SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH.
BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS  THE DIFFERENCE !
BETWEEN KEEPING THE E-DOOR'S OPEN...ONLINE MARKETING BEGINS WITH "QUALITY"

  Address: 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 ·  Phone 347-679-0103

 THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!

Top 10 Most Significant Search & Social Marketing Stories of 2011
Guillaume Bouchard, December 15, 2011
16 Comments
2011 has been the year of revolutions and webolutions. Here’s a list of the 10 most significant, earth-shattering digital trends to have rocked the online marketing world this past year.

10. Death of Digg

While the site hasn’t been completely erased from cyberspace, long gone are the days when a Digg front page could crash your servers. There have been countless theories as to why Digg failed, from the unpopular changes made to the UI, Digg’s attempt at democratizing the front page by limiting power users’ influence, to its founder, Kevin Rose resigning… The reality is these all had an effect on Digg’s demise.

While Digg will go down as a pioneer in the social news movement, Digg buried itself when it decided it would ignore what its users wanted and launched a buggy, poor performing system known as Digg 4. Traffic from Digg has fallen by 97 percent year on year and by 86 percent since Digg 4 went live.

Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Reddit hold most of the share of the social news community now. StumbleUpon has 9,642,000 Total Unique Visitors with a +424.8 percent yearly change; Reddit has 3,025,000 Total Unique Visitors and -9.3 percent yearly change, according to comScore.

Sayonara, Digg. If there is one thing you have taught us, it’s that if you don’t listen to your users, they’ll abandon you and your broken axle.

Image Source: Manka Bros

9. Google Gets Premium

Things are getting a little less free over at Google.

Effective January 1, 2012, websites that use the Google Maps API (think travel firms, hotel chains) will be charged $4 per 1,000 views. Maps will allow up to 25,000 map views per day for free before implementing the charge. While Google says the change is only expected to affect 0.35 percent of users, paid services seem to be on the rise at the search engine behemoth.

This year, Google also introduced Google Analytics Premium services and it seems that in both cases they are going after the heaviest users of their services to get something from them.

Image Source: Gb2b

8. 1st Digital Revolution (Arab Spring)

Wael Ghonim, the Google marketing executive who frontlined the Egyptian revolution, said: “If you want to liberate a country, give them the Internet.”

In a historical turn of events, public outcry surged in the Middle East this year, and three longstanding dictatorships were brought down thanks to people’s ability to communicate and share information through social media networks.

Web 2.0 played a vital role in organizing and coordinating protests in the Middle East, demonstrating the powerful role of online communication channels in spreading freedom of information, in turn changing the political landscape.

Image Source: Miller McCune

7. Facebook Timeline & Gestures



Mark Zuckerberg made his big announcement about Facebook Timeline at the f8 conference in September. The feature promises to revolutionize what users (and brands) can do with the Facebook platform. Giving users the ability to create a chronological story of their lives in one place, Timeline looks to be a great opportunity for brands to reach out to the social platform’s 800 million+ active users and tell their story in a novel and engaging way.

Facebook Gestures is another big feature announced at f8 that will encroach on the ubiquitous “Like” button. Internal research at the company showed that especially among younger Facebook users, the Like button was an implicit endorsement of content, which made many people afraid to use it.

With Gestures users can share specific feelings about the content. Facebook suspects that people will be more inclined to click a button that says they’ve “Read” an article, “Listened” to a song or “Watched” a video, rather than “Liked” it.

No news yet as to when we’ll be able to “Dislike” content.

6. Google+

In the battle for the future of the web, Google wasn’t going to sit back and let Facebook hog all the social pie. Google one-upped (quite literally) the major players in the social space by rolling out the +1 button. Placed directly next to search results links, by clicking +1, users can endorse the content and websites they find interesting, useful, fun, which then gets shared with their Google+ circles, and the rest of the web.

Forty million+ users later, the launch of Google+ has probably been the biggest news to social media marketing in 2011 and to search in many respects. A +1 has a direct influence on search results implying that social is an integral part of search.

Google Analytics has made social engagement trackable by reporting tweets, Facebook Likes and shares, and of course, +1s.

But all the hype surrounding the +1 launch, followed by a long wait for brands to be able to create pages may have hindered the network's growth. Google+ has been slowly losing users but time will tell what the future has in store for the platform.

5. Real-time Search

Google changes its search algorithm about 500 times a year, but this year’s changes were radical. Whereas traditional web search crawls indexed web pages periodically, returning results based on relevance to the search query, with real-time search, the search engine can track and deliver real-time results while users type in their search query.

Where is that real-time information coming from? News sites, blogs, social networks. What does that mean for

Top 10 Most Significant Search & Social Marketing Stories of 2011

 is becoming more social. Make sure your Twitter and Google+ pages and campaigns are optimized so they can be read by the real-time search spiders.

4. Facebook Becomes Biggest Site for Display Ads on Earth

In its quarterly report in May, comScore announced that nearly 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during Q1 of this year. Facebook accounted for 346 billion impressions, nearly one-third of all display ad impressions delivered.

Make sure Facebook paid ads are part of your advertising strategy.

