Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches.

Below you can click on the first screenshot to figure out how to find your calendar XML feed URL to use in the plugin settings.

Having a public calendar is very useful for those who need to display events on their site. Photographers, musicians, event cordinators, etc. can make use of Google calendars right inside their sites running wordpress or even on static html pages.  If you don’t use wordpress you can embed a Calendar using the iframe embed feature inside of Google calendars.

Hope the screenshots were helpful if you had a hard time finding the XML feed URL to use.

Note: that you need to include the XML feed URL to the full feed, not the basic one for this to work. So you need to replace the word basic to full in the feed URL. There is no link to the full feed that I know of in Google Calendars.  So this http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/youremail@gmail.com/public/basic becomes http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/youremail@gmail.com/public/full. Note that I just changed the last directory from basic to full.

Interested in seeing the Google Calendar in action on a wordpress blog?  Visit this page: Charleston Live Music Events – for Super Deluxe’s upcoming events.

This article is taken from Wired and the link to the full article is at the end.  I wanted to post this here because it goes to show that Google “not being evil” and all is tracking basically everything you do so that it can better feed you ads, because without ads Google wouldn’t be what it is today.  So here’s the article…

Google has announced a new feature for its AdSense Advertising network — Interest-Based Advertising. Interest-Based Advertising, often known by its more Orwellian moniker, “behavior targeting,” gives advertisers a way to deliver ads to users who have shown interest in related items.

In short, Google plans to track your online moves and build a collection of “interests” based on which websites you visit. For example, if you start your day on the Major League Baseball homepage everyday, Google will know that you’re more likely to respond to ads for baseball paraphernalia.

Along similar lines are the “previous interaction” ads that will allow Google to show ads based on demonstrated behaviors. For example, if you put a shiny new Nikon D700 in your shopping cart, but never actually purchase it, Google will offer advertisers a way to place ads for the D700. Think of it as a way of constantly reminding you of the things you’re lusting after.

Creeped out yet? Well, on the plus side Google is handling the rather sensitive issues surrounding behavior tracking with a reasonable set of privacy controls. The first is that Google is allowing users to control their interest profiles, something many other similar ad systems don’t allow.

In a perfect world Google’s new ad system would be opt-in. Unfortunately in our world it’s opt-out, perhaps not ideal, but at least you can turn it off.

Don’t expect it to be easy to opt out though. Google is using a cookie to turn off the tracking, which means you’ll need to opt out on each and every PC you use and every browser you use on those PCs. Worse, should you ever delete Google’s opt-out cookie, you’ll need to opt out again (a plug-in exists that enables you to permanently opt out, but it only supports Firefox and IE).

Read the entire article over at wired.

It explains keyword research a bit and what is needed to dominate Google for competitive keywords.  So here it is…

Google’s Keyword Tool – Understanding The Numbers

Here are examples of the two keywords you suggested you wanted to rank for “muscle pain” and “back pain”. As you can see below there are different numbers of searches performed for each which pertain to the way in which people search. The match types are “broad”, “exact” and “phrase”.

Broad Match means those keywords appear anywhere in the search parameter ex. “lower back pain” counts in that given search volume just as “back pain relief” or even “relieve my back pain”. It basicaly means those keywords “back” or “pain” appear anywhere and in any order when someone does a search. This is why it has the largest search volume.

Exact Match means that the person searching searched for exactly that phrase with no other keywords. This is why the search volume is lower than both Broad and Phrase matches.

Phrase Match means that the keyword was included in a search in that exact order. People searching might still include other keywords in their search but the order inwhich the keywords appear is always in the same order. So these keyword phrases would count towards that monthly search volume: “back pain relief”, “back pain medication”, but not “pain in lower back”.

The reason I am pointing this out is because you noted you want to rank for “muscle pain” and “back pain” which from a Broad Match perspective has a very high monthly search volume. That might lead you to believe you’ll receive 2+ million unique visitors a month if you rank #1 for the term “back pain” but this is not the case.

These Broad Match search volume numbers come from hundreds in not thousands of different keyword phrases. You’d have to rank #1 for every single one to receive that many visitors a month.

A large portion of searches performed each month come from what are called “long tail keywords”. That basically means keyword phrases that have atleast 4 words in them. An example would be “How to cure back pain”.

To rank on the first page of Google or any other search engine you need to focus on several very competitive keywords but also have a large number of pages focused on smaller related “long tail” keywords.

