6 Keyword Research Mistakes You Might be Making

Keyword research is an all too often under-appreciated aspect of SEO.

 For any successful SEO Campign following tips are very useful.

Here are some of the more common mistakes that I see people make with their keyword research.

#1 – You're being Unrealistic

"It is better to have a bigger slice of a few smaller pies rather than not getting even a slither of a much bigger pie."

Keyword research appears to be a very straightforward task. You fire up your keyword research tool of choice and find the keywords that relate to your industry with the highest search volumes. Sadly, that's not the way to do it if you want to see real results.

To many businesses, high-competition keywords are simply out of reach – at least in the short and medium term. Part of good keyword research is about being realistic and selecting appropriate keywords for targeting that take into account the site's age, current authority and any future optimisation that will take place.

Targeting one word keywords is quite often unrealistic but it may also prove unprofitable – someone searching for 'Toshiba l670 laptop' is likely to be much further along in the purchasing process that someone who searches for 'laptops' – think about which searcher is likely to have their credit card out already.

There's nothing wrong with targeting generic keywords, I'm simply saying that if your campaign has limited budget and you need results in the short to medium term then targeting less trafficked, less competitive keywords is a much better way to utilise resources.

Lower traffic but lower competition keywords might not seem as exciting to target but if your website can dominate these areas fairly quickly then you are going to see far more traffic from the search engines than failing to effectively target a much more competitive term.

#2 – You're looking at broad match instead of exact match

A seemingly simple mistake but one which many people continue to make...

Search volume is of course a very important metric when it comes to keyword research but all too often people make the mistake of looking at broad search volumes rather than the exact match figure when using tools like Google's Keyword Tool.

There can be a huge difference between broad match and exact match search traffic for example:

There are 135,000 broad match searches each month in the UK for 'dog kennels' but only 14,800 exact match searches for the same keyword. Still, this wouldn't prove particularly problematic as this is obviously still a keyword worth targeting – it would knock traffic and ROI projections way off kilter if you do these kinds of things though.

The real problem comes when you choose to target a keyword like 'ladies leather handbags' which has a broad match search volume of 2,400 but an exact match search volume of only 260 – failing to base your research on exact match data might mean you think you are targeting a reasonably well-trafficked keyword when in actual fact, once you've factored in data inaccuracies, you could be looking at a very low search volume keyword indeed.

It is widely accepted that Google's Keyword Tool isn't entirely accurate when it comes to search volumes but using exact match gives you the best data available when assessing how viable a keyword is to target.

#3 – You're targeting plural instead of singular

It is very common to see a website targeting the plural version of a keyword but in most cases, it is the singular version of a keyword that people are searching for.

I see this most often on eCommerce websites where the site owner optimises category pages and because they sell more than one product, they naturally focus on the pluralised keywords for example "tablet PCs" which actually gets 91% less searches than "tablet PC".

I will readily admit that Google is much better at determining that a singular and plural version of a keyword are one and the same, but in many cases there are still differences in the search results. Failing to target the singular keyword can be the difference between your search listing being highlighted in the SERPs (=higher clickthrough) and it can also mean your website appears lower (even slightly) than marginally better targeted pages – that could be the difference between making a sale and not.

#4 – You're ignoring conversion

This one could easily turn into a rant for me because so often I come up against clients who want to rank for [insert trophy keyword] when in actual fact they'd do better (financially) targeting a different keyword or set of keywords. I try to explain that a keyword that brings in traffic is wasted bandwidth if that traffic doesn't convert. You don't hire my company to get traffic for traffic's sake...you presumably hire us to help you ultimately make more sales.

The online world is competitive and it's only going to get more competitive, therefore making the most of every penny being invested is vital.

This makes conversion and language analysis a vital part of keyword research. The human mind is the only software capable of performing a good quality 'conversion audit' of a keyword list because whilst there are programmes out there that can filter and sort keywords to make your life easier, there's no real substitute for industry experience and SEO knowledge.

There are some very basic indicators for example prefixes such as 'buy' might be a clear indicator that the traffic from this keyword is going to convert.

A keyword conversion audit is more complex than that however since each situation and market is individual. I find existing data to be a very useful way to determine which keywords are likely to convert well. If you have goal tracking setup with Google Analytics, you can easily determine the highest converting keywords your site currently gets traffic from, try to identify patterns in your highest converting keywords and then translate and apply this knowledge to other areas of keyword research.

#5 – You're selecting keywords that are out of context

This is yet more rationale to further humanise the keyword research process because most keyword tools struggle to compute words and their meaning in the way a human would.

For example, a searcher looking for 'storage' could be looking for a self-storage centre, boxes and other storage furniture for the home or even professional storage solutions for a warehouse or office.

Opportunities for confused targeting are abundant which is why it is essential the keywords you decide to target are highly-relevant and laser-focused towards what your business offers.

A good way to do this is to search manually for the keywords in Google and see the kinds of results that come up, you will likely be able to get a feel for whether the keyword is applicable to the product or service you intended to target.

#6 – You're failing to conduct keyword reviews

It is accepted that SEO is an on-going process but rarely are target keywords reviewed and audited. If a marketplace is shifting over time then you would also expect customer search behaviour to develop and evolve over time too – this makes regular keyword reviews essential.

In most markets, I find an annual review is perfectly adequate. Any time period shorter than this and there is a risk that targeting becomes a bit chaotic with efforts focused on new keywords before results on old keywords have been achieved or evaluated.

That being said, in some competitive and very fast moving markets a more regular keyword review may be required.

The aim of a keyword review is to:

• Weed out poor performing keywords
• Identify opportunities and areas for growth
• Shape your SEO strategy for the future

To do a strategic and actionable keyword review you can use this adapted version of the Boston Matrix that I like to use.

Large brands use the Boston Matrix to assess the health of their product portfolio and to identify where to concentrate their resources.

You can do the same thing for your keyword portfolio.

Sort your keywords into four categories in order to better shape your search strategy for the future.

• Question marks – these are keywords in areas where growth is likely but at present you're not getting the performance you'd expect. These are very often untapped keyword opportunities and you should plan how you are going to improve performance on these kinds of keywords.
• Stars – high-performance keywords and loads of room for growth – find ways to capitalise on growth. My advice is to focus your resources of gaining results in these areas for maximum ROI in a short period of time.
• Dogs – the poor performing keywords with little or no chance of growth – bin these in favour of other keywords, reallocate any resources to other areas.
• Cash cows – the high performing keywords that show little opportunity for growth – look for ways to enhance and maintain performance whilst identifying patterns and translating this learning to other areas or verticals.

What mistakes do you see happening in the keyword research process? Please share them in the comments section below...

Resource: By Creative-Edge, founder http://creative-edge.in

How Search-Like Are Social Media Sites?

Like search? Who doesn’t — great traffic, huge brand value and an audience ready to convert. Like social media? What’s not to like — huge growth, tons of buzz and an entire new marketing frontier that is opening up. For the search marketer looking at social media, how does it measure up? Which social media sites are most “search like?” This article looks at the issue and tries to chart it all out for easy comparison.
To answer, let’s start with some definitions. The terms “social media” and “social media site” are often used to describe web sites and online services that can be radically different from each other. Facebook gets grouped with Flickr because they’re both “social.” Social, yes — but there are subcategories that are important to know.
This is how I breakdown social media sites, based on watching the space and talking with social media marketers over the past few years:

• Social News Sites (such as Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz)
• Social Bookmarking Sites (such as Delicious, StumbleUpon)
• Social Networking (such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
• Social Knowledge (such as Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers)
• Social Sharing (such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Urban Spoon, Yelp)

I’ll define these further as I go along. But the key question is this. How do these sites measure up against search?
I like charts, so I wanted to see if I could somehow graphically illustrate where the sites overlap with search in various ways. To do so, I considered three metrics:

• Traffic: How many visitors do they drive?
• Demand/Search Intent: How likely are those visitors to be after something specific?
• Branding: How can these sites influence branding by appearing in search results?

Start Your Charting: The Search Engines
For a baseline, the chart below starts with Google and search engines themselves:

For these charts, the bigger the circle, the more traffic a type of site (search, social bookmarking, etc.) sends. The circles aren’t precise — they just give you a rough idea if something will send lots of traffic or not. Google drives tons.
As for demand, the beauty of search is that people go to search engines in search of something specific. They’re ready to convert, which is why search visitors are so highly valued. On the charts, the more a source sends people with strong “search intent” or “demand,” the more the site will be shown to the left.
Finally, branding. Various studies show search can have branding value. There are few stories of entirely new brands being built from search, but brand lift has been shown in various ways. More important, brands can be hurt by bad reviews that show up in search and helped by positive references. Since every search listing on a search engine has brand potential, search is very high in brand value — and so shown at the top of the chart.
Social News Sites & Search
Social news sites are where people go to share current news topics or information. Digg is the classic example, where stories are voted on by others. Reddit is another example. For internet marketers, we run our own Sphinn social news site. How do these chart against search?

There’s no question that social news sites can drive huge amounts traffic. The Digg Effect is when a site gets so many visitors from Digg that it crashes. So on the chart, a big traffic circle for social news sites.
Social news also has some degree of search intent. That because people do go to social news sites in search of something — news. They just don’t necessarily know exactly what news they want. Rather than exhibiting search behavior (“I know exactly what I want”), they’re in discovery mode (“I want something in general, but I don’t know exactly what that is”).
If you have news content that matches the serendipity of someone’s interest, you may have a good converting person. Having said this, visitors from Digg are notorious for driving down ad conversion rates. They may be interested in your content, but your ads? Not so much.
So for demand and search intent, I put social news sites about midway down the line. How about branding? Well, content at social news sites can rank well in search engines. When I looked recently, I wasn’t finding that this was so much an issue for brand names. For example, a search for apple wasn’t getting me a page from Digg that outranked the official Apple site. But for product “issues,” it’s more noticeable.

Consider this story at Digg:

It appears in the top results at Google for a search on poison cup of noodles:

If someone does that search, curious about what happened, then clicks over to the Digg story, they find brand inspiring comments like this:

Remember when Apple dropped Firewire from new Macbooks? That hit Digg, which a few weeks ago put Digg in the top results on Google for apple firewire (right now it’s on the second page of results):

What do those who click from Google over to Digg discover?

If you’re concerned about your brand, you have to be concerned about social news sites. You’re being discussed on them, and even those who aren’t social news “regulars” may be driven to these discussions via search engines.
Social Bookmarking Sites & Search
Social bookmarking sites are very similar to social news sites with one key distinction. Content doesn’t necessarily have to be new. Plenty of stuff on Delicious or StumbleUpon isn’t new in general — it’s just new to someone who recently discovers it and shares with others. How do social bookmarketing sites plot against search?

In general, the sites can send tons of traffic. Delicious isn’t known for crashing servers like Digg, but it still can generate a noticeable traffic spike. StumbleUpon can produce for a one-time spike and be the gift that keeps on giving, sending lots of people to a site over time. Given this, I feel a big circle for traffic makes sense.
As for search demand, I see that as low. People aren’t even interested in a particular topic — news — but rather what’s being shared in general and may have no particular burning desire for that. There are exceptions. Places like StumbleUpon and Delicoius both have categories that allow people to narrow their browsing into interest area. But overall, I wouldn’t say these sites are heavily “search-like.”
As for branding, I’ve not typically seen these types of sites showing up in results to the degree content from social news sites has (and even they feel like they’ve had declining visibility over the past year). Potentially, data from social bookmarking sites might be used to enhance listings similar to a test that Yahoo ran last year:

Social Networking Sites & Search
Social networking sites are where people are connecting with other people. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn all have a variety of features, but at their core, they allow you to network with friends, family, coworkers and people who want to be your friends, family and coworkers. How search-like are they?

