Benefits of Video Ads

Powerful Reasons To Choose Video Marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to bring more traffic to a website landing page. It is an online model in which advertisers display their ads for products or services to entice people searching for those particular things online to click on their advertisement. [caption id="attachment_5507" align="alignright" width="300"] mohamed_hassan / Pixabay[/caption] With Adwords, each time someone actually clicks on their ad, the advertiser pays a certain amount based on an Ad Auction. This is an automated process that Google and the other major search engines use to determine the relevance and validity of advertisements that appear on their search engine results pages (SERPs). If a search query fits the keywords in your ad, a complex algorithm based on Ad Auction calculates what results to display. Because the platform is quite complicated, most business owners don't have the time to master Adwords, so they hire an expert that already knows how to best use their marketing dollars, but this comes at a price on top of the cost of the ad campaign.

Advice for PPC Marketing

If you choose to dedicate your time to learning PPC, there are some good resources online such as this article from Entrepreneur magazine, which outlines the 5 things you should never do when setting up an Adwords advertisement:

1. Sending visitors to your home page. Say you're running a PPC ad for the keyword "Nikon D90 digital camera" -- a product you sell on your website. You set up the ad to run whenever this keyword is searched for on your chosen engine, and you use a URL that redirects readers who click on your ad to your site's home page. Now, this user must painstakingly click through your website's navigation to find this exact camera model -- if he or she even bothers to stick around. In this case, you took an engaged, targeted visitor and forced him or her to work for the information you promised. A better approach would have been a link to the camera's product page, avoiding any frustration and bringing your visitors one step closer to completing their purchase. Whenever possible, drive PPC visitors to targeted landing pages. If you don't have a product-specific landing page to refer visitors to, create custom landing pages that provide the exact information the reader is looking for. [caption id="attachment_5508" align="alignright" width="300"] geralt / Pixabay[/caption] 2. Sending visitors to your contact page. Some businesses send PPC visitors directly to their website's contact page to force email newsletter opt-ins or lead generation form submissions. This can not only frustrate visitors and hurt the chances of making a sale, but it also can run afoul of PPC platform guidelines. If you're advertising through Google AdWords, for example, be aware that requiring visitors to fill out contact forms in exchange for something free goes against the search giant's guidelines. 3. Failing to split-test your ad text. To produce the most effective results, avoid running PPC ads without testing them first. You can split-test your ads by creating multiple versions of the ad's text for each of your PPC ad groups. That way, you can determine which specific wording leads to the most click throughs and on-site conversions. Nearly all PPC engines allow you to split-test, but ensure that your ad variations will be displayed at random so they generate meaningful data. Some PPC platforms use predictive algorithms to display the ad variation that's most likely to be successful, but this diminishes the integrity of your split-test data. You can find instructions on how to ensure that your ad versions are displayed randomly in your PPC engine's help section. 4. Relying entirely on 'broad match' keyword ads. Broad match keyword ads are displayed whenever all or part of your target keyword phrase is searched for, offering the greatest traffic potential. But you may be sacrificing relevance for reach. For example, suppose you're a law firm targeting the phrase "divorce attorney" with a broad match ad. Your ad should appear on the results page for the search query "divorce attorney," but it could also show up for the phrases "reasons for divorce," "dui attorney" or "dealing with divorce for children." In these cases, you may be wasting money on irrelevant searches. Setting your ads to phrase or exact match might decrease your traffic potential, but help ensure that your ads appear for search queries that are most relevant to your business. 5. Not taking advantage of negative keywords. [caption id="attachment_5511" align="alignright" width="300"] geralt / Pixabay[/caption] Many people fail to use negative keywords, which can prevent ads from displaying whenever certain words are searched for. Following the example above, adding the word "dui" as a negative keyword within your PPC ad group would prevent your "divorce attorney" broad match ad from appearing in results for "dui attorney." Adding negative keywords to your PPC campaigns is one way to control relevancy without eliminating the potential traffic of broad match ads. But you'll need to devote time to finding the many possible negative keywords that could influence your campaign.

Depending on the keywords you are going after with your Adwords campaign, they can come with quite a high price tag. For example, keyword phrases with the term "lawyer" or "donate" can cost almost $50 per click.

