Iran Lashes Out at Google Maps Over Gulf Nomenclature

Iran is harshly criticizing Google for what it feels is a disrespectful omission in Google Maps.

The country’s government is angry because Google Maps does not label the body of water known in Iran as the Persian Gulf. Others refer to it as the Arabian Gulf.

A senior Iranian official blasted Google in a statement on Saturday, threatening that the company risks losing credibility in the Middle East.

“Google fabricating lies… will not have any outcome but for its users to lose trust in the data the company provides,” Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Bahman Dorri said according to Iranian news reports.

Before Dorri made that official statement on behalf of the Iranian government, resentment about the omission had been brewing among many of the country’s citizens, the BBC reported last week. Upset Iranians say that, up until a few days ago, Google Maps labeled the area as the Persian Gulf.

A Google spokesperson told the BBC that Google Maps does not label every place in the world, but could not provide another example of a major location going nameless.

The large body of water in question is connected to the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Sea. It separates Iran, to the north, from Saudia Arabia, the U.A.E. and other Arab countries to the south. It has long been known as the Persian Gulf, but in recent years some Arab states have sought to rebrand the waterway as the Arabian Gulf.

Google’s response here so far appears to be one of studied uninvolvement. Do you think Google should leave the gulf nameless, stick with Persian Gulf, or perhaps use both names? Let us know in the comments.























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Google News Gets Deeper Ties to Google+

Google News has a new look, and it’s not just cosmetic. Besides adding larger thumbnail photos that dynamically expand when users click on topics, the news-aggregating service now has stronger ties to Google+.

In a blog post about the change, Google says “Many news stories inspire vibrant discussions on Google+, and today we’re starting to add this content to both the News homepage, and the realtime coverage pages.” The feature brings Google+ conversations from your circles, journalists and other “notables” right to the Google News homepage. It can also be turned off if you just want to see headlines.

Google News also now has buttons for users to get “realtime” coverage on a topic. If you’ve ever clicked through on a Google News topic in the past, you may have been frustrated by the seemingly random selection and organization of the stories presented.

SEE ALSO: Google News Fooled by April Fools’ Day Prank

“Realtime” presents the topic stories in a more organized way. Once you click on it, you’ll see news articles about the story at the top, listed more or less chronologically. Below that, in-depth articles, opinion pieces and “highly cited” posts are presented under their own headings.

Finally, every topic now gets a similar treatment on the main Google News page, with a top story, more headlines, in-depth/highly cited articles, and a large thumbnail. For topics other than the first one, however, the user must click a button to expand the topic to see anything other than the top story.

What do you think of Google News’s new look? Have your say in the comments.





















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A Marketer's Guide to Optimizing Images for Google Search

There's no doubt about it: the visual content revolution is upon us, as is evident by the infographic craze, the popularity of websites like Pinterest, and the success of visual content on social media sites like Facebook and Google+.

It's no surprise then that today on the Official Google Webmaster blog, Google shared some helpful tips on how to effectively optimize your website's visual content and images to get found in Google's Image Search. We thought these tips, in addition to the Image Publishing Guidelines Google encourages, were definitely worthy of sharing with you, especially if you're experimenting with ways to make your marketing content more visual so you can take advantage of the increased popularity of visual content.

Do you know how to properly optimize that fabulous pink paper unicorn image seen at top right? You will after you read this simple tutorial!

How Google Identifies and Indexes Images

So what exactly does Google look at when indexing images? Let's check out a quick overview before we explain how to optimize your images.

First, it checks out image type. The image types Google can index include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG. To learn more about a particular image when Google's algorithms index an image, Google looks at the written copy on the page where the image was found as well as the page's title and body. Google also considers anchor text pointing to the image, the image’s filename, and its alt text. In addition, Google may use other methods like computer vision (methods for acquiring, processing, analyzing, and understanding images) and the caption from the Image Sitemap (a Sitemap incorporating image-specific tags, which we'll elaborate on later in this post), if available, to learn more about the images it finds.

How to Optimize Images So Google Can Index Them in Search

In order to make it easier for Google to find and index your images, Google suggests the following:

1) Only Use Google-Supported Image Formats on Your Site

As we already mentioned, the image types Google can index include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG, so be sure to only use these image file types on your website to make it possible for Google to index them.

