IPL 2012 Opening Ceremony Videos

Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012

The Internet in 2012

1) In 2012, the audience of internet users in the U.S. will expand by 3.1% to 239 million, representing 75.6% of the total population.

In other words...

2) More than 3/4 of the total population will be online in 2012. 

Mobile in 2012

3) Mobile internet users will reach 113.9 million in 2012, up 17.1% from 97.3 million in 2011. 

4) Smartphone users will reach 106.7 million in 2012, up 18.4% from 2011. 

5) In 2012, 94% of smartphones users will be mobile internet users. 

6) All mobile phone users will reach 242.6 million in 2012, up 2.3% from 2011.

7) Mobile shoppers will reach 72.8 million in 2012. 

8) Mobile buyers will reach 37.5 million in 2012. 

9) Smartphone shoppers will reach 68.6 million in 2012.

10) Smartphone buyers will reach 36.4 million in 2012. 

11) Tablet users will reach 54.8 million in 2012, up 62.8% from 33.7 million in 2011. 

12) iPad users will reach 41.9 million in 2012. 

13) In 2012, 76.4% of tablet users will be iPad users. 

14) Adult-aged eReader users will reach 45.6 million in 2012, up from 33.3 million in 2011. 

Social Media in 2012

15) Facebook will reach 143.4 million US users in 2012, up 8.2% from 132.5 million in 2011. 

16) About 2/3 of web users will use social networks in 2012. 

17) More than 90% of social network users will be on Facebook in 2012. 

Online Video in 2012

18) Online video viewers will reach 169.3 million in 2012. 

19) 53.5% of the population and 70.8% of internet users (up 7.1% from 2011) will watch online video in 2012.

20) Mobile video viewers will reach 54.6 million in 2012. 

21) Smartphone video viewers will reach 51.2 million in 2012. 

Ecommerce in 2012

22) 88.1% of US internet users ages 14+ will browse or research products online in 2012. 

23) 83.9% of internet researchers will make at least one purchase via the web during 2012. 

24) Online shoppers will reach 184.3 million in 2012, up 3.3% from 2011.

25) Online buyers will reach 154.6 million in 2012, up 4.4% from 2011. 

Source- hubspot blog

Google Algorithmic Updates

We've seen plenty of algorithmic announcements made from the company over the course of the year. In November, they discussed ten recent changes they had made. Here's a recap of those:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.

Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page's title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page's content.

Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.

Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.

Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.

Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we've made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.

Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.

Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.

Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.


Source- webpronews 

On Page SEO Factors

One of the most basic things which a webmaster should understand is how to do on page SEO and the on page SEO factors to consider when both creating a new website or when adding new content and pages to an existing website.

On page SEO predominantly pertains to tweaking your site's code, choosing the right keywords, and optimizing your content overall to make it more attractive and identifiable to Google and other search engines' web crawling bots so that they will in turn rank your site higher in the SERPs.

Here I've expanded on the major techniques which you should implement on your site if you want to rank and rank well at that. Keep in mind that the weight which search engines place on these techniques is subjective as no one knows for sure the algorithms behind Google's and other engine's ranking practices. No one factor is ever been unanimously considered to be more paramount than all others, so don't overlook any of these techniques. Most of them are quick and simple to implement, so there's really no reason not to, either.

Keyword On Page SEO Factors

I've said it before and I'll say it again: keywords are the gateways to your site and they play a huge role in on page SEO.

Once you know what is a good keyword and how to do keyword research, then you can find the keywords which you should be using for your on page SEO. WordPress combined with a good free SEO plugin like All in One SEO Pack makes implementing most of the following keyword related on page SEO factors simple as can be, but let's take a look at where we need to make sure to effectively use our keywords.

Keyword(s) In Title Tags - The title tag is the line of clickable text which appears in Google's SERPs for each ranking page. This is also the text which appears at the top of your browser's window in naming or identifying the page which you are currently browsing. It's important to work your best (most relevant, highest searched, lowest competition) keywords into your title tags as Google will consider this over most factors when indexing and ranking your page and in general in determining what it's about.