3. Google Panda Update



The Panda update that was first rolled out in February was essentially implemented to improve the relevancy of search results, helping quality sites with quality content rank high on the SERP, while penalizing sites with low-quality, spammy, duplicate content. The update was said to have impacted 12 percent of search results and not all of them were bad sites.

Several good websites were negatively impacted by the Panda update, likely because they had low quality links pointing to them. What this update really did was change SEO best practices forever.

For SEOs, it’s no longer just about how many backlinks, optimized title tags, and keywords you have. Google’s quality raters look at a website and judge its worthiness around the site's trustworthiness, credibility, and quality.

Image Source: Labnol

2. The Freshness update



The Freshness update, aimed at keeping website content “fresh” and “updated” has had an impact on 35 percent of all searches. Even bigger than the Panda update, over one-third of every query is now related to fresh content.

The update has diminished the strength of aged domains and given more authority to sites that generate regular and relevant content. Social networks, news sites, video portals, press releases, brand sites, and blogs that keep news and updates brand-spanking will have greater influence on the SERP.

Time stamping your content matters more than ever with the Freshness update as it shows Google the timeliness of your posts. The usual format is Year-Month-Date. Make sure to have time stamps for each crawled URL.

Image Source: The Next Gen Writer

1. Query Encryption Update (the Not Provided update)

In the name of privacy, Google launched its query encryption update, which limited the data SEOs can track in Google Analytics. Users logged into a Google account can now perform safe searches on a secure socket layer (SSL).

While encrypted search sounds fair, this has infuriated many in the SEO community in part because the update disrupts organic keyword referral data, returning "not provided" for some organic traffic, but mostly because Google will pass referrer data to AdWords advertisers.

If webmasters make their sites more secure via SSL, they will get to see referrer query data from signed in secure search users.

Image Source: Mez Ads

Honorable Mention: Steve Jobs Leaves Us

The world lost a visionary when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011. The man behind the innovation and success of Apple's products, Jobs managed to create one of the planet’s most successful and leading-edge tech companies, transforming the way we experience music, movies, and mobile communications in the digital age.

He leaves a remarkable legacy behind him and sets the bar high for what we can achieve.

RIP, Mr. Jobs

Digital Resolutions For 2012:

Create content that is magnetic, fresh, relevant, regularly updated, and time stamped.
Clean up any unfavorable backlinks that may have diminished your site’s rankings after the Panda update.
Devote some of your ad spending on Facebook paid ads.
Reach out to target markets by boosting your presence and value on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
If you haven’t already, lose the Digg button and place your social media efforts on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Reddit.
Lastly, make creativity and innovation the core of all your marketing strategies. Like we did this holiday season to put a “fresh” twist on holiday cards! Rather than sending out generic print and e-cards, we decided to create something people can actually have fun with.

Search Engine Watch readers are the first to get exclusive access to our Xmas Rankerizer game, a fun and addictive online holiday game that of course, incorporates the essentials of search and social.

Be the first to play the game. Compatible on mobile and iPad as well. Rev up your game rankings by visiting the NVI Xmas Rankerizer to play!

Larry Page, CO-FOUNDER OF GOOGLE INC. once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. WE STAY ON TOP OF ALL SEO INDUSTRY TRENDS, PROCESSES, AND RESEARCH.





Larry Page, CO-FOUNDER OF GOOGLE INC. once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” We can’t claim that Google delivers on that vision 100 percent today, but THERE’re always working on new technologies aimed at bringing all of Google closer to that ideal.

Sometimes GOOGLE combine a few technologies to make them even more useful. Google Translate, for example, is the largest machine translation engine in the world, with more than 50 language pairs; using voice recognition, the mobile version of Google Translate can transcribe your voice, translate what you’ve said into another language, and then speak it back to you in another language. This is just one example of the things that are becoming increasingly possible. And THERE’re always looking ahead for more.

GOOGLE  looking for the next great innovation, the next way to make something you never thought could be better or easier to use… better and easier to use. GOOGLE'S  work will result in a tiny improvement you may not notice, like a new way of displaying some part of a search result. Other times, THEY tear up all THEY‘ve learned in order to start from the beginning.

GOOGLE built; Google Chrome based on three ideas: speed, simplicity and security.
The design of Chrome is sleek and minimal, letting you focus on what you’re doing online rather than taking up valuable screen real estate with unnecessary menus and icons. Meanwhile, every aspect of the browser is optimised for speed, and THERE powerful JavaScript engine, V8, which was built from the ground up, lets Chrome handle complex web applications at lightning speeds. And Chrome was designed with security in mind, isolating each page in its own “sandbox” for an additional layer of security, automatically updating when new bug fixes and security patches are available. On top of all this, THEY’ve built in robust support for HTML5 and an extensions gallery for you to personalize and enhance your browsing experience.
Chrome as a foundation THEY’re building Google Chrome OS, an operating system for a new generation of devices that will share Chrome’s focus on speed, simplicity and security.


Mobile and Android

Mobile devices are fast becoming the world‘s portal to information, and GOOGLE IS’ committed to developing IT'S products so they can be used on these small computing devices. For many, a mobile phone is the primary or even the only means of accessing the web, so designing IT'S products to be accessible on mobile devices is a key part of making information available to more people around the world. GOOGLE'S goal is to build mobile applications, such as Google Maps and Gmail, that work across multiple devices and locations.

