google

You already know that keywords are the backbone of your search marketing campaign. When writing website copy, you know that you need to include the keywords into your copy so that the search engines can identify what your page is about and rank it accordingly.

However, there’s a very thin line between optimized copy and keyword-stuffed copy. Follow these tips to make sure you aren’t guilty of the latter.

• Read your copy aloud—One of the easiest, most effective editing tricks I use is to read my copy aloud before finalizing it. Whenever you read it out loud, you can get a better idea of how it will sound in the reader’s mind when he’s scanning through it. Ideally, your copy should flow easily and have a conversational feel to it. When reading your copy aloud, it’ll become apparent if you’re using your keyword too often. It won’t feel natural, and you’ll stumble over difficult keyword-stuffed phrases. Identify trouble spots in your copy, and correct them.
• Measure keyword density—Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who believes there’s a magic keyword density that will get your website vaulted to the top of the search results. That’s a silly SEO myth passed off by SEO consultants who are stuck in the past. That being said, I do think that measuring keyword density serves a purpose. It gives you a clear idea of just how often you’re using your keyword in your web copy. If the percentage is too high (usually anything more than 5%), your copy will likely be difficult to read. Of course, there are exceptions where certain keywords don’t have a lot of synonyms or just naturally lend themselves to being used often.
• Use keyword synonyms—Using keyword synonyms is a good idea for a couple of reasons. First, it breaks up the monotony of your copy. For example, let’s suppose you’re targeting the keyword “internet marketing in Houston.” Rather than saying “internet marketing in Houston” 10 times in your copy, you could mix in “Houston online marketing”, “web marketing in Houston”, “Houston internet marketing”, and so on.  This will make your copy much easier for humans to read.

Another benefit of using keyword synonyms is that it gives the search engines more terms to pull from and to rank you for. This ties into the concept of “latent semantic indexing” where Google brings up pages based on the searcher’s intent rather than just specifically matching the key phrase entered.

Do you check your copy to make sure it isn’t overflowing with keywords? Share your anti-keyword stuffing tips in the replies.

Cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog. Public=Online is the the rallying cry during this year’s Sunshine Week, an annual event to highlight the importance of open government and the freedom of information. The week is sponsored by the American Society of News Editors, and many editorial boards have echoed the thoughts of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

“...government information ought to be made available to the public as quickly as possible, with a minimum of rigmarole and in the easiest, most accessible way possible--which these days means via the Internet.”

We agree--and what better way to celebrate Sunshine Week than with leading thinkers on government, media and citizen engagement on all sides of the political spectrum who feel the same? Yesterday at our Google D.C. office, the Sunlight Foundation announced its Public=Online campaign. It’s exciting to see growing support for transparency and to see the progress that’s been made in the last year alone. Every day, through sites like Data.gov and projects like Open Congress, OMB Watch and our Public Data Explorer, more data is available online. But there’s still a gap between having access to government data and easily understanding what it means. To help fill this gap, Google has partnered with the Sunlight Foundation in its Design for America contest to make government data more comprehensible to the public. You can learn more and get started on the contest homepage. There’s room for all kinds of folks to participate, and we can’t think of a more fun way to keep the spirit of Sunshine Week going. Posted by Ginny Hunt, Head of Google Public Sector Lab

Before the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition, Google rarely pre-announced new features or new services. Since many new features were released in beta, Google announced them when they were available. Google wanted to deliver real value and trying a service is far more exciting than reading a blog post or a press release.

Something changed in 2007, when Google launched Google Apps for businesses. In April 2007, Google promised that it will launch an online service for editing presentations: "Well, we tried to keep it a secret as long as we could, but to be honest, we've been dying to tell you about the bun we've got in the oven. We'll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations. Our due date is this summer." The service has been released in September.

Now it's no longer surprising to read things like: "We're pleased to announce the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server". Businesses need predictability, but Google shouldn't become predictable.

The latest pre-announcement is from Google Analytics, which will launch "a global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics. Our engineers are now hard at work finalizing and testing this opt-out functionality. We look forward to make it globally available to our users in the coming weeks."
It's nice to know that the engineers are "hard at work" and that the plug-in will be available "in the coming weeks", but when it will be released, people will no longer be excited to try it. If the launch is delayed and the plug-in won't be available "in the coming weeks", many people will wonder why they can't download it and will conclude that it's vaporware.

