On the one hand, finicky Apple users have been experiencing improved app discovery methods. On the other hand, Android is further stepping up its effort through enhancements to the Android Market, the Amazon Appstore for Android that sells Android apps alone as well as upgrades to services such as Appolicious and Appbrain.com.

Users find it easier to find apps

Of these search related developments in the wireless realm, the fine-tuning of the Android Market site is probably the most pertinent. The Android Market version on mobile devices was good. However, the Web version was rather shallow, offering no way for users to search for apps, something surprising considering that Google, the world’s search giant, owns Android.

So you would clearly expect a better performance. It introduced search on the Market site earlier this year, populating it with a vast assortment of specific categories for searching. The Market search and support was further improved with editors’ picks and trending apps along with spruced up graphics.

The new search strategy

Google apparently took a page from the playbook of Amazon more recently by giving away apps, in some cases, among the more popular in the Market. Instead of turning this into a pure giveaway, the Market is offering 10 apps each day for 10 cents apiece, thus requiring users to give their credit card details. Not many prospective app users refuse to cross that line, either because of fear of divulging their financial information or because of the inconvenience.

The Android Market still does well overall as a search engine, and will only get better, you can expect. It is possible to sort results by popularity or search relevance. The site judges the parameter relevance more effectively. For example, when one searched apps by Google earlier, one would receive a long list of those simply mentioning Google. Now the flaw stands rectified and only those apps created by Google top the results.

The search results come along with sample images to inform about the app experience, and after clicking through to app description, Android search recommends similar apps users have either bought or browsed. So searching in the wireless realm for your favorite apps is going to get only better, easier and fulfilling.

As online community increasingly migrates towards mobile apps, developers will continue to look for more efficient ways to take their offerings to as many people as possible through easy search discovery amid the crowded marketplace. The wireless realm is set to see vastly improved app-related engines and stores that facilitate the task by vastly improving their support system for both constituencies – users and the app developers.

Those having  a LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter  account, are already being tested and judged – or soon will be. Companies carrying names like Klout, Twitter Grader and PeerIndex are involved in the process of scoring countless users on their specific level of influence – or in the official lingo, rating ‘influencers’. These companies are not just looking at the total number of friends or followers you have amassed. Instead, they’re looking to measure or grade the influence in more subtle ways, and then posting their judgments – in the form of an online score.

Social score ‘influences’ your brand equity

Got Twitter and Facebook profile, then you have probably already been scored…It is an offbeat method, to some, encouraging the genuine democratization of online influence. You need not any longer be a celebrity, a media personality or a politician to be considered highly influential. To stubborn critics, this is a senseless new technosphere, wherein your vague rating could help decide how you’re treated by all those with whom you might interact – both online and offline – including by prospective employers, retailers, and even prospective dates

This is why your social score greatly ‘influences’ your offline image. So how can one actually become an influencer? A thorough analysis of more than 22 million tweets, a team of researchers at Hewlett-Packard concluded that it was not enough to draw more Twitter followers; you must also be able to inspire them to initiate action, which well could mean persuading your followers to share an apple pie recipe or to donate to the Sierra Club. To put it in other words, the process of influencing is more about becoming proactive – prompting engagement and providing motivation, than just about building up long legions of followers.

Learn to optimize your digital presence

As industry professionals explain, it is important to fine-tune, focus and channelize your digital presence a couple of key areas of interest. It’s no point in becoming a generalist with no special skills or niche areas. Most importantly: convince users of your passion, knowledge and trustworthiness. As far as influence in the offline realm is concerned, it doesn’t count.

Companies like PeerIndex describe this as ‘the Clay Shirky problem’, denoting the writer-theorist who won’t utilize Twitter much. It is obvious that he or she is massively influential, and has a poor PeerIndex right now.

Social and SEO to be intertwined further

As one would expect, dominance of social media will only get stronger, underlining the fact that social and search will have to tread a collective path. SEO sans social will be difficult to imagine or implement. Already, there is a clear influence of the former on SEO, and this will get further obvious. Optimization is fast getting intrinsically intertwined with social as was the case with link building, say a decade ago.

It’s not just the fact that social signals are now making their way up into the overall ranking algorithms (both directly and indirectly), but also the fact that social is emerging as the prime method of sharing as well as discovery for internet users. Even though the usefulness of link graph will not be diminished for years to come, it will gradually make way for the all-pervasive social ‘sharegraph’, challenging its ability to decide what’s really relevant, useful, and relevant to users. The trend could ultimately override every other aspect of SEO practices/ tactics, taking it to a broader level.

