It has been announced by Hitwise that between March 7th and March 13th 2010 social networking site Facebook overtook search engine powerhouse Google in terms of number of visits in the US, making it the single most visited website in the United States between those dates. Although seemingly just another stat which proves nothing other than the circumstantial trend of that period: it is in fact a massive insight into the changing way in which we use the internet.

This switch in number one spot from Google to Facebook does not mean that the famous search engine is in decline (their market share was up 9% on the same period in 2009) but more so that social networking is growing in popularity at an incredible rate. The large market share of search engines is easily explained: as they serve as a gateway to discovering other websites and are often set as homepages. The vast majority of visits to social networks however are purely to access the information contained on the site itself or as a means of communication and inter-personnel social activity. As such it can be asserted that it is not necessarily the case that one site is more popular than another, but that the manner in which individuals use the internet is beginning to change: which is a much bigger deal.

The early incarnations of the internet were built around newsgroups and other means of sharing a wealth of information with like-minded or interested parties. With the rapid growth in the number of people using the internet came rapid growth in the number of different applications of the worldwide web. Throughout this period of flux the primary use continued to be as a tool for accessing information, hence the sustained popularity of search engines. This recent news however could well be indicative of the beginning of a phase when non-email communication usurps information sharing as the main purpose for instances of online activity.

Drifting further into the world of conjecture, there could potentially be implications of the rise of social networking sites which have a heavy bearing on offline as well as online activity. Does a rise in interaction via the internet for instance, mean reduced emphasis and reduced prevalence of face to face communication? Although a possibly far-fetched assumption, the fact that this prospect can be legitimately considered as feasible is certainly a concern in itself and something which cannot realistically be monitored.


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After doing our usual random searches to see if we can see anything new we stumbled across a new rich snippet format so decided to take a closer look.

Google announced the arrival of its rich snippet format some twelve months ago and since then they seem to have been developing this format and are slowly rolling now rich snippet results for events.

OK so what the hell am I on about? If you have a venue that puts on various events such as concerts, comedy shows we are now seeing these events appearing underneath the main Google search results. Just another clever way for Google to keep you on their search results page to ensure you find exactly the website you are trying to find.

I have a feeling that the rich snippet results will begin to start showing up everywhere and for lots of other types of searches. The way they work is by using hCalendar micro formatting to find out more check out Google’s official word on this by clicking here.

We at Web Vitality will be keeping a close eye on rich snippets so be sure to check back with us because as soon as we know anything we will let you know.

If you would like a free website SEO health check then click here for more details

This isn’t going to be one of my usual long and boring posts with lots of technical mumbo jumbo instead I’m going to keep it really short as there isn’t really a lot to say on the subject but is a question that seems to keep cropping up.

It’s always a struggle getting all of the pages on a large e commerce site indexed especially when you have a client expecting results quickly so what do you do?

Webmaster Tools

First of all log into your Google account and setup a webmaster tools account. To access webmaster tools you can click here. Webmaster tools is an excellent resource for web masters as it gives you lots of information about the way Google views and manages your site and its content and is a must for any SEO.

Submit an XML Sitemap

If it’s a new or old website if you haven’t submitted an XML sitemap I would recommend that you do so. Not everybody will agree with me on this and some say that it isn’t necessary for indexing. My view is that if Google isn’t indexing your pages and you can do anything to help then why not?

A sitemap is basically a list of all of the URLs that you have on your website. One of the reasons for signing up to webmaster tools is that this is an area where you can upload your xml sitemap and tell Google first hand where it can find all of the pages on your website.

There are many tools out there that will generate an XML sitemap for you but most of them limit you to a maximum of 500 pages. This won’t help you with a large e commerce site but for your smaller websites they are great. You can purchase software that will create them for you but if you have a decent web developer it wouldn’t take them long to generate one on your behalf.

Blogging

Once you have submitted your sitemap to web master tools I suggest a vigorous blogging campaign dropping links to as many pages on your website as possible. Google seems to be crawling blogs a lot quicker these days so if you have lots of links pointing to different pages from your blog Google is sure to follow.

External Links

These are your biggest weapon for getting your site indexed. Start building lots and lots of quality links to your website. Building quality links to your website will help you in more ways than one and is the area that you need to spend most time on. The better the website you get a link from the more often Google will be visiting the page and the more likely it will be that it finds your website.

So there you have it my four easy steps to getting more pages indexed on Google. If you want to see a real example of how to get more pages indexed then feel free to keep an eye on my Office Supplies client. We are currently attempting to push more of their pages into Google main index using the methods described above.

