Though a cliché, any publicity is good publicity. History has been a witness to large and small, positive and negative publicity campaigns and stunts that affected fortunes and misfortunes of large and small corporations.

The past century belonged to the stoic print publicity campaigns. The current scene belongs to the fast moving sleek internet publicity trends.

What is Publicity?

In layman terms publicity is a deliberate attempt to make the public in general aware about issues, products, services or any other such matter that has direct or indirect relevance to their lives, using various media like print and/or electronic as well as social media.

In marketing parlance, publicity is a part of the marketing campaign that a company or organization undertakes to make their potential customers aware about their products, services or activities.

Press Releases are commonly used to disseminate information among different media. It answers the How, Why, What, Where, When and Who within the copy.

Since this blog post is all about Print Publicity and Organic SEO, we shall move on to what defines “Organic SEO”.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is a process aimed at improving visibility of a website on Search Engine Page Results using natural or organic methods like content writing and link building. Organic SEO employs unpaid and natural methods of attracting traffic to a website that has relevant information for the browsers.

Organic SEO can also take help of press releases to improve their search ranking by using relevant keywords within the press release copy. The copy again answers How, Why, What, Where, When and Who.

A case for organic SEO and print publicity connect!

Apart from press releases, the common ground between organic SEO and print publicity is content. Both aim for quality and relevant content for their readers or browsers.

The only difference between online press releases/content and print media press release and articles is the use of keywords. Organic SEO targets its potential traffic using keywords within the content and press releases, which is not possible in the print medium.

However print medium can aid organic SEO. Typically, when a person might come across some news in the morning newspaper, he/she decides to check how it has panned all over the world on the web. The web becomes a resource for search and further pursuance of news. And if a keyword appears within the online news, the chances of the traffic linking to the website go up.

Print publicity can and does affect the outcome of public opinion. A story in newspapers is often discussed on online forums and social networking sites. It becomes part of online conversation when it is liked, shared or tweeted, thus indirectly benefitting the organic links of a website.

Of course, this is only part of the story. Organic SEO require sustained efforts using multiple methods. Similarly print publicity does not depend only upon the press release or the news it generates. In the end how the organization delivers moves it forward on the journey towards success, organic SEO or print publicity notwithstanding.

Conclusion

Here, we can safely conclude that all media, be they print or electronic or social, have the power to influence the way news/links spread and further garners publicity. The optimal utilization of various means of communication ultimately lies with the people (Public Relations Company or SEO Company) who promote an individual/organization.

Neither can the PR machinery discard the print medium in an age of internet nor can the SEO ignore the indirect ëlinksí print sends in. Similarly, PR has to consider online campaigns to reach out to the potentials of their clients, while SEO’s have to be a part of the social media scene to be able to stay in the public eye!

The author Divya Rawat believes that sustained efforts are sure to reap rewards in the long term for all organic SEO Link Building Campaigns. She works as a Content Writer for the iNetZeal SEO Company.

The Web has changed shopping in a lot of ways. Easy access to an unprecedented amount of stores that will ship your purchase directly to me has made my Christmas shopping stress free. And it’s so much easier now to find gifts for those friends with really special interests. All of this is taken one huge step ahed with the Social Web.

Shopsquad

Shopsquad offers recommendations based on your actions on the site.

When you sign up, you are encouraged to go through a list of items in different categories and mark which items you own and which items you want. You also have the option to connect to your Facebook friends to share recommendations with them. And there is an option to follow other shoppers to see items they like or purchase.

The site offers shopping of all kinds in more than 20 categories. As you explore the site and make comments and connections, you unlock special discounts tailored for you.

Svpply

At Svpply, you sign in with your Twitter pr Facebook account and get the option to connect to your friends who are already on the site or to invite your friends to join.

You can browse categories and sort by a number of categories or see what your friends have liked. Items you want can be saved and/or added to sets to organize your finds.

Svpply showcases products of all kinds — for men and women.

Wanelo

At Wanelo, users post, collect and organize products and follow people and stores they like.

You can browse others’ finds and save them. You organize your saved products collections. Saving is like voting a product up – more saves means higher placement on the homepage. You follow users who tastes you like, and you get a feed of products they find online.

There are all kinds of items to browse, but mostly clothing and accessories and mostly for women. And yes, there is an option to connect to Facebook friends.