This is all possible because the applications and the data associated with them is stored on Google’s machines, rather than on your desktop hard drive or on servers maintained by your company. THEY keep live copies of your data on multiple servers in each of multiple locations, meaning that there’s no scheduled downtime and your data is backed up and secure.

Android is a free, open source mobile platform that any developer can use and any handset manufacturer can install. By opening up mobile devices to all developers, GOOGLE believe THEY can drive greater innovation and more choice for the benefit of mobile users everywhere.

Apps

In the past, the computer applications that people used to connect, communicate and collaborate with others—like email, word processing, calendars and spreadsheets—would have to be “installed” on your computer. This software would live on your computer, jamming it up with old files and outdated versions of the same software. If you spilled coffee on your computer, your files were done for. And you’d continually have to upgrade your programs manually whenever a new version came on the market. These are the kinds of problems that cloud computing technology avoids altogether.

With cloud computing, the apps themselves live “in the cloud”: on the web, so you don’t need any special software or hardware to use them as long as you have an Internet connection. As a result, you can access your stuff from anywhere, using any device with a browser: smartphone s, net-books, laptops. You don’t need to worry about whether an app is compatible with your computer or about upgrades and downloads. Your files are safe from any hard-drive-meets-coffee-cup disaster, and you can invite anyone to share your files or keep them private. If you’re collaborating on something, each of you can work in the same document, without having to save, attach and email version after version, risking the loss of important updates.

For individuals, this can make everyday tasks easier and faster: Imagine planning a wedding, and being able to access your guest list, budget and other important information at work as well as at home, and being able to share everything with your fiancee and family to get input and share planning tasks. For businesses both large and small, cloud computing saves money by removing the need to purchase and maintain software for each client machine, while at the same time enabling employees to be more productive.

Describing the basic crawling, indexing and serving processes of a search engine:
As Larry said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.”

DID GOOGLE DELIVER OR IS THERE MORE TO SEE?

BIGWORLDONLINE.

More local deals, personalized to your interests Building an amazing mobile shopping experience with Google Commerce Search

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH.
BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS  THE DIFFERENCE !
BETWEEN KEEPING THE E-DOOR'S OPEN...ONLINE MARKETING BEGINS WITH "QUALITY"


  Address: 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 ·  Phone 347-679-0103

                                              THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!


More local deals, personalized to your interests


There’s a universe of amazing daily deals out there, but it's hard to find them all in one place—and even harder to discover the ones that really matter to you.

We’re making improvements to Google Offers that help address this challenge. First, we’re delivering more amazing deals from a bunch of new categories including outdoor adventure sports, luxury experiences, family-friendly events, classes and more. We’re also introducing a personalization quiz to help you find just the deal you want, all in one place.

Google Offers subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area will have access to these new deals, and the quiz is now available in all cities. We'll gradually roll out an expanded offers inventory to new cities in the months to come.



To make all this happen, we’ve partnered with the best deal providers in the industry including Dealfind, DoodleDeals, Gilt City, GolfNow, HomeRun, Juice in the City, kgbdeals, Mamapedia, Plum District, PopSugar Shop, ReachDeals, Active.com Schwaggle, TIPPR and zozi. Now, with one account you can easily purchase, manage and redeem all your offers in one place.


Visit Google Offers today to purchase this great deal from the leading luxury experience site Gilt City

Our new personalization quiz is a first step towards bringing you more relevant deals. You can tell us what categories you’re interested in and where you hang out so we can send you just the tailored offers that match your interests—all in one email. If you’re not the outdoorsy type or interested in cosmetic treatments, then we won’t send you deals for zipline adventures and laser hair removal. Don’t worry, if your interests change you can always update your preferences.


You can select what categories of deals you’d like to receive with the personalization quiz

You can subscribe to receive deals that match your interests and learn more about Google Offers at google.com/offers. If you’re a deal provider interested in partnering with Google Offers, please submit your application using this form.

Finally, thanks to The Dealmap team that recently joined Google. They definitely helped on this one and we’re looking forward to working with them to develop many new ideas in the months and years to come.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager, Google Offers

(Cross-posted on the Commerce Blog)
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Labels: commerce

More Google Wallet merchants are live. Now you can pay AND save in a single tap.


We’re hearing from people at check-out counters throughout the country that paying with your phone is a little like magic. Just look at the ecstatic reaction on the faces of our friends who made their first Google Wallet purchases last Thursday.



Today, our partners American Eagle Outfitters, The Container Store, Foot Locker, Guess, Jamba Juice, Macy’s, OfficeMax and Toys“R”Us are rolling out an even better Google Wallet experience. For the first time ever in the U.S., at these select stores, you can not only pay but also redeem coupons and/or earn rewards points—all with a single tap of your phone. This is what we call the Google Wallet SingleTap experience.

With Google Wallet in hand, you can walk into a Jamba Juice, American Eagle Outfitters or any other partner store. Once you’ve ordered that Razzmatazz smoothie or found the right color Slim Jean, head straight to the cashier and tap your phone to pay and save—that’s it. You don’t have to shuffle around to find the right coupon to scan or rewards card to stamp because it all happens in the blink of an eye.

