to Hillary and the privilege of helping other parents connect with their kids through my store. Certain celebrity parents have found me through my AdWords ads and bought items for their kids.

I consider myself a pretty ordinary guy. When I started PlatesPlus for Kids, I had no idea it would become what it is today. It’s heartening to know that by following your gut and putting in a lot of hard work, you can find a fulfilling second career. Or maybe a first one.

Posted by Claire Johnson, Vice President, Online Sales and Operations, Advertising Programs

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/it-takes-one-to-show-one-getting.html

Keen to know more about Adwords? Let us tell you more here: PPC Singapore

To find out how you can get yourself more business from Google Adwords immediately, contact us at tel: +65 94500295 or http://www.advantageseo.sg/contact-us

Related posts:

1. Google AdWords Testing New Flat Rate Local AdWords Ad Pricing Model
2. Badly-Managed AdWords Accounts — Worse for You Than for Google
3. Adwords Bans: Poor Landing Page Quality Scores

By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writerApril 1, 2010: 11:22 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — In the rich tradition of April Fool’s Day pranks, Google has renamed itself after Topeka, Kan., accompanied by an absurd explanation from the company’s chief.

On Thursday morning, the company’s home page was titled “Topeka” instead of “Google,” although still in its distinctive blue-red-yellow-green font.

FacebookDiggTwitterBuzz Up!EmailPrintComment on this story

How Google, er, Topeka’s home page looked Thursday morning.
Why? Because in March, Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten announced that he was informally changing the name of his town to “Google,” just for one month. He told CNN that he was doing it for “fun.” This is Google’s tit-for-tat explanation, according to its official blog, posted by CEO Eric Schmidt.

“Whatever the outcome, the conclusion is clear: we aren’t in Google anymore,” blogs Schmidt.

April Fool’s Day carries a long tradition for pranks and punks, which affect every aspect of life, from the school yard to the board room. Since the advent of the Internet, companies and individuals have gotten inundated with funky e-mails making wild claims, on this day in particular.

Google has made a name for itself as one of the more proactive pranksters in the business world. Every year on April 1, the company tries to punk its followers with a new prank.

Past pranks
The naughtiness stems back to 2000, when Google claimed that its “MentalPlex” could read your mind through your computer screen, allowing users to conduct searches on sheer brain power.

“With MentalPlex, you just project a mental picture of what you want to find,” explained Google, in its 2000 posting, accompanied by a hypnotic spiral.

Last year, Google claimed its site was featuring the world’s first 3D browser, but this was just another case of April Fool’s bunk.

The strange tradition of April Fools’ mass media pranks goes back to 1957, when the BBC broadcast a weird and untrue television segment about Swiss farmers harvesting spaghetti from trees.

Naturally, many of the viewers mistakenly thought the BBC story was real.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/04/01/technology/google_april_fools/index.htm

Google's April Fool Joke 2010

No related posts.

become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week

Not sure of HitWises methodology – why aren’t they comparing all Google’s web functions, including Maps and Mail? – but good on Facebook! For a site that didn’t exist in 2003, that is quite some achievement.

What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Not much.

Given the lock-in for return visits, it’s unsurprising that Facebook might receive more visits than a search engine. However, the most important aspect of different channels, as far as a web marketer is concerned, is: does the traffic convert to cash at some point?

Measure Success

Social Media Marketing, like SEO, is a tatic. However, if the tactic don’t translate into more business, then it’s a waste of time. Whatever channel you use, it is important to establish KPIs – key performance indicators – that measure the effectiveness of your tactics, and directly relate to the success of you business.

For example, one of the KPIs often mentioned in SMM is volume metrics, such as number of followers, subscribers etc. If we were to relate this metric back to our business objectives, we’d ask how does having a higher number of followers, or people claiming to be followers, result in more business? How many of those followers are really engaging with you? Or are they, literally, just making up the numbers?

I’ve seen social media companies fudge this aspect. Some play around with the term ROI, changing the “I” from “investment” to “influence”, or to “interest”, and use the number of followers as evidence of the level of interest in a clients services or brand.

The bottom line is the golden KPI. It can become blurred in bigger organizations, but for the little guy, it is crucial.

Volume Metrics Can Be Deceiving

Search marketers know that the volume game can be an illusion when it comes to making money.

“Jokes” may be a very popular keyword term, but it’s not making people any money because there is no commercial intent. “Second mortgages” is not a particularly popular term in terms of volume, but is lucrative as it has clear commercial intent. A high position for second mortgages in search rankings will make you money.