Keyword-anonymous searchers to dominate

It is possible keyword (not provided) might rise to 25% plus of total web searchers. In spite of  statements from Google that missing keyword data will be in single digit numbers, certain experts are taking a contra call to predict that at least a quarter of all Web searches originating from logged-in (hence, keyword-anonymous) searchers by December of 2012. The search engine giant is working tirelessly to get adoption of Google+, Android, Gmail and Google Apps, all of which together will enhance the percentage share of not provided searchers.

Marketers in search of a new dominant social player

The last few years have witnessed Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Tumblr and LinkedIn all boasting a user base running into millions. In the year ahead, Pinterest might follow suit. It’s probably the first major social site where the gender balance is tilted heavily in favor of women. Pinterest will be a major phenomenon to dominate the social media mainstream. Because of this marketers will show keenness to leverage it to help share their content and find prospects.

Last but not the least, the domain of search/inbound marketing is perhaps in need of a program to hone the skills of professionals. So we should witness somewhere down the line a proper Certification Program, hopefully so…What more can we expect on Search and optimization front in 2012? Let us follow in the next post of our series on SEO trends!

It has been well established that that a growing number of employers, recruiters and HR managers in recent years have turned to the social media platforms and other online avenue to gather more information about candidates and even current employees. As Timeline goes live, this trend will get more prominent. The question to be asked is: How can you use this situation to your advantage?

Pick a good photo

A striking aspect in the Facebook Timeline is the cover photo. Pick a snap that jells with your personality, job profile, and professional identity so that it would impress the prospective employers who happen to check your profile. Avoid pictures at home or from a friend’s party or your birthday celebration.

A peep into your social past

Importantly, the Timeline will make presentation easier even for those who are not fully Facebook-savvy. In its earlier version, the Facebook profile as we know, has given a current slice of a member’s life. In case one wants to peep into the past by searching for older updates say for a week, month, or perhaps year ago, it would take some searching.

This changes with Timeline, and what it means is that employers can easily find out more about a person by searching particular time frames and checking how the relevant details mesh together. As a result, Facebook will become the go-to site for employers and clients curious to check your social past. Prioritize and expand the information that you feel is pertinent so that it can be prominently visible. Personalized and well-manicured Timelines are bound to get more attractive.

Privacy settings remain the same; posts fall into place, and mixed media fits itself into a nice snazzy arrangement, as you’ll find. Though no privacy settings change takes place, yet those unsavory status updates you posted a couple of years ago might resurface and can be accessed with some clicking on your Timeline, so be careful.

Refine your target audiences

Facebook Timeline along with the overall privacy settings will work much better if you choose to refine your target audiences. Organize business contacts into a proper list to ensure they only get to see your business-specific content. By personalizing the profile to fit the reader base is going to make your Timeline more focused and effective.

Adding a personal touch to search

The idea, as the search engine giant puts it, is to serve up pages, which bring your personal world to the fore through search, taking a salvo at Facebook for in their battle for eyeballs and ad revenues. Google is keen to neutralize its social rival’s growing influence by adding a personal touch to its engine in order to bring back users by combining the search engine function with Google+, its nascent social network.

Market analysts describe this as a significant step in the realm of search – namely, Search plus Your World – via a personal anecdote when you use Google. This move is aimed at delivering results that take into account not only immediate content requirements but also a user’s mindset and their relationships.

Blending public and the private worlds

For this, it’s extending the scope of search beyond public So webpages to the posts and photos photos shared privately come into play. As you key in a person’s name, Google will automatically recommend people you may be interested in. It’s also guiding users to profiles as well as Google+ pages that relate to the topic.

Until now there was no connection between one’s Web search results and one’s personal information. Not all users would want or even understand why personal information is part of search results. The company says it will explain the rationale to users at the top of pages as why it’s making certain information more visible. This may invite resistance similar to that faced by Facebook after rolling out Timeline.

Google is not asking users if they want this new feature, and just turning it on. In case you don’t want it, you’ve to turn off the same. Twitter has already raised a murmur of protest about the Google feature. Its official reaction was as follows:

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the Internet. We are concerned that as a result of these changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone.”

A move to promote Google+?

The new feature apparently tends to promote Google+ over its social rivals – by design or by default, which could lead to regulatory scrutiny even as the search engine giant is already facing antitrust investigations in Europe and the U.S.  Incidentally, Google is not the first engine to do so. Microsoft’s Bing in an alliance with Facebook, has already been tapping some part of information shared on the latter. But Google’s move has attracted greater attention owing to its total dominance in search.

