When Google+ Pages was first launched people had a lot of trouble because there was no way an admin could post on the brand page without giving his/her personal account information to someone else. Not only this, now users will be able to see how many people have +1′d the page and how many users have added the page to their circles. Another important change is that all the admins of the page will be notified about every activity going on the page.

You might have seen the ‘How Many Updates’ feature on Facebook. The new volume control feature for circles is pretty similar. However, the Facebook controls are applicable to personal users, but the changes made by Google are applicable to all the circles. User can select from different options from streams regarding the volume. They can go for ‘Show everything from this circle’, ‘show most, ‘show fewer’, and ‘show none’. Google notifications have also been modified as users will be able to see a small preview without going to the post. To learn more you should visit SEO workshop Toronto.

Google+ recently came out with brand pages. This was a feature similar to Facebook pages, and allowed celebrity and brands to create pages for establishing their presence on the site. The problem lies in the fact that anyone can create a page for any brand. You can go ahead and create a page for Pepsi or any other big company. In fact, at the time of writing this piece, the real page for Coca-Cola had fewer followers than a page created by a fan.

Facebook maintains a database of all the major companies, and when you try to create a page for such a company it displays an error saying the page already exists. Google should learn from Facebook and soon correct this mistake if it wants to compete with Facebook in this race of social media giants. Social media marketing training can help you in understanding such pitfalls better.

While generating page titles, Google takes into account a number of things. The anchor text in links is one of the signals considered while generating the title of a page. Now the emphasis on this signal has been reduced because of less relevance of boilerplate links featuring duplicated anchor text. This will help the search engine generate titles that are more relevant and specific to the content available on the page.

Google has also made a major change in snippets. In order to offer more relevant snippets, more content will now be picked up from the page itself rather than the menu or header. Rich snippets for applications, which allow users looking for software applications to see details such as reviews and cost in search results, were announced recently. Google has now expanded application rich snippet coverage. This means that now more such snippets will be available.

The search engine giant also made a significant change in the fresh content ranking process. The improvement enables the algorithm to assess the suitable level of content freshness for search terms. As many as 35% of total searches are likely to be affected by this change. With Google accounting for more than 65% of all searches, staying up-to-date with these changes is necessary for internet marketers.

To understand more about the impact of these and other changes that Google has made to its algorithm, make sure you attend one of our SEO training Canada sessions.

Ad position is one of the ValueTrack parameters. When you include this tag in your ad destination URL, it will appear as http://www.xyz.com/?position={adposition}. On checking your web logs, you will see something like http://www.xyz.com/?position1s4 for individual users. This means that the tag will be replaced with information. In this case, the data indicates that your ad appeared on the first page of search results in the 4th position. If you are new to ValueTrack, you will find the comprehensive help page very useful. Our PPC training workshop offers detailed information on using ValueTrack and other AdWords features.

Based on the technology you use to power your AdWords account and how advanced it is, you may already have access to the data offered by certain ValueTrack parameters. But tags like {network}, {keyword} and {matchtype} provide easy access to basic information on individual clicks. Depending on network, matchtype and keyword used, the value of traffic can vary greatly. In order to effectively analyze, bid and segment your traffic, you need to have this information. Apart from this, ValueTrack provides a lot of other useful information as well including the category of page and domain where your ad was displayed and performance difference between various ad copy versions.

Webmaster Tools allows you to manage many different types of websites like sites in a subfolder (www.xyz.com/health/), a subdomain (health.xyz.com) or a main domain (xyz.com). Until now, only those links that began with a website’s exact URL were categorized as internal. This means that if your site URL is www.xyz.com/users/health/, previously, links from www.xyz.com or ww.xyz.com/users/ used to be considered as external. Only links like www.xyz.com/users/health/profile.html were categorized as internal.

Even if you entered www.xyz.com as your URL, links from xyz.com were categorized as external because the URL is not exactly same in the two cases. The latest changes ensure a more accurate categorization.

A majority of people consider www.xyz.com and xyz.com as the same. Subsequent to the recent changes, links from both the versions, with and without www, will be categorized as internal, regardless of which version you add as your site. Moreover, as many domain owners also own its subdomains, links from these sites will also be categorized as internal links. This means that the number of internal links is likely to increase and external links will decrease, although the total number of links will remain the same.

Our SEO course Toronto can help you gain detailed understanding of your site’s link profile and how it affects its search rank.