Daily Grommet

Daily Grommet enables you to shop while supporting what matters to you: whether it’s technical innovation, green or social enterprises, the creation of jobs, domestic manufacturing, or the preservation of craft.

When you find an item you want or like, you can share it with friends on Facebook or Twitter — or by email. You can also comment and discuss the items.

You can search or browse the products. There are choices for both ladies and gentlemen as well as a category for “Green & Eco Living”.

Storenvy

Storenvy is a social marketplace for products from independent sellers, each with their own little store on Storenvy.

You can browse all stores at once, save your favorite items for later and follow updates from your favorite stores and users.

You can log in with your Facebook ID or create an account. Once logged in, you can connect with your Twitter and/or Facebook friends.

There are all kinds of products for all kinds of people. You can search for products or browse by category. You can also browse “Markets”, stores grouped by topic.

photo credit: laverrue

Google Won’t Pause New Privacy Policy – Should They Have To?
SE Watch: In a lengthy response to EU regulators who had asked Google to hold off on implementing the new policy, Google makes clear the policy will take effect March 1, as planned.

Ex-Googler Laments the New Google
Beyond Search: Nelson of Nelson’s Weblog is “No Longer Loving Google, Inc.” Sour grapes? Perhaps not, as the ex-Google employee maintains he has defended the company many times since 2006.
What changed? The write up explains:

“This last month has been particularly hard for Google lovers. I took the company’s side in the Kenya mobile fiasco up until the company admitted that, indeed, employees were lying to steal customers from Mocality. Then the big stories about Google Search+ and Google’s new privacy policy. I think one is actively bad and the other is mostly harmless, but both changes are so complex and unpleasantly self-motivated it makes me sad. So now when I read about a friend getting terminated from AdSense with no explanation I just get a headache.”

Google Fined in France Because Google Maps is Free
SE Watch: A commercial court in Paris has ordered Google France and parent company Google Inc. to pay €500,000 ($660,000) in damages to Bottin Cartographes after finding the company guilty of unfair competition.

Creative Commons Search Engine
P Bradley: Need CC images, text, audio or sounds? Try the Search.Creativecommons engine.

Google “Myth Busts” Microsoft’s Privacy Claims
Marketing Land: That didn’t take long. Google has reacted to Microsoft’s ad campaign that slams Google’s forthcoming privacy policy changes with a mythbusting blog post.

Google Earth 6.2: It’s a beautiful world
Google Blog: We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface.

Google’s Privacy Dilemma: Damned If They Do; Damned They Don’t
Innovation Policy Blog: A few days ago, I received an email from an advocacy group alerting me to the fact that Google was causing trouble again on the consumer privacy front. Like any good Internet populist, I immediately went to sharpen my pitchfork and grab a torch to join the masses in public outrage. Unfortunately, my pitchfork was broken and I was all out of torches.

Russian Search Engine Yandex Extends Map Capabilities To 4 More Continents
SE Watch: Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, has expanded its mapping capabilities by purchasing a license for digital maps from NAVTEQ, the leading location provider service. In yet another move expanding their worldwide search services, Yandex has purchased a license for highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia, and developed countries in Asia to expand their Yandex.Maps product.

Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot
SE Land: According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl and index their websites.

DocJax
P Bradley: Docjax.com is a file based search engine, covering ebooks, xls, ppt an pdf files. It also proudly says that it provides access to 159,647+ free e-books and documents for downloading.

Online news portals get credibility boost from trusted sources
Eurekalert: When readers access a story from a credible news source they trust through an online portal, they also tend to trust the portal, said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. Most of these portals use computers, not people, to automatically sort and post stories.

Twitter – World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine!
smedio: Twitter receives a whopping 800 million search queries everyday. Prorate that for a month and it comes out to nearly 24 billion queries per month. That’s a hell lot of search traffic. In fact, it’s more than the combined search traffic of Yahoo and Bing.

Czech Republic Gives Google Green Light To Resume Street View
SE Land: Google will take photos closer to ground level to avoid photographing personal property over fences/walls. Google will give Czech citizens a method to demand that their property be removed from Street View.

An alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo
About: DuckDuckGo is a useful search engine with quite a few different search tools and features that can make your searches efficient, powerful, and relevant.

DropBox files may be indexed by Google
Google translation of post on the Norwegian site DinSide.

See also our search marketing news wrap-up!

Kill the SEO Bug!
SEO Book: You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one: “Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.”

