7 Things I Want from Google - NOW!

I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want. What I want is for Google to stop photographing street corners in Manhattan and give me a few much-needed tools! Here's a list of 7 things I want from Google for Christmas (or better yet, July 4th).

1. Search my Google Reader - Hello!? Google, your main thing is, um, Search. Well, someone had to say it. Listen, all I want to do is search my feeds. Is it too much to ask? Why are you making me star everything I might want to go back and look at? Punks.

2. Blogger. Where do I even START?

a. Customizable title and meta tags right there on the post interface.
b. More templates and easier to customize!
c. Accepting the templates I've found elsewhere. There are some super-nice and super-talented people who've created super-great templates but I can't get them to work.
d. Google Analytics right there in the Blogger Dashboard. I know, I know, that's just CRAZY TALK!
e. Let me transfer my blog to another Google account. I changed my name when I got married but you insist on referring to my maiden name.
f. RSS feeds. Now that Feedburner is being added to your harem, let's have all of their options right there in the Blogger dashboard. Including stats.
g. Basically become everything I love in Wordpress, but go one step further and don't make me upload a bunch of plugins. Oh and drag-n-drop EVERYTHING would be icing on the cake.

3. Gmail - I want to be able to reply to emails sent to certain filters automatically using the email address it was sent to. Right now I have to manually change it.

4. Google Talk - Support AIM so my husband doesn't have to download AIM (doesn't that just screw with your computer!) or Trellian. I like it when he uses plain old G-talk b/c it tells me when he's typing :) Otherwise, sometimes I think he's not responding to me.

5. Break up with Wikipedia - So many instances of inaccuracies have been documented, it's a wonder you guys still think this is what the users should find on the first page of results.

6. Index Wordpress better. Too many Wordpress sites are having pages fall into the Supplemental Index. Vanessa Fox is all like "Don't use nofollow" but Google doesn't offer many alternatives. But she's right. I don't want to nofollow my category pages b/c I'm trying to optimize them for the long tail. Figure out what a sidebar is, already!

7. Calendar. Maybe it's just me, but I've never once received a reminder for the events I set up on my calendar.

Technorati: seo, google, gmail, wordpress, blogger

Blog Review: Five Cent Nickel

Five Cent Nickel , a personal finance blog, is celebrating their two-year anniversary by holding a contest where the prizes include free iPods. One of the ways to enter is to write a review of the blog. This gave me a great idea for The SEM Zone: blog reviews. Plus, I want to win an iPod. So it's a win-win for everyone.

Let's dig in.

What Five Cent Nickel (FCN) is doing right:

Good content. FCN's content is consistently selected for blog carnivals. Additionally, I have seen several organic links from other personal finance blogs I read. By organic, I mean the content was SO GOOD that other bloggers provided a link to their readers because the post offers so much value.

Engaging readers. The current giveaway is a prime example. Readers can enter by leaving a comment on the giveaway post (and promising to tell another person about Five Cent Nickel, consider yourselves told) and/or by blogging a 100+ word review of the FCN site. Not only does this encourage participation on the blog itself, it spurs word of mouth advertising, and keeps readers coming back to find out if they'll win the prizes.

RSS Feed. Having one deserves kudos. If you are serious about blogging, RSS is a must. FCN does a couple of key things with their feed. First of all, sponsored ads are included in the feed, which means the blog can still make moolah even when readers don't visit the site (and just read the posts in their newsreader). Secondly, a copyright notice appears at the bottom in an attempt to deter content theft.

What Five Cent Nickel could do better:

Title Tags. Title tags which feature keywords tend to help sites rank higher in the search engines. FCN's home page has the blog title first. Using Keyword Discovery, it seems that no one is searching for "fivecentnickel.com". No surprise there. "Personal finance tips" is searched for 26 times. However, Personal finance is searched over 19,000 times, so they can still get ranked for having that phrase in the title tags. But I recommend that FCN move "personal finance tips" to the beginning of the title tag. Having said that, personal finance is a very difficult term to rank for, so a little more research to find easier keywords might be a better idea. This type of research can be done for every single page on the blog. Just make sure to have unique title tags for each page or duplicate content issues can arise. Once the research is done, the SEO Title Tag Wordpress Plugin makes this task very easy!

Optimize the "Thank You" page. If you leave a comment, you have to enter a captcha password, which is put in place to deter spam. But after submitting, you're taken to a page that only has the words "Thank You" on it. FCN should offer the user the opportunity to return to the page they were on, go to the home page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or read related posts.

Design. The look of the blog is very text-y. It would be nice to see graphics and images mixed in. FCN could use the Get Custom Wordpress plugin to have a thumbnail sized graphic to go with each post. Each graphic could be assigned a category, and then every post within that category could automatically display the assigned graphic. I'm also surprised not to see any banner ads. There's a big white space in the top right corner just begging to be monetized.

Redirect duplicate pages. Wordpress essentially creates two pages for every post. One has a forward slash at the end of the URL and the other doesn't. Thankfully, there is a Wordpress plugin which fixes the whole thing for you. FCN should install the Permalink Redirect plugin to avoid duplicate content issues.

So that's my review of Five Cent Nickel. Obviously, they're not hurting for traffic. But who knows, maybe they could attract even more!

Want your blog reviewed? Drop me a line at njohnson at fortuneinteractive dot com.

By the way, I realize that the SEM Zone doesn't even employ all of these methods. However, we're hoping to switch over to Wordpress soon so we have greater control over design, title tags, etc.

Answering Alister Cameron

Today Alister Cameron was the guest blogger on Problogger. He dug into Google's patent for Blogsearch which is borderline Big Brother. At the end, he posed questions for readers which I will attempt to answer here.

1. Does it make sense to have Blogsearch separate from the main Google search engine? That's a tough question to answer. On the one hand, a niche search engine for blogs is highly useful. Where I get concerned is how Google handles blogs in its "regular" engine.

2. As Google Blogsearch gains in popularity, will new (or adjusted) SEO strategies emerge along with it? In Alister's post, he talks about how tagging, inclusion in Blogrolls, and even links in emails and IM are factors in Blogsearch. So I think the strategy should be a fusion of SEO/SMO.

3. How many people actually use Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com)? I tried to find this information out by plugging it into Compete. It defaulted to Google.com. So then I plugged in the url for the Blogger based Blogsearch (search.blogger.com), but there wasn't enough data from Compete's users to offer traffic estimations.

4. Do you use it? I do use it! I have a personal movie-related blog and I use Blogsearch to get links for roundups. I've also found my posts listed in the first page of results for Blogsearch but nowhere to be found in Google. My blog is new, so it might still be stuck in the sandbox. Could it be that there's no sandbox for Blogsearch?

5. How do you find Google Blogsearch compares with Technorati? I've found far better results on Blogsearch. Having said that, Technorati is probably searched more, so it might make more sense to optimize for that.


Speaking of which: seo, smo, social media optimization, blogsearch

Google Blog Search Gets Makeover @ Blogger

The Google Blog Search within Blogger has a new look, as well as the option of restricting the dates from which you would like to search. The look is unfortunately not carried over to Google Blog Search over at Google.

For the date sort options, check the right sidebar. This feature is carried in both Blogger Google Blog Search and regular Google Blog Search.

(via Blogger Buzz)

Technorati tags: google, blogger, search