Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug
Apple is plotting its universal touchscreen remote!
27. January 2012
ben
Another item to add onto our growing Apple wish list could have created today when a patent application for a universal touchscreen remote was published by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It revealed Apple is playing with the idea of a universal touchscreen controller capable of controlling multiple devices including your television, video tape player, video disk player, stereo or home control system.
The application highlights many of the issues with current controllers for televisions and noted that universal remotes are overly complicated to use and are not future proof. It also looks to take the age old problem of being confronted with multiple remotes previously discussed by Steve Jobs when talking about Apple TV.
Apple’s solution would allow the remote to pair with other devices over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, with full customisation of the remote’s touchscreen for each device, such as a button layout being stored in the device and sent to the Apple remote wirelessly.
I envisage the remote control to be similar in design to that of the iPad and would display a menu of applications for each device. A welcome and nice touch would be TV voice-control courtesy of Siri, similar to that on the xbox connect. As a final note is there are also reports claiming Apple is already working on its 42-inch+ HDTV so maybe this is the second drive of apple starting to push back on Google taking over our sitting room.
Either way I think the future of TV looks great!
Apple | 0 Comments »
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Loading ...Rumour has it
26. January 2012
turan
The ban of side placements of brand keywords search results in the US turned out to be just a rumour.
Google has confirmed that there was no change in policy with regards to the placements of brand keywords search results. Ads still can appear at the top, on the right hand side and at the bottom of the page. That applies to all countries.
Google suspects that the confusion with regards to the placements of the brand keyword searches came from the November updates. As of November ads that have previously shown to the side of the results started in some cases appear below them. The space on the side is taken over by maps, local business locations and Google +.
Google, Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...Focus on the User
26. January 2012
Faye
Since the launch of Search plus Your World, Google has increasingly come under fire for acting in its own best interests and edging out other social networks from its search results.
So much so that engineers from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have teamed up to create a new tool, or bookmarklet called ‘Focus on the User‘. by using this tool, which runs in chrome, Firefox or Safari. Users can see search results from a wide range of social networking sites from LinkedIn to Crunchbase instead of being automatically met with Google+ results.
How it works:
The bookmarklet’s creators had this to say on how it works
When you search for “cooking” today, Google decides that renowned chef Jamie Oliver is a relevant social result. That makes sense. But rather than linking to Jamie’s Twitter profile, which is updated daily, Google links to his Google+ profile, which was last updated nearly two months ago. Is Google’s relevance algorithm simply misguided?
No. If you search Google for Jamie Oliver directly, his Twitter profile is the first social result that appears. His abandoned Google+ profile doesn’t even appear on the first page of results. When Google’s engineers are allowed to focus purely on relevancy, they get it right.
So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+
Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Google announces privacy changes – no opt out
25. January 2012
Ben Romberg
Google plans to learn a lot more about who you are and what you do on the Web. The company announced plans to monitor user activity across its properties, Gmail, Youtube, Google+ and its search engine in an effort to better target its advertising.
Tug believes the aim is to directly compete with Facebook’s ad model which targets users specifically based on their interests and the personal details shared on the social network.
Google looks set to offer advertisers direct targeting of ads to audience/ demographics based on this collected knowledge of activity.
Consumers won’t be able to opt out of the changes, which take effect March 1st 2012.
“Google’s new privacy announcement is frustrating and a little frightening,” said Common Sense Media Chief Executive James Steyer. “Even if the company believes that tracking users across all platforms improves their services, consumers should still have the option to opt out — especially the kids and teens who are avid users of YouTube, Gmail and Google Search.”
Google, Integrated Search Marketing | 0 Comments »
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Link building in 2012: predictions and changes
20. January 2012
Carlo Pandian
As Google gets new updates and the algorithm becomes smarter, the job of SEOs has to modify its practices in order to keep up. As my main activity is link building I am always testing new ways to deliver great results and to anticipate trends. I strongly believe that social mentions and back links have an equal weight for rankings, saying that, I have compiled these suggestions to get the most out of your link building campaigns:
- When you are looking to publish a guest post for your clients or get a link, avoid evaluating your host with the old criteria: Page Rank, DA, MozRank. Nowadays it is more important if your contact has a good amount of followers and fans because you need to get tweets and likes out from your guest blogging activities.
- Make a good use of Social Bookmarking tools and open themed accounts for every industry you are working for. After that remember to bookmark all your links and articles out there. If you want to be more efficient organise a community of people that bookmark your content, that will make your content attractive for the search engine and it will be indexed quickly with good social signals.
- When you are doing guest blogging, maximise your effort. Tweet about a new post from the client social media account; ask the blogger to do the same and social bookmark everything.
- Establish online relationships and start multiple collaborations. I have a great new idea, which is to get in touch students with businesses they are interested to work for. This way you can really set up new ways of producing great content for free.
- As Google+ is definitely supporting the creation of personas (now you can connect articles to authors via G+) every business should choose a public speaker that can produce useful content for the web. It is something that was already in the sight as some companies started to use this strategy on Twitter for customer service.
