Is 2014 the Year of Google+?

We’re not the sort of people to ever suggest placing all your eggs in one basket; however we will hedge our bets and suggest Google+ is going to be bigger than it’s ever been in 2014.
With the arrival of Hummingbird many believe that 2014 is going to be the year that content marketing comes truly alive and will be the pivotal part of the marketing equation. Something we believe should be of note is that Google+ is going to be there every step of the way.

Google+ may have seemed a little underwhelming until now; however all is not as it seems. With over 340m active monthly users the site is far from a blip in the social media ocean – in fact it’s the second largest social media network. In fact, it’s potentially a huge wave – no Google pun intended – and 2014 may be its big year.
So, what do we base this on and what should we prepare to expect?

Pushing it as a Social Media Force

Google spent 2013 trying to push Google+ into the main stream in every which way possible. From switching over the YouTube commenting platform to Google+, to really pushing Authorship among marketers and websites, to even adding Hangouts to its latest version of  Android as an all-inclusive messaging service – Google’s been upping its promotion of the site.
Needless to say we expect more of this pushing and plugging of the site in 2014 as Google tries to place its social network at the fore. Expect, them to use mobile phone search to aid this somewhat in the coming year.

Local SEO AND Mobile

Googles always been quite strong in the local SEO area and has always included it as a component. A lot of Google’s services, including most notably in this example, Google Places or Google+ Local as it’s now known are Google+ orientated.
The reward for inclusion here is obvious – higher rankings in local mobile searches – something that Google has a 90% market share in – far higher than its desktop search portion. As we’re all well aware mobile search user numbers are going nowhere but upwards – so expect this part of Google’s strategy to be increasingly well-honed in the coming year.

Promoted Posts

Google+ is now in the BETA stage of promoted posts and it looks like it’s going to go the way of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and begin charging for posting.

Authorship

Authorship has been a factor in the back of marketer’s minds for almost three years now. Over that time Google has constantly amped up the pressure on people to utilise it. We expect to see this focus to increase even further in the coming period.
Google Authorship offers a lot as it allows you to link your content to your profile and your image to sit proudly beside your work. For your content it means a better chance of it being seen and also easier sharing. It also boosts your authority on a specific matter – something that’s in no way any harm.

Community Appeal

One of the big Google+ capacities and one that’s always been a prominent area have been the site’s communities.
Due to the nature of people that tend to use the site and also its close ties with other Google tools, G+ has always had strong communities. The year 2014 looks like a year of strong growth and interaction.
So, if you have a business in a specific niche or on a niche subject matter – the options for growth on Google+ are notable and should certainly be examined.
Google+ may not ever overtake Facebook, or might never have the mass appeal of Twitter, however with each year past it’s gathered steam and also popularity exponentially and it seems in 2014 this expansion will continue – so utilise it and reap the benefits.

7 emerging social media marketing trends for 2014

With 2014 knocking on the door, we thought it was time to put down the eggnog and take a hard look at what’s going to be hot on the social media marketing front the coming year — and what won’t be hot.

Before we do, let’s take a quick look at a roundup of trends that have originated from the most popular social networks this year.
Google: A reboot of Google+
Expecting a whole new surge of Google+ users (and rightfully so), Google made a wise decision to revamp the look and feel of its social network. The visually appealing, streamlined look was well received as more mobile users came to appreciate the larger displays and intuitively separated sections.
Google+ vanity URLs are now available for users who fulfill certain criteria. To long profile links that contain a host of squiggly numbers, good riddance, we say!
Facebook: Hashtags and Verified Pages

Not surprisingly, 2013 has been the year of updates for Facebook.
#hashtags were successfully implemented for profiles and pages. Now you won’t have to be ridiculed when you place them in your posts – they are now completely searchable.
Facebook rolled out Verified Pages a la Twitter’s verified account. Even the little blue checkmark looks familiar, doesn’t it?
Twitter: Twitter Trends expand worldwide
Twitter Trends is now available in 160+ locations, allowing users to narrow down current events to a specific area of their choice.
Want to leverage the power of Twitter for your business but don’t know how? Luckily for you and other business owners, the Twitter for Business website was launched to assist both new and existing users in growing their audience.
LinkedIn: Notify your contacts
LinkedIn finally gave its users the ability to mention contacts when posting, not unlike a feature that already existed long ago. Once mentioned, your contact will receive a notification that they’ve been mentioned in your post thus warranting their action.
Pinterest: Never miss a beat
Pinterest greatly improved its look, and besides the aesthetic appeal, it now boasts a new Categories section that aids searches for business and connections.
The new notifications feature is a natural – this feature ensures that you’ll never miss anything important related to your pins and activity on Pinterest.
2014: Image-based networks, social CRM, micro-video & more

