This year’s talk was around the core theme of the “conversation economy” and how marketing, branding, and business in general is being shaped by and around conversations. Not surprising, there was a fair amount of talk around social media. Of course, my portion was to focus on natural search as part of this conversation, which thanks to blended search, crosses over and intersects all marketing channels. While my view on natural search hasn’t changed much over the years, preparing my presentation for the conference helped me frame it up with the exact message phrasing that I’ve been looking for - “just in time conversation.”

Just In Time Conversation

This description is excellent for natural search, and those who have been doing SEO for any amount of time have probably recognized this viewpoint. Natural search provides the opportunity to reach out and connect with a website’s target audience at the ideal time…when they are seeking what the site has to offer.

Of course you would think that presenting to some of the whose-who of brands would make this messaging old news. However, even today, this still couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of brands have made great strides online, but there is still a lot of ground on the natural search marketing front to be gained.

In prepping for the conference, I had a chance to preview a list of some of the represented brands and took that as an opportunity to see how well they were doing already regarding SEO. To protect the guilty, I won’t call out any of these brands here. Many of the fundamentals that you’d expect these brands to have already addressed, many of which would be evident even through a 60-Second Website Audit, actually hadn’t been addressed: canonicalization, duplicate title tags, keyword cannibalization, generic anchor text, etc. Beyond some of the more technical issues, many of these sites could benefit greatly just through thin slicing natural search optimization tactics.

I can only hope that the presentation helped to start more of these big brands down the natural search marketing path. I certainly did what I could in the 45 minutes I was given to illustrate the point.

Natural Search Users, Please Stand Up

Early in the presentation, I invited the attendees to participate in a little poll by having them stand up based on their own personal interaction with various marketing vehicles. Specifically, I asked them to stand up if:

Within the last week, you…

• Used a phonebook?
• Acted on a billboard ad?
• Acted on a magazine ad?
• Acted on a radio ad?
• Acted on a TV ad?
• Used a search engine?
• Clicked on a paid search result?
• Clicked on a natural search result?

As you might imagine (and can see below), out of 300 plus attendees, the numbers grew gradually, from 2-3 for phonebook usage (which I was actually amazed that the number was that high), up to nearly everyone in the audience when I reached the “Used a search engine?” part of the poll. Presenting in-the-round also meant that it was very easy for all of the attendees to see how much search engine usage has become a part of their and everyone’s everyday life. Not surprising, those who clicked on a natural search result compared to a paid search result was far greater.

This of course was the first step…now to get marketers to question why they continue to put a disproportionate amount of their online spend toward paid search versus natural search, even when their own usage of search engines contradicts that logic. But just like natural search takes time, it takes time to turn this kind of thinking right side up.

For many companies, natural search marketing may itself be one of the most important just in time conversations they have this year, after all, it’s now July and the 2009 holiday season is just around the corner.

SEOmoz has been indexing the web with their killer app Linkscape and they have been analysing the data to arrive at solid results. Even though the SEO field has lots of grey areas, good evidence in the form of solid data proves that search engine optimisation can be a definitive science in certain areas rather than a skillful craft.

The search engine ranking factors that were analysed are outlined below:

1) Title Tag:
Best Practice:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keywords | Brand
Or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

If the keyword targeted is in an extremely competitive industry, then it is good to put it at the beginning of the title. If the targeted keyword is not very competitive and if the branding can help attract clicks to the site on the SERPs, then the brand name can appear at the start of the title tag followed by the keyword phrase.

2) Usefulness of H1 tags:
The H1 tag is more useful to users than to search engines. This is a hard hitting result considering that H1 tag has been an important on page factor and search engines appear to weight it.

This test reveals that H1 is still important for informational hierarchy and semantic purposes which help users know the heading under which the content appears. But search engines do not give the H1 tag the same ranking weight than was originally estimated. It is still important to help the user identify the information heirarchy on a given page.

It could be that the use of CSS has led to h1 tags being formatted to make them look like something else than what they originally stand for - prominent headings.

3) Usefulness of Nofollow:
Using nofollow tag for internal pagerank sculpting to flow link juice is no longer recommended. It is good to use the nofollow tag for disabling spammers in potential user generated content.

