Google is giving a new voice to small businesses – using their existing phone numbers. The company announced recently that Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral), the telecommunications service developed by the company, now comes equipped with a new feature, one that could entice more small business owners to use it. While previously, Google Voice can only be used by getting a new Google number (a criticism on Google Voice, since not everyone wants to start over with a new number), now it is possible for users to sign up for the service with their own existing phone numbers. This new capability gives small business owners plenty of reasons to use Google Voice as a sort of online PBX (private bank exchange), and a free one at that. The voicemail feature, for example, lets Google Voice users access voicemail not just from their phones but also through a computer; messages are transcribed automatically into text and can be read on a Gmail-like – Read the full article
Have you ever thought about how to get your website or blog included in Google News? Well, you wouldn’t be the first. Business owners, Internet marketers, online reputation management and public relations (PR) professionals, and SEO specialists all recognize the value of having their content show up in one of today’s biggest online news aggregators (and search engines). Why get listed on Google News? If you’ve never given a thought to getting listed, consider these benefits and key features of Google News. Millions of people use it to keep abreast of what’s happening. (It cannot be a bad thing to be able to tap into that, right?) These users access Google News using a variety of ways: via search, personalized Google News pages, regular E-mail alerts, mobile device or a tablet (like the iPad), RSS or Atom feeds, and more. Get listed and immediately you have a multitude of ways to reach out to an audience (search engine marketing, mobile – Read the full article
Earlier today, Google officially announced Google Instant- a real-time search experience that predicts search results as you type. As with most announcements, the long-term impacts are not yet known, but let’s look into the important parts.
When we look back at the present year events that affected the SEO world, we would realize that it has been more remarkable than we would have thought it would be. This year has actually marked a decisive point in the efforts made by Google to improve the quality of search engine results that are served to the Internet users. The focus with which Google went about its task of cleaning some of the damaging and poor quality sites from the search engine indexes is pretty well-known. Unlike the gentle avatar that a Panda is considered to be, Google’s ‘Panda’ update literally sniffed out thousands of sites in a matter of couple of weeks from the web’s most powerful search engine. While many analysts saw a sort of devastation in the making for some time now, the intensity of the impact left everyone guessing about the company’s motives. All sites that were built on duplicate or re-written content were penalized. – Read the full article
For those of you who are Google addicts like myself, you should find this piece choc-a-bloc full of Chrome apps for you to gorge yourself on. Whether it’s gaming you are looking for or an app to help your business run more smoothly, you should find something here to satisfy your taste buds. The Google Chrome Store makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop at the best of times, and if you haven’t checked it out already you will find it hard not to after reading below. Bear in mind that you need to be using the Google Chrome browser (to enjoy these apps), so download it now and start browsing in the shop and on the Internet. Google Chrome apps for small business One of the best apps I have found on the Google Chrome Web store is the ZOHO Invoice app, which I now use religiously to process all my invoices and keep track of – Read the full article
There are ways to monitor changes and updates to your favorite websites, blogs, social networks, classifieds, and local business listings (including Google Places pages) – without having to watch the Web 24/7 or pressing the Refresh button every minute. And while RSS is today’s most popular way of syndicating content automatically, not all websites have it. (And not all users prefer it.) That’s where this list comes in: to be able keep up with what’s happening (in real-time) on any place across the entire Web; to monitor what customers and competitors alike are doing and saying; and to listen and respond to reviews and feedback as they are generated. Here are some of today’s best tools for monitoring changes to any website. Page2RSS Page2RSS is a free service that lets you create feeds for web pages you wish to follow or monitor – pages, specifically, that are static or don’t offer any RSS/Atom feeds. Page2RSS also serves as a way – Read the full article
Google’s quest for perfection in search results has led the tech giant back to the drawing board to once again tinker with its AdWords algorithm. The goal remains the same: to deliver users to the most relevant content available that fits their chosen search words while also attracting advertisers by delivering superior return on investment for online advertising. Google Adwords auctions control the “promoted search results” seen at the top and to the right of the organic search results; however, Google and businesses lose customers when those results are of poor quality, because people have no use for spam and will use other search engines. To avoid this, Google offers lower prices to advertisers who have higher rankings as determined by its algorithms. In short, this keyword auction wherein advertisers bid on keywords relevant to their businesses is the way Google makes ad revenue without disappointing search clients. This process is somewhat contentious considering that the real high-quality material should – Read the full article
Google has paved their way through the crowd of search engines by doing everything that they can to ensure that their searchers are getting quality results. They’re able to do this by continuously updating their algorithms to eliminate low quality sites from the SERPs. The latest update that Google rolled out is known as the Google Panda update. This particular one has caused a lot of controversy among the World Wide Web and many large websites (like eHow) have been knocked down in their search engine rankings. You can either look at this as the end of the Internet or you can look at it as a learning experience. For those who want to run away scared, please do so now. This article is for those who want to learn more about how they can prevent being one of the websites deemed as a ranking disaster in the SEO world. What the Google Panda Update Implemented This update was just – Read the full article