2) Name the Filenames of Your Images Using Descriptive Words Related to the Content of the Image

In other words, name your image files something that is indicative of what the image is itself, rather than something like IMG2394870.jpg. For instance, if you're a paper vendor, and you uploaded that image at the top of this post of a pink paper unicorn made using your paper, you might name it pink-paper-unicorn.jpg. Descriptive filenames are also helpful for users who come across your images in search, since Google admits to using filenames as the image's snippet in search results when it can't locate any relevant text on the page that references the image.

3) Use Image Alt Text to Describe Images

Because Google and other search engines have a difficult time "seeing" images, use the alt text to describe it in a way that humans would read and understand, similar to how you'd choose a filename. In the alt text for that same pink paper unicorn image, for example, you might describe it as pink paper unicorn.

The alt text of an image is very important for a couple of reasons. First, because it lets Google know what the subject matter of the image is. Google then uses this information to determine the best images to return for a searcher's query. Second, because it provides users who are unable to see images on web pages -- whether they have visual impairments or are using devices with low-bandwidth connections -- to be able to interpret images. For these reasons, Google recommends you be as descriptive as possible, citing the following examples of bad, better, and best alt text for an image:

Bad: alt=""
Better: alt="puppy"
Best: alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch"

Avoid: alt="puppy dog baby dog pup pups puppies doggies pups litter puppies dog retriever labrador wolfhound setter pointer puppy jack russell terrier puppies dog food cheap dog food puppy food"

As you can see, Google also advises against using an alt text naming approach similar to 'keyword stuffing.'

4) Provide Context for the Image in the Page's Surrounding Text

It helps Google if the text on the page where the image is located mentions the image, too, so always try to reference your images in your text, close to where it lives on the page, using keywords similar to the alt text/filename of the image. Continuing with our pink paper unicorn example, let's say you had inserted that image into a blog post about creative uses of your paper. To ensure that Google better understood what that image was about, you'd reference it in the text of your blog post near where the image was placed (notice how we also did this at the top of this very post?). For example, you might write:

"To the right, check out the exquisite example of the pink paper unicorn one of our customers made using our handmade paper product."

Google also recommends providing descriptive titles and captions for your images, so consider adding those when relevant.

5) Submit an Image Sitemap

Google encourages website owners to submit what's called an Image Sitemap, which helps the Google team learn about your website's new images as well as determine what those images are about. You may already be familiar with Sitemaps in general, which offer a way to tell Google about the pages on your website it might not otherwise discover. In the simplest sense, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.

Similarly, you can also use Google's image extensions for Sitemaps to give Google additional information about the images on your website. This helps Google discover images it might not have otherwise discovered. In addition, it enables you to identify the most important images on your own website. To create an Image Sitemap, you'll have to add image-specific tags to a Sitemap, or just update an existing Sitemap.

To learn more about how to create and submit an Image Sitemap to Google, visit this page.
http://ow.ly/ayYCj  

6) File Size? Forgettaboutit!

Don't worry about the size of the images you embed on your website, at least when it comes to their ability to get indexed in Google search. Google clarifies that it doesn't discriminate, and will index images of all sizes -- no restrictions.

7) Avoid Embedding Text Within Images

While image size may not be a factor, Google does offer a word of warning against including important text in images -- particularly for elements like page headings and menu items -- with the reason being that not all users can access these images, and they'd be missing out on important information. Always save important text-based messages for the regular text-based HTML. Think of it this way: if a user would be confused or missing out on important information if the image wasn't viewable, you should save the text in the image for regular text-based HTML.

8) Use Descriptive Anchor Text When Linking to Images

Although you essentially have no control over the anchor text external pages use when linking to your images, you do have control over the anchor text you use in the links on your own site. Make sure this anchor text is useful, relevant, and descriptive of your images to clearly indicate to users the destination of your links. This will also make for a better user experience. For example, if you were linking to an album of origami paper animal creations made using your handmade paper, you might make the anchor text, Origami Animals Made With Handmade Paper.

9) Protect Your Images

Images on the web are easily sharable, and what this often results in is multiple copies of the image floating around the web, many of which are lacking appropriate attribution. Just think about some of the controversy surrounding Pinterest and users' improper use and attribution of images, for example.

