by Sage Lewis Search Engine Roundtable gave some interesting advice on upping your budget over at Bing/Adcenter. Check out our small business news site.

Originally posted here: 
Give Bing Some Money Love

All around Google, we’re proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly. In the U.S., this year’s celebration is historically important: it’s the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center . Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco. Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe’s best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn’t deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000. Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations. *LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others. Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Partner Strategy Team

More here: 
Celebrating Gay Pride 2009

All around Google, we’re proud of our work, our culture and, most importantly, our people. In the spirit of celebration, this spring and summer Googlers have participated in Pride celebrations in Tel Aviv, New York, Zürich, San Francisco and many other cities around the world. Pride is a time for the LGBT* community along with families, friends and supporters to stand up for equality, and to honor those who paved the way for us to express sexual orientation and gender identity openly. In the U.S., this year’s celebration is historically important: it’s the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City, a response to what was then routine police harassment of LGBT people. Some 75 Googlers, family members and friends marched with several hundred members of New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center . Hundreds of Googlers also joined other U.S. celebrations in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and San Francisco. Earlier this month, around 50 Googlers and friends gathered to celebrate at Europride, Europe’s best-known Gay Pride celebration. This year it was in Zürich, Switzerland. After weeks of sunshine, on the morning of the parade it began to storm, but that didn’t deter our intrepid Googlers from being out at 6:30am turning a 28-ton truck into a rainbow-colored nightclub on wheels. Hundreds of nuts, bolts and gallons of helium later, the truck was transformed, the sun came out and we were ready to march through the city streets, cheered on by a crowd of 50,000. Google is a company that supports its LGBT employees, taking a public stand stand on issues that are important to our community. This is not the first year that Google has supported Pride, and it will certainly not be the last. We hope you enjoy this photo album of our global celebrations. *LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered people and is also intended to include people who identify as queer, asexual or intersexed, amongst others. Posted by Cynthia Yeung, Partner Strategy Team

More here: 
Celebrating Gay Pride 2009

Want to know what’s new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel ? Here’s what we’ve uploaded in the past week: As part of Google’s goal to make the web faster , we uploaded several video tips about optimizing the speed of your website. Check out the tutorials page to view the tutorials and associated videos. Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag: What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS? Is over-optimization bad for a website? Will having my software listed in low-quality directories harm my website’s ranking? Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO? Will I be penalized if all of my Sitemap URLs have the same priority? And during Adam Lasnik’s visit to India, he was interviewed by Webmaster Help Forum guide Jayan Tharayil about issues related to webmasters in India. We have the full three-part interview right here . We’ll get you started on this batch of videos with Matt’s tips for targeting your site to a specific region: Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum . Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

View original here:
Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 22nd - 26th

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world. This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference ( NECC ) in Washington D.C. To help address schools’ email security needs, Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We’re also launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We’ll be adding more to these resources going forward. If you’re at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu . Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

Read the original here:
Google heads to grade school: New resources for K-12 teachers and students

We use the Internet all the time: at home, at work (especially at Google!), on the move, and, increasingly, at school. We believe that the Internet and cloud-based tools are a key part of a 21st century classroom, helping students learn and teachers teach in collaborative and innovative ways. Students use Google Docs to work on group projects; classrooms use Google Sites to show off their work; and teachers use Forms in Google Docs for instant grading and Google Calendar for lesson planning. Google Apps Education Edition is helping schools build online communities for students, teachers and parents, and we now have 4 million students using Google Apps Education around the world. This week the Google Apps Education team is launching a few new ways to make it easier for K-12 schools to use Google Apps, and attending the National Education Computing Conference ( NECC ) in Washington D.C. To help address schools’ email security needs, Google Message Security (GMS) will be offered free to current and new eligible primary and secondary schools globally that opt in by July of next year. GMS filters out email messaging threats, and education IT departments can customize the filtering rules and group messaging lists to suit their schools. We’re also launching the Google Apps Education Community site for educators and students to share tips and ideas for using Google Apps in their classrooms, as well as the Search Education Curriculum and a Google Apps Education resource center with more than 20 classroom-ready lesson plans for teachers. We’ll be adding more to these resources going forward. If you’re at NECC this year, come visit the Google team in booth #3148. If not, the teaching and learning continues with some cool presentations and lesson plans on the Google Apps Education Community site, or you can learn more at google.com/a/edu . Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

The rest is here: 
Google heads to grade school: New resources for K-12 teachers and students

