Google's New Onomatopoeia

Did you know that Google's mantra, as a company, is "don't be evil"? Does it scare you that they're so powerful that they need to remind themselves to be virtuous? Well, they're taking one more step towards world domination with the introduction of Google Buzz. It has similarities to social networking giants Facebook and Twitter, but there are some distinct differences.

According to the Official Google Blog,

"Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. We focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share publicly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates tightly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time."

It will be interesting to see how the power play between Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz turns out. My hunch is that they will continue to try to one-up each other, taking on commonalities that work, discarding elements that users don't like, and continually evolving.

How your website displays in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

How your messaging is displayed in the Search Engine Results Page is very important. It's your first impression towards potential website visitors.

The Search Engine Results Page is the page on a search engine with a list of links to websites, their descriptions, and their URL.

This is what it looks like:

The blue underlined text is the link to the website. It is the page title on your website (what displays at the very top of the browser title. Google indexes the first 70 characters of page titles.

The black text is your meta description. Google will display the first 150 characters of your meta description. However, if your meta description is not relevant, Google will just grab some text from your website that it does think is relevant.

The bold words in the page title and meta description are the relevant keywords that Google has found. In the example above, I searched "example" and so it is bolded in all of the results.

The green text is the URL of that page that Google is displaying.

For SEO, Google looks at all of these things! But if you cram keywords into your page title and your meta description, things will just look ugly!

Your page title and meta description is a chance to advertise to potential customers. Here are some tips and ideas for your page titles and meta descriptions:

1. Treat your URL like a headline.
2. Include your company name in your page title.
3. Consider asking a question that will draw interest.
4. Include a call to action ("Visit our website," "See our Knowledge Centre," etc.) in your meta description.
5. Speak in complete sentences.
6. Use only your most sought after keywords with their modifiers, so that they don't turn your page title and meta description into a nonsensical list of keywords.

Remember, your display is like an advertisement... but you may not want to treat it exactly like an ad. If you're only getting people looking to purchase something, then go ahead: give 'em an advertisement. But if they're looking for pure information, they will be turned off by anything that looks like an advertisement.

So be careful with your page titles and your meta descriptions, and always keep the end goal in mind.