The Offers tab in Google Wallet has been updated to include a new "Featured Offers" section with discounts that are exclusive to Google Wallet. Today, these include 15% off at American Eagle Outfitters, 10% off at The Container Store, 15% off at Macy’s and an all-fruit smoothie for $2 at Jamba Juice. There are many more Google Wallet exclusive discounts to come, and you can save your favorites in Google Wallet so they’ll be automatically applied to your bill when you check out.



Organizing loyalty cards in your wallet is getting easier too. Today, Foot Locker, Guess, OfficeMax and American Eagle Outfitters are providing loyalty cards for Google Wallet so you can rack up reward points automatically as you shop. More of these are on the way.

One more thing—in response to user feedback, we’ve improved transaction details for the Google Prepaid Card with real-time transaction information including merchant name, location, dollar value and time of each transaction. Here’s what it looks like:



Finally, a special thanks to Chevron, D’Agostino, Faber News Now, Gristedes Supermarkets and Pinkberry who are now also working to equip their stores to accept Google Wallet.

It’s still early days for Google Wallet, but this is an important step in expanding the ecosystem of participating merchants to make shopping faster and easier in more places. If you’re a merchant and want to work with us to make shopping easier for your customers and connect with them in new ways, please sign up on the Google Wallet site. And if you’re a shopper and want to purchase a Nexus S 4G phone from Sprint with Google Wallet, visit this page.

(Cross-posted on the Commerce blog)

Posted by Spencer Spinnell, Director, Emerging Markets
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Labels: commerce

Building an amazing mobile shopping experience with Google Commerce Search


Mobile usage in retail is on the rise—every year we see an increasing number of shopping queries originate from mobile phones. As mobile continues to proliferate, it’s also fundamentally changing the way people shop. Mobile and shopping are made for each other.

Knowing this, we’re sharing a secret with you: it’s not too late to get your e-commerce site ready for the mobile surge this holiday shopping season. In fact, our newest customer, Timberland, just went live with their mobile-optimized website powered by Google Commerce Search in a matter of days.

Chris Hardisty, director of Timberland Global E-Commerce, told us: “Our first priority in developing our mobile website was making sure customers had the best experience possible. Shoppers today expect fast and relevant results especially on mobile, where speed and interactivity matter most. Since we launched our mobile-optimized website, we have seen mobile sales grow 20 times faster than our desktop site sales.”



Today we’re growing the Google Commerce Search family by opening up our new Google Commerce Search Reseller Program, and welcoming Branding Brand and Perficient as our inaugural resellers. We wanted to make it easier for retailers to adopt Google Commerce Search to help them achieve amazing results and meet their customers’ needs. Through this new program, resellers can work with us to bring the unique capabilities of Google Commerce Search to their retail clients.

Branding Brand has worked with Timberland and—earlier this year—GNC to turn their mobile visions into reality. Before GNC optimized their mobile website, 10 to 15 percent of their e-commerce traffic came from mobile. Since launching it this summer, there are twice as many visitors using search, and mobile search conversions are up 50 percent.



If you decide that building a mobile application is the best choice for you, it’s still important to build a powerful search experience that will help shoppers find exactly what they’re looking for and engage with your brand. In August, Westfield launched a mobile shopping app powered by Google Commerce Search for its 55 malls throughout the U.S. Alan Cohen, Executive Vice President, Management and Marketing for Westfield, told us “Whether the shopper is looking for a very specific product or general holiday gift items, the ability to search retailer products effortlessly is of real benefit.”

Ready to get started with your mobile commerce site? With the big holiday shopping season coming soon, we wanted to share some tips based on our relationships with our merchant customers:
Every millisecond counts: You can’t deliver an amazing mobile shopping experience to your customers by wasting their time. Shoppers should be able to find the products without unnecessary clicks, typing or other steps.
Engage your audience: Search has become highly interactive with suggestions and auto-complete, while mobile allows consumers to touch and engage with their devices in new and fun ways. Combining the two allows you to intrigue your potential customers for instant gratification.
Get to the point: Whether someone’s looking for a high-resolution digital camera or orange khaki trousers, you want to make sure that it’s easy to find—with minimal keystrokes, of course. Space is limited on those 3- or 4-inch screens, so make the most of it by providing relevant search results.
Bridge the gap: According to our holiday retail user survey, 65 percent of high-end device users report they have used their device to find a business and then made a purchase at that business in person. In other words: mobile provides a great opportunity to drive foot traffic and bridge online and offline sales. You can delight shoppers by showing them when a product is also available in a store nearby—in-line with the search results.
We built Google Commerce Search just under two years ago to help retailers provide a great shopping experience to their customers, and we’ve had positive feedback from our retail customers on how they’ve been able to increase search revenues, site searches and online conversions while increasing customer satisfaction. Get started now with Google Commerce Search to build a great mobile experience in time for this year’s shopping season.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Group Product Manager, Google Commerce
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Labels: commerce


Launching Google Wallet on Sprint and working with Visa, American Express and Discover


In May we announced Google Wallet—an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

We’ve been testing it extensively, and today we’re releasing the first version of the app to Sprint. That means we’re beginning to roll out Google Wallet to all Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over-the-air update—just look for the “Wallet” app. Here’s a demo of Google Wallet in action:



Google Wallet enables you to pay with your Citi MasterCard credit card and the Google Prepaid Card, which can be funded with any of your existing plastic credit cards. As a thanks to early adopters, we’re adding a $10 free bonus to the Google Prepaid Card if you set it up in Google Wallet before the end of the year.