The Internet sure came a long way, didn’t it? Now that you’ve taken a stroll through the major changes that happened throughout the year, let’s take a look at the top marketing trends to watch out for in 2014.
Google+ will finally shine (yes, really)

1Google+ is hardly the leader of the pack when its number of monthly users (359 million) is compared to Facebook’s (a whopping 1.15 billion). However, Google is ramping up its efforts to appeal to those who want to gain a competitive edge in terms of SEO and search engine relevance to build their network.
More people to invest heavily in social media

2No ifs ands or buts: More and more companies are looking to enrich their social media presence to the extent of hiring experts to man their campaigns rather than delegate the task to a junior-level employee. Business owners will increasingly embrace social media networking as a means to:
Build their brands
Create viral advertising campaigns
Instill customer loyalty
Reward customers
Reach out to more people, even those from untapped audience demographics
Image-based networks will rule

3That’s right. While video giants YouTube and Vimeo continue to dominate, image-centric sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, Mobli and the likes will soar and businesses will aggressively leverage their built-in shareability.
Increasing need for social CRM

4Social CRM is the product of a perfect marriage between social media and web connectivity. More businesses will realize the importance of this tool, which encompasses benefits such as the ability to:
Manage social networking accounts from the CRM platform
Monitor and track current conversations and trends revolving around your brand
Analyze, track and scale your social media activities to bring profitable results
Micro video will prove to be more exciting than YouTube?

5Instagram might have hit the jackpot when it added a new video feature. Twitter followed suit with its very own Vine. The latter allows users to post 6-second long videos, a smart move that kind of capitalizes on the speed and fun concept made popular by Snapchat. Think of the value you can off customers in creating and sharing videos in the blink of an eye!
Foursquare might slink away into oblivion … or will it?

6There are predictions saying that Foursquare might not make it to see 2015, citing stale traffic figures and financial problems in 2013, but we think that this location-based entity is not quite ready to die a premature death. Sometime in October, Foursquare made a bold move in rolling out self-service ads targeted to small businesses.

This opens a whole new world of convenience for self-reliant business owners who want to create ads without enlisting help from the Foursquare team. Apparently, this move pleases business owners like David Feit, Sky Room’s marketing director, who was looking for better ways to spread the news about the location of his luxury rooftop bar. With the self-serve ads feature, he was delighted to reach out to potential customers and pay only for actual check-ins. Other businesses have since benefited from the move, so we think that there may be hope for Foursquare yet to co-exist along with other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Hype will give way to simplicity

7In a bid to woo customers, innovative marketers are shying away from loud, brash messages. More efforts are being made to create social media marketing campaigns that mirror that of Pinterest where minimalist beauty is king. Forbes revealed that consumers are increasingly being immune to the overly garish sensory input churned out by marketers who were too eager to take advantage of our highly digitized lives. In order for a marketing strategy to penetrate through consumers’ stubborn mindset, the campaign message (as well as accompanying aesthetics) needs to be clear, concise and simple – a far cry from the flamboyant efforts that are fast losing effectiveness.

The SEO Power Of Social Media Sites

Facebook is the largest site in the world, or it ties with Google as the most visited site, and people spend much longer on the former than the latter.

The majority of people play games and chat with their friends, but they also follow all the celebrities and public figures who they care enough to watch.

Social media is the way people connect with other people, and you can easily send a tweet or a message to almost anyone you want, or to a TV show, company, or small business through social media.

Almost everyone has a Facebook page, but what you may not have thought about is that Google loves ranking the pages on Google so that people can easily find it, and this works not just for brand names and names of celebrities, but any phrase you like.

After having done some testing, I've worked out that it's easier to rank a Facebook page from scratch when compared to a WordPress website on a new domain given all the same back links, but one of the most important things is to get internal links within the site.

Building Internal Links Inside Facebook
The easiest and most obvious way of building links is through the number of likes you have.
People like your page and often a publicly visible link appears on their profile to yours.
This is a high page rank do follow cross link inside the site, and it's one of the main ways Google determines which pages are important enough to rank.

