Google Search Quality Highlights – 52 Updates on April 2012

1. Categorize paginated documents.
2. More language-relevant navigational results.
3. Country identification for webpages.
4. Anchors bug fix.
5. More domain diversity.
6. More local sites from organizations.
7. Improvements to local navigational searches.
8. Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking.
9. Disable salience in snippets.
10. More text from the beginning of the page in snippets.
11. Smoother ranking changes for fresh results.
12. Improvement in a freshness signal.
13. No freshness boost for low-quality content.
14. Tweak to trigger behavior for Instant Previews.
15. Sunrise and sunset search feature internationalization.
16. Improvements to currency conversion search feature in Turkish.
17. Improvements to news clustering for Serbian.
18. Better query interpretation.
19. News universal results serving improvements.
20. UI improvements for breaking news topics.
21. More comprehensive predictions for local queries.
22. Improvements to triggering of public data search feature.
23. Adding Japanese and Korean to error page classifier.
24. More efficient generation of alternative titles.
25. More concise and/or informative titles.
26. Fewer bad spell corrections internationally.
27. More spelling corrections globally and in more languages.
28. More spell corrections for long queries.
29. More comprehensive triggering of “showing results for” goes international.
30. “Did you mean” suppression goes international.
31. Spelling model refresh and quality improvements.
32. Fewer auto-complete predictions leading to low-quality results.
33. Improvements to SafeSearch for videos and images.
34. Improved SafeSearch models.
35. Improvements to SafeSearch signals in Russian.
36. Increase base index size by 15%.
37. New index tier.
38. Backend improvements in serving.
39. “Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks.
40. Better ranking of expanded sitelinks.
41. Sitelinks data refresh.
42. Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks.
43. Movie showtimes search feature for mobile in China, Korea and Japan.
44. MLB search feature.
45. Spanish football (La Liga) search feature.
46. Formula 1 racing search feature.
47. Tweaks to NHL search feature.
48. Keyword stuffing classifier improvement.
49. More authoritative results.
50. Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile.
51. Updates to rich snippets
52. Another step to reward high-quality sites

Source : Google Insight Search Blog

Pinterest Marketing Techniques and Tips – Market Your Business Easily

Pinterest Marketing Techniques and Tips : 33 ways to maket your business in Pinterest.com

1. Use your business name as your username or profile name on Pinterest.
2. Describe your business and interest in “About” Sections.
3. Connect with your Facebook and Twitter accounts and share the information. 
4. Add your website URL in your profile.
5. Pin lots of stuff and categories.
6. Start creative and interesting board names.
7. Tag your pins by using “@username” in your descriptions.
8. Comment on other people’s pins.
9. “Like” other people’s great pins.
10. Pin from lots of different sources and variety is important on Pinterest.
11. Do lots of “repinning”, just like a Retweet on Twitter.
12. Share your pin into your own blog posts.
13. Pin videos.
14. Add a description under your pin an image.
15. Bookmark and share your pins to social media.
16. Use Pinterest’s embed option to publish pins in your blog posts and website pages.
17. Use Pinterest iPhone app.
18. Optimize your website content for Pinterest.
19. Create Pin for seasonal or holiday that related to your brand.
20. Follow Me on Pinterest button.
21. Use keywords in descriptions of pins, so pinners can find your images and boards when they do their own searches.
22. Make sure you’ve got a Pin It! button added to the footer of each of your blog posts so your readers can quickly and easily share your content on Pinterest.
23. Your Pinterest page has its own RSS feed
24. Create your own Pinterest shop.
25. Pin tutorials on your boards.
26. Integrate your Pinterest account with Facebook’s timeline.
27. Connect your clients Pinterest
28. Create boards for the classes and webinars you teach and present yourself.
29. Create boards for referral sources, affiliates and strategic partners.
30. Use client stories as Pinterest boards
31. Create coupons and add them to your boards.
32. Offer exclusive Pinterest promotions.
33. Run a Pinterest contest.

Share your thoughs and comments on pinterest marketing..

SEO Factors and Trends Report 2012 – Key Points from Bruce Clay

The key trends in SEO for 2012 are:

1. Panda and the quality content concepts behind it are likely to continue to be ever-increasing in their importance to successfully ranking in Google. It cannot be stressed highly enough that quality content, which is loved by users, is going to be one of the main elements of search engine success over the next year or two.
2. Aside from quality, content will also have to be fresh, useful and shareable to social media to be successful in 2012 and beyond. If content investment is not yet prioritised in the online budget, it should be.
3. One of our team members calls the sets of updates promoting brands to the top of SERPs “Branda”. This upwards shift in SERPs dominance of big brands for non-brand searches will continue. Some people claim favouritism for big companies, but it is likely to be down to increased engagement by brands with the web and an increased sophistication in the way they engage.
4. Google’s core page layout has changed significantly over the last few years. The “10 Blue Links” remain but are perhaps less of a feature as other content modules, both search and monetised, have elbowed their way onto the page. Even with Google’s renowned uncluttered layout, for some searches, especially in the US, it is now not uncommon for the first of the 10 blue links not to be visible above the fold. It is likely, especially with the inclusion of social snippets that this trend will continue and that fewer websites will be seen above the fold.
5. Facebook continues to go from strength-to-strength but has a capable competitor now in Google+, backed by search. We expect there to be an even bigger push for the lion’s share of end user ‘eyeball time’, with new features and new ways to engage. In line with this, we also expect there to be ingenious new ways of integrating social ads into the experience. Make no mistake, the social battlefield and the influence of social on search, both directly with the social graph, and indirectly between competing websites is only going to get bigger.
6. A lot of people were hoping this day had come a lot sooner, but it seems with the adoption of HTML5 into certain aspects of Google’s content, that HTML5 is finally coming of age, again. It’s most significant advantage is that it can run natively on mobile devices. Look forward to increasingly interactive sites coming this way using HTML5.
7. After a few false starts, it looks like Google has finally tapped the social zeitgeist with Google+ and their business offering, Business Pages. We expect because of the tie-up with Google and the technical construction of the content that a Google+ presence will be an invaluable aid to a successful SEO campaign. It is likely that Google+ will start influencing personalised results sooner rather than later. Please note, between the first draft of this document and publication, Google launched Search, Plus Your World, integrating results from your social circles as well as traditional search results.
8. As mobile continues its stratospheric uptake, so we expect Google Places to continue to develop quickly, especially if it ties in closely with the social graph and personalisation. Expect a search for “good coffee shop” to yield Places results personalised with comments, observations and recommendations made by your social circle.
9. Matt Cutts managed to worry everybody by talking about Google being interested in what can be seen on a page “Above the Fold”. And then they went and released the update mid-way through January 2012. This is likely to be a continuing developing area over the next couple of years, and is indicative of the development of Google’s crawling technology and their alignment with what they perceive the end-user as wanting from a “good website”. Make your content load fast and keep the juicy stuff above the fold.
10. Freshness is a big topic and look towards Google, and others, trying to refine the freshness developments that took place towards the end of 2011. Expect more queries to deserve freshness and for the freshness of results to have a more accurate lifespan.
11. It seems with the release of schema.org that rich snippets are another of those technical elements which are at last coming of age – and they seem to have been a long time coming. Expect the various rel=”” tags to gain in importance over the next 12-24 months as their usage becomes more widespread. As they tend to add code bloat, server speed and hosting infrastructure will be vital to successful implementation of the tags.
12. Citations, even though they have disappeared from Places results, will remain as significant signals of relevance for local search.
13. On-page factors which have not traditionally been seen as SEO factors will rise in importance. Elements like CRO, bounce rates, and user engagement may well all become more important metrics included in the ranking algorithm.
14. Key to multi-national websites will be the implementation of the link rel and href.lang attribute. This will ease a site owner’s fear of duplicate content and provide more accurate website targeting to different end–users who may speak a common language. Getting the website structure and code right to cover these eventualities will become more important.
15. Traffic analysis will be made immeasurably harder by the rise of “Not Provided” as the search query from securely logged in Google users. Early estimates have put the % of queries affected as high as 20%. This could even be a pre-cursor to the data being available to premium Google Analytics users. Some elements of the data may be available from Google Webmaster Tools, but it is not specifically identifiable and comparable.
16. The iPhone changed the way we used mobile phones. Then came Siri. It is expected that voice search, and other types of augmented reality search will grow in importance in 2012. They’ve been here for a while already but expect them to take off this year – especially in Local search. You never know, this could even be the year that mobile barcodes / QR codes actually become more than a geek tool. Of course, these services still need to have trusted sources feeding them relevancy and authority signals, which are still expected to be drawn from your website and social graph.
17. As mobile search gains pace, expect the user-experience to rise in importance for mobile sites to be successful in search.
18. Links are dead, long live likes! This isn’t quite true (yet), but certainly expect ‘likes’ to strengthen their relevance signals to search engines. As these signals get stronger, expect ‘like’ spam schemes to become bigger and more commonplace before they are algorithmically taken down by Google’s spam combat expertise.
19. +1 will become the equivalent of bookmarking a page and Google may merge Reader into G+ to create your own personalised shareable news feed.
20. Facebook has extended its Open Graph in January 2012 to include more business related signals on people’s timeline pages. It will be interesting to note how this plays out into expanding the social graph.
21. The 4G mobile phone network is on its way, bringing with it faster data speeds and phones which are also capable video cameras. Expect a rise in “vlogging” over the coming 12-36 months which may, like in all the best sci-fi movies, eventually replace the written word.

