What Is Google Boost?

Google Boost is a new online advertising product that Google is offering.

Google Boost allows business owners to create ads directly from their Google Places account. These ads will appear in the Sponsored Links area of Google.com and in the maps.google.com results page.

Google’s objective is to make it easier for local business owners by offering an automated solution to place the ads. The only requisite is to have a Google Places account with your business claimed.

What Do Google Boost Ads Look Like

If you sign up for Google Boost and you are a plumber in Houston, assuming you have a claimed Google Place profile, your ad will show up when a search related to the keyword plus location is performed. i.e. “plumber Houston”.

It will show your company name, address, phone number, reviews, star rating and a link to your Place page. When your profile page shows up, it will be accompanied by a blue pin to make your listing stand out, making it even more prominent that Google Adwords in my opinion. Listings that already have Google Tags will also show the yellow tags on the listings.

How Do I Set Up Google Boost Ads

Business owner will have to complete a set up process:

• - Business description with 70 characters maximum
• - Ad a Destination Page: User will have to select whether to send the users to the Google Place page or their own business website
• - Show ads for searches in these categories: Google will provide the relevant keywords that will make the ad to appear on google.com and maps.google.com. Usually the keywords are related to “what + where”, keyword plus location or only keyword. Business owner has to select the keywords
• - Monthly budget: Business owner will have to select among the budgets recommended by Google according to ad competition.

What This Means

Google Boost is like Google Adwords, with the difference that there is no need of keyword research or geo-targeting as that is determined automatically. If your profile page shows up in a search the blue pin added to your listing makes it more prominent than Google Adwords.

Note: Google Boost is in beta in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago.

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/google-boost-faq.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SearchEnginePeople+%28Search+Engine+People%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#ixzz14CHtjVFl

7 Ways to Get More Twitter Followers

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You want to get more Twitter followers. It sounds simple, right? Well, it is. Here are 7 sure-fire ways to grow your followers.

First though, I want to remind everyone that QUALITY matters more than QUANTITY. Unless you're racing to a million followers as a publicity stunt, don't loose focus of your real GOAL: getting more sales! Always strive for quality AND quantity.

Ask Your Followers to Re-Tweet Your Tweets
Teach your followers what re-tweeting is (basically, it's the Twitter equivalent to email forwarding) and ask them to re-tweet your tweets. This way, your tweets will spread to their followers, who then may follow you as well.

Add Your Twitter Link to Your Site, Blog and Email Signature
The more people who see your link, the more followers you'll get.

Use HashTags
A HashTag is a keyword preceded by the pound sign. For example, people talking about gardening might include "#gardening" in their tweets so that others talking about gardening can find them. Here's a website, where you can find the most popular HashTags. Using HashTags is a great way to ensure your tweets get found, leading to more people following you.

Be Part of the Conversation
Following people isn't enough. You have to actively participate in the Twitter community. Help your followers by sharing tips, cool things you find, etc.

Follow the Authorities in Your Field
Put together a list of the people in your industry you admire. Then follow them on Twitter, re-tweet their tweets, and follow people who follow them. If you're sharing great content on similar topics, some of them will follow you back.

Go Multimedia
People love photos, videos and music; include them in your tweets.

Follow People Talking About the Things You Talk About
Use the Twitter search to find people talking about your field of expertise. Follow them. Most of them will follow you back.

What do you do to get more and better followers?

Read more: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/more-twitter-followers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SearchEnginePeople+%28Search+Engine+People%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#ixzz141fiT89I

It’s now easy to set up new sites with Asynchronous Tracking

The Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains “link to your site”, in addition to other improvements. Notice on there are three main sections:

The domains linking most to your site, (Who links the most)

The pages on your site with the most links (Your most linked content)

The anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site. (How your data is linked)

Who links the most

Clicking on “More >>” Link under the “Who links the most” section will take you to a new view that shows a listing of all the domains that link to your site. Each domain in the list can be expanded to display a sample of pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.

The "More >>" link under each specific domain lists all the pages linked to by that domain. At the top of the page there is a total count of links from that domain and a total count of your site's pages linked to from that domain.

Your most linked content

Click on “Your most linked content” view from the overview page, you’ll see a listing of all your site’s most important linked pages. There's also a link count for each page as well as a count of domains linking to that page. Clicking any of the pages listed will expand the to show you examples of the leading domains. Linking to that page and the number of links to the given page from each domain listed. The data used for link counts and throughout the "Links to your site" feature is more comprehensive now; including links redirected using 301 or 302 HTTP redirects.

Each page listed in the "All linked pages" view has an associated "More >>" link which displays all the domains linking to that specific page on your site.


Each domain listed leads to a report of all the pages from that domain linking to your specific page.


We hope the updated “Links to your site” feature in Webmaster Tools will help you better understand where the links to your site are coming from and improve your ability to track changes to your site’s link profile. Please post any comments you have about this updated feature or post your questions in the Webmaster Help Forum. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us to continue to improve the functionality of Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools: Updates to Search queries, Parameter handling and Messages

Search queries: added a "Change" column next to the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and position columns. Making it easier to identify trends.

You can clicks on each search queries for that specific query, providing a quick visual of its performance in the search results over time. Below the graph is a table listing of the pages returned in search results for that query, along with impressions, clicks and CTR.

