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We help tourism professionals make sense of social media. Co-founders Becky McCray (@BeckyMcCray) and Sheila Scarborough (@SheilaS) tweet here.

Google+ Tweets | Tourism Currents Twitter

10 Things CMOs Need To Know About Google+

By Chris Brogan

First off, if you’re immediately thinking, “The LAST thing I need is to figure out yet another social network,” you’re totally right. This is the last thing you need. However, if you were fortunate enough to be a CMO back in 2007, and you said that about the transition from MySpace to Facebook, then you know what happened to people who didn’t surf the new wave instead of riding the one that petered out.

I’ve logged over 250 hours (and counting) inside Google+ so that you don’t have to, but I will say this: If people are asking for what the next big thing is for online marketing, mobile marketing, digital communications and social media, this is certainly my pick for 2011. We have to look at it. And to that end, I have 10 things for you to think about:

1. A social network made by Google impacts search. Google isn’t saying it like that, because they wouldn’t want to cause a panicking stampede, but think about this: Google has all the data from Google+. They can’t get any data from Facebook. Google controls search. Where would you cast your vote for search-improvement activities?

2. Google+ evolves from Gmail. No matter what the kiddies say, email is still the digital communications backbone of the modern world. SMS might feel like second place, but it’s a distant second. Google+ is very tied to Gmail, with hundreds of millions of users. It feels very natural as an extension in a way that Twitter and Facebook do not.

3. Business pages are coming. Early reports from users are, “It won’t matter. There’s no support for business pages.” That’s not true. Business pages are being developed now. Imagine the power of Google Places, Google Local, and several other Google products that formerly seemed lame and disjoined now acting inside one unified communications environment. Yeah.

4. 10 million users in the first two weeks. There’s limited access to Google+ at the time of this writing (Google did this with Gmail back in the day), but Larry Page reported on their earnings call that they’ve already let 10 Million users into the system. Some aren’t active, and you’ll see reports of that, but most are learning a whole new way to connect.

5. This blends personal and business. Google+ allows users to categorize their contacts into “Circles,” and then allows you to message those circles individually. Thus, your “prospects” circles could get your business information, and your “drinking buddies” circle can hear about that great new Belgian wheat you tried. Both will add value.

6. Google+ is already indexed and searched by Google, making marketing searches much easier than other platforms. Just drop “site:plus.google.com” before any search in Google, and you’ll see what people are saying about you inside the platform.

7. Lots of companies block Facebook.com. Yes, you can block plus.google.com without limiting access to Google, but many companies won’t be doing this for a while, so there’s a window of opportunity where marketing behind the firewall (you don’t do that?) will be a potential leverage point.

8. Don’t think “social network.” Think “communications backbone.” This tool allows for private collaboration (privacy is much easier to understand here, but it does require some learning), and permits a “one stop” kind of area for talking internally and externally without causing problems. And it works with email, not in lieu of email.

9. Google is committed to this platform. Unlike other attempts in the past, the mandate at the beginning of 2011 was to blow up social networking and mobile, and most of the leadership of Google and their subordinates was given ultimatum-sounding language to that effect. Why should you care? Because that means they’re committed to making this platform amazing for you.

10. First movers win. Okay, this depends on you, the CMO, and your marketing strategy. Are you a “second to market” kind of marketer? This might not be as useful. But if your leadership is calling for you to be FIRST at something, Google+ is one way to get out there ahead of the competition: At the time of this writing, Ford has a huge presence on Google+. GM and Chrysler (not to mention the other companies)? Not so much.

I haven’t predicted a “next big thing” for the last few years, because the marketplace didn’t really have an obvious successor to the Twitter/Facebook throne. I don’t care if this is a “killer” or not. I know that it’s become (in the first two weeks of its existence) the No. 1 referrer of traffic to my website, and that’s good enough for me.

Read more from Chris Brogan here...

