In this post we have taken the Video provided by SEOmoz from their Whiteboard Friday with Rand Fish.

In This Video Rand Fish is talking about the very exciting, very interesting, very controversial Google Panda update.

This is a great watch for SEOers trying understand what the changes Google Panda has to SEO best practices and what is required to get to the first page & maintain your positioning

Why you ask?

According to Google, there has been a growth in voice traffic by 600% in the past year. Approximately every 24 hours users will speak close to about 2 years worth of dialogue into the system.

It is also thought that Google is rolling out these innovative search results & products in the wake of Bing making its present felt stronger within shopping & travel search results.

How you might ask?

Users  will be able to use microphone connected to the computer or built into the computer by clicking a little image of a microphone which is located within the search box, Once clicked the user will be able to then speak their query.

What happens if the Queries are quiet complicated or very long?

According to Google these more complex queries appear to work just as well as a simple one or two word query, as Google has enter approximately 230 Billion words per day into the language bank which will take into consideration multiple accents & pronunciations, with English currently the only language available but additional languages to be rolled out in the coming months.

Google is continuing to make big announcements about further changes undergoing in Search. This time the focus is on Google Search by Images.

The innovative initiative to be rolled out by Google is the ability for a user to drag & drop images or paste the image URL into the search query field and Google will provide results for similar images.

An additional image feature is Google Instant’s extension to image search, changing the images below the query box as user’s type.

So what does this mean for a webmaster?

If your website is an e-commerce website the release of search by images means potential search queries for images can turn into potential shopping trips for users, working best with well established products

So what does this mean for a user?

The ability to be able to search for products like cars, clothes, shoes, appliances & so much more

One important issue Google raised was that there is no facial recognition, but in the event of a search of an image of a celebrity say, Google compares pixels and provide results of images that are similar to the face of the celebrity provided there is a well-documented visage.

“In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years,” Mr. Singhal said.

On desktop search, people start searching when they get to work and stop searching when they get home – with an hour drop in the middle of the day for lunch. Desktop search behaviour drops off during the weekend, and yearly patterns show a drop during winter and summer holidays.

Another interesting point made what that even during your peak holiday seasons like Christmas there appears to be no slowing down of the mobile search epidemic.  This is typically useful for advertisers you experience drop off in searches related to desktop search results. So for online advertisers being mobile friendly is a clear winning strategy to limit the drop off in search activities during these periods

To keep up with our ever growing demand for fast internet and fast online experiences on the internet Google continues to look for the means for faster search because they know better than any that faster search means a better user experience.

The challenge for Google here though is for them to continue to make search faster it means they have to look into speeding up the web as well.

What initiatives could Google take to speed up the web you ask?

This week Google has revealed a host of new updates for search, which includes:

• Search by Image
• New Tools for Queries on Mobile Devices
• Pre-loading Web Pages in Search Results (for those using Google Chrome or Plugins for other browsers

Google Instant for Pages is the new Google services that pre-load the page in search result based on a prediction by Google as to which result a user will click on. This initiative is set to save as much as 10 seconds and also having the potential to increase impressions within a user session.

To let you comprehend this a little better. Your standard web page pulls data from any where up to 70 unique sources, Google Instant will pull this data before the user even clicks the page thus allowing time to be saved the moment the user  makes their selection.

“What we have found is that even if we shave 15 milliseconds off a search, users search more and more,” said Google search fellow Amit Singhal at an event in downtown San Francisco.

With such a big initiative Google’s Mr.Singhal announce that Google Instant pre-loaded results will only be available in 32 languages, but will initially available for the main search and not for any Ads Google serves as relevant to the query.

A Special thanks to Social Times

Source: http://socialtimes.com/real-cost-of-social-media-infographic_b63360

1. Create your Page

Go to facebook.com/pages and click “Create Page” in the upper right hand corner.

The next screen asks you to select a category from the following list:

• Local Business or Place
• Company, Organization or Institution
• Brand or Product
• Artist, Band or Public Figure
• Entertainment
• Cause or Community

2. Fill In information

Once you select the category for your business, you can fill in the name, address and phone number. Check the box next to “I agree to Facebook Pages Terms” and click “Get Started.” You’ll see a Page that looks like this:

3. Add a photo

Upload a picture for your page. It can be a logo, a photo of a store or a photo of a person—whatever makes the most sense for building your brand. The file needs to be smaller than 4 MB, and it can be square or a vertical rectangle. However, note that the avatar that shows up next to status updates and wall posts is square, so if you don’t want anything chopped off, square might be the way to go.

4. Suggest your Page to friends

Get your Page started off with some “likes” by recruiting your own friends. Start typing in names and when you drag the cursor over someone’s name, it will highlight in blue. Click once to check the person and add them to your invite. Click “Selected” to see who’s on your invite list. When you’re ready to invite, click “Send Recommendations.”