When we announced Google Wallet, we pledged a commitment to an open commerce ecosystem. We appreciate Citi and MasterCard for being our launch partners. And today, Visa, Discover and American Express have made available their NFC specifications that could enable their cards to be added to future versions of Google Wallet.

Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets. In fact, we’ve got a video of our first customer, someone who is ready to replace his famously over-stuffed wallet. We hope Google Wallet gives him “serenity now.”

This is still just the beginning, and while we’re excited about this first step, we look forward to bringing Google Wallet to more phones in the future. You can learn more about Google Wallet at google.com/wallet.

Posted by Osama Bedier, Vice President of Payments
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Labels: commerce

Shop your favorite catalogs with Google Catalogs

(Cross-posted on the Commerce and Mobile blogs)

For years, shoppers have enjoyed flipping through glossy print catalogs to be inspired, discover new trends and find great products. Today, mobile technologies can make catalog shopping more engaging, social and creative. With that in mind, we’ve created Google Catalogs—a free app for tablet devices that enables you to browse all of your favorite catalogs and interact with new layers of rich-media content.

The Google Catalogs app features digital versions of catalogs across many popular categories, including fashion and apparel, beauty, jewelry, home, kids and gifts. We’ve partnered with a variety of top brands including Anthropologie, Bare Escentuals, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, Crate and Barrel, L.L. Bean, Lands’ End, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Pottery Barn, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sephora, Sundance Catalog, Tea Collection, Urban Outfitters and Williams-Sonoma, just to name a few.

With Google Catalogs, you can:
Interact: Zoom in to see products up close, tap on tags to learn more about an item or, in some catalogs, view inspiring photo albums and videos.
Find products in nearby stores: When an item catches your eye, instantly find it in a store near you or tap “Buy on Website” to visit the merchant online.
Express your creativity: Create a collage of your favorite catalog pages and products. If you need inspiration, you can check out collages created by others.
Share with friends: Email a product or collage to all your shopping buddies.
Get instant access to new catalogs: Add catalogs to your Favorites and get notified each time a new issue arrives.
Discover new products and brands: Search for products within or across multiple catalogs to find exactly what you’re looking for.


To download the app on your iPad, visit the App Store. Visit www.google.com/catalogs/about/ to learn more, and stay tuned for Google Catalogs for Android tablets, coming soon! If you’re a merchant and would like to participate in Google Catalogs, tell us about your catalog by filling out this form on our website.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Kinnari Jhaveri, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Commerce Team
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Labels: commerce, mobile

Google Offers beta launching in New York City and the Bay Area

(Cross-posted on the Google Commerce Blog)

Following our first launch of Google Offers beta in Portland last month, we’re bringing great deals to the Big Apple and the Bay Area starting today. Subscribers who sign up at www.google.com/offers or via the new “Today’s Offer” tab in Google Shopper 2.0 for Android will start receiving emails with local offers in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area today.

We’re kicking off our bi-coastal rollout with offers from some local favorites:
New Yorkers can mix salty and sweet with Belgian fries and mango chutney at Pommes Frites, savor chocolate molten cake with a glass of Malbec at Ayza Wine and Chocolate Bar or sample a delectable red velvet mini cupcake at Tonnie’s Minis in Harlem.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, fresh donuts and apple fritters are served up 24/7 at Bob’s Donut & Pastry Shop on Polk Street. You can also get a taste of Provence at the Le Bateau Ivre Restaurant in Berkeley.
We caught up with the small business owners of New York Dog Spa & Hotel, Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland and San Francisco plus Toy Boat Dessert Cafe in San Francisco to learn more about them and why they’re running Google Offers in the coming weeks.



Also starting later today, you can buy, view and redeem a Google Offer of the day with Google Shopper 2.0 for Android. Once you’ve bought or saved an offer, it will appear in the My Offers tab in both the Shopper app and when you visit www.google.com/offers. Shopper will also connect you to all kinds of deals that are near you in the Nearby Offers tab, so wherever you are, you can still get great offers from Google even if you haven’t signed up for the daily deals in Portland, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.



This is all just the beginning. Whether it’s touring Napa wineries, grabbing a slice of deep dish pizza in San Francisco or Albany, CA or catching an improv show in New York, stay tuned for deals from the best these areas have to offer.

Next up, we’ll be heading to Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Point your browser to www.google.com/offers to sign up ahead of time so you don’t miss the sweet deals when we launch in these cities.

Posted by Eric Rosenblum, Product Management Director, Google Offers
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Labels: Android, commerce, mobile

From acquisition to in-app payments in less than one year


(Cross-posted on the Commerce Blog)

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read why one team decided to sell their company to Google, and how they went from acquisition to product launch in less than a year. - Ed.

