Nice… To many in the SEO industry, Google is the end-all and be-all for everything related to optimizing websites. Getting on the first page results for your particular keywords on a Google search is the holy grail that all SEO’s seek on a routine basis. For their own websites, and especially those of their clients.

Interesting, Google has done an exhaustive SEO audit of over 100 Google sites, and better yet, has made the report public so that SEO professionals, as well as regular website owners and webmasters, can learn from what they found and improve their own optimization.

Google admits its SEO could use a little work | Web Crawler – CNET News.

Not to be left without a URL shortener service of their own… Google has launched http://goo.gl/.  As with Facebook’s http://fb.me service, it’s not really available the public yet, for manual or automated creation of shortened URLs, but it is being used by the Google Toolbar and Google’s Feedburner service.

Goo.gl: Google Launches a URL Shortener, Too

Google’s getting into Music. Interesting, I imagine most of what you can find – information about artists, albums, songs, lyrics – is already available in some or another from regular Google Web Searches, but providing a portal that’s essentially a filter on the web such as this could be very useful.

It’s also interesting that it’s just launched, and yet it doesn’t say it’s a “beta” service, in typical Google fashion.

Discover Music

“We don’t use the keywords meta tag in our search rank.” Boom! There you have it.

Good overview of Google Caffeine, basically the next generation Google – or at least the first step in an iterative process toward it.

Caffeine will impact Google in terms of its index size, indexing speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

You can access Google Caffeine for testing here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Bruceclay.com.au – Google Caffeine – SEO Blog

At least there is an opt-out option.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

Very cool tool here that let’s you quickly find your site in a search engine results page. Specify the domains to highlight (and the highlight colors for each) and you’re good to go.  At right it shows a site highlighted in Red.

This does require Firefox, and the free Greasemonkey script manager. Very useful tool for SEO professionals and website owners alike.

How to Highlight Your Site Listing in Google SERPs