So if you do a search on Google for “back pain” you’ll notice that the sites that are on the first page are very large sites containing hundreds of pages. Sites like webmd.com and wikipedia.org are very hard, if not impossible to beat when it comes to SEO. They are considered authoritative sites and will most likely never fall off the first page under such competitive keywords.

But you’ll notice a website ranked #9 on that page cure-back-pain.org that is operated by an individual who spent a lot of time writing articles about back pain and doing SEO so he ranks on the first page. He actually started the site in 2006 so it has been online for 2 years now. The age of a website also plays a role in SEO but I’ll explain more about that later.

The reason I am pointing out his website is because he has hundreds of pages of content on his website and that is one of the main reasons why he is ranking so well.

To rank as well as his website you’re going to need hundreds of pages of content all related to back pain. You’re going to have to create a portal of information related to the symptoms people have and then explain how your products can help relieve these symptoms.

I am focusing on the keyword “back pain” because that is one of the keywords you mentioned but I noticed you have other products that you’ll be selling from your site as well. Your product line contains items such as herbal tea, safron capsules, Tibetan rhodiola capsules etc. that are all considered natural medicines.

My thoughts are that you could focus on the natural aspect of your products. Or the fact that your products are Tibetan medicines.

One option you have is developing a portal about Tibetan medicine and the benefits of natural remedies for instance. This is possibly what you were trying to accomplish with your site *url deleted*.

SEO is a long term strategy and one that has a greater return on investment than say PPC advertising because once you do the work and build up a resourceful site you can reap the rewards of organic search traffic for years to come. And since 70% of people click on sites listed in the organic search results over the ads that appear alongside them you’ll fair far better in terms of converting traffic to buyers.

How to Rank on The First Page of Google For Your Keywords

I’m going to now advise you of what is required for your company to dominate the U.S. market using internet marketing tactics such as SEO, affiliate marketing and social networking.

The main goal is to achieve maximum visibility wherever people are active online whether it be from an internet search or an online community. You want to be the first thing people see when they go online to look for help with their ailments.

To accomplish this you must apply a comprehensive online marketing strategy that will ensure your brand is at the forefront of major search terms, related websites, communities and social networks.

1. An ecommerce website with these features:

• SEO friendly meaning URLs are static and meta titles and descriptions can be controlled for every product page.
• Affiliate tracking so an affiliate program can be operated and run successfuly.
• Built in CMS so content can be added easily.
• W3C-standards compatible meaning everyone can see your store in the same way, regardless of which web browser they use.
• Ability to accept all major forms of payment including Paypal, Google Checkout etc.
• Ability to detect the geographical location of a customer and shows prices in their local currency.
• Integration with UPS, UPS online tools, USPS, FedEx, Canada Post, Australia Post and Royal Mail for live shipping quotes.
• Single page checkout system as well as guest checkout which make it easy to order.
• Complete backend for customers so they can view orders, track their shipments and order easily in the future.

Along with your products you should have at least 100 other content pages explaining the benefits of each product. In depth articles about how your products help customers as well as news and company info should be provided.

This ecommerce website should be hosted on a dedicated server which would have dedicated resources for it including a dedicated IP address. This adds a level of security that you cannot receive when dealing with shared hosting. Of course the site would be protected by 128 bit industry-standard SSL security.

2. An information portal with these features:

• SEO optimized including static URLs. This includes optimized Meta titles, descriptions, content and site structure.
• Ability to easily add content by multiple authors online via browser.
• Between 300-500 articles related to your products. These articles would be optimized for search engines but also humans so they are of high quality.
• A complete user forum (bulletin board) where people can join in discussions. This forum would be optimized for search engines so the pages and content get indexed on search engines.

3. Social Networking

Because a majority of people online are spending their time on social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook it is essential to add this to your online marketing strategy. It is fundamental to be proactive on such sites and be engaged in conversations related to your products.

• Myspace page optimized with your search terms and product info.
• Facebook business page

4. Press Release Distribution

Press releases are an excellent method for not only announcing news to the public but also for SEO.

5. Article Distribution

Articles written around keywords you are targeting should be written, optimized and submitted to the major article repositories online. Many of these articles are redistributed on news and personal websites that further help build your link popularity.