If you want to talk about link building in 2012, drop me a tweet @tugagency
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0 | 0 Comments »
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Start a conversation in the Search results using Google+
19. January 2012
Nick
I’m starting to think that Google actually had a plan when they launched Google+ and even better than that – they are sticking to it and rolling it out bit by bit. OK it’s still early doors for Google+ but its starting to feel less of a flop than everyone was predicting.
I believe that Google’s new SSL search launched in the US, which makes searching anonymous when you are logged in to a Google property, is in fact a pre-emptive attack on any legislation in the future that might suggest that Google has too much data on an individual when all Google + plans are finally revealed…
The latest evolution is that you can now comment on a search result within Google+ How long before you can comment on the search platform itself…
Read more about Google’s integration of Search and Social here
Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Facebook Sponsored Stories in the News Feed
19. January 2012
turan
Facebook has begun rolling out Sponsored Stories in the news feed. The ads started rolling out gradually from the beginning of January, allowing brands to reach users whose friends have interacted with their pages – for instance with a like, a comment, or another action.
“You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to,” Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson confirmed. She added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”
The new ad placement could lay the foundation for Facebook to finally begin advertising in mobile.
Facebook, Mobile, Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Apple Education Announcement
19. January 2012
Nick
Rumours are spreading that Apple is going to digitize textbooks. The iPad will become the classroom’s computer – notebook – textbook(s). Seems like the right way forward to us. The announcement has just started in the US – will keep everyone posted with the latest that come out of it.
Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...SEO predictions for 2012 – The impact of social signals on rankings
16. January 2012
janina
Hello world of search!
This is my first blog post here at Tug. I’ve read quite a lot of SEO predictions for 2012, the most common being “Change of the search engine’s algorithm in favour of social signals”.
In my opinion this is a fairly safe prediction with Google heavily pushing their own social network Google+ (“Search Plus Your World”) and both Google and Bing having already confirmed that they take social signal into account. Even though we don’t know for sure how/if social signals have a direct impact on rankings there has been confirmation by some research that social signals have a correlation with higher rankings (but remember: correlation ? causation… There are some fairly plausible reasons why websites that are being liked, tweeted, +1ed etc. rank better even if those signal aren’t an offical ranking factor (e.g. they are usually updated more frequently). It would be interesting to measure this correlation and see if it increases over time.
So what will happen if social signals have more of an impact on SERPs? That probably depends on how big that impact actually is. Let’s just imagine that in 2013 Panda had devaluated most low-quality links and it has become harder obtain links that push the rankings. Social signals have become the new ‘link gold and all webmasters and SEOs put their efforts into getting those social signals to improve their rankings. Would this put a stop to SPAM like Google hopes? I doubt it, I think it would just take on another form. There will always be ways that those who chose to wear dark headgear will try to manipulate rankings by spamming. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a hunt for likes, +1s, comments etc. for rankings. Whilst this would not necessarily be a bad thing, just as some ways of link building are not (link bait, high quality directories, links earned by giving free stuff away or donating to charity etc.) there is always room for abuse. We already see competitions that can be entered by tweeting, liking etc. and I’m sure we will see more of that – much more. Whilst this will certainly be considered white hat, I don’t see why some people wouldn’t try to “buy” those signals from influential people in their industry (I assume authority will measure the value of those signals. No doubt if it happens we will get the benefit of many more tools and rankings that measure social signals)…
Another possibility I could see is that certain websites only allow you to access certain content of their site if you give like, +1, tweet (…) them, just as with paid for ‘pro’ content. In that case it might become hard to participate in a lot of stuff on the web for those who decide to not sign up on social networks (I’m sure there are still a lot of people who don’t like them for privacy or other reasons. Certainly not many people in the SEO industry but I’m thinking of the average Internet user).
It used to be keyword stuffing and then link spam that black hat used to manipulate their rankings. Of course I don’t know, but predictions are fun when you look back to them after a year and see what actually happened – whether you were right or wrong…
Pay Per Click (PPC) | 0 Comments »
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...WordPress Launches WordAds
13. January 2012
turan
A partnership between WordPress and Federated Media Publishing gives bloggers another monetization option, with an opt-in ad program available exclusively to WordPress.com bloggers, designed to rival Google’s AdSense.
The percentage of ad revenue paid to bloggers is unknown. In response to a question about how ad revenue is split between WordPress and publishers, founding developer Matt Mullenweg responded, “Our primary goal is to create something that rewards bloggers for their hard work and the quality of their work, and do so at a higher level than generic Adsense would, not optimize around a particular revenue share.”
To qualify for the WordAds program, blogs must be publicly visible and have a custom domain. Applying to the program doesn’t ensure acceptance; WordPress will choose participants based on the type of content, and traffic/engagement levels.
WordAds will be a welcome alternative for AdSense publishers affected by Google’s recent payment system/account interface bug and other issues that prevented timely payouts.
AdSense, Wordpress | 0 Comments »
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