A push to popularize Google+

The idea would be not only to prompt a greater usage of the social network, but also to arm them with an ability to collate social, ranking and visibility signals. This would also give a further push towards fighting spam and manipulation, to an extent, another area of concern for the search major. In fact, it is being predicated that Google will finally decide to initiate stern, Panda-style action to check manipulative link spam. There are some obviously undesirable links from sites that should be discounting at several pages. The engine’s search quality team can be expected to take steps to rectify this.

Apart from an effort to check on manipulative link spam, what else is supposed to be the core of developments in the vast search-scape. As we have discussed in the previous post, we can expect a few developments taking place on the search and social front. First, social and SEO will get intertwined further, to leverage their respective strengths. Keyword-anonymous searchers would probably dominate the scene.

Further algorithmic changes

Some time during the year, it is believed the search quality team of Google will bring about algorithmic changes in the way they evaluate low-quality links to do away with the linkspam and strengthen the credibility of Google search results. Experts are advising against overly pushy search ads, forcing out organic results, leading to an undue paid search markup.

One positive for marketers though, is that a better integration with the fledgling social platform will benefit those who do harness SEO/ social media strategies with a degree of skill and aptitude. It’s also likely to be a blessing in disguise for white hat tactics, which help build brand signals even while curtailing the overall effectiveness of ‘exploits’ that seemingly manipulate (such as anchor text link spam or exact match domains). The other side of it is that Google is probably going to gather much more data about the user’s online behavior pattern, making them a more powerful and overreaching force than they are currently on the web.

According to a Comscore estimate, Bing and Yahoo! lay claim to 30% of the US search market compared to Google’s 65%. Sources such as Statcounter (that consider traffic websites get rather than queries by a sample audience) show Google share, much higher at 82% and that of Bing+Yahoo! at 16%. This pattern should continue, though Bing should be able to record a reasonable growth in its market share as the year progresses.

• Facebook, as mentioned above, was the most searched term, taking up more than 3 percent of overall searches in the US, a good 46 percent rise from the previous year. Four variations of the term featured in the top 10 terms list, accounting for over 4 percent of searches overall, around 24 percent rise from 2010.
• YouTube jumped to the 2nd spot from the 3rd spot in 2010. YouTube terms logged 1.36 percent of total searches, representing more than 20 percent rise compared with 2010, whereas other Google terms (comprising YouTube) accounted for over percent and a half – an increase of around 27 percent.
• |‘Facebook login’ emerged as the third most widely searched item, followed by terms ‘craigslist’ and again ‘facebook.com’ that moved up a spot to figure among the top five searched items. The combined percentage of facebook and facebook.com was 3.48 percent among the top 50, a 33 rise.
• Further analysis revealed that terms related to social networking dominated the results, taking up more than 4 percent of the top 50 search terms, an increase of decent 12 percent in comparison to  2010.
• Yahoo terms accounted for 0.59 percent – an increase of 15 percent compared with 2010. Other terms in the top 10 list were ebay and mapquest. Some of the new terms entering the top 50 search terms’ list were addicting games, cnn, chase online, amazon.com, face, facebook sign up, lowes, pandora, twitter and hotmail.
• Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber were the two most most popular public figures in terms of top personality searches.

Analyzing the results, general manager of the research agency, Simon Bradstock, stated:

“Navigational searches dominated the top search results as users typed in terms versus typing in the URL in the browser bar. Hitwise saw 11 percent growth of single-word searches in 2011 as terms like ‘face’ and ‘you’ made the top 50 searches. Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines.”

Other top searches for 2011 reflect fascination with celebrities online, whereas many of the leading fast-moving search terms revolved around notable personalities passing away or natural disasters.

Also, avoid using any overlapping ads as they hamper the flow of your content. In the previous post, we have considered a few basics of optimizing your site for mobile and tablet users. Just to give a quick recap:

• First and foremost, checking out whether or not your site is optimized for the fast-evolving mobile and tablet generation. It must evolve in keeping with the changing technology landscape.
• Keeping your mobile website’s interface simple and page sizes small; making your content crisp, compact and visually appealing, and keeping the site regularly updated.
• Minimizing your site even while maximizing its searchability, plus testing your site’s mobile version on multiple devices cutting across models and brands (ideally of different platforms)
• Importantly, marketers must be well aware of the new mobile consumer behavior, to provide a overall thrust to your mobile SEO strategy.

Not all mobile browsers are compatible with Flash, video-audio players, frames, pop-ups, and JavaScript, which designers are keen to use. Even if they spice up the site, they are unusable for the people who visit your site via low-end mobile phones. Instead try to have in place a flexible mobile site for variable screen sizes plus resolutions. Scaling page elements by different screen sizes, instead of setting fixed pixel widths for your page elements is preferable to make your site compatible for a wide array of mobile phones.

