The Google Pay brand aims to consolidate various payment brands under one umbrella. Google offers the move as one of simplification. By streamlining how it offers its payment method tools to consumers it places them under a single brand called Google Pay.

Pali Bhat, Vice President of Product Management for Payments, covered this strategy via blog post. He cites the move as more of a rebranding than any significant change to a single product. Instead, he discusses how products like Android Pay(Google's platform for loyalty and mobile payments) and Google Wallet(a peer to peer payments app) can coexist harmoniously.

The strategy should allow online transactions to become more simple and clear in the future. Those who save payment information within their Google accounts needn't worry about figuring out which particular app to use as it would all be conducted within Google Pay.

Bhat writes via blog post that such transactions will be easier and faster due to this saved payment information and also offer "peace of mind". He also forecast that consumers can expect to see Google Pay in more places online.

Everyone wants to drive blog traffic but it's not always obvious how to achieve that end. With billions of websites out there, how to you make people go to yours? Here are a few simple tips:

Mention People in Your Posts
No man is an island and no blogger can get traffic completely on their own (unless you want to pay a fortune in PPC prices). Therefore you need to get other people to help you share your content. One way is to write blog posts that contain contributions from other people.

Reach out to thought leaders in your vertical and ask them to help you write a post. This can be something as simple as submitting a short paragraph related to their opinion on something. Compile your post then reach back out to these folks and ask them to share the content on their networks and link to it.

FCC head Ajit Pai recently denied allegations that his federal agency had been at all under the influence of Russian agents. Mark Ruffalo and Alyssa Milano accused Chairman Pai of being connected to automatic IP addresses in the Russian Federation. These addresses were allegedly used to influence the FCC comment system.

The two Hollywood celebrities referenced the fact that the FCC received over 440,000 individual comments about net neutrality from email addresses registered to users in the Russian Federation. They claim that these comments are being used to influence the debate on net neutrality.

Computer scientists have found that several million emails received by the comment system were sent from mysterious sources. Another 444,938 were sent from Russian accounts. Researchers aren't sure if they were authentic messages or sent by automatic scripts, but they were technically valid comments about the net neutrality debate.

Cyber Monday figures are looking impressive as the day starts off to the tune of $840 million in sales. The day is supposed to end with figures exceeding a staggering $6.6 billion making it the most profitable day in online sales history.

All of these impressive figures have originated from Adobe. Adobe extrapolates the information from information provided by online transactions from the top online retailers. As expected, Amazon sales account for a large percentage of all the Cyber Monday sales. The projections for the 2017 holiday season exceed those for 2016 by more than $10B.

With such impressive figures at hand, it is interesting to note how people are making online purchases. According to a report by Adobe, up to half of all visits are coming from mobile devices. Almost 40 percent of all sales are originating from mobile devices, a figure larger than ever.

Evergreen SEO methods have stood strong throughout time. This is amazing feat for such a fickle method that is ruled by ever changing algorithms. Methods that once were sure fire short cuts to achieve high ranking results have fallen to the wayside. The following Evergreen SEO methods and techniques worked when they were first implemented and they keep working.

Exchanging Value

This method is also known as external links. The basic concept is simple. You provide a link to a website on your website. In turn that website will provide an external link to your website. Google has penalized this method, however, it is still widely used amongst bloggers and other social media platforms. The exchanging value exposes your website to the traffic of the other websites instead of relying on just your own organic traffic. More exposure and more traffic can equate to a higher search result rank.

Keyword Research

Research the keywords that are used by your target audience. When you find several appropriate keywords use relevant and quality content on your site that contains these keywords. Be sure to use them naturally and do not excessively and unnaturally fill your website with keywords as this will hurt your search ranking.

Evergreen SEO Tactics That Will Always Work Come Rain or Shine

SEO (search engine optimization) is a method of boosting the quantity of visitors a website receives, by giving it higher rankings in the results displayed by big search engines, such as Yahoo Search, Bing and - most notably - Google. Indeed, Google is the world's biggest search engine provider. Industry experts report that Google controls roughly sixty-five percent of total searches. Yahoo and Bing are the next two biggest search providers, accounting for a 33.1 percent market share between them.

For this reason, lots of advertisers still concentrate their efforts on optimizing their websites, particularly for Google. Nonetheless, Google constantly updates its' algorithm, which makes it hard for advertisers to remain in the same position in the search listings.

Instagram redesigned its app. As a result, its call-to-action bar looks a little different. Now, the the bar is a way for the company to subtly display more advertisements. Obviously, the change was made so that Instagram could get more ad clicks from its users. This is why the ads were blended to look like regular Instagram content. They don't stand out as much, which means that users might click on them more.

Before the changes, the call-to-action bar was blue, and it was positioned below videos and images. The redesign makes the bar blend in more with images and videos as they constantly change. For example, if there is an environmental ad that shows trees in the forest, the call-to-action bar changes to green or earth tones to match the greenery in the images. Or it might be red or orange, if the image or picture shows a blazing forest fire.

YouTube is a terrific place to promote and advertise your business. In an image driven world full of competition, videos are a great way to get noticed and to stay relevant. However, simply posting a video, on any social media site, is not quite enough. You need to draw traffic to your video so it can be seen by your target audience. This is an essential key to making sure your video is actually marketing your business and ranking your YouTube videos

A lot of research has been conducted on how to make the most effective video, get the best ranking and most views on YouTube. This research has produced a few tips on how to best optimize your videos.

Make it Brief

Try to keep your video at around three minutes. Never make a video longer than this unless it is for some type of demonstrative purpose that is impossible to make shorter.

Make Better Videos not More Videos

It is a better use of your time and will produce more views if you spend your time to make high quality videos instead of a high quantity of videos.

President Trump wants the Department of Education to focus on computer science education. He suggests that the department spends $200 million annually on STEM education.

It is speculated that he will order the department to spend a total of $200 million annually on STEM education for children in grades K-12. According to Recode, the president wants the department to set aside this amount from its grant funds.

According to Hadi Partovi when interviewed by TechCrunch, this is a huge win for Code.org because this is a cause that the organization started four years ago. Their goal was to get more women and minorities exposed to and involved with computer science programs.

President Barack Obama wanted $4 billion for state funding to make sure that everybody had the opportunity to get computer science training. Sadly enough, Congress did not agree with President Barack Obama and did not approve the initiative. But maybe this administration can obtain funding for more STEM programs. Thus, even if you hate Trump, you have to agree that numerous American children could benefit from an increase in computer science programs.

Youth Prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook

Some interesting facts have emerged from eMarkter's most recent mobile forecast regarding how the young are using social media sites. The most important finding is that younger social media users prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook.

Facebook has 14.5 million users in the 12-17 year old demographic, but Snapchat has 15.8 million in the same age group. Instagram lags behind both with about 4.2 million users in this age group. However, among 18-24 year old users, Instagram has almost the same number as both Facebook and Snapchat with Instagram having 22.1 million, Snapchat 24.4 million, and Facebook coming in at 23.5 million. These statistics are for U.S. users of these social media sites only.