The truth is difficult to find if those that know it have a lot to lose when it's revealed. Three years after Viacom sued YouTube for 1 billion dollars, some pieces of truth are revealed:

"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users." (YouTube blog)

"Viacom produced numerous documents, including a Google memorandum from the Google Video team about YouTube. The team told senior Google execs that YouTube was a "rogue enabler" of content theft, that its content is all free, and much of it is highly sought after pirated clips and that YouTube's business model is completely sustained by pirated content. In May 2006, Ethan Anderson, international business product manager for Google Video, told other execs, I can't believe you're recommending buying YouTube... they're 80 percent illegal pirated content." (Ars Technica)

While YouTube became popular by hosting unauthorized content, it's now a platform for self-expression and many companies use tools like Content ID to make money from the videos that include their content. Like many other online services, YouTube is protected by the DMCA, a United States copyright law which "creates a safe harbor for online service providers against copyright liability if they adhere to and qualify for certain prescribed safe harbor guidelines and promptly block access to allegedly infringing material (or remove such material from their systems) if they receive a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder or the copyright holder's agent."

Even if YouTube's employees were aware that a lot of the videos weren't uploaded by the copyright owners, it was difficult to tell which videos should be removed.
This case shows that it's a bad idea to fight against those that love your work and want to promote it. Encouraging fans to be creative, learning from their ideas, finding which of your works is more popular and making money from ads - there's a lot to gain from being open-minded.

We have released Google Chrome 5.0.356.2 to the Dev channel on Windows and Mac to fix an issue where dragging anything with your mouse would freeze the tab. See issue 38414.

These two huge L-shaped structures visible at a very low zoom level are the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facilities in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.

Each arm of the structures is 4km in length, making them longer than the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre we visited some time ago here on Google Sightseeing, which is the longest building in the United States. However, the LIGO structures appear to be low concrete tunnels, so aren’t officially buildings.

The observatories are an attempt to detect cosmic gravitational waves, the existence of which was predicted by Einstein in 1916. Almost 100 years later, scientists are still searching for direct evidence of these waves which are thought to originate from supernovas and other astrophysical events.

The science involved is far beyond the comprehension of this writer (who failed high school physics) but here’s what I can figure out. Lasers housed in the main building at each complex (Livingston, Hanford) pass through ultra high vacuums housed in each of the tunnel arms and bounce back-and-forth on mirrors at the end of each arm a number of times.

Along the way they pass through interferometers before returning to the main building. If a gravitational wave happens to hit the Earth during this process, the laser beams will be out of step with each other, allowing the wave to be measured. The 3,002km distance between the observatories is equivalent to 10 milliseconds at the speed of light, which would allow triangulation of the source of any waves detected.

However, the measurements involved are so incredibly minuscule that the one of the main challenges faced by the scientists is learning how to distinguish actual wave measurements from random movements in the mirrors caused by minor earth tremors, vehicles on nearby roads, or (one assumes) something as simple as a mouse running over the concrete tube.

I’m totally out of my depth once I start reading about alteration of space-time, cosmic strings and other wonders, so if you want to learn more, Wikipedia is a good place to start, while the official LIGO site has options ‘for scientists’ and ‘for all’. There’s also an introductory video on Youtube.

Thanks to punk floyd, Joel Koerwer, Nicolas Ward and Rich Holmes.

Locations: Louisiana, Washington / Categories: Buildings, Structures, Weirdness

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You're reading an entry from Google Sightseeing, which is copyright © 2010 Alex Turnbull & James Turnbull and must not be reproduced without permission.

The Dev channel has been updated to 5.0.356.0 for Mac.

More details about additional changes are available in the svn log of all revision.

You can find out about getting on the Dev channel here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.

If you find new issues, please let us know by filing a bug at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry

Anthony LaforgeGoogle Chrome

Sometimes you start watching a YouTube video and you realize that it's not very interesting. You pause the video, but YouTube continues to download the file. What can you do to stop the download?

Until now, a simple trick to stop buffering a YouTube video was to fast forward to the end of the video. The good news is that YouTube added an option to stop the download: right-click on the video and click on "Stop download".

