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Google has launched a search site listing certified professionals and marketing agencies.

From the company’s description:

Google Advertising Professionals are not Google employees, but rather are online marketing professionals, agencies, and other individuals such as search engine marketers (SEMs), search engine optimizers (SEOs), and marketing consultants. They have been certified by Google to manage AdWords accounts. To become qualified, professionals must demonstrate an in-depth understanding of AdWords by passing exams, and they must meet all our qualification guidelines

You may not have a need for an Internet marketing agency now, but it’s a handy resource to bookmark.    Then again, since you’re here at Big Thinking for Small Business, save some time and bookmark our Google Advertising Professionals listing.

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Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It's certainly good usability practice.
Browser resolution may be a new SEO metric. It’s certainly good usability practice.

Google launched another tool hot on the heels of last week’s  release of Speed Tracer, a tool developers can use to determine what elements on a particular web page are slowing down its display in a browser.  And last month, we told you that a new SEO frontier for 2010 would be speed, as in how fast the site renders.

Now comes Google again with a tool that shows how much of a web site is visible for a particular monitor and video card. Browser Size is not a plugin or standalone problem.  Instead, a simple Google page allows anyone to type a web address and see how much of that page is visible to web users based on Google’s data about browser resolutions without scrolling.

Tools like this have existed for a long time, but not with built in Google metrics. Refinements will come.  Some sites will receive more visitors from people with smaller or larger screen resolutions.  Imagine the site designed for a certain width that receives a larger percentage of visitors with smaller resolutions?  Might Google someday begin penalizing such sites or demoting their ranking when the search engine knows the browser resolution as it displays the search engine results?

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The acceleration rate of Google announcements is amazing to watch.   As Search Engine Strategies’ Chicago conference roars into full swing this week, Google has:

* Offered an olive branch to mainstream media
* Introduced some nifty Android phone apps that has my wife broadly hinting about a new phone
* Finally introduced official extensions for Google Chrome
* Finally launched Google Chrome for Mac in development/pre-beta
* Launched all kinds of translation and other gadgets.
* Fundamentally changed the search engine results for everyone in North America using Google’s search engine.

Did you miss that last announcement?   We’ve been telling people for several years not to pay attention to rankings because they differ.  They’ve been slightly differing for a very long time.   Now comes the time when they will be different for everyone.

We could explain the ins and outs, but it’s easier to quote and show you the official Google video.  On their official blog, Google posted last week that,

Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well.

What does that mean?

Search guru Danny Sullivan calls this phase Search 4.0.   Danny says:

The short story is this. By watching what you click on in search results, Google can learn that you favor particular sites. For example, if you often search and click on links from Amazon that appear in Google’s results, over time, Google learns that you really like Amazon. In reaction, it gives Amazon a ranking boost. That means you start seeing more Amazon listings, perhaps for searches where Amazon wasn’t showing up before.

Sullivan continues:

If they’re looking for a plumber, Amazon probably isn’t close to being relevant, so the personalization boost doesn’t help. But in cases where Amazon might have been on the edge? Personalization may help tip into the first page of results. And personalization may tip a wide variety of sites into the top results, for a wide variety of queries.

We told readers a month ago to stop chasing rankings.   We even said in March that “search rankings are dead” as a metric.

Online marketing is about increasing profit.   Is generating profit easier if a page on your web site is at the top of someone’s search results?   Sure.  But ranking is also also about engagement, promotion through advertising and  dozens of other significant factors.    You still have to do the basics:  you need well-written copy on pages organized in a search-engine friendly way with the appropriate meta information, including page titles (title tags) that technically aren’t meta tags.  And you need links from other relevant, authoritative web sites and many other things.

Those are the table stakes.  That’s what lets you put your site into play as a viable commercial web site.   But stop saying you want to be #1 for widgets in your town.  Because your #1 is my #7 is your supplier’s #43.   We always tell our clients to follow the money.   A search engine ranking is not a proxy for profit.

Here’s what the Google camp says about their new search results: