I was reading Matt Cutts Blog about the Google Searchology Conference. Matt is a spokesman for Google to the SEO world. He blogs and does a lot of Google info videos. Looking through the presentation I came across a couple of slides that both amazed me and gave me a bit of concern.

If they aren’t doing it already, Google intends to know where you and your mobile phone are at any given point in time. They do this now with your IP address but a search engine company being able to locate you without the hassle of court orders like the Government would have to have is amazing. The technology they are working on is facinating. The potential for invasion of privacy is for smart people other than me to decide.

The slides where posted by a brilliant young student named Yvo Schaap from the Netherlands.

Google just made life more difficult for websites hoping to rank high on Google. They announced several changes to the way they present searches to the user.

As an example, Google uses a person looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but she is most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. With the new Search Options she can search for the product’s name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options “panel” also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. Google says, “One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways.”

Google has also begun implementing a process to help people by providing better information than you are used to seeing in the preview text. They call this information “rich snippets.” They give an example “… if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range:

In this example, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.”

Google says it provide these snippets on its own, so they are hoping that web publishers will help them by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. They have in the past talked about “time on site” being a part of their search algorithm.

Google plans to roll out more changes soon so there is much to stay on top of if you want to “stay on top of” the first page of Google.

Google announced today that they have improved their search results again. Google has an improved algorythm to better understand the relationship and meaning of words and they also provide longer text snippets for long tail searches.

Detailed information is available at the Google Blog.

Google has released a new search engine optimization tool called The Search-Based Keyword Tool.  When it does is the search based keyword tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website.  Google suggests that it will help you identify additional advertising opportunities.  I suggest that you can use it for finding relevant keywords to optimize your website.

Based on your URL they display a list of relevant user queries that occurred in global searches with some frequency over the past year.  Additionally, keywords are organized by category, and when you click on a category.  You can expand it to do its subcategories.  Imagine the possibilities in finding longtail keywords.

Assuming that you have an adwords account you can add options for showing partial matches to keywords, mostly queries, competition with the parameters low medium high, and suggested bid thresholds.  This is a good way to figure out the weight of your keywords.

Thanks to Google, it is getting easier to optimize your website for search engines.

A little over a week ago, Google released a new report in pdf format called Google’s Search Engine Starter Guide. It is a concise 22 page guide for Search Engine Optimization that helps the webmaster understand best practices for site searchabilty and usability. If you have been wondering why your SEO company has been recommending certain things, it will help you and him or her communicate better.

Some of the subjects the guide covers are:

- page titles
- page description
- URL structures
- site navigation
- your content
- anchor text
- heading tags
- optimized use of images
- robots.txt
- using nofollow
- site promotion
- webmaster tools

Inside the report Google links to other Search Engine Optimization tools that help your SEO efforts.

While there is more to SEO than is covered in the guide, it is a good foundation and it might help to dispell a lot of the misinformation on the internet that that could cause you to go down the wrong path and wonder why your site is floundering.