Goldilocks SEO: Too Hot, Too Cold or Just Right?
State of Search: SEO Book has a nice set of infographics they are sharing. Like for example this one below. They show the different types of SEO tactics in several categories based on whether they are too hot, too cold or just right.

How to Craft a Privacy Policy for Your Website

Social Media Examiner: Regardless of whether site visitors read the terms and conditions, companies can’t overlook the creation of policies that set out how such information will be used.

Google Says Most Invalid Clicks Come From Publishers
SE Roundtable: Google AdWords representative, Laura, said in a Google AdWords Help thread that the main reason there are “invalid clicks” on ads is due to publishers.

The Super Simple Guide to Using and Marketing Through Pinterest – Part One
SE Guide: Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows you to collect images and links to things you like on the web.

Leveraging Pinterest: How “Pinnable” Is Your Content?
SE Journal: Most advice focuses on creating a presence on Pinterest and pinning your own products or content. This is a mistake. The real strategic opportunity is in optimizing your content for Pinterest.

Writing Google Places Reviews to Improve Rankings
SE Guide: Google Places has become an essential tool in increasing popularity of a business on the Web to attract local consumers. It is a huge opportunity for local businesses to get exposure, but ranking in Google Places does not happen automatically – and building reviews takes time (any effort to improve ranking should be measured in months not weeks).

Why Clients Make Irrational SEO Decisions
SEO Theory: Vanity keywords inspire “King of the Hill” games every day. Search engine optimization teams squander endless hours and resources fighting for “high value keywords” that companies absolutely have to own. If someone sees 40,000 monthly queries for an expression they assume they are losing money if they are not ranking first “because 40% of all people click on the first result”.

12 Steps To Optimize A Webpage For Organic Keywords
George Aspland, SE Land: In this article, I’ll outline the steps I take to optimize a webpage to try to improve organic search results; both increase rankings and improve click-throughs from the search listings.

Google: Robots.txt Files Must Be Smaller Than 500KB
SE Roundtable: Google’s John Mueller reminds webmasters on his Google+ page that Google has a limit of only being able to process up to 500KB of your robots.txt file.

What You Need To Know About Targeting iPad & Tablet Searchers
SE Land: Do tablet owners search? If so, how do they search, what do they search for, and is it different from desktop and/or mobile search? How can content owners and advertisers build content today to effectively engage this highly lucrative tablet segment?

Penalty for changing the title on too many pages?
Webmaster World: There were a few reports last year about ranking problems on sites that did extensive title tag changes – especially if it was done more than one time.

See also Social Media News Wrap-up

Tumblr Now Lets You Highlight Your Favorite Posts For A Dollar
techcrunch: With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important.

Google Blogger URL Redirects Censor International Users
SE Journal: The change, which deploys a country-specific URL to the Blogger platform, will allow Google to censor and remove content on a country-by-country basis similar to the new Twitter policy.

17 Facts About The People Who Waste Time On Facebook
Business Insider: Researchers with the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a national phone survey of Facebook users and just released a report on the findings.

Social Media Analytics: Relationships with End User Consumers
Beyond Search: Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The second installment focuses on the relationships between vendors and their end user consumers.

Sina weibo has more tweets/second than Twitter
Search Cowboys: At 00:00 23rd Jan, Sina Weibo reached a new record – 32,312 messages sent per second, which was about 7000 messages more than Twitter’s record – 25,088 in Japan during a TV screening of anime movie Castle in the Sky last December.

One studio accounts for 1/3 of Twitter DMCA takedowns
Neowin: Twitter recently released all of the DMCA takedown notices they have received in the past year. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the 4,410 claims reveal that a single studio, Magnolia Pictures, was responsible for a third of them.

Could Reddit Be the World’s Most Influential Website?
Blue Glass: Started in 2005, and currently owned by Condé Nast, Reddit boasts more than 1 billion page views each month. Though Reddit was once considered fairly obscure, the site is now making waves and becoming quite well known.

Pinterest Driving More Referral Traffic Than Google+
SE Watch: Numerous reports agree that unique visitors to Pinterest are skyrocketing, and that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.

Yahoo Lays Off Flickr Customer Service Team, Reportedly 12% Of Entire Staff
Marketing Land: In a blog post Monday, former Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill says that “Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr’s customer support” and says these were the people who knew about Flickr’s ins and outs “than anyone else on the team.”

