Future Searches

Optimizing For Trending Topics

What are Trending Topics?

 A key aspect of marketing is taking ‘the next big thing’ and harnessing its appeal. Trending Topics are the popular subjects, recent news stories and current events that everybody is talking and writing about. Finding and harnessing these topics is an excellent search engine optimization tactic. Trending Topics are a fantastic way to optimize website traffic towards those who are searching for those current topics.

There are typically two different categories of Trending Topics: Short-term and long-term. Short-term trending topics are news stories that will not remain popular for a long amount of time. A prime example of a short-term trending topic would be celebrity news and gossip. A subject such as a celebrity marriage may be a Trending Topic one week but irrelevant and forgotten the next. Long-term trending topics are sustainable issues that have both staying power and growing potential. An example of a long-term Trending Topic is the current ‘green’ trend. A few years ago it was a specialist subject of minimal popularity now it is a huge trend that will continue to grow.

How to find Trending Topics

Yahoo’s Job Cuts, Google’s New Hires

Yahoo Inc said Tuesday it is laying off one percent of its workforce, or some 130 employees, in the latest job cuts. News of Yahoo’s latest layoffs come hours before the Web media company is due to report fourth-quarter financial results after Tuesday’s market close.

“The latest cuts are part of the company’s strategy to position itself for net revenue growth and margin expansion, and Yahoo will continue to hire to support key priorities” Yahoo spokeswoman Dana Lengkeek told Reuters in an email statement.

On Dec 2010, Yahoo said it will cut 4 percent of its workforce, as the struggling Web portal adjusts its operations to revive revenue growth.

Yahoo struggles to compete with Google and Facebook. On the contrary, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research, Alan Eustace announced on the official Google blog that 2011 will be Google’s biggest hiring year ever.

I love Google because of our people. It’s inspiring to be part of the team. And that’s why I am excited about 2011—because it will be our biggest hiring year in company history. We’re looking for top talent—across the board and around the globe—and we’ll hire as many smart, creative people as we can to tackle some of the toughest challenges in computer science: like building a web-based operating system from scratch, instantly searching an index of more than 100 million gigabytes and even developing cars that drive themselves.

Google’s Market Share Has Dropped by 2% in China

Alibaba has leapt ahead of Google in terms of the share of online advertising revenue it earns in China.  According to Analysys International, Alibaba’s Taoboa keyword advertising and development of interactive marketing ad business allows its ad revenue to grow substantially and therefore Alibaba has jumped to No.2 in China Internet ad market. The statistics below shows that Baidu, Alibaba and Google ranked Top 3 in China online ad market in Q3, 2010.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 in Hangzhou, China by 18 founders including Jack Ma. It is the global leader in e-commerce for small businesses and the flagship company of Alibaba Group. The global trade platform is used by millions of buyers and suppliers around the world to do business online. In addition, Alibaba.com offers a transaction-based wholesale platform on the global site (www.aliexpress.com) geared for smaller buyers seeking fast shipment of small quantities of goods. Alibaba.com has offices in more than 60 cities across Greater China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe and the United States.

Great Keyword Research Tools from Google

Choosing or selecting the right keywords for your website is one of the main tasks for any business owner, because the keywords which they choose are those keywords which bring them traffic to their site, conversion or at least a quick glance from a visitor. Selecting right keywords for your business is one of the daunting tasks. There are many tools available online which provides keywords data based on their assumptions.  Although, they may be not accurate at all times, we need to highly rely on them as there is no other option.

There are different ways to find keywords. As there are lots of tools are available online from the giant search engine Google, we don’t have to look at other softwares or tools. Below are some tools available from Google to find the keywords which are beneficial for your business.

1. Keyword tool from Google

This keyword research tool by Google is the best, simple and user friendly. Almost half of the people who are in to SEO use this tool to get effective data. With new interface, categories, ideas for mobiles etc. makes this tool more ravishing. I’d recommend each and everyone to use this tool to extract keywords which are meant for your business.

Faster Web with Google mod_pagespeed Module for Apache

Google, on it’s initiative “Make the web faster”,  introduced a new module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to speed up the websites and improve search experience of users. The tool works on the server so directly improves the loading time of the webpages.

Last year, Google introduced a tool that gives suggestions to developers to speed up web pages called Page Speed.  Page speed can be helpful tool to monitor the backfalls of your website but it needs a lot of effort to implement necessary suggestions about server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. mod_pagespeed automates many of Page Speed recommedations and delivers automated SEO with minimal developer and webmaster effort.

So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

Google Adwords versus Facebook Adds

Facebook is a social addiction. There is no powerful mean at all to connect and share! We are online all time; while working, travelling, resting…even while weeing & pooing. People spend more time at Facebook than they do at Google. Does it make Facebook a better online advertising channel than Google?

The answer is No. Being the most busy website doesn’t make Facebook the best advertising place. It’s all down to the purpose of the visitors. Facebook users are looking to socialize rather than buying a specific product. Advertising a new product on Facebook; similar to Google Adwords placement-targetted ads, can boost awareness; especially for a specific target group however when it comes to purchasing something, Google search comes to our minds.

Google can have less views however people use Google to find what they need. They perform a search about a topic and are willing to click on links during their visits.  Google users are more likely to be close to the sales stage on the marketing funnel and perform an action. Since Google’s core function is search, advertising your products on Google would bring more sales and leads than on Facebook.

Use Social Media to appear in Real-Time Search

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

What Would You Ask to Google CEO Eric Schmidt?

Last week, I read Michael Arrington’s interesting interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on TechCrunch regarding the future of search. The questions were simple and cool. The answers were inspiring. I just can’t wait to read the rest of the interview.

So, what people on internet business would ask or tell to Eric Schmidt regarding Google and internet if they are given a chance to do so. If you have questions or anything to say, write them down here now.  I will bring all comments together and maybe we might get the answers of our common interview later.

First question is coming from me: What do you think about the future of SEO?

Come on, say your word.

Global Search Market is Growing

According to comScore, 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009 globally.

Google sites had 58 percent increase compared to last year and ranked as the leaders within search engines in global search market with 76.7 billion searches conducted and 67.5 percent market share. Google sites are followed by Yahoo sites with 8.9 billion searches and 7.8 percent market share. Yahoo had just 2 percent increase compared to last year and closely followed by Chinese search engine Baidu sites with 8 billion searches 7.0 percent share. Microsoft sites ranked forth worldwide with a 41 percent increase compared to last years data which seems promising for next year.

The overall July 2009 data represents a 41-percent increase versus July 2008 in global search market that is a positive indicator for future search marketing opportunities and e-business.

No More Page Rank Sculpting with “nofollow” Attribute

Since Matt Cutts from Google throw a bombshell in SMX advanced meeting in 3th of June about Page Rank Sculpting, every search marketing blog is discussing the same issue. Is it really like “nofollow” attribute no longer passes more juice to followed links or not and what changes shall SEO‘s do in that case? First of all lets have a look at what page rank sculpting is all about.

What is page rank sculpting?

Every page has a page rank value, that is a numerical weighting that it passes in to the links allocated in it. Page Rank sculpting occurs when we use “nofollow” attribute in unimportant links to prevent passing page rank values so that we pass that left over weight in to followed links to increase the page rank of those links.

According to Google’s change, regardless of  “nofollow” attribute, Google determines the Page Rank  it passes along  links according to the number of links on a web page. That is using “nofollow” no longer generates more page rank for the followed links. Here are some of Matt Cutts goodies: