Online Marketing

Google has introduced an iGoogle gadget capable of translating blogs and posts of 34 different languages and translate into a chosen one, so any person within those languages is able to read news from other places, in which most of the times wouldn’t have a clue of what’s written…

By using Google Translate, the user sets his language and Google does the hard job. But, really does? The list of the supported languages is: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Though, the very first example, posted 17-Dec-08 on the Official Google Blog, showed a lack of accuracy on the translation from Italian to English, small stuff, but how can we trust if we don’t know the other language??

Within the first news title above, “Como” is a name of a city in Italy, but also means “as” in English, such as Google translated below, quite a bad mistake when it deals with Google Transit.

Well, well, errors are everywhere, and sure Google also makes mistakes, but we still love’em, don’t we? Enjoy all the Google Blogosphere!

Cheers

If you wish to read the original Google post, click here.

- The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

- 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).

- 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).

- The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

Read more

According to comScore, their lastest data points  out 11 billion videos were seen last July (08), guess what? Yep, Google again, through its YouTube they have achieved over 5 billion videos on the web. Fox Interactive comes next almost reaching 500 million (so far, aren’t they??) and Microsoft comes 3rd with 280+ million. I guess it’s pretty clear how long is the trail for the competitors to find Google, if they still can even see Google far ahead. Congrats again G!

Most likely to reach stores in weeks time, Google’s G-Phone is under expectations considering the recent launch of the new iPhone. Innevitable to be compared with, G-Phone and iPhone are not on the same level, taking into consideration that iPhone was produced to a niche market very tailored to a certain goal, we might see frustation running around Google’s Android which by main goal is to enter the dreamy $50 billion market for mobile advertising that Eric Schmidt keeps talking about.

Extracted from Essentials Of Search Engine Submission, written by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch

How can I get my site listed with search engines? It sounds like a pretty simple question, but sadly, search engine submission can be a complicated subject.

Have no fear. This guide will take you through the essential and relatively easy steps you can take to get listed with search engines.

Before we begin, it’s important to make a distinction between search engine submission and search engine optimization. These terms, along with others, are sometimes used synonymously to discuss different efforts to promote sites on search engines. However, within this section of Search Engine Watch, they will be used to refer to some very specific activities.

Search Engine Submission: Getting Listed

“Search engine submission” refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Another term for this is search engine registration.

Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms, however. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist.

Think of it as a lottery. Search engine submission is akin to your purchasing a lottery ticket. Having a ticket doesn’t mean that you will win, but you must have a ticket to have any chance at all.

Search Engine Optimization: Improving The Odds

“Search engine optimization” refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms, especially with crawler-based search engines (later in this guide, we will explain what these are).

Returning to the lottery example, let’s assume there was a way to increase the odds of winning by picking your lottery numbers carefully. Search engine optimization is akin to this. It’s making sure that the numbers you select are more likely to win than purchasing a set of numbers at random.

Search Engine Placement & Positioning: Ranking Well

Terms such as “search engine placement,” “search engine positioning” and “search engine ranking” refer to a site actually doing well for particular terms or for a range of terms at search engines. This is the ultimate goal for many people — to get that “top ten” ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Search Engine Marketing & Promotion: The Overall Process

Terms such as “search engine marketing” or “search engine promotion” refer to the overall process of marketing a site on search engines. This includes submission, optimization, managing paid listings and more.

These terms also highlight the fact that doing well with search engines is not just about submitting right, optimizing well or getting a good rank for a particular term. It’s about the overall job of improving how your site interacts with search engines, so that the audience you seek can find you.

On To Submission

The next few “essentials” pages cover the basics of search engine submission. If all you do is follow the instructions on these essentials pages, you’ll receive traffic from search engines. However, if you have time, you should also read beyond the essentials to understand how optimization can increase your traffic and other ways you can market your site with search engines.

From The Official Google Blog, posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Designer

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon — after all, we hadn’t in 8.5 years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set. Here’s the full set:

The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting, so we thought we would share more of it here. We tried in total more than 300 permutations. It was much harder than we thought at first. We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block. We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself. Since we don’t really have a symbol that means Google, we felt it best to work with the logo and letters within it. Our design team tried literally hundreds of approaches. You can see some of our explorations here.

By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more
unified set of icons. However, we really value feedback from users and want to hear your ideas that we may have missed. If you have your own notions about the Google favicon, please send them to us. We’ll do our best to work them in, and maybe your idea will be the one that people see billions of times per day.

From the Official Google Website Optimiser Blog posted by Jon Stona, Website Optimizer Team

One question we get asked often is whether Website Optimizer will work with content-management system (CMS) platforms. The short answer is yes: if you get our JavaScript tags onto your pages, Website Optimizer will function with any tool you use to build, manage, or serve your pages.

Of course, there are use cases when a particular CMS platform’s architecture might make it less easy for you to implement Website Optimizer tests. With this in mind, we launched our global Technology Partner Program this morning, to call attention to those specific platforms that are certified as compatible with Website Optimizer.

Although you can still use Website Optimizer on non-certified platforms, our partners make it easier by offering specific documentation and technical support. They can also automate the process of adding Website Optimizer tags, so you can launch experiments faster than ever, with fewer dependencies on your IT team.

We see this program as a win for CMS providers and website-owners alike. CMS platforms of any size can offer their customers a powerful A/B and multivariate testing solution, which might have cost them millions of dollars to develop internally. Site-owners who build and manage their websites through these platforms can in turn launch Website Optimizer experiments more easily to help improve their conversion rates. And perhaps most importantly, the web becomes a more useful place for users since more web pages will be improved through customer input.

Another customer,LA.com has used Clickability’s platform to run A/B tests on their newsletter subscriptions page. They tested two alternate page designs against their original layout and content:

Original Page

Variation 1

Variation 2

By leveraging Clickability’s integration with Website Optimizer, the LA.com marketing team was able to build the alternate pages and launch their experiment in no time. And their first variation outperformed the original by over 18%, while the second actually did worse. All this insight, for minimal marketing and IT work.

If your current CMS provider isn’t yet a Website Optimizer Technology Partner, we encourage you to ask them to join; it’s a free and easy way for both of you to benefit.

Google Friend Connect lets webmasters add gadgets or applications that connect their sites to the social networks more easily.

Our readers might be getting a little tired of all our talk about the social web, but there is a fair argument for saying that the social aspect of the web has become an essential part of Internet searching and navigation during the last couple of years.

Google certainly thinks so, and is now facing the threat from the mighty Facebook with a new toolbox of its own.

Facebook has, as you probably know, added software plug-ins or applications that lets users add social interactivity to their Facebook home pages. These could, for instance, be quizzes, maps over countries you have visited etc.

Facebook is a closed system, though. An application developed for Facebook will not work on other social web sites.

Facebook apps for the rest of us

Google Friend Connect is an tool that lets web masters add functionality that will make their web sites more social, and that help visitors to add info that can be transferred to social web sites like Facebook and Orkut.

It is a preview release, meaning that only selected webmasters are allowed to make use of it at the present time.

Preprepared code can be used to help webmasters add

• User registration.
• The ability to invite friends from other social networks.
• Picture sharing and member photo galleries.
• Message posting and product reviews.

and more.

This means that you do not need to be a programmer to make your site more dynamic.

Gadgets from Open Social

Applications developed for other web sites may be used by you if they are made public on the Google Friend Connect website.

Within the framework of the Google Open Social network there have been developed a large number of such gadgets or applications.

The gadgets are put in an iframe on your web site, which means that they are separate web pages integrated into your web pages. Nowadays this is is technology that normally works well.

(The content within these iframes will not be spidered by the search engine spiders, however, a point to keep in mind if you add such apps to strenghten your search engine friendliness.)

Google adds that Google Friend Connect integrates with contact lists for social networks like Facebook, Orkut and Google Talk:

“This means users who join your site are instantly connected with friends who are already members, and can invite friends from other networks to visit. They can opt in to broadcasting their activities to friends in their social networks. A post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks, along with links leading to your site. These instant networks, combined with the wealth of OpenSocial gadgets, can form potent new online communities, very quickly and very easily.”

Click here to sign up for preview release.

Fully extracted from

Recently, changes to Google Trends have been noticed, and today Google is finally announced a new version of the tool on the Official Google blog. The latest version includes a numeric metric dubbed ‘relative scaling’ and the ability to export trends data.

With relative scaling, the numbers will not provide exact data, but will give you ballpark of how certain terms are trending. Here’s how Heej Hwang of the Google Trends team explained relative scaling:

You’ll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don’t refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you’ve entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period. So in the example above, 1.00 is the average search volume of vanilla ice cream from 2004 to present. We can then see a spike in mid-2006 which crosses the 3.00 line, indicating that search traffic is approximately 3 times the average for all years.

The export function offers two options: relative scaling or fixed scaling. Fixed scaling is data scaled to a specific timeline.

Previously, users noticed the removal of the ability to view trends hourly.

What do you think of the new Google Trends? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Fully extracted from Search Engine Watch written by Nathania Johnson