Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » General

Are you a sweet tooth?

rainelda — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:00:04 +0000

It’s February already and all the supermarkets are full with flowers, heart shaped sweets and those big fluffy red hearts.

I remember working with make-up brands previously – we always created some ad copies for Valentine’s Day. Shops are now bursting with discounts and offers on gifts for him or her. Sweets are also everywhere. Just out of curiosity I wanted to find out what is more popular – sweets or beauty products through out the year.

I used the following terms to compare against each other:

Chocolate – the blue line
Make up – the red line
Sweets – the orange line
Fragrance – the green line

In January chocolate is the most searched one, but in general the searches are cooling off after Christmas and New Year.

In the mid of February chocolate kicks up and so does fragrance – obviously the Valentine’s Day effect.

Coming closer to April, chocolate searches start to kick again, as we all need to give someone that Maltesers chocolate bunny or a Mars chocolate egg (whatever makes you happy) – they start to appear in stores approximately the same time with Valentine’s sweets, which seems quite odd to me (if you don’t believe me, go to your local ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and check it out yourselves).

Chocolate searches start to drop down closer to summer time. Let’s admit, when it’s hot I think people crave for something fresh rather than a big chocolate bar. Well, at least the majority. Freshness – that’s where the fragrance industry steps in at the beginning of summer, offering a variety of different products: deodorants, body lotions, body mists, etc.

December is no surprise to anyone – chocolate Santa’s, Christmas trees and stars? Bring them on.

I must be honest and say that I wasn’t expecting chocolate to beat others so massively.

Now at least I know why I find people in the UK so nice and happy, as consumption of chocolate triggers the release of endorphins.

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How many social networks are there on the Web?

Carlo Pandian — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:43:51 +0000

At the beginning it was MySpace with a large community of music fans and bands sharing the same profile layout and functions. After that social networks have exploded in the market and now these can be divided by functions and objectives. If Facebook is the place for fun and for making contacts (that girl I met at the pub last night), then Linkedin does its job in providing career opportunities and taking care of my business contacts.

When Facebook started to decrease its market share in the States, some business analysts thought that more specialized networks would have space to grow. Since then other sites have started seeking my attention and begun to adventure into the crowded field of social networking sites.

On the 30th November 2011, Wikipedia lists 204 social networks currently providing active spaces for conversations, profiles and great organization services.

Here’s a selection of my favourites:

1) DeviantArt
It aggregates illustrators, photographers, painters, computer artists that share their works online.

2) TravBuddy
Community of travellers that share their experiences writing reviews about locations, attractions and special places that have visited.

3) SoundCloud
Looking for music producers and bands? This is the best place to discover the next coming star in the music world, it is a great source for independent stuff and a great marketing tool for every musician

4) Habbo
It started in 2003 and it has an amazing 3D pixel graphic design. It looks like an old school game where you can use an avatar to play a second life. Good luck with it!

5) Asmallworld
This unites the European jet set and the social elite worldwide. Many marketers use this for B2B leads. Members share similar backgrounds, interests and perspectives. Asmallworld offers memberships by invitations only

Any question or more on this, follow me on Twitter: @carlopandian

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Retail Search Volume Increases in Q3/2011 (But So Does Bargaining)

janina — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:15:17 +0000

Recent figures of the BRC (British Retail Consortium) and Google show, that in Q3 retail search volume in the UK has increased 35 % compared to the previous year. A main factor behind this is the continuing rise in mobile searches, which had already increased 216% in Q2 compared to 2010 and were up another 168 % in Q3 (year on year).

According to the organization Home and Garden related searches in July, Back To School related searches in August and Christmas related searches in September (no, I am not that organised neither but apparently people are) were the main factors that fuelled the increase over the past quarter.

And 10% of all retail searches were carried out on mobile devices.

However despite rising retail search volume actual online spending has dropped by 10%, which suggests that people put more time and effort into their research in order to find the best deals.

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TOP 3 tech CEOs to Watch – Who is going to succeed Steve Jobs?

