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Google Maps The Indoors

Drew Bowling — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:26:55 +0000

Remember paper maps? The kind that required olympic dexterity to hold and read competently and that never folded up as neatly as it was when it was brand new? Better yet, do you remember the last time you even used a paper map?

Good luck plumbing your memory to recall that moment, and thank Google while you’re at it. Ever since smartphones became the ubiquitous device velcroed to the hands of millions of people, Google threw the public a bone by providing smartphone users a mobile app with easy access to maps for virtually any place on Earth. They even gave us maps of the ocean floor. This new mastery over navigation worked like a sixth sense and made us feel like new Magellans.

Well, until you went inside.

Once you’re indoors, it’s back to the frustrating days of pouring over free-standing maps to find the “You Are Here!” icon or, at the risk of validating your cluelessness, asking someone for directions.

Finally recognizing that people are just as likely to get lost indoors as they are outdoors (if not moreso), Google’s finally lending a hand to smartphone users. A new blog post today from Google reveals that their Maps app will begin providing floor plans for some of civilization’s frequented yet most vexing indoor labyrinths (think airports or malls).

Google released two videos with the post demonstrating how the indoor maps work:

The blogpost also explains that Google will constantly update the indoor maps insofar as that information is made available as well as an invitation for businesses to submit floor plans so they can be included with this function. A detailed list of current locations currently supported by the app is also available. It’s worth mentioning that this feature is only available on Android devices (as of today, at least).

So far, the response from the Twitterscape appears to be positive:

@stevebuttry
Steve ButtryWill definitely use this in airports. RT @dannysullivan: Google Maps. Now for indoors: http://t.co/EeM20MLE 2 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

@LBiLondon
LBi LondonDefinitely going to be handy! Google Maps goes indoors in US and Japan. http://t.co/It5YSVXY 2 hours ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

@stephanieschopp
stephanie schoppGoogle Maps: one step closer to helping me find my keys http://t.co/TR0n2wXD 2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Now finding those Swedish meatballs has never been easier.

MapQuest Lets You Send Locations To Your Ford, Lincoln, or Mercury

Chris Crum — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:13:22 +0000

AOL’s MapQuest announced a partnership with Ford Motor Company today, in which MapQuest users will be able to search for destinations from the MapQuest site, and send them directly to their Ford, Lincoln, or Mercury vehicles (so long as they are equipped with the SYNC Traffic, Directions and Information service).

"Imagine I’m planning a trip to New York City and want to visit the Empire State Building," says MapQuest’s Ted Babitz. "Instead of printing the directions, I just click "Send to SYNC" to have the information sent to my SYNC system. Once in my vehicle, I just press the voice button, say ‘Services’, and the vehicle navigation system will calculate a route and then begin guidance to the MapQuest point of interest."

"Now you can plan and research where you want to go online and send it directly to your car," adds Babitz. "Think of how many drivers will navigate with their eyes on the road, instead of looking down at a printed map."

MapQuest has been working hard to attract new interest in its service. It recently rolled out a whole new design (which it has been improving upon since), and had expanded its live traffic coverage.

This partnership with Ford should go a long way in keeping users interested too.

TomTom Taps Localeze for Local Business Listings

Chris Crum — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:43:23 +0000

Localeze and TomTom have announced a partnership in which TomTom will have access to Localeze’s 14 million U.S. local search business listings for categorized points of interest. TomTom will make this content available for location content and navigation apps developers and device manufacturers.

"The number of GPS-enabled LBS subscribers is expected to take a big leap in coming years with market revenue reaching around US$ 9.8 Billion in 2013," a representative for Localeze tells WebProNews.

"We are pleased to work with an industry leader like TomTom and its industry customers, to deliver our descriptive local search business listings," says Jeff Beard, president, Localeze. "Relevant points of interest and information including a business’ name, address, and phone number drive a more dynamic and interactive experience for consumers when they are on-the-go."

"Localeze has a wide network of local search platform partners and far-reaching, pervasive local search business listings,” adds TomTom VP of partner development Dan Adams. "By working with Localeze, we can strengthen our product offerings with relevant content for our vast range of industry partners."

Among Localeze’s 14 million local search business listings are about 600,000 verified ones. This deal should force that number up.

Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results

Chris Crum — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:50:23 +0000

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results? Comment here.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its "semantic" period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Update: In the comments, one reader says:

My site breadcrumb is seperated by |. Somehow, Google seems to put the > character in of their own accord. I’ve seen many results with breadcrumbs in the SERPS, and I havn’t seen any with a seperating character other than >. I do think Google puts in the > character regardless of your site’s seperating delimiter.

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

Search as Navigation On the Rise

Chris Crum — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:59:37 +0000

Compete has shared some interesting data indicating that web users are increasingly using search engines to simply navigate to the sites they want to visit. For example, they are typing "facebook" in Google rather than just going to facebook.com from their address bar.

Following is a look at the fastest growing search terms according to Compete, for the top five search engines. You’ll notice that this list is largely dominated by brand names.

Some key findings shard by Compete include:

- Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and YouTube have seen explosive traffic growth in the past year and to follow suit their query volumes have grown substantially

- While portal properties Yahoo! (141MM Uvs) and AOL (55MM Uvs) haven’t significantly grown in traffic, they have seen 50%+ increase in brand queries since last year

- No sharp traffic trends in webmail properties Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, but brand terms for both of these properties have risen sharply

Now look at this other chart that shows the top five search terms to some of these brand sites.

It’s pretty telling, is it not? I would guess that a lot of this stems from users having search on either their home page or right on their browser. It’s easier to type "facebook" than to type "facebook.com" (granted, not by much, but humans are a lazy species). For that matter (at least in Firefox) if you type "facebook" into the address bar, it brings you up a list of search results anyway, then you are just a click away from facebook.com.

You better make sure you rank number one for your brand, or you just might be losing traffic to the site that is.

Graphics Acting As Barriers For Site Navigation

Manoj Jasra — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:21:52 +0000

Enquiro Research has just released another eye tracking white paper: Barriers on a Website, which explains how users interact with graphics and rich media in the navigation of a website. This whitepaper reveals:

How graphics can act as barriers to website user navigation.
How graphics can coax users towards essential website information.
If multimedia on a website creates a “wow” factor or a trap.

Download Now!

Barrier scanning is a term given to the type of scan behavior that deviates from the ideal user flow due to those on site design elements that can impede, redirect, or coach a certain type of user engagement. This is important, because this is this type of behavior that is working in combination with the value of your content, benefit messaging, and relevance to cause your websites to have high abandonment rates, low conversion rates, and lower ROI.

Understanding barrier scanning can greatly improve your website’s ability to resonate with your market by helping to make navigation and conversion paths more in-line with an intuitive user response, by making your page more dynamic, and by giving your content a better chance to sell to your unique visitor.

Source: http://www.enquiroresearch.com/barriers-on-a-website.aspx

Comments

An Introduction To SEO

Daryl Quenet — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:52:45 +0000

Welcome to Daryl Quenet’s introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimizing design, and how to maximize your websites search engine positioning for the major search engines.

When it comes to running an effective website that ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs), there are three major factors that can influence the number of search engine referrals (incoming searches) you get. This applies to all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live).

Content Is King

The most important thing is the content on your page regardless of how much time you put into Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) for your website without the content people are searching for you will find very little return on your efforts.

Involved with the preparation of your content is analyzing the keyword(s) for your given industry. Just putting Keywords in the keywords meta tag will get you no where without those Keywords existing in your content. This is known as Keyword Density, basically the more often you’re keywords the more relevant your content is for the searcher in the eyes of a search engine. Keep in mind an ideal density is around 3.5% per word in you phrase.

When writing your Search Engine Optimized content don’t forget about the end user. If you can’t get your keyword densities bang on, then don’t worry about it. I prefer to have a lower density but higher quality content for the end user, than having spammy content and a lower conversion rate. The end goal is still to convert your visitors to your products, services, or whatever your goal may be. Users, unlike search engines, are not interested in Keyword Density so beware of keyword spam.

And a final note on Content for this introduction is that it is advisable to constantly update your content. The longer your content goes without updates, the staler the content gets, and the lower your search engine positioning will drop. However with enough Link Building this can be negated.