5. Import contacts

Click on “Import Contacts” to reach out to your e-mail contacts about your new Page. You can upload a file (Outlook, Constant Contact, .csv) or you can enter your e-mail log-in info so Facebook can access people in your e-mail contact list. Again, you can check the box next to the names you’d like to invite, and you can preview the invitation to see what it’ll look like. For people who are already on Facebook, they’ll get a “Recommended Pages” widget on their Facebook, while everyone else will get an e-mail that looks like this:

6. Start writing content

Once you have a photo uploaded and have a few fans on board, you can start engaging.

For status updates, you can either share with everyone or you can target by location or by language. Targeting comes in handy if the Page is for a business with several locations in various states, especially if there is a contest, event or update that is only for a particular city.

If you want to post a link to a blog post or news story, don’t just type or paste the URL into a status update. If you do, it will look like this:

To post a link the proper way, click “Link” and paste the URL. Click “Attach.” Once you “attach” the URL, you’ll see that the text and photo from the page you’re linking to will populate automatically. You can change the title, paste different text into the snippet, and change the pictures (if there are several options, indicated by the “Choose a Thumbnail” prompt):

This is the best and cleanest way to link to another page. The post looks better and it will perform better if the link is attached instead of typed into the status. Note that you can click on either the link or the snippet to change the text before you click “Share.”

7. Get a vanity URL

Once you have 25 fans on your Facebook Page, any of a Page’s admins can reserve a vanity URL so that your Facebook URL is www.facebook.com/yourbusinessnamehere. Go to the Username page, select the Page name from the drop-down menu and then write in the name you’d like to use. Click “Check Availability.” If it’s available, a prompt will ask, “Are you sure you want to set [URL] as [Facebook Page]‘s username?” Click confirm to lock in that URL—and keep in mind that you can’t change the URL for a Page once you confirm.

8. Use the tools that are available

Facebook Insights is a great tool that can help you figure out when to post and what kind of content does well. Measuring social media success is complicated, but many brands focus on engagement. Activity on your Page is a good sign, and you can keep tabs on activity by clicking “Facebook Insights” on the right sidebar, just below the admins.

9. Assign other admins

Speaking of admins, you can invite several people to run the Page and post content—links and statuses will come through as written by the Page and not the individual. (Note, the statuses above were generated when I was on my personal account—but the posts came through from “My Sweet New Candy Shoppe” because I am an admin.)

In the “Admins” section of the sidebar on the right, click “See All.” A new page will populate with the names of the admins. To make someone else an admin, just type in his name (it’ll populate in real time)—there is no limit to the number of admins a Page can have. Admins are kept abreast of happenings on the Page—including comments and posts so that your company can interact with its fans—via e-mail.

Now that your Facebook Page is all set, you can learn more about what to do, what not to do and when to post to get the best engagement.

A huge thanks to Opensource for the article:

http://www.openforum.com/articles/how-to-set-up-a-facebook-page

Search result annotations: Bing now displays which search results your friends have liked. This is shown with annotations and small thumbnails under any link that your friends has liked.

Surfacing content from Likes: Let’s say Mashable or Cooks.com comes up in one of your searches, and your friends have liked specific articles or recipes from those websites. With Bing’s new Facebook integration, that content will surface right under the Mashable.com or Cooks.com search result. Bing says that this makes it easier to find the “good stuff” within core search.

Enjoy the full article here: http://mashable.com/2011/05/16/facebook-bing-integration/

Changes in search rankings: Facebook Likes now affect search rankings. An article that might have normally surfaced on the second or third page of search results may appear on the first page if friends have liked it.

Facebook Page integration: If a search result doesn’t have any likes from your friends, but that result has a presence on Facebook, its Facebook status updates may appear in search results.

Improvements to people search: Bing has prominently surfaced Facebook accounts in search results for individuals since October, but now Facebook accounts can appear in related searches. For example, if you search for Paris, Bing will show which of your friends actually lives there.

ore Facebook sharing options: Bing has added Facebook sharing options to its shopping, flights and travel search sections. You can now create and share shopping lists with your friends or post potential vacations to your wall. Bing says that 90% of people consult their friends or family before making a decision, so Bing wanted to make that process easier to accomplish.

Bing toolbar + Facebook: Bing has a new version of its toolbar starting tomorrow, and it will include a universal Facebook Like button. It gives you the ability to like any website or web page, regardless of whether or not it has added the Facebook Like button.

To read the full article visit Mashable or enter the url into your address bar http://mashable.com/2011/05/16/facebook-bing-integration/

Google is very excited to introduce the Page Speed Online API as part of the Google APIs.

With this API, developers now have the ability to integrate performance analysis very simply in their command-line tools and web performance dashboards.

Google have provided a getting started guide that helps you to get up and running quickly, understand the API, and start monitoring the performance improvements that you make to your web pages.

If you website is built in WordPress, for further website improvement the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache now uses the Page Speed Online API to provide Page Speed suggestions to WordPress users, right in the WordPress dashboard.

“The Page Speed tool itself provides extremely pointed and valuable insight into performance pitfalls.

Providing that tool via an API has allowed me to directly correlate that feedback with actionable solutions that W3 Total Cache provides.” said Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable and W3 Total Cache author.

Thanks for the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog for providing this update.

Read the original article titled: Page Speed Online has a shiny new API