by Josh Lowensohn

Google’s latest social-networking experiment is officially 10 million users strong.

That number, which appeared earlier this week as a third-party estimate, was confirmed today by Google CEO Larry Page, who spent the first few minutes of the company’s second-quarter earnings call talking up Google+ and its features.

“I’m super excited about the amazing response to Google+ which lets you share just like in real life,” Page said in a statement ahead of the call. Page then kicked off the call by talking up the new property, saying that it’s a good representation of the kind of clean and easy to use products he wants the company to be making. Page also noted how features like circles and hangouts mimic real-life human interactions.

Google launched Google+ late last month not even in beta, letting in only a handful of users, who could later invite their friends and family. Page noted that the service remains in a “field trial” mode, and with “a lot of barriers” to use it right now, but that the company is continuing to expand how many have access to it. Page referred to the 10 million benchmark as “a great achievement” for the team that worked on the product.

Beyond raw user numbers, Page said the service has received “a ton of activity” with more than 1 billion items shared and received each day. That’s been bolstered by the +1 button, which Page said is now being served up around the Web 2.3 billion times a day.

“We want to make products that everybody uses twice a day, like their toothbrush,” Page said during the earnings call. “We certainly think about Plus that way, and just generally having a shared identity experience across Google and its products.”

Page is currently the second most followed user on the new service according to Socialstastics.com, a third-party analytics tool that’s currently tracking more than 28,000 profiles on the service. Page is second only to Facebook’s CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has approximately twice as many followers.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20079567-93/google-officially-tops-10-million-users/#ixzz1SCKrooq5

DecoGraphic Marketing mission is to be your internet marketing agency with whom you don’t have to worry. Just leave us all the work and we’ll make sure you’ll be noticed. From SEO to Pay Per Click and from email marketing to Social media networks, we’ve got you covered. Visit us at http://www.decographicmarketing.com to better understand the technology that today we put at your service.

Just days after Larry Page messaged Mountain View to say the firm needed to “go social” and get behind it’s Like button rival – Google +1, Matt Cutts talked URL shorteners and SEO in a bid to bring webmasters up to speed on how Google’s latest social search strategy will affect ranking signals.

However, Cutts noted, Twitter links may be processed and ranked a little differently. The Mountain View man explained that links on Twitter’s web pages are often no-follow links and may not necessarily flow through page rank, even though they may be flagged and processed through data feeds.

DecoGraphic Marketing Joins the Constant Contact Partner Program

Solution Provider Program Delivers Effective and Affordable Online Marketing Tools
to Win Customers and Build Strong, Lasting Relationships

Miami, FL — April, 2011 — DecoGraphic Marketing – Digital Marketing Solutions today announced it has joined the Constant Contact Partner Program (NASDAQ: CTCT) as a Solution Provider Partner. DecoGraphic Marketing will now be able to provide its clients with easy-to-use: email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online survey tools to help them create and build strong, lasting customer relationships.

“This new alliance will allow us to offer our clients the best service available for email marketing,” said Fabrizio Colombi. “The Constant Contact online marketing tools give our clients a valuable addition to our core services. Because of the tools’ ease-of-use and affordability, membership in the Constant Contact partner program provided a great solution to meet our clients’ marketing needs.”

DecoGraphic Marketing will now use Constant Contact’s online marketing tools, which are specially designed to help small businesses and organizations drive participation and strengthen relationships. These tools include:

-       Email Marketing for quickly creating professional-looking emails, managing contact lists, measuring campaign results, and reviewing new list         members;

-       Social Media Marketing for turning fans, friends, and followers into customers. Harnessing digital word of mouth from Facebook, retweeting offers on Twitter, or posting a review on Yelp keeps the conversation going and generates a powerful buzz for small business;

-       Event Marketing for efficiently promoting and managing registrations and RSVPs for meetings, functions, seminars, and events; and

-       Online Survey for gathering feedback that helps meet customer needs, generate new ideas, and help grow a business or organization.

“Our tools are all proven to help small businesses connect with customers and build successful relationships with them,” said Steve Johnson, vice president, Partners, Constant Contact. “We are pleased that DecoGraphic Marketing chose Constant Contact to provide its clients with our online marketing tools and we look forward to working together to be an even bigger factor in their customers’ success.”

About DecoGraphic Marketing

With more than 10 years of experience with DecoGraphic, Inc, we now bring you DecoGraphic Marketing! A full digital marketing service so you can complete your marketing strategy and efforts, and once and for all, target your correct audience. Take a look around; you should be able get an idea of what we offer. Should you have any questions, we are here to help. Call us or write to us to get estimates on pricing for all our services.

About Constant Contact, Inc.
Constant Contact is revolutionizing the success formula for small organizations through affordable, easy-to-use Engagement Marketing™ tools that help create and grow customer relationships.  More than 400,000 small businesses, nonprofit organizations, and member associations worldwide rely on Constant Contact as their engagement hub for starting and driving ongoing customer dialogs through email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online surveys.  All Constant Contact products come with unrivaled know how, education and free coaching with a personal touch, including award-winning customer support.

Learn more at www.ConstantContact.com.