The decision to sell your company is one of the hardest an entrepreneur can make, and as the CEO of Jambool, I thought long and hard about Google’s offer to acquire us when they came calling in August 2010. Ultimately, we decided to join Google for two reasons: one, we shared the goal of offering consumers and merchants unified online payment solutions, and two, we realized that Google was serious about helping us integrate our technology into their digital tools by providing us with infrastructure and other support. Less than a year later, we’ve already taken a major step to help Google deliver on this vision with Google In-App Payments, which we announced last month at Google I/O. In-App Payments enable web application developers to receive payments for digital and virtual goods without the user ever leaving the application.


Me on stage at Google I/O introducing Google In-App Payments

When we first joined, we expected to spend a lot of time ramping up, meeting people and learning Google’s technology. In reality, our shared vision for the product enabled us to quickly partner with teams across the company to build out our product at scale. As a startup, you spend the majority of your time building teams from scratch to focus on functions like product, sales, marketing, operations and legal. At Jambool, I’d divide my time across operations, raising funds and meeting with outside developers. But at Google, we were able to combine our efforts with teams already in place who could manage those areas while we focused on the core product.

We set an ambitious goal of launching in-app payments nine months later at Google I/O, which motivated us to work quickly. We worked with Google’s established teams—especially Chrome, Android and Google Checkout—to build a simple API and intuitive user interface. During the last few weeks before Google I/O—when we were still working around the clock just to finish the product—we were invited to announce our launch as part of the day two keynote. That gave us even more drive to finish on time. And, thanks to the Chrome team, we found partners like Angry Birds and Graphic.ly, which really demonstrated the product’s usefulness and got developers excited about our broader vision of seamless digital payments.

As a startup, we never imagined we’d stand on a stage like the one at I/O and instantly reach consumers, businesses and developers around the world. In the first 24 hours after the announcement, thousands of developers signed up to use the API. This is something we wouldn’t have been able to do so quickly on our own, and it’s a testament to the big things a startup can accomplish by joining Google. We’re already looking forward to what the next year brings as developers around the world start to build great businesses on our platform.

If you’re interested in integrating your apps into Google’s In-App Payments API, we invite you to sign up and send us feedback.

Posted by Vikas Gupta, Head of Consumer Payments
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THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: An update to Google Social Search

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: An update to Google Social Search: SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS ...

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. WE STAY ON TOP OF ALL SEO INDUSTRY TRENDS, PROCESSES, AND RESEARCH.Being on the main page of google for your best\ keyword\ can make the difference! keeping the E doors open or... Online Marketing BEGINS With," Quality"Address 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 · Get DirectionsPhone 347-679-0103

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: An update to Google Social Search

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: An update to Google Social Search: SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS ...

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. WE STAY ON TOP OF ALL SEO INDUSTRY TRENDS, PROCESSES, AND RESEARCH.Being on the main page of google for your best\ keyword\ can make the difference! keeping the E doors open or... Online Marketing BEGINS With," Quality"Address 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 · Get DirectionsPhone 347-679-0103

An update to Google Social Search

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH.
BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS  THE DIFFERENCE !
BETWEEN KEEPING THE E-DOOR'S OPEN...ONLINE MARKETING BEGINS WITH "QUALITY"


  Address: 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 ·  Phone 347-679-0103
 THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!


An update to Google Social Search

(Cross-posted on the Social Web Blog)

Today we’re doing a little bit more to bring you all the goodness of Google, plus the opinions of the people you care about. As always, we want to help you find the most relevant answers among the billions of interconnected pages on the web. But relevance isn’t just about pages—it’s also about relationships. That’s why we introduced Google Social Search in 2009, and why we’ve made a number of improvements since then. Today we’re taking another step forward—enabling you to get even more information from the people that matter to you, whether they’re publishing on YouTube, Flickr or their own blog or website.

First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). This means you’ll start seeing more from people like co-workers and friends, with annotations below the results they’ve shared or created. So if you’re thinking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and your colleague Matt has written a blog post about his own experience, then we’ll bump up that post with a note and a picture:


Social search results can rank anywhere on the page, and you’ll see who shared the result in the annotation underneath

Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. In the past, we’d show you results people created and linked through their Google profiles. Now, if someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation (which is visible only to you, and only when you’re signed in). For example, if you’re looking for a video of President Obama on “The Daily Show” and your friend Nundu tweeted the video, that result might show up higher in your results and you’ll see a note with a picture of Nundu:


Now Social Search includes links people share on Twitter and other services

Third, we’ve given you more control over how you connect accounts, and made connecting accounts more convenient. You can still connect accounts publicly on your Google profile, but now we’ve added a new option to connect accounts privately in your Google Account. (After all, you may not want everyone to know you’re @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.) In addition, if our algorithms find a public account that might be yours (for example, because the usernames are the same), we may invite you to connect your accounts right on the search results page and in your Google Account settings:


The new setting enables you to choose whether or not to show your connected accounts publicly on your Google profile

For an overview of Google Social Search and our new features, check out the explanatory video:



As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week. With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about. To learn more, check out our help center.

