If you’ve already finished your taxes, you’re probably sleeping well at night, daydreaming about how to spend your refund, and neatly storing your grocery receipts for next year. If you haven’t finished your taxes yet, time is running out. April 15th is right around the corner. In these few days you have left to accomplish what you’ve been dreading since this time last year, you may find yourself looking for a few simple tricks to ease the burden of filling out your taxes. A tax cheat, perhaps. You are not alone.

 Here are a few Google search highlights from your fellow procrastinators/felons looking for a simple solution:

• how to tax fraud
• democrat tax cheats
• open a Swiss bank account
• how to legally avoid paying taxes
• tax cheats hotline

If you are displeased with your Google results, you may turn to your friends. Perhaps you will wonder how you can acquire this tax fraudulence information more quickly. Maybe you will consult Facebook. Again, you are not alone, although this time there may be more dire consequences than just bad search results.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may also be monitoring Facebook and Twitter for evidence of tax fraudulence. If your tax forms cause the agency to raise a brow, you may be subject to a social media inspection. The good news is there is a simple solution: don’t cheat on your taxes and your social chatter is safe. At least for now.

                                Photo Source: http://lorakathleen.com/tax-time/

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, so what better time to share some searches about love? Our love searches deal with all varieties of the emotion, from the everlasting romantic love to pizza love. So turn the lights down, unwrap your chocolates and join us for the most romantic searches we have to offer.

• love story with complications

- Doesn’t every love story have complications? A better search would be “love story without complications.”

• romantic prairie bathroom

- Because no room screams romance quite like the bathroom.

• songs about looking for love

- A Nina Hale classic! Check out our Songs About Searching post to answer this query. 

• corned beef romantic

- Even in my wildest dreams, I cannot think of a way to make corned beef romantic. Good luck searcher. 

• I love being me poems 

- You go Glen Coco! Seriously though, these poems sound awesome.

• romantic snow globe

- Ah yes, the romantic snow globe. A classic Valentine’s Day gift. 

• all consuming love

- Oh boy dear searcher. You’ve got it bad — good luck sifting through those search results. 

• hipster romantic remedies

- This is an unclear search. Are you looking for remedies against hipster love? Romantic remedies of the hipster variety? Or perhaps hipster remedies to encourage love?! 

 Thanks for joining us for 2013′s love searches from Nina Hale. We hope you have a marvelous Valentine’s Day!

Each year we mark the civil rights accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King with a national holiday, and each year Google marks the national holiday with a commemorative Google doodle.

The first Google doodle appeared in 2000 for Bastille day. Since then, Google’s dedicated team of doodlers have produced more than 1000 doodles seen around the world. These doodles leverage familiar holidays, anniversaries, lives of influential people and pop culture to become creative content. 

As we develop our own content marketing strategies and finish planning our 2013 content calendars, we should take inspiration from the authentic and engaging content Google creates. Google’s content enables them to capture and retain consumer interest, an increasingly important feat in an increasingly social world. If we are able to captivate our audiences in the same way, we are sure to experience increased brand and social interaction in the coming year, ultimately growing business.

2012 was a busy year for SEOs. A year of Google Panda and Penguin updates, more localization changes than you can shake a stick at, some kind of design update on nearly every social media platform, and more. Searches have been busy too. To close out the year, we’ve gathered the very best of the odd, the hilarious, the gross, and the just plain bizarre searches of 2012. 

These are real searches that people conducted on Google from January, 2012 – December, 2012.

“Ex boyfriend dog toy”

• No this is not an excuse to have your dog destroy your ex’s favorite shirt. There is actually a dog toy called “the ex-boyfriend.” For the record, he is not an attractive man.

“how to stop anti bullying”

• We’re really hoping this searcher just doesn’t understand double negatives.

“Acorn cookies!”

• Not a strange query, we just love the enthusiasm. You make those acorn cookies searcher!

“pain management cuddle treatment”

• Cuddle treatment! This sounds way better than shots or pills.

“# dead voters in florida”

• That’s it. The zombie apocalypse is finally here. (Okay, so this actually refers to the voter fraud scandal in Florida where 53,000 dead voters were registered to vote. Still creepy.)

“causes of teen pregnancy”

• Is it excessive candy? Too much TV? I’ve always wondered!

“instant bullying kit”

• All of the bullying with none of the work! But seriously, we hope these bullying queries are done by confused searches. Bullying prevention is serious business.

“antler chew vomit”

• Don’t even know what to say to this one. Except EW.

“scholarships based on height”

• Strange, but true. You can actually get up to $1,000 for guys 6’2” and taller and girls 5’10” and taller. Little People of America has a scholarship for people 4’10” and under.

“2 pounds of butter in baking”

• I don’t even care what you’re making with this recipe, all I know is: I want in.

“oops I got Chlamydia”

• The newest Britney Spears hit?

“help I m addicted to tumblr”

• Not me. Nope. I’ve got this tumblr thing totally under control …

Thanks for sticking with us through the gross, absurd, and down-right strange searches in 2012. Stay tuned for what 2013 will bring! 

Prelude

As search marketers, Pinterest has become a popular tool we can use for both sharing content and creating links. However, when 5:30 comes and I’m riding the train home, I am no longer thinking like a search marketer. I am just like every other user, perusing my friends’ boards, drooling over s’mores stuffed chocolate chip cookies and Manolo Blahniks.

Then, after about 812 pins, I didn’t understand the purpose of my collection. Through my boards I planned 140 dinners, 39 pumpkin carvings, and 3 weddings but had nothing concrete to show for my hours spent on this wonderful, time-sucking site. That’s when I decided to throw my first Pinterest party. 

Someone please tell me this is your life too.

How to Throw a Pinterest Party

Throwing a Pinterest party is really quite simple. Once you pick your theme (I’m on the opinion that every party must have a really great theme), everything you need to plan the party can be found on Pinterest. For my theme I choose a Pinterest Christmas party.

I found Pinterest party invitation ideas, recipes, crafts and decorations all on Pintersest, of course. To store the pins I found for my party, I created my Pinterest Christmas Party board.

After receiving the invites, my guests can view this board to see my Pinterest party recipes and craft ideas and get inspired. Once the board was created, I got to work on following through on some of these pins.

Pinterest Party Invitations

The first thing to do after creating your board is to make your invitations. I love any opportunity to use Photoshop so that’s how I created mine, but card stamping your invitations would also be a fun and creative way to invite your guests.

If this is your first Pinterest party, one thing to keep in mind is that it might be your guest’s first Pinterest party as well. Because of this, you will need to include more than just the time and place of the event. On my Pinterest party invitations I included:

Pinterest party invitation: time, place, what to bring, etc.

-Time: duh.

-Place: duh.

-Date to RSVP by: this is extremely important in the case of a Pinterest party because you will need to buy materials for your guests and also let people attending know how many people they need to cook for.

-What to bring: this is the area where you will share with guests to bring a unique dessert or appetizer that can be found on your Pinterest board (or elsewhere, but let’s try to stick with the theme here). Also, you may ask your guests to bring money to cover the cost of materials of the craft. I recommend doing one test craft first so you are aware of the cost to make your craft.

-A link to the Pinterest party board: here your guests can find/submit recipe and craft ideas.

-Pictures of the tentative craft plans: get guests excited about what they might be making.

Pinterest Party Preparation

Hopefully, those of you reading this keep a cleaner home than I do because this step required me to take a half day from work and scrub my apartment clean to make it presentable to my guests. Also, since I was throwing a Christmas themed Pinterest party, I had to make sure my Christmas decorations were up to snuff. Below are the Christmas decorations I used for my apartment.

Decorate your home to match the theme of the party.

Next, you need to get your materials and ingredients for your dish. When buying the materials, buy extras and keep your receipts. For my party we made ornament wreathes. I bought 490 ornaments to make nine wreathes. There were some extra ornaments but it is always better to have too much instead of too little.

Make sure you have enough supplies for all of your guests!

When you have your supplies, make a test craft. You will be seen as the expert at your party and people will be looking to you for help. I made my craft a couple days in advance in case something went wrong that would cause me to have to try again.

The Big Event

On the day of the party there were a few things I did to make sure everything ran smoothly: I covered my kitchen island in paper to avoid damaging my counters, I preheated the oven to guests could warm up their dishes on arrival, I set Taylor Swift’s RED to repeat and made a trip to the local liquor store to get Bailey’s and Peppermint Schnapps for the hot chocolate bar.

Pinterest Party hot chocolate bar. Complete with Bailey’s, Peppermint Schnapps, peppermints, marshmallows, toffee bits, white chocolate chips, candy canes and rolled wafer cookies.

Because I live in a cozy one bedroom apartment, there wasn’t enough workspace for everyone to do their crafts at once so four girls ate while four girls did their crafting, then they switched. This made spending time with my guests easy because I would eat with each group while checking on the other’s progress on the craft.

The little elves working away!

Pretty Christmas ornaments for ornament wreaths

Pinterest party recipes: Ham & cheese sliders and pinwheels

Pinterest party recipes: Stuffed bacon and cheese french bread, broccoli cheddar fritters, Rudolph cookies, taco dip and cream cheese pesto Christmas tree.

Red velvet cheesecake cupcake and hot chocolate.

Pinterest party guest with Rudolph cookie

Pinterest party craft: DIY family Christmas ornament wreath

Pinterest party craft: DIY intial Christmas ornament wreath

Pinterest party guests with their crafts

The Aftermath

Overall it was a great success! Everyone was happy with their wreathes and all the food was delicious. If you’re thinking of throwing a Pinterest party I highly recommend it. It is a fun way to mix things up and get refrigerator filled with all sorts of goodies. Now please, pin Pinterest Party images away!  

SEE THE HOW TO THROW A PINTEREST PARTY BOARD HERE!

P.S. Don’t forget to repin!