Carlo Pandian — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:57:47 +0000

As many business analysts have underlined lately, Steve Jobs had great ideas and a unique way to communicate to his employees and customers. In particular it can be argued that he has created a philosophy around the Apple brand, with at the centre, technology that is first of all user-friendly (wasn’t this the main strengths of Mac since 80s?).
He definitely made possible the integration of different devices such as a music player, laptop, smart phone, and DVD player appealing to customers with a cool design and contemporary values.

Who is going to succeed Steve Jobs in the tech world? Which CEOs are going to inspire you with great innovations able to change people lives?
You would be wise to follow these four famous ones to get inspired and understand the future developments of digital:

- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
Despite his bad character as the movie depicts, he is pushing the social networking further as the last Facebook F8 update demonstrated. He has built a multi-national company around the social platform and he is always developing to increase revenues and to retain customers.

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon
With him, the online bookstore has been able to expand into new markets especially electronics and computers. He introduced the Kindle with great ecommerce techniques and effective marketing strategies.

– Larry Page, Google
He replaces Schmidt as CEO of Google since April 2011. Its company has been able to develop great products that are meeting customers’ expectations while fulfilling market demands. Its great research and development department called Google Lab is able to work on new ideas and spot-and-buy new interesting start-ups. If Facebook is really trying to penetrate into the search market next year how can they think to beat Google?

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Kindle goes Social with Android

rainelda — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:10:46 +0000

Either it’s on the tube while getting to work or sitting in the park, people are reading books all over the world. E-book readers are very popular these days and almost everyone is familiar with the Amazon Kindle.

Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader that uses the E-Ink electronic paper display that shows up to 16 shades of gray, minimizes power use and simulates reading on paper.

Recently Amazon announced that they will launch a tablet that most likely is going to be called “Kindle Fire”. The tablets are expected to sport a 7-inch backlit display. It has been designed by the same company that worked on BlackBerry’s PlayBook, Quanta. Being of the same form factor it’s possible that the two devices will look similar at first glance. The tablet is expected to be powered by a T1 dual-core OMAPchip and it could have a very limited on-board memory of up to 6 GB.

It is very clear that the “Kindle Fire” would be running Google’s Android mobile operating system.

The users of Android are expanding and they enjoy the Android Market, where it is easy to download different useful apps (and it’s for free), but it seems that users of the “Kindle Fire” would have to download and use applications directly from Amazon’s own AppStore istead of the Google Android Market. Amazon has gone into customizing the Android operating system for its tablets very deeply, so users won’t be able to make out whether their “Kindle Fire” is running on Gingerbread or Honeycomb.

Other features are planned for the “Kindle Fire” tablets as well. Initially there should be a WiFi version only and it looks like Amazon is negotiating with mobile carries, so it is possible that a 3G version will also be launched. Amazon is planning to work towards to integrate almost all of its services into the “Kindle Fire” tablets (including MP3 service, Kindle app for book reading and the Instant Video Player).

It is exciting to see how Amazon ties the Kindle reading app with extra social sharing capabilities on the “Kindle Fire” tablets, like it did for the web.

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Multilingual SEO: 4 reasons why not to rely on Google Translate alone

janina — Mon, 16 May 2011 13:05:32 +0000

So you have been doing SEO for the same client for a while and they have now asked you to do SEO for the very same product but for a foreign market. Easy you think. You have got your keywords and your next step would be to put all these lovely keywords into Google Translate and work with the results. Since German is my native tongue I can assure you that it might not always be the best idea. Read here why…

1.) It is not always accurate.

In the same way as looking up words in a dictionary does not always help to pick the right expression. “Second hand clothes” for example are “Kleidung aus zweiter Hand” in German according to Google Translate. Speaking German I can confirm this is correct. But so is “gebrauchte Klamotten” oder “Second Hand Kleidung”. The last one being used most widely for vintage clothes, second hand clothes etc. but this is what the tool does not tell you (the other alternative suggestion was “zweiter Handkleidung” which is hilariously wrong, suggesting something like “clothes for your second hand” but more about this issue in 3.).

2.) It is still weak on Grammar.