What Is Video Advertising

A good alternative to running an Adwords PPC campaign is using video ads. Most people prefer video over reading a long page of text, making digital video advertising a marketing trend. Here is a great video that walks you through the process of setting up a video ad that is current enough to reflect the current interface:

Getting Started

Because YouTube is owned by Google, the first thing you have to do is connect your YouTube account to Adwords so you receive Google analytics for helpful insights. As with Adwords, your target audience is the most important section of setting up the ad. You can use just about any demographic based on location, gender, age, etc., and the more specific you get, the better qualified your viewers will be. This works well if you are a local business or tailoring your video to a definitive group, but if you looking to build brand awareness, you would be wise to go a little more broad with your audience. Keywords are also a key component of video ads, as well as with any PPC campaign.  With Google or any search engine, depending on what an online user types into search will decide what ads are shown. However, with video ads, no one is actually typing in the keywords. It is based on the search history of people who have the same type of interests as your keywords, the videos they watch, and the websites they visit. Another cool option is targeting where your ad is placed. You can choose specific YouTube channels, websites, app categories and more.

Why Use Video Ads

[caption id="attachment_5509" align="alignright" width="300"] geralt / Pixabay[/caption] So, what are the benefits of video ads? Here are 10 advantages:

1. Consumer Psychology Consumer psychology and emotion plays a great role in advertising. 2. Device Friendly Nature Now marketers are smart, and they make videos device friendly, more precisely mobile friendly. 3. Videos are Sharable Today’s users expect advertising to be brief, targeted and convenient because they love to share what they like and video advertisement has this quality. 4. SEO Benefit Search engines love the video. 5. Cross-channel Benefit Video advertising has changed the way that connects the target audience as digital content continues to expand. 6. Increased Visibility In-Stream videos offer another opportunity to reach audiences by allowing advertisers to deliver short video ads into both live and non-live videos on any video uploading platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and many others. 7. Lead generation and conversion If you go by the ad videos of the big marketers like Amazon or eBay, it would certainly prompt you to go to their site and make the purchase. 8. Social Media Videos Mostly all social platforms allow marketers to share videos directly to the targeted audience reach organically. 9. Resource of Information and Education Videos are the excellent format for informing and educating. 10. Resources for Sales Professionals Video marketing is most effective for sales professionals. See the full post here:  https://www.eyecandyinfographic.com/blog/10-advantages-video-advertising

Whether you choose TrueView skippable ads, non-skippable ads, 6-second bumper ads, sponsored ads, or any of the other options, you get more bang for your buck with video advertising. We're your video marketing Denver experts, so give us a call to learn more about how we can manage your video PPC campaign.

Benefits of Video Ads See more on: S&S Pro Service Blog

Best Practices for Anchor Text Usage

Anchor Text Optimization

Google changes its search engine algorithm approximately 500 - 600 times per year.  Most are minor changes, but occasionally they roll out an extensive update that substantially alters the online world.

They recently confirmed a broad core update that took place last weekend. Due to this, some websites may note gains or drops, and it appears there isn't a whole lot you can do about it according to this statement from Google via Twitter:

As with any update, some sites may note drops or gains. There’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, it’s that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded....

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018

Google went on to say that building great content will be the only option to overcome the issue of low performance of any page. However, this vague statement doesn't really provide "how to" details, which is typical of Google and their mysterious updates.

Search engine optimization is the best way to improve the traffic to any website, which includes content creation. There are endless options for how to go about this, and anchor text optimization has been gaining a lot of attention these days.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the visible characters or letters that are part of a clickable link within a webpage or online document. This clickable text, also known as a hyperlink, is usually displayed in a different color and is sometimes underlined. There was a time period early on when keyword stuffing and spammy outbound links were effective strategies. After the Penguin update in 2016 and once artificial intelligence and RankBrain became a Google reality, it was apparent that none of these tactics were good practice for any SEO company. [caption id="attachment_5457" align="alignright" width="300"] MasterTux / Pixabay[/caption] To develop good content that won't be penalized, there are some guidelines based on research from other SEO companies. Let say we are trying to rank for the keywords "content writing." Here are the main types of anchor text followed by an example.

