Cullmann Design Blog

The Official Google Webmaster Blog has a post that explains why Google ignores the “description” META data in it’s ranking formula. Google doesn’t outline the specifics of how they do rank pages, but the Google Webmaster Tools page does outline what META data it does prefer and how to best work deploy your website for good positioning in search results.

Online identity management is hard even for people who are adept at managing their own SEO/SEM footprint. The ability for the public, friends, colleagues or potential employers to find you (“findability” to reuse the O’Reilly definition) is a mix of art, science and alchemy. Controlling what those searching for you find is the trick.

Google’s newest service, Google Profiles, gives you another way to manage your online presence. Acting as an “official” identity page, Google Profiles is part fill-in-the-blank SEO tool, part social media landing page and part self-promotional web center. Without linking out to any additional services, you can add your bio, a picture and a link to any URL. Results may vary, but if you don’t have much in the way of a web footprint, your Google Profile should be a high-result in a search for your name. For those John Smith’s in the world, I think the task may be more difficult. If you have included a photo, that too will come up in the Google search results page.

In addition to the basic bio, you can add a photo feed from your flickr account, a seemingly infinite list of URLs to sites that house your content, map information, some information about you as well as your contact information. The contact information is governed by a control interface that allows you to choose who can see your information. You can use a “group” architecture, or if you are a Google user, you may use your chat list or e-mail list from gmail or Google Calendar. For those outside of the Google Network, you can turn the contact content on or off based on your preference.

If you already have a network of sites or an online presence, Google Profiles, is an ideal place to put all of your contact information as a spring-board for those who might be looking for you. With geographic information, flickr and room for an many URLs as you care to enter, it puts your empire of content in one place. This is not a replacement for any service or a way to fall flat on your search-engine optimization efforts, but rather another branch out onto the web.

As part of the launch campaign, iPrint has been offering free business-cards with the Google logo and your profile URL printed.

LINKS:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/search-for-me-on-google.html
http://www.google.com/profiles/cullmann

Google is encouraging content creators to organize social connections between their own sites and the sites of their friends, co-workers and other associates using a Social Graph. This hierarchy is executed using the XFN standard.
This standard allows content creators to simultaneously link and
classify connections between their content and other locations on the
web.

On the surface, the organization of social networking seems
superfluous, but this can be a powerful tool that will help create an
easy way for people and brands to organize their efforts and drive
traffic in a meaningful way for end users. The employment of the Social Graph API
will allow search results to be better organized and for the
social-network marketing and corporate brand websites to exist together
and not compete for SRP positioning. This is a new initiative, but one
that is very topical with Facebook’s exponential growth and the
monumental growth of social-media marketing efforts.

You can put your own network of content on the web by using Google’s Social Graph API demo.