“Larry Page Talks A Lot More About Search Than Social In New Letter”
Larry Page marked the completion of his first year as the CEO of Google Inc with a rather lengthy letter to the company investors, posted on the company’s website last week. After taking over as the CEO from Eric Schmidt last April, the rather silent Page has finally stepped out in front of the public giving an update about the company’s activities over the past 365 days.
“When I post publicly I get a ton of high quality comments, which makes me happy and encourages me to keep posting,” Page wrote in his Thursday post.
In his public letter, Page shares his thoughts on Google’s past accomplishments, and the future possibilities of the company. Discussing the success of some of Google’s newly launched products namely Google+, Page talks about ways in which the company can improve its search and also highlights some of the challenges he faces ahead as the CEO.
The letter has been published on Page’s personal profile page on Google’s social networking venture; Google+ which also happens to be the centre of his focus in the coming days. Page has been known to be pushing Google and its products aggressively to counter the popularity of Facebook, the most recent effort being the launch of its social networking site Google+.
Although Google has a long way to go before it can match Facebook’s 850 million user, Page does not hesitate in boasting about 100 million active users, on its social networking service which integrates over 120 products, most owned by Google. Expressing his excitement Page says that he is thrilled that the network is giving the search company a lot of valuable information about its users that can be used to refine and personalize search results with fewer mistakes on a search engine that understands “things not strings”. Also acknowledging that threat from growing competition is only a click away, Page has urged his employees to not make mistakes as it very easy for customers to go elsewhere.
Apart from this, Page also uses the post as a platform to defend several other issues like the complaints about Google’s business and privacy practices in the US and Europe, shutting down of several failed Google products like Buzz, Knol and Sidewiki saying failed experiments often lead to a better future product.
“We have always wanted Google to be a company that is deserving of great love,” Page wrote. “But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because most large companies are not well-loved, or even seemingly set up with that in mind.”
Page also talked about the $12.5-billion acquisition of Motorola that will be used to advance the hardware development of Android and highlighted the company’s $30 billion revenue generated from the AdSense program and the company’s ongoing work on driver-less cars and other experiments.
Page’s ending words reiterated Google’s focus on creating a simpler, more intuitive experience by integrating and producing innovative technology products that touch people deeply and enable customers do truly amazing things over the internet.
Facebook Building a Social Search Engine to Rival Google
Search on the social network could soon be getting a major overhaul as there are strong rumors of Facebook working on a new, improved search engine that will help Facebook users better sift through the huge volume of content created by its members on and off the site on a daily basis. The search would include status updates, articles, videos, and other information across the Web that people ‘like’ using Facebook’s like button all of which works pretty much to the benefit of the social network.
Citing two anonymous people familiar with the project, a leading Newsweek report stated that about 24 Facebook engineers, led by a former Google engineer Lars Rasmussen, are working on an improved search engine, however the social networking site is maintaining silence on the matter because of the mandatory quiet period ahead of its IPO release next month.
It has long been known that Facebook has not made search its top priority. But with Google pushing its way into the social search market with Google+ last fall, and with ComScore reporting that Facebook got a meager 336 million searches opposed to Google’s 17.6 billion searches in February 2012, it has forced Zuckerberg and his team to reconsider and act upon their current position in the search world. These reports have just intensified the ongoing competition levels between the two Silicon Valley giants.
With Google making an appearance in the social networking space, Facebook has every reason to start monetizing on the $15 billion search advertising market that it has not touched until now.
If the Businessweek report is true, and if Facebook does manage to develop a more potent search engine than Google, it might just be enough to encourage users to shift from Google to Facebook with few or no reasons to leave the social networking site at all; something Google might want to start thinking about.
Rumours Surface That Yahoo! Will Move From Bing to Google
Reports from various sources have confirmed that Yahoo Inc will begin its much anticipated layoff procedure this week that will cut down the company’s existing workforce by almost 14%. This move is a part of CFO Scott Thompson’s reform strategies as the Internet Company desperately tries to cut down its operating costs by an estimated $375 million and save its existence in the search world.
