SearchInfluence

Black Friday: 5 Apps That Make Bargain Shopping Easier — Mashable

The holidays are upon us, and many businesses local and nationwide are gearing up for the Black Friday sales frenzy. Be a savvy shopper and utilize these handy applications in order to find the best deals, compare prices, check to see where your desired item is on sale in your area and more!

How Groundbreaking Thinkers Spread Their Ideas — Inc.com

As an LSU alumnus, I'm proud to say I saw Tim Tebowing while crying, after a loss in Tiger Stadium.

According to Tebowing.com, tebowing is a verb, defined “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different.” For a little background on the subject, Tim Tebow is a NFL quarterback who currently starts for the Denver Broncos. He’s known to be very religious, one of the greatest college football players of all time, and so far, not a very great NFL quarterback. For these reasons he has been a focal point of sports media since he joined the NFL. Since Tebow became an NFL starter the last few weeks, he has been seen praying frequently before and after games, which has given way to Tebowing — basically the same thing as planking, or taking pictures of yourself performing a specific, silly pose and posting it online.

I send and receive a lot of emails every day on my two constantly active Gmail accounts.

And if you include the number of individual chats I have going at any given minute, that “a lot” expands exponentially.

That’s why I was hesitant about switching to Google’s new Gmail layout when I first noticed the little blue box in the lower right hand corner of my inbox last week.

Maybe I’ve been burned one time too many by Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing ADD-tinged quest to change every last pixel of Facebook in a kaleidoscopic onslaught of updates, but I really, really didn’t want to change my Gmail.

Methods for Evaluating Freshness — Justin Briggs

After Google’s big “Freshness update” was announced yesterday, the SEO world has been in quite a tizzy. But for those of us who aren’t technically-minded, what does this update actually entail? Justin Briggs, an SEO expert and Big Fish Games marketing champion, gives us this exhaustive set of data analyses to come up with a comprehensive guide to link freshness, including handy data on how to think critically about your site’s “Freshrank.”

How to Properly Use Facebook’s Advertising Features — ProNet Advertising

If you work in interactive marketing, you’re are probably familiar with comScore and its monthly estimate of the United States search market share that consistently looks like the following graph, reflecting data collected September 2011. It’s safe to assume that these numbers apply to the websites that you promote as well, right? Not really.

For the past few years, it seems like every dataset that I’ve seen contradicts these market share reports, so I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I can find.

Hot on the heels of big redesigns to a whole suite of Google services, including Docs, Reader and Gmail, searchers will soon see shakeups in the way local listings are displayed on their results pages. Instead of the familiar red pin of Google Maps, searchers looking for businesses matching a given term such as breast augmentation Maryland will now be greeted with a row of grey icons which can be expanded with a click to show a highlighted popout with site preview, map and reviews:

Google Places results page when no selection is highlighted.

Results page with mini-Place page expanded.

StumbleUpon: Where Should You Share? [Infographic] — Social Times

StumbleUpon is one of the most powerful sharing vector services out there, allowing users to “stumble” to your page based on their set of stated interests. This Social Times infographic provides some valuable data on how sharing your content via stumbling can work for you, from hard numbers on how much social media traffic the service actually drives to comparisons of the “half-life” of links distributed via different venues (Twitter, Facebook, et cetera).

Microsoft Wants You to Search the Web Like Miley Cyrus — Search Engine Watch

7 Technical SEO Wins for Web Developers — distilled

Working with outside web developers is an integral part of SEO, but some of us less technically-minded folk may be confused as to where to start. Technical SEO, defined by Paddy Moogan of distilled as “elements of a page that the user can’t see without looking at the source code,” can be a tricky field to master. In this article, Moogan elucidates some of the most important things to know about this aspect of optimization, including how to keep an eye on your site speed and get a firm grasp on crawler access.

Google has a crackerjack team of people helping to make their products bigger and better all the time, or at least, that’s the impression we get from them. I just might have caught an embarrassing typo in Google Docs last week, but otherwise, they seem to be pretty much on the ball. That is, unless you visit their Places page, which apparently is hot to show you photos of women’s bare breasts and much more — if the place you’re looking for happens to be a cosmetic surgeon’s office.

Search Optimization and 404 Errors — SEOChat

If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ve probably seen a colorful or visually engaging 404 page that pops up when you’ve reached an invalid page on a website. What you may not know, though, is that these pages have SEO potential and should be optimized for ease of use by your viewers. Check out this article to find out the four most important elements of a user-friendly 404 page, along with a bevy of other tips.

How to Use 3 New Facebook Features for Better Social Media Marketing — CopyBlogger