4) Usefulness of Canonical Tag:
The canonical tag is still in its infancy and is best used to provide hint to the search engines for duplicate content. From public statements, it is also believed to deplete between 1% to 10% of link juice as in the case of 301 redirects.

For example if page A has 10 link points and it is redirected using 301 redirect to page B, then page B would receive between 1 and 9 link points.

Since the search engines are still testing the canonical tag, it would be wise not to rely too much on its functionality in these early days. It would be wise to adopt confirmed architectural solutions like the hash tag at the end of the URL of duplicate content to prevent it from being indexed by the search engines.

5) Use of Alt Text in Images:
The recommendation is clearly to include good relevant alt text with images on pages that are targeting competitive keywords. This is based on two reasons.

Firstly, the alt tag helps users with disabilities to understand what a page is about and also computers using semantics to make the information more useful. Secondly, the correlation data at hand proves the alt attribute is a far more important ranking factor than what was assumed.

In the past, excessive abuse of alt tag by stuffing keywords has almost convinced many SEOs to deny it any importance. But the latest tests show otherwise.

6) Use of Meta Keywords tag:
This has long been abused and has lost its relevance as a ranking factor. But the recommendation here is to use the meta keywords tag if the site owner is not worried about making her site’s use of keywords public. Moreover, Yahoo still considers it as one of the several factors that influence ranking on its SERPs. The data shows that Google and Bing still ignore the meta keywords tag.

7) Use of Parameter Driven URLs:
The recommendation is not to use them unless absolutely necessary (in the case where the CMS being used employs parameters). Even then, it should be restricted to a maximum of 2 parameters.

The spiders have found it hard to parse URLs with dynamic content and often encounter duplicate content. The correlation data reveals that pages with static URLs tend to rank higher on the SERPs.

8. Usefulness of Footer Links:
Footer links are to be used sparingly and a limit of 25 relevant navigational links is recommended. This number is not a hard limit. The intent behind the keywords chosen for such links is an important issue.

Google has been known to penalise sites with keyword stuffed footer links and this manipulation can be detected through its algorithms. The testing shows that only an excess of 25 footer links that looked spammy invited Google’s automated penalty.

9) Use of Javascript and Flash:
The use of Javascript and Flash in navigation that search engines follow to index pages on a site is not recommended.

The main reason proposed is that the way the search engines parse flash and javascript is still inferior when compared to html. It is a risk that can well be avoided. Navigation using Flash and Javascript code leads to lower search engine rankings.

10) Use of 301 Redirects:
The best way to redirect pages is using 301 redirects though there are inherent disadvantages. A 301 redirect depletes about 1% to 10% of link juice. This is far better than a javascript or 302 redirect which passes no juice at all. Meta refreshes appear to perform similarly to 301s but the search engines still prefer 301 redirects.

11) Blocking Content from Search Engines:
The Meta Robots tag (noindex, follow) is a better method to block pages from the bots than the robots.txt. The robots.txt is to be used sparingly only in cases where the meta robots tag cannot be employed.

The main reason behind this conclusion is that the use of robots.txt stops the spiders from seeing what is on the blocked page. But they know the existence of such blocked pages. This leads to results on the SERPs for such blocked pages as just the site URL with no title and description. It is also referred to as Partially Indexed Pages (PIP).

Another negative is the blocking of flowing of link juice that a blocked page may have accrued. The bots cannot see the links on the blocked page and cannot follow them. The link juice is not distributed via those links.

The use of noindex follow parameters with the meta robots tag helps the page from being indexed but allows the link juice to flow to other pages through the links on that page. This is highly recommended.

12) Google Search Wiki’s Effect on Rankings:
The search wiki does not have any influence on rankings. The recommendation is not to spend time or resources on search wiki.

Google Searchwiki allows a user to customise her search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. The user has to sign in to her Google account for this and she can only customise the way her search results appear after she is logged in, aka personal search.

13) Negative Links from Bad Neighbourhood:
The effect of links from bad neighbourhood to good neighbourhood is minimal provided the links are one way and not reciprocal.

Tests show that the search engines can easily identify the hubs in a particular industry and get to know the legitmiate resources. All good sites receive spammy links and this is a fact of life on the web. As long as the percentage of inbound spammy links is a small proportion of the total number of inbound links and the site is reasonably well linked to legitimate resource hubs for that industry, there is no cause for concern.

