Imagine your TV not only brought you all your favourite TV shows, but gave you full access to everything you do on the internet too? You could watch YouTube videos, browse facebook, browse photos online, play your favourite games.

Google are doing just that, with Google TV. Google have posted on their blog: “Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favourite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favourite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.”

With technology as it is, this is really the next logical step in technology. I imagine that our remote controls will evolve in the very near future to work as touch screens, so everything can be done from the couch without moving. Perhaps not an entirely great thing as it could make the next generation quite lazy, but it is interesting to see how technology continues to evolve, and how large a part Google continue to play.

Here is a cool new little tool for Google, Google latitude. Google latitude can be used on your phone or computer, and allows you to see where your friends are in real time and quickly contact them.

For those concerned about privacy, this feature only works for people you have added to your list, and whose list you are on. But for those times when you want to hide, you can hide your location, control your specific location, i.e. only showing at a city level as opposed to exact map location.

Photo Credit: Google

Find out more in the video below.

Find out more about the privacy settings here

Visit the Google latitude website

Over the past two  years, the business landscape in Australian has changed significantly in its awareness of search engines, and the benefits and importance of an effective website.

Two or three years ago, Pay-Per-Click services such as Google AdWords were more widely known and utilised, whereas focusing on developing and improving organic search results (natural listings) was mostly under utilised . Historically businesses invested less in organic search engine campaigns in favour of Pay-Per-Click.

Today, changes in market awareness and the need to become more innovative has brought about considerably more competition in the organic search space.

Like any effective marketing method, news spreads quickly both through the consumer market, as well as the number of people offering search engine services. Unfortunately as a result of so many trying to jump on the bandwagon, the search engines services industry also has grown to a point where a high number of businesses offering search engine services, have staff who have very little true knowledge of this ever changing industry and end up delivering mediocre results, or worse yet, result in websites being banned from the search engines altogether due to inappropriate application of search engine service techniques.

So how do you know who the right search engine services company is to work on your website for the best result for your budget?

Firstly, stay away from any search engine services firm whose only focus is on increasing your website traffic. I know that increased website traffic sounds really attractive when being pitched to you, but what if that website traffic brings you very little new business, or even worse, none at all? The number one focus of any campaign should be increasing the goals of the website. I.e. Is your number one goal to increase sales, newsletter signups, or promoting a service?

Here are some of the most important considerations when choosing the right web marketing company.

• They understand without prompting, that your business needs are not just about being able to rank highly on keywords, but what will convert new business for you.
• What their methodology is for selecting keywords. I.e. Will they choose a keyword that will meet/exceed your website goals.
• Do they have a business background and understanding the effects of marketing for a business
• Understanding of the buying cycle – this is important, to adequately capture the right consumers, at the right time, based on your offering.
• Ability to interpret web analytics results – No marketing is an exact science. Testing and measuring results is important, and to do so, the right analysis of web analytics plays a critical role.
• Understand buyer behaviour – Why do consumers act the way they do when they are on your website, viewing your product or service? What can be done to make the user experience better, and so increase the chance they will buy from your company.
• With such constant change, the ability to adapt and change quickly is important – How are they keeping up-to-date?
• Do they understand how Social Media best fits in with your business?

These are important elements to consider, otherwise you face throwing your marketing budget away, on poor results.

Looking to market your business across the web? Whether you have an existing website, need a new website, we can tailor a web marketing package that will suit your business. Contact us today.

The past two months have brought about some of the largest changes in a short space of time I have seen from Google. What do these changes mean to your site? Well, depending on the current level of SEO/Web Promotion being done on your site, it may mean very little. If you are on a lower budget, or not doing any SEO work at all, it could considerably impact on your business.

So here are some of the most important changes:

• Personalised search changes
• Google Local, and other Universal blended results
• Real time search
• Site speed
• Social Media/Networking

Personalised search changes

While Google Personalised search has been in place for quite some time now, previously this only worked when logged into a Google Account. On 4th December 2009, Google announced that they will be opening this up to everyone, whether you are signed into an account or not.

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html
• More on Local Business Search

Google Local, and other Universal blended results

In the past couple of years, Google blended the search listings from images, video, blogs, news etc… into a system called Universal Search. Which have been incorporated into the natural listings, pushing many sites off the first page. Now we have social media sites such as Twitter, and Facebook showing up in Google results, and is one of the reasons social media/networking optimisation has become an important piece of search.

Google local is the small map and related results you will very often see in Google results. More frequently you will notice that these results no longer appear just based on using a suburb within your search, and will appear in more general searches. What this really means is if you were doing well in the lower 5 results or so of Google, is that your site will now be much harder to see.

Real time search

Real time search is where information just added onto Twitter or Facebook, and other sites, will immediately appear within Google’s results. While we are seeing very little of this in Australian results as of yet, this will be a major change to come in 2010, and will potentially have a large impact on sites currently doing well at the top of the search engines.

Site Speed

Google are also now using site speed as a factor in rankings sites according to how quickly though load. This means sites that are very ‘image heavy’, and have a lot of video or Flash Animation, may find their rankings drop.

Social Media/Networking

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other Social Media/Networking have been around for a long time now, but with the changes to Google in terms of including listing these within their results, having a presence within Social sites such as these is becoming a very important part of your web marketing campaign. Not all Social Media sites are suitable for all businesses, so it is important to select the right solution to match your business.

As you will see, these are large changes that make web promotion more complex, and require changes in strategy to keep you driving effective traffic to your website.

If you’re looking to drive more business through your website, contact us today to help you determine the best web strategy for your business.

Are you going through the process of a website rebuild?

There are some very important points to take note of during this process, to make sure that your site:

• does not lose any search engine rankings, or
• have any broken links, be they within your website, or through anyone who has bookmarked your website.

So what are the things that could affect my website?

Each page in your website will very often have an associated rank, especially with Google. If your page is named www.website.com.au/page.html, and in the new site this exact page is now called www.website.com.au/new-page.html then Google will view this as a new page, and your rankings could start from scratch.

Of course wherever possible keep the old page names exactly the same as the original names.

How do you minimise the risk of a loss in rankings?

A 301 redirect in a .htaccess file on the server is the best way of doing this. The 301 redirect is a command that shows you have moved that page permanently. You may still find a temporary drop in rankings of pages within your site, but from experience, I have found that this generally ranges between no time at all, and a two to three weeks.

Please note, the above reference to a 301 redirect will not work on a windows server. Refer to your Windows hosting support for this reference.

Other important elements to think of, that can also affect your search engine rankings, as well as lost traffic/business.

• Bookmarking – When people have bookmarked your website in the Internet Browser – a 301 redirect will fix this.
• RSS feeds – Internal and External.
• Social Media/Networking/Bookmarking sites, and Directories – Try to updates your links on all of these sites.
• Internal Links – Internal links within your website carry SEO value from one page to the next.
• External Websites that link to you – These can be very important, as Google places high value in some external links that point to a website. Changing your pages, could result in a large drop in rankings. – Try to updates your links on all of these sites.
• HTML Structure – Is it the same as it was, or improved? Consult your SEO expert on this to be sure.
• Meta Tags – Are these the same as they were or improved? Consult your SEO expert on this to be sure.

Please note, that using the 301 redirect method will certainly ensure there are no broken links, however it will not pass on the same SEO value associated with each site link, so it is important to update as many of these links as possible, to ensure minimal impact to your site.

If you need help with your site move, contact us today for a quote.