Source from Bruce Clay Australia’s SEO Factors and Trends report – http://www.bruceclay.com/au/bruceclay_aus_seo_factors_trends_2012.pdf

Happy New Year 2012

Merry Christmas 2011

SEMPO Chennai Meetup 2011 for SEO and Search Marketing

SEMPO Chennai MeetUp 2011 - Evolution of SEM and SEO

SEMPO Chennai Meetup is a day long event aimed at bringing together the best minds from the Search Marketing space to talk about search engine advertising, including optimization and marketing issues. This event will feature a few technical sessions and a panel discussion. This event aims to explore the present state and evolution of Search Engine Marketing and Optimization.

When & Where?

The event is scheduled on the 15th of December 2011 in Chennai, and will be held in Cognizant Chennai.

Cognizant Technology Solutions

#5/535, Old Mahabalipuram Road,

Okkiam -Thoraipakkam,

Chennai 600 096

What is SEMPO?

SEMPO is the largest nonprofit trade organization in the world serving the search and digital marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it. SEMPO provides a foundation for industry growth by building stronger relationships, fostering awareness, providing education, promoting the industry. SEMPO also encourages generating research, and creating a better understanding of search and its role in marketing.

SEMPO's activities are primarily centered on Education and Awareness. To support its educational mission, SEMPO offers an extensive library of resources, research and articles. SEMPO caters to outreach activities such as Webinars and local education/networking events facilitating its education mission. 

To drive Awareness of the value of search and digital marketing, and how to maximize its potential in a marketing mix, SEMPO funds outreach activities, events, and press. SEMPO's research studies help to quantify the value of Search Marketing and track the industry trends.

Speakers & Agenda

SEMPO Chennai 2011 will feature knowledgeable and awe-inspiring speakers who are thought leaders in their respective industries.In addition the event will also have eminent speakers to address wide variety of topics on digital marketing. The enlightening speeches will include message on: how to improve the effectiveness of your website, advertising opportunities, social search, reputation management and industry trends.

Registration  Fee : 

• Free entry for SEMPO.org members.
• For non-members, Rs.400 per person. It's a door donation to meet the expenses towards lunch and logistics.

Share and Invite : 

Twitter - You can tweet about the event; please use hashtag #SEMPOCHN

Facebook - You can also follow us on Facebook

For More details - visit - http://www.sempo.in/chennai2011/

Jobs opening for SEO Expert / Online Marketer in Chennai, India

Job Position : SEO/ Online Marketer/ Search Engine Analyst.

Experience : 1 – 5 years in SEO and Online marketing.

Job Location : Chennai, India

Job Description :

• Monitor, track and report on paid search metrics, including trend analysis.
• Key phrase search.
• Strong experience in picking the right phrases, rewording pages.
• Strong experience in Google Ad-words.
• Experience in PPC

Required Skills:

• Any Qualification
• Willing to work in Night Shifts
• Should be excellent in communication.
• Should be good in analytical skills.
• Excellent in Verbal and Written communication.

Interview Date :  31st Oct’ 2011 onwards

Interview Time : 2pm to 8pm

Contact Details : 

Adaptavant Technology Solutions
Ascendas Tech Park,
Pinnacle Building – Phase I,
4th Floor, Taramani Road,
Taramani, Chennai.
Phone No: 044 – 64607147

Website : www.adaptavant.com