Google has used its official blog to reveal the introduction of a new Chrome extension, Google Related.
The tool will operate in the background while you browse, for example, a news article, working to find the most relevant and interesting material related to what you’re viewing.
Included amongst the results are the categories: video (most commonly providing results generated from YouTube); news; web and images; displayed in a thin grey bar at the bottom of the web browser. Google Related will remain minimized until the user moves the mouse over the bar, while a built-in +1 button means that users can share content with others as well.
By paying close attention to user behaviour patterns, Google is able to hyper-personalise the results provided by the tool.
An article on Search Engine Watch has suggested that it is possible for webmasters to take advantage of this new tool, by making content more SEO friendly.
It states: “You can optimize your media or page contenting by improving your rank on other Google services; the images, video and news content reflect the top results found in Google universal search and Google News.”
Google Related won’t be ignoring the results provided by competitors, which is great for those hoping for a wider variety of sources.
SEW also added that while the Related toolbar was unlikely to have a great impact on the search engine’s algorithms, it had the potential to become a metric employed in the future.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
With the Bing/Yahoo! Search Alliance well underway, the Microsoft-operated search engine has moved to remind people of some of the SEO basics everyone should be aware of when optimizing their site.
In the post, entitled ’18 things you need to know about SEO’, Bing clarifies some of the aspects users can change in order to see their site rank higher on the search engine.
Here are just a few of those things site users can employ to add to current SEO strategies:
Bing has also warned users of the things that, if employed, will see their ranking gradually dissipate; including:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Widgets are tools often overlooked for driving volumes of website traffic up.
According to Erez Barak, writing for Search Engine Watch, widgets “serve as a scalable way to build links back to your target site while offering an easy to implement distributed application that people find valuable.”
To increase usability with SEO strategies, Barak states that widgets must be developed with care.
Here are some of the guidelines provided for creating a lightweight widget to drive your sites traffic:
Once the widget has been designed and subsequently built it has to be effectively promoted – if it’s to serve a useful purpose.
Good tactics that can be employed in making users of your widget include:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
A recent study by PageLever, and cited in an article published by Search Engine Watch, has revealed that SEO strategy plays a much stronger role in generating external referrals to Facebook pages than people may currently be aware of.
Conducted by Jeff Widman, the study found that 33.98 per cent of external referrals for Facebook pages came from either Google, Yahoo! or Bing.
Specifically looking at 1,000 fan pages – each with a minimum of 10,000 fans – during a 6 month period, – the beginning of January to the end of June – Widman used Facebook’s API (application programming interface) to gather raw data.
By then using PageLever, Widman was able to differentiate between those referrals coming from search engines and those provided by other external sources.
When broken down, the results displayed that Google provided 27.57 per cent of referrals, with Yahoo! providing 4.11 per cent and Bing, 2.3 per cent.
Surprised by the Bing’s low number of referrals, Widman stated: “since Bing has a official partnership with Facebook, I would have expected the disparity between (Google and Bing) to be lower.”
Concluding on the display of results, Widman finished: “Optimizing for SEO really paid off for several of these Fan Pages.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
It’s a well-established fact that Twitter is one of the best social media marketing tools out there.
However, it’s not always that easy to measure the success of campaigns or marketing efforts on the micro-blogging site.
Having recently produced a list of strategies that can be employed to increase Twitter’s effectiveness in marketing, Heidi Cohen, writing for ClickZ, has suggested five ways in which the return on Twitter initiatives can be tracked:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Interesting questions being asked in the blogosphere. Obviously, Google + has drawn a lot of attention since its launch, but already people are discussing its demise.
Cynic that I am, it is hard not to wonder whether the mass exodus from Facebook to Google + and the breaking of the FB habit, was an intended or unintended consequence of G+. For instance, from checking FB every day, for both clients and personal reasons, I actually find that on a weekly basis, I now *only* remember that FB exists because of the need to check client sites. On a personal basis, the vast majority of posts to the FB wall are automated anyway from other social media posts such as Stumbleupon, Twitter, Delicious etc.
Do I check Facebook hourly any longer? No. Do you?
It is interesting how far behind the major brands are with actuality, in that now nearly every TV advert has a facebook.com/thisisus URL rather than a website URL. But have your audience moved away from FB? Have you invested a vast number in Facebook marketing only to find that the numbers are falling away?
Google + has only just worked out verified accounts i.e. those for people who wander the internet under pseudonyms, handles etc. Business accounts have not yet been rolled out and to be honest, you would not choose to invest marketing budget in Google + if you were a brand anyway. Not yet, anyway as there is far too much work for our Mountain friends to do yet.
Google + may leave a legacy of Hangouts – the only thing I personally feel right now stands out from G+ – but it is being surpassed by sites such as Subjot.com on a daily basis. Circles lose quite spectacularly to Subjot right now. Probably because the subject structure is given to you whereas no-one can tell you what to name any circle you choose to put friends in.
Infinite choices on the Internet are not good.
What comes next? Well, the first thing has to be that everyone is now exhausted with trying out new things, new places to check in, update a status, share, or rabbit about the inanities of their day. Enough now!
Whatever comes next that will pick up an audience has to be a game changer, not a rehash of what has gone before. In a way, that may be why Google + has failed so far. It was too “samey.” There was no mould breaking. It just became another drain on your time.
It could have been amazing, but with hindsight, maybe Google and Facebook were so busy trying to do outdo each other, they forgot the customer/ user experience. They forgot us!