StumbleUpon Kills Direct Links, iFrames Everything
SE Land: Having recently removed blogs, themes, and groups off the site, the new changes continue to move away from any focus on the site and more towards getting users back into the toolbar, whether iframed or installed.

Need a Cheat Sheet for Social Media?
SE Journal: Well, Flowtown made a fantastic one and we want to share it with you. Now obviously many of us do not need this cheat sheet, but there are plenty of people that do! Like clients and parents.

Facebook By The Numbers – What Its IPO Means
Heidi Cohen: Thus it’s no surprise Facebook could be worth between $75 and $100 billion based on the numbers released in their IPO filing. A deeper look into Facebook’s data and financials reveals insights into their future prospects of interest to users, marketers and investors.

Social media more addictive than booze and cigarettes.
Discovery: Led by Wilhelm Hofmann, a team from Chicago University’s Booth Business School conducted an experiment using BlackBerry devices to test the will power of 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85 in the German city of Wurtzburg.

How Google+ Can Win: Make Publishing Universal
TechCrunch: One area where Google+ seems have gained traction is public sharing and broadcasting – a la Twitter. It has been impressive to see Google execute nimbly by adding multiple features to emerge as the iPhone of publishing platforms.

See also our search engine news wrap-up!

By Guest Writer Lior Levin

What We Already Know about Google and Google Plus

Google+ has been an important part of helping content rank higher in a Google search long before the controversy over Search+. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, “Social Search results have, since October 2009, allowed content from people you know to rank higher, if you’re logged in.”

With the rising popularity of Google+, a presence on Google+ can help you rank higher in search results. If customers A and B are friends, but only customer B is following you on Google+, you could appear higher in customer A’s search results because of your common connection with customer B.

Sullivan adds in his article, “Google has previously said that gaining +1s can help improve your ranking for those who have directly +1ed your content, as well as for those they are connected to. In addition, it can show even those who aren’t connected or using +1 an overall count for your page, should it appear for them naturally.” This integration of social search elements hasn’t caused too much of a stir until Search+ added a new wrinkle.

Putting Google+ on Top of Search Results

The key development with Search+ is noted by Erin Everhart of 352 Media Group: “The catch is that it [Search+] only factors in your Google+ social graph, leaving Facebook and Twitter, arguably the more active social networks, out in the cold.” Though more users are ranking content socially through Facebook, Google+ activity, at least for now, seems to have a greater impact on rising in search rankings.

According to Tim Carmody of Wired, part of the struggle is between Google+ and Twitter since Social Search prioritizes Google+ pages over Twitter pages. He writes, “Meanwhile, a ‘+username’ search is immediately recognized by Google as a search for a Google+ account — even though ‘+’ has a similarly well-established history as an operator in keyword searches. (In Google+ itself, typing ‘@username’ immediately converts to ‘+username.’)”

Carmody adds, “The company that conquered web search with a fast, objective algorithm that provided users with more relevant search results than anyone else is increasingly upending that approach to push its own products.” The key implication here is that a company’s presence on Twitter and Facebook won’t produce the same return as a presence on Google+.

The Challenge of Google Search+

Through the introduction of Search+, Google has created an environment where greater influence can be wielded through Google+. According to Nancy Messieh at Next Web, “Google+ power users will have a direct effect on search results, a consequence which could prove to be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, if you trust your Google+ network, your Google Search results will become even more relevant. On the other hand, could some of those search results be skewed based on an influential user you follow? It’s quite likely.”

The question boils down to what is most relevant. If the most relevant search content can be found on someone’s Facebook page, you’re out of luck with Google’s Search+ as a search engine according to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. Provided that Google stays on this course, there are serious implications for marketing teams and business owners.

The Implications of Search+ for Marketers

Your Google+ page could be at the top of the search rankings of your connections’ friends, and therefore Google+ becomes a kind of SEO short cut in some instances. In addition, if you provide a share button for Google+ on your website, you can gain more attention for your blog or web pages.

Google+ pages for yourself and your brand need to become an integral part of any SEO strategy now. In addition, Erin Everhart writes, “Search+ essentially forces brands to use their Google+ pages much like their own website. That means brands should integrate their main keywords into Google+ posts to increase their relevance in important searches. But again, this must be done in a natural, non-spammy manner.”

Local SEO may take the biggest hit with Google’s Search+, as personal results take up the top search spots, crowding out local results in some tests. This means that businesses that rely on local search results need to build local connections on Google+ in order to remain on the radar of Search+ results.