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Product Management Director, and Matthew Kulick, Product Manager
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Labels: search, social

Halloween google search trends

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH.
BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, IS  THE DIFFERENCE !
BETWEEN KEEPING THE E-DOOR'S OPEN...ONLINE MARKETING BEGINS WITH "QUALITY"


  Address: 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 ·  Phone 347-679-0103

 THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!

A prima ballerina vs. some very angry birds: this year’s Halloween search trends

The pumpkins are carved, the spiderwebs are hanging,
Kids and their pets are door-to-door banging,
Witches on their brooms and owls on their perches,
Let’s take a look at some Halloween searches.

Halloween searches are some of our favorite trends to look at all year. Using Insights for Search and some internal data, we took a peek at which costumes and candies are on top in the United States.

This year seems to be about the battle of the birds. Searches for [angry birds costume], based on the game phenomenon that has so many of us addicted, have been steadily rising in 2011, and we’re seeing 10 times more search volume this year than last. But as of mid-October, the Angry Birds were overtaken in search by [black swan costume]. The Darren Aronofsky ballet drama seems poised to be the most popular costume idea by All Hallows Eve, with related searches for everything from [black tutu] to [black corset]. Some are even looking to be the alter ego [white swan].



Meanwhile, search data doesn’t seem to show that anyone is too anxious to be the object of the Angry Birds’ rage—at least not independently from their sworn enemies. Although [angry birds costume] is one of the top 10 fastest-rising searches related to [pig costume] over the last 90 days, another three are focused on a much sweeter piglet, the cartoon favorite Olivia.



Birds aside, this year’s fastest rising costumes in the U.S. overall are inspired by a variety of sources from pop culture over the past year, including TV shows—[pan am], [wilfred]—movies—[smurfette], [tron], [captain america]—pop music—[nicki minaj]—and more [monster high].

In fact, we may have a battle of the pop goddesses on our hands as well as a battle of the birds. During 2009 and 2010, homegrown Lady Gagas were trick-or-treating throughout the country, but while Lady Gaga still rules the music charts, she’s a far less popular costume choice this year than in 2010:



And although overall in 2011 [lady gaga costume] leads [nicki minaj costume] in search volume, right now they’re neck and neck:



We’d be lying if we weren’t hoping that at least a few Minaj fans out there choose to pay tribute to her by dressing up as uberfans eight-year-old Sophia Grace and her cousin, the two little girls who blew away YouTube viewers with their performance of “Super Bass.”

Speaking of YouTube, Halloween doesn’t fall on a Friday this year, but that’s not stopping people from dressing up as Rebecca Black:



Even if you don’t want dress up as a YouTube star, YouTube can still help you create your Halloween costume. Head on over to the YouTube Blog for video tutorials and other inspiration.

Lest you think Halloween is just for humans, take a look at the huge amount of searches for [dog costume]. In terms of get-ups actually intended for canines, ewoks and dinosaurs are the fastest-rising related searches. But two of the top five rising searches in 2011 related to [dog costume] are a little quirkier: at least a few people out there may dress up as the eponymous character from FX’s “Wilfred” show, about a dog, and a man who sees the dog as a man dressed in a dog suit. Kinda meta.



Turning from costumes to the other traditions of this holiday, searches for [haunted house] and [pumpkin patch] are both spiking right now, but there seems to be greater interest in spooky thrills than in finding that perfect pumpkin to carve. Maybe spiderwebs and peeled-grape eyeballs are a less scary proposition than running into the [great pumpkin] (from the classic movie which, incidentally, celebrates its 45th birthday this Halloween).



Everyone has a sweet tooth this time of year, but [candy corn] is remains the undisputed king of people’s cravings. In the last 30 days, search volume is nearly twice as high for [candy corn] than for other candy choices:



Per capita, Alabama is searching the most for [candy corn] this year. Here are the states that searched the most for a few other Halloween sugar staples (and some newcomer treats):
Candy apples - Rhode Island
Gummy worms - Wisconsin
Kosher candy - New York
Sugar free candy - Kentucky
Gluten free candy - Oregon
Candy bars - Utah
Organic candy - Colorado
When trick or treating, there’s always that one house that insists on making Halloween healthy—but luckily for us, those are few and far between. Over the last 30 days, there is almost two and a half times more search volume for [candy] than for [apples]. The classic game of bobbing for apples, however, it still going strong, spiking dependably every October.

Whether you’re dressing up as an elegant avian ballerina or a brightly-colored roly-poly bird in a slingshot, we hope you have a spootakular Halloween!

Posted by Rachel Durfee, Google Blog Team

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesse...

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesse...: THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!! Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses This is the latest ...

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. WE STAY ON TOP OF ALL SEO INDUSTRY TRENDS, PROCESSES, AND RESEARCH.Being on the main page of google for your best\ keyword\ can make the difference! keeping the E doors open or... Online Marketing BEGINS With," Quality"Address 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 · Get DirectionsPhone 347-679-0103

Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses

                                THIS SHOULD BE YOUR COMPANY!!!

Adapting AdWords for time-strapped small businesses

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. In this post, you’ll read how a small team took a successful grassroots approach to helping businesses advertise online. - Ed.