14) Relationship between Traffic and Rankings:
The user metrics to a given site do not determine the rankings of that site. Though traffic and rankings are highly correlated, one does not cause the other. The reason is that the popular websites get more links and this in turn causes higher rankings.

Search engines have tried metrics like time spent by user on a page for ranking results but this turned out to be a noisy signal. If the engines do not detect a user click on their SERPs, then that is a more trusted signal for them to improve their search results.

The recommendation suggests not to trust unique visitor counts (opposed to total visitors) as it can be a fundamental flaw of the web analytics software. It is much better to look at the traffic derived from the various sources and comparison of traffic from one month to the next.

The tests conducted do throw interesting light on several assumptions associated with some of the SEO best practices outlined above. The full SEOmoz post on SEO Best Practices is an interesting read along with the comments that follow it.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior pay per click marketing consultant at Netconcepts, a well established and highly trusted Auckland search marketing consultancy that endeavours to provide the best practice white hat SEO and Pay per click services.

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable - it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start - clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon - they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

WordCamp is a mini-convention for Wordpress and blogging enthusiasts. Some of the content is Wordpress-centric, but other content is applicable to bloggers in general, such as how to promote your blog and other stuff.

I’ll be speaking on how to use social image sharing services for promotion. Social media sites such as Flickr allow people to publish and share their photos with many other people, and the site is well-constructed in terms of search engine optimization, so posting images there helps get media distributed all over. Using Flickr can help one gain more attention, inbound links, and overall search rankings.

I’ve spoken on using Flickr for promotion and optimization before, and I’ve written on details of image optimization here a number of times.

I’d further recommend blogging to everyone - I first started blogging here on the Natural Search Blog as a guest, after Stephan Spencer invited me, and it eventually changed my overall career path. Be sure to check out Stephan’s articles on blog optimization, btw, since he’s pretty much the top authority out there on the subject.

There’s still a few seats left for Dallas WordCamp - sign up before they’re all gone!

This threw the SEO world into a tizzy with lot of power SEOs blogging about their concerns. Danny Sullivan’s post on Google Loses Backward Compatibility was an interesting one.

Matt Cutts cleared the air in his post on PR sculpting on his blog. Rand Fishkin has posted a video on PR leak at SEOmoz. Bruce Clay has recorded Matt’s comments on PR sculpting on his post.

All this information notwithstanding, at this stage, it is not very prudent to read too much into the new meaning that the nofollow link has assumed with respect to pagerank. A year ago, if a page had 10 points of page rank, with 10 links (external or internal is not important) on the page out of which 5 are nofollowed, the 5 followed links got 2 points of page rank flowing through them.

But in the new scheme of things, in the above scenario, the 5 followed links get only 1 point each and the remaining 5 points of pagerank evaporate. The term evaporate as it stands today is very ambiguous and does not really explain many things.

My understanding is that there is not infinite pagerank to flow across the web. It is proportional to the number of pages in Google’s index. If we look at Pagerank as a pie, the sites with PR10, PR9 and PR8 constitute huge slices of the Pagerank pie. The remaining portion of this pie is distributed across the millions of other sites on the web.

If a PR3 site wants to increase its pagerank to the next level, then it has to create lot more pages of content and therefore own more virtual real estate than its competitor who is sitting on a PR4. Apart from this, other factors like the authority and trust of the domain, quality of backlinks etc also come into play. All these factors are clubbed together into the toolbar page rank of a site.

SEOmoz’s Mozbar tends to give a more accurate picture by breaking up the TBPR (toolbar pagerank) into its constituents namely pagerank at the page level, trust at the page level, page rank at the domain level, trust at the domain level and the number of extrernal links from unique domains.

Going by the theory that pagerank is not an infinite quantity, the law of conservation of energy in science states that energy disappearing in one form reappears in an exactly equivalent form. In the same vein, the page rank evaporating from the nofollowed links on a page must be compensated by distribution of the evaporated pagerank elsewhere on the page instead of disappearing into thin air.

If there were outbound links to good quality resources with the same topical focus as the content on the original page, it would help in the distribution of the evaporated pagerank and remain useful to the users. It also leads to better quality authoritative relevant content and reinforces Google’s vision - provide good quality relevant results to searchers.