There are strong rumors that Yahoo is discussing a renegotiation of its search and advertising deals with Microsoft, and that the company is also engaging “in active discussions” with Google about the latter taking over Yahoo’s search business although no comments could be obtained from any of the three companies involved.
As per sources, the lay off’s will take place in phases and is expected to begin with job cuts in the product, research and marketing departments which build and maintain the new Yahoo websites and mobile apps. Further job cuts can be expected in other departments like the public relations division and in addition a large number of contract workers who are not on Yahoo’s official roster may also be impacted by this decision. It is also being said that the company’s top executives are seriously discussing selling off the company’s various businesses including ad technology org and Yahoo search and more as part of the proceedings.
With only 2.4 billion searches conducted over Yahoo and the company’s constantly declining revenue the internet company is possibly looking at getting out of search altogether and focus on media advertising only. But if Yahoo is actually contemplating dumping Bing for Google, it would certainly hit Microsoft very hard at a time when the software company had just begun to succeed in its efforts to take away some market share from Google.
Expressing his regrets about the lay off’s, Scott Thompson stated that the changes would transform Yahoo into a slimmer and more profitable business with a stronger focus on its core priorities, which have been identified as “core media and communications”, “platforms” and “data”.
CEO Scott Thompson said in a statement.
“We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.”
“Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they’ve contributed to Yahoo!,” Thompson added.
Although there are rumors floating around everywhere, one can only wait for Yahoo to begin its lay off process and see what would be Scott Thompson’s next move to save the dying internet company. Further more, once Yahoo releases its Q1 results later this month it will throw some light on what will be the future of the employees who managed to escape the layoffs this time.
10 Essential Website Usability Tools
So you have a website, and you’re getting traffic – but the sales aren’t rolling in. Or maybe they are, but they’re not setting the world on fire.
All too often websites are built with little or no consideration given to their usability. And this is often the critical difference between good and great websites.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term:
“Usability is the extent to which a website can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. In other words, good usability implies that users can easily use a website and by doing so, reach their goals quickly and without getting lost or confused.”
For an existing website, the first steps to improving usability are of course assessing the current levels of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of users.
To help you with this process, here are 10 essential website usability tools to start the process.
Clicktale allows you to visualize your visitors activity and get an overview of complete browsing sessions. It also watches behaviour analytics, which include click heatmaps, mouse move heat maps, and web analytics. These can help improve usability and conversion rates.
CrazyEgg enhances your sites usability by keeping a track of pages i.e. it can watch over your website and have an overview of heat maps to track the clicks. It can also track the advanced activities such as top fifteen referrals, browser and search terms.
Feng GUI simulates human vision during the first 5 seconds of exposure to visuals, and creates heatmaps based on an algorithm that predicts what a real human would be most likely to look at. Feng-GUI Dashboard offers designers and advertisers, a pre-testing service that measures the performance of your design, before it airs, by analyzing levels of attention, brand effectiveness and placement, as well as breaking down the flow of attention.
Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design. By finding out what a person recalls about your design in just 5 seconds you can ensure that your message is being communicated as effectively as possible.
Google Website Optimizer allows you to set up different versions of your web content and then it random displays the versions to different visitors. This form of multivariate testing help you establish which versions are most user friendly and lead to higher conversions.
Kampyle gathers insight through Feedback and Form Analytic solutions. The feedback dashboard helps you to understand the real insights from a user’s feedback and allows you to reply to Feedback through automatic or personalizes responses to strengthen your connection with visitors.
Loop 11 is a solution for consultants, designers and web managers to get the metrics and optimize a website’s potential. It has an easy process to create a professional usability test, accumulate responses and source them via a social media and finally analyze the data through the usability metrics.
Usabilla integrates usability tests in your daily work-flow and helps you continuously improve your web site’s user-experience and conversions with high quality design feedback.
