Today is the day that 100,000 people will be invited by Google to test their up and coming product Google Wave, Google wave is a online collaboration tool which in real time allows multiple people access to everything from chat to docs to calendars and more. I’m pretty excited about Google wave to be honest, i think it will be a great tool to use in the workplace, We already have Google docs and calendars and a whole host of other tools and resources but Google wave will be a great way to collaborate all that. You could set up things such as Support waves, it could be like a fully interactive and intelligent FAQ system for companies!

Currently if you navigate to the homepage you get the nice little message that your Google account has not been activated for Google chrome. People who do have an invite do not have the ability to invite others but they do get the chance to recommend others who then go to the top of the queue for the next round of invites.

This means that by the time most people get the chance to login and start waving it will be 2010.

Well if you are really desperate for a feel of what Google wave could be like look no further than Zoho! Zoho is a website that offers a whole range of utilities and software much like Google. It has mail, chat, docs, calendar, it has a notebook facility which is similar to Google’s which they are stopping and they also have a interesting app called ZoHo Share.

ZoHo Share is funnily enough a collaboration tool for a lot of the other ZoHo offerings.  You can share docs and chat and invite other users to contribute.

I expect Google wave to be better than the offering on ZoHo but it will give you an idea of how a wave would work. If you want to have a go with ZoHo then pop over there now, you wont need to register as you can log in with your Google username and password.

One of the features of the SEO industry I enjoy the most is that it’s different from one day to the next with lots of changes on a weekly basis. At Just Search it’s essential that we stay on top of what’s changing in SEO, online marketing and general web marketing to ensure we deliver exciting new ideas to clients. So how does a company with lots of employees stay up to date? Here’s a few tools and ideas we use.

Google Reader

I can’t praise this product enough. It’s pretty simple which is often the case with great products and ideas. All your blog and news RSS feeds go into Google Reader, each posts has a status of read / unread that way you don’t miss a post from your favourite blog.

I currently have 103 subscriptions which is around 1,693 new items a month. We also have a system so you can “share” a post, all the shared posts from multiple colleagues go into one feed know as the Best Of Feed.

Twitter

Follow each other and follow some of the industry heavy hitters. This is something we need to improve upon sharing and comparing the people we follow.

Magazines

In reception we have monthly subscriptions to many magazines .net mag, NMA etc. Having a quick flick over at break / dinner can help you come across a few good ideas or links to good sites.

Podcasts

Not much time to listen to podcasts in work time but there are a few good podcasts from Webmasters Radio FM, the pick of the bunch a new one about WordPress called Press This from Joost de Valk.

Books

Not a massive amount of books for SEO but we use plenty of books for programing, PPC to find words that sell and one of two on analytics.

Email Distribution Lists

By having group email distribution lists set up on the Outlook Exchange we can quickly share links, articles, ideas with the correct people. Found a great icon set we has a design list that will send to all the designers in the company. Change to Google Webmaster tools then e-mail the SEO list and the client support department.

Talk to each other

Pretty simple, if you have a good idea, seen something good or have an idea just have a chat to someone else

If you run a business you’ll know how important it is to be able to access critical systems 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This is why having a Blackbury or iPhone is essential for any modern day business. You can receive emails, check orders and stock all via you phone.  Can the same be achieved with SEO and if so what iPhone plugins will you need?

1. Email – In conjunction with Google Alerts
The e-mail app on th iPhone is great, it’s easy to read e-mails, sync with your e-mail account and write the odd short e-mail. Being able to have emails 24/7 means you can reply to link requests, e-mail your content supplier or developer at any time. If your using Google alearts to check inbound links and brand mentions you’ll get them all into inbox.

2. Wordpress App
If you have a blog on your site then it’s most likely going to be WordPress, being able to add new posts or pages and moderate comments on the go makes blogging slightly easier. You’ll often find yourself on the bus, train or waiting for an appointment, this ‘dead time’ can be used to add content to your site. The WordPress app for the iPhone lets you add posts and pages with pictures and moderate comments too. It also features to autosave, so if you get a call your post will be saved locally.

3. Tweetdeck
There’s a large variety of apps to update your twitter accounts but Tweetdeck is my pick due to multiple accounts support, ability to add multiple columns and sync with your PC. At the moment I’ve not been able to sycn with the phone, work and home computer but the interface is a joy to use.

4. Byline (or for free Google Reader Mobile)
Keeping up to date with industry news is a must, if your up to date with your industry you’ll be on the forefront of everything cutting edge. You can then blog about them (point 2) or tweet about them (point 3) from your phone after reading about them in Byline which manages RSS subscriptions.

If your the first to update your blog or twitter account with a view point or review of a product you’ll soon mass a good list of followers or subscribers as the news breaker always gives results in links or followers. Byline is a paid app which can sync to your account so you can read offline, Google reader isn’t an app but just a mobile version of Google reader.

5. SimpleMideX
If you have an idea while your on the loo or in the middle of the night SimpleMideX is an easy way to brainstorm and map the idea. You can save each diagram as an image and then e-mail later. It’s great for getting lots of your ideas down in a organised manner when you might not be at your computer.

Hopefully these will help you, if you have used any iPhone apps to aid your SEO efforts add them in a comment and if they are any good I’ll add them to the list.

One of the problems we see often with ecommerce sites is a less than ideal URL structure.  As ecommerce sites are mostly generated by creating pages from templates and populating these pages with information from the database, they need to have parameters to find the information they need. For example, the two parameters might be product category ID and a product ID.

You might end up with a URL such as:

http://www.example.com/template.php?cat=2&prod_id=1234

which works but it not very search engine friendly. From this came search engine friendly URLs which would take a URL like the one given above and rewrite it to something that people might find more useful.

http://www.example.com/acids/hydrochloric-acid

This is better because it adds keywords for search engines and it follows a structure which humans can guess for other products. If we wanted sulphuric acid. Then we could have a stab at what the URL might be.

However, other problems are created with search engine friendly URLs. One of the major problems is duplicate content. This can occur when two or more URLs lead to the same page of content. In ecommerce systems this is can occur when  the same product appears in different product categories or in the special offer section of the site. How should you define category URLs and product URLs so that this doesn’t become a problem?

Category pages should be defined as http://www.example.com/category

subcategory pages http://www.example.com/category/subcategory

product pages http://www.example.com/product

This is a good system because it allows you to create shorter URLs that remain descriptive and easy to guess. For search engines the URLs are shorter but descriptive. It also means that the product URL is the same regardless of  which category it came from.

If you are going to change your URL structure then you should be aware there is a good chance that in the short-term you will lose rankings while the new URLs are indexed. You will need to make sure that all the changed URLs are permanently redirected (301 redirected)  to their new locations.