Google Instant 101

Still wondering how Google Instant—the new enhancement that shows results as you type—changes search marketing? Well, Google promises to shave 2.5 seconds off each user's search, with the end result of 10-percent faster searches.
In a recent post at the Daily Fix blog, David Felfoldi cites the benefits of this change, according to Google:

• Predictive Typing. As you type, a prediction is made of what you are seeking.
• Instant Results. As you type, the results appear. Every typed character updates the search results instantly.

How will it affect your efforts? Here are four ways Felfoldi says Google Instant has already changed the search landscape:

• Short attention spans will grow even shorter. An entire new search results page of options is now just a keystroke away. "Keep your copy brief, to the point, and able to grab attention," Felfoldi advises.
• Impression counts may increase. When a searcher stops typing and the results are displayed for three seconds or more, Google counts the pause as an impression. To see the impact of this change, Felfoldi suggests monitoring AdWords accounts closely for a while.
• There will be greater competition for shorter phrases. "No longer is your competition the other websites that rank for your target or niche keyphrase term like 'tankless water heater,' " Felfoldi notes. "Rather, it is also the shorter phrases, like 'tankless' and 'tankless water' that now also appear as the user types in their full search phrase. Each phrase presents a new layer of competition for you to now consider."
• Predictive search = keyword research. You can look to predictive search to help choose your hottest keywords. "The term that appears first is probably the most common search result, and the one you should consider targeting," Felfoldi advises.
• The Po!nt: Success is rarely instant. Make sure your search strategy addresses Google's latest enhancement—and the changing user behaviors likely to result.

Source: Daily Fix.

Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/

In May, Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL. Google promised that the feature will be rolled out to all accounts, but it was only enabled in new accounts. The good news is that the feature is now available in all accounts and you can find it if you go to the "Accounts and import" tab from the settings page.

You may wonder if it's a good idea to use this service powered by TrueSwitch instead ofGmail's mail fetcher. Here are some differences between the two service:

* Mail importing saves to your Gmail account the existing messages from other accounts and continues to check for new messages only for 30 days. Gmail's mail fetcher downloads the existing messages and checks for new messages indefinitely.

* Mail importing saves to your account messages and contacts, while Gmail's mail fetcher doesn't import contacts (you can manually import contacts).

* Mail importing works for mail services that don't support POP3 (for example: the US version of Yahoo Mail), but the mail fetcher requires POP3. Mail importing supports a small number of popular mail services.

"Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it's done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place," says Google, but I disagree. You'll import the old messages to your account, but after 30 days the service will no longer fetch new messages.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=117173

Importing contacts and mail

Print

If you're switching to Gmail from another email provider, importing contacts and messages from your old email account can help you make the transition without having to do a bunch of housekeeping.
To get started, follow the steps below. Before you dive in here, keep in mind that you'll need to have access to that email account for this process to work:

1. Click the Settings link.
2. Under the Accounts and Import tab, click the Import mail and contacts button.
3. In the new window that opens, enter the email address of the account you'd like to import contacts from. Click Continue.
4. Enter the password for your other email account and click Continue.
5. Select all the checkboxes that apply:
• If you choose to import contacts, the information in your contacts list in your old account will be imported to your Contacts section in Gmail.
• If you select the Import mail checkbox, your existing messages in that account will be imported to your Gmail inbox.
• If you want, you can also select the Import new mail checkbox so that messages sent to your old account for the next 30 days will be imported to your Gmail account. These messages won't appear in Gmail immediately once they're sent to your other account, but should update within a day or two.
• Finally, you can automatically apply a label to your imported messages to indicate that those were sent to your other account.
6. Click Start Import. The import will continue if you leave the Settings page or sign out of Gmail.
7. Your contacts and/or messages will be imported. It may take 24-48 hours before you see your imported messages, so don't worry if they're not there as soon as you click OK. You can check the status of your import by clicking the Accounts and Imports tab on the Settings page. Once the import is complete, you'll see a confirmation message at the top of your inbox.

Click here to see which email providers are supported

Google Universal Search and your travel industry business. Are you ready?

April 21, 2008 · By Claude

It was around a year ago when Google started going live with universal search .

The goals was to bring all the other specialised search results (from Video, Maps , Images , News , User Reviews, etc.) to the main web search portal.I think it is interesting to analyse some data and live examples, thinking about a strategy and then to give our travel readers some tips to be operational with this “new Google game”.