In fact, what happens a lot is the original source getting buried in the rankings by copies if the copies version is better optimized using the tips above. So "if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text," remarks Google, "it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search." While Google tries to use as many signals as it can find to identify the original source of the image, they encourage users to provide as much attribution information as possible when using sourced images.

If you're concerned about others abusing, misusing, or not crediting the original images you embed on your website, make your images available under an attribution license that require users to attribute you as the source and link back to your website. You can use such licensing services as Creative Commons to easily implement this.

10) Consider User Experience

As is evident by the huge popularity of visual websites like Pinterest, using images and visuals is a great way to boost site traffic. But Google also encourages users not to overlook the user experience of those site visitors. Thus, Google recommends the following best practices for creating a positive user experience through use of images:

1. Use High-Quality Images: Not only are they more professional-looking and sharper-looking in the thumbnail versions displayed in Google Image Search, but they are also more effective at attracting inbound links and generating traffic when shared on third-party websites like Pinterest.
2. Create Standalone Pages for Important Images: You may use images on various pages of your site, but if you want a certain image to rank well in search, consider creating a dedicated page for that image where you can aggregate all its related information in one place. We recommend doing this for original images such as infographics, visualizations, and other original images your business creates.
3. Place Images Above the Fold: In other words, don't make visitors scroll down on the page to view your image. This will help you to immediately capture the attention of your visitors.
4. Create Directories to Curate Similar Images: This is particularly important if you have a visual business such as a photographer or an artist. Make it easy for your users to browse through relative images.
5. Optimize Images to Load Quickly: This will prevent the text on your page from loading before the images do. Check out Google's Optimizing Web Graphics guide for more info.

Are you taking measures to ensure that your visual content is easily findable in search?





















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How to Rank on the First Page of Google Through Videos

Don’t you ever wish there was a way to land on the first page of search results that didn’t involve the back-breaking work of traditional SEO?

Well, ever since Google started giving more and more attention to its blended results, you have had an incredible opportunity to jump to the first page of results by creating video content.

Studies have shown that videos were over 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results as part of the blended results.

The bad news is that this pushes down web pages…the good news is if you jump on the advantage that videos give you in appearing on the first page then you can get a distinct advantage over your competition.

But you have to do more than just create, edit and upload. There are some very specific steps…

Step #1: Upload videos directly to YouTube

So, while it won’t guarantee first-page results, you can be certain that Google will index your video if you upload it to YouTube.

The only problem is this won’t accomplish your SEO goal of driving clicks to your site since anyone who clicks on a result on YouTube will get sent to YouTube and not your site.

Now, this just won’t be a successful SEO strategy…so that’s not the only thing you should do.

Step #2: Embed the video onto your website

What you have to do is embed the video on your site like SEOmoz does…


By embedding videos onto your website it will help get the videos more views.

This is important because Google algorithms want to know how many times a video on YouTube has been watched…



The views on the video on your site will get included in that tally. Keep in mind; almost all of the videos that Google show on its blended searches are from YouTube.

There are exceptions, however:

Step #3: Embed videos on pages with text

To help search engines like Google get a better understanding of what the content is all about, make sure you are putting copy on the page.

There are two simple ways of doing that.

One, write an introduction to the video that goes before the embedded video:


The other strategy is to put the transcript on the page, too:


You can insert the transcript under the video.

You can get the transcript by using a service like SpeechPad. You are also going to use the transcript on YouTube, so save the transcript as a txt file.

Step #4: Create a video sitemap

You don’t need strict video content to get indexed. Google recognizes a lot of other formats as video like slide shows, screen capture and Power Point presentations that are animated.

The issue is, Google doesn’t see your video content, which means it searches for other ways to determine what your video is all about. That’s where video SEO comes in…

Traditionally, Google reads a page of content to figure out how to index it. But Google, though it is trying, can’t fully read Flash, so the content in the video remains invisible to their spiders. That means you need to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap found at their Webmaster Tools site.

Here is an example:

Step #5: Focus on long tail keywords

The video title is important. It is what Google is most interested in when it comes to the term that is being used for a search. In other words, the title and search term needs to match your video title.



In the above search I typed in “how to buy an iPad.” The title influences the search rankings, as well as the description tag so make sure you fill those in as well.

And just like normal SEO, it’s much easier to rank videos for long tail keywords, so focus on thehm instead of going after generic keywords like “credit cards”.