Yep, there is a reason why English has become THE world language (besides all the political reasons). It is an easy language. There are many exceptions to its rules but generally the rules are straightforward and easy. Only one article, nouns don’t change their endings according to position in sentence, straight forward word order in sentences. This is not the case in all languages. Especially non-Indo-European languages do work very differently in terms of word creation and sentence structure, which is where computerized translation becomes even more difficult. Usually very short keywords are fine but once they become a bit more long tail, things get a little bit more complicated. Let’s take German as an example again (unfortunately I do not speak any Non-Indo-European languages) the tool’s translation of a simple phrase like “How to make more out of your keywords” comes up with “Wie man mehr aus ihre keywords” which is something like “How one more of you keywords” – which does not sound right, does it?

3.) It sometimes still goes very wrong.

Again especially for the long tail key words. Although “I miss you” no longer translates as “Je Mademoiselle vous” into French (“I Miss [as in Mr., Mrs, Miss] you”) and despite many updates there are still limitations to this tool. Let’s say your client is a travel website and one of the main keywords is “Things to do in (New York)”. Although the suggested German translation “Dinge zu tun in New York” is not necessarily wrong, it is pretty useless as a keyword as people would not type it into Google when searching for what to do on their visit to New York. Or take “days out” as another example, which is a very simple, every day expression in English. The German Google Translate though “Tage aus” (days from) will definitely not get any traffic and only make people laugh.

4.) It does not reflect any cultural knowledge.

As the examples above have shown although words and phrases can be translated you still need to know which of the translations to choose. Even if you speak the target language a little bit there is still a lot that you don’t know about culture. “Fancy dress outfits for Halloween” can be “Verkleidung für Halloween” or “Kostüme für Halloween”. Both are right and both are suitable as keywords. But Google translate does not tell you that there is an even more important fancy dress event in Germany in February, the carnival, which probably gets even more search volume.

So, I guess the answer to what to do instead seems pretty obvious. The best thing would be to get a local involved at some point, even if it is just for cross checking and editing your Google Translations.

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Google Launch Chrome for a Cause

David — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 10:36:02 +0000

Google have launched a new extension for Chrome in which when you open new tabs – Google donates to charities. The charities currently involved are: The Nature Conservancy, charity: water, Doctors Without Borders, Un Techo para mi Pais, and Room to Read. The following is a breakdown of what gets donated for however many tabs:

10 tabs: 1 tree planted
10 tabs: 1 book published and donated
25 tabs: 1 vaccination treatment provided
100 tabs: 1 square foot of shelter built
200 tabs: 1 person’s clean water for a year

If you use the Google Chrome web browser on a regular basis, be sure to download the extension as soon as possible. Once you have installed the extension you will immediately start the scheme and you can keep track of how much you have contributed by clicking the chrome for a cause extension button. At the end of the day you will be able to choose what you are donating and to which charity.

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Blackberry Announce New iPad Tablet Competitor – The Playbook!

David — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:06:59 +0000

RIM have announced their new tablet competitor to the iPad, the Playbook. The Playbook is a new 7″ tablet with a new operating system known as QNX which RIM recently acquired, it will offer full OpenGL and Flash support along with important web standards such as HTML 5. Specifications wise, its very impressive – including a Cortex A9 Based Duel Core 1GHz CPU, 1gb of RAM, twin HD cameras (front facing 3meg, back facing 5meg) and more. There will be a 16gb and a 32 GB model at launch. Ports wise, it will have the all important HDMI connector, micro USB, WiFi and 2.1 Bluetooth. Looking at the interface, it seems to be a mash up of Palm’s webOS (with multi tasking cards) and Blackberrys traditional mobile operating system. There are no solid launch dates yet, all RIM have said is “early 2011″. We’ll keep you updated! Check out a preview video of the new tablet below or read more on the new tablet at Engadget:

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2010′s Best Global Brands!

admin — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 15:51:55 +0000

Click the link below to find out this years best global brands:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/news/1028788/best-global-brands-2010-google-goes-strength-strength/

I can’t say I’m surprised about who is number 1, but I can’t believe Apple aren’t mixing it with the big boys ( they are 17th)… I think it’s time to pull your socks up Apple!

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Time’s 50 Best Websites

Faye — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:51:58 +0000

Time unveiled its 50 Best Websites list this week. I love this stuff as there is always an unknown or two that creeps in there. Very surprised about the social media list though…no Foursquare in sight – totally gazumped by Gowalla.

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