More than 14 million devices are already running Microsoft’s Windows 10 after its global launch on Wednesday, but it’s unclear how many of their users read the company’s Privacy Policy and Service Agreement before downloading. Tucked away in the 45 pages’ worth of terms and conditions (effective August 1) is a substantial power grab: The company is collecting data on much of what you do while using its new software. From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information—name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics —but it also digs a bit deeper. Microsoft is collecting ... - your words and phrases - much like a keylogger . - Bing search queries and conversations with the new digital personal assistant Cortana - contents of private communications such as email - websites and apps visited (including features accessed and length of time used) Ummm, Microsoft is taking on the qualities of G...

Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site. Make sure that other sites link to yours Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Keep in mind that our al...

It is easy to have people find your product or service in Google by searching with multiple key phrases. Here is a video that illustrates that accomplishment.     For more information - click here .

Google announced back in November that it would begin marking mobile-friendly sites with a mobile “badge,” and subsequently revealed that it would revise its algorithm to give more weight to mobile-friendly sites for search queries coming from mobile devices.  Google is reporting that effective April 21, 2015 they will be expanding their use of mobile friendliness as a ranking signal . This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices. Mobile user stats from Google …. 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble with. 40% said they would visit a competitor’s mobile site instead. 55% would give up caffeine to keep their phone. Q. What makes a good mobile design for a web site or blog? A. Readable and useable content where zooming and left/right swiping is no...

Google is saying “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices,” from their update being launched in April, 2015. While Google has announced this search engine software update early; it hasn’t exactly been spilling the beans with all the details. The big takeaway from this early notice about the launch date is that if your site is not mobile-friendly, get to work now on it. If 50% of your traffic from Google comes from mobile devices, it sounds like if you are not mobile-friendly that virtually all of that traffic from mobile is at huge risk. Preparing for the Update Google has been prepping webmasters understand mobile computing. Thanks to the announcement of the Mobile Search update, many webmasters now have a compelling reason to take action. If you find yourself scrambling to be mobile-friendly and can’t decide between a dedicated mobile or responsive design, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons o...

Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in the very beginning of Google. He is currently the head of the Google webspam team.

Well, I am doing my best to help you get your arms and mind around the fact that social media, SEO, and SEM can help you grow your business. I have a  "web system" that I've  developed and used with clients very successfully .   My "web system" has a static piece, a dynamic piece, and integrates social media.   Below are the seven key statistics. The source of the information with a link is provided.   1. There are networks of connectivity in the internet. "There are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth.   AllTwitter "     2. The best way to create a buzz about your products and services is using a blog or social network. " 80% of active internet users visit social networks and blogs.   AllTwitter "   3. Google is the new yellow pages. You better make sure you are easily locatable there. "61% of all online shoppers research products in search engines before making a purchase.   H...

As a small business owner, you have to know how to get the most for your marketing efforts . The battle between Google and Facebook (FB) to be King/Queen of the pile will be interesting to watch over the coming years. #1 Google+ rivals FB since Google already has millions (billions?) of gmail users that can easily activate their Google+ accounts.  It is free to list your business with Google and create a Google+ account with it. #2 Blogger (blogger.com) is a free blog service that is owned by Google. And, yes, all those blog posts are automatically distributed to Google+ users. FB posts stay in FB and get little, if any, attention in Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results. #3 Google is the number one search engine used around the globe. Do you think their search results favor Google+ accounts and posts made with Blogger? Proof is Here.... The other day I logged into my gmail account and searched, in the Google search engine, for a local business - using a ke...

Facebook (FB) is expanding it's perception beyond a social network. What this means is pretty important if you are a small business owner wanting to sell more products. You already know that goofy "Thumbs Up" icon where everyone can bless you or hate you courtesy of FB. Imagine a world where you can sell your products online to anyone in FB. That means accepting payments online through FB - what a concept. That is in motion now as FB ramps up its' FbStart program, literally giving selected  businesses $30-60K to develop FB apps. Some say this eliminates the need for a web site or blog. Really?  Sure, FB has some advantages to doing networking. It's difficult to measure the clients it generates for business pages listed there. I see it more as a free "Angie's List."  I have never met a new client using FB, and only know of one business who has. But, FB is great as a search engine because it's a global repository of information ...