We’ve picked two free tools that anyone can use while setting up Google Analytics for your site. The tools below are pretty basic but are applicable to anyone tracking a campaign with an Analytics account. URL Builder The first tool we want to introduce our beginners to is the URL Builder. In order for Google Analytics to track your marketing campaigns effectively, you’ll need to tag your online ads with the right information (e.g. campaign, medium and source) so that Google Analytics can track your marketing campaign and show you which activities are paying off. To help the the tagging process goes smoothly, you can use the URL Builder from our Google Analytics Help Center. Tagging your campaign links will consist of a URL address followed by a question mark and your campaign variables. But, you won’t need to worry about link syntax if you fill out the URL Builder form and press the Generate URL button. A tagged link will be generated for you and you’ll be able to copy and paste it to your ad. SiteScan The Google Analytics SiteScan tool, created by EpikOne, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, is a very handy tool to verify that all pages on your site include the tracking code. SiteScan picks up on some classic signs indicating that your site has improperly implemented tracking code like: 1. No data in your account. (The tracking code was either never implemented or has the wrong account number) 2. You’re seeing a high bounce rate even though your site isn’t a blog and has more than one page. (If you’ve only tagged your homepage, your Google Analytics account will be unable to identify any other pageviews from your site. ) SiteScan then reports each page in an easy-to-read CSV file after you’ve installed the tool. This makes it easy for you to isolate the pages with tracking problems, fix them, and effectively manage your Google Analytics Tracking Code installation. We’re constantly working on developing tools to diagnose problems associated with your account or increase the usability of Google Analytics. We hope that you find the above two tools useful and leave us a comment about any other diagnostic tools you would like to tell us about on this blog ! Posted by Christina Park, Google Analytics Team

Original post:
Back to Basics: Free Google Analytics Tools

by Jennifer Laycock With more and more people signing on to social sites like Twitter and Facebook, companies are working overtime to figure out how to make the companies, products and offerings go viral. While I’ve written quite a few article about the theories behind preparing a campaign that’s likely to go viral, the truth is that some of the most effective viral campaigns are also the simplest. Sometimes it’s less about creating a great idea and more about enabling the spread. I saw the perfect example of this earlier today while hunting for a pair of sandals. I was looking for a pair of slip-on Croc sandals to replace a pair that broke last week. Since I’m going camping with friends this weekend, I wanted to make sure I had replacements before we head out on Thursday. There aren’t any local stores here in Canton that sell this style of Crocs, so I headed to Zappos, knowing I’d get fast, free shipping. Unfortunately, Zappos doesn’t carry Crocs. That sent me to the Crocs site, which had my shoe in stock, but charges a hefty fee for shipping. That’s when a Google search turned up Shoebuy.com. The site advertising free UPS ground shipping both ways, plus they carried the Crocs I was looking for. On top of that, they were offering $20 off a $50 purchase if I used PayPal. That alone would have been enough to make me mention the site to at least a couple of friends. After all, giving people a great deal is a key way to get them to talk about you. In fact, I pretty much expected to see the standard “send a discount to friends” option pop up after I checked out. I wasn’t disappointed. But the folks at Shoebuy.com score in the viral realm by taking it a step further. Give the Consumer Control If you look up in the top right corner of the checkout page, you’ll see the discount code for friends. Clicking on that discount shows where they take things a step further and do them right. They not only offer me a discount for my friends, they give me the ability to share that discount in any way I’d like. If you look closely at that screen shot, you’ll notice the standard “email to friend” form. The nice thing is the line of options along the top of the window allowing me to share it via several other social media outlets. As a woman, I love this. I’m not keen on giving the email addresses of my friends to a random company. (I’m more than happy to TELL my friends about a company, but I don’t like handing those email addresses over.) The folks at Shoebuy.com give the power of the message to me. No email? No problem. I clicked over to the Facebook icon and filled out the form to share it with my Facebook friends. A few seconds later, their coupon and my personal endorsement broadcast to my list of Facebook friends. I clicked through the list, looking at the options and ended up shooting the link and a quick plug out to my Twitterverse as well. Making a perfect example of how this type of enabling of your customer can take word of mouth or viral marketing to a whole new level. Had the Shoebuy.com demanded email addresses for me to give friends the discount, I likely would have given them just three or four addresses. My best friend, my mom and maybe one or two others. But with these options…it got broadcast to a few hundred Facebook friends and to a few thousand Twitter contacts. Heck, they even gave me a simple “embed” option complete with code, so I’ll go ahead and share it with all your Search Engine Guide readers as well. Here’s $10 off at Shoebuy.com “” Save on shoes, accessories, handbags and apparel at Shoebuy.com. We’ve got something for everyone and for a limited time, you can save $10 on that special something. Valid on purchase of $50 or more. View > > Put More into Enabling than Inspiring I watch companies put tons of time and creative energy into coming up with a brilliantly catchy video, or an enticing blog pitch. Marketers preach viral like it’s the key to free advertising, but we try to convince business owners they have to create the next big thing to capture a viral success. While that’s one way to go about it, most companies will see a dramatic improvement if they just start with something as simple as creating a really great social media friendly “send to friend” option. Give people a simple and easy message to spread, then give them the tools to spread it. You might be surprised at how far it takes you. Check out our small business news site.

