Have you ever found yourself in a fancy dinner asked by your host about his new expensive bottle of wine standing in front of you on the table, but you didn’t have the knowledge on which harvest it was?

Well, Google is proud to solve all of these problems with its new service – Google Goggles.

Google posted in its official Mobile Blog of its new search service called Google Goggles. The new service allows you to take a picture of an item ( could be a bulding, site, product, restaurant,  etc ) and get immediate information about that item back to you cell phone. The service also suggests to take a picture of other person’s business card, for example, and get his personal details sent to the contact list in your cell phone.

This service is added to a list of other similar services brought by Google ( such as – Search by Voice,  ”What’s Nearby” , etc ) which intend to spread the search into other areas than the classic web search we are all used to.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the future, so it says, we will be able to walk in the fields and characterize plants and flowers, and even plan our next Chess steps.

One might concern about the future ability of such service, for example, if we could take pictures of people we don’t know and yet get a lot of information about them ( an ability which today is almost possible with all the social networks around us ) without getting their permission to do so.

All in all it seems like a very innovative service, and would be very interesting to see where it will take us.

Mobile SEO Basic Guidelines

Mobile search is growing rapidly and Google is, as usual, very dominant. When you create the mobile version of your site, follow the basic SEO guidelines, but pay attention to the following issues:

1.      Include the word “mobile” in the search term you’re aiming to.
2.      Keep your titles short and your content in small amounts. Remember the mobile site is targeted to people on the road or on their way to some place – They need this info fast and simple and preferably on one page.
3.      Submit your mobile site to Google, Yahoo and other directories – it can’t hurt.
4.      Don’t waste your time on building links. Will Critchlow wrote in SEOMOZ blog that according to his experience, links are not a factor in the mobile search algorithm. It also makes sense because mobile users don’t tend to link to other sites or to click on links due to the nature of their searches. Therefore, at least for now, it is advisable not to waste your time on link building for mobile sites.
5.      Will Critchlow mentioned that keyword phrases in the domain name are not required

Technical Mobile Marketing Guidelines

1.      Google advises to upload a mobile sitemap.
2.      Use well-formed markup (WML, cHTML, XHTML Basic or XHTML MP) – Validate your markup through the W3C Validator.
3.      The W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative published their own recommendations of Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0.
4.      Create a Small, lightweight and fast-loading site (which means smaller than 20kb per page). Remember that in the mobile world, usability and minimalism are very important.
5.      Use UTF-8 character encoding.
6.      Use JPEG / GIF images.

Some Useful Mobile Tools for Marketers

1.      This tool enables you to test your mobile site in various mobile devices – Dot Mobi Tool.
2.      A great testing tool that gives your mobile site a grade and in-depth analysis of pages – Ready.mobi.

Potential mobile users have lots of constraints – they have shorter searches, more misspellings, and only parts of the products are appropriate for

mobile marketing. You can’t sell furniture through a mobile site, at least not yet. They are also usually short on time and need to find what they need to quickly. Therefore, your whole marketing approach should be different – and you should always stay up to date with the latest changes in this unique and fast-growing market.