Another way you can build links is to comment on other pages with a @ symbol followed by the name of your page, which leaves a public link from another page to yours.

You can also create other pages and while using Facebook as that page, like your own page, and this creates a permanent link on the timeline to your page.

Engagement figures are important as well, Google takes into account all the same things that Facebook's Edgerank algorithms take into account, and a lot more.

The general idea is that if you make a quality page with lots of content on each part of it, add a few apps like Just Redirect and Static HTML: iFrame Tabs, get lots of likes, make cross links from relevant pages, (without spamming), and also build quality back links, your page will rank for a medium competition Google search.

If it doesn't, then you need to build more layers to the link pyramid using only the highest authority sites, seek guest posting opportunities, publish posts more regularly, add photos to photo albums with relevant text in the descriptions, get more likes, and build more cross links.

You will get there if you already have an idea of how to rank sites, and it depends on how big the search is as to whether it will be worth it.

Some would say that it's better to rank a site as you have more freedom to do anything you want, and to publish multiple pages on a blog.

The Facebook page is just one click away from the site, and you can have all the same important things on your page like Pay Pal buttons, videos, subscriber forms etc.

People feel comfortable within Facebook, it's a user-friendly environment that people are used to, and a like is very valuable, similar to an email subscriber, because you can continue to sell to, or rather engage your fans for life.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7878421

10 Ways Google+ Will Improve Your SEO

There are still people that argue for a wait and see strategy before using Google Plus. They will often point to lower numbers of people using Google Plus. These people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of Google Plus and the way it can improve your SEO results, even if none of your clients actually use Google Plus itself.
There are ten ways that Google Plus will improve your SEO:

1. Google Plus content is treated by Google just like any other page on the web. Google Plus content will be efficiently indexed by Google, it will gain page rank and appear in Google’s search results.  With two thirds of searches in the US taking place on Google you want your content indexed and searchable in this way.
2. Your Google Plus posts allow you capture SERP real estate as they appear on Google search page results, thus your audience may find your Google Plus content through a standard Google search.
3. Google Plus content stays around, gains page rank, gives page rank and appears in search results over a long period. It appears Google Plus posts can retain ranking indefinitely with some posts over a year old still top of search result pages. Compare this to the 14 minutes of life a standard tweet is estimated to have.
4. Google Plus authorship provides you with a higher visual profile in search results.  By validating your Google Plus profile with sites where you publish, you will enable your image to appear next to the search results and attract greater visual attention on search pages.
5. The use of Google authorship is closely tied to content authority. Google is keen to give a higher profile to authoritative content in search results. If an author posts interesting content which is shared and receives plus ones, this will potentially lead to higher authority. There is growing evidence that Google+ authorship improves your authority and search performance. Mark Traphagen argues that “over a broad sample of bloggers with G+ profiles, those who use Google authorship tend to average a full Page Rank higher than those who do not.”
6. Google Plus authorship and the Google Plus social layer provides a wide range of social signals that may improve the social media optimisation (SMO) of your content and SEO. This is not as simple as the number of followers, people in your circles or number of Plus Ones. What appears to be far more important is the interaction between you and your content and others of a high authority. Thus if a high authority person shares your content this will improve your own authority.
7. Social signals from platforms such as Google Plus will become more important in determining search results. Joshua Berg has called this the social media optimisation (SMO) of SEO. He has explained that “social signals provide a much better way of filtering out the noise and improving the quality of search results” and “this is a trend that will continue because it is a much better way of understanding what people really want, which is one of Google’s founding principles.”
8. The featured link in a Google Plus post will pass page rank to the page to which it links. Note there is a no follow for links included in the body of a Google Plus post, you must use the featured link. If you connect a Google Plus page to your website this will increase the relevancy of your website content and support your search ranking
9. Links from regular websites to Google Plus content can also pass page rank authority in the other direction back to your Google Plus posts and pages.
10. Finally, the use of hashtags in Google Plus connects every post to a search on the platform.

You are simply losing out in terms of SEO if you are not using Google Plus effectively. Hopefully, the ten reasons outlined above will make you look again at Google Plus and reconsider your social media optimisation strategies for SEO.

How to Switch Back to Old Gmail Compose (Temporarily)

Response to Gmail's new compose feature has been less than celebratory. Many users are confused by the minimalist design and hidden tools, preferring instead to interact with the typical icons and options from old Gmail compose.