Constant Contact and the Constant Contact Logo are registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All Constant Contact product names and other brand names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

Please direct all press inquiries to:

DecoGraphic Marketing

Fabrizio Colombi

Owner

info@decographicmarketing.com

+ 1 (305) 454-8548

But traffic to CDKitchen, which features free recipes and cooking columns, plunged 39 percent on Feb. 24, knocking it “into the abyss,” Whitmore said. That’s when Google, which delivers 70 percent of the site’s traffic, made a major change in how search results are ranked.

Google won plaudits for promoting original research and analysis and banishing pages littered with second-rate content or overloaded with advertising. But the revision to its algorithm, the secret mathematical formula that determines the best answers to a searcher’s query, also caused an uproar as hundreds of sites complained they had been unfairly lumped in with “content farms” that churn out articles with little useful information.

Google won’t discuss which websites it was targeting or how it revised its algorithm. It says it’s pleased with the results, even as it acknowledges that it has to be constantly vigilant to make sure its search engine finds what users want.
“Our primary goal is to make sure we return the best websites we can,” said Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting efforts. “No algorithm can be 100 percent accurate.”

Such a major change to its algorithm was a rare admission from the world’s most powerful search engine that it was being flooded by spammers and hucksters.

As part of its effort to zero in on troublemakers, Google created a software extension to its Chrome browser that lets users block sites. More than 100,000 users have installed the extension, giving Google the ability to study the top several dozen sites that users disliked. About 84 percent were affected when Google tweaked its algorithm, Cutts said.

“The work of search is never done. No matter what we improve, there will be people trying to game search,” he said.
Cutts and his team are monitoring feedback from websites affected by the change to its algorithm. One site that’s popping the champagne is Britannica, which got a big lift, appearing as the top Google search results 15 percent more often and in the top three results 18 percent more often. The change resulted in 40 percent more visits from Google users, said Gregory Barlow, chief marketing officer of Encyclopedia Britannica Group.

Meanwhile, however, Advizo, which runs a question-and-answer service with 800,000 registered members at www.askmehelpdesk.com, saw a 35 percent nose dive in visits from Google, which used to send Ask Me Help Desk 80 percent of its traffic.
Ram Prayaga, chief executive of Advizo, says his company is determined to win back the lost traffic.
“To be considered a content farm by the world’s most respected Internet organization seems very unfair,” he said. “It’s like being put on the do-not-fly list.”

And if Google was trying to take out spammers, its aim was off, at least in some cases, Prayaga said.

For example, Ask Me Help Desk used to rank high in Google results for the somewhat obscure search query “turbotax login.” After Google changed its algorithm, two of the top results linked to spammers who had figured out how to game Google, Prayaga said. (After The Los Angeles Times alerted Google, its spam-fighting team reviewed the sites, found they violated the search engine’s guidelines and removed them.)

“It demonstrates the issues Google is dealing with,” Prayaga said. “I don’t expect them to fix everything, but by the same token they should tread more carefully in areas of determining content quality.”

BY JESSICA GUYNN
LOS ANGELES TIMES SERVICE

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/29/2138446/googles-new-search-formula-hurts.html#ixzz1Hzsy2qGa

How is SEO different from placing and ad on the newspaper or yellow pages?
In today’s world, most print methods of communication will disappear. With the convenience of “The Internet”, less people are reading the news on printed newspaper or using the big old yellow pages book to find someone. So search engines will be come more prominent than they already are.

With newspaper ads you might be paying a campaign and it might get you results however, the day you stop paying the ad will no longer feature which will. All your efforts will be no-exitent for the new reader who will not find your ads. SEO builds upon itself leaving a long-term presence you can still purchase Google Ads (Pay-per-click) and appear as sponsored links but you will have the piece of mind that your efforts won’t disappear once the ad is removed.

How does it work?
Let’s start by explaining the logistic behind a search engine (specifically google.com). What matters the most is how relevant a website is based on the keywords typed by the user. The results appear in descending order of how relevant google thinks they are to the particular search. But how is relevance measured? For google, relevance means how many pages point to your website as well as how many of these pages are really content-rich and not just spam with a link pointing to your website. Google also reads you website, in our case http://www.decographic.net and see if the content inside the site is relevant to the search being generated.

Unfortunately some companies have abused the system and say a company that sells fabrics, show use keywords that pertain to that industry and not keywords like “ice cream shops in miami”. If google sees that a fabric company or any other business is appearing in keywords that are not related to the nature of the business, it will count it as an invalid link.

Google also looks at how old a website is, and how long the’ve been relevant for certain keywords so that will also be a bonus. Start early your SEO campaign. You won’t regret it! write to fcolombi@decographic.net or call (305) 454-8548 to get more information.

Best Buy’s use of QR Codes has become a benchmark for other retailers and their latest experiment is no exception. Posters (image below) have gone up at Best Buy Headquarters to test the viability of mood sampling. The relevant QR Code when scanned inputs a single value ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and a running total of ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ is displayed to the user. At the back end Best Buy techies can see the running totals and because each code is location specific they can attribute a mood to that location. I would not be surprised if this experiment is successful and rolled out to the stores.

So this is one of the ways of how Best Buy is benefiting from QR Codes! Any ideas on how these codes can be used? The technology is out there, we just need to use it to our advantage.