We’re getting more and more reports from readers who are seeing a “new” Google look-and-feel for its search results. This is a three column design that Google’s actually been testing for some time. That testing appears to be accelerating.
Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature is our story from last November that takes an in-depth look at the new user interface and the features it offers.
At the time, we wrote:
For the past couple of months, Google has been telling the world that page speed is an increasingly important aspect of Web sites. The Google Speed site – which has the laudable goal of making Web browsing as fast as turning the pages of a magazine – has been featured in several posts on their Webmaster blog, and features links to various free tools that they, and others, have made available for the masses.
So, as someone responsible for a site, if you suspect that you may have page load issues, what’s your first stop? Where should you go to get an overall idea of your site performance, short of opening every page of your site while holding a stopwatch?
Looking to integrate your analytical data and tracking across your site, blog and now even your Facebook Fanpages? It appears that the UK’s WebDigi Dev team has figured out a pretty easy way to use Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page. With SEJ’s Facebook Page having over 4,000 users and lots of cool comments and voting going on, adding Google Analytics to track referrals or time on site will be quite awesome.
If you travel much and still need to keep your blog active, you will definitely find these tips useful: they will show you how to post to your blogs from email (and thus from your mobile phone).
Of course, you won’t be able to apply those to all types of blogs but generally this is very useful to know.
Detailed instructions can be found here; the steps:
1. Create a dedicated e-mail account to be used only for posting to your blog. You may want to use of the suggested random strings (You can find those in Options > Writing menus).
As social media continues to grow at an exhilarating pace, it can become challenging for marketers to balance the time-consuming demands of today’s social media marketing landscape with their career’s core focus. Whether you’re a full-time social media marketer whose main responsibility is to manage social media campaigns, a brand-side marketer who dabbles in social media throughout the day, or a consultant who networks with others in the industry, it’s important to streamline your social media initiatives as much as possible, in order to save time & stay focused. Here are 5 musts for boosting the efficiency of social media marketing in the workplace.
I am no web designer (I have neither time nor talent to learn web design), however for SEOs it is essential to know some basic tools and tips to test a website design when it is delivered.
Thus this post is not intended to share some advanced tips for web developers: instead it lists three quick ways to test a web design in FireFox:
There are a number of FireFox addons that allow to view the current page in an alternative browser:
At a search engine marketing conference, several of us gave a session on website usability topics ranging from usability and SEO to site architecture and requirements gathering. Afterward, there was time for questions by the audience. Someone asked, “Why don’t we all just copy Amazon.com?” I replied, “Never, ever copy what Amazon does.” The audience responded with surprise, thinking I was not a fan of Amazon.
In my last Analyze This post, I alluded to the importance of click to conversion time, that is, the estimated conversion time of the revenue attribution window. I shall devote this article to explaining the importance of the revenue attribution window and some empirical methods to help determine the right window length.
The revenue attribution window refers to the maximum length of time between click and conversion that an advertiser must include when calculating the revenue from a click. Consider two consumers who clicked on an ad for a t-shirt on a given day. One consumer clicked on the ad and bought the shirt on the same day. The other consumer did not convert the same day but bought a shirt from the same website two months later.
Opera, the leading independent mobile browser, has been putting out great data on mobile Internet usage for quite some time. Google always ranks as one of the top sites globally. However this month’s “State of the Mobile Web” report is the first time that the company has released search market share data.
It shows Google with a lead comparable, almost exactly, to its market share on the PC in the US. Yahoo enjoys a larger share of mobile search than it now does on the PC, according to Opera. And Bing is virtually non-existent.
Yahoo has announced a fairly substantial overhaul of how Yahoo Answers looks and works — and as a semi-regular user of the site, I’d say these changes are very welcome.
The primary functional changes involve a new set of navigation tabs and a new way of browsing the categories on Yahoo Answers.
The four new tabs will appear across the site, and hovering over the Browse Categories tab will show a dropdown layer that replaces the old laundry list of categories from the left margin of Yahoo Answers.
