Google +1 Button

As a webmaster you must have noticed that Google has added “+1″ Metrics into Google Webmaster Tools. But, Do you know the exact reason behind doing so? If your answer is No, then you may carry on reading this article further. In this post, I will figure out areas which you need to know about “Google +1 Button” , “Google +1 Metrics” and effect on this button on your search engine results.


Google +1 Button :

You may think that “Google +1 Button” is only a sharing button for your content for your blog post, like any other button like Facebook, Twitter and all. But, the truth is it is not its only utility. Google has always tried to provide best search results to their users and for that Google is using so many different parameters for handling personalized search results for every user. This one step by Google is also in relation to provide best search results to the users.

When user comes to your site with “specific keywords” and read your article. Then, If that user clicks on “Google +1 Button”, it indicates the Google that there is some quality contentrelated to these “specific keyword” on this site. This click of a user not only increase the search relevency in Global Search Results but also becomes more effective in personalised search results of his friends and family who is in his contact list. Seems interesting na..?

Simply speaking this is one of the area which is difficult to be manipulated for better Google search engine results by Webmaster, Except proving quality content on the blog or website. This may help google to provide better search results for “specific keyword” in search engine results.

How to use and evaluate Google +1 Metrics :

In Google +1 Metrics, there are 3 different area on which I will come upon one by one. I will tell you how you can evaluate and use it for your site and search engine optimization.

+1 Metrics: Search impact

The “Search Impact” page will let you know the exact impact, how +1 button is affecting your site’s performance in search results. This feature shows you the pages on your site that received the most impressions with a Google +1 Button annotation, and allows you to see how Google +1 Button annotations impact clickthrough rate (CTR). You can compare the clickthrough rate (CTR) of Google +1 button clicked search impressions to the general clickthrough rate for all impressions. The data for all impressions and clicks matches the data on the Search Queries page, so you can compare your +1 traffic to your traffic from all sources.

+1 Metrics: Activity

The Activity page shows you, How many times users have clicked on “Google +1 button” with customized date range report. You can choose to display, New “Google +1 button” clicked and All time “Google +1 button” clicked on your site from Activity page.This page further shows you how many times users have clicked on “Google +1 button” in search results and ads.

+1 Metrics: Audience 

The Audience page displays information about people who have clicked “Google +1 Button” on your pages, including the total number of unique users, their location, and their age and gender. All information shared is anonymous; Google doesn’t share personal information about people who have clicked “Google +1 Button” on your pages. To protect privacy, Google won’t display age, gender, or location data unless a certain minimum number of people have clicked “Google +1 Button” on your content. But, If you have good traffic and you blog about some targeted traffic then you may get quick feedback about your content quality apart from comments.

As a webmaster, I would suggest you to login to Google webmaster tool and check out your Google+1 metrics. If you still missing out Google+1 button on your blog, I would suggest read:

Indeed, Google +1 button is going to be one powerful social bookmarking buttons which will also help in your search engine ranking. I hope this tutorial have given you enough insight about new Google +1 metrics and webmaster tool integration. Read more

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The Benefits of Blogging for Business

First, if you don't know what a business blog is, this post, "What Is Business Blogging? [FAQs]" should get you up-to-date.

We on the same page? Cool. Let's move on to why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic.
1) It helps drive traffic to your website.

Raise your hand if you want more website visitors. Yeah, me too.

Now think about the ways people find your website:
They could type your name right in, but that's an audience you already have. They know who you are, you're on their radar, and that doesn't help you get more traffic.
You could pay for traffic by buying an email list (don't you dare!), blasting them, and hoping some people open and clickthrough on the emails. But that's expensive, and, you know, illegal.
You could pay for traffic by placing paid search ads, which isn't illegal, but still quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So ... how can you drive any traffic? In short: blogging, social media, and search engines. Here's how it works.

Think about how many pages there are on your website. Probably not a ton, right? And think about how often you update those webpages. Probably not that often, right? (How often can you really update your About Us page, you know?)

Well, blogging helps solve both of those problems.

