As a thank you to our valued Get Elastic readers, we’re offering you our Friends and Family discount code for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store.

The code is good for 15% off any purchase, no minimum! (Excluding Red Mittens, Petro Canada glasses and video games. Ends February 14th.)

For our US readers, use the code EPFRIENDS2010US at the US Olympic Store.

The rest of the world, use EPFRIENDS2010 at the Olympic Store…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Building Instant Translator Companion

  Google leaps language barrier with translator phone from The Times Online reports Google is working on a new tool that would bring instant translation to people.
  It appears that Google is a couple years away from this coming but they would build on their existing Google Translate and Google Voice features to create an instant translator…

We’ve just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we’ll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We’re also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we’ve set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants…

In case you’ve missed it, I recently released a free vector set of Social Media Icons at IconDock. It includes 50 icons of the most popular social media networks. The icons are available at 32px and 16px in EPS, PNG, and GIF format. Feel free to use it in your blogs or client’s projects. If you like it, don’t forget to spread the love by blogging or tweeting about it…

While 106 American football players sought yardage in the 2010 Super Bowl, millions of people sought information related to the big game from Google search. We looked at some game-day search trends and data* to see what football fans were searching for this year.Most searched-for teamTo the victor of this year’s big game went the search spoils: The New Orleans Saints captured both the NFL championship and the lion’s share of Super Bowl team searches in 2010…

We have put on line a simple, searchable interface to the Google Local Business Center (LBC) categories and synonym lists. The idea is to to assist in early planning and judicious picking of the most appropriate categories for your LBC listing. At this point, the categories included are for the US LBC only.

Late last year I published the Google LBC Category list as an HTML page of all the categories but I wanted to make the list more manageable so I have placed it in a database with a simple search interface…

Feras Alhlou, president and principal consultant of E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, will be conducting a Google Analytics workshop at SMX West on March 5, called “Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing & Business.” Register here and get 10% off with this discount code: GA@SMXMany organizations, large and small, struggle to go beyond basic web metrics of visitor counts and pageview volumes…

Since its controversial release, the iPad has been both criticized and admired by the design community.

In this post we have compiled a list of great resources, that teach you how to create your own iPad icons, as well as a collection of ready made icons and PSDs.

To download the files, please click on the preview image to go to the source site and remember to check the terms of use before using them in your projects…

We’re excited to announce our latest and most interactive online training for advertisers: the AdWords Online Classroom.You can get free, hands-on online training on key AdWords topics, delivered by our own AdWords & Industry specialists.We’re offering a great selection of live and recorded courses, including:* Improving your AdWords performance with key tips* Reaching more potential customers* Getting the most from your website with Website Optimizer* Using Google Analytics reports to improve your AdWords return-on-investmentTo view all upcoming live and recorded courses for North America, please visit our North America Online Classroom site…

You’re writing a page about a new stadium in your City, soon to enjoy the sounds of crowds in the bleachers watching duels between batters and pitchers, hoping to watch balls batted over the centerfield fence, or shutouts pitched, or the perfect doubleplay.

Your page could simply contain a picture, a street address, and maybe a [...]…

What Bestselling Authors Know About Writing Titles

They vary by genre, but the majority of bestselling authors and editors return to the same hooks time and again to routinely sell obscene amounts of books. On the recommendation of Clayton Makepeace, a celebrity in the web’s direct response copywriting world, I decided to visit a bookstore and peruse the titles on their shelves and take note of what titles grabbed me…

An aspect that often confuses those new to PPC – and many of those not so new -is Google’s quality score.

The quality score is a test of your keywords worthiness. The quality score is used on all your keywords, and is used by Google as a test of your campaigns relevance. The more relevant your campaign is – some would say “relevant to Google’s bank balance” – the more likely you’ll appear in prime position on Adwords…

Designing your own (or redesigning existing) gadgets such as MP3 Players, Game Consoles and Computers is an incredible way to improve your general skills in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (or any other design-related software package for that matter). You’re bound to pick up new skills every time, even if you’re considered an expert.

The following round-up of tutorials consists of 60 great gadget tutorials…

My friend Marios Alexandrou, an advanced SEO who loves to test ranking factors, worked with my programmer to update the popular Wordpress plugin I had built, Internal Link Building.

For those who don’t know, Internal Link Building automates your internal linking, so you can rank like Wikipedia without being Wikipedia. Ever notice how Wikipedia always links keywords in its articles to the relevant Wikipedia pages? This plugin does that for you…

I recently caught the replay of a web clinic presented by Marketing Experiments titled Affiliate Marketing: Tests and tactics that increased clicks and leads by 165%. The presentation is full of great tips for both retailers and affiliates and I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but there was one point that stood out as a really novel idea:

“Solicit advice from your affiliates, many are seasoned online marketers who can offer you valuable insight on what does and does not work…

If you missed it last week, Sysomos released a ‘what’s hot’ list of Twitter topics in 2010 so far. As you can imagine, topics such as Tiger Woods, Avatar and Haiti were amongst the most popular this year. Full post here.

…

Should direct marketers place Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and/or other buttons as part of the template for every email blast?   What about PPC landing pages? Should Twitter and Facebook be exit-options for every PPC landing page impression? How should advertisers think about socialization as either primary or secondary KPIs (key performance indicators A.K. A “goals.”)?

At first gape, these questions seem easy, yes?  “Of course, yes, socialize everything” you shout!”  “After all, isn’t the ‘net  all about social media these days?” How could it be wrong to ever consider omitting the all-powerful and ubiquitous social media click-me-now badges?

Caveat:  We understand that as social-trust augments and even partially supplants trust rank in how content is ranked by search engines, having influential tweeps and and wielding one’s own street cred’ is of paramount importance…

If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you’ll have seen a video from Google called “Parisian Love”. In fact you might have watched it before, because it’s been on YouTube for over three months. We didn’t set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it’s had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience…

Like 150 million or so other folks, I spent today watching the Superbowl. As a marketer, it’s hard not to pay close attention to the advertisements, and this year featured a heavy focus on sending viewers to the web. However, I was a bit surprised that we didn’t see anything like 2007’s Pontiac advertisement:

At the end of the ad, Pontiac invites viewers to "Google" their brand to learn more…

Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I’d like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag’s attributes.

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website…

Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out…

Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social, may just create more noise. But computers are getting better at understanding language is a good thing “our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports.”

But it seems each increase in relevancy justifies additional increases in irrelevancy to increase monetization…

By Thursday Bram

There’s no formula for a perfect portfolio. There’s no format that’s guaranteed to land you clients, as long as you follow it. However, there are certain questions that a prospective client has in mind when he’s looking for a web designer. If your portfolio can supply the answers a client wants, you can improve your portfolio’s ability to convince a client and land a new project…

Today we are glad to release Valentine’s Icon Set, a set with 10 free icons in resolutions 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px and 150×150px in formats .ico, .png and .icns. This set was designed by Iconsmaster and released especially for Noupe and its readers. The set was created from scratch using Adobe Fireworks — the .png-sources are available for free download as well…

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.

The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons…

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. – Ed.In addition to language improvements this week, we released several other new features:Haitian Creole translationWe’ve now added Haitian Creole (kreyòl ayisyen) translation to Google Translate, so that you can translate between Creole and 51 other languages, and also hear spoken versions of Creole translations…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Two Simple Rules For Fixing High Bounce Rate Pages

  Of all the metrics that I struggle and fight with, probably the easiest one I’ve found to correct is a high bounce rate. The reality of website design lies in the fact that many choices are made in page layout, color and image choice based on what the graphic designer or website owner like—not […

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.Developments over the last couple weeks really showcase how Google’s other innovation focus areas — including Search, Mobile and Chrome — help make Google Apps even more useful.Updates to Google Search in Gmail LabsOn Tuesday we made some helpful changes to the Google Search feature in Gmail Labs…

Though the methods used to gather website traffic statistics call into question the validity of the stats themselves, the fact is that some of your website’s visitors will have JavaScript disabled.

You could divide your traffic sources into four broad categories:

Search engines, mobile visitors, visitors using screen readers and visitors who have JavaScript turned off…

Each year, Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) sponsor a Fashion Fund to support emerging designers. In 2009, each participating designer was asked to create a one-of-a-kind item inspired by Google in some way — whether through our logo’s colors, technology or our commitment to equal access to information. Last October, we transformed 10 of the finalists’ designs into iGoogle Artists themes…