Branding 101 says to establish your company brand and then be consistent. Place your brand everywhere and under no circumstances should you change that brand. Use specific PMS colors to print on slick stock and different PMS shades on uncoated stock. The RGB values and hex codes are specified. Maintain a clearance distance of x space around the logo. Never change the size relationship between the mark and the text. And never, ever, under any circumstances, or risk your own personal safety, alter the logo. It’s sacred!

Then along comes Google who proceeds to turn this Branding 101 rule on its head. Visitors to google.com sometimes see a creative interpretation of the Google logo, based on the date. Like today’s logo celebrating the birth of H. G. Wells. A mouse over explains the topic and a click on the logo takes you to a Google search of that topic.

New designs may be related to a holiday like New Year’s or St. Patrick’s Day. It may be an event like the Olympics. It may even be to celebrate the birth of a famous author, or artist, or inventor. Do any of these look familiar?

Google will customize its holiday logos specifically for certain countries, only displaying in that country. Most Americans have never seen these logos.

Why would Google practice such blatant blasphemy of it’s company brand? Two reasons come to mind. First, it gives people something to talk about on the web…builds some Google buzz. Secondly, it gives people a reason to go to the Google search page occasionally…to see the creative logo. Otherwise, with the integration of search into web browsers and websites, there in not much of a reason to ever visit google.com! I also think Google does it because it’s fun and it supports their company culture and brand of being different and “going outside the lines.” It’s a brilliant example of the old adage, “There’s an exception to every rule.”

Google archives all of the logos on its website so don’t worry if you missed the recent “crop circles” logo or the “unexplained phenomenon” logo that you heard all the buzz about.  You’ll find all of them dating back to the very beginning of Google. What is “Burning Man Festival” anyway?

Oh, and if you find one that you really like and wish was your default Google logo, there is a new greasemonkey script for Firefox that will enable you to pick your favorite Google logo to display by default.

To see all of Google’s holiday logos, visit the company’s website, but remember to never, ever, ever alter your company brand. Unless you are Google or you have a strategic reason for doing so.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) all started with websites. Then came blogs, followed by press releases, maps, and profiles. And before we knew it, SEO was about more than just having a company website. With the recent explosion of community-driven sites like Youtube, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn to name a few, more and more companies and brands have jumped into social media to connect with their customers AND to increase their website traffic.

Word comes from a post on the Google Help Forum for Google Docs last week that in about two weeks there will be yet another “medium” added to the search index: Google Docs. All Google Docs that are published publicly to the web and that are linked to from a website that is crawled by the search engines will also be crawled by the search engines.

This will provide yet another resource to gain organic search engine rankings. And a non-technical one at that! What we don’t know is how the results will be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). Will they be intermingled with all of the other web pages in the greater index? My suspicion is that the Google Docs will be treated as a group of results similar to the way Google handles maps, news, videos, and profiles on page one. But we’ll just have to wait until Google implements this change to know for sure.

In the meantime, get your Google Docs account set up if you haven’t already. Get your word documents optimized, uploaded to Google Docs, published to the web, and linked to on a website. I see a lot of opportunities, including:

• press releases
• company overview
• executive bios
• white papers
• product sheets
• and more!

If you’re already using Google Docs and have documents that you don’t want indexed, be sure to change the settings on those documents:

• Go to the ‘Share tab’
• For documents and spreadsheets, choose ‘Publish as web page’. For presentations choose ‘Publish/embed’
• Click on the button that says ‘Stop publishing’

As Halloween approaches, be on the lookout for spiders crawling your Google Docs. It’s no trick; it’s an SEO treat!

Posted via email from Katy Barrilleaux | Optimized

Google has a beta application called Google Image Labeler which it describes as “a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.”

Sounds kind of boring, but leave it to Google to turn image labeling into an online game.
Here’s how it works

You are matched up with another online user and both of you are shown an image. You each start adding labels to the image until you both suggest the same label. To add to the challenge, you can’t see the labels your partner is adding. So you just keep adding labels until the game tells you that you matched — or you and your partner may click a “pass” button to move to the next image.

Once a match is made, a new image is presented to both of you and the process begins again. And just to make it really exciting, there is a time clock. You and your partner are given two minutes to label as many images as possible. And of course, it wouldn’t be a game without scoring. So there are points rewarded for successful matches.

After the clock has expired, you are shown a page containing your overall score, thumbnails of the images you saw, along with identifying information:

• image size
• image URL
• whether it was a pass or a match (with matched word)
• your partner’s labels

A little warning

Some of the images presented are a bit risque. However, Google does not believe you’ll come across inappropriate images. In the Image Labeler FAQ Google states, “While there’s no guarantee, it’s unlikely that you’ll see mature content because all images are filtered under image search’s Strict Safe Search setting.” Hmm, well I saw a few that apparently snuck past the filter.

Also, since you are playing with an unknown partner, your success – or failure as the case may be – depends in part on the other person. On one occasion, I had a partner who I couldn’t match with at all, and when the game was over and I reviewed his or her image labels, they were not related to the images at all and were rather silly like “poop,” for example.

You should give Google’s Image Labeler a try, but I’ll warn you , it is a little addictive.

You’re probably familiar with Google’s AdSense Contextual ad network that displays ads on websites based on the context of the content on the page. Now we are introduced to yet another type of ad network. Google has launched in beta what they call “Ad Preferences.”

Ad Preferences displays ads to the user based on the user’s interests as edited by the user and as interpreted by the user’s search history, websites visited, etc. In Google’s words:

As you browse certain Google services and websites that have partnered with us using our AdSense program, Google stores a cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages you visit (this cookie appears as .doubleclick.net in your browser). Based on this information, Google associates your browser with relevant interest categories and uses these categories to show interest-based ads on participating websites.

Google has also published this video to explain Ad Preferences.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUkm_gKgdQc&w=320&h=240]

Before you become alarmed with concerns of online privacy, know that Google does enable you to opt-out of the tracking and it claims they do not capture any personal data. But you should probably look into it more yourself. Here is where you can read more about how Google’s Interest Ads work and also the FAQ’s. Here is where you may opt out of Google Ad Preferences on your computer or set your preferences.

Superbowl XLIII is over. NBC, advertisers and their agencies are surely pleased that the victor was not determined until the last play of the game. Congratulations go to the Pittsburgh Steelers for a hard-fought victory and the Arizona Cardinals for providing one of the more entertaining Superbowl games in years.

Even before the confetti flew to signal the end of the game, the internet was all a-twitter with people casting their votes for their favorite Superbowl Ads. Here are the top 5 Superbowl Ads as determined by search volume on Google, reported by Google Trends:

1. Jack in the Box – Hang in there Jack
2. Denny’s – Free Grand Slam
3. Vizio
4. Go Daddy
5. Hulu

This list definitely does not match my top five Superbowl ads. These may not have been your favorite ads either, but advertising really isn’t a popularity contest or a beauty pageant. The true measures of a successful ad are that it is memorable and it moves the viewer to action. In the absence of sales figures and primary research, Google search engine queries are a pretty good barometer.

When you pitch a new business prospect, you get to know a little about the company first. What business are they in? Who are their customers? Who are their competitors? How big is the company? And a million other things. You cater your pitch to appeal specifically to the prospect. The more you know in advance, the higher your odds of winning the account.

Well, it’s the same thing with search engine optimization (SEO). If you want to understand SEO, you first need to gain an understanding of how search engines work. And with a tight grip on 60+% of the search market, that means Google! Here’s a simplistic look at how Google works, from the 50,000 foot level.

Google has bots or spiders ─ programs it calls “Googlebots” ─ that “crawl” billions of web pages everyday. The Googlebots analyze the pages to determine what each page is about (keywords to match to your query) and the relevance of each page (incoming links from other pages that help determine the importance of the page). All this information is stored to create Google’s “index.” The index is constantly being updated to add new pages as well as to record changes to existing pages in the index.

When you place a keyword into a Google search box, Google checks its index to determine which pages are most relevant to the keyword and presents (or “serves”) a snippet of those pages in order of Google’s proprietary and highly complex ranking algorithm.

Here’s an illustration from Google that shows the search query process, which by the way, is usually executed in less than a half a second:

"Life of a Google Query" by Google

Think of SEO as a process of employing various techniques to:

1) ensure that the pages of a website are easily and thoroughly crawled and indexed by Google
2) maximize the relevancy of the web pages through quality links and other Google-defined factors
3) closely match the content on web pages with targeted keywords

For a little more explanation of crawling, indexing and serving, check out what Google has to say on the subject. Soon you’ll be ready to make your pitch to Google.

Natural listings, organic results, sponsored ads, SERPs — these are just a few of the terms used to describe elements of a Google results page. But do you know what each one means? If they’re Greek to you, then keep on reading.

When you conduct a search query on Google, the results page presented — also known as a search engine results page or SERP — usually contains links that are free as well as links that are purchased. Free listings are referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. They represent the majority of the results on a SERP and are found along the left side of the page. See the green box in Figure 1 below.

Purchased links are called “Sponsored Links,” but may also be referred to as “pay-per-click ads (PPC),”  “Google AdWords” or “paid ads.” Sponsored links are found along the right side of the page, and may also be the top three links on the left side of the SERP. See the pink boxes in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 -- Organic results vs. Paid results

As suggested by the name, Sponsored Links are paid ad placements based on the purchase of clicks for specific search query keywords. Organic results on the other hand, are completely controlled by Google. Google bots crawl millions of web pages every day, constantly analyzing the context of pages and adding them to its index. Using Google’s proprietary and incredibly secret algorithm, it serves up organic results to your query, making every attempt to provide the highest quality web pages matching the keywords.

There is a lot more that may be said about how PPC and organic listings happen, but we’ll leave those for other posts. For now, if you would like a detailed explanation of all of the elements on a Google SERP, visit Google’s Web Help page (link).