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Posts tagged Google
Is Google+ the answer to social networking behemoth Facebook?
Jun 28th
Google have unveiled their latest attempt at cracking the world of social media, titled ‘Google+’. After previous attempts such as Google Buzz turned out disastrously (and even resulted in privacy scandals), it is particularly important for Google to get it right now before they lose an irreclaimable amount of ground to Facebook.
In fact, Google+ looks very promising. The tool will be baked in across the entire suite of Google products – search, maps, GMail, Reader, YouTube and many other successful services. A notification drop down similar to the red icon you see on Facebook will be accessible and omnipresent across all of these services, ensuring that take up and continued usage is high.
Circles
Google have presented some innovative ideas to the status quo of social networking. They noted that granular sharing is ‘tacked on’ in many current social services, like ‘Friend Lists’ on Facebook, to which you can restrict access to your posts. Google wants to slip this on its head and make their social network reflect reality – hence their ‘Circles’ feature. A fun interface will allow you to drag and drop you friends in and out of your different social ‘circles’ – like ‘University friends’ or ‘Colleagues’ or even More >
Google Checkout Badges
Jun 24th
The Google checkout badges, which have formed part of the AdWords listings for over four years, have been dropped by Google.
According to eCommerceCircle, Google reportedly said, “We’re making this change to improve the user experience on Google search results pages.”
The move comes as Google looks to freshen up their operations with the new +1 badge. This new badge is designed as a way of endorsing a post, website or search result. It will act similarly to the Facebook “Like” button.
If you want to know more about the new +1 button and how it could affect the Search Engine Optimisation for your business, contact Areatrade.
B is for Bing! Microsoft’s bid to win the search war
Apr 12th
According to data released recently by eagle-eyed Experian Hitwise, Google’s grip on the search engine market – leading to the colloquial use of “to Google” as a verb – may be slipping, due to competition from the name that keeps cropping up when computers are concerned – Microsoft.
64.42% of searches in the US routed through Google in March, claim Experian Hitwise, and while that is still two-thirds of the market, a sizeable 30.01% can be claimed by Microsoft – 14.32% via their well-publicised search engine Bing, and 15.69% from Yahoo!, which is technically owned by the Microsoft corporation. In a smooth and virtually silent virtual coup, Yahoo! is now powered by Bing.
Bing, ridiculed by some as an acronym for “But It’s Not Google,” also appears to be doing well in terms of successful searches, 80.32% of its users clicking on a search result, whereas the idle Googler only has a 65.91% chance of finding an appropriate website via the search facility. As a result, Google appears to have flatlined somewhat, their market share down 10% since August 2010.
Bing, on the other hand, is up massively from 9.9% of searches as the last year ended, and although Google still controls the More >
Google takes social search a step further with ‘+1′
Mar 31st
Search engine giant Google has announced a new feature called ‘+1′. +1 is essentially the same as Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, which when clicked shares that page on the user’s Facebook Wall. Google +1 will do this as well, listing all links +1ed by a user on their Google Profile.
However, the integration will go deeper than this, as +1 buttons will also appear on search results, and the number of times a result has been +1ed will appear next to its link, potentially influencing which result a user will choose. This could end up being incorporated into the algorithm that Google uses to rank its listings. Also of note is that this does not just apply to the ‘organic’ listings- these +1 buttons will also be a feature of the ‘sponsored’ pay-per-click results that appear at the top and down the side of results pages.
The impact of this new feature on SEO is obvious, so we will be watching this development with great interest. The social aspect to this button highlights how important a social media strategy is when considering the online promotion of your website. If you’re interested in our online promotion services, contact Areatrade on 020 8366 2050 or email More >
Amazon pulls ahead of the pack; releases cloud-based streaming of your music collection
Mar 30th
Amazon unveiled their new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player products this week, which will allow users to store their files in Amazon’s ‘cloud’ – an online server which can be accessed from any computer. Whilst products like this are nothing new, the Cloud Player function is – it will allow users to stream their music through their web browser from any computer, or to their Android phone using Amazon’s MP3 app. They provide 5GB of storage space free – and only files and music not purchased from Amazon count towards this limit – a fantastic incentive for users to purchase music from the Amazon MP3 store, as they will essentially receive unlimited music storage.
