“Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers,” says Google software engineer Robin Schriebman. “But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?’”

Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours! Thanks to everyone using this new feature http://bit.ly/aRgNtc

Google tested the feature internally before releasing it to the public (in the U.S. so far). When users with Google Voice numbers call people, that number will display as the caller ID.

Along with the launch, the company showed off some phone booths it will be setting up in universities and airports. Danny Sullivan got to peek inside one:

The phone booths should go a long way in showing off this feature and familiarizing people with Google Voice in general, which seems to be the company’s real goal.

Clearly there is an interest in making phone calls from Gmail, as the numbers from the first day indicate.

“Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new ‘Apps Search’ lab, we just made that all a bit simpler,” writes Google software engineer Bram Moolenaar.

“You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down,” adds Moolenaar.

The feature also comes with “did you mean?” suggestions.

Given that the feature is a Gmail Labs experiment, it is subject to bugs, so keep this in mind if you turn it on. The feature can be turned on by going to Gmail settings, and clicking the “labs” tab. From there find “Apps Search”.

Google software engineer James Hawkins talks about a couple of the other new features on the Chrome Blog. “One of my favorite features, Autofill, helps you fill in web forms automatically with information that you specify, such as your name, address, phone number, and the credit card number you use for shopping online,” he says. “Autofill builds up and saves this information for you over time, so that you can fill in long web forms with just a few clicks without typing in the same information over again. For your security, any personal information stored in Chrome is safely stored and kept private until a user chooses to share the information with a website. Additionally, your credit card information is never saved without first asking you explicitly.”

“We also continue to bring more synchronization capabilities to Chrome,” he adds. “In addition to syncing bookmarks, preferences, and themes, you can now choose to sync your Chrome extensions as well as your Autofill data (excluding credit card numbers) through your Google Account. With Chrome’s sync features, you can personalize your Chrome experience and access your painstakingly curated set of bookmarks, preferences, themes, extensions, and Autofill data from any computer you choose, as long as you’re signed in to your Google Account on Chrome for that computer. To start syncing, go to the the ‘Sync’ section of the “Personal Stuff” tab in Chrome’s options.”

In addition to the new interface and these features, the new beta is faster. Google has always placed a great deal of emphasis on speed with Chrome, and they continue to do so. Hawkins says its 15% faster on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks. You can see the progressions on these visually here.

“Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more,” says John Maguire of the Google Place Page team. “Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers.”

“For example, a thoughtful response acknowledging a problem and offering a solution can often turn a customer who had an initially negative experience into a raving supporter,” he continues. “A simple thank you or a personal message can further reinforce a positive experience. Ultimately, business owner responses give you the opportunity to learn what you do well, what you can do better, and show your customers that you’re listening.”

Google actually has a user guide with some tips on how to handle your responses, just in case customer service isn’t your strong point.

You must have your listing verified before you are able to respond to reviews.

Now, according to Google Operating System, Google is testing a feature that will let users log in to multiple Google accounts in the same web browser. Personally, I have at least four different Gmail accounts open at all times, and this feature is very high on my wish list.

Google services that are currently being tested include Gmail, Reader, Sites, Calendar, Code and Docs. There is one limitation: if you turn on multiple sign-in, you cannot access Gmail in offline mode.

Multiple sign-in will let you open Gmail in multiple tabs, log in using different accounts and read the messages from all your accounts without opening another browser. Right now, you have to log out before logging in to a different account.

Search Engine Optimisation

1. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.

3. Balance Cost and Traffic – Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

It has been a pretty busy month for the AdWords crew, it seems. The company recently added the ” Analyze Competition ” feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

The user question in this particular video says:

Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they’re updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs & other dynamic sites? Isn’t the content more important than the simple # of posts per day/week?

Matt’s response is that it is indeed much more important to have quality content, but frequency can be a nice thing to have for the users.

Essentially, if you post more frequently, people have more of a reason to keep coming back. That can be good for page views. However, as Matt says…

“Whenever you’re thinking about search engines, it’s much, much, much more important to think about the quality of your content. For example, on my blog, I don’t post every day. Sometimes I don’t post every week. But I try to make sure that each post has something useful about it…”

Matt implies that you’ll be better off in terms of search, if you wait until you can deliver some value to a post, rather than just crank stuff out that isn’t that much different than stuff that’s already out there. This strategy is likely to attract a lot more links, he says.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled seo campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

When you analyze a page with the Page Speed tool, it will display suggestions that you can use to make your page faster. The difference is that now you can use the “Analyze” menu to determine if a suggestion is related to your own content our to ads and trackers.

Google recently made it a point to stat including page speed as a signal in its search ranking algorithm. The main motivation for this was that it is simply better for the user experience.

As you probably know, ads can slow down a site. While clearly users may find ads annoying at times, slow-loading ads are going to do nothing to make them less annoying, which is why this tool can also enhance the user experience.

That’s one hard-to-avoid conclusion, anyway.  Another is that Google’s actually decided to drive searchers to use Bing (compare the “synthetic lollipops that hurt your eyes” image to the gorgeous picture of Belem Tower and see if you don’t feel the same way).

Google’s official explanation is that it’s trying to promote a certain feature, though.  Marissa Mayer stated on the Official Google Blog, “Last week, we announced a new feature that lets you add a favorite photo or image to the background of your Google.com homepage.  To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we’ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage.”