One of the most important things to me as part of the SMX search marketing conferences that Search Engine Land runs is educating newcomers to the basics of search marketing. That’s why we run a special SMX Boot Camp track. That’s also why we created a special low-cost ticket for those who just want to attend this track during our SMX West conference next week.
The track runs on March 2 and covers these essentials:
While some webmasters anxiously wait for Google to roll out its “Caffeine” search infrastructure any day now, Google says it may not happen for “months.” What’s more, the IP address of the one data center where Caffeine was said to be available may have changed, and Google is no longer saying where users can see Caffeine search results. Here’s the latest on Google’s “next-generation architecture.”
When Will Caffeine Launch?
A Google spokesperson tells Search Engine Land that Caffeine is still live at only one data center, and says “we expect to roll it out to all data centers over the coming months.”
If sitelinks, product extensions and plus boxes are still sounding like Greek to you, read on for a primer on implementing Google Ad Extensions as a part of your paid search strategy. Testing these new extensions is a great exercise for any in-house search engine marketing manager.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks launched with wide availability in November of 2009 giving AdWords advertisers the opportunity to provide four additional content links to an existing AdWords ad. The links will only appear for ads that meet (quoting Google) “a certain high quality threshold.” Generally speaking, this means ads in a high quality-score first position spot on Google. So far, only unique brand name terms seem to be triggering these new links.
Given the consumerism mentality that is so pervasive in society today, people regularly throw good money after bad, chasing more of what they already have. But this behavior isn’t limited to consumers. Time and again, I see B2B marketers doing the very same thing.
The situation
B2B marketers work hard to target the right keywords, create compelling ad copy, and drive potential customers to click on their ads, all with the hopes of capturing them as a lead. But unfortunately, conversion rates often fall short of what they could be. Desperate to make up ground, many B2B marketers ramp up their paid search spend to drive more traffic, and in doing so, end up maintaining their dismal conversion rate.
When Google launched AdWords Comparison Ads last fall, the company promised it would continue to expand its testing and use of this new ad format. Today, Google says it’s begun testing comparison ads in the UK for credit card-related searches.
Earlier this evening Yahoo announced that it had deepened its relationship with Twitter and would be integrating Twitter’s feeds and content across its network:
The partnership integrates Twitter’s real-time social experiences with Yahoo!’s global network of nearly 600M people. Together with the recently announced Facebook integration, this relationship is a key part of advancing Yahoo!’s social strategy, transforming it into a highly customizable social experience that lets people unify their activity from their many social experiences across the Web.
Twitter caused a stir Monday when it lifted its curtain enough to show us how much activity the service is seeing currently, and how it’s grown since 2007. And while many reports talk about visits to Twitter.com flattening, Twitter’s own chart showing the number of tweets its users are publishing is staggering.
Twitter says it’s currently seeing about 50 million tweets per day, which breaks down to about 600 per second.
But how do those numbers compare to Facebook, the king of social networking, and Google Buzz, the new kid on the block?
Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web from Wired has an excellent and detailed look at the evolution Google’s search algorithm over the years. It is a pretty long write up, so I wanted to highlight those key points in bullet format for you all.
Key Advances:
Many people think of link building as purely an SEO endeavor. You build links to improve rank. I’ll argue this is the wrong way to think about link building, but not here in today’s column. I’ve accepted that when people use the phrase link building, chances are the word Google is not far from coming up. So be it.
Link marketing is related to link building, but it’s a far more tactical and nuanced approach to the process. People often use the terms link building and link marketing interchangeably, but that doesn’t do justice to either term. If I’m not mistaken, it was Debra Mastaler that first coined the term link marketing.
In December of 2009, the new FTC policy on blog disclosure went into effect. Here we are well into 2010, and nothing much has changed. In fact, even the FTC has said it is unsure how it will actually enforce the new policy. Is this something publishers, bloggers, or social media consultants need to worry about, or will this turn out to be a paper tiger without any bite?
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