Conversely, how difficult would it be to get buzz around the term “second mortgages” via social media? Sure, with some inventive twisting and disguising of the true message it could be done, but really, it’s pushing water uphill. The social environment isn’t really suited to such a message.

Choose The Right Environment

The two channels are like apples and oranges.

Different environments work for different messages. Social media is great for generating awareness, getting people talking, and when integrated with an SEO strategy can be a great way of getting links. Primarily, it’s a brand strategy. However, because it is a social environment, there is less tolerance of overt commercial activity that in direct channels.

Typical social media measurements include:

• Business outcomes – can you link the campaign to specific interactions, such as sales?
• Influencer Reach – how many influencers picked up on your message and spread it?
• Audience Reach – how many visitors saw your message? Link this metric to…
• Engagement – how many of those people who saw you message contacted you, or took a desired action?

Conversely, SEO isn’t much use for building brand awareness or encouraging people to talk about your message. The environment is similar to direct marketing. It is well suited to direct response and commercial activity, as the intent of the user can be determined, and if that intent is commercial, then people welcome commercial messages.

What Is Your Business

Hanging out and being cool on Facebook isn’t a business

Business on the web typically falls into one of nine groups. Which is yours?

• Brokerage – bringing buyers and sellers together
• Advertising – displaying/selling advertising
• Infomediary – run programs such as ad networks
• Merchant – sell stuff
• Manufacturer (Direct) – make and sell stuff
• Affiliate – sell other peoples stuff and take a commission
• Community – leverage your community to sell something else
• Subscription – sell content/training on an on-going basis
• Utility – pay as you go usage

Decide which business you are in. When deciding on marketing and advertising tactics, ask yourself which environment is best suited to developing your business, then develop KPIs that support that business. You key KPI should be the bottom line – either this activity returns more money than you spend, or it doesn’t.

Related posts:

1. Google Makes Facebook Pages a Higher Priority for Businesses
2. Facebook Page Owners Getting More Stats
3. 6 Tips to Succeed in Social Media

We’re very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There’s a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.
…
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it’s not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it’s the recipes. We think we’re where we are today because we’ve got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Wednesday Google’s chief scientist Peter Norvig shared his view:

We don’t have better algorithms than anyone else. We just have more data.

And this is why you see so many hucksters hyping trash, committing fraud, scamming users, cutting corners, and working legal loopholes at launch time to try to grow marketshare *at any cost*

Build the scale and you have the cashflow and feedback mechanisms in place to test viral marketing strategies, improve conversion rates, increase real (and perceived) relevancy, and lock in users.

“In a July 19, 2005 e-mail to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote: ‘jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.’”
…
“Our dirty little secret… is that we actually just want to sell out quickly,” said Karim at one point. In an e-mail, Chen talked about “concentrat[ing] all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” – Ars Technica

Welcome to the exciting world of innovation in online media!

Without brand you have nothing.

With brand even a wounded duck full of unauthorized scraped content like YouTube or Mahalo somehow manages flight, at least for a while. Then you only need to find someone dumb enough to buy the growth story and purchase the bag of smoke before the fire emerges.

Of course people don’t have to cut corners, lie, cheat, and steal to build a real business. Those are the strategies employed by people trying to sell value where none exists. You can do just fine by dominating a small niche THEN leveraging data to grow. It is not sexy. You probably can’t hype it to the media. It might not lead to an 8 or 9 figure payday. But then you won’t have to describe your strategy as “whatever tactics, however evil.”

Related posts:

1. Facebook Gets Into Customized Data Centers
2. Google: a new signal in search ranking algorithms!
3. Google Makes World Bank Data Available in Search

Spy tools can be useful in an SEO and/or a PPC campaign. However, many of these tools essentially try to extrapolate scraped results which can lead to some fairly inaccurate results. Also, these tools occasionally come up with in-house metrics (of which they really don’t give you much useful info about how they arrived at the data the present from these “proprietary” metrics”) to help try and differentiate their offerings from their competition.

Spy Tool Reviews

There is a much more in-depth review, with examples, up in our members forum. Here, we will do overviews of some of the more popular tools on the market. Specifically, we will be taking a look at:

• review of SEM Rush
• review of SpyFu
• review of Keyword Spy
• review of Compete.com
• review of Ispionage

Value of Spy Tools

The idea that you are missing out on something is a core marketing tactic so even if you are comfortable with one tool chances are you’ve been tempted to go with another. Keep in mind, from a cost standpoint, the ROI you would take by just finding a few decent keywords to target will likely far outweigh any cost associated with these tools. Your business probably won’t collapse if you pick an A minus tool versus an A plus tool and none of these tools are able to make concrete decisions for you. What these tools provide are additional data points for you to consider in your own research.

