TopRank Online Marketing

Michelle Bowles

Google: The Social Media Company

Comments | Posted by Michelle Bowles on Mar 19th, 2010 in Google, Online Marketing, Search Engines, Social Media |

Over the last few years, the popularity of social channels – for professionals, teens, grandmas and everyone in between – has skyrocketed. Consider the recent numbers:

  • Twitter experienced an annual growth in 2009 of 1,382%
  • Facebook now boasts 400 million active users
  • Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

Between blog posts, Facebook status updates, tweets, videos and every other piece of social content published, there’s a whole lot of information floating around out there.

Enter the latest social media player, Google.

Google’s latest activities, acquisitions and features all point to the fact that the search giant no longer has a close eye on web 2.0; it’s already there.

Here are 5 ways Google is now becoming a dominant social media player:

Lee Odden

All New Google Design

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Nov 26th, 2009 in Google, Online Marketing, Search Engines |

Google is a master of innovation in the search space and while they seem to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s “release early and release often” new product philosophy, the attention to changing the Google search page is near-holy. Minuscule design changes at even the pixel level are cautious and carefully considered. And rare.

Apparently, Google is testing a redesign and logo which you can see in this home page screen shot:

New Google Home Page 112609

The logo has changed and the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons are blue rather than gray. But the biggest changes are on the search results page. There are three columns rather than two:

New Google Search Results 112609

I’ll mention some of the specific changes but I have to say, my initial (and critical) opinion of the updated search results page is “awesome”. I liked it immediately.

Michelle Bowles

SEO for Flash: 5 Tips and Best Practices

Comments | Posted by Michelle Bowles on Nov 19th, 2009 in Online Marketing, SEO, SEO Tips |

flash seoSEO for Flash – is it a reality yet?

One of the most common issues for web sites with poor search visibility involves Google not being able to crawl and index a site’s content. Web sites made entirely with Flash are problematic because there are often no links for search engine crawlers to follow or HTML text to copy.

According to the Opera (browser) developer center, somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files representing a lot of content that may not be included in search results or only partially indexed. Despite a large number of sites publishing content using this type of file format, Flash and search engines have been like oil and water. They just didn’t mix.

Lee Odden

Google: Social Media is a Party, SEO is Bullsh*t, Advertising is Good For You

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Nov 19th, 2009 in Google, Online Marketing, Search Engines |

I noticed someone using Google suggest in another story today (honestly forgot where) and thought I’d see what Google “thinks” about social media. Then I tried SEO. Not surprising. Funniest of all, considering Google’s business model, was advertising.

What Google Thinks of Social Media

Pretty telling when you think about it. Of course this isn’t what Google “really thinks” about social media, it’s Google’s response to search queries and effort to predict what we’re really searching for.

Google Suggest works by drawing from searches by other Google users, sites in Google’s search index, and ads in the Google advertising network. If you’re logged in, Google will use your search history to make suggestions. It can be a handy search tool. It can also be revealing.

Adam Singer

SES SJ: Google on Converting Visitors To Customers

Comments | Posted by Adam Singer on Aug 13th, 2009 in Google, Search Engine Strategies |

google-session
Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager at Google presented a sponsored session on converting your visitors to customers, specifically through the use of internal site searches.

Businesses spend a tremendous amount of time, resources, and capital on website development and online marketing initiatives.  Getting people to a site is a challenge in itself, but another key aspect is retaining those visitors and converting them into buyers or subscribers.

Google search has set a high bar for relevance, speed, and ease of use. Unfortunately most site searches don’t meet these high expectations: 85 percent don’t return what the user sought, and 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor (Jupiter Research).

Jolina Pettice

SES SJ: Beyond Googling: Where will Customers be Searching in 5 years?

Comments | Posted by Jolina Pettice on Aug 12th, 2009 in Google, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

beyond-googling

Beyond Google. Where will customers be searching in 5 years?

Dixon Jones of Receptional asks the audience: Who doubts life after Google? About half the audience raises their hand.

According to Dixon, there will be life after Google and we are already there. He cites Facebook as an example of a site that is growing links more quickly than Google.