Originally posted here: 
Sparking Viral Spread - Make it Easy For Them

by Miriam Ellis A few day ago, a business owner told me about a rather complex problem with his Google Maps business listing and asked me what to do about it. My explanation was pretty long, starting with the need to claim his listing and ending with a warning that fixing errors in Google Maps isn’t always simple. It took several paragraphs of detailed text to cover what I felt the business owner needed to do and he came back to me with a, “That’s great, but how do I claim my listing?” Sometimes, I get ahead of myself when I’m answering questions and in this case, I forgot for a moment that such a huge number of the business listings that make up Google’s local index are still unclaimed. Let’s get down to basics with this article. If you’ve been mystified by the verification process, read on! Why Do You Need To Claim Your Google Maps Listing? Important Reason #1 - Just as you keep careful tabs on the content you have published on your website about your business, you need to be in control of what content Google is publishing about your business. You may discover that Google has errors or blank spots in their data about you. The way for you to correct this is to let Google know you own the business, which I’ll describe how to do, so that you can officially edit the content of your business listing. Claiming your listing gives you improved control over how you are being represented by Google. Important Reason #2 - Just like the rest of the web, Google’s local index is plagued with spammers and crooks. Unclaimed business listings are at risk of competitive hijacking . If you haven’t claimed your business listing, malicious parties can step in and alter its content for their own benefit - not yours. This has been an acute problem in Google Maps and your best defense is to lock down your listing by claiming it. How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing Step one is to go to Google Maps and do a search for your business. Let’s imagine we own K-Mart in San Mateo, California. So, we do a search for k-mart san mateo ca . Unless your business is brand new, chances are it will have been indexed by Google already. So, all we have to do is click the More info link next to the business title, as shown: This brings up the big popup to the right of the business listing. Click the Edit link, as shown: This will bring up a second popup, this time a smaller one. In this popup, we see the question, Are you the owner? Claim your business : Click that link and you will be taken to Google’s Local Business Center login page. If you already have a Google account of some kind, such as for gmail or Adwords, you can use your pre-existent login information to get into the Local Business Center. If you do not already have a Google account of some kind, you will need to create one at this point. Once you have logged in, you will be shown the business you want to claim. Look carefully at all of the data in the listing! Are the address and phone number correct? Are the categories the business is listed in accurate? Are there additional details you could include, such as hours of operation, languages spoken or forms of payment accepted? Make sure the description of your business is as thorough and accurate as possible. Once you have edited the data so that it is the best possible representation of your business, the Local Business Center asks you whether you would like to verify your changes to the listing by either phone or postcard. A phone call is the fastest way to go, but sometimes, the phone call doesn’t work because of weaknesses in Google’s phone system and you have to select the postcard route. In this case, Google will send you a small postcard containing a pin number that you need to phone in with when you receive it. And that’s how you claim your Google Local Business Center listing. Despite the fact that Google has given major prominence to their local search results in the Universal SERPs, they have done very little to alert business owners to the need to verify ownership of the listings. No one, that I know of, has calculated what percentage of the listings in Google’s local index are unclaimed, but pretty much everyone agrees the number is staggering. So, don’t feel badly if you didn’t realize you needed to take control of your listing. You’ve got the information you need to do it now. Once you’ve got this initial, and utterly vital, task completed, you can work towards starting to win reviews from your happy customers and encourage citations from relevant websites. But that’s a subject for another post! Check out our small business news site.

Read the rest here: 
How To Claim Your Google Maps Listing

This is the first of a series of posts from YouTube’s news and politics blog, Citizentube . -Ed. YouTube is the biggest video news site on the Internet, and at no time in our site’s history was that more apparent than in these last two weeks of the crisis unfolding in Iran. As hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens took to the streets of Tehran to protest the national elections, the government kicked out foreign journalists, leaving citizens themselves as the only documentarians to the events unfolding there. We’ve been highlighting many of these videos and keeping track of the latest developments on our YouTube news and politics blog, Citizentube . Though the circumstances in Iran are unique, this isn’t the first time that citizens have played a crucial role in reporting on events around the world. Burmese citizens uploaded exclusive video footage to YouTube during the protests in Myanmar back in 2007; people in China’s Sichuan province documented the devastating and historic 7.8-magnitude earthquake of 2008 in real-time; and eyewitnesses to the shooting of young Oscar Grant by Oakland police forces captured the event on their cell phone cameras and uploaded videos to YouTube for the world to see. Citizens are no longer merely bystanders to world events. Today, anyone can chronicle what they see and participate in the news-gathering process. Though it’s the phenomenon of citizen reporting that YouTube is probably best known for, we also have hundreds of news partners who upload thousands of videos straight to YouTube every day. You can see lots of these on our news page at youtube.com/news . Many of these organizations have used YouTube in unique ways, like asking the community to submit questions for government officials , providing a behind-the-scenes look at traveling with the Obama press corps and accepting video applications for a reporting assignment in West Africa . We believe the power of this new media landscape lies in the collaborative possibilities of amateurs and professionals working together. And so today, we’re launching a new resource on YouTube to help citizens learn more about how to report the news, straight from the experts. It’s called the the YouTube Reporters’ Center , and it features some of the nation’s top journalists sharing instructional videos with tips and advice for better reporting. Learn how to prepare for an interview ; or how to be an investigative reporter from the legendary Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward; or how to report on a global humanitarian crisis from Nick Kristof of the New York Times. All of the videos are available on the YouTube Reporters’ Center channel. Posted by Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics

The rest is here: 
Media and citizens meet in the YouTube Reporters’ Center