On April 1, 2000, Google announced its brand new form of search technology, a technology they cheerfully named MentalPlex. How did MentalPlex work? Brainwaves, all the searcher had to do was think about what they wanted to search for, this eliminated the need for typing, effectively eliminating the issue of spelling errors.
In 2002, Google openly discussed the genius behind its PageRank system. The secret? Pigeons or rather PigeonRank. Google was very proud of the way they had created a more efficient and cost effective way to rank pages. They were quick to explain that no pigeons were cruelly treated.
April 2004 offered Google employees the opportunity to work at the Google Lunar/Copernicus Center...on the moon. This April Fool's Day prank made several tongue-in-cheek references to WindowXP's visual style. They named the operating system Luna/X paying homage to Linux.
Google broke into the beverage industry in 2005 with their Google Gulp. People who drank Google Gulp would be able to get the most out of their Google search engines because they would be increasing their intelligence with every swallow. Google Gulp worked through a series of algorithms that used a real time analysis of the drinkers DNA and made precise adjustments to the brains neurotransmitters. Google Gulp came in a variety of flavors including Google Grape (glutamatic acid), Sero-Tonic Water (serotonin), Sugar-Free Radical (free radicals), and Beta Carroty (beta carotene).
2006 was a time for romance. Google created Google Romance. Google's catch phrase, which appeared on the main search page was, "Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance." Google users were invited to use Soul mate Search which would send them on a Contextual Date. Google invited people to "post multiple profiles with a bulk upload."
Google has also taken advantage of April Fool's Day to announce very real changes in the company. The reason they make real offers to consumers on April Fool's Day is so that the consumers will think that it's a hoax, joke about it, and then be pleasantly surprised when they find out that its real. Google announced the launch of Gmail, e-mail that was free to the consumer and provided one entire gigabyte of storage (that amount of storage for free was unheard of at the time), on March 31, 2004 (most consumers found out about it on the morning of the first). Exactly one year later they announce that they were increasing the one gigabyte of storage to two gigabytes.
Google's map of the moon was added to Google maps on July 20, 2005. The map of the moon was semi-real, it did show NASA images of a very small section of the moon, but zooming in on the tiny section presented viewers with a photograph of Swiss cheese. There was also the location of all moon landings on the map. The map was Google's way of celebrating the thirty-sixth anniversary of the first man on the moon but many consumers assumed that it was an extension on the Google Copernicus hoax. Google claims, through something called Google Moon, that in the 2069, Google Local will support all lunar businesses and addresses.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Search Engine Optimization is the act of organizing a website so that in such a way that it increases the volume and quality of the traffic through natural/organic search results by achieving higher search engine rankings. When a website has higher search engine rankings for specific keywords, then it is seen by more people because it is shown higher on the page. In general, the higher the ranking of the site, the more visitors that site gets. If the site ranks highly for long tail keywords, then the visitors it receives are targeted visitors. Search engine optimization can target regular search or image search. In order to optimize a site for search engines, it must be understood how the search engine algorithms rank websites and what the search engines goals are when they alter their algorithms. It also must be understood how the search engines crawlers crawl a site, so that it can be optimized in a way that allows the site to get indexed and ranked quickly and easily by the web crawlers. Website's are considered to be "search engine friendly" if their designs/themes are easy to optimize and are easy for the search engine crawlers to crawl. There are two types of search engine optimization: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page involves the HTML coding of the website, the theme of the website, the keywords on the website, and the links on the website. Off-page SEO involves mainly incoming links to a website.
Why Would I Want to Search Engine Optimize my Site? The main reason for search engine optimizing your site is because you can gain tons of free, targeted traffic for years to come. Paid advertising can recieve the same amount of targeted traffic, but it costs a lot of money (which is why it is called "paid" advertising) and that traffic only lasts for the amount of time that you are paying for advertising. SEO, when done properly, can earn you thousands of free, targeted visitors constantly for years to come. You could even obtain more traffic than with paid advertising because people more and more are first examining the organic or natural search results because they know that the paid ads are separate and that those people are most likely just trying to make money, and therefore are not trustworthy. So search enging optimization can bring you stampedes of targeted, quality traffic, without you having to pay for it.
How do Search Engines Work? In order to properly search engine optimize your site, you must know how search engines operate. Each search engine has its own set of "web crawlers" or "web spiders". These spiders' job is to crawl webpages, read the webpages, collect the content and follow the internal and external links on the site. The spiders then input this data on the search engines database. This process is known as indexing. You will probably hear people talking about strategies for getting sites "indexed" quickly. If your site is not indexed, then it cannot show up in search results. The next thing that happens is people search for certain keywords by typing them into the search box of a search engine (No way! People use search engines to search for things?). The search engines job is now to locate the most relevant results for that search query from its index and display them on the search page. A search engines main goal is to display the most relevant results possible, so that people come back to that search engine. The search engines decide which results are most relevant based on the search engines algorithm. There are several factors involved in the search engines algorithms, and certain factors are more important than others. How high your webpage ranks for these factors determines how high your webpage will appear in the search engine results. Now, one of the most important things you need to know is that the search engines are constantly altering their algorithms in order to achieve more relevant search results so that the people doing the searches will be more satisfied with their results and therefore come back to that search engine the next time they want to search for something. This means if you find a loophole in the search engine algorithms, which many people often do, you should not take advantage of it. You will get high rankings for a short period of time, but then when the search engine alters its algorithm you lose your rankings and depending on what it was you did, you can even get your site de-indexed. Instead what you need to do, is understand that you are trying to provide the visitor with relevant results, and therefore optimize your site to be relevant, and that way when the search engines change their algorithms you can keep your rankings, or maybe even improve them! Most people do not do this, so when a search engine changes its algorithm many people lose their rankings and have to start all over. If you want proof, just check the forums after the search engines change their algorithms and you'll see a bunch of people complaining about lost rankings. Please do end up like those people.
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