YouTube's help center has more information about buffering. "The YouTube video player downloads a video as it plays. A buffer is a section of memory in your computer which allows for the simultaneous writing and reading of information -- on YouTube the buffered section is represented by the red section of the video timeline. The YouTube video player reads video information from one section of the buffer while writing to another. This kind of multitasking allows for smoother playback of video during a continuous process of downloading which is especially helpful for slower connections. "

New York Times reports that Google has partnered with Intel and Sony to create a TV platform powered by Android.

"Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes. (...) The partners envision technology that will make it as easy for TV users to navigate Web applications, like the Twitter social network and the Picasa photo site, as it is to change the channel. Google intends to open the Google TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for cellphones, to software developers in the hopes of spurring the same creativity that the consumers have seen in phone apps."

The idea is not new, as many other companies tried to bring the Web to the TV. YouTube already has a version for large screens, Google already sells TV advertising and there are many Google apps that could improve the TV experience. New York Times says that Google's software will include a new interface for YouTube, a browser and other Android apps that will extend the functionality.
"Google has built a prototype set-top box, but the technology may be incorporated directly into TVs or other devices, like Blu-ray players. (...) A person with knowledge of the Google TV project said that the set-top box technology was sufficiently advanced that Google had begun testing it with Dish Network, one of Google's longstanding partners in the TV Ads program."

The Dev channel has been updated to 5.0.356.0 for Windows, Linux, and Google Chrome Frame.

All

• Form autofill enabled by default for new profiles. (Issue: 37466)

Windows

• [r40376, r40570, r40955, r41171] Crash Fixes (Issues: 36280, 31723, 37674, 37698)

• [r40587] Client SSL Certificate Support (UI) for Linux. (Issue: 25241)
• [r40795] Renderers can now figure out how much memory they're using and release it properly. (Issue: 32519)

Chrome Frame

• [r41754] Chrome frame should use "parentNode" instead of "parentElement" to get the DOM
  
• [r41595] Better integration with host (InternetExplorer) popup blocker. (Issue: 34823)
  
  

More details about additional changes are available in the svn log of all revision.

You can find out about getting on the Dev channel here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel.

If you find new issues, please let us know by filing a bug at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry

Anthony LaforgeGoogle Chrome

Since we launched Google Buzz for mobile, we've been working on ways to make it quicker and easier to share your thoughts and experiences while you're out and about.

Today, we're excited to release a Google Buzz widget for Android phones that lets you post text and photos with a single tap. Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait.

The widget is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. Search for 'Google Buzz' in the Android Market to download it now. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap "Menu" while on the home screen and select "Add > Widgets > Google Buzz".

We plan to add support for other languages soon. Visit our Help Center to learn more, ask questions in our Help Forum, or give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.


Posted by Zak Cohen, Software Engineer, Google Mobile

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is even harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone's availability and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to excruciating. We'd rather schedule dental appointments.

On the Google Calendar team, we've noticed that when people talk about scheduling they say things like "I'm trying to find a time" or "let's search for a new date." We wondered what would happen if we treated calendaring more like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most relevant results from the web, we hoped we could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the person scheduling the meeting.


Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you enable the Lab, you can find a new time for an event simply by clicking on a link. Our schedule search algorithm will return a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times based on the calendars others have shared with you. You can read more about it on the Gmail Blog.

So next time your boss says "We need to reschedule," just smile and say "I'm feeling lucky."
Posted by Ken Norton, Product Manager

Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer

As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.

If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.

Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":

You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.

This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.

Orkut friends live folders
Simply add the list of your orkut friends as a live folder on your home screen, and you'll be able to browse through your friends list even when not under data network coverage. The live folder also lets you communicate (via call, scrap or SMS) with your friends in a single click. To install a live folder, click "Menu > Add > Folders > Orkut" on your Android device’s homescreen after installing the orkut for Android application.

Google Chrome 4.1 added a feature that detects the language of a web page and lets you translate it. The feature can't be disabled entirely (there's a setting for disabling it in the latest Chromium builds), but you can hide the translation bar for certain languages. For example, if you go to Google Greece's homepage, there's an option button that lets you disable the translation bar for google.gr or for all Greek web pages.


The easiest way to disable the translation feature for the languages you're familiar with is to define a list of your preferred languages:

* click on the wrench menu, select Options, go to the "Under the hood" tab.