• Exact match = content writing
• Partial match = learn more about content writing
• Branded = S&S Pro Services (our company name) or Moz or Search Engine Land
• Brand + Keyword = S&S Pro Services content writing
• Naked link = ssprosvcs.com or www.moz.com or https://searchengineland.com
• Generic = click here or go here (no keyword or brand)
• Images = Google uses the alt tag for the anchor text
• LSI = (latent semantic indexing or closely related keyword) =  what is content writing or content writing vs content curation
• Title Anchor Text =  Lead The Pack With Successful Content Writing Tips (linked to the title of a previous blog on our site about content writing)

Anchor Text Distribution and Placement

Now that you understand what anchor text is and the various types, the next step is best practices for anchor text usage. This video by Nathan Gotch provides a review of the types of anchor text, but at the halfway mark he begins discussing anchor text distribution percentages and where to place the preferred link: There are no actual written rules or industry standards for anchor text usage, so it is basically a matter of opinion. If you did study the search results to discover the optimal formula, every niche would be different so you would need a massive amount of research to have a solid conclusion (or an inside contact at Google).

How Vital Is It?

The important thing that must be taken care of while performing anchor text optimization is to keep the content versatile and natural. Avoid overuse of keyword-based anchors and multiple repetitive anchors. It's also wise to avoid over optimization as Google will never be okay with over-done anchor text. Good linking must also be naturally spread across the inbound links in the right proportions. As mentioned in the video, the key to high-quality content and ranking isn't just the anchor text ratios, but it is also the quality of the site, how well optimized it is, and the backlinks that are coming in from other sources to your page.

Importance of Inbound Links

[caption id="attachment_5458" align="alignright" width="300"] PIRO4D / Pixabay[/caption] Attaining backlinks from high authority sites is one way of showing Google that your site offers relevant information and is worthy of their recognition.  It is like getting a referral from another company and creates co-citation and, in turn, authority. There are a lot of ways to earn backlinks, but receiving one from a big name like Hubspot or Forbes requires some effort. This article offers 33 ways to get inbound links to your site. Another method is to hire a Denver SEO company to do this work for you. It will cost you to have someone else manage the process, but it will save you time and should offer a nice return on your investment because of increased traffic and income.    

Best Practices for Anchor Text Usage is republished from SS Pro Services

Digital Marketing Tips for Local Businesses

Building Your Online Presence

By Catherine Park

Marketing a small local business with a limited budget is not easy. However, if you are well versed with the internet, you can still market your business profitably with a small budget.

Small businesses should never underestimate the power of internet marketing though they don’t sell products online as a major part of their customers are online.

Here are some cool tips to expand your local small business online

1. Build your presence online

A lot of small businesses keep away from the internet simply because they don’t sell online. However, they should also consider the fact that customers nowadays refer to the internet before opting for most services these days. In fact, customer purchases are mostly based on the reviews and information available from sources other than the business location itself.

As an instance, customers visit 2-3 stores before purchasing any product. In case the customer visits your store and later, browses the internet for the same product, your competitor’s online website might allure the customer. Through your online presence, your customers will be able to know about your products and prices within a single click and will help you retain your customers.

2. Build a website to get more leads

Leads are immensely important for marketing or promoting local businesses with a small budget. Even if you are not selling your products online, try to get more and more leads from your website. Giving your number and expecting customers to call is completely a waste of time. Instead, get the leads from your website and mail them along with maintaining a regular follow up to extend your business.  Make visitors complete lead forms and you will have contacts to whom you can market your products.

[caption id="attachment_5450" align="alignright" width="300"] mohamed_hassan / Pixabay[/caption]

3. Get involved with the online local community

If you want to get a high number of conversions, choose Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc. social media platforms. These are the most trending and promising platforms that will help you promote your business. Post everything about your community events over these platforms and within seconds, it will reach to your potential customers leading to more conversions! Also, it is a budget-friendly option.

4. Choose digital banners for your local business

If you think only huge and international brands benefit from digital banners, then you are mistaken. The digital ad network by Google helps local businesses prepare their digital banners and post them on their community. This option might not be very cost effective but helps the businesses target the local community rigorously.

5. Add more localised content on your website

While you put your address and contact details on the contact us page, the search engines will showcase all the cities you serve. This will help you gain more traffic from the surrounding cities. But when you will create individual pages for the cities you serve, better local signals will be sent to the engine. A lot of businesses miss on local customers though they don’t have any competition in the local market due to lack of such localised content on their website.

6. Keep posting about your local community events

If you have a website, make sure you blog about all the community events. Blog about the events on social media too. It might happen that your blog or article gets ranked and represent your website or community to bulk people. Marketing with blogs or articles is a very important marketing tool you should never ignore.