Over the years, webmasters have been reluctant to link to good quality sources from their sites. The use of excessive internal pagerank sculpting to flow link juice to important pages on their sites using the nofollow tag has sidelined the “perceived less important pages” on their sites. The concept of pagerank revolves around linking. The new measures adopted by Google could be to encourage sites to link more to trusted authoritative sources in their domain of expertise.

The increasing incidence of use of nofollow tags in links to external sites has also contributed to this quandary. The original intention behind nofollow was to use this tag to link to untrusted sources. They could be user generated comments, paid links, signup pages, links to RSS feeds etc. But the sole purpose the nofollow tag has served has been to channel link juice to specific money pages on a site to make them more powerful so that they can rank well in the search results.

Google has also come across cases where inexperienced site owners have done more harm to their site by using nofollow injudiciously that they have blocked off good quality content from the Google index. This is to the detriment of Google’s vision in providing quality relevant content to users. This can be disputed as the good quality content can be linked to, from other sites on the web. Google still knows the existence of such pages and can even rank them on the weight of the anchor text of the inbound links.

Matt Cutts admitted that Google started evaporating pagerank over a year ago. There are lots of sites (especially large ones) who have done internal page rank sculpting on their sites to flow link juice to their most important pages. There has been no significant report of sites losing their pagerank in this period en masse.

There are two other important issues that hinge around the value of Pagerank. They are:

1. The inclusion of pages in the Google index is dependent on a pagerank threshold value the page must accumulate to be worthy of being admitted into the index
2. The crawling of pages on a site is also dependent on the page rank threshold

Assuming that the pagerank evaporates from a page with a good PR score due to presence of nofollowed links, would the subsequent decrease in the pagerank cause problems for that page to be crawled in future? Would excessive evaporation lead to the page thrown out of the Google index? It is very difficult to analyse such factors and your guess is as good as mine.

Danny Sullivan made a comment on Matt’s blog wherein he points out that all links are not created the same on a given site. Google uses its own techniques to measure the importance of links and their ability to flow juice. Webmasters in their earnestness to adopt pagerank sculpting use the nofollow on links which, if followed, might still get credit from Google’s algorithm. But their manual intervention snuffs it out.

In a subtle way, Google is maybe reminding webmasters and site owners that they should stop being search engineers by trying to channelise pagerank flow and concentrate more on their business, developing quality content and improving traffic and conversions.

Michael Martinez in a post on SEOmoz had an interesting comment to make. He said that the TBPR is not an accurate reliable measure of the pagerank of a site/page. Internal pagerank sculpting has been pursued by SEOs across the board based on the TBPR score. He says that a technique based on faulty measurement will only lead to inaccurate results. It is akin to chasing rainbows. This is offset by Rand who has clearly stated that internal page rank sculpting has worked wonders for his clients.

Matt Cutts weighs in when he says that it is highly desirable to plan a good site architecture right from the inception stage of a website. The architecture should take care of the site hierarchy by providing links to important pages using a natural linking style rather than use nofollow to achieve the same results.

With all these deliberations going on in the SEOsphere, it would be ideal for SEO practitioners to avoid excessive use of nofollow from now onwards in their future assignments. If they have used nofollow in the past on client sites for internal page rank sculpting and there has been no outcry to date, it is best to leave them as is rather than undo all the nofollowing. More importance should be given to the planning of the site/information architecture to link naturally to important pages on the site.

Again, it is early days to fully understand the effects of pagerank evaporation. Many SEO experts have been testing this and their pronouncements should be awaited eagerly.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland pay per click (ppc) marketing company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Okay, you aren’t going to fully understand the intricate details and you’d obviously spend far, far more time (closer to hours than seconds) on a true site audit, but I’d venture that 60 seconds is enough for a good gut check and for identifying areas that need deep exploration.  What may make this most interesting is to compare results that your “team” gets from this exercise since we all have our own approaches, hot buttons, etc.

Ultimately, I’d recommend all SEO practitioners go through this exercise, even randomly on any old site, at least once or twice a week. I say this because like most skills, true mastery comes when it transcends thought…it becomes instinctive and our minds take in and process more naturally without conscious thought.

