1. It gives searchers the ability to get personal search results – pulling posts & photos from your Google+ circles.

2. Google+ profiles are made more prominent in search. When selecting a Google+ profile in the autocomplete, you will be returned results about THAT Ben Smith that you already know instead of those you don’t:

3. Searching for a topic will also return results of people who frequently discuss the topic on Google+.

Thinking about these developments for a moment (and using your imagination of what else there is to come), if appearing in search results is important for you, you would want to get a Google+ page and invest in it as best you can as you would your Facebook page.

Google is recognising the people behind the content and the influence of those using it. It has taken steps recently towards this integration such as utilising authorship tags and pulling +1 button recommendations into search results and ads. It is taking search to the point where, in this latest move, the influence and network of the people that follow your Google+ page could be more important than all the pagerank & SEO you have achieved to-date.

Last year you didn’t need a Google+ page. The network’s market share plateaued, its usage slowed after its loud launch and we were all doubtful it would actually fly given Google’s track record in venturing to the social space in the past. However, the introduction of heavily personalised search results based on Google+ data outweighs any resistance to be involved.

Your standing on Google+ will soon determine how you perform on search. This is why it is important to have a Google+ page. Because search is becoming social. And by social, Google is only really interested in Google+.

Videos & screenshots of the new features are on Google’s blog.

Some revealing stats of what is happening in the Australian & NZ mobile market were presented (unfortunately most of their stats are for AU). But, if anything, it is an indication of what is around the corner for us:

• There are 1 million mobile queries per day in NZ.
• 1 in 5 mobile devices are smartphones in NZ.
• 1 in 2 mobile sales are now a smartphone in NZ.
• 30% of NZ mobile searches have local intent – people want to know what is available nearby.

Of the 30,000 surveyed in Australia:

• The average user has downloaded 25 apps (8 were purchased).
• 36% of restaurant queries during the weekends are from mobile devices – Is your restaurant site optimised for mobile?
• 12% of finance queries are coming from mobile devices.
• 72% have used a smartphone for in-store comparison.

The point to take away from these trends is that mobile is where you need to turn for your digital strategy if you have not already. This is not simply having an app & m.website.com and checking those boxes. It is the whole strategy around mobile users.

Predictions of uptake have been made – often proved under estimated, the data is there and the trends have been realised.

Now, here is what you need to do:

• Create and optimise your mobile presence.
• Make it easy for mobile visitors to get the key info and convert.

People searching on mobile are qualified and ready. Make it easy for them to be your customer.

And still: “It is not too late to be early in mobile.” – Google

It allows searchers to recommend search results to others by clicking a button alongside the search result.

This is important for webmasters and site optimisers to be aware of for 2 key reasons:

1. Having your page +1′d is a visual indicator searchers will use to evaluate the relevance of the page. Apart from being at the top of SERPs, +1′s will be an important factor for searchers as your pages become approved by actual people and not just the Google algorithm.

2. +1′s “will be one of many signals [Google] use to calculate organic search ranking”.

Get the full story from the AdWords blog and Google Webmasters.

An upcoming extension of this feature is the ability to add the +1 button to your web pages. Its function is very much like the Facebook “Like” buttons that you can add to your pages already but +1 would carry the weight of the significant benefits above.

You need to know that Google has made the move to ensure the AdWords reporting by agencies clearly breaks down the client’s spend on AdWords and therefore, your spend on the agency.

Some agencies or third-parties are known to bundle the cost of AdWords clicks and their agency service fees together. This way, there would be no way for the client to know how much their ads are actually costing them per month or per day or even per click and how much the agency is taking.

At minimum, agencies must provide a monthly summary on AdWords clicks, impressions and cost for the whole account. Even this is very top level, but it could be enough to expose the dealings of some third-parties.

If you are using the services of an agency for AdWords, your bill should break down the cost of the actual AdWords (the amount that is paid to Google) and the agency’s service fees. Check that the amount you want to spend on ads is actually going to the clicks.

This is a welcomed policy change to help ensure advertisers continue to have full transparency into what is the most accountable advertising channel available.

You can read about the changes at Google AdWords Help.

My good friend Nigel Parker over at Microsoft beat me to the post with his excellent blog post on Marker Studio‘s new search site for Yellow and customised IE8 browser experience:

The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!

To add a bit of technical detail to Nigel’s post we made heavy usage of the Google Search Ajax APIs. I kind of wish they still had the SOAP apis as it would have been easier in many respects using .net to bind the results using server side asp.net rather than be forced to work primarily with the ajax apis. Also, the ajax apis come with handy code snippets http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ but they assumed things like ajax calls for paging requests which means the user can’t bookmark the urls. Aside from that a few workarounds here and there got us enabling Google integrated search quite easily. I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.

We made use of Linq to XML when consuming the core Yellow listings api which is REST based. This made the consumption and binding of the search results to the page using a standard asp.net repeater much easier. In fact, i cringed to think of the additional effort that was involved before Linq for XML in navigating XML Documents with the .net 2.0 xml apis which I never found particularly intuitive.

There is also some Salesforce integration for helping to manage competition entries where we created custom lead objects in Salesforce. It’s kind of nice to have the ability to regenerate the wsdl for the web service after you make changes in the gui to core field information. It would be even nicer to have this discoverable at runtime so i could just regenerate proxies using a url rather than having to download the wsdl and re-run svcutil across the wsdl locally.

And let’s not forget our good friend JQuery, and loving that Intellisense support in Vs.Net 2008;) Also a shout to facebox for those obligatory modals with rounded corners.

Oh, and the whole thing is powered by Kentico CMS. Kentico CMS is a powerful, flexible and affordable content and document management system that i have been personally recommending to all and sundry since i first came across it in 2005. At Marker <shamelessPlug>we have a great team of experienced Kentico developers should you be looking in this direction. Please give me a yell if you would like to discuss further</shamelessPlug>. ]]> http://www.markerstudio.com/marketing/2009/03/marker-and-yellow-partner-to-bring-ie-8-first-in-new-zealand/feed/ 1