Google released its “Streetview” feature on Google Maps today. It is an amazing (free) service that will revolutionise my house hunting efforts. If you are unfamiliar with Google Streetview, it is a add-on feature (to the currently awesome Google Maps product) that allows you to jump down to street level and view photos of almost anywhere you can think of.

Google Streetview Australian Street/Road Coverage

Google Maps is ultra fast vector mapping software that allows you to search the country for streets, roads, parks etc. They also supply a “Satellite View” that allows you to see roof tops and parkland, roadways to sports stadiums.

Earlier in the year (I think this year) Google added street numbers to all the blocks, this added a great amount of win to their already superior service. Every night as we search for real estate, this amazing tool [Google Maps] allows us to find a property, even when the agent doesn’t list the address of said property. We simply look for a unique feature of the house, roof shape, gardens, background landmark or something as simple as the number on the letter box and then we use Google Maps (with Satellite View) to  find it.

Once we locate the block and the address, we used to take a closer look at it from the sky using whereis.com, a Sensis product. The Whereis product used to have far greater zoom ability so we would jump over there. However, not to be outdone, Google (within the last month) upped their resolution and zoom function to an amazingly superior level. You can literally see dogs in backyards, flowers in bloom and even make out the type of material a roof is made of. So forget the Sensis product, it is now (again) too slow, full of ads, and generally an inferior peice of software.

However, today marks another win of epic proportions as Google added the Streetview feature for Australia. We are the third country to receive this awesome technology, after the USA and France!

The photos are generally about 8 months old (I’ve read), and their elite software automatically blurs out faces and number plates. If they happened to miss something, you can report it using a simple form.

Anyway, the product is fantastic. There only seems to be one problem, they forgot the street I live on. I checked our street sign tonight and noticed someone had put a “nofollow” tag on it, I guess that’s why the Google Streetview car skipped us

Something wrong with my META data perhaps?

I registered my domain name, paulcherry.com.au on Saturday 15th December. On Wednesday night (19th) I checked Google.com.au for the term “paul cherry”. There it was, my new website ranked number one on Google Australia, for both “The Web” and the “Pages from Australia” result sets.

I know this will fluctuate and go up and down with time. However I will tell you how I “got to number one” in such a short time. This list is in no order of importance, it’s just what I have done so far to get to this point.

1. It’s a weak topic, or “niche”. How many people do you know that are optimising for the term “paul cherry”? If I bought “hotels.com.au” and tried to do the same thing in 5 days, I doubt I would have the same luck.
2. Dedicated IP address. This domain is hosted (in the USA mind you) on a dedicated IP address. This means it shares the IP with no other websites.
3. Outbound links. I am unashamedly linking out directly (not via affiliate links) to other websites. I am not hoarding PageRank or inbound links. I am sharing the love of the internet and linking out to other good websites.
4. Inbound links. I have acquired a few good inbound links from my friends who have other blogs in good standing, some with decent PageRank.
5. Content is king. I started posting ASAP and am going to try to post some decent content every day.

The future. I am going to try and target another keyword and see if I can get ranked for that. So it will be twist on rule #1 above, however #2 will obviously stay the same. #3 I will continue to do, not just to sites about my new target keyword, but also any other decent site I refer to. #4 is key, I need to get some more inbound links with my next target keyword, and #5 is also a given. I need to post and create content around my new target key phrase.