Google Testing “Value Alert” Notice In Google Shopping Ads

This time Google has another test running on product listing ads, to highlights “value” of the products.

Marked by Elizabeth Marsten at CommerceHub on Thursday, the test displays a “Value alert” message at the bottom of the ad and showing items that are on sale or significantly discounted. Yeah! Google is testing a new way of showing items.

Based on the size of the discount the “Value alert” message triggers itself but it’s not clear yet that the advertisers’ TrustedStores status has anything to do with the inclusion in the test.

Well, the experiment seems to be very limited at this point. We haven’t been able to get it to trigger. May be upcoming day Google will provide a detailed explanation on their new experiment.

Till then stay connected.

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Apple Confirms Their Web Crawler: Applebot

After much rumour about an Apple Web Crawler, Apple has finally posted a help document approving the presence of AppleBot.

Apple said, Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. AppleBot is “used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions,” the company said.

The user-agent will usually follow the following string but will contain “Applebot” in it always:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_1) AppleWebKit/600.2.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0.2 Safari/600.2.5 (Applebot/0.1)

Apple declares it will respect the usual robots.txt guidelines and robots meta tags. AppleBot currently originates in the 17.0.0.0 net block. If you don’t mention AppleBot in your robots.txt directive, Apple will follow what you mention for Googlebot. So if you want to block AppleBot and GoogleBot, you can just block GoogleBot, but it is recommended to block each independently.

If you figure our some unfamiliar AppleBot activity, you can always reach Apple about it at Apple-NOC “at” apple.com.

It is still uncertain if Apple plans on constructing and challenging with Google on search, but this is one step closer to that.

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Google Will Stop Displaying Emojis in SERP

Say goodbye to Emojis in the Google search results, at least from Google’s desktop search results.

From last couple of weeks Google has initiated displaying Emojis on desktop search results and then publishers, like Expedia, began trying to see if adding Emojis to their title tags and snippets would increase CTR from Google’s organic results or not.

After that, many other webmasters started adding emoji to their web page titles, finally leading to Google’s SERPs being somewhat overrun by cute and funny emoji symbols.

Google’s John Mueller said that the emoji will be removed from the search results soon, like Google dropped Unicode symbols back in 2003. It does not mean that your web pages will be penalized for putting emoji, Google will simply stop displaying the emoji in the search engine results pages.

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Google Launches Custom Voice Actions for Third Party Apps

According to a post this week focussed to Android developers Google is further growing his Voice Actions to third party applications to let consumers reach into apps on Android devices, beyond just launching them.

In some cases, this appears to enable a version of in-app search:
“Today, we launched our first set of partners for custom Google voice actions on Android. This feature will enable people to say things like “Ok Google, listen to NPR” or “Ok Google, show attractions near me on TripAdvisor.” We’re currently piloting custom voice actions with a select group of partners, but we plan to open it up more widely in the future — and we’d love to hear your ideas for actions you’d like to implement.”

Nearly a year ago we all have heard about this development from Google and it came just as Microsoft is expanding Cortana integration of third party apps.

Google has also expanded the range of developers and application producers contributing in Google Now, freshly adding 60+ new apps.

Google Now and Voice Actions will represent the future of search for Google on mobile devices rather than mobile friendly conventional search results. As, these experiences are much more practical and better adjusted for smartphone users and their usage settings.

Making money from these user experiences is a different subject, however.

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Google Says More Searches Now On Mobile Than On Desktop

Last year Google employees said that the mobile search queries would possibly overtake desktop queries sometime this year and now Google has just confirmed this.

Google says that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.” The company declined to disclose more on what the other countries were, how lately this change occurred or what the comparative numbers of PC and mobile search queries are now.

Google also explained that the mobile queries include mobile browser-based searches and also those coming from Google’s mobile search apps.

This includes only smartphones, not tablets because Google counts tablets with desktops.

With the disclosure of this news that mobile search has now surpassed desktop search, we get a bit more colour and context for the recent mobile-friendly algorithm update.

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The Mobile Friendly Algorithm Has Fully Rolled Out

Google has confirmed that the mobile friendly algorithm is now fully rolled out to all data centres and fully in place.

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed this on Twitter that the algorithm is rolled out. Gary also added: Not all pages were reindexed yet so they don’t have the new scores. Yet.

The actual number of sites affected decreased considerably because a lot of sites became mobile friendly recently. So while most of the webmasters and tracking companies are not seeing all that much of a change in the mobile Google results, some are definitely noticing trivial changes in the mobile search results.

Will things in Google’s mobile search results change even more in coming weeks? No one knows. We just need to wait and watch how this MobileGeddon is going to affect the whole strategy.

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5 Fundamentals for Digital Marketing Success

These simple to understand basics of Digital Marketing ensures you of developing the key abilities required for successful online marketing in your business. If followed, developed and improved, leads to greater and greater success with online marketing.