Here are some examples of keywords I could go after with my Quick Sprout Traffic System video:
Traffic SystemQuick Sprout Traffic SystemSEO TrainingOnline marketing training.

Once you figure out the keywords you want to rank for, make sure you video title and descriptions match them, as it will be very difficult to rank them if they don’t.

Step #6: Create a YouTube channel

If you don’t already have one, create a YouTube channel… andmake sure you create a channel name that is related to your industry. You can even go as far as creating a channel name that has your keyword in it.
In the example above you might say “SEO Training and Marketing.” Not many names will be available, so this will take some time. And don’t forget that there is a character limit to the channel name, which seems to be about 30.

The fastest way to get the keyword loaded copy is to upload the transcript to YouTube. The procedure is pretty straight forward…you just upload it like it was a caption:



The reason this is important is because all of your keywords are in that transcript, which then gets indexed by Google.

Enter the keyword in the title, description and keyword tag, and now start building links to it.

Step #7: Build backlinks to your video

If you want to build links to your video I recommend that you follow these 10 advanced techniques of getting authority links and these link-building tactics. If you want to be lazy about your link building, you could use Fivver.

Fiverr is a site where people will do just about anything for $5, like dance in spandex and sing happy birthday messages.

But that’s not what you need!

What you need is to look for the Fiverr profile “social_bookmark”.


Once you give him the keyword and URL and pay him $5, he’ll get backlinks to your YouTube video.
In about a week he’ll be finished, even giving you a report with all of the links.

The amount of time that it takes for your video to actually rank, however, may take anywhere from a week to three weeks after the back links have been added.

So in total you could be ranking in one month, but you probably won’t rank as high as you would like as the links that you’ll get from Fiverr won’t be as high in quality. Which is why I recommend that you ideally try to build them manually.

Conclusion

One advantage you have with videos over conventional SEO is that it is easier to get a YouTube video to rank on page 1 than it is to rank a website.

What that means is you can compete for rankings with well-established sites if you have optimized your videos correctly, giving you equal footing with the competition.

Google’s algorithm to find and index videos will only get better over time…and the competition for these results will obviously get more competitive, which means first page ranking will get tougher. So if you haven’t created a video yet, you better hurry up.

What other SEO tactics do you use to rank videos on the first page of search results?









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Google Launches Improved Online Advertising Metrics for Brand Marketers

For traditional brand marketers, it's no secret that measuring the impact of advertising efforts has always been a struggle. But with the rise of the web and digital advertising, luckily, these efforts have gotten much easier to measure through such standardized metrics as clicks, interaction rates, and conversions.

But have these metrics ever really been good enough to measure branding?

Google thinks not. Which is why today at the Ad Age Digital Conference, Google, partnering with the industry and supporting the IAB's Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) coalition, has launched the new Brand Activate Initiative, "an ongoing Google effort to address these challenges and re-imagine online measurement for brand marketers." The new initiative aims to reduce marketers' challenges in measuring an ad's ability to cause changes in brand favorability or in driving purchase intent and, ultimately, sales.

The announcement of Google's new initiative is also accompanied by its first wave of new brand metrics, which are being built into the tools advertisers already use to manage their ad campaigns. These three measurement initiatives are the Active View and Active GRP metrics (both rolling out starting today), and the Brand Impact Survey Pilot (coming soon).

Before we dive into what these individual metrics mean, check out Google's overview video on its new Brand Activate Initiative:

Active View

The first of the new Brand Activate Initiative metrics is Active View, a technology that can count “viewed” impressions, or a display ad that is at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second, as defined by the IAB’s proposed standard. In other words, with Active View, brand marketers can understand more than just impressions (i.e. simply whether their ads have been served). Now they can also understand whether the ad was actually viewed. Active View is made up of two insights: the percentage of the ad that was seen, as well as the duration for which it was seen.

Active View is being submitted for accreditation by the Media Rating Council (MRC), will be available in the coming weeks within the Google Display Network Reserve, and will be made a universal currency that will ultimately be offered within DoubleClick for Advertisers and Google's publisher partners, meaning advertisers will have the opportunity to pay only for Active View, or viewed impressions.

