SEO or search engine optimisation has for a long time been tarnished with a negative undertone. As with all industries there are good and bad search engine optimisation professional, some following every rule by the book and others manipulating and using black hat techniques to gain a search engine ranking advantage. Well implemented SEO not only improves a sites search engine visibility but also improves usability and is focused on return on investment and natural organic growth.

Matt Cutts, a spokes person for Google, has publicly acknowledged the worth of well implemented SEO and finally has acknowledged that SEO is not spam. Below is the original video from Matt Cutts, it would be great to get your feedback on this, it’s great to finally have an acknowledgement of the worth of SEO.

By creative seo

Google have announced that as from September 14^th 2010, trademark keywords and search terms will be allowed to be used within Adwords content and copy. In May 2009, Google adopted this policy in the US but many believed the complex UK legal system would prevent this from happening in the UK.

Since September 2009 Google have been beta testing a new version of their highly utilised keyword tool, we knew the day would come when Google would finally retire and phase out the original tool. As an announcement on the Google Adwords Blog confirmed, the original Google keyword tool will be phased out by the end of the month.

Google confirmed the tool will be removed by the 1^st September 2010, old links will be redirected to the new keyword tool and the beta label will be removed from the new version.

So if you want to remember the fun times you had researching keywords, why not revisit the old Google keyword tool one final time, before it is escorted to the Google retirement home…

Article by  CreativeSEO

Google have released a list of 5 key privacy principles which they use on a day to day basis, the list has been made public for the first time to allow Google users to understand how Google treats privacy from a product perspective.

“Like our design and software guidelines, these privacy principles are designed to guide the decisions we make when we create new technologies. They are one of the key reasons our engineers have worked on new privacy-enhancing initiatives and features” Google Official Blog.

The 5 privacy principles are as follows:

1) Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2) Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3) Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4) Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5) Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

You can find out more at the Google Privacy Center or click on the video below.



Article by Creative SEO

Google Social Search was launched last year as part of Google Labs, the product has been in testing and is due to be launched in the next few days, so what exactly does it do?

Google Social Search is an innovative concept which allows users to search their own personal social networks, blog posts and other social content for specific information. The possibilities are endless you could look within your own social network to find out firstly who is an expert on a specific topic and secondly who is talking about or has similar interests or opinions. Really this is just the very beginning; the possibilities for research are endless allowing users to network there direct contacts based on keyword search queries.

To get the full benefit of Google Social Search you will need a Google account and you’ll have to be signed in. Within your Google account you’ll need to configure your profile to include all of your social networks etc. Google have also added the service to Google Image search so you can find images based on a keyword search exclusively from your social circle.

“While we’ve been enjoying Social Search (and having babies), we’ve been hard at work on new features. For example, we’ve added social to Google Images. Now when you’re doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called “Results from your social circle” Google Blog.

We’ll update the post to let you know when the service has gone live but in the mean time, here’s a great video, by Google, which gives an overview of what lies ahead.

Article by Creative SEO