According to Google:

Google’s vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results. At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience.

Read full post here: Tourism Internet Marketing [dot com]

How does Google collect and rank results?

One of the most common questions we hear from librarians is "How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?" Here, from quality engineer Matt Cutts, is a quick primer on how we crawl and index the web and then rank search results. Matt also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students.

Crawling and Indexing
A lot of things have to happen before you see a web page containing your Google search results. Our first step is to crawl and index the billions of pages of the World Wide Web. This job is performed by Googlebot, our "spider," which connects to web servers around the world to fetch documents. The crawling program doesn't really roam the web; it instead asks a web server to return a specified web page, then scans that web page for hyperlinks, which provide new documents that are fetched the same way. Our spider gives each retrieved page a number so it can refer to the pages it fetched.

Our crawl has produces an enormous set of documents, but these documents aren't searchable yet. Without an index, if you wanted to find a term like civil war, our servers would have to read the complete text of every document every time you searched.

Google Librarian Central

Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it.

Google's PageRank Explained

and how to make the most of it
by Phil Craven

What is PageRank? How is PageRank calculated? Internal linking

Dangling links Inbound links Outbound links

Toolbar PageRank Tips Miscellaneous

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

From here on in, we'll occasionally refer to PageRank as "PR".
Pagerank Explained. Google's PageRank and how to make the most of it

New Toolbar PageRanks visible

New Toolbar PageRanks visible
 

October 1, 2006 @ 10:14 pm · Filed under Google/SEO

 

Roughly every 3-4 months we take a snapshot of PageRank values and export them so that the new values are visible in the Google Toolbar.

I believe that another set of PageRanks started going out on Friday. New PageRanks are visible at many data centers, but not at every data center.

Why not at every data center? Because some data centers are using a slightly older infrastructure for a few query types that are off the beaten path a bit
(info:, link:, toolbar PageRank queries, etc.).


New Toolbar PageRanks visible

More info on PageRank

Every few months we update the PageRank data that we show in the toolbar, and every few months I see a few repeated questions, so let me take a pass at some of them. Note: I wrote this kinda quickly, so I think this is pretty good, but if I spot something incorrect later, I’ll change it.

Philipp Lenssen asks: “Matt, I often wonder, how is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?”

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

viggen says: “Do i need to know that? What does it tell me when i know it? Why would i care? Meaning, what purpose has the Pagerank for the mom and pop site out there?”

viggen, I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me.

More info on PageRank

What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters

GREAT post about what Google PageRank really is... If you're not fully balled up on this yet, here's your crash course.

Stuart

=====================================================
Several times in the past few months, I've written about new Google features where PageRank was involved.

Unfortunately, Google itself has very poor information about PageRank that I could use for those wanting to learn more about it. To solve that, here's a guide to PageRank, designed for searchers and site owners alike.
This is fairly long article. To help, you can jump to particular sections of key interest, if you like:

• Google's Definition: PageRank As Votes
• Recent Google Edits Emphasize PageRank Just One Of Many Factors
• PageRank For Searchers: Google Toolbar
• PR Stands For PageRank, Not Public Relations
• PageRank In The Google Directory
• PageRank For SEOs
• Seeing PageRank In Search Rankings
• PageRank Versus "Toolbar" PageRank
• PageRank Tech Talk
• Conclusion (Especially For Those Thinking I Don't Have Time To Read)

What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters

Inbound links, link exchanges
and link acquisition

Link text (the text that is clicked on when clicking on a link) is singly the most important factor when Google determines the rankings for any given searchterm. This article isn't about that aspect of inbound links, although it is briefly touched on. This article discusses inbound links for their link popularity/PageRank value, and provides ideas on how to acquire them.

Why do we need inbound links?

Even before Google came on the scene, link popularity (linkpop) was being used by one or two search engines as part of their algorithm when determining the rankings for any given searchterm. Then when Google arrived with their link-based PageRank, link popularity took off and became an absolute essential ingredient in achieving top rankings.
The idea behind linkpop is that the more pages that link to a page, the more important the page is and it, therefore, deserves a higher ranking than it would otherwise have.