The first thing you need to do is choose a suitable hosting platform for your blog. It is advisable to choose reputable hosting sites to launch your blog. WordPress based sites are good for this purpose. You can also add the blog as a sub-directory of your main domain.

After you have created a blog, you need to update it regularly. Updating the content increases the search frequency of the web pages by search engines. Add tags to your blog articles as they help the search engine determine what the article is about. It’s important to optimize your blogs for search engines.

A professional looking blog is important for increasing readership. Another thing you can do is build your marketing email list by including a form where people can enter their names, email and website details so that you can get in touch with them regularly.

You can better optimize your blog by taking time to find out the keywords used by searchers for relevant searches. Tag the most visible and popular keywords in the blog article that you post online.

Increase the value of your blog by posting content rich articles on it. Only when you have something interesting to offer to the readers will they come back for more.

For those who have SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, it is now obvious that Google is now combining relevance with relationships where search results are concerned. So the impact of Google’s Social Search on SEO is a game changer. As the search engine market leader continues to tweak these updates and algorithms, it is certain that SEO and the areas of content, social network building and participation will become increasingly important for businesses with an online presence.

Business enterprises that wish to make an impact online must utilize blogs and other digital real estate and create profiles on leading social media sites such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn. Of course, standard SEO practices like relevant and quality content created around keywords and link building will remain crucial but participation in social networks is fast becoming a ranking factor.

There is time yet to adopt these requirements as it will probably take years for social search to become fully functional, but there is no denying the fact that network building and participation online must become a pivotal practice for businesses. Hire the services of a local search engine marketing agency to help you navigate the new SEO shoals.

This approach is an effort to decrease search spam, ensuring content of the best quality is listed on Google’s first page of search results. The search engine states that the update is working well and projected that it will affect nearly 12 percent of total searches.

Websites affected negatively by the Panda update have been reporting average traffic cuts in the range of 30 to 40 percent. Of course if your site has seen an increase instead, the update has benefited it. However, once ‘content farms’ adapt their approach and improve the depth and quality of their content, competition will once again become fierce on Google search.

Google stated that the algorithm change was made with specific intent and certain factors were used to guide modifications. These include questions on whether the products and services advertised seemed safe and claims credible, and whether users could trust the site with credit card information. Issues surrounding site aesthetics and design were also examined, as also the number and relevance of ads featured on pages. Quality of content is also considered by the Panda algorithm.

The update is beneficial for sites that have been focusing all along on providing visitors with pleasing and user-friendly site design, refraining from displaying obtrusive advertising and creating relevant, quality content. Enlisting the help of a local search engine marketing company to help you fulfill these criteria would be an excellent first step in increasing your Google page rank.

Google+ was launched on June 28 this year in a beta trial, but was open only to a very limited set of users and only by invitation. The service offers excellent features for content sharing among friends in your ’Circles’. However, the downside to Google’s new social network rolling out so late in the game has meant that very often the people users would like to add are quite content with Facebook and don’t want to join a new social media site.

However, it must be remembered that the new service is now in a restricted field trial phase, which means that it has not been opened up on demand globally to everyone who wishes to join, though over 10 million users globally have joined Google+ since it debuted in June. While early responses from users have been very positive, access being limited makes the overall user experience slightly difficult to assess.

Google+ has been working on tweaking its old features and adding new ones ever since launch. The new service has introduced games on its site with third-party developers like Zynga Inc. Local search engine marketing opportunities should take off in a big way once Google+ launches its Brands Pages, and this is scheduled for the near future.

Google+ is steadily gaining popularity. Although it is not possible for people to join Google+ without being extended friendship requests for the time being, the community is gradually attracting many members.

The user interface of Google+ has just four key elements: Home, Profile, Circles and Photos, and it does not include any games. There are options to share, host videos and photos, and delete and edit them as well. The ‘Stream’ is similar to Facebook’s news feed and you also have the option to ‘mute’ conversations. The ‘Sparks’ component brings to you videos and articles that it thinks you may like.

What makes Google+ stand out is the ‘Circle’ concept. This enables you to create your own social spheres which would include your friends, colleagues, classmates, acquaintances and other contacts at different circles. If you want to share specific information with only a specific group, say to your colleagues, you can do that and the others may not be able to see the information you have shared. This would assure you more privacy and can save you from many troubles like mere acquaintances getting information you don’t want them to know.

Mobile Google+ is functional on Apple’s iOS and on Android platform but not yet on Symbian platform.