Link Building Your Way Too Success

Link building is easily the second most important factor in SEO, and in some cases the most. Building links into your website is the only way as a webmaster that you can affect the authority of your website, and the value your existing content may have in the eyes of the search engines.

To conceptualize link building think of your website as if it was a person. The more popular a person is the more authoritative what they have to say is to their target audience. The big difference being that our target audience is Google, and the other major search engines, and having quality links on other sites equates to your websites "popularity".

Now keep in mind when you start your link building that nearly no two links are exactly the same. When Google calculates the value of a link it looks at several important things to figure out just how much strength to give you. Here are just a few:

How much strength did the page with the link have

Number of external links on a page

Anchor text used for the link

Is a rel=nofollow tag used

How long has that link been there

Now keep in mind all of these factors above are irrelevant if Google hasn’t cached the page with the link, if Google hasn’t found it then it is worth nothing. The stronger the strength of the page your link is on the more strength you will get in return. The more outgoing links there are on a page the more that strength will be divided between all the linked sites.

A link with a rel="nofollow" attribute is virtually useless to your website other then increasing your overall link count to give your competitors a scare. You will mainly find NoFollow attributes for Blog Comments, Website Advertisers / Sponsors, Paid Links, or links to competitors (I use them on my resume for past work experience).

When a link is built very few search engines will give you the full strength of that link right away. This is done to maintain the quality of the SERPs if everyone could just go out build 1000s of links then rank there would be no quality to the search engines. Instead they slowly give you more strength as these links age up until around the 6 month period.

Lastly you will constantly see something called Google Pagerank. Pagerank is an arbitrary Google measurement assigned to a website / page to denote that pages strength. Now some people consider this measurement to be the end all be all, but in truth it means very little other than an indicator of you sites health. If you have a PageRank on your homepage as well as pagerank on most of your internal pages your off to a good start. Also keep in mind that pagerank only updates every 3 – 6 months, and ultimately the proof is in the search engine results not some number in the toolbar.

* It’s important to note that when I’m referring to PageRank above I’m referring to the visual PageRank displayed in the little green bar, not the actual PageRank that Google uses internally to calculate the value of a page.

Optimize Your Website Navigation Structure & Design

I purposely left site structure to last as it can be the quickest way for you to royally mess up your website rankings. The worst case with bad structure is that no part of your website will be cached and you will see no visitors. I’ve seen a lot of sites with a lot of issues causing no search engines to crawl these sites. Some of the worst yet simple structural issues that can affect your search engine crawler visibility that I’ve seen are:

Automatically redirecting all visitors that come to your site to another page.

Using HTTPS only

Pure Javascript based navigation

On other sites I have seen Google only cached the index page, which may have an assigned Pagerank without spidering the rest of the website. The things to remember when mapping out the structure of your website are:

At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs (ie index.php?PageId=1), a dynamic URL is a URL that contains HTTP GET variables. Search engines don’t tend to spider these sites well. And to users they don’t have any relevant information to their Queries. Try to use Page keys that contain your keywords, if you need to use Dynamic scripts to build your website (i.e. through a Content Management System), use Apache Mod Rewrites to build a static in appearance website (Notice how all URLs on my personal web design & development site appear to be directories). If you have to use Dynamic URLs keep your number of variables at no more than 2.

If possible try to use the Keywords you are targeting for your industry in your URL or Files / Directories. This helps increase your Keyword Density, as well as providing users clicking through on Google information relevant to their query in your file names.

Don’t constantly change your website structure. Pagerank takes time naturally to develop, and Google holds new sites back in a Sandbox. By renaming a page you can often kiss your pre-existing search engine positioning away on renamed pages until their rank is redeveloped.

When designing a new site try to avoid having filenames with extensions in the URL (ie Products.asp), this can limit your options in the future if you change programming languages (ie ASP to PHP), as well as the platform your website can be hosted on (ie Windows vs Linux Hosting).

When implementing a new structure or new site, create a Google sitemap, and register it with Google to let Google know what to index.

Whenever possible attached CSS and Javascript as external files.

Once you have decided on a website structure, or you have a pre-existing structure, the best way to score higher search engine positions is to have minimalist coding in the HTML to maximize your Content to Markup Ratio. The best way to minimize the amount of HTML code required is to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Cascading Style Sheets allow you to pull the design out of your HTML pages and place them into a separate file. Not only does this remove a lot of HTML if you were using Tables for layout, it makes maintenance a lot simpler as all your design changes are made in one place.

When I moved my website from table based layout to Cascading Style Sheets I managed to reduce my markup code by around 60%! If you have a very large site this can be even more beneficial as some search engines limit the amount of hard drive space they will allocate to caching your website, as well as raise the position of your content higher up in your document.

Conclusion

And thus concludes my introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it may sound long and long winded, but that is really just a little bit of what goes into successful positioning your website on the search engines. I’ll finish up with one last warning and that is to not buy or sell links, as you can easily be penalized completely from the SERPs for this (Google supplies a page for reporting websites for buying and selling). Good luck on your Search Engine Result Pages and Positioning!

Google Experiments: Search Views, Shortcuts…

Rene LeMerle — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:20:50 +0000

Google has released a new experiments area where users can pilot some of the enhancements that the search giant is trialing. By signing up, you can give them a test drive and provide feedback to help shape their final release.

The experiments include alternative views for search results, keyboard shortcuts and new navigation options. All the experiments represent some interesting improvements to the current Google search experience.

Descriptions of the new experiments as listed on the Google Experiments page:

Alternate views for search results:

See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Navigate search results quickly and easily, minimizing use of your mouse.

Left-hand search navigation:

Search deeper in a particular type of content- patents, products or news, for example. Google searches across all kinds of content, then ranks results by relevance.

If you want to see additional results of a particular content type, just click a link in the left-hand search navigation.

Right-hand contextual search navigation

Similar to the left-hand search navigation, right-hand contextual search navigation allows you to search deeper in a particular type of content or to search related terms – but from the right side of the page.

All the new experiments will be welcome additions to Google’s user interface and options. Unfortunately you can only sign up for one of them, so pick wisely and make sure to provide them with feedback – chances are, they’ll be released as permanent additions in the not too distant future. Sign up for Google Experiments here.

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Mobile Navigation Driven By Ads

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 22:18:32 +0000

U.S. and European mobile subscribers who use maps on their handsets will total more than 43 million in 2012, according to Berg Insight.

That is an increase from four million in 2007 and equals a 60 percent compound annual growth rate.

"Record shipments of personal navigation devices in Europe and the US have introduced the benefits of GPS for motorists," said Andr Malm, a telecoms analyst at Berg Insight.

"Now the major players in the mobile industry are in hot pursuit of delivering the same experience for pedestrians, commuters and travelers on the handset display," he said.

Revenue from mapping subscriptions and advertisements is projected to reach $625 million by 2012 from 96 million in 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 39 percent.

Mr. Malm said that ad-supported mapping services will be required to stay competitive.

"Maps are already available free of charge from a host of sources on the Internet," he said. "Soon navigation will reach that stage, too, pulling away the very foundation for premium-rate mobile propositions."

Mercedes Takes Maps From House To Car

Doug Caverly — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:54:27 +0000

No matter how comfortable your car is, odds are that your house is even more cushy. The house is also likely to have a better computer, monitor, and keyboard. So it’s an important breakthrough that will allow American Mercedes-Benz owners to send directions from their computers to their cars.

Mercedes Takes Maps From House To Car

Admittedly, a similar system is available from BMW, but it’s only available in Europe, and it only interfaces with various versions of Google Maps. The Mercedes deal involves both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps; according to a press release, owners will be able to “simply click on a newly introduced ‘Send to Car’ icon” from either site.

“The information is then sent directly to the vehicle’s GPS navigation unit,” the release continues. “When the driver gets into the vehicle, pushing the i-button of the Tele Aid system downloads the destination directly to the vehicle’s navigation system and prompts the driver as to whether to start route guidance immediately or save the information for later use.”

Not bad, eh? And although no Mercedes is inexpensive, don’t worry that availability of the “Search & Send” feature will be limited to go-fast AMGs or other exotic models – the company stated that the service will introduced on a range of cars.

Don’t worry, either, that availability of the service will be limited to this one luxury brand. By introducing Search & Send in the U.S., Mercedes will encourage (even force) BMW and Lexus to keep up.