Whether Search+ provides more authoritative search results or merely waters down the relevance of Google’s search results, companies will need to seriously consider how to integrate Google+ into their search engine strategies. There’s a new way to rise to the top of Google’s search results, and it’s yet another social network.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that convert psd to html formats, and who also consults for an inspection company that specializes in Pre shipment inspections.

photo credit: dgray_xplane

When preparing this week’s search and social news wrap-ups, we found an endless number of blog posts and articles about Google’s social network Google+.

Google Plus links appear in Google ads, as links on web sites, as invitation to coversations in Google search results, and — above all — as regular, “personalized” search results in Google search.

It is abundantly clear that Google is now willing to do anything to force both searchers and search engine marketing people to establish a presence on Google+. The goal is clearly to turn it into one of the major social sites on the web.

You might say that since Google owns the Google search engine, it must be allowed to do whatever it likes with the search results.

Maybe. What worries us, though, is that this does not make much sense business wise, either.

Here is why: Google’s success is founded on quality.

Google won over long forgotten search engines like AltaVista and Excite because they constantly focused on helping the searcher find what he or she was looking for. AltaVista, for instance, lost because it stopped working on the search algorithm, focusing on building a portal instead.

Now Google is sacrificing the quality of its search result by including links to inferior content on Google+. These links appear above much more relevant pages from Twitter and Facebook.

To me it does not matter if the relevant Google+ pages link to Twitter and Facebook. I do not want to be forced to take a detour via Google+ to get to the most relevant results. Nor do I want to be forced to establish and uphold a company page on Google+ just because Google controls the mighty Google search engine.

It is true that history never repeats itself, but there is something about human hubris that make people do the same mistakes over and over again. By sacrificing quality on the altar of market dominance, Google may — like AltaVista before it — soon find that the searchers go elsewhere.

Ironically, this time it is the old monopolist, Microsoft, who provides the most likely alternative: Bing. Search engines like Duck Duck Go and Blekko may also benefit from the strategic errors of Google.

Here are some of the search related articles we have found interesting lately, including some very interesting posts about Google+ and the quality of Google search results:

The Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up

Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
Danny Sullivan: The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of being a search engine.

Google+ Spreads to AdSense, Will It Spread to the Whole Web?
Battelle: I’m thinking Google can differentiate itself by not acting like Facebook, but instead allow any advertiser to integrate “+1? into their ads, regardless of where that ad runs – be it a direct buy on ESPN, an independent web player like FM, or, as seen above, a buy on Google’s own AdSense service.

How Google+ Could Threaten Google’s Core Search Business
SE Watch: Antitrust implications aside, are searchers, in fact, better off for having personalized results in their search results? As Manjoo states, the reason we turn to a search engine is to get the collective view of all Web users, and that has worked particularly well until now. “Not once”, he says “did I get to a Google results page and lament that I couldn’t see my friends’ ideas about the car I should buy or the hotel I ought to book.”

Google Keeps Mum on Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet
Google Watch: Ever since Facebook Product Director Blake Ross unveiled his Don’t Be Evil bookmarklet, which uses Google’s search indexes to show what Google Search, plus your world would look like if it included results from Facebook, Twitter and other sources, the tech world has been waiting for Google to respond.

Pandia’s comment: The Don’t Be Evil Video demonstrates clearly that Google is now clearly favoring inferior Google? pages to much more relevant profiles from Twitter and Facebook in search results. In other words: The company is sacrificing search quality on the altar of Google+ promotion. That is a serious strategic error, as people use Google because of its perceived quality, not on its ability to deliver relevant social results.

Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
SE Land: Two weeks ago, Google launched Search Plus Your World. Since then, Google has faced strong criticisms that SPYW is making its search relevancy worse and favoring its Google+ social network too much. Not so, says Google search chief Amit Singhal.

Google choosing between advertisers and searchers. Guess who is losing?
VentureBeat: Now, with the introduction of Search Plus Your World earlier this month, Google has shown us it may believe it has enough clout that it can more or less ignore its original customers, the individuals who use search engines to find relevant content. Instead, it appears intent to focus on building its marketplace, expanding its audience, and delivering ever-better results to advertisers — even if that means degrading the experience to search engine users.

Google to Shut Down Picnik, Social Graph API and Urchin, Open-Sourcing Sky Map
SiliconFilter: The program that Google’s users will likely miss most is Picnik, which was among the first web-based online photo editing tools.