He then goes on to discuss the Trust/Convenience Contract. This contract is illustrated when searchers trust Google to give them data, as opposed to going around knocking on neighbor’s doors to find the answer.

However,  Google isn’t the only choice anymore. Users can and do go to blogs, Facebook, Twitter to retrieve information often removing Google from the equation.

Thomas McMahon

SEO Basics: 6 Tips for Google Webmaster Tools

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Apr 7th, 2009 in Google, Online Marketing, SEO, SEO Tips, SEO Tools, Search Engines |

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service that provides a wealth of information directly from Google. Once you have verified a site with Google, they’ll give you access to all sorts of information.

Here are just a few features of Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Errors
Google Webmaster Tools will show all sorts of errors with a site. Not only does it show broken links on the site, but also links that are driving traffic to the site for which there is no valid page. Google even tells you pages it knows about but has been restricted from crawling. That’s good to know incase someone accidently blocks to much.

Google Webmaster Tools Error Report

Google Webmaster Tools Error Report

Jolina Pettice

SES New York: Universal Search Panel

Comments | Posted by Jolina Pettice on Mar 18th, 2008 in Google, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies, Search Engines |

Universal Search Session

Today’s Orion panel at SES NY really took a different spin on the topic of universal search. I went in expecting to hear the same info  about what it is, how info is gathered and how to optimize for universal search. Which, if you are interested, can be read about in a previous SES Chicago post regarding universal search.

This session was moderated by Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan. The session was lively and engaging. Panelists included:
John Battelle from Federated Media, James Lamberti from comScore, Lyndsay Menzies from Big Mouth Media and Jack Menzel from Google.

James led the group by presenting not-seen-before data about universal search from a study comScore recently conducted.

Of the 1.2 billion queries studied, 220 million contained a universal result, categorized as news, video, images etc.

Jolina Pettice

Google Gets its Groove On at SMX West

Comments | Posted by Jolina Pettice on Feb 28th, 2008 in Google, Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, Search Marketing Expo |

Google hosted a party last night at SMX West, entitled Google Groove. And groovy, it was.

dsc00456.JPG

Andy Beal and other SMXers enjoying the party

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Main bar, all in Google Colors

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SMXers playing Rockband

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SMXers enjoying drinks, notice the colorful Google cups, which people went crazy over

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Blinky Google spheres, also very popular

Check out all of the photos at TopRank’s SMX West Flickr set.

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Jolina Pettice

Session: Google’s 5 Tips to Succeed in Universal Search

Comments | Posted by Jolina Pettice on Feb 26th, 2008 in Marketing PR Conferences, Online Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Strategies |

dsc00389.JPGAs mentioned in a previous post, universal search is a hot topic here at SMX West.

My first session of the day: The Blended Search Revolution revealed insights from the major search engines about how they are ‘compiling’ the universal search results and how companies should take advantage of the opportunity.

Universal search leverages new content such as news results, images and videos.

Specifically, David Bailey from Google shared these five tips (some obvious, some maybe not) to take advantage of the specialized results:

1. Publish high quality, well captioned images
2. Create a Google video sitemap
3. Update business listings in local business center
4. Submit your feed to Google product search
5. Create a high-quality company blog

Lee Odden

Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Feb 20th, 2008 in Google, SEO, SEO Tips, Search Engine Strategies, Spotlight on Search, Video Interviews |

On day one of SES London I was able to catch up with Google Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik to do a short (10 min) video on several topics important to web masters looking for better results on Google. Adam starts with a descrption of his responsibilities at Google and then answers questions about Google compliant Flash and JavaScript, duplicate content – especially with press releases and suggested uses of internal site nofollow other than for “PageRank sculpting”.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1830519162896248638
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Thomas McMahon

5 Lesser Known Google Analytics Features

Comments | Posted by Thomas McMahon on Feb 14th, 2008 in Google, SEO, SEO Tips, Search Engines, Web Analytics |

Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is a great program that can do a lot more than most people realize. Here are a few features that you may not know about:

  • Capture internal search stats. This is a newer feature of Google Analytics and a very nice one. Not only can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, but what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL. Here’s a short video interview with Google’s Brett Crosby on some of those features.
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