Horowitz emphasized the use of Circles to easily segment audiences when communicating brand / product / corporate messages and the Hangout feature, which allows brands to host face-to-face video sessions with customers. Both of these are features that would appeal to large businesses.

The real power of Google+Pages, though, lies in their ability to influence search engine rankings for a brand or product name. This alone is reason enough for all business owners to want to ensure that they do have a presence on the otherwise placid network. This is also Google’s only ace in an otherwise extremely weak deck.

A number of bloggers have labelled the new feature a rush job or a Facebook / Twitter rip-off. What they overlook is the fact that unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ can integrate with a number of even more useful services, not least of which is Google Search and YouTube, to change the way brands can reach their target audience.

StumbleUpon has added a new feature called ‘Interest Optimisation’ to their Paid discovery feature. This feature will help to improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns by reaching a larger target audience.

Interest Optimisation has been applicable to auto-targeted campaigns for some time. It will now be available on manually targeted campaigns as well. Even manually targeted ad campaigns will now be served to a wider variety of categories, which happen to be similar to the ones selected by the advertiser.

For example, if a particular campaign were primarily targeted to the ‘mutual funds’ category, with the use of Interest Optimisation ads from that campaign could also be served to the ‘investing’, ‘financial planning’ and ‘taxation’ categories, thus helping to reach a larger audience.

Advertisers who wish to exert greater control over their campaigns might not wish to make use of this feature. They can easily opt out of it by making sure that while using the manual format they click on the option that says “Strictly limit my campaign to only the topics selected below.”

In order to find out how the campaign is performing after using this new feature, the advertiser can access the Advanced Reports interface in the StumbleUpon ads system.

A vulnerability in the Website Optimiser’ control script makes it possible for hackers to break into any site using the code and then make use of the site to launch a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack.

In other words, hackers can exploit the Google code vulnerability to send out malicious material in the form of email spam or embedded viruses from any site that is using the code, which could then destroy important data on the computers of visitors to those websites.

The good news is that this can be done only if the website or browser has been previously compromised during an earlier attack. Moreover, Google have detected the issue and are proactively informing webmasters about the potential problem. The Website Optimiser team suggests that the possibility of such a thing happening is low. Nevertheless, it would be wise to take appropriate precautions before it is too late.

The bad news is that Google could potentially drop the affected website from its organic rankings for hosting the malicious code that was introduced in the first place via a vulnerability in Google’s own programming!

Any Website Optimiser experiments that may have been created before the 3rd of December 2010, even if they have been paused or stopped, should either use new code provided by Google or should stop the experiment completely. remove all the old code from the site and create a new experiment in its place. It would be easier to create a new experiment than to update the code directly on the site.

New experiments created after the 3rd of December 2010 are safe from the possibility of an XSS attack as the Website Optimiser team has already patched the vulnerability to protect new experiments.

The first feature, Malware Details, simplifies the tough task of finding out if pages on a site are distributing malware. Webmasters previously had to depend on manual testing, use the Google Safe Browsing API or rely on malware notifications in the Google SERPs to find out if pages on their site had been compromised. Now, this task should be a lot simpler, as Google will provide snippets of code that exist on some of the pages, which they feel could be malicious.

Malware details will not only be helpful to webmasters who wish to eliminate malware from their sites quickly but might also help a number of webmasters, whose sites fell in ranking due to the presence of malicious code on their site, now understand why this happened.

The other feature, Fetch as Googlebot, was previously launched in Google Labs. Webmasters are often curious to know what exactly Googlebot sees when their page is accessed. The text only cache on Google SERPs and the keywords and HTML suggestions tools in Webmaster Central help site owners to understand, to some extent, what information Googlebot sees on the page and what details are extracted during the crawl and indexing phases.

Now, with the Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters will be able to get real-time feedback on what the Google search robot sees when it crawls and indexes a page. This information will be especially useful when users update their sites with new technology or find that their pages have been hacked. It might also help some understand why they have not been ranked on specific keywords.

