Google Video gets a new face

Google has given its service, Google Videos, a fresh look by customizing many of the features. The new look of the video search engine of Google is supposed to be more user friendly and has many new features. Now we have a time line that helps you search for Hot Videos, Most Blogged, Most Viewed, Most Shared and Movers and Shakers for any specified day. There is a dateline and all you need to do is select a date.

In the bottom you will find the featured videos. Video views can also be viewed in three different ways – list view, grid view and TV view. The TV view allows the users to view the video on the home page itself. Google has said that it wants the features to be more easy and the service to be more accessible.

There might be and indeed is the hidden agenda of capturing the online video market, which is predicted to witness a tremendous growth in the next few years. You might get a clue from the promoted videos and featured videos as how the big guns are making money with online videos.

Official Google Video Blog: Google Video gets a facelift

Social Media Optimization – Web Analytics and Video Analytics

Continuing with content communities and blogs, today I will talk about something really interesting that You Tube has come up with. It’s called You Tube Insight. ‘You Tube Insight’ is a video analytics tool – just like you have web analytics tool. With the help of this facility now you can get all the relevant statistics about your videos that will help you know your viewers better.

The web analytics tools are quite helpful when you are promoting your business online. They give you accurate information on who is watching your website and all the necessary details like the time spent by each viewer, how they arrived at your site, what are the searches that they are making etc. The same applies for video analytics tool – who is watching your video and what do they like or dislike? Did that ring a bell with you? Not yet? Think about your potential customers – you might have some of them in the people watching your videos on You Tube.

With the help of Web Analytics tool on your blogs and with the help of the You Tube video analytics, you can track various necessary details about your viewers and approach your target market with a well chiseled marketing strategy.

Social Media Optimization – Forum

The last post talked about blogs, and how blogging plays an integral role in social media optimization. To give a quick recall –

Blogs are more like mini websites that anyone can own and maintain. Blogs can be used by organizations and businesses to promote their products or services or also the company at large. Usually blogs have a very personal tone. This also helps in establishing a friendly relationship with readers, customers or casual visitors.

With blogs you can

1. give industry updates to your regular readers,
2. get as close as possible to your target audience or potential customers.

In this post, we will discuss forums and how they can be used for the purpose of social media optimization.

Forums are probably the very first kinds of social media sites. A forum is basically a platform where people of the same interests or varied interests can come and voice their opinion, share knowledge or indulge in chit chat about various topics. Most of the times, the forums are dedicated to a particular vertical/ industry/ field or any particular topic.

Usually the purpose of having a forum is to share and accumulate knowledge and point of view on a particular topic. The most common topic of discussion in forums are automobiles and the auto industry. However, one can have or join a forum of on any subject or theme and enjoy participating in it.

How can forums be used for social media optimization? Forums can be really helpful in your attempt to promote your products / services / organization or site. You can join a forum or start your own forum dedicated to your industry and encourage people to participate and give their input in different ways.

Through forums, you can –

1. Promote your products / services / organization or site.
2. Make people aware about your products and offerings
3. Impart knowledge and know-how
4. Gain an insight on what your competitors are doing
5. Get to know what your customers or potential customers need and expect
6. Assess the popularity of a certain product or service
7. Get expert opinions

Basically you can give and take information through a forum and speak to real people, related to your industry in different ways and get to peep inside other’s minds too. This is also the platform where you can speak about your existence or inform about your new range of products or you can simply give industry updates and stay hooked.

Social Media Optimization – Web Analytics and Video Analytics

Continuing with content communities and blogs, today I will talk about something really interesting that You Tube has come up with. It’s called You Tube Insight. ‘You Tube Insight’ is a video analytics tool – just like you have web analytics tool. With the help of this facility now you can get all the relevant statistics about your videos that will help you know your viewers better.

The web analytics tools are quite helpful when you are promoting your business online. They give you accurate information on who is watching your website and all the necessary details like the time spent by each viewer, how they arrived at your site, what are the searches that they are making etc. The same applies for video analytics tool – who is watching your video and what do they like or dislike? Did that ring a bell with you? Not yet? Think about your potential customers – you might have some of them in the people watching your videos on You Tube.

With the help of Web Analytics tool on your blogs and with the help of the You Tube video analytics, you can track various necessary details about your viewers and approach your target market with a well chiseled marketing strategy.

Social Media Optimization – Content Communities

After blogs, forums, what else can we use for social media optimization? Actually the list is still quite long and picking the third one from the list, today we are going to discuss about content communities in our series of social media optimization.

What are content communities? Although, most of us, especially those who are into online marketing and online promotions, are using them almost everyday, yet only some of us know that these sites are categorized under one name – content communities.

Content communities are sites where you can upload, accumulate, syndicate content and information. The content can be both of personal nature and of general interest. By content, we don’t mean just written material, we also have content communities that’s got to do with images, photographs or anything that can be broadly classified under content.