Of course, every one of these 60-second site audits will also be different based on initial perceptions and where the path leads us. Some elements we identify will be revealing in and of themselves, while others will merely be stepping-stones to other elements or footnotes toward criteria for our eventual recommendations.

Here is just a quick list of the things that I might look for in undertaking a 60-second SEO audit:

• Canonicalization (www vs. non-www)
• Title tag formatting pattern
• Title tag duplication (quicker via search engine with a “site:domain.com” search at 100 results per page)
• Indexation (via the “site:” search in Google and appending &filter=0&num=990 to the URL string from the initial results page)
• URL insight: construction parameters, keyword usage, length, tracking parameter usage, etc. (via site navigation as well as site: search)
• Meta description usage and duplication (via site: search)
• Heading usage (navigating site with Outline Headings and Show Element Names When Outlining via the Web Developer Toolbar)
• Nofollow usage (via SearchStatus plugin with highlighting while navigating site)
• JavaScript/Flash usage in navigation or links (combination of hovering over links in the simplest, but more accurate via disabling JavaScript with and disabling CSS, and view source)
• Hidden text or links (combination of ctrl-A to select everything on the page, disabling JavaScript and CSS, viewing text-only cache pages, review list of links on a page)
• Pagination, guided / faceted navigation constructs, sorting constructs
• Site structure (via sitemap)
• Robots.txt file and XML sitemap usage
• Server platform (Apache, IIS, WebSphere, etc.)
• 404 Handling

That’s just a sampling, but a very powerful sampling that can provide a considerable amount of insight into a site. What you might have found surprising is the amount of information learned about a site without even looking at the site, but through the search engine results pages. For the daring souls, try this exercise without even looking at the site itself — how much can you learn just through analyzing SERPs?

And this isn’t just for work. Feel free to amaze your friends and family at your next party — then again, perhaps reserve that for parties with other SEOs.

So, what cues would you look for in your 60-second audits?

It is a double edged sword and if done right, you will glow on the winner’s podium with a great name for your product/service/company in the online space reaping rich inbound links to your site from a multitude of powerful and trusted domains. Done wrong, you could end up a social pariah in cyberspace with a bad reputation and poor record of integrity attached to your name and company’s product/service.

In real life, imagine a scenario where Mr X is at a party and he makes a sales pitch to others around him for an innovative product or scheme his company is introducing. People have come to the party to have a good time and would be put off by this approach and keep their distance from Mr. X. This is what happens when someone tries to promote their own product excessively in their online social media campaigns.

The most important step is to leverage the poweful social media sites to your advantage as you get unlimited real estate spaces for free to establish yourself. Create profiles on the major powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Youtube. Users congregate at these sites and all you have to do is participate. You can be in any niche.

You can do this by having your own blog where you post quality content that is useful and does not harp on your products or services. Update your blog regularly and distribute them as feeds to your accounts on other major social media sites. Users can add these feeds and view them in their news reader of choice.

You can create articles and submit to various article directories. You can create lenses on Squidoo and hubs on Hubpages related to your niche. These are time consuming but at the end of it, you increase your virtual real estate which in turn generate traffic and brings more visitors to your site.

A big mistake that happens time and again is that people initiate these web properties and do not maintain them. Just having a Squidoo lens on its own will not help you leverage it. You have to update it regularly till you manage to push your lens into the top 100 popular lenses. Your lens can rank on Google for the search terms unique to your niche and also get lots of eyeballs on your lens because of the popularity rating on Squidoo.

The next important step is to maintain control over your web property and how users access them. Connect all your social media profiles and services and control the flow of traffic between your various web properties.

By offering unbiased quality content on your social websites, you can woo users back to your personal blog and expose them to your posts. You control the dialogue through your blog posts and allow users to place comments. You can offer newsletter subscription and contact them by email. You can lead users to your other web properties with good clean linking strategy.

You can display your Twitter account on your Web 2.0 properties and get users to follow you on Twitter. You control the communication and let your users control the method of delivery. You make yourself accessible to your users in a multitude of ways.

The third step is to converse. The social media concept is built around conversations between people in the real world who share their likes and dislikes and their personal or professional experiences in cyberspace. For a business owner, this is word of mouth and she can track these conversations and respond to them.

