The top prize is a £250 travel voucher, which can be won simply by playing a game on the faceofglobalsearch website. This game is quite simple but fun and asks you 5 questions about your travel habits. It’s not the easiest game (took me a few attempts before success) but it’s quite fun and worth the chance of winning £250.

If you are a Search Engine Marketing Individual interested in Multilingual SEO, then you might want to get in touch with Oban Multilingual, who will be able to provide you with additional information as to how to increase the visibility of your website for international audiences. Simply go to www.obanmultilingual.com to read more on the subject.

And don’t forget to take part in the competition… after all I was involved in the design of the site

2- The servers used at Google are built by Google engineers and make use of their own Operating System.

3- For each page indexed on the Internet, a copy of that page is stored in 3 different locations worldwide.

4- The Google Chair, Eric Schmidtz, wasn’t initially keen on working for Google as he didn’t really see the potential in it.

5- There were over 20 million searches a day and Google was still not making any revenue.

6- When the group went public at NYSE in 2004, there was a long hesitation over how much should the shares be sold at. They finally agreed on a price of $85 (they are now worth almost $600) .

7- Larry Page and Sergey Brin are big fans of the Burning Man Festival in the Desert of Arizona, that they attend each year at the end of the summer.

8- Google has been facing lawsuits in many different countries due to privacy and IP infringement, including Belgium (Google News Snippets), India and Israël (Google Maps).

9- Google has controversially recruited former employees of Microsoft, including the Kai-Fu Lee, managing director of Google China, who has faced lawsuits by Microsoft for violating terms of his employment contract.

10- Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell the Google algorithm to Yahoo in 1997, proposal Yahoo refused, making it the biggest mistake in its history. Today Google is showing interest in co-operating with Yahoo in an attempt to merge the companies in the future.

If you have any more you can think of, please do comment on this post:)

What I did discover is how Google is secretive about everything it does! I already knew they didn’t reveal details on search and indexing algorithms, but after reading this book, it sounds like working for Google is almost like converting to a new religion. Each and every idea that a Google employee comes up with stays into the Google HQ. Some ideas are even reviewed directly by Larry and Sergey! This chain of commandment is surprising for a company of that size.

This brings me to talk about the type of company Google is proning to have become. Amongst free lunch, travel, and TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday!) Google allows their employees to dedicate one whole day per week to personal projects (or 20% of their working time). This allows employees to allocate a considerable amount of work to potentially successful projects. It works both ways: employees are happy to work on something new and exciting, while Google profits from such innovations in terms of building innovative products. It’s a give / take relationship!

It seems like where Google really gets is right is by treating its employees like gold. OK, it might not be the easiest process (at least today) to get a job at Google – but when you get there, they make sure you don’t want to leave! The whole Google environment is built around innovating while having fun. This includes the design of the GooglePlex, as seen here. I believe this is a very strong incentive for young and bright professionals to apply and remain at Google: a forward-thinking and innovative company which treats its employees like gold. So what’s the hidden factor?

The book comes accross as a “praise” to Google. It uses a considerable amount of pages to explain the ethical and fair principles which are behind the whole advertising strategy. Any of the legal issues are dealt with very much care in the book, mentionning very or little downsides to Google’s privacy policies. It attempts to emphasize on the fact that Sergey and Larry are not driven by money, but rather their interests lie within the growing of the improvement and expansion of the company’s range of services.

The Google Story is a very good introduction for non-IT individuals, as it provides with a very good base of knowledge of the web and online advertising. It gives an introduction to the principles of search indexing, quality score, PageRank and PPC. This allows for a strong and relevant understanding of the underlying principles of online marketing.

For IT professionals like myself, the Google Story can come accross as very biased. It praises the fairness of Google methods and the range of free services it provides. I was expecting more information about the future plans for Google such as how it expects to tackle the privacy lawsuits it is facing or the inevitable pursuits for abuse of monopolistic position it will face in the near future. It is difficult to imagine the World without Google these days. It is doing a great job in terms of generating online revenue for many companies. I guess I just get a bit worried about all the information it is gathering about its millions of users. Who knows what could happen if it falls in the wrong hands…

review by Flo Devellennes

Jony Kelt, managing director of DoubleClick (recently acquired by Google), which is one of the biggest digital marketing companies out there, says that “Natural Search has been demystified a lot. Paid Search has been taken up much more quickly becuase it’s easier to understand, but natural search is a growing story”. The great difference between paid search and natural search seems to be the immediate Return on Investment (ROI). While paid search allows customers to draw more traffic to their website immediately, it is often considered as a better way to increase profits. SEO is much less profitable in the short term as it takes time to provide effective results (a few weeks or even a couple of months). This is the reason why people concentrate on paid search rather than organic search, because wit paid seach, ou can sit down and say ‘Here is a budget, let’s go out and spend it’.

However, there are impressive numbers to support the case for organic search and SEO. According to JupiterResearch, 87% of clicks are derived from organic search. This suggests that the majority of traffic on the Internet is still from natural search. No wonder effective SEO tactics can highly benefit traffic to a website. Fresh an new SEO strategies include updating and adding new content to your website regularly, as Anthony House from Google explains: “We always say, build things for the people you want visiting your site, and that is what we try to reflect with our ranking. It is not about trying to trick your way into the highest results”. Google has also recently been endorsing the use for sitemaps and websites, as the most useful way to get your new content crawled and indexed by search spiders. Additionally, Google provides a service whereby you can submit your sitemap to its system, which will accelerate the indexing procedure for the new content on your website.

One of the most crucial principles for efficient SEO strategies, as Neil Jackson from Tamar reveals, is “to ensure your website is set up correctly, that the structure and designs are good, so that the site can be crawled and indexed by the search engines”. The web designer should ideally have some good knowledge of search, which is rarely the case. Barry Mills from Netstep argues that “it is unbelievable how many people build a website and then go to and SEO specialist”. It’s like building a roof and putting in the walls later!

This post, summarised from an article from Business Link in this month’s issue, provides with a very positive view of the services we provide here at DEXthis. To be visible to search engines, you need a website which is constructed properly and which allows you to add more content on a regular basis. That is precisely what we aim for: to provide well-structured website ready for SEO (using headings, titles, alt tags, etc) and which can easily be updated through a state-of-the-art Content Management System. Thanks to DEXthis, our clients are able to update and improve the content of their website themselves, in order to ensure their position in search engine results. This allows them to acquire a product which is usable, well designed and efficient, whilst being SEO-friendly and easily maintanable. We are unique in that way and are proud to be able to provide usable and well-designed SEO ready websites.

At the end of the day, one must admit the fact that while SEO isn’t getting any easier to implement, it is at least becoming far harder to ignore.

For more information on our SEO ready websites, please contact us or send us an enquiry form.