As you can see, I’ve rated their traffic as very low. It’s not that you can’t find lots of people at these sites. Heck, our own Facebook group for Search Engine Land has nearly 3,000 members. Over at our LinkedIn group, we have over 4,000 members. Social networking sites are hives of activity. But that activity seems to stay within the network, rather than flowing outward to external web sites. No one talks about “The Facebook Effect” having crashed their web server. For a search marketer, this may mean adjusting to the fact that you have to maintain a presence within these networks to fully tap into them.
In terms of search demand, I think the social networking sites have very low levels here. There is some sense of discovery that goes on. People share interesting news items or discussions in these places. You can have high search intent when they are used to find someone or learn more about a particular person. But when that water pipe breaks, and you need a plumber? You’re probably not hitting Facebook immediately looking for help.
Let me add that I visited Facebook last month and had a good discussion about how their ads can flow into search intent. As said, people might not immediately turn to a social networking site to find a product or solution. But one story they told me resonated, about how a moving company targeted college freshmen, sophomores and juniors with ads. Down the line, when these people inevitably needed a moving company, the ads apparently had created a strong awareness, and the company had a good success.
It’s something to consider. But for that immediate search demand that a search marketer is after, I don’t think you’ll find it on social networking sites. Instead, adjust your expectations and tactics, so that you can tap into the less immediate desire.
As for branding, again, there can be strong branding opportunities within these networking sites. But externally, I’ve yet to see them register much of an impact in search results. I don’t see Facebook or LinkedIn discussions about products coming up regularly in the searches that I do, nor do I tend to see pages within these sites coming back on searches for brand names. This might change over time, as the networks open more and more of their internal pages up to search engines.
Social Knowledge Sites & Search
Social knowledge sites are places where people are sharing answers. Wikipedia is the classic example, and Yahoo Answers is another good one. Where do they sit compared to search?

In terms of traffic, I give them a medium circle. This comes from having seen and heard marketers over time say that these places drive noticeable amounts of traffic. They don’t crash your servers, but they do show up on the radar screen of traffic drivers.
As for search intent, these places all register high to me. People go to them seeking answers to questions they have. That’s the core of what search provides. If you’re one of the lucky answers, that puts you in front of an audience prequalified to convert.
They also have high branding value. I always get a laugh when talking search to audiences, showing a Wikipedia page in the top results at Google and joking that by law, Google’s required to show Wikipedia in the top ten. I’m far from the only one to make that joke. Do a search, you’ll bang your knees against a Wikipedia entry. Yahoo Answer results often come up, as well, especially for searches that are phrased as questions. In both cases, this means your brand might be discussed at these sites — with searchers flowing over to them — so it’s something to be monitored.
Social Sharing Sites & Search
Social sharing sites, to me, are places where people are — well — sharing stuff! You share video at YouTube, pictures at Flickr and whatever’s on your mind (for better or worse) at Twitter. How do they stack up against search?

Like social knowledge site, I give them a medium circle on the traffic front. They send noticeable amounts of traffic but aren’t crashing servers. Note that this can vary within the services themselves. A YouTube video might get thousands or millions of views from those watching a clip at YouTube itself, rather than embedded on a site.
Search intent is high. People are often actively seeking a photo, a video or something at these places. Even at Twitter, search provides a way to seek out news and buzz.
Branding? These sites do very well in the search engines. Consider a search for jetblue, where currently the company’s official site is listed, along with its Twitter account and its YouTube channel. That gives the company control of 30% of the search results page — more ways for people to find them and potentially pushing out negative comments (though not always — there’s still a news article about a man who is suing over accusations he had to sit in the toilet for 90 minutes on a flight).
Consider also a search for diet coke on Google:

The screenshot above shows how video content shows in the top results. Neither is from Coke itself. Instead, both are about mixing Diet Coke and Mentos, video content from non-Coke sources.
Now, I seem to recall that Coke wasn’t that found of the Diet Coke-Mentos mixing craze. I couldn’t find a reference about that, so I might be wrong. But if so, I’d say get over it. Produce the biggest Diet Coke-Mentos experiment ever, one that is so amazing that the video of it will gain links and jump over into the top listings at Google.
That would give Coke more control over its brand — a pretty good thing when you consider the current search results features for negative articles about Diet Coke and health impacts (makes me glad I took my diet from Diet Coke!). Social sharing sites provide an opportunity for brand owners to tap into search — you’ve got to consider them.

Resource: http://searchengineland.com/

Info for Video Publishing on Your Own Sites

Video Publishing Guidelines for your Own Sites:

We'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

• Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt
  
  • Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:
    
    • Playpage
    • Content and player
    • Thumbnail
    More information about robots.txt.
• Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in
  
  • Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.
• Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience
  
  • Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.
    
    To signal that a video has been removed,
    
    1. Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
    2. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the <video:expiration_date> element) or mRSS feed (<dcterms:valid> tag) submitted to Google.

Building Effective Websites

In the previous article, we discussed how internet can be used as an effective marketing channel. This article will focus on giving you some tips on how to select domain names as well as build effective websites.

Domain Name Selection

Selecting domain name or names could be one of the most critical decisions you will take to market your business on the internet. In order to select one domain name, one needs to know the keywords people are searching to look for your product and services.
Here is a practical tip to select the domain names. Come up with a list of keywords that you think are relevant. Go to google and search for the selected keyword. If the result set contains websites that are of your competitors’, then look for domain names that contain that keyword.
Google AdWords has a tool called Keyword tool that will tell you the number of times a keyword is search in a month from a region. If someone you know has an adword account set up, you can use that to know the keywords being used to look for your product and services.

Keyword tool is available only as part of Google Adwords which is a paid service.
Once you have list of domain names that are relevant for your products and services, you will need to check their availability. This can be checked for you by the company that is going to develop your website or you can check that on your own.  There are websites that will generate domain names when you provide them with your keywords. Here are the sites that do that
http://www.nameboy.com/
http://domainfellow.com/
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-rich-domain-suggestions.php
 Availability of domain can also be checked on http://whois.net. The site will also tell you when the domain name’s registration will expire.
Best strategy is to reserve 3-5 domain names with right keywords and then direct them to your main webpage.

Website Creation

Your website is the centerpiece of your internet marketing strategy. Your website will give surfer a glimpse of the company they are going to deal with.
Few things to consider while making a website.

• Over 70% of internet traffic originates from search engines
• An average visitor to any site spends about 30 seconds to get the information he/she seeks
• If he/she finds right information, you can expect another 3-4 minutes of surfer’s time on the site

Given above information, create websites that market your products and services. Trying to sell in that time is almost impossible. Use website to generate brand awareness.
While building websites, following key criteria should be kept in mind:

• Easy to find on internet: Your website must be search engine friendly. It must contain pages that are created to attract traffic to the site which contain keywords that you think surfers are using to find you. Dynamic websites where most of the information is built using databases, do not lend themselves to be crawled by the search engines hence do not give good results. Websites built completely in flash can not be crawled either. Most crawlers look for keywords in specific “tags” of the website. It is important to use the tags wisely. No information can be crawled from the images. Search engine reads and interprets information in a slight different way than the way you and I do. It is important to keep that in mind while building websites.
• Easy to navigate: Ease of navigation is very important while building a website. Common mistake made by companies is to “expose” internal structure of the organization to the surfers. Remember, the surfer is trying to find information about your product and services. He/she is least interested in your internal departments. Information, that is embedded under 2-3 layers is not going to be found easily. Remember that if you want someone to read something, make it easy for them to find it first. Provide plenty of internal links to the relevant sections and the links should be made very conspicuous.
• Track visitor behavior: Websites built now a days, should allow surfer behavior to be tracked. Google Analytics is a free tool that should be used to track surfer behavior on the website. As far as possible, there should be one page per action for the user. Showing enquiry form and successful submission of the same, should be separate pages. This will allow you to tell the number of times enquiry form was visited and the number of times it was submitted. Low submission rate may tell you that your enquiry form needs to be looked at. You may be asking for information that the surfer does not think is necessary to be provided.
• Disseminate information that can be digested and easily accepted: Many websites make claims that are easy to discard. Do not make your surfer doubt the information you are putting forth. Give claims that the surfer can believe and may invoke his/her curiosity.  Most surfers, now a days, do plenty of research on the internet. Assume that the surfer on your site will be well informed and knows exactly what he/she is looking from you. Providing him/her with your unique selling point will probably make him/her curious to know more about you. On a product page, putting too much information is not a good idea. Keep your product pages short and simple to read. Remember, you are trying to market and not sell. In order to build effective websites, one must know the company’s true Unique Selling Points (USPs). Then turn that USP into easy read for the surfer before putting that on the website.
• Action oriented: Each page of your website should have a link that allows user to take some action if he/she likes the information he/she reads. The action can be submitting an enquiry, registering to the site to get information on a periodic basis, make a phone call, chat with some support person etc. One thing to remember while building enquiry form is to know the information that the surfer would be willing to share. Most companies build enquiry form based on their needs but tend to forget that the enquiry form has to be filled out by the surfer. He/she may not have the information or may be unwilling to share some information. A rule of thumb to follow is to ask for information that you would provide on someone else’s website. Time to fill out an enquiry form should not be more than 1 minute for most businesses.

In the next article, we will discuss Google Analytics tool in detail and how it can be used to get valuable information about your website visitors. Please send your queries on my email address at ajoshi@erpconsultantsindia.com  related to Internet Marketing and I will answer your questions in the next article.

About the author: Ajay Joshi is the president & CEO of Creative Edge India provides IT advisory and Internet Marketing services to companies globally. For more information Log on to http://www.creative-edge.in  Or Email: info@creative-edge.in

How to Customize Google+

1. Google Plus Header Hider (Mozilla) hides the black bar at the top of the screen. Hover over it to bring it back.

2. Google+ Enhancer (Mozilla) adds the number of unread items in Gmail, Reader, and Calendar to the black bar.

3. Google+ Manager (Firefox) and Goo Plus Manager (Chrome) gives you keyboard shortcuts and a table that outlines them all, as well as adding a translation button next to every post.

4. Google Plus Tweaks (Mozilla; also available for Chrome) hides Google+ functions or features that you don't use, expands the page to the full screen width, and lets you toggle comments, preview images on roll-over, and more.

5. Adhik (Safari, Chrome) is somewhat similar to Google Plus Tweaks, streamlining the look and general experience of Google+ with design modifications that focus on the content being shared by people in your Circles. Notice in the image the "linen" background and how posts are more prominently boxed off.

6. Google+ Commander (Mozilla) lets you add keyboard shortcuts for sharing, plus-one-ing, commenting, displaying notifications, and jumping between your homepage, profile, photos, and Circles.

7. Fixed Google+ Notification Bar (Mozilla) freezes the Google+ notification bar for quicker access to notifications and other features on Google Plus and Google Search. Two variations are included: only that freezes the right part of the bar, and one that freezes the entire bar.

8. G+ Friends First (Mozilla) shows your friend stream by default when Google+ first loads.

9. Google Plus Auto Pager (Mozilla) auto-selects the "More" button at the bottom of posts on a profile page, letting you scroll through more updates faster.