Every time you write a blog post, it's one more indexed page on your website. It's also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you've published that they should surface.

Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, anddrive traffic to your website through organic search. We'll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later.

Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you're creating content that people can share on social networks -- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ -- which helps expose your business to a new audience that doesn't know you yet.

Blog content also helps keep your social media presence going -- instead of asking your social media manager to come up with brand new original content for social media (or creating that content yourself), your blog can serve as that repository of content. You're strengthening your social reach with blog content and driving new website visitors to your blog with your social channels. Quite a symbiotic relationship, if I do say so myself.

So, the first benefit of blogging? It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that.


2) It helps convert that traffic into leads.

Now that you have traffic coming to your website through your blog, you have an opportunity to convert that traffic into leads.

Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity togenerate new leads. And the way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.

Often, these calls-to-action are things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials ... basically, any content asset that someone would be willing to exchange their information for. To be super-clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it's as simple as this:
Visitor comes to website
Visitor sees call-to-action button with a free offer behind it
Visitor clicks call-to-action button and gets to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
Visitor fills out form, submits information, and receives the free offer

If you scroll down in this blog post, you'll see a call-to-action button. In fact, 99.9% of the blog posts we publish have call-to-action buttons ... and yours should, too! That is how you turn that traffic coming to your blog into leads for your sales team.



(Note: Not every reader of your blog will become a lead -- and that's okay! No one converts 100% of the people that read their blog into leads. Just get blogging, put calls-to-action on every blog post, set a visitor-to-lead conversion rate benchmark for yourself, and strive to improve that each month.)
3) It helps establish authority.

The best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you're consistently creating content that's helpful for your target customer, it'll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals.

Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Or how many more deals a salesperson could close if their leads discovered blog content written by their salesperson?

"Establishing authority" is a fluffy metric -- certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it's pretty powerful stuff.
4) It drives long-term results.

You know what would be cool? If any of the following things helped you drive site traffic and generate new leads:
Trip to Hawaii
Going to the gym
Getting your hair blown out (amirite, ladies?)
Watching Game of Thrones
Sleeping

Good news! That's what blogging does -- largely through search engines. Here's what I mean:

Let's say you sit down for an hour and write and publish a blog post today. Let's say that blog post gets you 100 views and 10 leads. You get another 50 views and 5 leads tomorrow as a few more people find it on social media and some of your subscribers get caught up on their email and RSS. But after a couple days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down and you've netted 150 views and 15 leads.

Only it's not done.

That blog post is now ranking in search engines. That means for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic and leads from that blog post. So while you're surfing in Hawaii, picking up your kid from school, and hitting your snooze alarm, you're also driving traffic and leads. One hour of effort today can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future.

(Fun Fact: About 70% of our traffic each month comes from posts that weren't published that month. Whoa.)

There are other reasons businesses might want to blog, but I think they're smaller and stray from the core benefits of blogging.

For instance, I love to use our blog to test out big campaigns on the cheap -- before we invest a lot of money and time into their creation. I also love to use our blog to help understand our persona better. These are great things, but they're not the whammies.

If you're looking to start a business blog or get more investment for one you've already started, the reasons above are a great place to start arguing your case.

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Why Google Plus Wants Every Business Blogging

While climbing the rankings on Google and the other major search engines, getting higher quality, trusted backlinks is really now one of the only ways to go. The days of sending thousands of spammy, low quality backlinks is over -for pure whitehat methods at least.

Google stopped updating the public Toolbar PageRank, so that metric is out the window. Now SEOs are relying on new metrics in search engines which hover around trust and authority.