Adobe SEO Technology Center

Sites built with Adobe Flash technology have remained largely invisible on search engine results until mid-2008, when Google and Yahoo! announced the ability to crawl and index text within Flash files after Adobe agreed to cooperate with the search engines.

The technology centre will help developers to build Flash applications that will be more search friendly in the future. The site describes difficulties that SEOs face and explains simple ways to deal with them.

So far, the SEO Technology Center has five articles: search optimization techniques for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), an SEO checklist, information about enhanced search indexing of SWF content, and guides to the Adobe Flash Player version checking protocol, detecting Flash Player versions and embedding SWF files.

Adobe has also informed that at present it would be more practical to offer HTML representation of content while the work on improving Flash technology is still in progress. Webmasters can use additional text, build static (HTML) version of their site or include content in a <noscript> tag.

It is hoped that the creation of this SEO Technology Center for Flash will help small and medium businesses in particular, as they often do not have highly specialised personnel to deal with these problems. However, the damage may already have been done, and Flash technology, as we know it, will probably never recover to be considered an equally viable alternative to HTML for website SEO.

The data Kaushik had gathered on Google queries provides the following information:

1. The average number of words per query to Google has gone up from 3 words to 4 in the last quarter of 2007
2. Paid searches account for about 14% of Google clicks, while 86% of clicks are organic
3. 25% of queries made in a month on Google are unique for that month.

The implications of these three points of data are very important for all search marketers.

Search Matures

An increase in the number of words per query indicates a maturity in the market, from the point of view of searchers as well as publishers. Searchers are more focused and aware of what they are searching for. 1-word queries tend to be typically navigational queries. Longer query strings typically indicate that the person searching has a specific objective in mind and is using more keywords in the query to filter out irrelevant sites and hone in on the correct types of sites.

Market maturity on the whole would be the primary driving force for such query refinement. If the amount of content were limited, searchers would not need to type in long queries to find exactly what they wanted. However, as more and more information becomes available online, more targeted searching becomes a necessity when looking for particular information, products and services.

Optimisation Is More Important

According to Kaushik‘s data, 6 times as many clicks are counted on organic search results as on sponsored links. While sponsored links provide accountability and fully controllable marketing, the bulk of traffic comes from natural search listings, which irrefutably implies a need for organizations to focus on SEO.

Long Tail Keywords Matter

The long tail theory of search marketing postulates that a large number of queries are made for terms that might not have high volumes, but put together, all of these queries often amount to much more searches than the total searches carried out on a handful of high-traffic keywords. If 25% of queries within a month have only 1 search associated with them, that means 25% of searches come from long tail keywords, which further extols the importance of these keywords.

2.79 million small and medium businesses in the UK have a company website. However, 62% do not promote their site online, which means that with websites costing £1,750 on average, an estimated £3 billion is spent on websites that are not visible to customers!

• 34% of SMEs plan to use search marketing in the future
• 20% have ‘never got round to it’

Out of the 1.73 million (62%) SMEs who own websites but do not use search marketing:

• 92% have never even tried to set up a campaign
• 78% are aware of the online marketing channels available
• 56% claim they would be willing to set up a campaign themselves

Time, costs and lack of expertise seem to be the two main reasons why SMEs do not use search marketing. A quarter of the companies questioned thought that £50 would be a profitable cost per lead.

• 89% thought SEM is more complicated than online banking
• 39% think it is too complicated to do themselves
• 34% of SMEs surveyed believed it would take them a day or more to set up a PPC campaign
• 25% do not use PPC due to cost
• Whereas only 29% thought search marketing was not right for their business

A number of SMEs tried to run a search marketing campaign but gave up. Of these companies:

• 44% thought it was too time consuming
• 33% thought it was too complicated
• 56% thought it was too expensive

Of the SMEs that are currently running a search marketing campaign, 76% said it had increased their sales, which is  a good indicator of the value of SEM as a marketing method for small and medium companies.

Microsoft’s UK SME Search Marketing Report