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S EO has been a thing for, well, decades now. Pretty much everyone knows that if you're starting a business, you need to set up a website, do some keyword research, and optimize your content to rank on Google. But what not many entrepreneurs realize is that SEO is evolving, big time. These days, people are more likely to use voice search to ask a question, rather than manually typing their search queries into Google.com. Want to get found on these voice searches? Then you'll have to tweak your marketing strategy to include voice search optimization (VSO). How are voice searches different from traditional searches? Generally speaking, voice searches are phrased more casually and informally, and they tend to be an entire sentence (as opposed to a few words). For example, if I wanted to locate the nearest McDonald's outlet, and I'm doing a standard Google search, I might type "nearest McDonald's outlet" in the search bar. But if I'm conducting a voice sea...

R esearchers at Princeton released a new study on how many online shopping sites use coercive so-called "dark pattern" techniques to trick people into spending more money. "This is manipulating users into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make and buying stuff they don't need," Gunes Acar, a research associate at Princeton who helped run the study, told Business Insider. "Showing a timer and saying you only have 5 minutes left — there's a sense of urgency that's questionable at best." Acar and his team created a tool that crawled over 10,000 e-commerce sites. Ultimately, they found that more than 1,200 use "dark pattern" techniques to coerce customers into buying items or spending more time on their sites. The tool is more text oriented (as the "cancel order option" says something like "No thanks," I don't like exquisite meals, for instance, on a shipping page) and less manipulative layout, Acar intr...