A Flexible Website 

The 1st fundamental is the need for a trustworthy and flexible website, which permits you to manage your content effectively in-house. With tools like WordPress, businesses can manage the most sophisticated website with low levels of technical talents akin to those required to use MS Office, helping any company to publish content on the web easily and reducing the external costs and delays at the same time.

Regular and Fresh Content 

Our potential customers have the power to seek us out on the web, that's why it is necessary for us to leave content for them which will lead them to know more about our product and/or services. Many businesses are not in the habit of creating content on a constant basis. And, the most effective way for a business to produce good quality content is to make some simple changes to the primary processes in the business which results in generating new fresh content.

Developing a Social Face to The Company
This can be achieved by participating in one or more of the major social networks like Twitter, Facebook and/or LinkedIn. It could also be accomplished by posting videos on YouTube or writing blog posts which draw the attention of the crowd. The purpose is to encourage people you develop relationships through these channels to increase your chances of doing business with them.

Monitoring and Tracking
Embrace, implement and use systems that will help you monitor and keep a track all of the interactions your customer base have with you and your business. There are many Web Analytics Tools, and you can also start off with Google Analytics.

Well Optimised Conversion Processes
The course of cultivating your relationship with a 1st time visitor through to them becoming a client will usually take time and go through several phases. Plotting out that journey and how it will clarify and what you present a customer at each phase to move them to the next phase, is valuable piece of work. By doing it, you can also choose what conversion rates you assume to accomplish as you go through the process. Over time, you can test elements to try and enhance those conversion rates.

Social Entellus Team

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Why Hire an SEO Expert?

Businesses of all sizes are frequently faced with the problem of employing a professional SEO service provider, or trying to learn top training of SEO themselves. Below are numerous reasons why it’s undoubtedly best to leave search engine optimization to the professionals.

1. Professional SEOs are very used to with the tools they use to examine websites. Choosing the appropriate keywords for your marketplace is arguably the most essential feature of SEO. After all, if you invest in getting a top position on Google for a weak keyword, do you really achieve anything?

2. Professional SEOs have been there, and done that. While learning SEO for the first time can take you months or even years to correctly analyse a website, specialized SEOs can more proficiently analyse your website’s potential and recommend smart strategies. Professional SEOs know what it takes to get a site in tip-top shape for its Google Debut, or reorganize an existing page to be more search engine friendly.

3. The quicker you get top rankings, the better. Think of your rank like retirement. If you start saving for retirement at 40, you’re not going to get out as much as you would if you started saving at 20. Just as interest builds off of interest in retirement account, SEO builds off of SEO on your website. Which website do you think will be better off? 

Website A) Takes their time learning the basics of SEO and a few cutting-edge skills. Within a year they have optimized their pages to the best of their capabilities.

Website B) Hires an SEO firm and gets in the top 10 for their preferred keywords in a month or two. With the increased exposure on Google, Website B’s client base is progressively growing and more people start talking about Website B’s products on forums and blogs. Google takes notice of all the inbound links pointing to Website B and raiser its rank further. As Website B’s rank improves, more and more people see their products and more and more people are talking about them. The cycle continues.

Just like with a retirement account, the more principal you start out with (in this case, initial exposure), the more you’ll benefit in the long-run.

4. Don’t risk being black-listed. Often times, people get discouraged with their website’s rankings and try to take the speedy road to success. Don’t be tempted. Trying to artificially fuel your website’s advancement in the search engine results pages can cost your business greatly. It is unknown whether or not Google holds a grudge, but who wants to find out? Using shady methods is referred to as black hat SEO. Examples of black hat SEO are: keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, and spamming. Professional SEOs know the significance of staying clear of black hat methods and will build your rank naturally and adhere to important guidelines. If you try to handle SEO on your own, you might be accidently contributing in black hat SEO without even recognizing it.

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SEO – Tips, Tricks and Facts

The Benefits of SEO are enormous. The digital world has improved dramatically over the past few years, but SEO still remains an effective and essential marketing strategy. It has turn out to be broadly embraced as an online marketing strategy. Here are some Tips, Tricks and Facts to better understand the SEO.

• 75% of internet users never scroll past the first page of search engine's results.
• 93% of the online experiences begin with a search engine's results.
• An estimated 79% of all search engine users click on the organic, non-paid ads that search engine results.
• Search engines look at how many times a keyword is in your content & if it is abnormally high, will count this against u rather than 4 you.
• The top position in search engine results help your site in getting more exposure increasing chances for users to see your content.
• SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
• The traffic coming from SEO is more competent than different marketing strategies
• When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
• An easy to use website can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
• 3 in 4 users never scroll past the page of search results.
• The fastest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
• SEO is one of the most cost effective marketing tactics. It aims users who are actively looking for your products and services online.
• Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use html, asp, php, etc. & it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
• Always make sure that your web designer understands your expectations for natural SEO. Doing a retrofit on your glittery new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Search Engines’ Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
• Regularly updating your site’s content will keep it fresh. Updates mean that there is activity around the site & therefore it’s in operation.
• If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text.
• 48% of mobile searches started with a search engine and 55% of mobile searchers are ready to buy within the hour.