“Ask On Google+” Links Appearing In Google’s Search Results
Search Engine Land: Now Google’s encouraging people at the end of its search listings if they “Want to ask your friends about” what they were Googling.

Google+ Invades Earth
All Things D: The search giant has rolled out the latest version of Google Earth, and while it boasts much improved graphics, the big enhancement to take note of is its integration with the company’s Google+ social networking and identity service.

When Larry Met Sergey – Interactive Infographic
Online PhD made a interactive infographic which starts with “When Larry Met Sergey”. The guide, embedded below takes you through the history of Google highlighting al the major milestones starting at the moment that Larry (22) and Sergey (21) meet at Stanford University in 1995 when the internet just had 16 million users.

Created By Online PhD

Russian Search Engine Yandex Adds Face Recognition Technology
SE Watch: Russian search giant Yandex has added facial recognition technology to its photo hosting service, Yandex.Fotki.

New iGoogle Layout Live For Some
SE Roundtable: The new iGoogle is less colorful, and more the new bland white dull feeling of the new Google look throughout the various properties.

Professor Resigns From Stanford To Launch Online Education Project
Slashdot: “Professor Sebastian Thrun has given up his Stanford position to start Udacity — an online educational venture. Udacity’s first two free courses are Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car.

Udacity teaches you to build a search engine in seven weeks!

Find hotels by travel time
Google Inside Search: Last year we introduced Hotel Finder, an experimental tool to help you find hotels, and today, we’ve extended its functionality with a new way to search: ‘Hotels by Travel Time’. Now if you go to Hotel Finder and enter [Empire State Building] in the search box, you’ll see the hotels that you can get to by public transport within 20 minutes.

SOPA Is Dead: Smith Pulls Bill
Mashable: Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, the American online anti-piracy act, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.”

Google Public Alerts: Innovative System Provides the Public with Emergency Alerts
SE Journal: Google launched its new Public Alerts page, which provides emergency information and warnings related to floods, tornadoes, winter storms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.

Google Exposed: Federal Government Used Con Man in Google Sting Operation
SE Jorunal: The Wall Street Journal recently published an article that provides additional details of last year’s sting operation against Google AdWords. The federal investigation, which alleged that Google was aware of online pharmacies illegally selling drugs such as Steroids, HGH, Oxycontin, and Ritalin to individuals without prescriptions, used a convicted felon by the name of David Whitaker to build a strong case against Google.

Is Google Selling Investors Private Search Data?
SEOBook: Private investors get to see that search data before anyone else does. If you have a retirement plan invested in stocks, then you are at an asymmetrical information disadvantage because Google is providing an in-depth look at that search data to competing investors who can trade on the information before it is public.

Your Privacy On Google: Don’t Panic, Do Think
Discovery: Alarming news arrived this week about your privacy online. Your Gmail messages, your YouTube viewing habits, the Google Maps directions your Android phone provides and numerous other online activities will get fed into a giant algorithm that shapes the search results you see on Google — as if one company were seizing control of all those products!

EU Releases Broad Internet Privacy Recommendations
Inside Google: The recommendations include allowing users access to their personal data, creating a single international protection agency for complaints from Internet users and establishing rules for prosecuting crimes involving data.

Google Search Showing Results For Punctuation Marks
SE Land: Alex Chitu reports Google is now showing search results for punctuation marks and other types of symbols. In the past, Google ignored most punctuation marks and didn’t show any results for them that were useful. Now Google is.

Drop-Box files can be indexed by Google
Link to Google translation of Norwegian site Din Side: File sharing tool DropBox’ Public folder is actually open to the search engines and its content may be indexed by Google.

See also today’s social media news wrap-up!

Twitter Now Able To Censor Tweets, If Required By Law, On A Country-By-Country Basis
Danny Sullivan: So far, Twitter tells me that virtually all of the tweets it has had to pull have been due to complaints filed through the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Like Google, it has already been filing requests it receives to remove content with Chilling Effects.

Greplin: Search your Social Timeline
State of Search: “Personal search engine” Greplin is one of the social search engines which tries to grab a part of social search. It looks through your social accounts to find that one message or topic you lost or couldn’t remember who said it.

10 Things Facebook is doing that will guarantee its future dominance
memeburn: Despite the numerous stories one continues to read about people planning a mass exodus from Facebook, however, the global growth stats continue to boggle the mind month after month, with 1-billion Facebook users starting to look more likely sooner rather than later.