6. Social Media Optimization

Just like article repository websites there are websites that focus on user generated content such as hubpages.com and squidoo.com where you can create and distribute your own content. These sites are an essential part of creating buzz and interest around your product as well as driving traffic to your main website.

7. Satellite Websites

Because of the vast majority of keywords you’ll be optimizing for it is suggested you create a number of satellite websites. Satellite websites are smaller informational websites optimized around alternative keywords. These sites would be focused on one main keyword such as “arthritis pain relief” and would contain unique information related solely to arthritis and relieving pain.

These Satellite websites would collect and drive traffic to your main ecommerce website to increase sales and also help boost the ranking of your main site.

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another essential component of online marketing that I suggest you implement. Affiliate marketing gives incentives to website owners and online marketers to promote your products online.

Affiliates drive traffic to your ecommerce store via their own websites, PPC ads with banners and text links you provide them so that they receive a commission when someone purchases your products. You pay out commissions only after an order is made.

A complete affiliate program can be implemented along with program management and ad creation.

9. Aquiring Websites

One method to fasttrack brand visibility online is to purhase existing websites that already rank for keywords that we want to rank for.

After doing some initial research I’ve found atleast one person who is willing to sell their website. I can aquire more info and negotiate a deal with them or others to see if it is worthwhile to pursue.

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So that is where I am stopping.  It gives you an overview of what I propose needed to be done to not only enter but dominate major keywords on Google.  This is a pretty big project and by no means do you need to do all of these things if you are a small business.  Of course the more marketing you do that is focused the better.

I hope someone finds this info useful.  I figured I’d post it instead of letting it sit in a folder on my hard drive.

Google finally introduces video chat functionality within Gmail! This is an awesome new feature that will surely excite people who use gmail and also skype. Now you don’t have to use a separate client to chat with people in your gmail contacts list.

Read more about the features below.

That’s why today we’re launching voice and video chat — right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and video — all for free. All you have to do is download and install the voice and video plugin and we take care of the rest. And in the spirit of open communications, we designed this feature using Internet standards such as XMPP, RTP, and H.264, which means that third-party applications and networks can choose to interoperate with Gmail voice and video chat.

Once you install the plugin, to start a video chat, just click on the “Video & more” menu at the bottom of your Gmail chat window, and choose “Start video chat.” You’ll have a few seconds to make sure you look presentable while it’s ringing, and then you’ll see and hear your friend live, right from within Gmail. You can click the “pop-out” iconto make the video larger, or click the fullscreen iconin the upper left-hand corner for a fully immersive experience.

Visit the Gmail’s official blog.

Here’s an example below of Google Local in action.  A simple search for Durham Pet Sitter returns a bunch of local businesses that offer this service.   I’m not sure how the businesses are ranked here… if its first come first serve or if there is some other algorithm that Google is using, but I’d say get on board before it’s too late and you’re listed under the “more results near…” link

What Google Local is offering for Free to business owners.

Reach new customers on Google Maps and Google.com
Local customers are already searching for the products and services you offer. Why not make it easy for them to find you on Google search and on Google Maps? The Local Business Center is the place to start.

Works great for businesses of any size
Whether you run a single dentist’s office or dozens of coffee shops, manage all your listings from a single account.

Update your listing at any time
Use the Local Business Center to edit your listing whenever and however you like. Your Google Maps results will be updated in a few weeks, not next year.

Catch their eye with printable coupons
Google printable coupons are a free and easy way to bring in more business. You decide what your coupons should say, then customers print them out and bring them to your store.

Google Local gives businesses the ability to receive top rankings in Google without the cost of using Adwords or implementing an SEO campaign.

Sign up for Google Local Free.

You can edit these by using Google’s Webmaster Tools under > Links > Sitelinks

There you can either block or update the current sitelinks Google has listed for your site.  There might be links listed there that you have never seen under your listing in search results.  That’s most likely because your website isn’t popular enough to need it.  And Sitelinks really only show up if someone is searching directly for your brand or domain name (that I’ve seen).  If you don’t own a popular website then this doesn’t really apply to you.  In anycase you can get a sense of what Google sees as your most important pages.

There’s more clarification about Sitelinks here, but I’ve posted the gist of it below written by a Google employee named Maile.

Sitelinks are created algorithmically to help users quickly navigate
to the information they need on your site. To display sitelinks,
Google must basically determine: 1) a relevant structure for your site
conducive to sitelinks, and 2) that sitelinks will be helpful for the
user’s query.

