Do you provide online gift cards for your online shop? If not, it may be something you want to consider. CashStar released the results of an interesting survey about pre-holiday online shopping and gift cards.

The survey indicated that more consumers are going online to purchase gift cards, and not just plastic gift cards for the physical world, but electronic gift-cards that can be delivered through email.

Google has made some adjustments to it’s “Place Pages.” As Doug Caverly reported, they are now showing more specific details for reviews. They are letting people rate individual aspects of businesses.

Another update that Google made is the addition of verification to the Place Page. Google is letting users know when owners have verified their Place Pages. If it is verified, there is now a link with a checkmark beside it at the top of the page that says “owner-verified listing.”

The above headline was not intended as a reference to the Bonnie Raitt song, but if you want word to spread about your business or your product, it only makes sense to give them something worth talking about.

When you can get real people generating buzz about your business/product, it is bound to be more valuable than a regular old ad. Think about it from the consumer’s point of view. If you heard from a friend that one kind of pizza was better than the other, wouldn’t you be more likely to try that kind than you would if you just saw an ad for it on a search engine results page for a pizza search?

How Many Editors Does it Take to Stay Accurate?

We recently reported on the notion that Wikipedia losing editors could lead to a decline in accuracy. Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, tells WebProNews growth in editing has slowed, but the number of editors is just flat, and not declining.

The Wikimedia Foundation raised $3 million in just ten days right in the middle of the recession. This is one reason why Gardner was named the Ultimate Game Changer for media by the Huffington Post. That publication says Gardner changed the game by “taking the people’s online encyclopedia to the next level.” Gardner answered a few questions for us, and the following is the product of that Q&A.

Making Money with Content By Covering More Ground

Those new to blogging or article writing have often been told to focus on one very niche topic. One narrow vertical. That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn’t your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services. But is keeping it narrow really the best way to go?

Demand Media is making SEO’d content to rank in Google … Is this the future of online publishing?

Big businesses with huge pageviews fueled by Google have emerged in recent years that exist only because of a unique SEO / Adwords relationship with Google. Google gives them a huge presence in the long tail SERPS and they in turn give Google increased revenue by being a Google Adsense partner. Not just any Adsense partner, but a Google partner that turns Google search generated traffic into billions of Adwords clicks totaling tens of billions of dollars.

Concerns About Page Speed and Tips for Improving it

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world’s most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Cutts’ suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.

What Is a Title Tag?

The title tag has been – and probably will always be – one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.

In fact, fixing just the title tags of your pages can often generate quick and appreciable differences to your rankings. And because the words in the title tag are what appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP), changing them may result in more clickthroughs.

Search Engines and Title Tags

In August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.

In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences…”

The point of a brand is to create an instantaneous association in people’s minds. The Nike ’swoosh’ brings to mind footwear, athleticism, and Michael Jordan. The Toyota ‘bull’ logo evokes images of compact cars, foreign business competition, and new ways of doing things. The name Budweiser reminds us of everything from the actual beer to those clever talking frogs, and the ‘wassup!’ advertisements.