In early 2010, I was talking with some friends from Google’s India office about how to help small, local businesses advertise online. We found that small business owners the world over had a key commonality: very little time. We decided to tackle this problem head on, with the hopes of making the advertising process quicker and easier for small businesses.

My colleagues in India flew out to our headquarters in California, and we teamed up with a Google Maps product manager who had some first hand experience working with small business owners. One of his friends ran a small mountain clothing store in New Hampshire called The Mountain Goat of Hanover, which had just moved to town. She was responsible for staffing, bookkeeping, inventory management and many other time-intensive tasks—all with very little help. She had the desire to try promoting her business online, but learning to manage a new form of advertising wasn’t something she had time for.

The Mountain Goat of Hanover was our first case study, but it seemed like any interaction we had with a small business led to a conversation about how it advertised. A photographer in Virginia, a San Francisco dentist and a contractor re-doing my kitchen all told the same story: Online advertising should be simpler.

What all of these business owners needed was advertising that was measurable, affordable and quick. While they could use AdWords, they needed something even faster: a tool that they could set up easily and then walk away from, trusting that their advertising would be managed efficiently.

A handful of us started building a new tool for advertisers that met these requirements and within a few weeks, we were beta testing it with the owner of The Mountain Goat, the photographer, the dentist and the contractor—inviting more small businesses as interest grew. We literally went door to door in San Francisco and Chicago, asking local businesses if our tool could help them advertise better. Soon, we had more than 50 businesses testing the new ads product and within a few months, that number was over 2,000.

Our team runs somewhat like the small businesses with which we work. We’re a small, close-knit group of friends that spend most of our time huddled in a room making decisions on the spot and moving fast to launch a product in a matter of months. By the end of 2010, we’d launched our tool, which we called Google Boost at the time, in 25 cities across five states. And just last week, we officially launched AdWords Express to all businesses in the U.S. We would never have been able to do that outside of Google, where we were able to leverage the existing AdWords system, infrastructure and dedicated teams. By making it easier for people to implement effective advertising campaigns, we’ve been able to bring tens of thousands of small businesses online—and we’ve only just begun.

Posted by Xuefu Wang, Tech Lead and Manager, AdWords Express

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: Best SEO – Google’s Human Reviewers Ranking Factor...

THE OFFICIAL GOOGLE BLOG, INSIGHT'S FROM GOOGLE-RS: Best SEO – Google’s Human Reviewers Ranking Factor...: SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. BEING ON THE MAIN PAGE OF GOOGLE FOR YOUR BEST KEYWORD, I...

SEO HELPS DESERVING BRANDS ACHIEVE EXPONENTIAL BUSINESS SUCCESS THROUGH SEARCH. WE STAY ON TOP OF ALL SEO INDUSTRY TRENDS, PROCESSES, AND RESEARCH.Being on the main page of google for your best\ keyword\ can make the difference! keeping the E doors open or... Online Marketing BEGINS With," Quality"Address 10401 Ave K, Brooklyn, NY 11236 · Get DirectionsPhone 347-679-0103

Best SEO – Google’s Human Reviewers Ranking Factors Revealed
· Show me you are alive?
Rumours have been floating around for a couple of years now that Google has employed an army of human reviewers who evaluate websites to assist their website rankings. However, I think nowadays virtually all top SEO’er doesn’t consider it as a rumour anymore because there is just an overwhelming amount of evidence. Even recently, a 125 paged document had been circulating in SEO forums that was claimed to be Google’s official guidelines for their human reviewers.
Further evidence of Google interest in the human review process is reflected in Google’s Panda update changes. This is where Google attempts to mimic human review process in their algorithm to determine a websites quality, relevance, and uniqueness.
Working through the huge amount material available on the above, I have tried to present the most salient points below in bullet point form.
‘Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty’ is no longer a myth. Websites that have content that have been scraped from other websites can be penalized. However, if the website that has duplicated content has higher authority than the original source, or if the content is presented in editorial way penalties can be avoided.
If duplicate content is applied to a certain page then the whole site can suffer!
Keyword density on the page considerations can lead to a penalty. I often criticize old timers who still mention how keyword density of around 3% is necessary. I personal focus on where the keyword is placed on the page rather than how many times the keyword occurs.
Duplicate content checks looks like they are performed in two distinct ways:
By Google’s algorithm using snippet of text to make comparisons. However, they seem to be using PR/Trust authority to determine the originator of the content
Human reviewers searching for an exact sentences occurring elsewhere on the www
Websites are evaluated in and classified in terms of :
Vital
Highly relevant
Slightly relevant
Useless
The above evaluation is performed in the context of the keyword. So “buy Sony” may have different evaluation than the results than “Sony Review”
Bad things to watch out for your website are:
Too many affiliate links and ads
Generic and low quality content
Too much emphasis on “Buy buttons” pointing to affiliate sites
Duplicate content of any kind.
Poor layout and bad website design.
Small amount of pages
Lack of relevancy with respect keyword
Keyword repeated too many times or inapproprately
Backlinks from non relevant, or low human traffic sites
Good things to include in your website are:
Price comparisons of the product/service in question
Unique valuable content that shows that you are an expert.
Good website design.
Large amount of content
Rich media content – text, pictures, video and podcast
Social media backlinks, buzz and brand reputation