7. Get online reviews

   [caption id="attachment_5451" align="alignright" width="300"] mcmurryjulie / Pixabay[/caption]

Generally, people know that reviews improve ranking and rankings can bring you better conversions. Local businesses can grow if they have satisfied customers and thus, ensure to take follow-ups with our customers to get reviews. You might need to push it a little, but go for it.

8. Don’t buy links

No matter how alluring purchasing the links look, it is not a proper way to market your business. Nowadays, you won’t be able to trick Google on this and thus, you must choose natural and ethical ways to promote your business.

9. Don’t forget to market offline

Try to market your products offline as it leads to online marketing. Once you market your business offline, it will make headings online and thus, this is a promising way to expand offline as well as online.

10. Try something innovative

Though marketing isn’t an easy job, you can get innovative; try your hands on something new to get successful. Sometimes, the marketing practices become too common to be noticed and this is the reason, you should hire creative people and try something exceptional. Build something new, fresh and controversial for getting your business noticed.

Marketing requires a rigorous and creative approach. Through different and unusual tactics and online marketing tools, you will definitely be able to grab a larger and better-converting audience.

The blog post Digital Marketing Tips for Local Businesses is courtesy of http://www.ssprosvcs.com

What Is Cloudflare and Should You Be Using It?

How Does Cloudflare Work?

If you own a website, you should know that the loading speed of any webpage is extremely critical when it comes to someone checking out what you have to offer or abandoning your site to go elsewhere. People's impatience with waiting on a page to load has become a major pain point for website owners. This post provides some stats on this topic:

In a study done by Akamai, about half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. If it isn’t loaded within 3 seconds, those users tend to abandon the site. An even more alarming statistic is that 64% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with an online store’s experience & loading time will take their business elsewhere. See more here:  Importance of Website Load Time

Not only is load time a big issue, but the security of your site also ranks right up there. As a small business owner, how can you manage these two relevant problems without purchasing a bunch of extra software/hardware? [caption id="attachment_5424" align="alignright" width="300"] geralt / Pixabay[/caption] A product like Cloudflare could be exactly what you need.

So what is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a U.S. company that launched in 2009 which provides a content delivery network, DDoS mitigation, Internet security services and distributed domain name server services. It automatically optimizes how your web pages are presented, giving your visitors fast page load times as well as blocking threats. Cloudflare also limits harmful bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. Cloudflare is known for managing the safety of your site by mitigating DDoS attacks, which are cyber attacks that can take out a server, as well as offering firewall, caching, and routing for your site with no extra hardware needed. This video gives an overview of what Cloudflare can do for you:

Even though the above video might be a little biased since it was made by Cloudflare, it gives you an idea of its potential. There are other companies that offer similar services, such as Amazon's CloudFront, KeyCDN, Imperva Incapsula, and Akamai. The key for your business would be to decide exactly what your needs are and choose what best fits those requirements. To make that decision easier, Cloudflare recently rolled out a new feature.

Consumer DNS Service

As of April 1, 2018, Cloudflare launched their own consumer DNS service that promises to keep your internet more private and make it even faster than before. [caption id="attachment_5421" align="alignright" width="300"] EstudioWebDoce / Pixabay[/caption] The DNS resolver resides at https://1.1.1.1 and claims to open a page at 14.8ms. Why is this important? Nearly everything done on the Internet starts with a DNS request. Here is more on how Cloudflare's new DNS service came to be:

Cloudflare has worked with APNIC to offer its DNS service through 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. Lots of people have used 1.1.1.1 as a dummy address, and APNIC have tried in the past to analyze the flood of traffic to the IP address and been overwhelmed. “We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system,” explains Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.”

Cloudflare Launches 1.1.1.1 DNS Service That Will Speed Up Your Internet

Cost of  Cloudflare

Cloudflare offers a free plan that is for personal websites and blogs, but if you have a business and want a higher level of speed and protection, you will want a paid plan. It's hard to put a price on keeping your site free from hackers, and even though it isn't cheap, consider the damage a cyber attack can cause. If using a service like Cloudflare seems like a no-brainer, you're probably right. To try out their new DNS service, head over to https://1.1.1.1 and check it out. It only takes a couple minutes to set up and the instructions are all there.