Measuring Trust

The main thing we need to do to improve a sites authority is to improve its TrustRank. TrustRank per Wikipedia:

"TrustRank seeks to combat spam by filtering the web based upon reliability. The method calls for selecting a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once the reputable seed pages are manually identified, a crawl extending outward from the seed set seeks out similarly reliable and trustworthy pages.TrustRank's reliability diminishes with increased distance between documents and the seed set." (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrustRank)

So how can we go out there and get links from these high authority seed list websites, and at the same time, not have to build thousands of links and stay within 1 jump from the seed site (not diminishing the distance with multiple jumps)? The answer is simple: Social Networks and Google Blog for Mobile Users. The other important thing is Google has started displaying the Google+ profile details including number of followers, next to the URL of the website. So when you have a Good number of Google+ Followers it will build the trust and definitely increase your organic traffic. And your customers will find you easier in online searches on Computers, Mobile Phones and Tablets from 4”. Earlier this year, Google announced that for the first time, it was seeing more search activity on mobile than desktop. The caveat was that this was for 10 countries, including the US. Today, Google has now said this is the case worldwide.

Google Plus blogging connection has been inarguably forged. At this point, it’s only a question of how strong it will become. Google Plus has this little feature known as the rel=“author” tag. This short piece of code can be added to your blog or website, letting Google know that this content belongs to you (and your Google Plus account). When you show up in the Google search results, your relevant Web page (my page: Asus Wireless AC5300... ) will look like this second search result (instead of the non-Google Author results below it):

Not only does that first link look more authoritative and click-worthy, it actually is. According to Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO:

“Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.”

By the way, when Schmidt says “anonymous,” he isn’t referring to any subjective position about your Internet status. In Google’s mind, if you’re not on Google Plus, then you are anonymous (and will be treated as such).

Avoid Anonymity: Set Up rel=“author” in Google Plus

Setting up the rel=“author” tag really isn’t that difficult to do. If you know enough to operate your own little business blog, then you’re definitely capable. There are a number of short tutorials out there, but I recommend this one from Search Engine People, which will show you how it’s done from point A to point Z.

While setting up a Google Plus profile and this tag will produce the desired result (a picture next to your search engine results), I highly recommend using Google Plus actively. We’re not sure yet exactly how users’ level of Google Plus activity will affect their results in the search engine, but it’s very likely that more engaged users will be better rewarded.

If you’re a business owner and you’re not blogging, then the time to start is now. You don’t have to take it from me – just ask Google.

Google ended Google Authorship. After three years the great Google Authorship experiment has come to an end … at least for now. now the bylines and everything else related to the program are gone. It’s dead.

The markup people have included in their pages won’t hurt anything, Google tells us. It just will be ignored, not used for anything. But before you run to remove it all, keep in mind that such markup might be used by other companies and services. Things like rel=author and rel=me are microformats that may be used by other services

Now that Google Authorship is dead, how can Google keep using Author Rank in the limited form it has confirmed? Or is that now dead, too? And does this mean other ways Author Rank might get used are also dead?

Google told us that dropping Google Authorship shouldn’t have an impact on how the In-depth articles section works. Google also said that the dropping of Google Authorship won’t impact its other efforts to explore how authors might get rewarded.

How can all this be, when Google has also said that it’s ignoring authorship markup?

The answer is that Google has other ways to determine who it believes to be the author of a story, if it wants. In particular, Google is likely to look for visible bylines that often appear on news stories. These existed before Google Authorship, and they aren’t going away.

This also means that if you’re really concerned that more Author Rank use is likely to come, think bylines. That’s looking to be the chief alternative way to signal who is the author of a story, now that Google has abandoned its formal system.

Earlier this year, Google announced that for the first time, it was seeing more search activity on mobile than desktop. The caveat was that this was for 10 countries, including the US. Today, Google has now said this is the case worldwide.

It was last May when Google said that more searches were happening on mobile devices than desktop in the US, Japan and eight other countries that weren’t named. Today, Google’s senior vice president of search, Amit Singhal, reiterated that statement when speaking at Recode’s Code Mobile event, as reported by The Verge.

Old news? No. We followed up with Google, which told Search Engine Land that Singhal was referring to the fact that worldwide, mobile searches now exceed desktop.

It is possible that in some individual countries, desktop still tops mobile. The worldwide is for all searches, from all countries, lumped together, Google told us.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that desktop searches have diminished.Stats on desktop search from comScore routinely show the overall amount has risen from month to month. Rather, it’s that mobile searches have been a growing new segment that have caught up and now overtaken desktop search.

