Till now, Google Maps guided us to find the way outdoors with the usual blue dot that indicates where you are right now. But now Google has partnered with “some of the largest retailers, airports and transit stations in United States and Japan” and helps you find where you are and what you are looking for in these places with its new Google Maps 6.0. Google Maps for Android now “enables you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors”. In other words, it helps you determine which floor you are on and where the place you are looking for is. Android users can also use other available features such as finding out restaurants and stores in the vicinity of a few metres.

With Google Maps 6.0, when you enter these selected places and open the Google Maps, their detailed floor plans would appear. As you move around, the interface would automatically get updated to show the location where you are right now. Google has added a few airports and stores for the time being; however, in course of time it would be adding more locations around the United States and Japan. Currently, this facility is for Android devices including mobile phones and tablets. IPhone users might have to wait for some more time.

The help centre for Google Maps for Android has the complete list of indoor locations in the United States and Japan where you could avail this facility for now. In fact, if you have a business of your own and wish to add the floor plan of your store in the Maps, you could do that as well through the help centre. Very soon, your customers could find you through Google Maps and thus reach you faster and easier.

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Google News is one of the prominent news website that is followed religiously by many individuals and organisations. To establish your presence in Google News you need to play a very different game. In other words the algorithm for Google News is quite different. Let’s see some of the factors that can affect the ranking in Google News:

• Freshness

When it comes to news, whether it is online or offline, freshness matters most. If you come across an event that happened some 2 weeks back you are not going to be very amused or thrilled, right? It’s the same principle that you follow for offline news. Nobody reads a newspaper that is a week old. Same way, if you post some news that is just not the latest or the most updated you can’t expect Google to rank it high.

• Relevance

Being relevant to what a user is looking for is what qualifies a news article to be listed by Google. Google is believed to classify news articles based on the topic. If your article is original and contains substantial information regarding the topic with the right keywords, it would naturally get a good listing.

• Treatment of recent developments

If you post an article about a hurricane that happened last week and another about an archaeological discovery you can rest assured that your article about the hurricane would get more clicks and therefore more ranking. This is because when it comes to news, users would prefer to hear more about something that involves more urgency and directness than something that wouldn’t affect them, however breathtaking that news is.

• Local reporting

The idea of local reporting strikes with Google News. If there is an event that happens in a particular place Google would prefer those in that region to report it with their own local version.

• Credible authority

The best thing about Google News is that you don’t have to have the label of BBC or CNN to report something. Google gives weight to the news source for each news and each category. Therefore, all you need to do is to become a trusted source for the category of news you report and your article will be ranked accordingly.

• Speed

Do you want Google to rank you high as well as other news sites to refer your site? Then be the first to report an event. It is of course not news for you that speed matters a lot in news reporting. This is one field where “early bird actually catches the worm”. Hence, report something as soon as it happens and before someone else reports it and get your position safe in Google.

• Originality

Remember that if you copy and paste the news from another site or even reproduce sentences from other news sites Google would recognise the similarity. Make sure that the content you provide is original and unique. Even if you provide the original source of the content Google would rank that original source higher than your content.

Reporting for Google news is almost like reporting for a newspaper or television channel. Not only from an SEO perspective but also from a journalistic perspective the factors mentioned above would help you in creating and submitting news that can bring you under the visibility span of Google News faster.

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So your next question would be what is the use if you are listed in the 50^th, or God forbid! 500^th, position where no one would ever know of your existence? The fact is if you make it to Google, that is just the beginning. From there you can come up front by doing an effective optimisation of your website for Google. Of course there are no particular short cuts that can guarantee you of a high position. All the search engines, as you know, have their own unique algorithms for ranking a site.

There are some basic factors that apply for all the search engines like providing good content, keyword-rich tags and quality back links. However, here are a few tips that can help you in the entering Google:

• An all inclusive site map is one way that can ensure a visit from search engine crawlers. It is not a page that human visitors often visit. But Google crawlers are known to visit the sitemap of a website. Hence, ensure that all your web pages are found by Googlebot. There is in fact an XML site map tool from Google that makes sure that your sitemap is visited by crawlers of Google. However, it is better to create your sitemap on your own so that it is visited by the crawlers of other search engines like Yahoo! and MSN.