A woman’s world: How social media has changed gaming
memeburn: A recent study conducted by PopCap Games (most famous for Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled) found that women were the most active gamers on social networking sites, making up over 55% of gamers.

TwitWipe Allows Room for Regret
Beyond Search: A service created in 2009 by Aalaap Ghag is becoming popular with Twitter users. The service, TwitWipe, allows users to easily erase all of their previously posted Twitter messages.

What your online friends reveal about where you are
New Scientist: “You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behaviour,” says Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester in New York. He has developed a system for predicting a Twitter user’s location by looking at where their friends are. The tool can correctly place a user within a 100-metre radius with up to 85 per cent accuracy.

This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post
SocialBeat: Counting registered users instead of daily active users tells us nothing about the popularity of the service. Think of the millions of people who’ve registered for Google+ but never use it. Second, given the huge popularity of Google search, Gmail, and YouTube, it’s actually surprising that so few people who have registered for Google+ are using those more popular services on a daily basis — only 60 percent.

FBI plans social network map alert mash-up application
BBC: The FBI is seeking to develop an early-warning system based on material “scraped” from social networks.

Google+ Lowers Their Age Requirement to Allow Young Teens
Marketing Pilgrim: Google+ has just lowered their minimum age requirement from 18 to 13. Young teens everywhere couldn’t care less.

Reddit On The Rise While The Decline Of Digg Continues
Marketing Land: Reddit referrals rose 360% from 2009 to 2011 while Digg traffic dropped to 4.6 million in 2011 – just 14% of the referrals the site was sending 2 years ago.

Google+ is now allowing nicknames, pseudonyms & more
SocialBeat: Up until now, Google+ users were supposed to only use their given-by-their-parents-on-a-birth-certificate names, which might have worked well for a lot of normal social-web users accustomed to that policy by Facebook-driven norms.

Can Facebook Save Digg From Being Buried Alive?
Brent Csutoras, SE Journal: So can Facebook be the savior Digg needs to keep them relevant and profitable, or is this just another failed attempt for a company watching the social media space move on without them? Well I can tell you they are not making any fans by forcing people to Facebook when they try to visit the site, that’s for sure.

Google keeps Pushing: Your New Google Account is Automatically your G+ Account
State of Search: Now if you decide to get a Gmail account you won’t have to sign up separately for all the other services anymore. Your Google Account is now also your Google+ account, your YouTube account and other Google products.

Bye Bye Summify:Twitter Acquires Social News Aggregator
SE Journal: Twitter announced that they are acquiring the Vancouver-based social new aggregator Summify. Summify, which was founded in late 2009 as ReadFu, summarizes the stories that are shared on the popular social networks and other news sites.

When Is The Best Time Of The Day To Blog?
socialfresh: We have looked at best times to publish for Twitter as well as the best publish times for Facebook.

Google+ lets you start a conversation directly from search results
Econsultancy: Google rolled out yet another new feature for Google+ that lets you start a conversation directly from search results – and contribute to a topical Google+ stream.

Want More Clicks on Twitter?
SE Journal: The infographic is by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot. This IG a lot of great recommendations if you are looking to increase your clicks on Twitter. I especially liked the suggestions on using words correctly and the use of action words. I guess I will be tweeting more on the weekends too.

See also today’s search engine news wrap-up!

Google Revamps Submit Content Page
SE Land: Google has updated their URL submission tool page and redesigned their Submit Your Content page.

7 Tips for Landing Page Greatness
SE Watch: Creating a great landing page is a critical step in the conversion funnel. By viewing the page as a speed bump in the conversion process rather than an information dump, you’ll find users will be inclined to move onto the next step, and they’ll do so because there is less friction.

Pew: 19 Percent Of Americans Now Own Tablets, eReaders
Marketing Land: After a big holiday season the percentage of people owning eReaders and tablets has nearly doubled — from about 10 percent in early December to 19 percent in January. The data were compiled from several telephone surveys the Pew Internet Project conducted between late November and January.

Tips on How to Help Uninteresting Pages Rank Better
SEOMOz This video was done by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. He has some fantastic tips on how you can help the boring pages of your site rank better.

Are You Keeping Secrets From The Search Engines?
Rick DeJarnette: So many websites invest in pretty web design with little-to-no thought on whether or not the search engine crawlers can access and interpret the meaning of that pretty content. This is really about down-level strategies, aka graceful degradation, for search.