On the whole, desktop search has grown. As a percentage, it has dropped. That’s because we’re living in what I’ve called an “always-on search world,” where we’re always able to search. Got a query? Your phone is always in reach, as opposed to the past when you’d have to get to wherever your computer was. So the overall search queries happening have grown.

On a related subject, last month we reported that despite the growth in apps, search remains strong. Google Search in mobile browsers is big, according to a Morgan Stanley report based on comScore data. Google Search within its app is even bigger. In fact,Google Search is rated as the fourth most popular app overall in the US.

Singhal also said Google has now indexed 100 billion links within apps. This means that when people are within Google’s search results, and Google knows they have a particular app installed, it can jump them from the results into the app version of a Web page. Read more at searchengineland.com

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Best Marketing Blogs

If you google “marketing blogs” you will find an overwhelming amount of results, which is why I took it upon myself to sift through the best of the best and create a list of blogs that in my opinion, everyone should have in their RSS feed.

To start us off – Medium. If you’ve never heard of Medium, now is the time to change that! A great blogging platform that not only lets you write, connect, and search whatever topic you want, but it also allows you to take advantage of collections. What is that? – you may ask. Collections are clouds where people can submit and admins can add, medium blog posts that relate to the subject of that specific collection.

Here are four examples of collections that take marketing tips to the next level:

Digital Marketing: Social Media, Online, Internet, SEO
Content Marketing Edge
On Content Marketing…
Marketing & Growth Hacking

.
Marketing communities

It is always worth your time to see what articles are recommended by other marketers! People often share only the best of the best. Here are two sites that have a great community of valuable “sharers”:
inbound
GrowthHackers

.
Best of the best

There are numerous blogs that wow with their great content, but let’s be honest – I would have to make a list that goes on forever! So within the best of the best I picked a few that you should definitely have in your RSS feed:
SumAll – quoting their own website “The marketing blog that doesn’t suck.”
Litmus – tips that go from creating a responsive page all the way to getting more subscribers.
Quick Sprout – Growth hacking tips from the best in business, Neil Patel.
TrackMaven – like the name suggests, this company focuses on tracking results for marketing companies. Which is why they know just what you need to succeed.
Moz – Keep up with the latest in the Internet world, get tips to social media success, and read what the future holds for marketing.
Duct Tape Marketing – Strategies on making you fall in love with your business once again.
Sprout Social – the complete social know-how.
Buffer – social media resources, tips, and insights.
Shopify – if you’re in e-commerce, this blog is a must for you!
Email on Acid – Email marketing tips focused on design, HTML and testing.
Conversion Rate Experts – quoting their blog “turn clicks into customers.”
OkDork – explore what works best for you and make your business grow! Noah Kagan guides even startups in the best direction!
copyblogger – a blog that helps you make your content count.
Boost Blog Traffic – another great blog devoted to posting valuable posts.
Digital Marketer – online marketing is different than normal marketing, this blog keeps up with the online marketing world.
eCommerceFuel – starting an online business? This blog must be in your feed!
Adobe Digital Marketing – if you like design and want to know the best practices in optimizing and resourcing in marketing, this is a blog for you.
Writtent – effective copywriting tips.
Optimizely – everything optimization related all in one blog.
Vero – Email Marketing tips at their finest!


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Compare the features of Facebook & Google+

Facebook, once the darling of the social media world, is starting to lose its sheen. With the new restrictions on what people can see, privacy issues, increasing advertising, promoted posts and less relevant content in news feeds, many people are starting to look for alternatives. Fortunately, there’s an interactive, well supported, rapidly growing, easy to use social network that’s ready for you right now, Google Plus. In this overview, we’ll explore some of the similarities, and differences between the two networks, answer some of your questions and let you know how to make the switch.


Hang on, isn’t Google Plus a ghost town?

Google Plus has certainly had this criticism levelled at it many times in the past, and once, that might have been true. When the network first launched, it was quite tricky to find other members and interact with them. Now, that’s all changed.

In late 2012, Google Plus launched Communities, interactive forums where people with common interests could gather and discuss the things important to them; some of these communities have around 50,000 members! 