Userfly records a visitor’s frequency of visits. It does this by keeping a track of their mouse movements, clicks and form interactions. Amid the tasks conducted, the videos can be watched later to increase the conversions and to ameliorate the performance of your website. Sign-up for free Userfly to record 10 captures or take up any premium plans which start $10 till $200 providing you a maximum of 10000 captures per month and that can be stored for ninety days.
User Testing is a way of getting data on your visitors’ browsing patterns — data that isn’t biased or subjective; data which shows the real activity from people using your website.
UserTesting provides on demand user testing. Post your website usability test requirements on their website and get direct feedback from real users via participant videos of activities completed. With a large database of users, you can target exactly who completes your tests.
Of course there’s plenty of other tools out there which can help you improve your website’s usability. The key is to get started with the process. Whether you invest in one of the tools above or just start looking at some of the basics through Google analytics – once you’ve started testing, you can start improving.
Are Search Ads Still Worthwhile Alongside a #1 Organic Ranking?
The title of this post might seem a bit confusing, but according to Google’s latest research, combining paid advertising alongside a top ranking organic result will help to give your total number of clicks an incremental gain of up to 96%.
The study that was released by Google a few days ago and found that even when advertisers show up in the number one organic search result position, 50% of clicks they get on ads are not replaced by clicks on organic search results when the ads don’t appear.
The percentage of incremental clicks increases further to 82% when an ad is found alongside an organic ranking in positions 2-4 and to 96% when an ad is found alongside an organic ranking of 5 or higher.
The key message that Google is trying to get across is SEO and PPC efforts complement each other, and lead to a more successful search strategy.
This may surprise some webmasters who don’t see any point to run search ads for a term which they already rank organically.
According to our AdWords expert Sam, one of the reasons this occurs is trust. When a user scans the search results page and notices the same company listed first in both organic and paid results, they are perceived as industry leaders and are more likely to attract a click compared to their competitors.
It’s also important to remember that the top two or three results on the search results page are mostly PPC ads which some users may be more inclined to click on over organic listings.
If you’ve noticed a similar trend with your website, let us know in the comments below.
Warning: Google to Crackdown on ‘Unnatural’ Links
The search marketing industry has been abuzz about safe link building practices in light of Google cracking down on sites with ‘unnatural and artificial links’.
Many webmasters have been left enraged after being issued penalties by Google because their sites acquired artificial links that were used to manipulate their PageRank. Many experienced a sudden drop in the Google SERPs without prior notification.
Google has either partially or completely removed entire blog networks from its index. Consequently when Google removes a website from its index, any outgoing links automatically become null and void leaving thousands of websites affected.
The worst affected by this update are blog networks like BuildMyRank who are reportedly on the verge of shutting down.
So why are blog-networks being penalized this time?
Firstly Blog networks are a form of paid link building and Google’s policy on paid link building is crystal clear that states that “buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”
The purpose of blog networks is to facilitate link building, by creating genuine back links with quality content via posts opposed to creating paid back links from blogs without genuine content, which many webmasters resort to as it is easy and quick.
Blog networks are a type of “link scheme”. Recently some blog networks have been found to develop a technology to allows users to distribute their articles to hundreds of different blogs in the shortest span of time which is another quick and easy but un ethical way to generate thousands of back links to a site. It was only a matter of time until Google noticed this especially when Google’s opinion on link schemes clearly states that scheme blog networks are not on their list of favorites.
Articles posted to blog networks tend to be of fair to poor quality. The majority of articles posted to the affected blog networks were purely “filler” content that was written to get back links.
Following the first Panda Update in 2011 Google has constantly maintained that it wants genuine and quality content sites to occupy its search index and it wants webmasters to create and exchange value added content that helps readers visiting the blog site, not content that just creates back links.
Back in March 2012 Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts had hinted an algorithmic change that will come down hard on sites with over optimization or SEO.
(http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update-14887.html)
“We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page, or whether they exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect in a particular area. It is an active area where we have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”
Givena Google penalized one of their own Chrome websites when it was revealed that a marketing company they used had employed paid back links, there is no reason to think Google would spare the other culprits.
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