PharmiMike

Google are stepping up their “social media” integration with gMail by a new featured called Buzz. This allows interaction with your contacts and social media websites though the gMail account. In some respects it seems to be competing with Wave, but I guess its just another string to their social-bow.

This may seem obvious, and also more of an SEO point, but as I’ve just spent some time doing it myself, I thought I’d remind you!.

Google et al, rely heavily on sitemap.xml to know what’s on your site. Sure they can crawl and do crawl it, but why make their lives hard. By keeping a valid sitemap.xml file in the root of your site, you provide a link to all the pages on your site that the search engines should know about.  A few points:

• you should update your sitemaps every time you change content. (ie add a new job) so it should be done dynamically without you  having to get involved
• you can have multiple sitemaps. Useful if like on www.PharmiWeb.com, you have thousands of pages.
• you can add your sitemap(s) url to your robots.txt file (another essential) to help the engines keep track
• submit your sitemaps to google webmaster tools and bing
• Yahoo treat things differently, I’ll do that separately!

woo I received a Google wave invitation this morning – looks nice !- all I need is someone to talk to. Any takers? I can invite 8 people (need Google accounts)

Now here’s an interesting thing… I was recently looking at Google’s Insight tool. If you dont know, its a tool that allows you to look at search trends over time, and against keywords from 2004 onwards. So, I dropped in “Pharmaceutical Jobs”… expecting to see a steady rise in the numbers of people entering that keyphrase into Google. But, guess what, its actually fallen, and fallen quite dramatically, to 45%  of what it was at the start of 2004.

Google Insights for "Pharmaceutical Jobs"

So then I typed in “Pharma Jobs” and its the opposite story although not quite as dramatic.  So why is that?

My guess would be that:

1. people are increasingly familiar with pharma as the acceptable abbreviation of pharmaceutical
2. more people realise that searching for something as broad as pharmaceutical jobs, doesn’t really narrow their search. Indeed, the number of people who land on PharmiWeb.com as a result of that search is actually pretty small, even though we rank #3 on Google.

Interestingly you can also see that annual variations in search that mirror pretty much exactly, the traffic on PharmiWeb.com. That is, busy in January and around August, dead over Christmas, so I suspect this is pretty universal.

So have a play on the insight tool and you will see that more specific searches are rising, and also that geographically some areas like India are increasing significantly. Use that information when planning your SEO and your adword campaigns too.

This is pretty important! but very simple. Its also only a very small step in a long journey! 

Simply go here  and enter the URL of your site.

Submit your site to google

But before you do that there are a number of checks you should do :

• Do you have a basic sitemap (a simple navigation method) ?
• Is your website search engine friendly?
• Do you have a Robots.txt file?
• Do you have a sitemap.xml file?