Fresh Start For Google?

So Eric Schmidt is out, and Google’s original  CEO Larry Page is back in charge.  Hopefully, this will mean an end to policies like the “creepy line” that Schmidt was lampooned for so many times last year.  Since Page was in no small part responsible for Google’s early success, it’s a hopeful sign that this change is going to take the company back to the kind of  direction that made everyone love it in the first place.

Of course, this could mean no difference in the long run, only time will tell what Mr. Page is going to do as the man calling the shots.  The company has the unofficial motto of “Don’t be evil”, though, so hopefully this change will take the company away from the invasive practices that they’ve been tending toward for the last year.  Personally, I think that this leadership change is, as Schmidt said in a recent update to the Official Google Blog, for the best.

So, as long as the company stops scaring us all with the possibility that it actually is trying to become the third half of our brains, that means we can expect things to go a lot smoother for everyone.  Everyone who’s trying to do honest business online may well be able to get things done more effectively in the near future.

Happy New Year, Internet!

2010 has been an interesting year for the Internet.  Google’s made several bids at major expansions – more than one of which have already proven to be complete flubs.  Facebook has faced scandal over failures in its famous privacy policy (you know that’s why it beat out MySpace).  China has all but declared war on most of the top websites.  Yahoo! has staggered along amid mockery and diminishing popularity.

SEO has changed, too.  You still need to keep track of things like meta-tags and link building, but social media marketing and even video SEO have taken up a lot of the focus that used to go into how much you could get away with without being marked as spam.  Just 12 months ago, social media was the Next Big Thing that everyone was trying to figure out how to use effectively, and now its becoming a proven method of courting return visits from people and even first time stops from their friends.

There have been virus scares on a lot of important websites.  Someone even used one to attack Iran and a number of other countries en masse!  It’s safe to say (pun intended) that the Internet has revealed that it’s every bit as dangerous as the concrete jungle.

But things aren’t all bleak.  As I just said, social media is stabilizing as a way to market your company.  Smart phones are evolving to use satellite technology in addition to cell towers.  A guy made a real fortune selling virtual real estate.  Most of the times a major site has been caught in an embarrassing situation, it’s managed to take care of things and save face.  And the Internet has really proven how it’s become the front line in freely expressing yourself.

I don’t know whether the Internet’s come a long way or whether this has all been just a small step in the grand scheme of things, but it’s been quite a year.  I’m sure that you’re looking forward to seeing what the new year will bring to the online world as much as I am.

Is Christmas Online December 27th?

You know, I find myself wondering lately, how much business is done online in the days after Christmas.  Everyone knows that there are a lot of returns made on gifts that just aren’t right or don’t actually fit.  What happens with all that exchange money?  Certainly a lot of it is used in-store at the time of the exchange, but that can’t be all of it.

And what about all the Christmas cash and gift cards?  Do people make a bee-line exactly where they know something they want is?  Or do they just look around for a while to find the best deal they can on anything that interests them?  On occasion, search engines have used seasonally specific searching features, so is it possible that they’re going to need something that helps people find the best sale associated with your chosen keywords?

I’m afraid that I don’t have any worthwhile answers to this, but it’s certainly worth thinking about.  We all know that the Internet is used a lot for conducting business, so why shouldn’t it be part of the big After Christmas sales?  I know that, if I get some Christmas cash, I’m probably going to spend it in online purchases.

Know The Best Ways To Promote Your Site

There are more and more ways you can go about letting everyone know that your site is great.  It used to be that everything was spread through word of mouth, back before the search engines came along.  Nowadays, there’s link building, web ads, and email messages sent because a company heard about you rather than the other way around.  It’s even starting to be where you need to make on-site videos in order to help your search engine ranking.

That shouldn’t be surprising, when you think about it:  the most important part of SEO services has always been and will always be the work that’s done to your website itself.  People have known for a while that videos can help them because of how communicative they are, so it isn’t a very big step from that to also using them to help the site show up on search listings.  You just have to be sure that, in keeping with the expectations of quality content, your videos are worth the attention of your client base.

Keeping up with things is always tricky if you don’t want to find yourself on the trailing edge – meaning if you’re actually keeping up.  When that’s what you’re doing, it’s far too easy to try to get a little ahead but take a proverbial wrong turn and find yourself left behind by everyone else.  Continual learning is the only way to deal with this, the same as it is with everything else.

So, you need to take enough time to carefully consider your options when you’re looking at getting anything done to improve your website.  You need to make sure that you at least keep up with everyone else, but you don’t want to wind up fully committed to a dead end method if you get too far ahead.  Only hiring the best services can keep you safely on the right path.