• Creating a blog is another path that leads to Google, especially if it is created in blogger.com that is owned by Google itself. Add blog posts on topics that are relevant to your website and provide that link that takes the reader to your home page.  Similarly, by creating quality articles on relevant topics and submitting them in article directories can also help you spread the word.

• Do a proper research of the keywords that you need to pay attention on. If necessary, get the help of Google keyword tool. Properly researched keywords can take your website places, not to mention the happy visitors who find what they were searching for. Also, adding the keywords in the domain name and in the tagging has been reported to be quite effective.

Though you can never be sure of the reasons that can make your website rank high in Google, you can definitely work on the reasons that do not make your website popular. There are less chances of your website getting a high position in Google if:

• The site is not connected well with other websites that deal with the same topic. In other words, if it does not have relevant, quality links

• If Google’s most recent crawl preceded the creation of the website

• If the website was not available or reported error at the time of Google’s crawling

• If the design and coding of the website do not promote its search engine optimisation.

It is quite easy to submit the website in Google instead of doing all these steps mentioned above. You might get faster results too. However, letting Google find your website on its own has benefits that last and would prove effective in the long run for the purpose the site was built: to bring more visitors and increase sales consequently.

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Let’s take a scenario. Suppose you want to visit a website. You type the URL and press enter and wait for the website to load. How long would you wait? 10 seconds? 50 seconds?  A minute? Well, reports tell us that an average visitor would not wait beyond 15 seconds for a website to load. Which means if you want people to visit the site the loading speed of the site should be really high.

Google has realised the significance of loading time and that is why it has made it one of the determining factors for page rank. Google recently announced that it has included the loading speed of a website in its algorithm. Though it is now applicable for only websites in English, and not all of them, there is going to be a gradual increase in this.

However, for the new websites that are currently taking more time to load, the good news is that though loading speed is one of the ranking factors, it doesn’t carry much weight compared to the other determining aspects of page rank like incoming links and relevant content. As Google explains, “currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

This is good news for those websites that take some time to load. Still, it would be a good idea to increase the speed as it goes. There are a few tools in the market that can find the pages that are slow to load and provide recommendations on how to load faster.

In the case of websites that have good content with relevant keywords in place the page rank is not going to be affected for some time at least. Faster loading time is only going to strengthen what you have already. However, the key factor to remember is that without adding content and graphics and without any links, a website cannot hope to increase its page rank only by increasing its loading speed.

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What is real time search?

In a crispy way, real time search is searching online for material that is published in real time. In other words, there is no time gap between the time it is created and published. The best example, as you would already have guessed, is tweeting for Twitter. In a broader way you can consider the Yahoo answers and a status update in Facebook as further examples.

How is real time search useful to you?

The most obvious advantage is of course that you get the news as and when it happens, be it as personal as a change in mood or as public as an earthquake. For a company that runs an online business this would mean instant advertising, as you can provide all the latest developments as news bits to the readers all across the globe. Moreover, it avoids all the glamour and ornamental parts of marketing and provides the exact information that a user is looking for.

The “first come, first served” usage is most relevant in the case of online sales offers and promotions. Time is of utmost importance and real time search serves best for that purpose. Here the news is fresh and relevant. Moreover, you also get the response of your customers as fast as you publish the news. Because real time search helps real time communication between people. If you are a buyer of an iphone you get to contact previous buyers and know the details. Similarly, if you are seller you publish the latest offers and promotions or the launch of a new model.

What is the role of Twitter in real time search?

Twitter almost started the trend of real time online presence. The character limit of Twitter to 160 has worked for it rather than against. The very fact that Google has started adding tweets to its search results make Twitter the most powerful weapon for real time search. Twitter users want what they provide: information that is relevant and short. They need information “now” and “quick”. Providing such an audience with a single-page blog, however interesting that blog is, would be a waste of not just time but also effort.

While webmasters are still arguing about the value of real time search the truth remains that the consumers would always be hungry for news that they want as brief and as important as possible. Provide them that and you could witness a considerable boost in your sales.

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