“Google publishes a whole lot about how to make your site show up as much as possible. If people haven't taken action on it, that's their own fault."

That is one person’s opinion from this article about the backlash many major media companies have agianst Google. These media giants, such as ESPN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are taking aim at Google over search results that don’t give them the front row seat that they are used to.

Google has had much success based on their approach of not catering to the status quo. Instead, they leave it up to people to choose the relevance of their content. They do this in large part through a voting process based on internet linking, along with many other factors.

Maybe I can see how the media giants take issue with certain search results such as the "Gaza" example given in the article. But, I believe they are making claims based on too broad of a keyword example. Searchers have become more proficient with their searches, and a generic keyword such as “Gaza” doesn’t necessarily have to return a bunch of news articles published by the New York Times and WSJ.

Google may not publicize its ranking algorithm, but they do explain in great detail what you can do to make your website rank higher for particular keywords. Media giants may feel they don’t have to play by the same rules since they are so well known and established, but small business owners certainly don’t have this luxury.

A new business just launching a website for the first time has to work even harder on its online marketing than another established local business, making it that much more difficult for their newly launched website to appear in Google’s search results. Many of these business owners are asking themselves the same question: “Do I have the time and expertise to work on my website to move it to the first page of Google for keywords related to my business?”

The playing field still may not be totally level, but Google at least gets us pretty close to it.

I recently had a website that needed the ability to rate multiple items on a page.  I had previously used the ASP.NET AJAX control toolkit available at http://www.asp.net and it included a rating control that worked perfectly for the project I was building.  Or did it?

It didn’t take long to set up the control and put together the Business logic and Data layer for the project.  The requirements were fairly simple.  Display items on the page and allow users to rate the items from 1 to 5 and only once within a specified time period.  The business layer had a configuration for the time span of voting and whenever a vote was cast, it would simply return a Boolean on whether the vote was saved or not.

During final testing of the rating section, I noticed a single instance of lag when rating one of the items.  Since the site was running locally, it caught my attention.  I opened Firebug and inspected the page.  Keep in mind this page was still clean – the page and master pages were blank with the exception of simple navigation links and the datalist of 4 or 5 items to rate.  Firebug reported the postback response at almost 12kb.  Since the datalist was within the update panel, that was not surprising.  Each item had some detail information and inline styles for testing.   However, even after final CSS streamlining, it was likely to have a decent amount of information returned with each vote, especially if we paged the listing at 12 or more items.  For a small website without a lot of traffic, this may be acceptable.  For most people using the internet at DSL and faster speeds, the vote would take less than a second.  However, if the site became busy, that traffic could add up quickly!

As any good developer should, I set off on a Google search to find information on streamlining the update panel and only returning the information concerning each vote.  It did not take long to find other complaints about the hefty update panels or the amount of work required to get granular control using ASP.NET AJAX panels and controls.  In fact, I kept coming back to the fact that it would be simpler to use “old school” AJAX approach and create my own JavaScript XML connection and parse the results.  I had used this approach in many instances prior to the release of Studio 2005 and AJAX support without issue.

I did one last Google search for a JavaScript rating sample to use as a framework since I decided to drop the AJAX toolkit control.  I immediately came across the jQuery Star Rating plugin.  It looked very promising AND it gave me a chance to use jQuery within an ASP.NET web site.  I had dabbled with jQuery, but had wanted to get more proficient before adding it to a current project.  Since there’s no time like the present,  I quickly downloaded the plugin, added a literal control in the datalist and kicked out 5 radio button items with a specific class.  In a short time, I had the plugin working and looking great!  At that point, jQuery offered a perfect solution for the AJAX.  A simple jQuery post to an ASP.NET page that used the same code I had already written was all that I needed.  I was able to return a message to the user for each vote and Firebug showed it at 20 BYTES!  A few style sheet additions later, I had a very nice rating system ready for action.

