Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

The Google Bloggers have reported on the State of the Google Union, creating this post titled Helping computers understand language. I’m a big fan of Google, but in this case (and in a previous post titled How I Know that Search Engines Haven’t Mastered Semantics), I have to take the side of the devils advocate and disagree.

It’s not that they don’t understand semantics, I think they do a fine job of interpreting queries and suggesting alternative meanings, but they do an awful job of organizing results from synonyms and related terms in a uniform manner.  My evidence suggests that Google can understand terms that are actually synonymous, but not implied relationships that exist only in human language.

In their example, they cite that they glean the relationship between photos and pictures as applied in 2 queries, photos developed with coffee and pictures developed with coffee.  The results jive for me, but then again – If I just search developed with coffee, I get the same results once again.  One could infer from this that Google is not actually understanding anything, but that they’ve cherry-picked a site that happens to have great presence for a shorter phrase.

It’s not a stretch to say that film developed with coffee is synonymous with photos developed with coffee, but for this query the results are different.  Imagine my surprise when a thesaurus shows me that “film” is not necessarily a synonym of “photo”.

Perhaps that’s why Google didn’t give me the same result they favoured for the #1 position for three other queries.  One could also infer that the site, optimized for “photo” and “picture”, didn’t have the same optimization for “film”.  My conclusion, unscientific as it is, tells me that while Google can use a thesaurus as well as anybody, possibly better, they’re no closer to understanding natural language.

Back in March of 2008, Time published an article titled How Google Earth Ate Our Town.  Big news for our “old coal mining town” of 78.000.  We had replaced San Francisco, the 13th largest city in the US as the capital of Google Earth.

I’ll let you read the article, because I want to talk about something different.  There’s a new feature that allows you to embed Google Earth into your webpage via an iframe.  It lacks some of the major functionality of the full version but it beats Google Maps hands down for a rich user experience.

In addition, Google has their eyes on the Island streets as they troll the towns from Duncan northward for street view footage.  While heading out to visit my folks in Duncan, I found myself driving behind a Google car on Herd Road – this was about a week before I read the article in the PQB News.

As a small business, you can use these tools to give out of town clients a better picture of your business.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, it makes you wonder what an interactive 3D map is worth.

If there’s a downside to running Google Earth off of your site, it’s that visitors have to download a plugin (on demand) before it will work.  Since I have to do the same with Flash though, it’s hardly an inconvenience.

Visit earth.nanaimo.ca for the City of Nanaimo’s KMZ files.

My previous post on the new Google features was published today (June 5th) at 11:48am

The screenshot of the search result below was taken about 5 minutes ago.  I’m not certain why this post was indexed so quickly while others remain un-updated. It definitely calls for experimenting.

Search Results from June 5th, 2009 at about 12:45 pm PST

I do know that blogs tend to get indexed a bit more quickly than standard sites with a fixed navigation path to static content. My theory is that blogs are current, and so, more relevant. It seems to be working for me, which is exciting. I’ve seen nothing but steady growth since I started this blog a couple of weeks ago.

Google recently rolled out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions… read the complete article here

It’s true, folks.  I did a search using their suggested phrases.  “spice market review shrimp starter dessert” yields results, one of which had a 312 character snippet.  It should also be noted that Google pulls the snippet from the <meta name=”description”> tag.  If you don’t have one of those, it will use the first snippet of content it finds on your page.

Google also says:

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Sounds like they’re trying to push forward on semantic understanding.  And here I thought they’d given up.

Time will tell if either of these additions turn out to be particularly valuable.  It will mean a change in the way a site is optimized, as individuals try to increase relevance across a broader contextual understanding.  For relevance, I still like Wolfram’s odds of providing the best answers to my questions and queries.

I want to use an example to explain why local search is important. I created a company, Acme Widgets Inc., that has an office in Nanaimo and an office in Courtenay. They each serve the surrounding areas, like the Comox Valley, and Ladysmith right through Lantzville.

Acme wants to have a website so customers can read about them and submit orders online. Most of their new business still comes from referrals so it’s important to show up when people type in their name, address or phone number.

Right, so, there’s things Acme can do. They can use their page titles to emphasize their company name first and follow it with their regions… something like this

Acme Widgets Inc. – Widgets to Nanaimo, Ladysmith and the Comox Valley.

The formula isn’t set in stone, I would recommend that Acme experiment with different combinations to see which work best.

Once a site is optimized, there’s  a certain amount of ongoing promotion that has to take place.  Depending on your business and targets, the costs may be free or they may be in the thousands of dollars.  It may take one person a few hours a week, or it may be an outsourced job.  If you’re just concerned with minimal, basic SEO have a read through some of the things I do when I’m starting an SEO campaign.

I have a Google account and I recommend that every business owner get one master account for their business.  It gives you access to Google Docs, gMail, Google Analytics, AdWords, AdSense and anything new they crank out.  You need one for a Google Maps Listing and I recommend that every business have one of those too.  If you’re serious and want all the tools in the Google toolkit, check out the Google Dashboard on Techcrunch.

I advertise in local directories.   Be wary of any costs or listing fees.  I don’t spend a cent until Ive done the research to see if it’s a good link and if I even need to buy a link to get to the top position.

I participate on the web.  I blog,  I forum (is the verb forumming?  foraging? I was foraging in the forum?).  I facebook and twitter.  I don’t linkedin, but I should.  Extreme enthusiasts might consider adding a YouTube channel, a digg profile, an eBay store and a yahoo! store.

You may only get to a few of these things, and you may not need to spend much time on SEO.  If you want some advice on your current SEO or have questions about local search, let me know.