New: Test Sitemaps & Features In Google Webmaster Tools
SE Roundtable: Two new features in Google Webmaster Tools: the ability to test sitemaps before submitting them to Google and testing crawlers specifically for Googlebot-Mobile.

See also this week’s search engine news wrap-up!

Google has revolutionized the Internet in many ways and shopping is just one of them. The easiest thing to do when you want to buy something is to search that product on Google. That will allow you to view reviews of the product, compare prices from different stores and make the best choice.

By Pandia Guest Writer James Lander

Google uses two strategies to help users save money:

1. Google AdWords – Google’s online advertising program.

2. Google search – The Google search engine.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords was conceived as a program that would allow companies to insert their own ads and keywords when promoting their products and have their ads displayed only when a user searches for one of the mentioned keywords. This would ensure that the ads actually reach an audience that is interested in the promoted product not just the people that reach a page by mistake.

This is considered a much better method than forced advertising, which relies on inserting an ad on as many sites, and pages as possible, hoping a user would eventually click on it.

Google ads may also appear on web sites who have signed up with Google’s AdSense program. Google will analyse the content of the relevant web pages and try and deliver ads that are relevant to that content.

Note that Google’s success relies on them being able to deliver ads that are useful to the consumer. They want people to click on the ads, since you — as an advertiser — pay for each click. If people find the Google ads useful, they will continue clicking on them, which is a win-win-win situation – for Google, the advertiser and the consumer.

Because of this, buying Google ads on a large scale requires some skill. The highest bid does not automatically bring you the top position in the ad section of Google search engine result pages. However, with some practice you will be able to write ad texts and designing landing pages that make people happy.

Google Search

The Google search engine allows consumers to search for reviews of a product to find out the ups and downs of the product before pulling out the wallet.

Being the search engine with the highest number of indexed pages, Google ensures that once you type the keywords and hit the “Search” button, you’ll have everything at your fingertips: forums, blogs, review sites and online stores – all in one place. Information is money and Google is well aware of that, so giving you access to all the information you need to make the right purchase Google allows you to save money.

By developing web sites and blogs that contain content that is relevant and useful for searchers, you may get Google exposure for free. That is: Instead of having your web pages listed in the ad section, you can get them listed in the regular “organic” search results.

Note that Google also has its own dedicated shopping search site, called Google Product Search.

Under the hood

Google uses two main methods to index content: its own basic algorithm and methods for combatting “spam”, i.e. adjustments made to the basic algorithm compensating for attempts made by webmasters to manipulate search results.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the easiest method someone could use to take advantages of search engines. Using some words of phrases that describe the products repeatedly, people can boost up their products in the search engine rankings.

There have been cases, however, of promotional texts consisting of keywords only that were irrelevant to the reader but were destined to attract the attention of search engine. Google’s response to this was the use of its own algorithms to filter out spam content from true genuine content. Therefore, the Google search engine ignore pages that are filled with keywords without actually having the content a real user would look for.

The presence of relevant keyword phrases is only one of many factors determining the ranking of web pages. Note that the number of links pointing to a page has a great effect — especially links from important and popular “authority” sites. The logic is that good content will attract links. They are a sign of quality. Any good search engine optimization strategy therefore includes a plan for how to attract links in a natural way.

Lately Google has started paying attention to exposure on social media sites — especially its own Google+ network. The borderline between search engine marketing and social media marketing is therefore becoming blurred. Note that even if a link in a Twitter stream may not have much effect on your ranking in isolation, it may increase the interest in your site, leading to more links from regular web sites.

The road ahead

There’s no real prediction of what Google will do in the future to take things to an upper level but, as seen in the past, Google can always surprise us.

Will it be the most sophisticated feedback and review system? Will it be the biggest online store? We can never know, but one thing’s for sure: Google helped consumers save money and will continue to do the same. Until then, it’s all about seeking information, reviews and finding the shop that has the best offer – all this with the help of Google.

Reference

Google Adwords

Fashion Business Today

7 Almost Unknown Google Search Engines You Should Use

This post was written by James Lander of couponing site, Couponing. The site strives to provide consumers with the most authoritative information on retailer coupons and couponing.

You might also like

Why Google Is Like Wal-Mart

Analysis: How Google Has Changed Our Lives

How the Internet Revolutionized Shopping

See also Pandia’s Shopping Search Portal.