  

My consumption of public news would never be considered higher than average.  However, I believe something interesting happened in 2008 that I never caught a glimpse of until now (of course it probably just got lost in all the election hype).  Google indexed its TRILLIONTH web page.  Here's a New York Times article that was recently sent to me.

Most of us have trouble at grasping that number.  It's OK, we're all human.  Here are some pictures that put it in perspective.  Warning: these images may also shed some unwanted light onto just how much our country is spending on bailouts!

That's a dude standing next to a stack of $100 bills totaling one million dollars, $1,000,000 (isn't that guy on American Idol this year?)

  That's the same stylish dude standing next to $100 bills on a standard pallet totaling one hundred million dollars, $100,000,000

That's our boy (bottom left corner) standing next to $100 bills totaling one trillion dollars, 1,000,000,000,000

Those pictures make an impact.  Combine that with the Times article research about search engines still not even scratching the surface on the true amount of data that's on the Web.  The only logical conclusion is "dag gum there be A LOT of websites out dare"!  And we would agree.  (Hopefully you also imagined that last statement being said by some long lost Vulcan hillbilly cousin of Spock's like I did when writing it)

Everyday the importance of having a website becomes more of a given while the importance of getting your website found sharply rises.  It's an awfully deep well.  How is your message going to get seen or heard amongst all the clutter and noise?

1. Professional image.  Just because it can be easy to initially get online doesn't mean throw your branding in the trash.  If your website looks homemade or half-hearted then that's how YOU are coming off to your visitors.  Well done website design and development is the first step in setting you apart.  (Hasn't this always been true with the TV, paper and other types of advertising you see?)
2. Search engine optimization (SEO).  That's the fancy term for getting your site to rank high in the results for the words people type into search engines.  There are basic fundamentals you should do for this.  A lot of these are FREE (i.e. they take time but you don't have to drop any quarters in the Google machine).  I've got a pizza in the oven so I won't go into specifics right now.  But, at least do the basics.
3. Search engine marketing (SEM).  People who would be interested in your website are online, even if they're not searching for or coming to your website.  Search engine marketing is about going out, finding those people and getting them to the site.  It's not too unlike online cold calling.  So whether it's viral video, social networking, pay per click, etc. you're going out to get the traffic.

These aren't new or life altering revelations.  However I do speak to a lot of business owners who need help with even these very basic fundamentals.  So they're at least worthy of a blog post.

If you need any assistance with these please let us know.  Now I'm off for a slice of pepperoni.

In school our teachers taught us not to plagiarize or to at least footnote your source for giving credit where credit is due.  But let's be honest, we all took that Encyclopedia Britannica paragraph, rearranged a sentence or two and then pawned it off as our own.  Now the web has made content more readily available than ever.  Fortunately we're no longer receiving grades because I fear many would have to repeat the course. 

Copying someone else's written content and using it as your own is still wrong, whether it's online or offline.  If you or your business have proprietary website content and have ever wondered how to protect it, then let me share with you three kind of cool ways to catch someone stealing it.  And to make my teachers proud please let me first give credit to my source, Dennis Gaskill writing for Website Magazine, February 2009 edition, page 35.

Brillant website content thief snare #1: Identify a unique sentence, phrase or word string from your website then Google the content with quotations around the phrase.  Only pages with the exact wording will be returned and you can study the results from there.

Brillant website content thief snare #2: Hide a link in the middle of some content.  Be sure to check with your website developer to be sure this is done in a manner considered "legal" by the search engines and does not appear as a broken link.  You can periodically use Google to check what web pages are linking to your hidden page.  (Insert sound of jail door slamming shut here)

Brillant website content thief snare #3: In the middle of some content, use a transparent image (like a GIF) to separate two words instead of a space.  If someone has copied your text, that file will be called from your server when the thief's page is displayed.  (Insert dramatic dum-dum-dum-dum).  From this point just check the log files and you can see exactly where that file has been used.