Google and Yahoo have announced big changes that will impact your small business web site. Several weeks ago Google announced the latest version of its' Panda Update — a filter designed to penalize “thin” or poor content from ranking well — has been released. If you see some change, good or bad, in your web traffic or your search engine rankings you know where it came from.  What Google is working towards, based on user (and webmaster!) feedback, is to  identify low-quality web page content more precisely . With that accomplished, there will be a greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites in search engine results. Meanwhile, Yahoo announced that it is closing the Yahoo directory after 20 years of operation. Sure, they will have the Yahoo search engine available but no longer will they be maintaining their own directory of web sites and blogs. Over the years I have been comparing the search...

From the Empire State Building to the Blue Mosque, plenty of people take photographs of iconic architecture when on holiday. And now Google Maps’ Panoramio ‘heat map’ of the world allows people to see the most photographed travel destinations. Three of the five most photographed places on the planet are in the EU, according to the popular service, which lets people tag photos of landmarks and scenery and upload them to Google maps. According to the website’s heat map, New York City is the most photographed place in the world, or at least more images of New York landmarks and scenes have been uploaded via Panoramio than any other city. Rome, Barcelona, Paris and Istanbul make up the rest of the top five most photographed destinations, suggesting the service is more popular in some areas of the world than others. The map shows the most popular photographic locations in yellow, before fading to orange, pink and then purple for slightly less photographed places, making it easy t...

Tracking people online and showing personalised adverts is already a controversial topic and now Google is set to ruffle feathers further by tracking people in the real world too. According to reports from tech website Digiday, the search giant is testing a program that would follow users around the high street to see which shops they visit. Each time a user enters a store of business, Google would be able check to see if that user looked at adverts for that company online beforehand to check the ad's conversion rate. Recent reports found Google makes around $100 million a day by selling Google Ads to businesses online. It tracks conversion rates online when either a user clicks directly on an advert, or the user visits the website featured in an advert during its browsing session. Google can already access certain information about a user through its own apps, such as the mobile Chrome browser, Google Maps, Gmail and Google+. If users have ‘Location services’ activated and then ...

Google rules the West but Japan still prefers Yahoo: Map reveals how different internet giants dominate countries across the globe Google has become so much a part of everyday life many people now use the brand name as a verb for searching, but a new map highlights exactly how far and wide the site spreads across the globe.   The map, created by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, used data from millions of people's browsing history worldwide and shows Google as the most popular site, in 62 countries.  Facebook was the second most visited site globally, in 50 countries, while the third place site - China's  Baidu search engine, was popular in just two countries. To work out the number of visitors, Dr Mark Graham and Stefano De Sabbata from the institute combined the number of estimated average daily unique visitors, with the estimated number of page views for that site from users in a particular country, for a particular month.  The data show...

Well, I am doing my best to help you get your arms and mind around the fact that social media, SEO - search engine optimization, and SEM - search engine marketing -  can help you grow your business. I have the " web marketing system " I have used over and over again with clients and it works. Wanna know why? Because people, at home and at work, around the world use the internet and social media. If you plug into those streams, doing it correctly, you will increase your sphere of influence. I guarantee that to my clients. Below are my statements, the statistics are in quotation marks. I didn't make up these stats either, they come from the sources where links are provided. 1. There is a lota connectivity to the internet. "There are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth.  AllTwitter " 2. The best way to create a buzz about your products and services is using a blog or social network. " 80% of active internet users ...

More news today about tech giants scrambling to reinvent business models to stay in business. Geez, look at Facebook at Google. Both lost billions of company value in stock drops because they are not keeping up with the pace of mobile computing.  Here is a link to one article . All this means to you is a wake up call. If your web site isn’t friendly to mobile devices, you are literally driving away traffic from your pages - shunning potential buyers of your products and services. Here is a link, click here , to understand the pros and cons of going mobile. This mobile computing trend is reshaping the market in technology, according ot the New York Times article . Demand for Intel chips inside computers — which are much more profitable than those inside smart phones — is plummeting.  At Microsoft, sales of software for PCs are sharply declining.  At Google, the price that advertisers pay when people click on ads has fallen for a year. This is partly becau...