Google and Apple have both been racing to release their own versions of these products but Amazon have seemingly appeared from nowhere with Cloud Player, baffling industry experts. Interestingly, Google and Apple have been having issues coming to licensing agreements with major record labels to ensure users are not on shaky legal ground when uploading their MP3 files to a remote storage location. It appears Amazon have failed to observe this obstacle, so it is possible that we could see litigation arising from this surprise release.
You can More >
Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 9 to the masses
Mar 15th
Microsoft have released the final build of their Internet Explorer 9 web browser in an attempt to stem its steady loss of users to alternative browsers like Firefox and Chrome. IE9 features an enhanced user interface with the removal of unnecessary toolbars and the amalgamation of the address and search boxes into one field and the alignment of the address/search bar and tabs into one row. The new browser also offers impressive speed improvements and also great leaps in support for web standards like HTML5. Web standards are a common set of guidelines offered by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) that browser vendors and web developers are expected to adhere to to ensure a consistent experience across all software. Internet Explorer has been notoriously poor at this in the past, and Microsoft has sought to rectify their previous errors.
The improvement in web standards support will be welcomed with open arms by web designers such as us at Areatrade as it means less extra code is needed to ensure compatibility in all software. Microsoft has recently been calling for the small minority of users still stuck on version 6 of the software to upgrade to a newer version. Many IT departments have More >
The Japan Tsunami Appeal
Mar 13th
Most people will have heard by now about the horrific disaster which struck Japan over the weekend. We would like to urge our followers to donate to the British Red Cross appeal if they’ve got any spare change – people are desperately in need of rescue and shelter at this very moment.
It has been interesting to see the usage of social media in relief efforts. News of the disaster spread quickly across Facebook and Twitter and videos of the event appeared almost instantaneously on YouTube, Japan being such a well connected country. The phrase ‘Text REDCROSS to 90999′ was trending on Twitter worldwide to encourage users to make an instant $10 donation to the appeal (though this only functioned for American users.)
Google have also set up a version of their ‘Person Finder’ tool, the technology of which was used extensively as part of operations in Hurricane Katrina and the Christchurch earthquake. The tool allows users to search for information about someone they are trying to find or upload information about the whereabouts and state of someone to be found by others. The tool uses a standard, open format to allow different organisations to collate data in one place – reducing the More >
Google increases emphasis on social search rankings
Feb 18th
Google has announced an upgrade to its social search features. A feature has been available for some time that shows links related to your search at the bottom of the results page that have been shared by your contacts on social networks.
Now Google will be further integrating this feature by moving the social results higher up in the rankings. This feature is only available to users signed into a Google account that is attached to social networking accounts.
What does this mean for people optimising their websites for promotion on Google? It seems clear that a strong social networking presence is becoming a increasingly important component of an effective online promotion campaign.
Social Media Campaigns
Feb 15th
Social Media Campaigns
We can help you create and optimise profiles for your company on the key social media sites which include Facebook (business pages) and Twitter. These sites allow you to connect with existing customers, so you can use social media as an extra method of customer support. You can also reach out to prospective customers or simply use the site to connect with other businesses in your industry or keep track of how similar business owners are promoting their sites. Another feature of social media sites is that they are visited frequently by the search engines and the profile pages rank highly. This is great for brand awareness as when a customer searches for your business name, your social media profiles rank highly in Google alongside your site, making your company hard to ignore.
We are a London website design company that specialises in website planning, website design and website promotion. Call us to find out how we can work together to make your website work for you online.
How to Check the Links to Your Website and Assess Their Value
Jan 12th
If you want your website to be at the top of Google, or any search engine, then one of the most important things you can do is aim to increase the number of links that are coming in to your website.
What this means on a basic level is that you need as many other websites as possible linking to you for search engines to value your site as one that is trusted and useful. Every other site that links to yours is counted as a positive vote when the search engines look at your site and rank it. That said, the links have more value if the sites linking to you are relevant (ie. on-topic and of reasonable quality).
Before you can start the often challenging process of trying to increase the number of links that are pointing to your site, you really need to check how many links you already have so that you can see how much work you need to do compared to outrank your competitors.
There are two main categories of links your site can attract: those that show as links in Google (very valuable links that can be difficult to get) and those that show as links More >