What Is Cloudflare and Should You Be Using It? is republished from http://ssprosvcs.com

Google Announces Mobile Sites Will Be Indexed First

What Does Mobile-First Indexing Mean?

If you are a business owner with an online presence, this week's announcement by Google could affect your site's ranking. Google officially started rolling out their mobile-first indexing algorithm this week, but what exactly does this mean? [caption id="attachment_5400" align="alignright" width="300"] Digitalpfade / Pixabay[/caption] Some of the questions from business owners include "What do I need to change?" or "Is mobile-friendly is good enough?" Google updates tend to create a lot of apprehension among the business world, and the online marketing sector may be especially perplexed by what to do next. The next post offers an explanation of what the new update might entail:

Mobile-first indexing is exactly what it sounds like. It just means that the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index, and the baseline for how they determine rankings. If you monitor crawlbot traffic to your site, you may see an increase in traffic from Smartphone Googlebot, and the cached versions of pages will usually be the mobile version of the page. It’s called “mobile-first” because it’s not a mobile-only index: for instance, if a site doesn’t have a mobile-friendly version, the desktop site can still be included in the index. But the lack of a mobile-friendly experience could impact negatively on the rankings of that site, and a site with a better mobile experience would potentially receive a rankings boost even for searchers on a desktop.

See more here:  How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

What Lead Up To Mobile-First Indexing?

This plan of mobile taking the top spot for the search engine crawlers has been in the works for quite some time. Because of the increasing popularity of mobile devices, Google announced late 2016 that they would be slowing rolling out their mobile-first strategy. It was really no big surprise considering that more than a year earlier, Google announced that having a mobile-friendly site was pretty much mandatory. It was a significant enough change that some people referred to it as mobilegeddon or mobilepocalypse. Google even provided a mobile-friendly test tool to see if your site passed the mustard. So when they announced in 2016 that the traditional desktop computer was being knocked off its pedestal and replaced by mobile, it was no big revelation. What is a little curious is how long it took, as Google has been talking about this update since mobile devices surpassed desktop usage back in 2014. In this video from November 2016 by Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable, he talks about how Google said they were already experimenting with this feature and that it would launch in the next few months. Barry discusses the proposed change first, which lasts until around the 4-minute mark, and then he provides other updates by Big G:

Using a Mobile Responsive Design

It is obviously a big update since it took until March of 2018 to fully establish the change. Going forward, Google will consider the mobile rendition of your website as the primary version. Previously, the desktop site was prioritized as the most comprehensive version of the two. It had the majority of the content, structured data markup, and backlinks that were created by SEO companies or marketing teams. With the onset of mobile-first indexing, your site content will see a significant increase in crawls by the Smartphone Googlebot with the search results reflecting snippets from content on the mobile version. Here are some extra tips from the search engine giant: [caption id="attachment_5401" align="alignright" width="300"] geralt / Pixabay[/caption]

 As we said, sites that make use of responsive web design and correctly implement dynamic serving (that include all of the desktop content and markup) generally don't have to do anything. Here are some extra tips that help ensure a site is ready for mobile-first indexing: Make sure the mobile version of the site also has the important, high-quality content. This includes text, images (with alt-attributes), and videos - in the usual crawlable and indexable formats. Structured data is important for indexing and search features that users love: it should be both on the mobile and desktop version of the site. Ensure URLs within the structured data are updated to the mobile version on the mobile pages. Metadata should be present on both versions of the site. It provides hints about the content on a page for indexing and serving. For example, make sure that titles and meta descriptions are equivalent across both versions of all pages on the site. No changes are necessary for interlinking with separate mobile URLs (m.-dot sites). For sites using separate mobile URLs, keep the existing link rel=canonical and link rel=alternate elements between these versions. Check hreflang links on separate mobile URLs. When using link rel=hreflang elements for internationalization, link between mobile and desktop URLs separately. Your mobile URLs' hreflang should point to the other language/region versions on other mobile URLs, and similarly link desktop with other desktop URLs using hreflang link elements there. Ensure the servers hosting the site have enough capacity to handle potentially increased crawl rate. This doesn't affect sites that use responsive web design and dynamic serving, only sites where the mobile version is on a separate host, such as m.example.com. We will be evaluating sites independently on their readiness for mobile-first indexing based on the above criteria and transitioning them when ready. This process has already started for a handful of sites and is closely being monitored by the search team. See the full post here:  Getting Your Site Ready For Mobile Indexing

When you read their pointers in the above paragraph, most business owners might have a little trouble understanding the lingo, as it directed toward webmasters. To be sure your site fits the "mobile bill", you might want to contact an SEO company in Denver to recruit their expertise in getting your site set up for mobile users as your primary target.    

