Recently, Google released a starter guide explaining some of the basics principles of SEO. I believe this is a very positive thing for SEO’s since it confirms what we have been preaching (and practicing) for years. Things like title tags, meta descriptions, useful 404 pages, search engine friendly URL’s are the cornerstone of any well ranked site and should always be implemented before getting to the stuff that REALLY helps you rank above your competitors….that’s why I like that they appropriately named this a “starter guide”. It’s similar to a starter guide to renovating a house, you can probably cover a few of the basics yourself but if you want to do anything major and you want it done right, you’re better off calling in the pros.

In their ongoing quest to dominate the universe, Google has announced that they are coming out with their own web browser called Chrome. Interesting news considering they were so “in bed” with Firefox before. It was a win win relationship for Google and Firefox but now it doesn’t look like that relationship will continue much longer. It sort of makes sense that Google would come out with their own browser. I guarantee that over the past 5 years or so, as FireFox has steadily grown in popularity, they have also grown a backbone and don’t bend to Google’s will as easily as they used to. I was actually kind of surprised that Google didn’t just buy Firefox a long time ago considering they have bought their way into so many other markets. If Google dominates the browser market they can control which search engine a lot of people use since many people use the default search engine that comes installed in their browser.

I just downloaded Chrome and started testing it out. I have to say it is definitely a lot faster. I tested it out on gmail which always runs really slow for me in Firefox and Chrome runs like 5 times faster. Pretty cool… I’m sure they still have a few bugs to figure out but it looks like this might mean trouble for Internet Explorer which still dominates around 80% of the browser market. I also like that when i open a new tab or a new window they show my most visited sites for easier access:

I’m still going to continue to use Firefox because of all of the plugins that I have installed but as soon as we start seeing some plugins for Chrome I might take the leap!