Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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Here is another search engine optimisation (SEO) podcast for you today. In this one I talk about using site maps to ensure search engines fully spider your entire website so every page will show up in search results. There are a couple of simple things to learn about using site maps:

• Why site maps play such an important role in search engine indexing
• Using keywords in site map links
• Balancing human navigation with SEO

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Fresh out of college and not sure what to do with your life? Neither were these guys so they hit the road and started interviewing people around the USA to find out what they did in their 20s and how they got to where they are today. Included in the interviews are Howard Schultz from Starbucks, Jeff Taylor from Monster.com, Michael Dell from Dell Computers and whole host of other people from a range of backgrounds and industries.

Roadtrip Nation: Roadtrip Nation was started when some recent college grads, who had no idea what they wanted to do with their lives, decided to take a roadtrip to figure it out. They bought an old run-down 31-foot RV, painted it neon green, and hit the road for 3 months and 17,000 miles to explore how other individuals found their roads in life. Along the way, they interviewed over 80 people, including: a Lobsterman in Maine, the scientist who decoded the Human Genome, the Director of Saturday Night Live, the stylist for Madonna, and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. All of the leaders shared where they were in their twenties, and how they resisted pressures of conformity to find their roads in life.

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I just downloaded the latest version of the Google Toolbar plug-in for my browser (I.E. only at this stage unfortunately). Among the few additional features is the new SpellCheck function that checks the spellings of entries you make into forms on web pages. This is a damn handy feature for me considering I run an editing and proofreading business. My writing is constantly scrutinised by readers whenever I’m promoting my business and I’m certainly not perfect, I do make spelling and grammar mistakes. People just love to point them out to me, it gives them a perverse pleasure. I even once had a fellow offer to show me where a spelling mistake was on my website in exchange for $100 which he promised he would give to charity. How nice of him.

You may not realise but the Google spellchecker is quite a revolutionary piece of software itself born out of the unique indexing method Google uses. In the past spell-checking has been handled by simply comparing how a word is spelt against a list of words. If there is no match then it flags the word as incorrect. Google goes one step further. It checks it’s index of the web and offers you what it thinks would be the correct spelling based on how the whole Internet spells the word, or at least Google’s index of the web (incidentally this is probably not even close to half of the entire amount of web pages out there, but who’s counting). So rather than checking against a single index Google compares how millions and millions of other people are spelling the word and uses the context of your writing (the words around the misspelled word) to help offer corrections. Hence you get those really handy spelling correction questions from Google whenever you mistype a search request into Google. Neat hey.

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Download the MP3 [ 16 minutes - 3.68MB ]

Today’s podcast includes two beginner tips on search engine optimisation:

• Using heading tags in your website’s HTML code
• Keyword usage in your website file names

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Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money
by Bart Milner

Amazon: This book is a brief history of Cyberspace and Google’s fundamental contribution - a new search method that gives almost immediate access to the contents of billions of web pages.

It covers the rivalry with Yahoo! - once their closest partners, the competition with Microsoft and the success that made Google’s 2004 launch on NASDAQ inevitable and the struggle by the company’s founders to prevent that success from ruining their vision of how a 21st century engineering enterprise should be organised.

It traces the origins of the Internet in the work of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee and the serendipity of the Google founders’ breakthrough discovery of a technology of hypertextual and contextual search developed at Stanford University, after the failure of dozens of earlier Search engines, and their subsequent development of targetted advertising which is already fundamentally transforming the future profits of both the Internet and printed newspapers and magazines industries.

Review

I just completed reading this book. It was tough to finish because it’s not written like a conventional story with biography-style narrative. It’s more like a patchwork collection of ideas about the search industry and Google’s impact on it. A word of warning, if you want a nice background story of the people and the events behind the Google Internet company, this is not the book for you. The author actually states this in the book. I didn’t know before buying the book and perhaps if I did I would not have made the purchase in the first place, however I feel it has been worth my while to finish the book.

Google And The Mission To Map Meaning And Make Money teaches you about Internet search and the dream of creating meaningful search. Meaningful search technology’s goal is to provide the perfect meaning-within-context answer to every question a user may ask of it. This is not an easy goal because computers, and the technology behind them, have no way of accounting for meaning which is vital in human communications. Google made a solid step forward providing context and relevance using technologies such as PageRank, but it is still a far away off from mapping meaning.

The main reason this book is a beneficial read is to gain a better understanding about Internet search and Google methodology. If you are interested in Internet business and/or run your own business website this book is well worth a read to familiarise yourself with why and how Google changed the Internet search industry and why other sites such as AltaVista and Lycos fell behind and eventually faded from prominence. It also explains how Yahoo! survived and evolved from it’s original incarnation as a human built directory of links.

Considering the majority of web business site traffic comes from Internet search and will most likely only increase in the future as more and more people come to rely on the Internet to find things, keeping abreast of the developments in this industry, including an understanding of how it has changed in recent net history, should be a priority for any Internet entrepreneur. For this reason alone I recommend this book. If you want a good story, with interesting characters and entertaining events, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Rated 3 / 5

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