P.S Sorry for the shameless link I couldn’t help myself

When doing our usual rounds in the search world we came across the latest offering from Google. Latest Live news feeds for certain search terms.

Not 100% sure (at this stage) where it is pulling the information from but looking at some of the results we are seeing. Twitter updates are showing, Google News updates and many more.

This is just another example of how Google are pushing the boundaries of search, providing up to the minute results. Definitely one to watch me thinks.

In this post I would like to offer my two penneth as to the use of microsites when trying to gain higher rankings.

My understanding of a microsite would be a one or more page website that is related to the theme of your main website, which is put together for the sole purpose of trying to obtain a relative link to your main website.

Sounds great doesn’t it and I’m sure it served as a good tool in the past. Below are the reasons why I believe this is no longer the case and why I don’t feel you should waste your time building them when you could be generating natural quality links.

Ok let’s say you put together three microsites all in a similar theme to your main website. The microsites themselves will have no PR value as they are new and nobody is linking to them.

The first thing you would then do would be to link each microsite to each other. Ok so now each microsite has at least two links from other related sites. Then you would place a link from each of the microsites to your main website and voila you now have three related links to your site.

Not the case. Let me break this down. First of all unless you are really clever you probably purchase all three new domain names with the same credit card and used the same domain registration details when registering. Google is registered as a domain registrar not to sell domains but so it can have access to all domain registration details. Why would it want this info?? Google has found you out already at this stage.

Next you have probably also purchased the three domain names from the same registrar so all will be in the same IP range. Again Google will see this and has found you out yet again.

Thirdly, you have linked each of the three sites up and have no other links into them. This shows again that the three sites are related so you have been found out a third time. There is no point in obtaining links from other sources for these sites as if you were going to spend your time doing this you might as well do it for your main site.

The point of this post is that there is really no point in embarking down the microsite route in a bid to increase rankings because Google is on the ball with such tactics and the three reasons above are only a few reasons that highlight this.

It all boils down to the fact that search is becoming more intelligent everyday and no matter how hard you try, for long term gains there is no substitute for good hard work.

Ok, our new site has finally gone live so I had better start blogging. I need to come up with something good so Chris doesn't shout at me. I'm going to talk about all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, but to begin with I want to talk about link building.

Link Building is without a doubt one of the most important factors when optimising any website and is a subject I can talk for hours on end. Instead of boring everybody with one huge post I will break it up over the coming weeks. Now as I'm sure you will start to see I tend to go off subject when I blog so please bear with me I will get there in the end.

There are lots of blog posts out there on the subject and lots of different opinions on how to obtain top quality links. All I can do is offer my spin on the subject. So where do I begin?

WHY LINK BUILD?
Link building is important as each link that points to your site is like a thumbs up from the other site saying your site is a good resource. Basically the more thumbs up you get the higher your website will rank. Sounds simple doesnt it?

Back in the day before search evolved into the clever little beast it is today, it really was as simple as that, and those black hatters out there went away and obtained links from everywhere under the sun in a bid to obtain high rankings for their own sites and clients sites. They didn't care where the links came from and it became a big battle as to who could obtain the most links. This couldn't continue so Google introduced the PageRank Algorithm which made link building more of a skill, and gave more weight to links that were actually relevant to the websites they were pointing to.

Although some people still argue that quantity still out weighs quality, Google still claims that it doesn't so I will keep my post in line with Googles thoughts and save the other argument for a later post. Getting back to it, it's important to obtain relevant links to your website in order to gain higher page rank which will in turn raise your rankings. This is why it's important to link build, as without lots of top quality and relevant links pointing to your website, you may as well give up (unless your website is extremly niche that is, and by extremely niche im talking about a website that is about pink and gold spotty dogs with only one leg, for example).

WHAT ARE MY LINKING OPTIONS?
There are many differnt types of links out there and I have listed a few of them below. I will go into details on all of them in future posts:

• One Way Links - Links that point to you but you dont link back
• Reciprocal Links - Links whereby somebody links to you and you link back to them
• Social Bookmarking Links - Links obtained through social media
• Article/Press Release - One way links obtained through articles and press releases
• Link Baiting - Links obtained through offering something useful to the end user

Link Building is without doubt a skill that any SEO must be good at, as it's extremely difficult. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of relationship skills. It isn't something that is going to go away so check back here for future posts on the various types of links, as listed above.