Active GRP (Gross Rating Point)

Active GRP is an online metric that adopts the methodology of GRP (gross rating point), a television advertising metric used to estimate how many people saw a certain TV advertisement. Google hopes that by using an online equivalent of this standard offline metric, marketers will be able to extend brand marketing from offline to online, comparing results across the two mediums.

Active GRP, like the traditional offline metric, enables marketers to determine the reach and frequency of a given online advertising campaign. But because Active GRP is built into the ad serving tools Google's publishers and marketers already use, it also allows marketers to react and make adjustments to their campaigns in real time, a feature missing from its offline counterpart. According to Google, Active GRP also depends on a robust methodology that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data with Active View data to combat issues like panel skewing and reliance on a single data source.

Active GRP is first being used in a pilot program for Google's DoubleClick for Advertisers clients before being rolled out to other products.

Brand Impact Survey Pilot

The final brand measurement initiative Google mentioned is its Impact Survey Pilot with digital brand advertising measurement company, Vizu. While Google reported very little on what this entails, we do know that it is the result of an experiment Google reported on last month involving online brand measurement research for approximately 70 DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) campaigns. The approach leverages DoubleClick ad-serving technology to generate two groups of users that have been randomly selected. One group sees the campaign ads, while the other sees public service ads instead, and Vizu’s sampling technology is then used to administer a brand lift survey to all users to measure such variables as brand awareness, purchase intent, and favorability. According to Google:

"The brand results show how ads performed across the campaign, as well as different sites and ad frequencies. This data can be used with the other campaign metrics in DFA to help marketers to see the impact of the campaign using any metric they want -- from impressions to clicks to brand impact to conversions."

A Big Win for Brand Marketers

These three new online advertising metrics are definitely a big win for brand marketers everywhere. And Google reportedly isn't stopping there, mentioning plans to continue iterating, integrating, and providing even more metrics for brand marketers to understand how their digital advertising efforts are paying off.

As Google says, "We think that with brand new metrics comes a new brand moment -- one that will encourage brands to invest in the web, help publishers show the value of their digital content, and stimulate digital media’s own golden age."

For many, online advertising has proven to be a great complement to an overarching inbound marketing strategy, but measuring advertising's impact on branding has always been a struggle. But with new initiatives sprouting up like Google's, brand marketers will more effectively be able to measure how well their digital advertising campaigns are contributing to their overall marketing programs, and that's certainly to marketers' delight.

What do you think of Google's new initiative? Will you be more apt to experiment with online advertising as more robust metrics become available?









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Google Whips Up 3D Graphing Goodness in Search

March 30, 2012 by Lance Ulanoff 7 Pin ItShare on TumblremailsharePin ItShare on Tumblremailshare

Add one more thing to the list of fun stuff you can do directly from Google‘s search box: 3D Graph Plotting. And these aren’t just still 3D charts. They’re colorful and fully manipulable, all thanks to Google Chrome Browser’s support for WebGL.

According to a post in Google’s Inside Search blog, the new features are an enhancement to the 2D graphing functionality Google launched late last year. Google announced the new update by providing a sample equation that, if you have the Chrome browser, you can drop right into the address bar:

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Forget Google Instant: In the Future, Search Engines Will Read Your Habits

When Google launched Google Instant in 2010, it claimed that providing results as users type and removing the need to hit the “enter” key saved users two to five seconds per search.

Wolfram Alpha CEO Stephen Wolfram’s vision of what the word “Instant” could mean for search is a bit more literal.

He envisions some type of search engine which could — through data maps of personal data history — provide reports automatically when they’re needed without an explicit query. He counts this sort of “preemptive delivery of information” among “a large number” of projects the data company has been working on.
Though there are no concrete plans to create such a product, here’s the type of thing Wolfram has in mind:
“You run into a person (e.g. at SXSW); your augmented reality system automatically recognizes their face, tells you your social network connections to them, plots the time series of when you’ve exchanged email with them, does topic modelling of recent material about them (or email you’ve exchanged with them) and compares it with things you’ve written recently and suggests interesting conversation topics.”

Earlier this month, Wolfram wrote a blog post about personal analytics that outlined some of the data he tracks in his own life. It includes the same sort of data that could be useful to this type of pre-emptive search.
He has, for instance, archived every email message that’s passed through his inbox since 1989. He also tracks his keystrokes, meetings, hours spent on the phone and daily steps taken. Most of the data is recorded automatically.


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