Better Parameter Handling: We've moved this feature under its own tab in the Settings section of Webmaster Tools, and introduced a new action to manage parameters. When we introduced Parameter Handling last year, we allowed you to specify URL parameters and whether they should be ignored or not. When you choose to ignore a parameter, you are telling us that this parameter has no impact on the displayed content. For example, consider a session id parameter, like “sid” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=1234
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=5678

Assuming that these three URLs display exactly the same product page for tasty Swedish fish candy, Google only needs to crawl and index one of them. You can simply select action “Ignore” for parameter “sid” in Webmaster Tools and Google will just crawl and index one of these URLs, avoiding duplicates.

In addition to the old functionality, you now have the ability to choose a specific value among the known values for a given URL parameter. This is important when a parameter is relevant to the content, but different values of this parameter lead to similar pages. For example, consider a sorting parameter, like “sort-by” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2

The right solution comes from the new action “Use specific value” now available in Webmaster Tools. To avoid duplicates but still keep our indexing consistent, you can simply select action “Use specific value” for parameter “sort-by” and choose one of the valid values, say “asc-price”. After this, our indexing would be fully consistent, as we would focus only on the pages with products sorted by ascending price.

Messages: Some sites receive lots of messages in the Webmaster Tools Message Center. With this update we've added the ability to "star" specific messages that you deem important. you can see all the messages that you’ve starred, making tracking and finding the most important messages for your site a breeze.

We hope these updates make Webmaster Tools even more useful for your site. Please post a comment if you have feedback on any of these updates; or if you have questions, post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

TrainingCrossing

At TrainingCrossing we provide a database for jobs in Training from microbiology to biochemistry jobs. We mine both online and printed sources in order to provide the most comprehensive and wide reaching analysis available. Job opportunities from over 250,000 websites are presented in an up-to-date fashion. Our site features substantially more jobs than any other job board, and includes jobs from all of Fortune 500 and Fortune 1,000 companies and all Inc. 500 and Inc. 5,000 companies. As we are not indebted to the employers who post jobs on our site we do not display bias and will treat each opening equally. The validity of the jobs that we advertise is certified by job analysts who have been highly- trained to review each opening. The site offers links with which to search for suitable jobs by both job and by city as well as with keywords and specific careers are examined in profile lending insight into what they necessitate. The fact that we are the fastest growing American employment site stands as testament to how many people have benefitted from our assistance, every day thirty people tell our host site Employment crossing that they found their dream job on it. To access the largest resource of Training job opportunites obtainable join us at TrainingCrossing.

There will always be a need for experienced contract managers. And, there will always be good paying Training Jobs available if you know where to look.
Trainingcrossing.com is a good source of Training Manager Jobs because it only shows you jobs from employer websites and every other job board out there and allows you to post your Computer Training Jobs so that interested employers and Technical Trainer Jobs can easily find you.
You can also find out more about Training Jobs, Training manager Jobs .

Trainingcrossing.com is a good way to track down Training manager jobs because these jobs are often not advertised."

Tools to Find Your Competitors Keyword Rankings

Before I start reviewing available tools showing which keywords your competitors rank high in Google, let me describe how you can use this information:

• do not just copy-paste your competitors’ keywords, use it as additional help for your keyword research;
• compare which keywords your competitors optimized their pages (i.e. tried to rank for) and which keywords they ended up ranking for. Thus you’ll be able to avoid their mistakes.

1. SEO Digger (paid with free trial) will show you Google keyword position, check date (International style: DD/MM/YYYY) and Wordtracker rank:

2. SpyFu (paid with free trial) spies for both your competitors’ organic search rankings and Google Adwords campaign keywords:

3. KeywordSpy (paid with free trial) will show you both the keyword your competitor ranked for and the total number of results returned for this keyword. While the tool does have some really user-friendly interface, it lacks some sorting options.

4. KeywordRemix (free) also offers some interesting data on keyword rankings such as total number of results in Google, Google News and Google Blog Search competition, data age and synonymous phrases (the tool also has some bugs: it shows one and the same key term multiple times):

Final note: all these tools showed me different keywords. So my advice is to try all of them before you decide which one is better for you.

Facebook Adds Lexicon And "Friend Feed" Style Outside Activity Alerts

Facebook hasn't yet added Web search but it is allowing users to import content from third-party sites. Users are now permitted to import stories and content (into their mini-feeds) from a handful of sites: Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us to start with, Digg and others to come. The intention is to enable people to do more on Facebook, without having to go "outside."

In addition, Facebook has launched what it calls "Lexicon," a successor to the shuttered Pulse. Lexicon is like the Yahoo Buzz Index or Google Trends/Zeitgeist in a way.

Yet it's not as specific or useful. Here's how it's derived according to site FAQs:

Lexicon is a tool to follow language trends across Facebook. Specifically, Lexicon looks at the usage of words and phrases on profile, group and event Walls. For example, you can enter "love, hate" (without quotations) to compare the usage of these two words on Facebook Walls. You may enter up to five terms, where each term can be a word or two-word phrase consisting of letters and numbers.

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December. The text of each Wall post is also "cleaned" before it gets counted. For example, every word is converted to lower-case, and apostrophes are removed (so "You’ll" turns into "youll").

Beyond novelty this might be valuable to marketers and others, like search queries, to determine what people on Facebook were interested in, thinking about doing, test "buzz" or to determine opinions about subjects, brands and companies. It currently has some but limited utility in each of those scenarios. Beyond generic subjects like "vacation" and "love" one can compare things like Coke vs. Pepsi or McCain vs. Obama:

I'm sure there will be more functionality added and it will become a more useful research tool in the near future.