Some engines simply counted the number of links coming into a page (inbound links), but Google took the idea a step further. Each inbound link comes comes from a page which itself has inbound links. The more inbound links on the linking page, the more important that page is and, therefore, the more important the link to our page is. So Google gives more weight to inbound links from important pages that it does to inbound links from lesser pages. They call the idea "PageRank", and you can learn all about in this PageRank article.

Google is the world's number one search engine, and currently provides the results for around 80% of all the searches done in the world. Because of that, it is vitally important for any website that relies on search engine traffic to do well in Google. Doing well in Google means making the site 'important' in Google's eyes and, to do that, the site must have good inbound links - as many of them as possible, and preferably from important pages (pages with medium to high PageRank values).

Inbound links, link exchanges and link acquisition

Google Translation Center

Google took the lid off a new service today, an extension of its Translate service called Google Translation Center that connects translators with people who need content translated into other languages. All compensation arrangements are left to the individuals involved, but Google will store results on its own servers.

Already the new service has been compared to Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which matches up people/companies needing services with those who can provide them. Google doesn't take a cut of whatever arrangements are made, leaving lots of speculation as to how the new service fits in with the search company's overall strategy. More on that later.

A little detective work at Google Blogoscoped blew the whistle on the service perhaps before Google intended: Philipp Lenssen's thorough analysis of what the Translation Center suggests the service was briefly online before disappearing. Subsequent posting around the Net may have prompted it into a permanently live status.

The idea is pretty simple: Those in need of translated documents can browse translators and work out the details with them, and can submit the material via the Translation Center and post a request. Translators can post their services and make use of Google's new "easy-to-use translation tools."

Google cites not only professionals, but also volunteers as potential sources, and the service will match current translations with previous ones to prevent duplication. The value is fairly obvious to those in the translation business and to those, like webmasters, academics, etc., who need content translated into as many as 40 languages (Google Translate's current capability).

But what about the value to Google? Investors have criticized Google and other companies for spending too much time on peripheral services that seem to do nothing to enhance their core business, which is search advertising. Google Translation Center, then, seems to fit into that peripheral services category, among multitudes of other side projects with a historic fail rate of 80 percent. It's tempting to put this one in the same camp as Google Books or Google Scholar.

But, as repeatedly illustrated, Google products and services are often surprisingly related to the search business or are masks for some other, some grander, purpose. Google News, for example, Marissa Mayer estimates is worth $100 million despite its free status because of the number of searches it generates on the main search engine where ads are displayed.

That Google 411 thing? That was a front for voice recognition technology development. Callers got their info, Google got their voices to play around with. Indeed, Google's services are appearing less spontaneously altruistic and more mutually beneficial with every new launch.

Google Translation Center would be no exception to that new rule. In June, CEO Eric Schmidt said the goal was for Google to be able to translate 100 different languages, so this seems like a step in that direction.

But also, in the same way the Rosetta Stone was a key element in translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Google can use submitted human translations as comparison tools used for machine translation. Google's "payment" for use of its Translation Center, then, are the translated texts themselves.

Currently, machines lack the capacity to understand nuances in language, and therefore lack the ability to understand highly contextual, colloquial, or combinative search queries. Having human word strings and phrases to compare them to would help not only in the same language search capacity, but also in offering cross-language searching.

That helps Google in search, but it also fits in with the larger context of making all information available globally—except in China, of course.

Knol PageRanking: a little algorithmic love behind the scenes

We have already seen how Knol grabbed great Google rankings for a significant percentage of pages listed on Knol's home page. Knol isn't supposed to have a high PageRank yet, but Google may be giving its house resource a little algorithmic love behind the scenes.

Wall suggested this as he reached out to see how a page on the site might fare for him. He created an SEO Basics Knol that "was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com)," he said.

Google cited the new Knol as being similar to work already on the web at Work.com and Business.com. Wall searched for a string of text from the article and found it ranking on Google; searching for it with duplicate content filters negated found the Knol piece ranking above its syndicated and much older placement on Business.com.