Three most popular examples that come into my mind right now are Digg.com, You Tube and Flickr.com. These are just two of the numerous content communities. Some more that I can think of are – Reddit.com, Stumble upon etc.

Now, let us see how one can use these content communities in social media optimization. The content communities are a great way to get up close and personal with your customers and clients.

1. You can get into details like what your target customers like/ dislike. This will help you strategize your approach and advertisements aimed at your customers.
2. You can find out what do they think about your products / services in communities and threads. This will be a good source of feedback.
3. You can participate in these communities and try to bend your customers towards you.

There are many ways content communities can be helpful in social media optimization. In fact, when used with the right strategy, content communities can help you reap great benefits from your social media optimization plan.

Social Media Optimization – Blog Away to Success

In my last post, we discussed what are social media optimization and its benefits. How it is a holistic approach to popularity and promotion in a number of ways. Now, I will delve deeper into the topic and take up different ways of going about social media optimization.

In this post, we will discuss how blogging can help in social media optimization.

Blogging is no more a new concept. The whole world seems to have woken up to this amazing way to voice individual opinion. Blogs are more like mini websites that anyone can own and maintain. But more than that, it seems to have become the platform where you can place any thing that you want to show or express to the entire world.

Blogs can be used by organizations and businesses to promote their products or services or also the company at large. It can also be used as a side track to your business where you can delve deeper into the field or vertical that you are into or that is related to you.

In blogs, you can have as personal a tone as you want to or you can get as professional as you would like to. Usually blogs have a very personal tone. This also helps in establishing a friendly relationship with readers, customers or casual visitors.

With blogs you can do any thing you want for the purpose of SMO

1. You can give more knowledge in the subject matter – take up topics that you could not address in your site.
2. You can ask for queries and resolve them for your customers or interested people.
3. You can give industry updates to your regular readers.
4. You can initiate a friendly chit chat with your readers to know what they want from the products you provide, or what are their expectations from your organization. Basically you can get to know what they have in their hearts.
   

Basically you can do anything that you want with your blog. You can unleash the potential of a blog and get as close as possible to your target audience or potential customers.

You can also use your blog to reach out to experts and other players in your vertical or industry and establish a great rapport with them too. But will that be a feasible idea? Leave your comments and queries if you have any.

Social Media Optimization - A New Angle to Your Online Promotions

The term SMO or Social Media Optimization is termed by Rohit Bhargava. SMO seems to be the buzz of the virtual land these days. But what is it all about?

SMO or Social Media Optimization is a set of methods that generate publicity of a website, a service or even a concept through the various channels of social media like RSS feeds, content communities and community websites like Digg and Del.icio.us etc. Rohit Bhargava gave 5 rules for conducting Social Media Optimization:

1. Increase your linkability.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy.
3. Reward inbound links.
4. Help your content travel.
5. Encourage the mashup.
   

What are the ways you can utilize Social Media Optimization?

Well you can include RSS feeds, add a ‘Digg This’ button, dedicate blog space to what you want to promote and also include third party community functionalities like Flickr photos and You Tube videos.

What are the benefits of Social Media Optimization?

The benefits that you will gain through Social Media Optimization are two folds –

1. This is a great way to promote your site or whatever you want to promote. When done in the most efficient way, it gives you high popularity and your fair share of limelight.
2. Social Media Optimization also helps in search engine ranking. It pushes up the Page Rank and also increases web traffic. This sure helps in search engine marketing.
   

In a way, Social Media Optimization is a holistic approach to popularity and promotion in different ways.

Novel Advanced Search Page of Google

Google advanced search is really advanced and I am sure it will entice you if you are a regular Google user.

It is more user friendly than the older advanced search page. The whole page is divided into 11 boxes with distinguished titles. There is a new box at the top of the page that shows the keywords, as you input information on the lower search box.

All the search boxes are divided under three headings. The first heading is “Find web pages that have.” There are 5 boxes under this heading in which you can stuff your specific keywords. You can put words or exact phrase.

The second heading is “But don’t show pages that have”. Here you can put the unwanted words.

Moreover, third heading is “Need more tools”. Here you can choose various options like results per pages, language and file type. The last box provides you an opportunity to do your search within a specific website or domain.

I don’t want to compare the new page with the older one but I want to say that the new one is crafted a bit differently and the wordings are more user-friendly.

Omniture Summit 2008: Mecca of Online Marketing Professionals Concluded

March 2008 would be a significant month for the Internet marketing professionals worldwide. Omniture Summit 2008 was concluded in Salt Lake City on the 7’Th of March and the event has seen overwhelmed response from Web analytics and online marketing professionals. It was a huge gathering of nearly 2000 customers from industry leaders in various sectors like financial services, travel, retail, automotive, media etc.

