Google is now following you on Twitter!  If you have a twitter account, feel free to do a search on google search engine and you will see a new feature as below:

You can get the updated tweets whenever it is available.

Indeed is a job search aggregator. If you conduct a job search on Indeed, it will pull opportunities posted to a variety of job boards including Career Builder, Dice, etc. as well as corporate sites.

Today, they’ve revealed the fastest growing job opportunities for 2009.

1. Twitter
2. Cloud Computing
3. iPhone
4. Facebook
5. Corporate Social Responsibility
6. Blogger
7. Pediatrician
8. Hospitalist
9. Social Media
10. Speech Language Pathologist (SLP)

With high unemployment rates in the past year, many have chosen to look at new careers. This list may help you find a new path if you’re struggling to find work.

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091230-133021

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091230-152708

The 2009 most searched lists just keep coming, this time from voice mobile search provider, Vlingo:

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Weather
5. Movie Times
6. Twitter
7. Yellow Pages
8. MapQuest
9. craigslist
10. White Pages

So where are the Michael Jackson searches? Vlingo president and CEO Dave Grannan explains:

Unlike traditional Web searches that focus on specific search terms such as ‘Michael Jackson’ or ‘Twilight,’ our data shows that on mobile phones, people tend to search for specific destinations sites and resources. Mobile Web search is very popular on Vlingo, accounting for over 20% of all usage. Based on our users’ top searches, we are seeing mobile extending far beyond SMS and voice communications to encompass multimedia and social networking.

Try it now: http://www2.mcdonalds.fi/day/avatar/

Google announced a bunch of new features today. Let’s dive in:

Real-time integration
See the latest tweets, blogs, news etc. You can click on “Latest results” in the search results or the “Latest” link in the Search Options panel in order to get more results for a given keyword/phrase.

Hot Topics on Google Trends

This feature is similar to “trending topics” on Twitter. This is not the same as “Hot Trends” launched in September. That included a Google graph at the bottom of search results if you happened to search one of the top 100 hottest trends in Google search on a given day. This new feature is viewable simply by visiting Google Trends.

Oh yeah, and Google Trends is now out of Labs.

Search by Voice in Japanese

Searching by Voice is available on Google search apps for smartphones. So far, it has understood English and Mandarin. Now, Japanese is added to the mix.

“What’s Nearby?” on Google Maps

Find local businesses near where you are. Available for Google Maps for Android on versions 1.6 or higher. In coming weeks, browsing to google.com on iPhone or Android phone and then clicking “Near me now” will give you the same option.

Google Goggles Launches into Labs for Android

This lets users search by taking pictures of products, works of art, and locations they’re interested in instead of typing in a query. There is a reason this in Labs, as not all things are ready for primetime including animals, plants, cars, etc. You can help the process along by using the new tool.

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091207-150314

Are you ready?

With many people using mobile phones on a daily basis, and the subscription of GPRS plans are becoming affordable to mobile users, webmaster should make your sites mobile ready (or at least to create a new mobile site).

Take into account there’s a large number of subscribers using Google’s mobile search page (see http://www.google.com/m/), please have the Google search engine to index your site by:

Ensuring your site can be crawled and indexed properly by Googlebot.  The said crawler is named “Googlebot-Mobile”.

Creating and submitting Mobile sitemap to Google.  It can be submitted through the Google Webmaster Tools.

Checking your websites and important pages through the site operator (site:theurl.com), and ensure the pages can be indexed properly.

One kind reminder:  Please make your website layout zooming or make the page resolution and size smaller, so that the mobile users will not feel panic on downloading the webpages through limited GPRS access!

Video solution provider Fliqz has announced the launch of a new online video search engine optimization (SEO) tool. The tool is dubbed SearchSuccess and Fliqz says that companies who tested the product are experiencing early success.

A whopping two-thirds of the videos submitted by these early customers have reached first page Google rankings. 25% have seen the number one position.

“SearchSuccess addresses many of the common flaws in existing Video SEO strategies,” said Benjamin Wayne, CEO of Fliqz. “Many publishers are mistakenly under the impression that submitting videos to YouTube will drive traffic back to their site, or are working with video platform providers whose search engine submission techniques are either ineffective or drive traffic to the platform provider rather than the publisher. SearchSuccess is the first product to ensure search ranking while guaranteeing traffic is directed to the publisher’s site.”

One customer experiencing the early success is Design World Online, who has produced videos for topics such as 3D CAD models and OEM machine building. They’ve submitted 1,000 videos and 700 of them are already ranked on the first page of results.

“One of the most critical parts of our business, aside from generating quality content for our users, is helping engineers find and engage in our community and resources,” said Marshall Matheson, vice president of New Media for Design World Online. “Using Fliqz to optimize our videos has directly impacted our bottom line as not only has it resulted in a significant uptick in traffic but increased visitor engagement and conversion rates.”

SearchSuccess is available as an add-on to Fliqz’s Gold Edition video solution.

Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091116-135753

The google ‘officially’ announced that keywords meta tag are no longer part of the althogrim in web ranking on the webmaster central blog.  The Yahoo! also put an end to the keywords meta tag by explaining that they will ignore the said tags from their ranking althogrim.  What surprised me is that the Google had never explain the changes of their ranking althogrim on their official sites, and for this time, the Search Quality Team explained the reason behind the move!  Anyhow, I didn’t feel shock on the announcement, since I believe the Google has abandoned the keywords meta tags for somehow a decade already.

Okay, should we remove all the keywords meta tag then?

Personally, I do not suggest that.  Keep all the keywords tags and treat it as keyword insurance!  I can’t see there’s any harm to keep the tag.  I guess the said meta tags offer some kind of help in ’searching’ althogrim but not the ‘ranking’ althogrim.

What does the move implies?

As explained by the Google search team, the description meta tag would play a more important role in web ranking.    They do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets. 

Even though they use the description meta tag for the snippets, they still don’t use the description meta tag in their rankings.   So, what should we do then?  Focus on the off-site optimization.  It means that we should create more inbound links with relevant site, so that you are getting voted from your friends and the Google will surely give you a credit on this (get the ‘juicy links!).    Do keep an eye on the Pagerank of your webpages though it only counts the number of inbound links you have, but not the value and relevancy of the said links

Erm.. Do you mean the On-site optimization is not important?

No, I didn’t mean that, but I believe the off-site optimization is much more important than before.   It might be the only way to guarantee the information seekers get the most relevant result from their search queries.   As described by the Google search team,  the keyword and descriptions meta tags might confuse the information seeker in some sense.

Looking at the future

Please take a look at the video search.   Guys, when you upload a new video onto the Youtube, you have to type in the title, description, tags and to select the right category for your video.   These elements are important since the ‘content’ of a video can’t be crawled by spiders.  Take into account the description meta tag and keywords meta tag are no longer to be used in web ranking, what should the web marketer do for optimizating a video page?    Usually, a video creates buzz from the audience and a vote will be given by the said audience.  They will usually to get the video embedded to their pages.   Anyway, I am still waiting for the new “3D” spiders for crawling the video.

Market leader Google managed growth of 2.6 percent in comparison, behind an overall average of 2.9 percent for the sector, but continues its dominance with 65 percent of searches.

Yahoo, meanwhile, saw its volume of searches drop by 4.2 percent, but continues to hold second place in terms of overall share with 16 percent. Rounding out the top four, AOL experienced growth of 2.9 percent, accounting for 3.1 percent of total searches.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3634991