"Some may call this the Query Deserves Freshness algorithm, but one might equally decide to call it the copyright work deserves to be stolen algorithm," said Wall.

"Google knows the content is duplicate, and yet they prefer to rank their own house content over the originally published source."

Whether Google changes this behavior or not, which could happen given all the algorithm tweaking they regularly do, probably won't change the flood of SEOs churning out pages at Knol. Considering Google's treatment of such content with favorable rankings, SEOs may have to do this out of a need to compete.

And we've all seen how well competitors fare against Google. Ask.com seems moribund, and depends on Google advertising; Yahoo took an ad deal with Google to avoid being taken over by Microsoft; and even Microsoft sees Google as a major competitor.

By ranking Knol articles highly, Google, by design or accident, made Knol a go-to destination for anyone seeking traffic for a website. Knol became something SEOs must consider in their work for their sites and clients because of this, and that may not be a great thing.

Six Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

• It's better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.

• If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.

• Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.

• Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?

• Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.

• Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: "keyword phrase" in your browser and check the number count.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it's hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it.

Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per clíck (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it's a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren't counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don't do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won't count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can improve your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn't magic and isn't a crap-shoot.

"SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines."

Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Conversion University - Intelligent Advertising for Small Business

Another great article at Google's Conversion University. You really should spend 1/2 hr every day just reading these articles...

Stuart

By Alden DeSoto

Perhaps you own a café or a spa, or you build swimming pools. It's not an online business, but you have a website that describes what you have to offer. You'd like more visibility for your site, and you've had a salesperson tell you about the benefits of buying a listing on her portal site. It sounds like a good deal, but how do you know? Here are a few tips that will help you make an informed decision.

Find out what's already working for you.

The first thing to do, if you haven't done it already, is to install Google Analytics on your site. Google Analytics is free and gives you important information about what is already working on your site - for example, which sites refer visitors to your site, and which keywords your visitors are searching on. Knowing exactly how many visits you get, and what those visitors are looking at on your site provides an important baseline to improve on. And, you may find some pleasant surprises - perhaps an article about your business or a site that you didn't know existed is referring important traffic to your site.

Installing Google Analytics is easy, but if you don't edit your own site, you can ask your hosting provider or web site designer to do it. For many sites, the installation takes less than 15 minutes.

Read full thing at:
Conversion University - Intelligent Advertising for Small Business

Video and SER's

Did you know that submitting a video to YouTube or Google, along with your keywords, can
shoot you to the top of the search engines, in less than 24 hours?

If you're not using video yet, now is your chance to get started. You don't need to be the least bit technical. You don't even need a camera.

Seriously, if you can talk on the phone and download photos from your digital camera (or copy and paste stock photos) you have all the skills that are required.

Add yourself to Wikipedia Business Pages

Something you will notice if you search for the big corporate brands in Google is that Wikipedia pages for those businesses show up in the top 10 results very often. Most businesses do not know that you can create a Wikipedia page for your own business.

However, these business entries do get deleted sometimes, so try to make yours fairly informative and complete, not just profit driven!

If it offers real information or you are a well known business then it is a lot less likely that one of the editors will delete the business page you've created. Deletions still do happen, but if you can get it to stick it is almost guaranteed to rank on page one in Google for your business's name. This will put more and more of YOUR pages on the Top 10 pushing competing agents and commission earning websites down.

Some Wikipedia pages for the BIG businesses include:

• Walmart
• Pepsi
• Wendy's

AboutUs.org is similar to Wikipedia, except that its entire focus is for businesses to insert their listings. Creating a page for your business on this site will also tend to rank very well for your business name. And your chances of getting deleted are much lower. A walk in the park compared to Wikipedia, but not as strong...

Google - Flight Status Now On Results Page

Our flight stats search feature can now deliver real time status and info on your flight directly on the search results page.

Just type the name of the airline and flight number ( e.g. American 123, ua226, aa 1018) into the search box, and we'll return the most up to date information from FlightStats.com.

http://www.google.com