The event was full of delegates from different industry leaders like GM, Kelly Services, HP, Microsoft, Bentley, Think jobs.com, Napster, TNT, Deutsche bank, Healtholgy, Xerox, CNN, Redcats, Pepsi, Avis etc. and HP was the hardware sponsor of this online marketing professional’s great event.

Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and marketing author and thought-leader Seth Godin were the eminent speakers for these customers. The event was a huge success in which Omniture revealed its integrated marketing suite of products for online marketers with the release of SiteCatalyst 14, SearchCenter 3 and Omniture Test&Target.

According to the attendees, the presentations were helpful and informative, the networking opportunities were invaluable, and Omniture showed they really know how to cater to their customers and put on a first-class event.

Furthermore, at Omniture Summit, the company announced the addition of Adobe Systems and Baidu.com to the company's Omniture Genesis Network of partners.

So, from a period of 4’Th March 2008 to 7’Th March 2008, the Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, was confronting 30 % of the world’s online marketing spend gathering which was represented by 2000 marketing professionals.

Yahoo! Marking Strong Presence in Israel

The central advanced research organization of Yahoo! Inc., Yahoo! Research, is a leading global Internet brand. They strive for big inventions and for creating the next generation of businesses for Yahoo! One of its primary goals is to develop leading-edge algorithms and technology to empower the next generation of Internet search.

The latest news is that Yahoo! is opening a new research laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Haifa is the third largest city in the country.

The lab will focus over the research and development in the areas of Web search and information extraction. The sources say that the office will be led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, who is an information organization and retrieval expert. Of late, Dr. Lempel worked for the Information Retrieval Group at IBM's Haifa Research Lab.

The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab will focus on boiling down complex technology problems into simple solutions to simplify the Web search. As a demonstration of its commitment to next-generation search, Yahoo! recently opened Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore, India, and appointed eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi to head the new India lab.

These expansion plans of Yahoo! may result in some of the major developments in the area of Web search as according to a Yahoo official “search is still in its infancy.”

Google Analytics: Sometimes it skip updating statistics of your website?

One service of Google which has proved itself one of the premier services is undoubtedly Google Analytics. This service has been redesigned so that the website owners learn even more about the activities of their website visitors. Since Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers and website so they can learn easily how the visitors interact with their website.

The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve the results of different websites online. Various website owners are utilizing it for this service only.

Now, Google analytics hardly fail to update the daily reports. But, sometimes it may happen that the statistics are present but they are just not being displayed for a particular date (say March 26, 2008) in the graph. If you highlight the previous day’s date you can see the numbers below the graph.

It is true, while the visitors graph seems a day behind but if you change the date in the date drop down to today, it will actually show the correct statistics in the detailed reports.

It happens sometimes. So don’t worry your Google analytics is working efficiently for you.

Google Benchmarking and how it can generate more traffic

So far, Google has launched various services under its three categories of products, i.e., desktop products, mobile products and online products. Now, under its online products it has a service by the name of benchmarking service. This is an optional Google Analytics service which shows how your website's statistics compare against other industry verticals.

In the beta version of this service you can compare your website's visits, webpage views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites.

If you have such a data then you can easily understand where your website lacks in terms of content or services. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics.

You might be thinking that how can you enable the benchmarking. The process is simple and easy to understand. To enable the benchmarking service for your account, the Google must first opt in to share the account data in an anonymous and aggregated format. In order to do that select the option to share your Analytics data "Anonymously with Google and the benchmarking service" from the Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings page.

The Google takes up to two weeks for the benchmarking data to appear in your account. If you do not choose to share your Google Analytics data anonymously then benchmarking will not be enabled for your account.

So, if you are an advertiser, website or any company offering some services through the Internet the benchmarking can be of great help to you.

Google Benchmarking - Beta Version

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website's statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site's Visits, Page Views, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics.

Source : Google

Latest invention of the Google for the information hungry

There is no limit of innovation, at least for Google! Sometimes, it makes me astonished as what kind of brain they have. They are continuously developing the search patterns and it is becoming more user-friendly. Let see their latest technology.

You were seeing single search box on the Google webpage. Now, sometimes you can find one more search box in it. What does it mean? It means that if you are going to search some big websites like naukri, Sulekha, YouTube, Indiatimes and some of more high traffic and popular sites on Google, you can get one more search box with the search results. Find the image below



A question may arise as how it is going to help you. It will refine your search and now you don’t need to visit more sites which are of no use for you. You can get what you want in one go.

This facility of Google is for some big websites right now but it is gaining popularity and in coming times you may get two search boxes with more number of websites. It may save a lot of time and you can find your specific page quickly from the specific websites from Google. So keep searching!

Yahoo Search Index Update - Weather report

Yahoo has started some changes in the crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. As this is in progress and not completed, you may see some changes in ranking, page shuffling, etc.

With this weather update you might also experience drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

To know more visit Yahoo Search Blog