One of my favorite things about Google Maps for mobile is finding businesses on the go. Today we launched a server-side change that makes it easier to get directions to businesses. You can now get directions to restaurants, stores, and other points of interest by entering their names in the start or end point. Consider this example:

Until today, if you tried to get directions and entered a business name, “starbucks” for example, as the end or start point, Google Maps for mobile did not understand that you meant Starbucks the business. Rather, Google Maps for mobile would search for an address with “starbucks” in it.

Google Maps for mobile now recognizes when your end or start point is a business and not an address. Try setting “starbucks” or “mcdonald’s” as an end point when getting directions, and you’ll quickly see what we mean.

If you’ve already got Google Maps on your BlackBerry, Nokia S60, T-Mobile G1, iPhone, or other smartphone, then you don’t have to download anything to start using this new feature. This is because today’s launch was made on our servers, not the Google Maps for mobile client.

But if you don’t already have Google Maps for mobile, visit google.com/gmm on your phone to download it today.

Posted by Constantinos Michael, Software Engineer

We’re happy to let you know that you don’t need divine forces to play a role in the findability of your site. Nope — you can help make sure that your site turns up just when it should by taking advantage of these tips from our Search Quality Team.

1. Not sure if all your pages are being seen by Google? Search for your site’s address after the command “site”, like [site:example.com]. When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles. Include information that matches the topic of a particular page. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
2. If you upload new pages or topics faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Google Sitemap and include a refresh rate.
3. Label your images appropriately. Users searching in Google Image Search will more easily find the image on your site. Don’t miss out on potential traffic because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so you should take advantage of it.
4. Manage your SiteLinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as SiteLinks, so remember you can remove any that you don’t think users will find useful.
5. Check for errors and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.
6. Serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you’ve retired a page permanently, serve a 404. If you’ve simply relocated it, serve a 301. The more we know about your old pages, the faster we will find the next best page on your site for a given query. 
7. Users and search engines like organic content. Make some of your own!
8. Read our recently released SEO Starter Guide.
9. Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.
10. Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
11. Get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.
12. Find answers to your questions in our Webmaster Help Center, or ask your questions in the Webmaster Help Group. 

Whether it be the perfect gift, the perfect site, or the perfect cup of cocoa on a cold winter’s night, we hope all your searches are fruitful this holiday season.

Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

We recommend 3 simple methods captured in the videos below. You can find these videos and more on the new Google Analytics Youtube Channel.

1. Use Google Analytics to track your e-commerce activity. As an e-commerce site, you likely want to know who is visiting your site and the goods they are purchasing. By enabling E-commerce tracking on your site, Google Analytics will provide vital metrics including overall revenue, revenue per product, average transaction amount, and more

2. Identify your high spenders to better target your website promotions and ad spend. With additional information on ROI for keywords and spending trends, you can focus your efforts on the traffic you care about the most.

3. Link your AdWords and Analytics accounts to track ROI, Revenue per Click, campaign and keywords performance. Added benefits include drilling down to the ad campaign, ad group, and keyword levels for goals conversions and e-commerce transactions.

Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

We have two developments that we would like to share with you: the expansion of our HD player and a test of three new landing pages designed to help you find the news, music and movies on YouTube that matter most to you.

HD on YouTube

Starting today, if you click the “watch in HD” option below any HD-enabled video, the video will automatically play in widescreen – so you can find out where the hell Matt is in glorious HD, if you so wish. As part of this launch, we have created an HD Videos area where you can browse videos uploaded in the HD format. In anticipation of your questions – including how to encode your videos to take advantage of this new feature and how to avoid the dreaded “windowboxing” – we have prepared an FAQ in the Help Center. Hopefully you’ll find any technical information you need there, but feel free to post follow-up questions to the YouTube Community Help Forums.

New Video Landing Pages

News, music and movies are huge categories on YouTube and as a result it can sometimes be tough to find exactly what you’re hoping to watch. In a bid to smooth your path to the perfect video, we are testing three new video landing pages: youtube.com/news, youtube.com/music, andyoutube.com/movies. The news page will be populated with breaking stories from around the world as well as news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos alongside playlists dedicated to different genres; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today. We’ll keep a close eye on how these pages perform with a view to rolling them out in other categories.

With these developments we are hoping to improve your viewing experience and make it easier to find the content you want to watch. Leave a comment and let us know what you think…

Happy holidays and, as always, have fun watching!
The YouTube Team

It seems there are two types of people today, those who hate Twitter and those that freak out when Twitter is down. I am now the later. My first go around at twitter failed, I felt stupid writing my 140 word or less tweet and I always tried my hardest to be profound and say something that would wow somebody. It became more difficult than it was worth, so I quit.
Everybody kept blogging about Twitter and facebook tried to buy them, so I figured I would give it another try.

First, I started reading peoples Tweets and found out people were just sharing things like they were speaking to a friend or family member. The information was all over the map depending who you were following. So this took the pressure off and I started tweeting the same way I saw other people do. I started following people who are interesting and re-followed the same type of people.

Second, I started reading the information that people posted in their Tweets. Then I started sharing information that I found interesting in my Tweets. I am being social.

So my suggestion to you is to give Twitter the collage try and start sharing and building you sizable network of people and drop in some news worthy information about your business every once in a while.

Here is our score.

You can follow us at http://twitter.com/seotoknow

Or you can follow how many followers you have.

Twitter counter.com

I’m sure we will continue to see many more tool and widget that are based of Twitter.

Google Analytics is full of insights that can benefit your AdWords account, and your business. To help you make the most of this information, we’ve started an introductory video series called“Google Analytics in 60 Seconds.” The first two videos explain two easy ways to refine your targeting. You can find them below and as part of the Google Analytics Conversion Universityplaylist.

Location, Location, Location
Now, you no longer are flying blind when you target your campaign by location in AdWords. Use the Map Overlay report and location data within Analytics to see, geographically, where your visitors are coming from – or where they aren’t coming from. You can then use this information to refine your AdWords marketing with location-targeted campaigns to build your business.

Note: You can also use the recently launched Geographic Performance report within AdWords to see similar information, but it currently does not have a visual component nor includes some of the metrics available in Analytics, such as time on site and bounce rate.


Improve Your Placement Targeting
The Google content network is the largest contextual advertising network in the world, comprised of high-quality websites, news pages, and blogs that partner with Google to display targeted AdWords ads. And within AdWords, you can hand-pick which sites you’d like your ads to run on by creating aplacement-targeted campaign. But how do you know which sites to pick? If you knew which sites were already sending you high value traffic, why not run your ads on these sites? This video will show you how to use Google Analytics to identify the best sites by using the Referring Sites report.

More to come!
There are a number of easy and effective ways to use Google Analytics with AdWords – whether you want to identify the best keywords, save money on bidding, expand your business or refine your campaigns – and we’ll post more of these videos soon!

Posted by Stephanie Hsu, Google Analytics Team

Here is a good video that explains how it benefits a user.

These button allow you users of your site to post your information on sites like Myspace and Facebook. This is becoming so popular so fast that I’m sure you see the down side of not adding this benefit if your competition is using it.

This can benefit the site owner by if you are lucky enough to be a site that is getting bookmarked by these users. We like to use code from a site from a site called addthis.com.

There is a simple create an account process, then it allows you to choose from three styles of button with or without a drop down option. I personally like the drop down button. Then you choose if the button is going on a Blog or a website. If you have a wordpress blog, use their plugin like you will see on this site.

You will then see the generated code you can copy into your site.

Here is an example of your button.

If your site is template driven, try to modify your template so the button shows up on every page.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.