* click on "Change fonts and language settings" and go to the "Languages" tab.

* add the languages you use the read web pages.

Making sense of a fast paced and changing world is difficult under the best of circumstances, but when you’re on the go, it’s even harder. With the new Google Maps for mobile 4.1, we’re introducing a few features that make sorting through search results or quickly seeing Maps info a bit easier.

Updated search results page
With the newly reimagined Google Maps for mobile search results page, we’ve done away with the tabs to give you all the info you want on one page. Tap the new buttons to see the place on the map, get directions, call it, or see it with Street View. The extra space let us bring details and reviews right up front.

Swipe for more results
Take a look at the new page, and you can quickly see that Milk Pail Market specializes in cheese, has mostly 4 and 5 star ratings, and also sells fresh vegetables. You can select any section to see more reviews, buzz, etc. If you want to get to more search results without going back to the list, simply grab the page with your finger and swipe it away to the left or right to see the next or last result.

Latitude widget and Maps live wallpaper
Once you’ve updated to Maps 4.1, you’ll also have a couple different ways to put Maps up close and personal on your phone. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could quickly find your nearest friends or glance at the traffic conditions around you without opening Maps? Add the Latitude widget to a home screen panel to see your nearest Latitude friends by pressing the “Menu” button from the home screen and selecting Add > Widgets > Latitude. On Android 2.1+ phones, you can also turn your home screen into one big, updating map using the Maps live wallpaper. Press the “Menu” button from your home screen and select Wallpaper > Live wallpapers > Maps. Now you can see nearby friends or a map each time you open your home screen.

Switch Google Accounts
We’ve been adding more and more features that sync with your Google Account whether you’re on your phone or your computer. If you’re managing multiple identities, Maps now lets you switch the Google Account it uses between the accounts you’ve synced to your Android-powered phone. From the Maps menu, select More > Switch Account to sign out of your current account and sign in to a different one. Features like Google Buzz, Latitude, Starred items, My Maps, and more can then begin using whichever account you’ve chosen.

Get these new features at your fingertips by searching for “Google Maps” in Android Market from Android 1.6+ phones. Update Maps to version 4.1, available in all the countries and languages where Maps is currently available. Visit our Help Center to learn more, ask questions in our Help Forum, or give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.
Posted by Chiu-Ki Chan and Andrew Oplinger, Software Engineers, Google Mobile

Google Chrome 4.1 for Windows doesn't add too many new features, but it's a very interesting release.

Google Chrome is the only browser that automatically translates web pages written in foreign languages. It's a great feature, previously available in Google Toolbar and in a Chrome extension, that's now included in a browser. Besides using the best free machine translation service available today and translating pages inline, Google Chrome uses a language detection algorithm that doesn't require a connection to Google's servers. The language detection library is now open source and any developer can use it.

"For most languages, the library determines the language of a page by breaking down its text in quadgrams, or sequences of up to four characters. The library then looks up each quadgram in a large hashtable that contains language probabilities, which is included in the Chrome binaries. This hashtable was originally built by processing language probabilities over billions of web pages library are indexed by Google's search engine. In just a few milliseconds, the library can accurately determine the language of most web pages."

The second new feature is an improved content filtering dialog that lets you selectively disable images, cookies, JavaScript and plug-ins. It's almost like having a less sophisticated version of the NoScript extension for Firefox. You can disable JavaScript for all sites and whitelist the sites you trust, you can block third-party cookies or block images from a domain.


Chrome's blog mentions that Google Update no longer generates an unique ID for each Chrome installation. "We've implemented a new approach to our Google Update technology, which allows us to remove the unique ID from Google Update while still preserving our ability to determine the number of active users and keep everyone up-to-date with the latest security updates and speed improvements." There's also a page that explains the privacy controls that are available in Google Chrome.
Chrome is now more cluttered, more privacy-aware and it's now updated faster: 4.1 is an intermediary version released two months after Chrome 4.0.

Since announcing the latest Google Chrome beta earlier this month, we've been excited to receive feedback from our beta users on the browser's new translation and privacy features. Today, we're introducing these features in the stable channel, so that they're widely available to everyone who uses Google Chrome on Windows.