The following post Google Announces Mobile Sites Will Be Indexed First Find more on: http://ssprosvcs.com/

Changes With Google Images

Searching for Images is Easier

If you loved research back in College, you must have come across Google Scholar – a version of Google laying emphasis on research papers. Today, we have another Google variant, Google Images – a tool by Google that we people use to reverse search images. You want to share a funny meme that you saw today but can’t remember which site it was on. Type into Google what text you can remember and it will do its magic...on a PC. Mobile is a little different, though. Performing a reverse image search on mobile devices is limited, as stated in this post: [caption id="attachment_5383" align="alignright" width="300"] Simon / Pixabay[/caption]

First, you cannot do a traditional reverse-image search with the standard Google app or via images.google.com on mobile browsers like Safari or Chrome. The camera icon won't show up in the search bar (pictured), so there is no way to upload an image for a reverse search on mobile. But the Chrome browser app for iOS and Android does support a reverse-image search workaround. When you have the image you want to search, hold your finger on it until a pop-up menu appears; pick "Search Google For This Image" at the bottom. Note: This will NOT work in the Google app or other browsers (not even in Safari). If for some reason this doesn't work, you can also select Open Image. Then copy the URL, go back to images.google.com, and paste in the URL—but that's adding extra steps. With either method, the results of a reverse-image search then appear, with lots of options to narrow your query, such as finding animated GIFs, clip-art equivalents, or looking by the color scheme used in the original image. See more here:  How To Do A Reverse Image Search From Your Phone

Image Recognition Software

Google is making commendable efforts towards intelligent image recognition with Google's cloud platform. Using Cloud Vision API, developers can classify images into categories which be used to find where a given image originated from, allowing metadata to be built, and analyzing and integrating images. Another option for image recognition and the non-developer community is the app called Goggle. It was released in December of 2009 as a way to identify images without needing a text-based search. Ironically, it was removed from the Android operating system in 2014 because of a lack of use, but at Google I/O 2017, Google Lens was announced that has similar functions as Goggle's, but instead it using Google Assistant. Apparently, Goggle is still in use, as seen in the demonstration with this video published in February of 2017:

Using Google Images For Any Browser

1. Head over to images.google.com using your favorite browser. 2. Click the grey camera icon to the left of the search text box. 3. You can either upload a local image or link to it. (On a computer, try the drag and drop feature, you will love it) 4. You will be directed to the normal Google search result page. 5. Click/tap the images tab. Right-click/hold the thumbnail to view a higher resolution version of the image. You can then save it at this stage. Even easier, using Google Chrome browser: [caption id="attachment_5384" align="alignright" width="300"] Simon / Pixabay[/caption] 1. Find an image you'd like to reverse search on any website. 2. Right-click / Hold the image. Choose “search Google for this image” In mid-February, there were some changes with Google Images. The View Image button was removed, mostly to make it harder to steal images. With View Image, it opened up the photo in a window by itself. This update frustrated users but I'm sure those in the photography/graphics industry rejoiced. You can still download an image but first, you have to go to the Visit button, which takes you to their website. Not only does it appear to be an effort to stop people from "borrowing" photos, but it also drives traffic to the website where the image is found, giving the owner a chance to show ads or entice a purchase.

Helpful Addition to Image Search

With this, Google made searching for related images easier by adding tags to the image that include where it is published and the title of the picture. The following post discusses this feature further:

Google Images is the incredibly useful tab on Google searches that lets you look through images relating to your search term. Last year Google improved Images by adding badges to each result that highlighted the type of content the images were from. If the image comes from a recipe it now has the word recipe written on it so that you know that clicking on it will take you to the recipe of whatever it is that you’re looking at. Google is now looking to extend this functionality even further, adding more information to the tag that shows up with image results. Google is starting to add captions to Google Image results. That captions that Google is adding will offer users a little more context about the images that they’re looking at. Captions will include the title and where the image is published. Read more here:  Google Images Is Even Now More Useful

There are additional options that save time instead of opening a browser each time you need to perform an image search. There are a few good apps that let you take pictures and search through them. One choice is Veracity. Let’s say you’re interested in a given art piece at the museum. Upload a photo to Veracity and it will display links to web pages containing that art piece. You can then learn more about that item. There are many other similar apps offering the same functionality.