We hope you’ll find these reviews useful. There are perhaps a few other services we missed given how many of these tools as there are and our primary focus on SEO. If these reviews are well received we could also review everything from Quantcast & Alexa right on through to AdGooroo, but we need to know if you would be interested in those types of reviews. If there are any other cool products or services you would like us to review just let us know.

A few disclaimers: some of these services have given us free review accounts, whereas we have paid for some of the others. And some of these tools offer affiliate programs, but all reviews were done without those 2 factors influencing the editorial. Most these reviews do not have affiliate links in them (I think SEM Rush is the only one which does have an affiliate link right now), and Aaron reviewed SEM Rush before they even had a public affiliate program.

Already an SEO Book subscriber?

• We license SEM Rush’s SEO data for our competitive research tool.
• The second post in this thread has some killer member’s only tips for getting the most out of competitive research tools.
• This thread is also awesome, and these three threads really shows how to use these tools in a way that really kicks arse.

If you can’t make $1,000’s from reading those threads then you certainly are not a professional grade SEO.

Related posts:

1. Keyword Spy Review
2. ISpionage Review
3. SpyFu Review

Compete Site Profiles

Here is how compete gets their data.

Here is a screen shot of their site profile overlay

It’s kind of like a semi-analytics program view of things which includes:

• Unique Visitors
• Page Views
• Average Stay
• Demographic Info
• Link through’s to Referral and Search Analytics (discussed further down)

Data is available in 7 day, 30 day, 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year increments.

The audience profile tab is similar to quantcast and is only available to the verified site owner (unless the site has made it’s info public) and the sub-domain tab shows sub-domains associated with the main domain.

Enterprise users, where there is no standard pricing listed…also get access to category profiles and behavioral categories as shown below:

You also get the option to compare up to 5 sites at once in their site profile section

Those are the options in the profiles section. These statistics are far beyond what most traditional spy tools offer and can be very useful when comparing large sites as small sites do not fare very well with these types of data sets (this is not specific to compete, it’s pretty much industry wide).

Analytics Tools

Compete’s second tool set is the Analytics Tools set. Here you can search through Search Analytics (keywords) and Referral Analytics (sites referring traffic to the domain) as well as a variety of Ranked Lists.

Referral Analytics

This is pretty sweet as you can see what search engines the site’s SEO campaign is doing well in, as well as possible advertising opportunities for your site.

It also will show you Destination sites (where users go after landing on the site you are reviewing.)

In addition to messing around with some of the filters you can take a peek at historical data (trends, seasonal, etc) as noted here.

Ranked Lists

Compete offers ranked lists which you can filter in a few easy steps

Compete lets you look at ranked lists via 3 steps (one from each)

• Step 1 – unique visitors, visits, page views, time spent, monthly attention
• Step 2 – site ranking, ranking + unique visitors, ranking + all metrics
• Step 3 – top 200, 1,000, 15,000, 100,000, 500,000 domains

Search Analytics

Compete’s Search Analytics show keywords referring traffic to a site (or two) with some pretty neat metrics:

• Highly Engaging Keywords – Keywords that make up 40% of the total time index and have a referral share greater than 0.01%
• High Traffic Keywords – Keywords that make up the top 40% of the search referral share
• Paid Keywords
• Natural Keywords
• Engaging Long Tail Keywords – Keywords making up the bottom 60% of search referral share, with a total time index of > .10
• Enthusiast Keywords – Keywords that make up the top 40% of Average Time Index and a Search Referral Share greater than 0.01
• Long Tail Keywords
• Total Time Index – scale of 100 with 100 being the term where the searcher came from…that made up the highest total time spent on the site for ALL visits.
• Average Time Index – scale of 100 with 100 being the term which resulted in the most average time per visit spent on the site.

You can also compare 2 sites like so:

In Closing

The high price point of Compete might scare some users away, but consider that their data is not just relying on scraped Google/Yahoo/Bing results then extrapolated by some internal metrics. Compete is probably more useful to those who “compete” in really competitive markets with some sites as competition, although it can be useful to folks who may be involved in less competitive SERPS with smaller sites as competitors because they can use this data to investigate larger sites in their market, which may not be competitors but could yield helpful industry data.

Related posts:

1. ISpionage Review
2. SpyFu Review
3. Keyword Spy Review