But Google rolled out new Gmail compose to all account holders Thursday, rendering it the default. It seems Google no longer offers users the choice to work in the old compose window — at least, not explicitly.

To "temporarily switch back to old compose," tap the Compose icon as if you were creating a new email. Then click the arrow on the bottom-right of the window. Select the option from the drop-down box that reverts your interface back to the old design.

But who's to say Google will keep that option around for long? You may prefer to dive into the new Gmail compose, anyway, since it's becoming more mandatory by the day.

What changes would you like to see in Gmail? What works? Share your opinions in the comments below.

Google Music Ready to Take on iTunes With Warner Agreement

Google is gearing up to go toe-to-toe with Apple and Amazon in MP3 sales.
The company announced Monday that Warner Music Group agreed to begin selling its catalog of songs through Google Play. All four major U.S. record labels have now signed on to Google’s music, video and app retailing platform.

Google launched its music offering, which allows users to upload and play their existing library to the cloud as well as purchase music, last November. The service was hampered by its lack of selection, however, making Amazon’s Cloud Player the superior option for Android users. (iTunes is not available on Android devices.)
Google also said it would begin selling movies in Canada, the UK, France, Spain and Australia on Monday, as well as music in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain on Nov. 13.

The announcement was made in conjunction with the unveiling of Google’s new line of Nexus devices: a Nexus 4 smartphone, a 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet and a 10-inch Nexus 10 tablet.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ShaneKato

Google Passes Microsoft’s Market Value for First Time Ever

Google‘s market cap passed Microsoft’s in early trading on Monday, making the search engine giant the second most valuable technology company in the world behind Apple.
Microsoft’s stock dropped by about 0.8% in the first few hours of trading, while Google’s stock increased by about the same percentage, helping it to overtake Microsoft’s market cap for the first time ever. As of publication, Google’s market cap was closing in on $249 billion and Microsoft’s market cap had dipped below $248 billion.

Google’s stock has been on a tear ever since mid-July, passing $700 a share in early September and hitting a new intraday trading high of $747.28 just a few weeks later. Since then, the stock has continued to tick up gradually and is currently trading above $760 a share.
For Google, the stock’s rise is tied to strengths in several key areas, including positive reports about its display advertising and growth in mobile activations. On Friday, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek told Barron’s that these and other factors put Google in a great position for long-term growth.
Microsoft’s stock, on the other hand, has been on the decline in the past couple weeks on fears about the health of the PC industry and uncertainty about the prospects for its latest operating system, Windows 8.
Google is quickly closing in on Walmart, which has a market cap of just under $250 billion, to become the third biggest U.S. company behind Apple and Exxon Mobil.

3 Game Changers in Online Marketing

Times are changing for web marketers, particularly those dealing with online retail marketing. Customers are getting harder and more expensive to attract and retain, and new technologies are emerging at breakneck speed.

There are a lot of tools that promise to help, but the better approach may be to focus on the following three areas that every marketer needs to address if they want to succeed online.

1. Speed

Many websites are still under performing when it comes to speed, and there’s a measurable financial cost associated to this. Every second added to a website’s load decreases conversions by a massive 2% to 7% and reduces page views by 1% to 2%. Just as importantly, Google makes no secret of the fact that speed is part of its ranking process, meaning that a slow loading site is going to suffer in search results.

A fast website is, therefore, the first thing you need to ensure if you’re going to win in the increasingly competitive online retail world. There are basic, technical things you can do. For example, ensure your site is technically optimized.Also, check out your hosting and bandwidth providers and make sure that you’re not unnecessarily forcing users to download massive videos or images.

Another route to faster site speeds that’s being adopted by major players in web retail is the tag management system. Website tags are used by third-party technologies to track and control activity on a page. Many sites can have twenty or even thirty different tags per page, and each one of these will slow down a page’s loading speed. A tag management system can manage this process, speed up your site, and improve performance.

That said, speed isn’t just about the rate at which your pages load. The best companies are constantly evaluating and rolling out new approaches. To succeed, your marketing team needs to be working with your technical team to ensure that you can move quickly and make the most of the technologies and approaches that exist.