If Google had only launched Hangouts, as a stand alone option, it would have taken off. Interestingly, Hangouts can now be started within Youtube and it surely will not be long before you can start, record and broadcast a Hangout with minimal fuss. THAT will be a winner.
As part of the big picture of Google +, and particularly for marketers and brnads, little else, right now from Google + seems to stand out sufficiently to detract marketing budget from any of the other equally outdated resources that the Board love.
Yet, Stumbleupon drives 50% of social media traffic according to the latest stats – how much social bookmarking are *you* doing???
Although many businesses are looking to improve their social media marketing strategies by increasing their spending, many are still making errors, according to an article published by the Sydney Morning Herald.
In particular, brands are failing to effectively analyse what people are saying about them on the Internet.
Recent results from research carried out by Alterian showed that 80 per cent of the companies they surveyed were ‘concerned their brand was at risk from not being engaged with customers online, or from failing to have a good grasp of how online conversations were impacting their brand.’
Carried out by tracking 350,000 mentions on various social media sites during a six-month period – in order to track and analyse performance – Alterian also found that a quarter of marketers were predicting their digital marketing budget would increase by around 25 per cent or more.
Despite this, it was also found that marketers weren’t capitlising on conversation; 29 per cent stopped analysis at a basic level, while 28 per cent stated that they had difficulty in linking analytics to the original campaign strategy.
Senior vice-president of Alterian’s Asia Pacific strand, Chris Tew commented on the results.
He said: “The survey shows the majority of brands lack direction on what exactly to measure and analyse, how to go about it, and how to utilise that information to continually improve on their marketing efforts.”
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Many recent studies have indicated that marketers would be open to increasing the amount spent on their various social media marketing efforts.
Twitter is one the most commonly used social media sites for marketing purposes, though there are many marketers out there not making the most of the micro-blogging site’s capabilities.
Social media expert, Heidi Cohen, writing for ClickZ, has produced a list of six marketing strategies that can be employed to boost the effectiveness of Twitter marketing campaigns.
Here are just three of those aforementioned strategies:
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
In August, Google announced a new feature which has been dubbed “mega sitelinks”. Although this seems to be a small change which wasn’t widely reported, we think it is important.
The reason, is that for every site of a well-known brand, the most important searches by volume are brand search terms. Sitelinks give an excellent opportunity to engage both customers and prospects by highlighting the best content.
If you’re not familiar with Sitelinks, they are the listing of extra links below the brand main site description when you search on a brand name. Before this change site links in the natural search results gave just a series of links. But this example showing the new sitelinks for ClickThrough Marketing, shows that they now take up much more of the page with 8 to 12 alternatives and include more detailed descriptions.
ClickThrough Marketing - Mega Sitelinks Example
We suggest you take a look at your sitelinks and those of your competitors and answer these questions:
Most established brands will already have sitelinks, so you can skip this question. If you’re a small business or not in the top position the change won’t help you, in fact it could push you down the search results page.
If your sitelinks are wrong or have glitches like an unsuitable title or error page, then it’s worth changing these – this can be done in Google Webmaster Tools as explained below.
Since Google’s site algorithm is automatic it does a good job of highlighting the most important and shared pages on a site – typically those within the main navigation. But also other popular or shared content.
You can’t tell Google what you DO want as a sitelink, but you can tell it what you DON’T want. This is where you go to in Google Webmaster Tools and the new Google facility.
One of the big changes is that the new site link adds a description – if you want to change this, you can through editing the meta description of the page through the CMS.
The most important description is for the home page – often this doesn’t explain the site value prop well, but this one does.
Adwords now has its own “Ad Sitelinks” above the natural listing – you may want to use these to highlight offers that are popular in your natural sitelinks – or missing! These work well for many ClickThrough clients already.
This is where people search for the brand name plus a product or service. It seems that Google may include more of these now, so you check your analytics to see whether Brand plus phrases are driving traffic for you.
You can use the Landing page report in Google Analytics to see the importance of different brand phrases in driving traffic. This graphic summarises the steps to tackle this.
Thought Facebook Places might be a serious contender to Foursquare and Gowalla for location marketing? Think again.
Whilst it ought to have stood a chance in the geolocation marketing stakes, Facebook rolled out Places as an afterthought, a feature with no thinking behind it. And now it has gone. In the hullabaloo of yet more privacy changes on Facebook to affect all users, Places has been consigned to the pile of tried and failed apps.
It would be interesting to look at why certain features ‘fit’ in a social network, and why users prefer other features to remain in a dedicated space. For instance, it is unlikely that everyone will start making voice calls within Facebook rather than using already established solutions such as mobile, Skype or the good old landline. Even Ebay has not really resolved that one although it was a logical fit to allow buyers and sellers to communicate via Skype.
Those who use geolocation, for whatever reason, have a preferred tool for the job. Facebook was not it. And never could be without becoming increasingly good at delivering what the dedicated solutions had found to be the big wins – badges, tips, photos, event location, crowdsourced and unique awards, discounts etc.
It will be interesting to note during 2012 how far down the social graph Facebook sinks. Already, it is feeling like it has lost its edge. And for that, you should probably blame Google+. Not that Google+ is going to fill in the space, more the space has moved.
Facebook has suddenly taken on a MySpace tumbleweed type feel, and once sites such as this lose the interest of users, there is rarely a way back up.
Which geolocation tool do you use, and why? Is it to inform friends of your whereabouts? To track down deals? To meet people you share common interests with, or FOAF? (Remember that?!)
Or are you as a marketer far less interested in any time of check ins than you were 12 months ago? In which case, what is piquing your interest right now? Tell us more……
