Using Google+ profile information, Google will be able to deliver more meaningful and customised content which is more tightly focused around an individuals interests. By understanding how individuals share and discuss content on the internet -e.g. they see which blogs you like reading-, Google can adjust its search results to show what you’re interested in.
2. Changing How You Get Traffic
Google have a +1 button which can be implemented on a wide variety of multiple points from your website, e-newsletters, sponsored Google advertising to YouTube. Video is a big factor as seen with Hangouts and Google TV. It makes sharing and recommending content even easier, especially seen with the integration of YouTube and Hangouts. This allows you to watch the video simultaneously with your friends and have a fun video chat with up to 10 of your friends!
3. Search Engine Optimisation
Google currently drives 90% of Australian search engine trafficand Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google has said they take into account social signals, such as Google+ as a factor in search engine rankings. Even though it’s still relatively new, it’s best to jump on board, create a profile and start updating it – as Google looks at your historical data in how they determine your rankings.
4. Social Gaming
Facebook is a big player in the area of social games with more than half of Facebook’s 700 million users on it every day. However with Google’s $100 million investment into social gaming company Zynga, Google have their eyes set within this area. For those businesses who want to enter into the gaming arena – Google presents a lot of opportunities to tap this whole new market.
5. Segmented Messages
Now that Google+ is available to users from 13 years old (it used to be restricted to those below 18 years old), companies are able to customise their messages over a larger demographic. This presents massive value to businesses for better branding as their messages will tie into their customers own preferences.
For example a fashion label will be able to show a new collection of dresses that are suited to females aged between 18- 25 years, and another collection of printed tees to males aged 15- 17 years.
Google rolls out their new feature for Social Integration called “Search, plus Your World” for google.com, but as of yet no indication as to when this will be rolled out to other countries Google search.
This is where Google+ will really have the opportunity to smash Facebook, especially in the area of business. It’s also why it is becoming increasingly important that all businesses have a well used Google+ business page. Facebook is still much more utilised for friends connecting with each other on a personal level. If people want to search for a business, they use a search engine, primarily Google. With the introduction of ‘Search, plus Your World’ we’re going to see Google results much more personalised from Google’s Social Network. And as we all know, seeing a friend who has endorsed something, or someone in your social circle offering a product or service your interested in carries much more weight in making a decision as to where to buy from than finding a business you know nothing about.
Like Google has done for many years with search, they look at your past history to help them determine if you’re important enough to rank well in Search results. This will be no different, so we’d recommend you start actively using your Google+ page , and inviting as many friends and business contacts as you can.
Find out more about Google+ in the video below, and stay tuned for further updates as they roll out. And please + 1 us for hints and tips to managing your Google+, SEO and Social Media.
Keeping up-to-date with the changes Google make to their algorithm is a challenge, especially when they make over 500 changes per year. Fortunately with Google becoming more transparent, they are now providing monthly updates to the changes made, and even adding code names in to help make them easier to reference.
Below are the 30 search quality highlights (with codenames!) for December taken from Google’s blog.
Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.
More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We improved our algorithm for picking sitelinks. The result is more relevant sitelinks; for example, we may show sitelinks specific to your metropolitan region, which you can control with your location setting.
Soft 404 Detection. Web servers generally return the 404 status code when someone requests a page that doesn’t exist. However, some sites are configured to return other status codes, even though the page content might explain that the page was not found. We call these soft 404s (or “crypto” 404s) and they can be problematic for search engines because we aren’t sure if we should ignore the pages. This change is an improvement to how we detect soft 404s, especially in Russian, German and Spanish. For all you webmasters out there, the best practice is still to always use the correct response code.
More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”] On domains other than .com, users have the option to see only results from their particular country. This is a new algorithm that uses several signals to better determine where web documents are from, improving the accuracy of this feature.
More rich snippets. We improved our process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets. As a result, you should start seeing more sites with rich snippets in search results.
Better infrastructure for autocomplete. This is an infrastructure change to improve how our autocomplete algorithm handles spelling corrections for query prefixes (the beginning part of a search).
Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.
Google Instant enhancements for Japanese. For languages that use non-Latin characters, many users use a special IME (Input Method Editor) to enter queries. This change works with browsers that are IME-aware to better handle Japanese queries in Google Instant.
More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”] We made a few improvements to how we determine what date to associate with a document. As a result, you’ll see more accurate dates annotating search results.
Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”] We’ve added new live results for NFL.com and ESPN’s NCAA Football results. These results now provide the latest scores, schedules and standings for your favorite football teams.
Improved dataset for related queries. We are now using an improved dataset on term relationships to find related queries. We sometimes include results for queries that are related to your original search, and this improvement leads to results from more relevant related queries.
Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”] Sometimes we fetch results for queries that are related to the original query but have fewer words. We made several changes to our algorithms to make them more conservative and less likely to introduce results without query words.
Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”] This change improves our result quality for lyrics searches.
Tweak to +1 button on results page. As part of our continued effort to deliver a beautifully simple user experience across Google products, we’ve made a subtle tweak to how the +1 button appears on the results page. Now the +1 button will only appear when you hover over a result or when the result has already been +1’d.
Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”] We launched a new Vietnamese spelling model. This will help give more accurate spelling predictions for Vietnamese queries.
Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.
Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”] This update refines how we handle Hebrew synonyms across multiple languages. Context matters a lot for translation, so this change prevents us from using translated synonyms that are not actually relevant to the query context.
Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"] We updated our SafeSearch tool to provide better filtering for certain queries when strict SafeSearch is enabled.
Encrypted search available on new regional domains. Google now offers encrypted search by default on google.com for signed-in users, but it’s not the default on our other regional domains (eg: google.fr for France). Now users in the UK, Germany and France can opt in to encrypted search by navigating directly to an SSL version of Google Search on their respective regional domains: https://www.google.co.uk, https://www.google.de and https://www.google.fr.
Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster
We’ll be adding these to our blog monthly along with all other updates, so please make sure you visit regularly to keep-up-to-date..
The area of online video is only going to get bigger. According to comScore’s October Video Metrix, which looks at online video viewing trends, Americans watched a total of 42.6 billion videos (a new record!), up almost 3 million since September. But regardless of where you’re watching, these findings are indicative that online video viewership is growing very rapidly, so incorporating videos into your online strategy may be a good opportunity for your business to effectively reach a larger audience.
Not only is the number of people viewing videos increasing, but the way social video is changing the way brands use online advertising. With the emergence and interlinking of social media e.g. implementing a YouTube channel onto your Facebook Business Page. This allows users to opt-in to view the videos on their own and encourages them to action such as sharing the video, liking it and/or commenting – which would then be shared with all their friends. A study by YuMe Video Advertising Metrics reports in 2010 and 2011 found that users are more than three times as likely to interact with a brand after the view, compared to pre-roll, on their Facebook Page.
So where do you watch your online videos? Check out the most popular places on the web here.
This is a very cool new feature for Google Maps. Although still only in the US and Japan right now, I hope to see it become available in Australia soon.
The new feature is starting to show interior maps of airports, shopping centres and retail stores in the US and Japan. In Japan transit stations are also mapped. Find out more in this video below. Businesses in the US can help growth of this by uploading their floor plans.
It needs to be noted though that Bing Maps came out with ‘Mall Maps‘ in December 2010.