Changes With Google Images is republished from S&S Pro Service

SXSW Conference 2018 – What’s New?

Why Is This Year Different

If you are part of the emerging technology scene, you are probably aware of the SXSW conference that happens annually in Austin, Texas.  SXSW (South by Southwest) is a festival in mid-March filled with technology, music, film, and interactive media, showcasing big-name profiles and celebrities from all genres, locations, and walks of life. The event has been part of the Texas landscape for quite some time. It was first held in 1987 as a local music event with the expectation that a handful of people would attend; however, over 700 showed up and it instantly created a stir.

History of SXSW

To provide some perspective on the longevity of SXSW, in 1987:

• Email was called electronic mail and was mostly used by colleges and the military.
• Landline telephones had a rotary dial.
• The Boombox was how you listened to CDs.
• The cost of an Apple Macintosh computer with 128 KB's of memory was over five thousand dollars.

Here's more on the history of the South by Southwest Celebration:

That same year, a small group of people in Austin, Texas began a series of long discussions about the future of entertainment and media. The meetings were in the offices of The Austin Chronicle, and participants were sworn to secrecy. A fundamental opinion shared by the group was that the local creative and music communities were as talented as anywhere else on the planet, but were severely limited by a lack of exposure outside of Austin. Music was the uniting factor, but the group had a catholic taste for art and ideas. Inclusiveness and reaching for new things were core values. The solution being discussed was an event that would bring the outside world to Austin for a close-up view. As the key ideas were formed, recognition grew that Austin was not the only city where this was an issue. For a local event to bring the world to Austin, it needed to have value everywhere. A name was sought that was not restrictive in its concept. Finally, in October of 1986, the announcement of the first South By Southwest was made. The SXSW group expected initial resistance from the locals, but it was quite the opposite. Almost everyone wanted to be involved. Resistance would come later. See more here:  SXSW History Intro

Events at the Festival

SXSW Conference 2018 started on March 9 and runs through March 17. It isn't just your typical tech conference, with a wide range of topics and formats, including:

• Book Readings
• Book Signings
• Demo Listening Sessions
• Featured Speakers
• Keynotes
• Meet Ups
• Mentor Sessions
• Pitch Events
• Podcast Stage
• Round Tables
• Solo/Dual/Panels
• Workshops

There are appearances by politicians that receive a lot a publicity, such as this year's discussion by Jake Tapper and Bernie Sanders on March 9, 2018. Another powerful event was two days ago on March 11 with SpaceX & Tesla CEO Elon Musk and film director Jonathan Nolan.  This Q&A session deliberated everything from artificial intelligence to colonizing Mars to self-driving cars. Most of the conference presentations are at least an hour long and replays can be found on YouTube. This video is a teaser for SXSW 2018 does a good job of highlighting the various genres that are included.

Are Big Tech Companies Falling From Grace?

From the information I have read, it sounds like this year's conference has a different tone than previous years. Technology and social media aren't as beloved as they were a few years ago. In fact, on the first night's lineup, Facebook reps and other big names were grilled on how they have handled some important topics as of late, such as fake news and their monopoly on information and media being distributed.

According to USA Today, the backlash being received by the tech world has been dubbed with its own name - techlash. The USA Today article went on to say, "The rapid growth of Facebook, Google and Amazon has fed fears that these companies control too much of the information that gets shared and, in Amazon's case, the goods and services consumers buy."

Reining in the sheer amount of information and data that is sent out digitally every day is an overwhelming task. in addition, getting a grip on the people using technology for the dark side of the web that is hidden in obscurity makes you realize it's a good thing that individuals are willing to call out the big hitters with all the control. As the SXSW name indicates, we are still in the Wild West of technology, with artificial intelligence and machine learning in the early stages of their growth. What we envisioned as a Sci-FI movie not long ago is quickly becoming a reality. Technology is very influential in our lives, so asking the prominent leaders in the industry to be more responsible and transparent is a recurring theme at this conference and worldwide.  

SXSW Conference 2018 – What’s New? See more on: www.ssprosvcs.com