Google has today launched its personalized home page, a service which enables you to get your GMail, local Google (and other) news, local movies and stock quotes. These features are already part of Google’s offerings and this latest move just brings them together onto one page for the first time.

Localisation appears to be the key point here, so it is an important aspect of any current Google search optimization to ensure that a site has optimal localisation data associated with it by Google.

Google localisation data can be entered directly by organisations in the US, where it will be confirmed by having a pin number sent by mail to the physical address given. In the UK the Yell directory is used, submission to which can be conducted free online.

Basic optimization tactics include:

• Associating your website with a highly populated area.
• Ensuring each branch of your company located in physically different areas is appriopriately listed.

Some organisations may wish to ensure that they are found on particular geographical searches, an Italian restaurant chain may wish to be present on the search engine results pages for Mulbery Street, New York, a newspaper might want to associate itself with Fleet Street or Docklands in London.

Within three months Google is saying that it will possible to integrate any news feed on the web into its personalised page - something that is already possible with Yahoo’s established and popular service MyYahoo.

Localisation is a question of scale.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 6:29 am and is filed under Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.