10. Nicknames For Google Plus (Mozilla) lets you add nicknames and icons to your contacts in Google Plus, using a Google Doc spreadsheet. (Note that the original spreadsheet adds nicknames for existing users whom you may not know or want to follow. The second link provides details on creating your own spreadsheet.) 

11. Show full size links to Google Plus album photos (Mozilla) gathers links to full-sized photos being previewed on a Google+ album page via a button in the menu bar.

12. Google+Facebook (for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome)—currently in dispute with Facebook and not supported at present--adds a Facebook icon to your Google+ page to the left of the home icon that displays your Facebook feed. This plug-in worked at first until Facebook pulled the plug on it. We can't guarantee that service will resume.

13. Surplus (Chrome)

The toolbar offers plenty of useful functionality, but unlike Mary's little lamb it simply doesn't follow us everywhere we go. Pop the Surplus extension into Google Chrome, and you'll have access to your notifications no matter where you are. Surplus also lets you utilize the Google+ sharing functions even when the bar is MIA.

14. Google+ -> Contrast, Denser, More Features (Chrome) lets you customize scrolling, background, navigation, image size, and placement of other elements on the page.

15. Google+ Ultimate for Google Plus (Chrome) rejiggers a lot of the look and feel of Google+'s UI, such as the making the status bar at the top of the page and the left sidebar float so that they stay in place when you scroll, slimming down the scrollbars, and adjusting the whitespace on the page.

16. Move Your Photos (Chrome) transfers your Facebook photos to Google+ Photos (i.e., Google Picasa).

Source :  http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2388909,00.asp

Google+ About To Hit 10 Million Users

Google’s social network, Google+, might be one of the fastest-growing networks ever, having already reached 10 million users according to one estimate.

Paul Allen, of Ancestry.com — not to be confused with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — has developed an interesting methodology to calculate the number of Google+ members.

He sampled a number of surnames from the U.S. Census Bureau data and compared it to surnames of Google+ users. By comparing surname popularity in the U.S. with the number of users on Google+ with each surname, he can guesstimate the percentage of the U.S. population that signed up for Google+. Finally, he calculated a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate an estimate for the number of Google+ users worldwide.

The result? Google+ has approximately 9.5 million users worldwide, with 2.2 million joining in the past 32 to 34 hours, according to Allen’s estimates.

This is amazing growth even for a giant such as Google: We cannot remember any social network reaching so many members so quickly after its release.

Coming from a third party, the data is obviously unofficial (we asked Google for comment on these numbers, but haven’t heard from them) and should be taken with a grain of salt. If they’re true, though, they indicate that — after so many stumbles — Google might finally be conquering the social networking arena.

Resource: http://mashable.com

Google+ challenges Facebook in social network battle

Online search giant Google has launched a new social networking website in its latest attempt to take on Facebook, which now claims more than 500m users. Google+ allows individuals to share photos, messages and comments but also integrates the company's maps and images into the service. It also aims to help users easily organise contacts within groups. But some analysts say Google has simply reproduced features of Facebook while adding a video chat function. Google, which handles roughly two out of every three internet searches in the US, has taken several stabs at Facebook in recent years. But its previous efforts ended in failure, with both Google Wave and Google Buzz proving unpopular with users.

New functions

The company is now boasting that four features in Google+ could help make the company a permanent player in social networking:

Circles - a functionality that allows individuals to place friends into groups, allowing users to share different forms of content with targeted clusters of friends

Hangouts - live multi-user video conferencing that permits friends to drop in and out of live group conversations

Huddle - group instant messaging

Sparks - a feature that connects individuals on the network to others with common interests.

The current version of Google+ has only been released to a small number of users, but the company has said it soon hopes to make the social network available to the millions of individuals that use its services each day.

Source : BBC