Google have just announced their acquisition of Picnik, a browser based photo editor that can be used to edit photos directly without having to leave your browser. At the moment the majority of people will be using software on their computers to edit photos.

Picnik allows uploads of photos from the majority of social media/photo websites including Picasa, Flikr, and Facebook and being cloud based allows you to edit your photos from any computer with internet access.

At the moment all the search engines are announcing numerous deals with social media sites to integrate results into real time search. Google’s deal with Facebook now means that Facebook content is included in Google’s search results when deemed relevant.

The latest move means that news pages, photos and blog posts that fan pages publish can now potentially show up in search results, helping to drive traffic provide another reason for businesses to consider using social media as part of their online efforts.

While inclusion of facebook content will most likely be integrated slowly, we should see it more and more of it as it gets rolled out.

Google has announced a new feature to be applied to it search results in an attempt to make them more personalised – Stars. Stars are replacing the search wiki feature that was previously available in the search results and allow you to click on the start marker next to any result or map and when relevant these results will show up at the top of the results page in future.

Stars are useful for selecting websites that will be of interest for future reference when looking for relevant topics. You can use them to select your favourite football team or your favourite online community to help bring these up in future search results.

The stars feature will be available for all signed in users, so you will need a Google account to benefit.

Over the past few years there has been a massive increase in the amount of websites that have blogs integrated into them.

For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, take a minute to read our article what is a blog?

Along with social media, blogs have become a way of keeping people updated and letting them interact with your business. Although they can seem like a lot of work, there is often a good return on this investment in time, even for the most unlikely websites.

By keeping an up to date blog you can communicate with customers, give them an opportunity to provide feedback and also help broaden your reach in the search engines. Covered below are some of the main ways in which a blog can help your website.

Crawl rate

A blog will provide your website with a section that is regularly updated with fresh content, which search engines love, and can help increase the overall crawl rate of the main website also.

Long Tail Keywords

More blog posts mean more pages. With more pages comes more of an opportunity to target different keywords in the search results. By writing a blog posts about a specific topic, e.g. a new product release, you are also giving the website an opportunity to rank on terms relevant to the product. This can be a very effective method of driving targeted traffic to the website, think about the amount of people that will look for reviews/specifications of products online before buying them. If you can provide this information for them you are one step closer to converting them into a sale.

Links

Links are an important part of SEO. Having a blog helps to get your website involved in the online community focused around your product or service. If you can get referenced on other relevant and authoritative websites, this will usually mean a link to your website or page.

Customer Interaction

If you provide relevant and regularly updated content, not only do the search engines love it, but you will attract people who have an interest in your product or service. Although these people may not be direct customers, the influence they can have on your business both online and offline can be huge. By also offering customers the opportunity to interact with you via the comments on the blog you can gain a lot of valuable information about your product or service.

It may still seem like it is a lot of effort to integrate and maintain a blog on your website, but if traffic helps your business grow it’s definitely worth it. Setting up a blog shouldn’t be too difficult depending on what you want to do, you can either integrate a blog into your website like ours, or you can use a free or paid blog hosting service. There are pros and cons to each depending on how you are going to best use the service.