They also improved their ‘Find People’ functionality, making it easy to find former colleagues and classmates, review your existing contact lists and providing suggestions for interesting people to follow.

This, together with Google’s continued promotion and support of the network means that it’s now the biggest social media network in the world.


OK, so what is the main difference between Facebook and Google Plus?

If there’s one main difference, I’d say it’s this: 
- Facebook focuses on connecting you with your existing friends and your relationships with them.
- Google Plus helps you build new connections, find interesting people and discover content that can surprise and delight you.
That’s not to say that Facebook can’t help you discover new things, or that Google Plus can’t help you stay in touch with your current friends, far from it. Google Plus is simply setup to let you define exactly what you want to see and from whom, whilst also highlighting some of the best people, content and thinking so you can expand your interests and horizons.


How does that work? How can I control what I (and others) see in Google Plus?

When you follow people in Google Plus (just like friending them on Facebook), you can add that person to one or more Google Plus ‘Circles’. You can make these circles about anything you like: you might have one for family members, one for business colleagues, another one for people that post awesome photographs and another for popular science. Circles have two major advantages:
- You can post your content to one circle, all your circles or to a public feed, so you can control exactly who sees what you post.
- You control what you see from every circle in your content feed. You might want to see everything that your family posts but only the best posts from the photographers.
That’s all very easy to setup in Google Plus and it will quickly become second nature. This means that you can interact with the people you want to in the way that suits you best.


What about Facebook Groups, is there anything like that?

Yes, the Google Plus Communities feature. G+ communities are interactive, constantly updating, live forums where people can share ideas, discussions and thoughts on thousands of different subjects. There are Google Plus communities on just about any topic you can think of, including art, science, literature, social media, amusing memes, music and many, many more.

How can I discover new content?

One of the best aspects of Google Plus is the very wide diversity of people, topics, content and more that it will expose you to; there are lots of ways of finding new content:
- Joining some of the more popular ‘public circles’ and having other people share stuff with you
- Joining some communities and discovering content that way
- Using the ‘Explore’ function in Google Plus which will let you know what’s popular on the network
If you hang around on Google Plus, it won’t be long before your horizons expand! One of the things that I find annoying in Facebook is all the ads and promoted content, how does Google Plus deal with that?
It doesn’t, because it doesn’t need to. Google Plus doesn’t have paid advertising or promoted posts. The interface is actually pretty clean and uncluttered, meaning it’s easier to focus on the content and not have all of the different screen real-estate trying to grab your attention.

This all sounds great; does Google Plus have any features that Facebook doesn’t have?

You bet. Two of the most exciting features on Google Plus are personalised search and hangouts.
1. Personalised Search – As we all know, Google is always working to try and provide the most relevant search results for our questions. One of the best measures for this is what our friends and connection think; after all, if it’s relevant to them, it may well be relevant to us.
Google Plus uses these connections to suggest search results based on what your contacts on Google Plus like. If they have read and liked an article, it may show up higher in your searches on a similar topic when you do a standard search on Google. This means that you get to the information you need more quickly.
2. Hangouts – Imagine if you could hold a real-time, virtual meeting with video and audio with a chosen collection of friends, colleagues or others. Google Plus has this functionality built in, through ‘Hangouts’. These are virtual meeting rooms that you just need a microphone and (optionally) a web cam to join and are a great way to discuss common interests.


Can you do a side by side comparison of Facebook and Google Plus, so I can see whether what’s on one social network is also on the other?

Certainly, here you go:

 

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Google Free Services

Google Apps for Work (formerly Google Apps for Business) is a suite of cloud computing productivity and collaboration software tools and software offered on a subscription basis by Google. It includes Google’s popular web applications including Gmail, Google Drive,Google Hangouts, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.^[1] 

While these products are available to consumers free of charge, Google Apps for Work adds business-specific features such as custom email addresses at your domain (@yourcompany.com), at least 30 GB of storage for documents and email, and 24/7 phone and email support.^[2] More Info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps_for_Work

The following is a list of products and services provided by Google. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products

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