The best way to optimize your e-commerce based offerings for mobiles is to develop an app. This will give your wireless presence the much needed competitive edge so as to stay ahead of your competition. An app can place the users directly in your virtual store. Last but not the least, consider the design options in terms of Google transcode and mobile subdomain. Employing Google’s configuration tool to transcode the site to mobile HTML from classic HTML won’t probably provide a unified experience to your users.

There is a chance of having content and images resized in unrestrained or unattractive ways. There is scope for, duplication of content and error pages. One way to avoid the overall poor user experience is to make a mobile subdomain specifically geared for your mobile website.

This can be done by creating a subdomain txt files, a key aspect for both search direction and indexing. A distinct mobile URL will prevent your mobile optimization from hampering your classic optimization and vice versa. Importantly, this will let the GoogleBot Mobile index the mobile site version for mobile searches.

According to a study done by Google, more than 70 percent of smartphone users look for related content on their devices after being exposed to ads both offline and online. Such are the peculiar habits of mobile users that you need to know in order to maximize your brand’s goodwill. In effect, marketers must be thoroughly aware of the new mobile consumer behavior.

The key thing to check out is whether or not your website optimized for the fast-evolving mobile and tablet generation. The new mobile and tablet technology gives today’s consumers the unbounded power to connect on the go on devices that easily rest into the palm of their hands. So your site must visually evolve to stay tuned to the changing rather shrinking viewing technology.

It is logical that your mobile website’s interface is simple, page sizes are small and font size is big enough. Make your content crisp, compact and visually appealing as well as geared up or a constrained screen viewing by utilizing CSS in coding. See to it that the site is regularly updated to draw attention of mobile web surfers as well as search engines.

Keep in mind the fact that mobile users does get charged per KB of web data they download from their devices. It is important to minimize your site even while maximizing its searchability. Cut down the image sizes. Ensure fonts are simple enough to easily decipher and understand. These are the aspects to keep in mind when devising layout.

Your URL reflects the crux of your mobile site so think of employing the better .mobi domain that gives a holistic mobile experience instead of .org or .com, denoting a desktop web experience. You may want to establish the mobile version on a subdomain, for example http://m.digg.com/ (the normal version is http://digg.com/). Avoid employing Flash, Java, Ajax, Frames etc as far as possible. Instead opt for XHTML (WAP 2.0), WML (WAP 1.2), or cHTML (iMode).

Test your site’s mobile version on multiple devices cutting across models and brands (ideally of different platforms). This is the only way to make sure that your mobile site will offer a complete experience to different categories of users. If you lack the access to multiple devices, you may use a web-based emulator like the iPhoneTester.com.

More ideas to optimize your e-commerce based offerings for mobiles

1. One of the key elements while devising a mobile site is layout or structure. It can get time consuming and tedious at times, to browse and navigate through a mobile site, more so if its layout is not properly thought out. It should be simpler, uncluttered and easy to access. Make it a point to put most of the important pages you want mobile device users to check, at the front. Insert the key bits of information right on top of the page.
2. Include a company logo that is customized for your mobile site. Minimize unnecessary left/right navigation, since it is difficult on a handset. Arrange the content in a unified single column layout. Minimize the usage of tables. If you need to incorporate them, do not use more than a couple of columns. Row and column merging should be avoided.
3. Ensure the information on your mobile site is easier to read, and doesn’t take the hurried users on the go much efforts to figure out content structure of your mobile site. After having finalized the content, which is to be displayed exclusively on mobile, fine tune the site menu accordingly and in order of its importance and relevance. Font size is another issue to consider while rendering the content. It should be easy on eyes.
4. There is no special coding, as is the common perception, needed for your mobile site. It’s much more convenient to code it using XML or XHTML. You may create it with basic HTML/ CSS coding. Pay attention to elements like title tags, heading tags, description meta tags, filenames. They should be infused with target keywords to optimize the content offering.
5. Most mobile devices would take long to load images owing to slower Internet speeds or operating systems. Hence do not use heavy images or graphics. Visual elements should be kept to the minimum, as far as possible, and added only when they are contextually relevant or unavoidable.
6. If you want to put images on a mobile site, they should be in .gif, .jpeg or .png format as these files are comparatively light-weight. Also, ensure that your pictures are compressed to prevent zooming. Though most devices display images, at times users may opt to browse with the images’ functionality turned off. So it is recommended that you invariably use the alt text.