Keywords In Heading Tags - Effective use of heading tags helps Google know what is most important on your site, and what text it should pick out over the rest. It's been estimated that most people when opening a new page will first instinctively read the top left of your page before other elements. Consequently, your most important message using your most important keyword that you want to get across should be here and ideally using the H1 tag.

From here, less important keywords should be put in H2, and even less important but still noteworthy keywords should be in H3, and so on. An effective use of heading tags is a valuable skill to have in on page SEO.

Keywords In the Body - There is no substitute for good content, and in SEO a large part of good content is effectively including keywords where applicable. This means no over saturation because as I mentioned in the last chapter this will get you penalized and possibly de-indexed. A number of SEOers have argued for years over just the right saturation which will get you ranking well but not penalized and they have thrown out different figures to try to answer this magical ratio.

My advice is to not waste your time trying to crunch ratios as there is no perfect ratio. Besides, you have better things to do with your time and other ways to optimize your site. Just make it look natural and don't over think it and you'll be fine.

Words Surrounding Keywords - This all may seem a bit redundant, but the words around the keywords are just as important as the keywords which you include to begin with.

Google not only looks at the keywords which you are targeting, but it looks at the words surrounding them to get a better idea of what your site is about, not to mention that it does this to check you on keyword stuffing and make sure you're not doing anything "black hat" which could get you in trouble.

Keyword In Domain Name - This takes some careful planning, but many SEOers agree that this has a decent amount of bearing on how Google ranks a site for a keyword. In continuing with this point, you can set your site up as it expands to be more SEO friendly by naming subdomains after keywords, as well. So be as specific as possible when naming if you can. For example name a subdomain of a music site "Gibson-guitars" rather than just "guitars".

Note the use of the hyphen in the example. Hyphens represent spaces, so if you are using keywords in your URLs, break them up. While keywords in the subdomains don't carry quite as much weight as the top level of the domain, they're nonetheless important and helpful to Google in identifying what your site is about.

Source- SEO NEWS

Google+ It's Already Good For Rankings

Google+ hasn't even been around 6 months yet, and it's considered a major player in the social media realm. It regularly draws comparisons to both Facebook and Twitter. But, Google+ does have one thing going for it that currently Facebook and Twitter doesn't: it's good for rankings... in Google. Imagine that.

At the BlogWorld Expo in L.A., Alltops, Guy Kawasaki and Human Business Works President Chris Brogan had a very interesting discussion about all things Google+.

During the session, a question was raised "Is there now connections between google plus and search rankings?" Brogan stated that:

"Google doesn't index all of Facebook right now. It's a lost cause for SEO, they're also no longer indexing Twitter. Google does index anything publicly for Google+"

It should be noted that Facebook doesn't allow it. Kawasaki chimed in that this is probably a direct result of the relationship between Facebook and Bing.

If you Google Chris Brogan's name, you'll see his Google+ stuff shooting up the rankings. The same holds true for anyone. When you post something publicly it'll begin working for you, he states "It's a Google thing".

Source- webpronews

Google PageRank And +1

Let me start off by being very clear. Google is not getting rid of PageRank in favor of the +1 button. Google is, however, looking at the data from the +1 button as a signal of content quality, and +1s will no doubt continue to be largely coveted by webmasters and content creators web-wide.

Will +1s become more important than PageRank? 

It's been pretty clear since Google first announced the +1 button (even before they announced Google+) that the feature was designed to send Google signals for quality content. It was essentially billed as a way for web users to tell Google when a piece of content is good enough to be a good search result.

Wired is running a story now saying that Google has confirmed its plans of turning the button into "a crowdsourcing tool that helps re-order search results and fight web spam".

"Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results," a Google spokesperson is quoted as saying. "The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1's and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality."

Of course it is unwise to place too much emphasis on just a single ranking signal. At least that's what Google would have webmasters believe. They're tossing around very similar language with regard to the +1 button ranking as they historically have when people worry about PageRank too much: "There are more than 200 signals that we use to determine the rank of a website, and last year we made more than 500 improvements to the algorithm."

Just as you've seen plenty trying to boost their PageRank through black hat tactics, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that these same people will try to exploit the +1 button. A major weapon against this that Google has is its strict Google+ account name policy, which has been a bit controversial thus far.