2. Customer View

Online shopping behavior is becoming more complex. Three quarters of customers use more than two points of contact to make a purchase, whether that is multiple visits to a single site or using different online and offline access methods. As a result, 25% of sales cycles take more than a month to complete from consideration to purchase.

During these extended purchase processes, there are hundreds of different influences, offers, social messaging, and other touch points that can influence a consumer decision. A user might visit your website initially, but then they might friend your Facebook page, see a display ad, visit through a search link, or head into your physical store. Retailers need to stay on top of this journey throughout its life cycle. You need to know what led to a customer buying something from your site and, more importantly, what led to them not buying.

The answer is to take a customer-centric view of your analytics, rather than a web-centric view. Traditionally, analyzing website traffic has been all about tracking individual visits to your website, but instead you need to think more broadly about what customers are doing that leads into their on-site experience.

Amazon does a great job of this, using all the information they have on you to ensure that their recommendations are almost always spot on. Similarly, Apple does a great job of integrating the in-store and online experience. They’ve taken the pain away from in-store lines with their remote iPhone-style checkouts. Would you like them to email you your receipt? Of course! And in doing so, you’ve just handed them valuable information about your purchase that they can use on their website.

3. Personalization

Once you have a distinct understanding of your customer the next step is to see how you can personalize their experience. Personalization isn’t the same as recommendation. It’s not saying ‘you bought that so you might like this.’ It’s about building an online experience that’s truly personal and unique.

Imagine a store owner who knows you by your name, your size, your preferences, and hang ups. Imagine if you’re hesitating to buy a pricey shirt and they offer you quality reassurance or even a special offer if you’re about to walk away? What about if they can help you curate an outfit or even try it on? What if the store layout was adapted to your liking? What if you always walked into the Hugo Boss section? (Assuming that’s your cup of tea?).

This is personalization: The combination of bespoke design, layout, stock, and messaging. Some websites out there are starting to do this, but only a few so far. However, many websites still work on a site-wide change basis, changing everything for everyone. Research by Jim Manzi , has shown that only 10% of site-wide changes actually drive business change. True personalization relies on being able to serve the right content to the right segment at a specific time, nearly guaranteeing that your changes are going to drive results.

Of course, personalization isn’t a simple process, and it requires what could be the fourth game changer: automation. If you’re going to personalize for individual users effectively without killing your backstage team then you need to be able to customize on the fly based on the data you hold.

770,000 Users Demand YouTube-to-MP3 Conversion

Philip Matesanz, a 21-year-old German student studying computer science, believes that it should be easy to convertYouTube videos into downloadable .mp3s. His website, youtube-mp3.org, allows its more than one million daily users to do exactly that.

Google, however, disagrees. Last month, it reportedly sent Matesanz a cease-and-desist, claiming that his site’s function violates YouTube’s terms of service. The site is still up, but it no longer works as advertised.

In response to Google’s threat of legal action, Matesanz did two things: he turned to two experts in Germany to examine his case (they have produced reports defending Matesanz) and he asked his users and supporters to sign an online petition defending his site.

That petition took off like wildfire and now has more than 770,000 signatures from users across the world in just over two weeks.

In the petition, Matesanz draws a historical parallel between Google, YouTube and the content providers of yesteryear:

“For decades, people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast,” reads the petition.

“You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology. Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service.”

The core of the dispute involves youtube-mp3.org’s method of creating MP3s.

Google’s cease-and-desist letter reportedly claims that the site violates the terms of service of YouTube’s API, which prohibits using the API for downloading content as opposed to streaming it. However, Matesanz holds that his site doesn’t use the YouTube API, but gets data through another undisclosed means.

At a broader level, the youtube-mp3.org case is an example of the often conflicting interests of content providers and content consumers.

Google and YouTube make money from advertisements included with and alongside content streamed directly from YouTube; that money is lost when consumers convert streaming videos into MP3s. However, hundreds of thousands of YouTube users clearly desire a way to access YouTube audio content in MP3 form (perhaps for offline listening), a service which Google and YouTube do not provide.

The argument, however, may be becoming moot: Last month, Google introduced a way to watch some content while offline for users of the YouTube Android app, possibly signaling a trend that it will continue to make content more accessible in the future.

When asked for comment, a YouTube spokesperson said, “we have always taken violations of our Terms of Service seriously, and will continue to enforce these Terms of Service against sites that violate them.”

Should Google and YouTube allow all users to download content for offline viewing? Share your thoughts in the comments.