Google Chrome’s translation feature is the latest step in the evolution of translation tools across Google. Just a few years ago, Google’s translation tools consisted of a site where you had to copy and paste text into a box — and it only worked for a handful of languages. Today, our translation technology works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. Chrome's translation feature automatically detects if the language of the webpage you're on is different from your preferred language setting, The browser will then display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated using Google Translate. With one click, you can instantly translate the page, and all of its text will appear in your preferred language. Here's a demo of Chrome's translation feature:



Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page.

In addition, we've introduced new privacy features in this stable release to give you even greater control of your privacy while helping to protect the information that you do decide to share online. You can now manage Chrome's privacy settings via the browser's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up rules to allow cookies exclusively for sites that you trust, while blocking them from for untrusted sites. For the in-depth scoop, check out google.com/chrome/privacy or watch our video series on privacy and browsers.

For those of you who already use Chrome, go raibh maith agaibh! You'll soon be updated with these new features. And for those of you who haven't yet tried Google Chrome, download it at google.com/chrome.
Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich

Over the past year, we've highlighted companies around the world who have switched to Google Apps. And that means more than 25 million people have "gone Google", including those at such globe-trotting organizations as Jaguar Land Rover and National Geographic. (You might have seen their Gone Google messages in print.)

Recently we visited one of our newest customers, Konica Minolta, to learn about why they decided to join us. Here's their story:



For those considering a switch to Google Apps, this updated resources page offers a variety of info such as customer testimonials, white papers, links to webcasts and more. Be sure to visit the Google Enterprise Blog and visit google.com/appsatwork, too.

If your company is already using Apps, join the Gone Google community. Put yourself on the map to share your experience and see who else has, yes, gone Google.


After you add yourself to the map, grab a laptop sticker that you can personalize. We're giving them away free for a limited time*. More details here.

*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!
Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise Team

Looking up at the moon, one of the most striking visible features has to be the sheer number of impact craters around its surface. These giant holes in the ground are made by asteroids and comets flying through space and then crashing into our little satellite.

Of course many of these are easy to see without any special equipment, so for many years scientists on Earth wondered if we can see them all so easy up there, why can’t we see them down here on our planet? Then along came aerial photography…

GSS visited some of the most recognizable impact craters on Earth already, including Barringer Meteor Crater in the United States and Manicouagan Impact Crater in Canada, but updated and enhanced imagery makes these sites worth a second visit.

We start our tour with the largest verified impact crater on Earth, Vredefort Crater in South Africa. Measuring a staggering 250 – 300 km (155 – 186 miles) across, this crater was formed over 2 billion years ago by an asteroid estimated 10 km (6 miles) in size.

Today, the most recognizable feature of the crater is the northwest rim that created the mountains near the town of Parys. Vredefort was also added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2005.

Our next stop is a crater in southern Ontario, Canada near the city of Sudbury. The Sudbury Basin was formed by a meteorite impact 1.85 billion years ago, creating a round 250-km (155 miles) crater.

Subsequent geological processes like tectonic plate movement then stretched into its current oval shape, which is hard to see on the satellite image. However, the crater shape is strikingly obvious when using Google’s terrain mapping. It is the second largest verified impact site on the planet.

Perhaps the most famous meteorite impact of them all is the one that slammed the Earth in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, and also is the one that scientists believed killed 75% of the species on Earth including the dinosaurs¹.

About 65 million years ago, a 10 km (6 mi) wide meteorite slammed into the Earth and created a 180 km (110 mi) wide crater centered just off the coast of present day Mexico in the Gulf of Mexico. Today, the south to southeast rim can still seen with Google’s satellite maps if you know where to look. The Chicxulub crater is the third largest verified impact crater on the planet.

Be sure to check out the other GSS articles on impact craters and other natural landmarks, including the Kebira Crater. Check Wikipedia for more information about the Vredefort Crater, Sudbury Basin, or the Chicxulub Crater. Since there are so many sites around the Earth, we’ll be sure to have more crater articles soon!

Locations: Arizona, Mexico, Ontario, Quebec, South Africa / Categories: Natural Landmarks, World Heritage Sites

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You're reading an entry from Google Sightseeing, which is copyright © 2010 Alex Turnbull & James Turnbull and must not be reproduced without permission.