For your verified site in Webmaster Tools, you can view your available
sitelinks. If you choose to block a sitelink, it will then appear in
Webmaster Tools as blocked. Once the change becomes effective, the
blocked sitelink will not appear in search results. You will not
immediately see a new sitelink listed in Webmaster Tools to replace
your blocked sitelink.

For example, let’s say you have 8 sitelinks in Webmaster Tools. If you
choose to block a sitelink, it will be removed from your “Current
sitelinks” section and added to the “Blocked sitelinks” section. The
blocked sitelink will not appear in search results for 90 days, and it
can be unblocked at any time. (It does, however, take a bit of time
for the blocked/unblocked change to take effect.) Every time you visit
the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools, whether or not you modify your
Sitelinks settings, the blocked sitelinks will renew their blocked
time for an additional 90 days.

In search results, the sitelinks displayed are determined
algorithmically based on the user’s query. So, while Webmaster Tools
may show 8 sitelinks for your verified site, it’s possible that search
results show only a subset (e.g. search results display 4 sitelinks).
Furthermore, the sitelinks displayed in search results can vary
according to the query (e.g. different combinations of sitelinks for
different queries).

Common questions
Can I trigger new sitelinks to appear in Webmaster Tools?
New sitelinks appear in Webmaster Tools when a general sitelink update
occurs. Updates (i.e. new sitelinks in search results and/or Webmaster
Tools) are not affected by your blocking or unblocking sitelinks. New
sitelinks cannot be triggered manually.

How can I get sitelinks to appear for my site in search results?
Your site must have at least 3 unblocked sitelinks in order for your
sitelinks to appear in search results.  Therefore:

1. If you block sitelinks in Webmaster Tools and leave fewer than 3
remaining, no sitelinks will appear for your site in search results.

2. If you have fewer than 3 sitelinks algorithmically generated for
your site, you will not see a sitelink options in Webmaster Tools.

Sitelinks are calculated algorithmically. Having a crawlable,
intuitive architecture is helpful in generating sitelinks. Also,
creating compelling, unique content or providing a useful service
(thus making your site highly relevant to user queries) can increase
the probability of sitelink generation — and thus your site
displaying sitelinks in search results!

You should still use URL Rewrites if you’re either dealing with a smaller site like say a blog or an ecommerce site where it makes more sense to use a descriptive URL then one that contains a bunch of parameters humans can’t read.  I’ve highlighted in red the main point you should keep in mind.  I also think having your keywords in the pages URL helps in your rankings.

Here’s what Google had to say…

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren’t essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we’d advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won’t be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Following are some questions we thought you might have at this point.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

Should you try to make your dynamic URLs look static?
Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.

If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

So what’s the point of all this?

Unless you have a site producing large dynamic URL’s you have nothing to worry about.  Don’t go turning off Permalinks in wordpress or stop using Mod-rewrite because Google can now index dynamic URL’s a bit better.

Btw, here’s the link to the full article over at the Google Webmaster blog

Although I believe they’ve had the ability to spider flash files for awhile they have officially come out and announced it and also described more about what in Flash files they do index.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?

All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we’re also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?

At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?

Basically, you don’t need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a “copyright” or “loading” message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

So if you want to hide any text from Google just replace it with an image and it will be invisible to them?

Anyway, I think Google improving it’s ability to index Flash based sites is good news for people with Flash based sites that don’t know any better or care about their rankings because I still see using Flash in it’s entirety for a website as a bad decision SEO wise – Also see “Case Against Flash“. It’s still better to use standard CSS/XHTML or plain HTML pages if you want to rank high for your industries keywords.

Also does anyone else see black hat SEO’s taking advantage of this? You can embed the entire encyclopedia in a small flash file that Google could essentially index if you wanted to. Or what about embedded links? I can definitely see this being abused. What do you think?

According to Google:

“We recognized there was a need for a Google icon that would better work across multiple applications including web, mobile and client applications. We felt the small ‘g’ had many of the characteristics that best represent our brand: it’s simple, playful, and unique. We will be looking to improve and enhance this icon as we move forward.”

Simple, playful and unique? That’s not the impression I have of Google at all. Am I missing something?

What do you think? Big G or little g?

Here are some iterations of the Google Favicon:

Read more about it here.