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July 11th, 2009UncategorizedYesterday on the Yahoo Q1 earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz sent a mixed message of sorts. She said at the outset that Yahoo was going to focus on key areas of the business and was open to “outsourcing” some functions if that made sense. -
July 10th, 2009Uncategorized
Compete.com launched a new interface and a host of new features recently, and the changes provide some excellent tools for digging deeper into websites.
Starting with the user interface (UI) on a URL search, the first thing you will notice is an easier-to-read graph than before. Hover over individual months and you will see detailed traffic numbers for that month, a feature not included in previous versions. The graph can also be sorted by Unique Visitors, Visits and Compete Rank.
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July 9th, 2009Uncategorized
Not that anyone needed any confirmation of Google’s dominance, but comScore has put it into numbers with today’s release of data about worldwide Internet usage. comScore says Google is the most popular Internet property in the world, with its sites reaching 77% of the online population that’s 15-years-old and up in December, 2008.
Microsoft and Yahoo are second and third, respectively, while Facebook is the top social networking site in the world and the seventh most popular property overall.
It’s also worth mentioning that comScore says the global Internet audience surpassed one billion people in December — the first time that’s happened. China’s 180 million Internet users makes it the largest national online population.
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July 8th, 2009UncategorizedAdJuggler, an online advertising management system, launched a new advertising platform to appeal to smaller businesses. Previously, AdJuggler only offered long-term contract advertising, but with the new platform, advertisers can participate in a "Pay as You Go" model. Now small businesses, or businesses with tight budgets, can participate in advertising programs that would previously have been cost-prohibitive.
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July 7th, 2009Uncategorized
Google has taken leadership from Map Quest in terms of usage, and is putting more and more features under the hood. The Google Earth itself is so packed with widgets and features - it is a scary if you turn all of them. I think Google is going to bite off entire tech savvy audience from Map Quest (if not already), leaving the “loyal” customers.
The “loyal” seems to be at the center of Map Quest strategy, but people are loyal for as long as you’re the best. When there’s a better player on the scene, the loyalty can shift quickly. I personally think they are making a huge mistake and should change their strategy to innovation and market acquisition, otherwise they will be left with old people, who are truly loyal because they never heard of Google.
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July 6th, 2009Uncategorized
In a story so short it could fit into a handful of tweets, notorious British tabloid The Sun reports that Beyonce Knowles is planning legal action against those who are pretending to be her on Twitter.
Apparently, her sister Solange said that she was being pestered by someone pretending to be the singer.
Whether this is a legitimate story is another matter. Though Twitter has been known to shut down accounts that either impersonate or are otherwise dubious, it’s possibly a better idea to ensure that your official Twitter account is well publicised so that the fakers can then be easily identified.
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July 5th, 2009UncategorizedWhite Hat and Black Hat are two methods used in SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
White SEO conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.
Generally, White hat SEO creates content for real users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is not exact like website promotion, but they are similar in certain ways.
Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.
Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms.
One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of black hat SEO. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.
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July 4th, 2009Uncategorized
Committee to Protect Bloggers reports that TinyURL has been blocked in Saudi Arabia. The URL shortener service is not the only option out there for your shortened URLs, but it is the default one for Twitter, so if you want to reach the Saudi followers you’d better use another service. I should also link the Facebook group that wants TinyURL unblocked, but I doubt it’ll do any good, at least not with a mere 19 members.
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July 3rd, 2009Uncategorized
Some media executives are bitching about Google ranking blogs and sites not controlled by the mainstream media. Of course Google has been tilting their algorithms in the direction of brands, and even includes trusted news partners directly in the search results for recent news items. But that is not enough to make bloated media companies profitable.
"The original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results."
Google subsidizes these media companies with additional exposure by
- weighting domain authority
- giving them first mover advantage in the search rankings (through direct inclusion of recent news results in the organic search results)
- featuring their content (yet again) in their news search product
- favoring informational content over commercial content
If a big business has "real access" and yet loses out to people rewriting the story, it means the original source did one (or more) of the following
- did a pretty crummy job of reporting
- did a pretty crummy job of SEO
- erected barriers that made them not linkworthy
- fought off niche brands with a generic brand that does not resonate as well with the market
Google could give these media companies almost 100% of the search traffic and many would still go bankrupt because their business models simply do not fit the web. Online ad rates are lower, most of the media infrastructure is unneeded bloat, and individuals and brands are starting to create their own media.
When I click the publish button, 10's of thousands of people will read this post. Its not your fault or my fault that big media was too lazy to create niche brands offering relevant regularly updated content.
Ironically, the quote from AdAge, begging for coverage of the original source, did not have a name on it. You can quote it, but there is no source. These clowns whine about something and are not willing to put their names behind their own words. Maybe that has something to do with why people would rather read elsewhere.
This is the same media that pushed the bogus Iraq war, laughed and joked about those errors (while people were still dying), and missed the financial terrorism occurring back home. Why again is the original source more important than those who dig a bit deeper and add further context?
If the relevancy algorithms are your enemy, then maybe your work is no longer relevant.
Maybe they can work on stuff that matters.
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July 2nd, 2009UncategorizedI have been working as a SEO Expert in the search engine optimization field in Phoenix Arizona for over 12 years, and unfortunately I am still learning. SEO consultants can teach you about a lot of things when it comes to the search engine optimization marketing of your website. However, one of the most important things that they are going to teach you about is linking. There are 2 forms of linking, Internal linking within your website and external linking; which is the process of obtaining links from other websites.
If you have never worried about the marketing of your website online, then you may not know how important linking is. Sure, it helps to get the name of your website out there, because the more links to your website, the better. SEO experts will teach you that linking is used also for a totally different reason. They will obtain links to your web site for the purpose of improving search rankings in popular search engines. Internet crawlers are the bots that crawl the web for search engines to find updated information on the internet. Then they report back to the search engines and use an algorithm to determine where you belong on the internet search rankings. The more quality links you obtain to your site, the higher you should rank. The better spot you get in the search engines, the more traffic you will obtain.
This is how it works; As search engines move around the internet, they come across tons of sites. When the search engines come across websites that link to your site, then it's like you get a thumbs up towards improving your search rankings. As you can guess, the more points you get, the higher your ranking; and thus, this is what a lot of SEO experts build off of. SEO consultants usually use their services to better work on your web site as well as teach you how to improve your site on your own. They will teach you how to obtain quality from popular sites. Because there are a lot of tips and tricks to make it easier and more effective. Link building is what makes search engine optimization so hard!
The truth of the matter is, you can not just throw your link out there anywhere and expect it to count towards your site. In fact, a lot of search engine crawlers look to make sure that the websites have something in common and that they are credible links and referring sites. For example, let's say that your site is about cars, and you place a link on a flowers website. This is not going to help as much for your website rankings. If you do this sort of thing a lot, it can actually hurt your site. Many SEO experts are masters at getting links to your site that work for you. Their services are aimed at simplifying your online marketing with their professional services. SEO consultants can help teach you about the basics of search engine optimization, and how you can use it to get ahead.