It became clear in recent days that Google+ is all about identity as far as Google is concerned. Eric Schmidt drove this point home, as discussed here. While this makes sense for a variety of reasons (including the potential integration of Google+ with products like Google Wallet), it also makes a great deal of sense in that it shows Google exactly who is +1ing what, which should in turn help them enforce any policy (current or future) concerning abuse of the button for gaming search.

In terms of white hat tactics, you may do well to consider things like this research comScore just shared. +1's now mean more sharing of content to the actual Google+ network - people's circles, which should (in theory) translate to increased traffic from Google+ itself. So, it may help to know about the kinds of people who are using Google+, as opposed to Facebook, for example. comScore's data looks at those searches containing the Google+ and Facebook brands. It's probably not exact, but many of those searching for Google+ content are likely going to be users of the service.

"The most striking differences between Google+ searchers and Facebook searchers are in Age and Income level," says Eli Goodman, who leads the business development team at comScore. "Google+ searchers overwhelmingly skew towards 18-34 year olds. Clearly Google+ is a popular brand with the younger segments, and good knowledge for Google to have as they develop their acquisition strategy and evolve their user base. Since Facebook is a much more mature brand in the social networking space, their search audience falls closely in line with the search population at large."

"The income skews are even more distinct, essentially polar opposites of each other," he adds. "More than 32% of Google+ searchers have a household income of $100K or greater, compared to 23% of Facebook searchers. Google+ is definitely off to a fast start in reaching the most desirable income segments, which may make it more attractive to advertisers."


Google's quest for quality

In terms of Google using the +1 button as a way to combat spam, this also goes hand in hand with another new(ish) announcement from Google that it is calling upon users to report scrapers in some new algorithm testing.

"We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms," the company says on a "Report Scraper Pages" form, found here.


This followed another recent announcement from Cutts about a major refresh to Google's spam reporting process.

Google seems to be putting more emphasis on quality of results than ever before (I haven't even mentioned the Panda update in this article…or the domain blocking tools Google launched this year). It does appear that Google's grand social plan with Google+ is a major factor in that, and is sure to have everyone clamoring for +1s, which will not only provide a boost in ranking signals for content, but potentially traffic from the social network itself. And you can bet that WHO is +1ing things matters, just like with PageRank - WHO you're getting links from matters.

Between things like Google's emphasis on identity with Google+ itself and the authorship markup it's pushing(which links people to their Google profiles), it's clear that who you are matters in the Google world, and that also means that it matters who THEY (the people +1ing your content) undoubtedly matters too. Build your personal brand.

About the Author: Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter:@CCrum237 Google: +Chris Crum

Some Information on Google SandBox

   At the beginning of 2004, a new term appeared among SEO experts – Google SandBox. This is the name of a new Google spam filter that excludes new sites from search results. The work of the SandBox filter results for virtually any phrase of sites that have high-quality unique content and which are promoted using legitimate techniques.

   The SandBox is applied only to the English segment of the Internet; sites in other languages are not yet affected by this filter. It is assumed that the aim of the SandBox filter is to exclude spam sites – indeed, no search spammer will be able to wait for months until he gets the necessary results. However, many perfectly valid new sites suffer the consequences. So far, there is no precise information as to what the SandBox filter actually is. Here are some assumptions based on practical SEO experience:

   - SandBox is a filter that is applied to new sites. A new site is put in the sandbox and is kept there for some time until the search engine starts treating it as a normal site.

   - SandBox is a filter applied to new inbound links to new sites. There is a fundamental difference between this and the previous assumption: the filter is not based on the age of the site, but on the age of inbound links to the site. In other words, Google treats the site normally but it refuses to acknowledge any inbound links to it unless they have existed for several months.

It is hard to say which of these assumptions is accurate; it is quite possible that they are both right.

 The site may be kept in the sandbox from 3 months to a year or more. It has also been noticed that sites are released from the sandbox in batches. All sites created within a certain time period are put into the same group and they are eventually all released at the same time. Thus, individual sites in a group can spend different times in the sandbox depending where they were in the group capture-release cycle.