Most site owners are constantly on the look out for ways to increase their online exposure. Increasing web traffic not only allows for higher brand recognition but also higher revenues. One of the most overlooked methods to achieve this, is to get content syndicated from your website and onto smaller sites or 3rd party aggregators. This provides targeted inbound traffic from the people who have read your content and click through to read more.
Now that Google Video has been operational for several months, it’s a perfect time to review the progress of Mountain View’s hottest BETA service. Some may view me as a Google skeptic, so perhaps I’m in the best position to evaluate the real value in Video’s offering. Although it pains me to say this, I am actually very impressed with the web application. I do not think that it’s perfect just yet however, its lack of a sub-category structure (made famous by the DMOZ directory) and a cumbersome desire to push people into searching the archive makes Video a little frustrating at times. It’s also a service which only broadband users can effectively use, so there’s no need to keep such a basic visual design – other then to re-iterate that its made by Google.
It is often noted that there is currently an on/off switch for websites perceived as spam, with little grey area or notification. This could soon change however, with an added feature being tested for the users of Google Sitemaps. To recap, Google Sitemaps is not the same as a HTML written web page sitemap which many sites use like a book index or navigation page for visitors. Google’s Sitemaps service uses a language called XML in order to help Googlebot (the crawler that indexes your site) find every web page which you have published. This is particularly helpful for dynamic pages which are sometimes ignored by Googlebot, or content which is hidden behind an online form or search facility.