Social Entellus

http://www.socialentellus.com

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Interesting Facts about Popular Socia Media Websites

If you are looking for some interesting statistics about social media? You have reached the right place. The graphic below will explain the facts about different social media sites.

Why Responsive Web Design is important?

Smartphones and tablets have changed the approach toward design and user experience. Before the creation of mobile devices with innovative web-browsing ability, web designers had only one primary challenge to deal with keeping the same look and feel of their websites in various desktop computer browsers. Though, interacting with sites on handheld devices is not the same as doing that on a desktop computer. Factors like Click versus Touch, Screen-size, Pixel-resolution, optimized markup and many more have become essential while making sites with Responsive Design.

Before we move forward to why Responsive Design is important? Let's take a look at what is Responsive Design first?

Responsive Web Design. What is it?

Responsive Web Design is a method of laying-out and coding a website so that it can provide an optimal viewing experience, ease of reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling through an extensive range of devices (from desktops to palmtops).

When creating a responsive web design, the designer should make sure that the website's navigation elements, screen-layouts, text, images and other UI elements rearrange themselves on a variety of devices. Thus, one need not spend extra time and money in creating and maintaining one "desktop version" and another "mobile version" of his/her website.

Now, we can move on to the importance of Responsive Design while crafting websites.

Time & Money

People say that making a responsive website is expensive and it's a fact, the cost to make a responsive website is somewhat more than making a conventional website, but the expenses to duplicate a website for handheld devices gets completely eliminated, cutting total development costs, significantly. Plus, a responsive design cuts the total ownership cost, by means of taking away the effort to maintain different versions of a website. Thus, spending the money in responsive website design is the smartest decision.

Increased use of Mobile Devices

Mobile internet users getting increased every day exponentially. As more and more peopleget used to browsing the web through their smartphones and tablets, it is foolish for any website publisher to overlook responsive web design.

The UX (User experience)

While, content is king and discoverability of content are leading success metrics; it is the UX that helps visitors to consume content on any website through the device of their choice, anytime. And, that's why responsive web design is about providing the best user experience regardless of whether they use a desktop computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart-TV. Responsive Websites are uncertain to devices and their operating systems. It ensures that users get the best and steady experience of a website on any device of the user's choice.

Thus, rather than classifying website content into dissimilar, device-specific experiences, it is smarter to embrace the responsive web design approach. That's not to say there isn't a business case for separate sites geared toward specific devices, but that kind of design-thinking does not have to be our default. Now, digital content is expected to be viewed on a range of different experiences. Responsive web design offers the way forward.

Don’t Make, These Mistakes - Web Design

Today, many websites suffer from mistakes that can dramatically influence their effectiveness. Here are some common mistakes with helpful information on how to avoid them. Some of these difficulties merely result in irritation, whilst others will hinder or prevent visitors to your site from accessing the material or functionality that you have placed there. Here are some mistakes that we must avoid with respect to the development of a website.

1. Role of Website - The biggest mistake we can make is not defining the website's role in the overall strategy of your organisation, in the first place. It doesn't matter how well or poorly your site is implemented. Once the strategic purposes and role of the website are understood, it can be built in a manner to achieve its goals.

2. Graphics - The graphics on your website should enrich the user experience. These need to be kept in balance enough to make sure that the site is attractive, and the same time functional too, but not enough to create mess and slow down the user experience. Graphics need to be enhanced to make sure that the site is displayed at a reputable speed.

3. Navigation - of your website must be intuitive. You need to ensure that the site is well organised and presented in a manner so that the visitor can easily get what he is looking for. Visitor easily gets off of such sites which are hard to navigate. Stick to standard techniques and standard locations for navigation elements such as links and menus.

4. Flash - If used sparingly and aesthetically, it can give out great results. It can increase enthusiasm and movement to your site and capabilities that are difficult or not possible using only HTML. Unfortunately not everyone has flash and not everyone has the bandwidth to support flash.

5. Pop-up Windows - Unless and until you have a very good reason, avoid pop-up windows. They are very irritating and many advanced browsers block them.

6. Dead Links - Always make sure all of the links on your site is working and they must. Nothing is more unprofessional than having users visit your site and encounter broken links. It can weaken the confidence of visitors in your site and finally your organisation. Always make sure to test all links in your site. External links from your site that you no longer control must be checked regularly, especially if they link deep into your content of site.

7. Monitoring Your Site - Today, many tools are available for monitoring a site. The insights they can provide are valuable to understand the behaviour of users on your site, helping you in determining where they come from, how they found your site and the kind of content that they are looking for and which links are receiving the most attention. Many excellent tools are available free of charge; there is no excuse not to monitor your site.

There are many things we need to keep in mind while designing a website and many can be understood if we put ourselves in visitor's place. Be a visitor of your own site.