If the owner leads people from her social media sites to her blog, it is easy for her to know what people think of her business/products and also reply to users’ comments. But it is not so simple as people can talk about her at several other places on the web.

The business owner can track these conversations on the web using Google Alerts where she sets up alerts for her company name, products/services and specific keyword phrases. She selects the Type as Comprehensive and the option How Often can be set to As it Happens. Everytime Google encounters a mention of her name or company when spidering the web, it sends an email to her. She can alternatively recieve it via a feed.

She can also use a Twitter search using the above method. She can get a feed of all the searches made on Twitter concerned with her company and view them in real time on her newsreader.

The fourth and final step is to convert the people talking about a company or its products and services. As a business owner, you can easily see the conversations happeing in your niche and you get a clear idea of what people are talking about especially their wants. All you have to do is get to know your target customers’ minds through these conversations and convert them into customers.

The central factor in conversion is the trust you garner in the eyes of the buyer. With your wide social media presence and effective linking of all your web 2.0 properties, your potential customers get to know you better.

A few steps you can take in portraying yourself as a person of trust and integrity are:

• You provide good quality content and advice in your selected niche
• You do not blatantly hype your own products/services and indulge in hardsell
• You respond well and unbiasedly to positive and negative comments about you/your company
• You assume the mantle of a thought leader in your field by adding new dimension of thinking to existing conversations

The strongest aspect of social media is its virality, the parallel of word of mouth in the real world. If you have a good message of value to the world, it is likely to be devoured quickly and transmitted many times over increasing your exposure manifold.

It is now time for you to dig your heels in the social media arena and reap the benefits it has to offer.
This post is based on Don Crowther’s article, “How to Knock A Marketing Campaign Out Of The Park” and is documented by Andy Jenkins in his post called Create, Control, Converse, CONVERT! The True Power of Social Media

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland social media optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

The demo product is an HTML 5 applicaion built using the Google Web Toolkit. Wave is being released as an open source product. Its open platform encourages developers to build other Wave clients, extensions and embed waves in other web pages and platforms. The product is characterised by the 3P’s namely product, platform and protocol.

The brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia are the creators of this incredible product. Their previous creation was Google Maps which is now the defacto standard for online mapping of geographical locations. This has taken a good couple of years to develop and bring it to its current form. Jens stressed this fact to the audience - You must remember that all this is happening in your browser.

A “wave” contains equal parts document and conversation where people can simultaneously work and communicate together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.

How Google Wave Works

You create a wave and add contacts to it. All the contacts on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, gadgets and feeds from other sites on the web. All members can edit the wave directly and also insert replies. You can see all the edits in real time as the changes are made to the wave by others.You can be running a Firefox browser and your friend can be on Safari browser. You can add as many contacts as you want.

The playback feature is a very powerful feature. If a new contact joins the wave, she can see the collaboration and communication that has taken place in a certain form at that point of time. By clicking playback, she can see how the whole wave has evolved from the beginning to the point of time she joined the wave. This is a very powerful feature especially when teams are working on different parts of the same project document.

Some of the really cool features are:

• Google Wave offers plain vanilla type email conversation where you can send emails to contacts you choose to.
• Instant messaging where unlike the typical IM chat, you see the message - Sarah is typing
  before you get to see the message once Sarah is done typing, in a wave, you see the chat transferred character by character in real time
• Use playback to see how the wave has evolved to its current shape
• Drag and drop attachments, say photos, into the wave from your desktop and everyone else on the wave can see it almost instantly
• API for embedding your wave to web pages such as a blog
• Wave can be embedded in social media sites like Orkut
• You can participate in a wave from your mobile phone
• Editing of the wave in real time and edits appear instantly with markups denoting the different edits
• Ability to send a private message to a particular contact which others cannot see
• Teams working on a project document can collaborate in real time and communicate simultaneously when working on it

Google Wave can be viewed as a platform with a rich collection of open APIs. This allows developers to build new extensions that can work with waves and also embed waves in other web services.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the basis for storing and sharing waves with the all important live concurrency mechanism which allows edits to be viewed in real time across contacts and services. This protocol is designed such that any user’s wave services can communicate with each other and with the Google Wave service. This is going to be achieved by making the Google Wave protocol code open source.

An excellent video on the Google Wave demo by the development team will give you a great idea of the amazing features that have been built into it.

Google is encouraging the developer community to create some cool apps that can be incorporated into the Google Wave before it is made public. You can sign up at http://wave.google.com to be notified of the release date when Google Wave is launched as a public product.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland search engine optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Here’s an example:

Clicking on “Show options” (just below the Google logo) displays a box to the left of the results:

Clicking on “Show options” (just below the Google logo) displays a box to the left of the results:

The options allow you to restrict the results by content type or by publish date. This is much more convenient than going to the Advanced Search screen.

The content type refinement is currently limited to videos, forums and user reviews. By toggling on “Images from the page”, you can see thumbnails of images pulled from the page displayed alongside the search listings. The “More text” option displays longer snippets for each result.

When viewing using the “Reviews” refinement option, Google replaces the standard snippets with content that is more representative of opinions expressed within the content of the page. Google does this by way of  sentiment analysis.

When viewing results restricted to a particular time period, you can sort by date or by relevance (relevance is the default). The only time periods offered are “recent”, “past 24 hours”, “past week”, and “past year”. You can specify other time periods quickly simply by modifying the Google SERPs URL.

To do so, first select one of the four given time-based options. For example, select “past week”. Let’s say you want to instead see results from the past month — which is not an available option. You would simply change the qdr:w at the end of the URL to qdr:m. The w stands for week, m stands for month. If you want to see results from the last three months instead of just one, simply specify qdr:m3 instead of qdr:m. For the past two years, use qdr:y2. Here’s an example URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=design%20patterns&sa=X&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:y2

One of my favorite new features is the Wonder Wheel. What a great tool for keyword research. It lets you explore keyword niches. As you can see below, by clicking on Wonder Wheel, the laser printers results are displayed diagrammatically with laser printers in the middle and related keyword categories around the perimeter.

If colour laser printer is clicked, it leads to more keywords surrounding colour laser printer. This happens in real time and Wonder Wheel is virtually a treasure chest for discovering new related keywords.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland SEO firm in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

Google has stated its support for rich microformats. Yahoo’s Search Monkey has already implemented them. But is still not clear if the search engines read them. Local search results have been rumoured to use microformats but there is no evidence to back this either.

Google has introduced Rich Snippets whereby existing open standards microformats like  hCard , hCalendar and  RDF (Resource Description Framework) assume significance.

Google’s adoption of these standards now gives webmasters an incentive to include microformats on their websites. They can enhance their existing data through use of these open standards without registering with Google. The rich snippets enhance the search results on the SERPs and show more information. To start with reviews from Yelp and user profiles from LinkedIn will be part of this process.

If your company address on your website is enclosed in a hCard microformat, this will appear as part of the enhanced listing on the SERPs for your site result.

If your site has a product launch coming up in say two months from now, you can use a hCalendar format to enable the search engines to display it as a rich snippet. Being an open standard, your calendar can be shared with other users who can import it into their Outlook and Google Calendar apps. This can build backlinks to the calendar on your site.

Sentiment analysis is a unique feature that Google uses to emphasise opinions from user reviews. It can be used as a description enclosed in quotes in the absence of rich snippets. This can be used in conjuction with the newly released Google search options that allows you to slice and dice search results by various options, one of which is Reviews.

Google’s rich snippets is much easier to implement than Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. As a site owner, you have to make the metadata available to Googlebot by placing the microformats on your web pages. To use SearchMonkey, you need to develop an application that will use the microformat data on your site to make it compatible for Yahoo to use on their SERPs.

Another option is the new Google search options is People search. This can be used in sync with Google Profiles to highlight a user’s job title, name and the geographical location of the company. Searchers can distinguish between people having the same name or sharing names with a celebrity.

A site owner cannot control the enhancement of his site listings. He has to make this metadata available in the first place for Google. Also, placement of data in microformats will not ensure enhanced listings for a site in the SERPs.

A site owner can request Google to be considered for the inclusion of rich snippets using this form. This helps the bots to find your content quicker than finding it in a regular crawl.

Both Google and Yahoo have clearly stated that they will not be using microformats for indexing and ranking purposes at this point. It could be considered in future based on its usefulness and popularity.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts and based out of Auckland, New Zealand. He also posts regularly to Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz