E Marketing Strategies

Social Media - Leading the List of Online Priorities 2010

2010-02-09T23:52:00.000-08:00

According a report published by MarketingProfs, Social media is leading the list of Online Marketing and overall interactive strategies of 2010. The report is based on a survey from ISITE Design.

The report says that most companies plan to invest heavily in social media. Nearly 73.5% consider Social Media as part of their online strategy. Among other online priorities, Web analytics scored second with 60.5% of companies planning to give it more priority in the year 2010, closely followed by user experience (59.5%), and rich media (49.5%).

Source: MarketingProfs. Click here to read the complete report.

Google Warns Goojje

2010-02-09T03:11:00.000-08:00

Google has warned a Chinese search website to stop using their logo that bears a close resemblance to their own. The home page of the website in question (Goojje) is adorned with a Google-styled logo along with the very familiar paw print logo of Baidu Inc. Goojje provides search and social networking services. Goojje has already stopped using its original URL, www.goojje.com and all the visitors typing in the address are now getting automatically redirected to dierqi.com, though the content appears to be the same.

Social Media Ruling The Trend

2010-02-04T21:24:00.000-08:00

Social media is the new buzz in SEO fraternity. Started as a platform to get connected and be social, the media is now extensively used by SEOs and Internet marketers to promote the websites and increase their online visibility.

Today, social media optimisation & marketing has become an integral part of Internet marketing and web promotion strategies.

SMO is also an excellent source to acquire theme based back links for any website. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social networking sites can bring loads of traffic to your website and are immensely useful resources to spread word of mouth publicity.

Social media is going to rule the Internet marketing industry in 2010 and we, as Internet marketing strategists, need to exploit its potential to extract the maximum benefit for the websites we promote.

Human Emotions and Landing Pages

2009-12-22T22:51:00.000-08:00

I just came across a very good article talking about how human emotions motivate the online business. Of course we do not always think or act rationally. Many, if not all, of our decisions depend on our intuitions and emotions. After all we are all humans, aren’t we?

This fact that our actions are based on our fundamental emotional motivations has provided a new area of consideration to us (Internet Marketers) for building and optimising the landing pages. As defined by Direct marketers Bob Hacker and Axel Andersson, several key copywriting concepts that motivate people to act: fear, greed, guilt, exclusivity, anger, salvation, or flattery. Not one of these motivations is rational -- all of them are rooted in our fundamental and unchanging emotional nature.

So the next time you prepare an Internet marketing plan for a website, along with the robots, take human emotions also into consideration.

YouTube URL Shortener - A Welcome Step

2009-12-22T02:36:00.000-08:00

YouTube, being one of the most popular video sharing sites getting much exposure in Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, its introduction of URL shortener for sharing links is a welcome step in the Internet world.

With YouTube's URL shortener, you are sure that the links you are clicking are actually YouTube links. Another added benefit of this feature is that it saves precious character counts when you are sharing links on sites like Twitter that allow limited character counts.

Do You Really Need SEO for Your Website?

2009-05-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

I have often come across clients / companies, who are doubtful or rather a bit scared to implement SEO for their websites. They are concerned about the delayed results achieved by the process. (We SEOs know that search engine optimization is not a rocket science and it takes a lot of efforts and patience to see the sites ranking on top search pages. Don’t we?) But people who are unaware of the potential of SEO are always reluctant to adopt organic SEO for their websites. Rather, they are happy with the instant results obtained through PPC.

PPC is good. In fact, while preparing an integrated Internet marketing strategy for any project / website, I always consider PPC as a major point as it helps your online business going until your SEO gains momentum.

But, one should never ignore the fact that SEO can do wonders for any business. The latest data of Hitwise shows that the share of paid search traffic has declined by 26% in the past year as compared to other traffic sources. But this should not be taken as a drop in paid search traffic. Rather the opposite is true. In fact, organic search traffic has surpassed that of paid search and the slice of paid search share has become smaller.

So, what do you think now? Does your website really need SEO? Would you really like to lose that major chunk of traffic coming through organic search?

Just rethink……

SEO Tip - Deeplinking

2009-05-19T00:13:00.000-07:00

Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Are You Fulfilling the Purpose of Your Website?

2009-05-18T00:59:00.000-07:00

Life has a purpose and so a website has. The purpose of your website depends solely on what you want to achieve through it. Let's examine concepts behind various types of Web sites as you look for the model that fits your organization the best.

Advertisement
Prospect Generation
Direct Sales
Business-to-Business Sales
Customer Support
Education

Whatever be the purpose of your website, it can only be achieved when it reaches to maximum number of prospects. And this can only be achieved when your website ranks well at the top result pages of the Search Engines. Your website must mark its presence in the search results otherwise it is possible that you are offering best of the services and products, but still you can not sell them because there is no web traffic. When your website ranks high on SERPs, it attracts maximum online visitors, thus helping achieve your business / website goals.

To be ahead in the competition of the online world, your websites needs to be search engine friendly and here SEO comes into picture. SEO can make or break the purpose of a website. It’s the job of a good SEO consultant to keep a website ahead of its online competitors thus fulfilling its purpose.

As an SEO consultant, I have worked on number of websites with varied purposes, but the most sites I have come across are sites seeking to generate business and revenue through online world.

You would not like it at all that you lose the major chunk of your business that is sure to come from the Internet. To succeed, a website must be a carefully targeted, wisely-designed, pay-its-own-way tool which adds to the bottom line. In such cases, Internet marketing experts advise to implement SEO strategies so that your website can also rank well at the top Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). SEO can help you reach to your new prospects and increase revenue from your website through online sector.

Through search engine optimization you are earn big revenues. You can seek advise from an Internet Marketing expert and SEO consultant who can guide you on preparing and implementing an SEO strategy that will work for the Search Engines. He / She can also guide you on other aspects of website designing, usability and accessibility to make your website more Search Engine friendly and usable.

So, to fulfill the purpose of your website, make it Search Engine friendly, implement ethical SEO techniques and see the web traffic flowing to your site.

Class C IP and Its Importance in SEO

2009-05-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

IP addresses hold a very important place in the world of SEO and Internet Marketing. It’s a major factor that decides the fate of the ranking of any websites on the top Search Engine results pages (SERPs). Before preparing the SEO strategy of any website, any SEO consultant should also consider the IP address. IP addresses also play a major role in the backlink strategy of websites.

Before discussing Class C IP and its importance in SEO field, let me first describe IP address in brief.

What is an IP Address?

Every machine or computer on the Internet has a unique identifying number which is known as an IP Address. A typical IP address looks like this:

216.27.61.137

IP addresses are normally expressed in decimal format as a dotted decimal number (like the one shown above). This is done to make it easier for us (humans) to understand and remember the address. But computers communicate in binary format (0 and 1). Thus the same IP address in binary format would look like:

11011000.00011011.00111101.10001001

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IP addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 28 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 232 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values!

Classes:

Five classes of IP ranges are available: Class A, Class B, Class C, Class D and Class E. Each class allows for a range of valid IP addresses. All IP addresses are broken down into 4 sets of octets that break down into binary to represent the actual IP address.

The octets are used to create classes of IP addresses. The octets are split into two sections: Net and Host. The Net section always contains the first octet. It is used to identify the network that a computer belongs to. Host (sometimes referred to as Node) identifies the actual computer on the network. The Host section always contains the last octet. There are five IP classes plus certain special addresses:

Class A - IP addresses with a first octet from 1 to 126 are part of class A. The other three octets are used to identify each host.

Class B - IP addresses with a first octet from 128 to 191 are part of this class B addresses. Class B addresses also include the second octet as part of the Net identifier.

Class C - Class C addresses are commonly used for small to mid-size businesses. IP addresses with a first octet from 192 to 223 are part of this class. Class C addresses also include the second and third octets as part of the Net identifier. The last octet is used to identify each host.

Class D – Class D IP is used for multicasts and has a first bit value of 1, second bit value of 1, third bit value of 1 and fourth bit value of 0. The other 28 bits are used to identify the group of computers the multicast message is intended for.

Class E - Class E is used for experimental purposes only.

Below is a listing of these addresses:

Class Address Range Supports

Class A 1.0.0.1 to 126.255.255.254 Supports 16 million hosts on each of 127 networks.
Class B 128.1.0.1 to 191.255.255.254 Supports 65,000 hosts on each of 16,000 networks.
Class C 192.0.1.1 to 223.255.254.254 Supports 254 hosts on each of 2 million networks.
Class D 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255 Reserved for multicast groups.
Class E 240.0.0.0 to 254.255.255.254 Reserved.

Importance of Class C IP in SEO?

To increase the backlink of websites, in the era of spam, many webmasters started creating multiple website on same server, linking each other thus trying to improve the ranking of the websites on the SRPs.

Search Engines identified this issue and started avoiding links coming from similar IPs. As it is very easy to get different D class IPs on same server, Search Engines also started avoiding Links from same C Class IP. So when Search Engine find that you’ve a link coming from same C Class IP on which your website is located, the backlink will not have any importance.

So for a successful backlinking strategy, it is always advisable to get links from websites on different C class IP. If you source more than one link from same C class IP, you will get benefit of only one link. Please note that you will not get penalized if you’ve link coming from same C class IP, but you’ll not get any advantage either.

So if you are doing the link exchange specially if you don’t have your own server, do check if the person you are linking to has a different C class IP than yours.

Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?

2009-01-23T02:43:00.000-08:00

This is a very fast moving world and the technology is evolving every moment. This is a techno era and to keep pace with the ever evolving technology, we need to keep pace with the changing time.

When we create a websites, we do the cross browser compatibility check. But how many of us (please note the %age) really check the mobile friendliness of our site? We are happy, if our site is compatible with multiple browsers. But have you ever thought about those users who access your website from their mobile phones? Today, when the whole world has become mobile and nothing is static, we can not afford to forget the importance of mobile browsing.

One more reason to make your website mobile friendly is that in countries like India, where internet penetration is low, mobile penetration is quite healthy at almost 300 million. Estimates show that the number of web-enabled phones outnumber the number of PC internet users in India.

So as a webmaster, if you want maximum exposure for your website, don’t forget to make your website mobile friendly.

Google Webmaster Tools Now in 40 Languages

2008-12-17T02:57:00.000-08:00

Google has recently launched Webmaster Tools in 14 new languages. This makes the total language support count to 40. The tool has been launched in languages like Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese (Portugal), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Webmaster Tools, with the launch in these languages, joins other Google products like Google.com, AdWords, Gmail and Toolbar to reach the 40 Language Initiative.

10 Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank

2008-08-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

Install the Alexa toolbar and set your website as your homepage.
Put up an Alexa rank widget on your website.
Encourage your friends, your site visitors and fellow webmasters to use the Alexa toolbar.
Always place your URL in webmaster forums that will get webmasters to visit your website.
Create a webmaster tools section on your website and write content that is related to webmasters.
Get Dugg or Stumbled which will bring massive numbers of visitors to your website and will have a positive impact on your Alexa Rank.
Buy banners and links for traffic from webmaster forums and websites.
Develop quality content to attract and maintain a large audience.
Promote your content on social networking websites and webmaster forums.
Great link-worthy content will help to increase the website traffic organically and passively increase your Alexa rank.

Now you have ten ways to boost your Alexa Rank and increase your site’s monetization potential.

Alexa Ranks – How Worthy They Are?

2008-07-28T01:07:00.000-07:00

As an Internet Marketing Consultant, I have come across many clients who are very much concerned about the Alexa ranking of their as well as their competitors’ websites. As a professional Search Marketer, this is my personal opinion that Alexa ranking hardly matters when the success of internet marketing plan for any website is measured.

What is Alexa and Alexa Rank?

Alexa.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Alexa is a website that provides information on traffic levels for any website and the Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

The schema of Alexa ranking is based on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

This traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical data that is gathered from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. This ranking is a combined measure of page views and visitors and is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time. A lower Alexa number means a greater level of traffic. Alexa simply provides a rough snapshot of what is going on and does not mean that much by itself.

Problems with the Alexa Rank

The main problem with Alexa ranking is that it is heavily skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster or web savvy audiences because of the fact that they are much more likely to have installed the Alexa toolbar than the websites whose visitors are unaware of Alexa. This makes Alexa a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential.

But unfortunately, Alexa is still heavily used by webmasters and ad networks while measuring the value of advertising on any website and is considered as a central element in site monetization strategies.

However, if you really want to increase your Alexa rank, watch this space for the next post where I shall explain the methods to get started with Alexa and give you some handy tips and strategies that can be used to increase your Alexa Rank dramatically in the short and long run.

Analyse Your Competitors for a Successful Internet Marketing Strategy

2008-07-17T03:23:00.000-07:00

Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management, as defined in Wikipedia, is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.

Competitor Analysis is an important element of the strategic internet planning process. Like any other successful marketing plan, an internet marketing plan also requires thorough and in-depth analysis of the competitors to be successful to generate the desired online business. It is an essential component of the corporate strategy and thus requires a very systematic approach to prepare a robust internet marketing plan.

As a search marketer, you should be aware of your competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, and their overall online activities. Very often, competitive intelligence and analysis is taken for granted in the search industry and the search marketers rarely spend any time getting to know the competitors. You can learn a lot of things by studying your competitors and pick up new tricks and techniques from them. A complete competitor analysis would study in detail all aspects of each of your competitor's internet marketing strategy. Analyzing your competitors will help you to understand their strategy, their tactics, their level of success, etc. which is very crucial to the success of your online marketing strategy. One good method of studying your competitors is by signing up for their emails, read their content and get to know their sites.

Google alerts are good tools to keep a track of your competitors. These alerts notify you when something changes for your competitive keywords as well as when you and your competition are mentioned online.

Why Competitors’ Analysis?

Competitor analysis has various important roles in your internet marketing strategy. It helps you to:

understand your competitive advantages/disadvantages relative to your competitors
generate understanding of competitors’ past, present (and most importantly) future strategies
provide an informed basis to develop strategies to achieve competitive advantage in the future

Questions To Be Asked While Analyzing The Competitors:

The following is a useful list to keep in mind:

Who are our competitors?
What threats do they pose?
What are the online activities of our competitors?
What are the objectives of our competitors?
What internet marketing strategies are our competitors pursuing and how successful are these strategies?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors?

Competitors’ analysis is not a one time thing but a regular process that is needed to stay ahead. The industry is always changing and so you need to do constant research and study of your competitors to stay on the top.

Integrating SEO with SEM

2008-07-14T02:12:00.000-07:00

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is a division of online marketing that seeks to promote any website by increasing its online presence and/or its visibility in Search Engine Result Pages. Some of the methods or techniques which are being used for SEM are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), sponsored or paid listings (PPC), online banner advertisement, affiliate marketing etc.

Technically, banner advertising and affiliate marketing are parts of Internet Marketing instead of SEM but I have included these under SEM because of the fact that usually affiliates adopt general SEO techniques to rank the affiliate websites in the organic or natural search listings. Similarly online banner advertisement relies majorly on the number of visitors and page visits to any website.

In this post, I am not going to explain the techniques but would focus on the fine line which differentiates SEO from SEM and the methods which can help us to integrate any SEO strategy with marketing plan to generate more online business.

SEO is actually one element of SEM which means optimisation of any website to make it Search Engine friendly and get higher rankings in the organic search results. Various website designing, web architectural, web usability, accessibility, technical and content guidelines are followed to make a search engine friendly website. But this much is not enough for a complete SEO process. Unique title and meta tag creation, off page optimisation and other techniques are involved to configure the website with the targeted keywords and rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP)s.

The common notion is that the SEO task is accomplished once the rankings are achieved for the desired keywords. But this is not true as higher ranking in the SERPs do not ensure increased business. There are various other factors which decide users’ clicks and/or conversion rate of any website and hence the fate of its online business. Following list explains how we can increase clicks to a website and enhance its online business:

1. Keywords: Keywords are the foundation of any successful SEM plan. Proper and thorough keyword research helps in laying a solid foundation to the plan. The chosen keywords must satisfy two major criteria: relevancy and popularity. There can be numerous search phrase related to the theme of any website which can draw innumerable visitors to the site. But here the question is conversion and not the junk traffic. Increased traffic does not always mean increased sales. One should always keep in mind the geo location, demographics etc. while choosing the keywords. Also the keywords should be able to convey the purpose of the webpage. If the page is selling any product, then the search phrases should be able to tell the web surfers the actual purpose of that page.

Let us take the example of an ecommerce website that is selling only handmade paper. If generic words like paper, handmade paper etc. are used as the keywords, then the possibilities of driving more traffic are much higher. But how many of the clicks will get converted when a user looking for information on paper or handmade paper finds out that the site is selling handmade paper? In this case if the keywords buy handmade paper and/or handmade paper supplier are used, then the conversion rate would be much higher.

2. Title and Description: Title tags are one of the most important SEO ranking factors. But it is one of the most important conversion factors also. If the title is simply a set of keywords separated with delimiters, then it fails to attract the potential buyers. The title and description tags of a website should be sale statements with the strategic placement of the keywords.

3. Landing Pages: Do not ever mislead the visitors and send them to a wrong landing page. Many times, pages like about us, contact us sections optimized for potential keywords to increase the range of keywords. This leads to a big disaster for the SEM plan of any website as the users get irritated when they are looking for some good handmade paper bags and eventually land on the contact us page of handmade paper bags manufacturer.

4. Irrelevant Textual Content: A lot of textual content on the pages merely to accommodate the keywords is not advisable. This confuses the visitors and diverts their attention. If you really want to say something, then only add unique and relevant content on your page else restrict the page content to short and crisp text strictly related to the theme of the page.

SEO and SEM go hand in hand and we can not consider them in isolation as the final aim of the internet marketing plan for any website is to increase the online visibility and the business. So don’t just do SEO for your website, do SEO in integration with SEM to achieve the goals on a broader canvas.

Link Baiting

2008-07-10T05:16:00.000-07:00

Link baiting is simply getting more and more inbound links with a twist. Rather than hunting out links link baiting brings the links to you through unique and popular site content. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”. Link baiting involves production of link worthy content, video or images, which in turn generates massive amount of one-way inbound links.

Link baiting has been long time regarded as black hat technique, but if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations. Content can be both: white-hat as well as interesting enough to generate buzz. Floating information or ideas that people talk about is a sure-shot method to generate links.

You don't have to be a big brand or have a lot of money to create link bait. Many people have created link bait on purpose and many have created link bait without even knowing it. For search marketers, the techniques, if handled properly in an ethical manner, can be quite helpful in producing good quality one way links.

How Does Link Bait Work?

Link Baiting is just like fishing. You send out bait (content) in the pond (the internet) and patiently wait for a bite (linkback). The article is the bait, and the link is the catch. A properly created page can capture huge links on its own with little to no effort from you.

The Hooks

Before any real ‘fishing’ can take place you need a link baiting hooks and they come in all shape and sizes:

News Hook
Resource Hooks
Contrary Hook
Attack Hook
Humor Hooks

1. News Hooks

For this to work you almost exclusively have to break the ice on the matter, that means to you have to be the first to break the news. Whether it’s the latest gadget or the latest Britney Spears goof, you have to be the first and the news should be big enough to generate enough curiosity.

2. Resource Hooks

Resource hook is more of an informational page. Do some research and build a great, unique and remarkable article in a field on which you’re an expert. It’s important you know what you’re talking about or else you’ll get trolled.

3. Contrary Hooks

Contrary hooks are when you contradict someone else’s statement. It should be about someone prominent in the industry and it should be controversial.

4. Attack Hooks

Attack hooks are next level of contrary hooks where you launch personal attacks on people taking the debunking of theories to the next level.

5. Humor Hooks

This is the easiest type of link bait, just blog about a funny video or story and you can get some major exposure. But it isn’t as easy as it looks, the niche is really crowded and that means you really need to have something truly funny on your hands and a lot of luck.

10 great Examples of Link Baiting:

Rhea Drysdale - SEO Dream Team
Mixed Markets Top 10 Reasons Why This List Will Be Popular on Digg
SEOmoz Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content
The AfterEllen.com Hot 100 List
SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards
Lifehacker Top 10 iPhone applications
Performancing 10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read (at least once)
Engadget Blu-ray vs HD DVD: State of the Division
2decides 2008 Presidential Election Candidates on the Issues
SingleGrain 301 Useless Facts

Related Links on Link Bait:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/28/golden-rules-of-linkbaiting-principles-strategies-and-effective-rules/

10 Tips to Avoid SEO Spam

2008-07-08T05:21:00.000-07:00

In SEO fraternity, the word Spam is used to describe unethical techniques and practices adopted to boost Search Engine Rankings artificially. These techniques and tactics are a real no no for the Search Engines and the sites adopting these techniques are banned by them being thought of using unethical business practices.

Even the word Spam itself is being used to describe the dark-side and often deceptive side of everything from Email marketing to abusive forum behaviour.

In this post I am listing some techniques which are treated as Spam by the SEs and should always be avoided while promoting any website.

1. Cloaking
Cloaking is the technique that involves serving one set of information to search engine robots or crawlers and an entirely different set of information to the general visitors.

2. IP Delivery
IP delivery is a simple form of cloaking which involves serving targeted/different content to users based on their IP address. If you need to use the techniques in some gelocation specific cases then make sure that Search Bots see the same content as a typical user from the same IP address would see.

3. Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar documents each of which are designed to meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. It is considered SPAM by the major search engines as they see multiple incidents of what is virtually the same document.

4. Mini-Site networks
Mini site networks were designed to exploit a critical vulnerability in early versions of Google's PageRank algorithm. These are very much like leader pages and involve the creation of several topic or product related sites all linking back to a central sales site. Each mini-site is designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine and has its own keyword enriched URL.

5. Link Farms
Link farms are groups of websites all hyperlinked to every other page in the group. Most of the link farms are created through automated programs and are a form of spamming the index of a search engine, also referred as spamdexing or spamexing.

6. Blog and/or Forum Spam
Blogs and forums are amazing platforms for essential communication over the world Wide Web. In some cases, blogs and forums establish high PR values for their documents which make them the targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. Google in particular has clamped down on Blog and Forum abuse.

7. Keyword Stuffing
At one time, search engines were limited to the algorithm that used to rank websites entirely on the number of keywords found on the pages. That limitation led webmasters to stuff keywords everywhere they possibly could. Over use of keywords on a page leads to keyword stuffing and spamming.

8. Hidden Text
There are two types of hidden texts. The first one is the text in same colour and shade as that of the background which makes it invisible to human visitors but not to search robots. The second is the text that is hidden behind images or under document layers. Search engines tend to dislike both forms of hidden text and devalue the pages containing them.

9. Hidden Tags
There are a various types of tags like comment tags which are sometimes used by SEOs to increase keyword density on a page. These should be avoided since they are treated as spam techniques.

10. Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (ie: Wiki, Social Networking and Social Tagging)
A very common form of SEO spam is the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia or social networking and bookmarking sites. Like blog comment spamming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provide an open range for SEO spam technicians.

Many of these exploits might find short-term success though in the long run they are always penalized by the Search engines.

Image Optimization Tips for Search Engines

2008-07-03T00:58:00.000-07:00

With the increase in the impact of visual trends, importance of images on a website and image search has drastically increased. Image search can be defined as query results that are accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users' search queries.

In this post, I have listed few points which will help you to optimize your images for Search Engines and rank them in the image search.

1. Places the images where image search results appear, and are indexable into general Search Engines' contextual results, including:

Major Search Engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki)
Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook)

2. Take original photos, so that you can brand them with your trademark, logo or url. At business listing sites, add your business logo to creates a more significant effect on users’ mind.

3. Use good quality pictures and images, and make necessary resolution adjustments between full size images and thumbnails. Pictures with good contrast tend to work better.

4. Save your photos as JPG files, and other graphic images as GIFs.

5. Give appropriate file names to your images that match and represent the theme. Image names should be descriptive such as mobile-phone.jpg rather than untitled1.jpg.

6. Give appropriate alt tag and title tag to the images.

7. Use clear images as distorted images are not able to speak their agenda.

8. Images should be less weighted as heavy images increase page loading time and also use extra bandwidth.

9. Always specify the width and height of the images when you define an image on webpage. If you don’t mention the same then html parser itself need to consider the image size and it’ll take some extra time to think.

10. If content rich pages are embedded with pictures then they have more chances of ranking for those images and web pages. Such as if you’re providing services then add smiley faces of employees OR if you are selling products then include all products images on site. So add images on to content rich pages.

11. Add map image or link to map from site page. It increases your site usability.

12. On alt tag of map images, add physical address of your business.

13. You can also add testimonials from customers, celebrities’ snaps or award winning snapshots. This will create trust and attract more visitors.

14. Add your logo on press releases and link them to your home page.

15. While submitting your site to directories, add logo to your profile.

16. Upload images to Google Base.

17. Include images and logo into your newsletter (email marketing campaign) and get linked from them.

18. Get more links from clients, partners or B2B sites through images.

19. Use thumbnails (i.e. small size images) instead of large images and get the large images linked from those thumbnails. It will decrease the load time of your web page and also increase its usability.

20. Enable enhanced image search in Google webmaster tools in order to add valuable tag to your image in Google image Search Engine.

21. Link every image as hyperlinked images have much better chances of being included in image searches even if they are linking to themselves.

22. Bookmark your images using social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg etc.

23. Search Engines also look at the text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy so take care of the surrounding text and use related text near the images.

24. Do not exclude your graphic images directory from search robots or limit search engine access to graphic-image files.

25. Don’t use JavaScript code to show up the large size of the image. As search engines still can’t understand JavaScript code completely so never do this.

Image Search Engines:-

http://images.google.com/

http://www.live.com/?&scope=images

http://www.exalead.com/image/results?q=

http://www.pixsy.com/

http://www.picsearch.com/

http://www.altavista.com/image/

http://www.ithaki.net/images/

http://www.graphicsfactory.com/

http://www.ditto.com/

http://pro.corbis.com/

http://www.animationfactory.com/en/

http://www.faganfinder.com/img/ (Specifies all search engines, Stock photographs, graphics and clip-art, photo sharing sites and artwork related images sites)

http://images.search.yahoo.com/

http://www.ask.com/?#subject:img|pg:1

http://www.fastimagesearch.com/

www.fotosearch.com

www.webplaces.com/search

Optimizing Dynamic Websites

2008-07-02T02:06:00.000-07:00

Dynamic content used to be a real obstacle for any Search Engine friendly website. Search Engines did not crawl and index these pages which made optimization of such websites nearly impossible. But now times have changed and so do the Search Engines and their indexing process. Now SEs include dynamically generated pages in their index.

Although Search Engines have started indexing and ranking dynamic websites but some particulars of dynamic pages can still be obstacles to getting indexed. Today most of the websites have some level of dynamic or CMS-managed content which means that you need to follow certain guidelines to avoid major pitfalls and ensure that your dynamic body of work is search engine friendly from head to toe.

Here are some guidelines that help your web pages to be crawled properly by the Search Engines:

Allow Search Engine Robots to Follow Regular HTML Links to All The Pages of Your Website

Search engine robots reach any page by following the links to that particular page. Sometimes it becomes difficult for the search robots to reach all the pages on a dynamic website. You can get an idea of the same by the following example.

Suppose you have a form on your website and you ask people to select their preferred category from a dropdown menu, and then when people submit the form your website generates a page with content that is specifically written for that particular category. Since Search Engine robots are software programs, they don't fill out forms or select from dropdown menus, so there will be no way for them to get to that page.

This problem can be rectified by providing standard HTML links that point to all the dynamic pages. The easiest way to do this is to add these links to your site map.

Set Up an XML Sitemap

If providing static HTML links is not possible, you can use an XML site map to tell search engines the locations of all your pages.

You can tell Google and Yahoo! about your sitemap through their webmaster tools (Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Webmaster Tools).

Keep The Dynamic URLs Short and Tidy

Here are a few guidelines you should follow for your website parameters:

Limit the number of parameters in the URL to a maximum of 2
Use the parameter "?id=" only when in reference to a session id
Be sure that the URL functions if all dynamic items are removed
Be sure your internal links are consistent - always link with parameters in the same order and format

Avoid Dynamic Looking URLs

Not only for Search engines but dynamic-looking URLs are also less attractive to your human visitors. Most people prefer URLs that clearly communicate the content on the page and such pages get more hits than dynamic looking urls.

Static-looking URLs are more likely to receive inbound links, because usually people are reluctant to link to pages with very long or complicated URLs. Also keywords in the URL are one of the factors in Search Engine Ranking Algorithms.

There are many tools available that can re-create a dynamic site in static form and re-write your URLs, if you have too many parameters, to "look" like regular non-dynamic URLs.

De-Index Stubs

Website stubs are pages that are generated by dynamic sites but really have no independent content on them. For example, if your website is a shopping cart for apparels, there may be a page generated for the category “Age 8-10 Skirts” but you may not actually have any products in this category. Stub pages are not only a real no no for the Search Engines but are annoying to searchers also. So, if you can not avoid them, exclude them from indexing using the robots.txt file or robots meta tag.

De-Index Pages With Duplicate Content

While this is not a problem specific to dynamic websites but dynamic sites are the ones which are more likely to face this problem than the static ones. If there are multiple pages on your site with identical or nearly identical content, exclude the duplicate pages from indexing using the robots.txt file or a robots meta tag. Choose the most appropriate and relevant page and exclude the rest.

Since dynamic content is usually timely and useful, more and more webmasters are opting for such websites and Search Engines are ranking them in their result pages. And now you know how to optimize your dynamic website and make it reach its full Search Engine potential so that it can rank well in the SERPs.

Related Posts:

XML Sitemaps

Unlock Online Success with Keyword Research

2008-06-21T01:24:00.000-07:00

Keyword Research is the process of selecting the most appropriate keywords and phrases that can help your visitors to find your website. The keywords and phrases you select to promote your website play a vital role in the online marketing of your business. They can decide the fate of your internet marketing strategy and can make or break your listings in the Search Engine Result Pages. Since the aim of any Internet Marketing plan is not only getting high rankings but to be able to generate maximum business via web. Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords. Therefore, the foremost step in any SEO campaign is identifying the niche target audience and researching what keyword phrases they might be searching in the search engines to locate a site.

Keyword research is the core of SEO campaign and is very much similar to customer research, because you are studying and looking for the words that your potential clients use while searching for your services or products on the Internet. While selecting the keywords and phrases for your website, remember to select search terms that describe your products and services in the most logical, simple and specific way. This will not only ensure higher traffic but also targeted traffic for your site. For any marketing strategy to succeed, it is critical to know your audience and the means to reach them. A certain focus is required which could be location specific, region specific or country specific; it could be business, trade, service, product specific, since we are talking specific audience.

Since keywords are the foundation of Internet Marketing plan for any website, so always consider tapping numerous resources to locate a variety of keywords. Identify the best keywords and phrases that are relevant to the products, services, or information you are promoting. Also focus on the phrases which have high searchability with low completion. I know this is a difficult task, but trust me, the efforts are worth it.

There are various keyword suggestion tools like Google keyword tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Digitalpoint which can be used to research the potential keywords.

LSI and Synonyms: Today, Search engines not only look for the exact keywords but also for their synonyms due to implementation of LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. You can learn more about Latent Semantic Indexing at my previous post.

To make use of LSI for online promotion of your website, use a thesaurus to find terms that are related to your primary keyword. You can visit some good websites like Webreference and Merriam-Webster to get your desired phrases.

So, the whole idea behind the concept of Keyword Research is traffic optimization and not traffic maximization. A good and effective Keyword Research helps in bringing qualified, targeted and focused traffic to your website that leads to a higher rate of sales conversion.

Related Posts:

http://e-marketing-strategies.blogspot.com/2008/06/5-most-effective-tips-on-keyword.html

Establishing Credibility with Returning Visitors

2008-06-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

The main objective of businesses while getting into Search Engine marketing is driving traffic to their websites and getting higher ranks in the SERPs. Full effort goes into driving new visitors to their websites and almost all SEO strategies devised by webmasters revolve around this objective. Perhaps this is the greatest mistake the webmasters and business owners can make. It is a fact that new visitors help in pepping up the traffic influx of a website but one can not ignore the importance of old or returning visitors.

Studies done on online visitors’ behaviour have revealed that for any online transaction or shopping, the deal is closed with the seventh visit. This means that the prospective buyer visits your site for seven times before making any decision and purchasing or moving ahead with your offers. This gives you a very strong reason not to neglect your returning visitors to establish your online business. Credibility and branding plays a major role for your business.

To achieve your goals, you should formulate strategies to bring back old users to your website Apart from catering to new visitors. Retaining users is not as easy a task as it sounds to be. The first and foremost requirement for the same is that your website should have appealing and substantial content. It should be something that users have not read before and which can hold their interest, something that interests them enough to make a return visit, and above all, something that benefits them.
Another step towards generating return traffic is by constantly upgrading your website which can ensure that users will not find your site boring or static. All web users have certain favourite sites which they access frequently for getting information related to their fields of interest. If you can get your site to this level, it'll definitely spell success for your SEO campaign.

You can analyse your web analytics data to analyse customer behaviour who have visited your website. The log files of your website will also provide a good insight into visitor reactions, thus helping you identify pages that are retaining or repelling users. This return traffic will ultimately go on to benefit your campaign in a major way. Use it to establish your credibility and enhance your online business.

Is Your Website Sticky Enough?

2008-06-09T01:35:00.000-07:00

Website stickyness is the ability to keep your website visitors on your website longer and keep them coming back. It is the art of attracting visitors to your site and to keep them around long enough so that you can develop a relationship with them. When you have a real ’sticky’ website, people will spend more time on it, come back often and will bookmark (add to favorites) your site. If your website is not sticky, it’s almost pointless to make any effort to get traffic to it. Website stickyness plays a vital role in the conversion rate. The longer the visitors stay at your site, the better chance you have to sell your product or services to them. Once someone visits your site, if you don’t offer what they want, chances are they won't come back again to your site. One of the best ways to hold the interest of your visitors and bring them back again and again is by giving them a reason to be there in the first place and offer them something of value that can catch their interest. So your main aim is:

To motivate your visitors to spend more time exploring your pages

Persuade potential customers to keep clicking from page to page

Prompt and encourage visitors to return after their first landing

To accomplish the task, the first and foremost thing is to decide the theme and purpose of your website. Stick to the theme of the website and think from the user’s point of view. Tell them what you want to tell but in a manner which is understandable and acceptable by your target audience.

In addition to the products and services, you can also offer your visitors advice, tips or articles on related topics. This helps in getting returning visitors also as your users will use you as a resource and as an expert in your subject area and keep coming back for latest information.

Benefits Of A Sticky Website

You Develop a One-to-One Relationships with Your Visitors: When visitors stick around and browse through your website, you have the opportunity to develop individual relationships with them. This relationship with your visitors plays a crucial role to your long term business success. Building a one-to-one relationship with your visitors enables you to gain their trust. People will only buy from you if they trust you.

Repeat Traffic Means Increased Sales: A sticky website has a higher ratio of repeat visitors which increases their exposure to your products or services - hence more sales. Repeat traffic is the lifeblood of your business.

Performance Through Feedback: A sticky website allows you to obtain valuable feedback from your visitors. By judiciously analyzing and applying this feedback you are able to meet consumer needs.

How to Make A Website Sticky?

The thrust of your website is to create an enjoyable and satisfying experience for your visitors which can be done by implementing the points listed below:

Make Your Website Simple, Attractive and Consistent: Appearance is the first thing noticed by your users when they visit your site. The look and feel of your website sets the tone for their visit. Keep your site simple and consistent with a uniform appearance. Use the same backgrounds, colors, navigation menu, and site logo throughout your pages.

Make The Pages Fast Loading: Visitors tend to leave if they have to wait more than a few seconds for your page to download. If you frustrate them with a long wait, they'll move on to someone else. The best way to increase download time is by eliminating unnecessary and heavy to load graphics. You can also reduce the file size of the images.

Immediately Tell Visitors What You Have To Offer: A sure way to turn visitors away is by not immediately offering them what you've got for them. They want to know now and don't want to hunt for it on your site or click out of your home page to find out. So give them what they want immediately.

Keep The navigation Simple: Make it easy for people to navigate within your site. At all times your visitor should know where they are how they got there. All your pages should have a navigation menu linking to the main sections of your site. Provide a hierarchical "You Are Here" navigator to help visitors orient themselves.

Keep Your Site Fresh with New Content: Update your content as regularly as possible. You should give your audience a reason to return to your site Even if your site is not content-rich, a key to getting repeat visitors is to offer something new when they return — new graphics, new product information, new offers, new article links, new company news, whatever. If you sell products or offer services, updating your online catalogs and product or services pages regularly will let people know you're still active in the business.

Make Your Site Interactive: Interactivity is now the standard rule for top quality sites. Provide your users with ways to interact with your site to make their experience enjoyable. You can add a poll, host a discussion board, or put up an audio version of your latest article. You can also ask for their feedback.

Test your labels and links: Before making your website live, put it through a usability test. Watch a live customer click page by page through your site to see if it's intuitive. It's essential to learn whether the labels you've come up with make as much sense to your audience as they do to you. Also use phrases or call-to-action sentences instead of one-word labels for your active links.

Fine Tune Your Site: Always fine-tune your site after launching it. You can take user’s feedback and behavior to enhance your website. Your website may be perfect from your point of view but this may not hold true for your visitors. They might look for something else or the same thing in a different fashion. Always respect the user’s feedback and work towards delivering them what they want.

In conclusion, you must stay in touch with your target group's needs and format your site in interesting and useful ways. Establish trust in your users and empower them. Although it does take some work on your part but trust me, you will find it's a lot more effective to achieve your goals in an effective manner.

How to Get Listed in DMOZ Directory – The Open Directory Project (ODP)

2008-06-06T23:03:00.000-07:00

DMOZ is the largest and most comprehensive human edited Open Directory of the web. Being listed in this directory definitely help Google rankings, but getting in can take a very long time. This is due to the fact that often webmasters fail to fulfill the criteria and submission guidelines which lead to rejection for submission. Websites must fulfill certain criteria before being submitted in DMOZ. The websites are manually reviewed for quality and relevance.

Although the directory plays very little role in generating traffic as not many people actually use DMOZ for searches. DMOZ listing can improve your search engine rankings and Google Pagerank dramatically. The DMOZ directory data is syndicated throughout hundreds of web directories and even Google uses this data.

As we all know that Page Rank is an integral part of Google's ranking algorithm, and higher PageRank helps in getting higher rankings in Google SERPs. A listing in DMOZ creates two significant backlinks for your website - one from DMOZ itself and one from the Google directory. This also gets your website links from the thousands of small sites which download and use the DMOZ directory.

Now, there are some points to be remembered while submitting the site in DMOZ. It rejects spammy/MFA sites, sites with too many affiliate links and sites without unique content. Another major reason why a site may be rejected is because of the failure to adhere to submission guidelines. If the Title and Description provided in the submission don't follow the Open Directory's guidelines, then the site gets rejected. While submitting a site, it is very necessary to read and follow submission guidelines.
So, how can you submit a website over the DMOZ, this point is worth pondering. According to some editors of DMOZ, it is a 5 step process. These steps are not official DMOZ submission guidelines but these steps may help. Here are those 5 steps…

Read carefully the submission guidelines: The open directory does not include mirror sites, sites with duplicate and illegal content, or sites consisting largely of affiliate links.

Try to choose and submit in the regional section rather than the main one.

Submit in the appropriate category under which your website belongs.

Follow the guidelines while creating the Title and description for submission.

Make the title official: Sometimes a non promotional description works. Experts advise to use business names a titles.

So, follow the steps listed above and get your website listed in DMOZ directory. And yes don’t forget to continue working on your site to get the desired results.

5 Most Effective Tips on Keyword Research

2008-06-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

Keyword research and analysis is the first and foremost task towards an effective SEO campaign. If done correctly, half the battle is won. Expert keyword research is the foundation to a successful SEO campaign.

Real keyword research requires not only research but analysis also. There are so many aspects of keyword research and analysis that can get amazing results and can not be left to chance.

Following are 5 tips for effective keyword research analysis:

Page Specific Keywords

You should always decide the specific keywords for any webpage before starting copywriting for it. Target your niche keywords and phrases for each page and keep them no more than two to three per page to achieve the desired results. You can always go for the long tail keywords but restrict the main search phrases to two to three only.

Country and Region Specific Keywords

Always keep in mind that the search terms should be country specific. Even though a country is English speaking, the terms used for a particular product and object may differ. For instance, UK and USA may have different expressions, terminology and spellings (i.e. colour, personalised). In UK what is known as bespoke is nothing but custom made for USA. So it becomes very important to consider the geo location of your target audience while researching the keywords. This helps in increased traffic and also helps your visitors to identify with you and your website.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

As discussed in my previous post, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a vital element of a successful SEO campaign. Practice LSI while doing the keyword research and developing content the site.

Keyword Analysis

Once the majority of the keyword research has been done for a site page, it’s time to plug those terms into the search engines to determine:
- If it is really the desired niche keyword for that page
- To assess the competitiveness of your keywords. Along with checking the competitiveness of your keywords you should look at the strength of the competition.
- Are the other sites listed for your keywords truly your competitors?
- Are the sites listed for your keyword even related to your industry, products or services?

Ongoing Keyword Research

While you may think that you have completed your keyword research analysis and laid a solid foundation for your SEO strategy, you need to keep monitoring your keywords and tweak as necessary. Keywords can change from month to month as keyword search terms change, genres change. Maintaining ongoing keyword research is essential for best practice SEO.

To be certain of your keyword data, accurate keyword analysis should be performed - and cross referenced - across multiple expert keyword tools.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) - An Integral Part of SEO Copywriting

2008-06-06T03:35:00.000-07:00

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is a technique which allows and helps S search Engines to determine the theme of a page and what the page is all about outside of specifically matching search query text. IT is an Algorithm used by Search Engines which is based on LSA or Latent semantic analysis. LSA is a technique in vectorial semantics.

LSI is the process by which Search Engines infer what a pages is about based on words and phrases other than the official keywords of that particular page by considering the latent semantic content of the text. The idea behind the approach is to minimize keyword stuffing. LSI allows you write about anything without mentioning the keyword more than once or twice.

Latent Semantic Indexing is meant to allow a more natural approach for search engines to view and rank websites. The principles of LSA to determine the content of web pages were used by a small company called Oingo that changed its name to Applied Semantics who developed a search system to determine the relevance of page content for specific advert placement. They called this Adsense. This company was in turn bought by Google in April, 2003, and Adsense used to replace their own system which was still under development. Adsense, then, was not developed by Google, but purchased by them.

LSI is about words, keywords usage and their placement with the page content and form sentences so that Google is able to get an idea what the web page actually wants to convey to the users. The technique helps a page to rank for search phrases related not only to the keywords but their synonyms also. Using the Latent Semantic Indexing concept, a web page about music could also include related words such as radio, mp3 players, ipods and so on. Rather than repeating the same words throughout the site, a wider variety of text and phrases can be used for keywords and search phrases.

If we take the example of "SEO", the LSI algorithm will look for SEO related terms like Search Engine Optimization, Website Optimization, Web Promotion, Search Engine Marketing and so on. This also helps in increasing relevant search results and decrease search engine spam.

A simple method to get an idea of the synonyms and the equivalent words considered by Google for any particular term is to use the tilde (~) in Google search for the keyword. For example, if you search for “Phone”, the first result you get is that of Nokia. IT means that Google considers Nokia as the synonym of phone.

Latent semantic analysis and indexing is used by Google primarily to detect spam to determine the page theme and its relevancy. It is also used to determine the true meaning of homonyms, heteronyms and polysemes. The technique is used to determine the difference by means of analysis of the other words in the text.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Google Adds TV Campaign Analytics

2008-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

Google announced that it was adding TV campaign analytics to AdWords. If you're using the Google TV Ads system you can now get metrics on the performance of those campaigns via Google Analytics.

Here are the metrics that you can obtain on TV Ads:

* Impressions delivered
* Number of ad plays
* Cost
* CPM

My understanding is also that you get to see the ad duration too -- or whether people watched the entire ad. And if you act now . . . Google says it "will cover the cost of creating your TV ad through our Ad Creation Marketplace, up to $2000."

Google TV Ads encroaches on SpotRunner turf and allows contextual targeting, dayparting and demographic targeting. Sophisticated advertisers can also seek to coordinate or integrate their TV Ad creative with their online/search campaigns more readily this way.

Disney World 3D Now Playing In Google Earth

2008-06-05T22:12:00.000-07:00

Disney had made a 3D version of its Florida theme park for Google Earth.

Disney has reportedly gone to great lengths to make this an especially rich 3D experience. You have to have the latest version of Earth and then you navigate to Disney World and click on the golden Mickey Mouse ears.

Source: [http://searchengineland.com/080605-134621.php]

Google To Expand Headquarters At NASA Site

2008-06-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

Internet search leader Google announced plans Wednesday to greatly expand its Mountain View, California headquarters onto a portion of the adjacent National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center, beginning in 2013. Up to 1.2 million square feet of research and development buildings and offices will be built under the 40-year agreement with NASA, a campus-style expansion that would be large enough to accommodate up to 5,000 workers. Google has roughly 20,0000 employees worldwide, with 8,000 working at its so-called Googleplex headquarters slated for expansion.

Google Lease May Extend To 90 Years

The expansion, which is expected to take place in three stages finishing in 2022, will see Mountain View's largest employer build company housing and facilities for such employee amenities as dining, exercise, child care and parking on presently unimproved Ames Research Center land, Google said Wednesday in an announcement. Conference facilities were also slated to be built as part of the expansion, and Google said that some improvements would be made available to NASA workers, such as parking and recreation facilities.

Google real estate and workplace services vice president David Radcliffe viewed the agreement, which would extend to as many as 90 years if five 10-year term extensions were exercised, as an example of Google's commitment to the area, despite the company's rapidly growing business outside the United States. "This long-term lease agreement is a key component of Google's strategy for continued growth in Silicon Valley," Radcliffe said in Wednesday's announcement. "We believe this collaboration between Google, NASA and the city of Mountain View is emblematic of the mutually beneficial partnerships that can be created between the public and private sectors," Radcliffe added.

Under the terms of the agreement Google can choose to extend the initial four decade lease for three 10-year periods, with the option to extend the lease two additional decade-long terms after that.

Expanding On Past Google Joint Projects With NASA

Land appraisals leading up to the agreement determined that the fair market value of the land Google will develop were used to arrive at the initial yearly base rent of $3.66 million Google will pay, although the deal allows for periodic rent adjustments.

In expanding the Googleplex, which presently consists of dozens of mostly single-story and low-rise office buildings, Google will be extending a relationship with NASA that dates back to September 2005, when the two organizations announced an agreement to team up on certain research and development projects.

"With this new campus, we will establish a new era of expanded collaboration with Google that will further enhance our Silicon Valley connections," said NASA Ames director S. Pete Worden. "This major expansion of NASA Research Park supports NASA's mission to lead the nation in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research," Worden added Wednesday.

Once the expansion is complete, Google said its existing office space of some 2 million square feet would be increased to 3 million, according to Radcliffe.

Ames Facility Use Has Drawn Local Criticism

Some local residents have criticized certain aspects of NASA's cooperation with Google, such as last year's $1.3 million per year agreement that gave the search firm's top executives - co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and chief executive Eric Schmidt - the right to land their fleet of planes at NASA's Moffett Field, which is typically closed to private air traffic.

When that agreement was made public last year, Lenny Siegel, then director of a local non-profit group called the Pacific Studies Center, questioned the motives behind the landing rights deal. "If they are doing science missions, that's OK," Siegel said at the time. "If they are doing it just because they are rich and popular, it is not OK," Siegel added.

Siegel, now an employee of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, was more accepting of Google's latest agreement with NASA, which will see more on-site housing for Google workers. "That's the kind of thing people in the community wanted to see: mixed-use and high-tech," Siegel is quoted as saying in a San Jose Mercury News report.

Google To Expand Headquarters At NASA Site

For the past several years NASA has been seeking tenants to rent unused portions of its Ames facility, which it has described as "a world-class, shared-use educational and research-and-development campus," to help with the costs of maintaining the one-time air station, and it said Wednesday that the proceeds from agreement with Google would be used for maintenance, capital revitalization, and upgrades to the property at Ames. When Google begins development there it will join other organizations ranging from universities to start-ups which are presently tenants in other sections of the center.

Joint projects developed from Google's relationship with NASA have included a "NASA" layer within Google Earth, a popular mapping application which the company recently made available through the Web in addition to its installed software version, along with high-resolution images of the moon for its Google Moon program.

Google and NASA have also worked together in a project called Planetary Content, which was formed to make it easier for scientists and researchers to publish planetary information online, and a program to help improve early response to large natural disasters.

Source : http://www.searchengineworld.com/google/3457798.htm

Social Media Optimisation and Marketing

2008-06-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

Just a quick recap of Social Media Optimisation and Marketing

SEO Copywriting

2008-05-31T03:27:00.000-07:00

SEO copywriting as defined in Wikipedia is "A technique of writing on a web page in a way that it can be read and understand by the surfer and it also uses the keywords and keywords phrases targeted for the websites. The purpose of doing copywriting that is SEO centric is to rank highly in the search engines for the given targeted keywords and phrases."

It can also be explained as the technique of writing the text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer or the user, and also targets specific search terms. The challenge lies in creating a content that is both user as well as Search Engine friendly. The purpose of SEO copywriting or Search Engine copywriting is to make a web page that can rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms and also conveys the message to the surfers in an effective and easy to understand manner.

While optimizing the websites, I have come across many situations where you are provided with a readymade website with very little or no content at all with a long list of keywords that are not at all related to the theme or goal of the website. What worsens the situation is that you can not find a single page which talks or deals about the search phrase you are provided with.

Generally, the novice users or users new to the world of Internet fail to understand the actual process of web development and the relationship between website design and Search Engine Optimisation. According to these users, SEO is all about creation and placement of title and other meta tags with stuffing of keywords within the page content. But the fact is that the task of an SEO expert starts right from the designing phase where the potential keywords are identified before content development and deciding the page url.

Search Engines look for genuine and unique content on the web pages that should be related to the search terms and the keywords used in the title and other meta tags. The content on any page should not be misleading for the users and it should reflect the correct picture and idea behind creation of the page. This ensures that the users are getting exactly what they are expected to find on a particular page. Search Engines ensure this by matching the words present in the text of the webpage with that of the page title and meta tags. LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is a technique which helps them to accomplish the task. In this technique, synonyms of the search terms or phrases are also taken into consideration while generating of SERPs.

The task begins right from the designing phase before content development. Thorough keyword research is required for all the individual pages. Once the keywords are identified according to the theme of the page, content is developed with strategic placement of the search terms or phrases within the text and other on page elements. Synonyms of the search terms are also used to maintain the LSI ratio.
The reverse approach can also be taken for content development. In this case, first the target key phrases are identified according to the business, website theme and goal, and then web pages are created that can represent the actual aim of the website.

The URL is or the filename is also decided based on the target keywords to give more emphasis to the potential search terms.

This helps the Search Engines to know that the page is actually about the keywords and the users are provided with the correct information.

SEO copywriting is one of the major factors which decide the ranking of any particular page in the SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. So, it is always a good practice to do SEO copywriting while creating any website or page, so that it can rank well as well as provide genuine and useful information to the users.

Social Bookmarking

2008-05-22T05:29:00.000-07:00

Social marking, as defined in Wikipedia, is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. It is very much different from simple Bookmarking where you save the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. Tagging or saving bookmarks to a public website has become very common now-a-days. Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, Furl, Simpy etc. have become household names.

Social bookmarking dates back just a couple of years, when these sites just began operating. Social bookmarking is particularly useful when collecting a set of resources that are to be shared with others. Anyone can participate in social bookmarking. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you need to register with a social bookmarking site, where you can store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to these social bookmarking sites can easily search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

Social Bookmarking provides an entirely unique way to organize information and categorize your resources. You can assign also use social bookmarking as a networking tool to make social connections with other interested individuals. Tagging information resources with relevant keywords has the potential to change the way how we store and find information. Social bookmarking helps in simplifying the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers and other resources.

The Significance

Social bookmarking gives you the opportunity to express differing perspectives on any topic or information. This process also allows you to connect with like-minded individuals and create new communities also known as folksonomy.

XML Sitemaps

2008-05-21T03:54:00.000-07:00

Few days back, I had published a post on 10 basic thumb rules for SEO success. I got many queries regarding the 7th point i.e. xml sitemap. So I am publishing this post on xml sitemap for those who want to learn more about these sitemaps.

What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform the Search Engines about all the pages on their websites that are available for indexing or crawling. These are basically the tree structure of the website showing the hierarchy of the pages and the clear structure of website architecture and navigation. Usually Search Engine crawlers discover a new page from the links within the site and from other sites. Creation of sitemaps helps in providing this data to the crawlers.

Sitemaps can be of two types: html and xml. Html sitemaps are simple html files containing links to the individual pages of the website.

XML Sitemap

In the simplest form, an xml Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL. These metadata are the last updated or modified date, the change frequency, importance of individual pages, relative to other URLs of the site etc. These are the additional information for the Search Engine crawlers.

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. The file must be UTF-8 encoded and data values in the Sitemaps should be entity escaped. The xml Sitemap must:

Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag

The namespace (protocol standard) should be specified within the tag

A entry must be included for each URL, as a parent XML tag

A child entry must be included for each parent tag

All other tags like , etc. are optional and support for these optional tags may vary among Search Engines.

Another very important aspect to be remembered is that all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com.

A Sample XML Sitemap

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9

http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

http://www.example.com/

2005-01-01

monthly

0.8

A Sample XML Sitemap with All Attributes

      http://www.example.com/

      2008-05-21

      monthly

0.8

      http://www.example.com/page1.html

      weekly

      http://www.example.com/page2.html

      2008-05-21

      weekly

      http://www.example.com/page3.html

      2008-04-20T18:00:15+00:00

0.3

      http://www.example.com/page4.html

      2008-03-21

Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)

You can also provide multiple Sitemap files, but make sure that each Sitemap file you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must not be larger than 10MB. To list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.

In case of multiple Sitemaps creation, you should list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file.

The Sitemap index file must:

Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag
Include a entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag
Include a child entry for each parent tag
The optional tag is also available for Sitemap index files

Syndication Feeds

An RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 or Atom 0.3 or 1.0 feed can also be provided which is generally done when the site already has a syndication feed. Make sure that the RSS feed is located in the highest-level directory. Search engines extract the information from the feed as follows:

field - indicates the URL
modified date field (the field for RSS feeds and the date for Atom feeds) - indicates when each URL was last modified

Use of the modified date field is optional.

Text File

You can provide a simple text file that contains one URL per line. Following guidelines must be followed while creating a text file:

The text file must have one URL per line. The URLs cannot contain embedded new lines

You must fully specify URLs, including the http

Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and add each one separately

The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box)

The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs

The text file should contain no header or footer information

If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap text file using gzip to reduce your bandwidth requirement

You should upload the text file to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl and make sure that you don't list URLs in the text file that are located in a higher-level directory

Location of a Sitemap File

The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. An xml Sitemap located at http://www.example.com/dir1/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://www.example.com/dir1/ but not the ones which include URLs starting with http://www.example.com/dir2/.

So, the Sitemap should always be located under the root directory to include all the pages of the website.

Informing the Search Engines

After creating the Sitemap and placed it on the webserver, the Search Engines that support this protocol must be informed of its location. This can be done by:

Submitting it to the search engine via their submission interface

Specifying the location in the robots.txt file

Sending an HTTP request

The search engines can then retrieve the Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers.

Twitter

2008-05-17T04:29:00.000-07:00

I hope the post on Squidoo was helpful for those who were new to the website. Another very popular website is Twitter. This site also helps in Social Media Marketing. I have compiled some material on Twitter and publishing on this Blog to help you know it better.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing. That doesn’t really tell us very much. Wikipedia says, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or any one of the multitude of Twitter applications now available”.

Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” and allows you to send a small update (limited to just 140 characters) to your followers. The concept is amazingly simple and that is perhaps one of the main reasons why it has caught on like wildfire. The restriction to 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labeled “micro blogging”. A traditional blog is a log of what somebody is up to, but in a richer, more detailed format. One of the key benefits of Twitter is that you can send and receive updates (also called tweets) via your browser, email, instant messaging clients and SMS so you can keep in touch no matter where you are.

Twitter is a Broadcasting Service

Email, Instant Messaging and SMS are all direct messaging systems. You choose the person with whom you would like to communicate and you send them a direct message. Blogs are open broadcasting systems. When you publish a blog post, it will go directly to those people who have subscribed to the RSS feed but it is also available publicly. Twitter is rather like blogging with just an RSS feed. Consider the diagram below:

We have two people, Bob and Betty. Bob can follow Betty, Betty can follow Bob and if they both did that they would be following each other. That is literally all there is to the relationships between people in Twitter. It’s extremely simple and what it produces is a situation like this:

Every time you send out a tweet, all your followers will see it. Unlike blogs, Twitter is a real time broadcasting medium. You update, it is broadcast to your followers, and then it is largely forgotten (but not quite!) When you first join Twitter you have no followers and you are not following anybody else so it can seem pretty lonely.

However, there is much more to it than that! There are now many tools and other web applications that will integrate with Twitter allowing you to broadcast your tweets all over the web even without followers.

Twitter is a Mobile Communication Tool

After you join Twitter you have the option to link it to your mobile phone and / or to your instant messaging clients. By having Twitter accessible on your phone you can both send and receive updates which means that you can stay in touch wherever you are so it is a truly mobile communication tool. This can be a pretty powerful thing.

Socialising with Twitter

Twitter is a social service - you will not get much benefit from it whilst trying to use it alone.

Is This Business or Personal?

I would urge you to stop and think for a moment before you even sign up to Twitter, whether you want to use it for business or personal use or some kind of combination. Twitter was originally used mostly as a fun little tool to just keep up with friends but it has now evolved into so much more than that. If that’s the way you intend to use it and that’s all you want to use it for then just go ahead and sign up and get started.

However, if you have a business or some other online presence then you may be able to use Twitter as a way of communicating with your customers / readers / members etc. If this is the case you need to ask yourself whether you would rather be represented by your business name or your own name.

Consider for example, whether you might want multiple people to use the same account to post updates. For example, several news services are now using Twitter to broadcast the latest headlines and in these cases the Twitter account is under the name of the news service rather than an individual.

How Can Twitter Help My Business?

A lot of people just don’t get Twitter, they don’t see any value in it. Now if you are using it from a purely personal perspective then really, it is nothing more than a time consuming distraction.

The value comes if you have some kind of business / service / organisation that you want to promote. For example, you might have a standard online or offline business, or perhaps you are an artist, musician etc and want to get your work out into the community… Maybe you work for a charity and would like to gain more public awareness of it. There are many reasons why you might want to go looking for an audience beyond just your own friends and family.

It is well known that the more contact you make with a customer, the more likely you are to make a sale. These days it is much more ‘in vogue’ to sell by not selling, rather than doing the hard-push sales pitch. Twitter is a way of doing that. With Twitter you can chat to people in a friendly way and give them nudges and hints about what you’re doing in your world. Look at the benefits:

It reminds them that you exist
It shows them that you are human
It allows you to mention new offers immediately
It allows you to form a more casual relationship

How to Get Twitter Followers?

When you first join Twitter you will have no followers. You can send updates but the only people likely to see them are the people who are currently surfing the public timeline on the Twitter homepage and that moves pretty fast. You aren’t going to get many followers from there! How then, should you get followers?

Ask For Them Directly

If you are creating a personal account just email your friends, tell them about Twitter and encourage them to sign up and then follow you. If you have a business and you have an email list then you could email the list and do a similar thing. If you have some kind of website, access to a forum etc then post a message about it - write a blog post etc.

One word of warning though - if you are approaching this from a purely business perspective then you need to have something to offer your customers. What It means is, if you use your Twitter account to just pitch, pitch, pitch, you will not get many followers. Twitter is not something that can be effectively used as a direct selling medium without adding extra benefits .

Stalk Your Targets

When you start following somebody on Twitter they will get an email telling them of the fact and in that email is a link to your profile. This notification can be turned off but it is on by default and most people leave it on because it is nice to know when somebody starts following you. Human curiosity will result in many of those people checking out your profile and possibly following you back.

This is rather like the strategy of linking to other bloggers if you want them to notice you. You link to them, they see it in their stats and they are curious as to who is talking about them so they check out the link. If they like what they see, they may turn into another reader. The principle is the same with Twitter but there is a caveat here - when they click on your profile, they will see a transcript of your most recent updates. If those updates don’t look interesting or there are none there then not many people will follow you.

This is a tricky situation to get around in the beginning because you have no followers so you feel as though you are talking to yourself.

Networking in Your Niche

Unless you are using Twitter just to hook up with your friends, you probably have some kind of niche that you relate to. Let that niche be Internet marketing. A musician would have his own niche within the music industry, a charity would also have some kind of niche. You get the picture.

The key is to get out there into your niche and network.

Now assume that you have some kind of online presence - whether that is a blog, some other website, an account on Facebook etc. If you don’t, then now is the time to create one! Wherever you present yourself on the Internet you should make your Twitter profile known. This also applies to other social networks.

The idea is to participate in the communities within your niche which naturally draws people to you. There is usually some kind of profile feature - whether its just a link in a blog comment, a forum signature of a fully blown profile such as that on Facebook. Everywhere you go online you have the opportunity to say who you are and when you do so, make sure you tell people where they can find you.

Using Twitter Properly

140 Character Limit / Plain text Only

Twitter updates have a limit of 140 characters. This is to allow them to be easily sent over mobile SMS systems. Twitter has since been coined a ‘micro blogging’ platform due to this reliance on short updates. The updates have to be plain text. You cannot embed HTML or any kind of control codes. The only exception to this rule is links.

Embedding Links into Tweets

Updates must be plain text but the one added bonus that Twitter provides is that it will turn links into hyperlinks. These are no-follow so don’t think you can get backlinks from these! Most links are long and so to keep the tweet size as small as possible Twitter automatically uses the TinyURL service to shorten them. This is automatic - you paste in a full link and Twitter will do the rest.

Don’t be Too Noisy

Keep the incoming Twitter noise to a minimum. Turning that around, you need to make sure that you are not one of those noisy people otherwise you’ll find yourself either being ignored or losing followers. Either way, you will no longer be getting your message across.

What is a good number of tweets? There is no absolute number and it varies according to your audience. Generally speaking, try not to update more than once per hour so in a standard day, that’s probably no more than a dozen.
Occasionally something interesting might happen that tends to cause many more - like the recent fires in California, but dont tweet all day long about mundane stuff.

Don’t be Too Quiet

Let’s not go to extremes though. Twitter is not a service on which you should lurk. If you want to get followers you have to have something to say, and it needs to provide some kind of value - interesting, entertaining, controversial etc. Basically there has to be a reason why people would want to listen to you.
Remember that your personal profile shows a history of all your tweets so if somebody comes to it and it’s just empty, or you only post a mundane update every day or so, why should they bother following you? Yes this can be difficult to do in the beginning when you don’t have many direct followers.

Using Twitter for Marketing

If you are using Twitter to market something, whether that’s a business, a blog, organisation, etc then in addition to the previous guidelines you also need to read this section. This stuff can be the make or break on your Twitter success so pay attention!

The Tao of Twitter by Ed Dale

Ed Dale put together a little video showing what he calls the ‘tao’ of Twitter which is worth watching.

Twitter is Not an IM Client

One of the points that Ed talks about in his video is the danger of using Twitter as an instant messaging system. It shows you how somebody did this recently, albeit accidentally. Look at this image:

If you read the messages from the bottom up you’ll follow along a conversation between two people. If you have your Twitter updates coming in real time, this is very distracting. In all fairness, you can see by the top tweet that this member noticed his error and corrected it shortly after.

At times you will get caught up in a conversation that requires a personal response. If you need to do this then do it sparingly. Placing the @ symbol in front of somebody’s name indicates that this message is for them. For example, @cmiddlebrook . Some tools will even help you out with this by incorporating intellisense so that once you type the @ symbol it will help you find the username of the Twitter member.

However, here’s the thing - personal tweets are still public! Twitter client gives intellisense and highlights personal tweets in a different colour. This makes it easy to forget that it is still public. When you are sending a personal tweet bear in mind that some people who are following you, may not be following the person you are talking to. This means they get only one half of the conversation, and that’s why it can seem so rude.

To offset the problem, if you are going to do this, try to word your tweet in such a way as to allow spectators to have some idea of what you are talking about. That way, they can feel more included in the conversation and it doesn’t seem so rude.

You might also want to try using the direct message system that Twitter provides instead. This allows private messages (still limited to 140 characters) between two Twitter users who are following each other.

Fly on the Wall Conversation

In the tools section of this guide I will show various ways in which you can get other people’s updates from Twitter. Whilst it is possible to get them sent directly to you via email, due to the volume of messages that can generate, most people prefer to use something that is less invasive. For example, you can see updates as popup notifications. you can also see a little number in brackets (6) that shows there are six new tweets to see. But you can choose not to read these if you want to.

Most people do not read all the tweets that come in. Many of the people are not in the same timezone as you are so they miss a lot of their tweets anyway.

This is how Twitter differs from direct communication methods like email. When somebody sends you an email you feel somehow obligated to respond if it is a personal message. If you are receiving an email from somebody because you are on their ‘list’ then as Ed says in the video, your defenses are up. But when you see people like Ed twittering about his latest Internet marketing products you can choose to completely ignore them if you want to. There’s no pressure.

The True Value of Twitter for Marketing

Of course, another key point is that just seeing Ed’s tweets come up now and then just lets you know that he’s out there, he’s doing something. Sometimes he’s out swimming with his dog. This shows that he’s a human too and not just some guy trying to sell you something.

Trust is such an important factor in today’s markets. We hate sales letters, we don’t trust salesmen and marketers. We think most advertisements are full of hype. Twitter allows you to expose the person that you are. It slowly allows you to build trust with your audience and this can have a massive impact further down the line.

If you have anything at all to market, Twitter helps you build your brand and promote yourself without direct email, without a sales letter, without any kind of sales pitch at all. If you don’t like the hard sell, then start using Twitter!

Don’t Use Twitter Only for Self-Promotion

Of course, there are some people who DO like the hard sell and they will try to use Twitter as another avenue for selling. This is a big mistake folks. The beauty of Twitter is that it is personal, it can be fun and hard sell messages can interrupt the experience and seem incredibly out of place.

Even if you promote yourself in a gentle way, don’t overdo it. You need to intertwine your promotional messages with the rest. Sometimes you click on people’s profiles and all you see is a stream of ‘New Blog Post” tweets. Really, you can get that just from their RSS, their Twitter account becomes pointless.

Remember that even though Twitter is real time, your personal history is saved on your profile. It’s worth looking at it now and then to see how it looks to an outsider. Would you follow yourself?

Twitter Tools | Platform Specific

The Twitter home page is rather limited and of course is only available via a browser. In this installment the first list tools specific to mobile devices, Windows based PC’s and Macs. After that a list of Firefox plugins.
The tools are listed alphabetically within each section, the ordering does not represent any kind of ranking.

Mobile Tools

jTwitter - A Java application that you install on your phone. You can leave it on all the time without fear of incurring data charges.

Pocket Tweets - A web based Twitter client for the Apple iPhone.
ThinCloud - Post to Twitter from your iPhone. It’s very finger- and eyeball-friendly, much more in fact than other iPhone apps. It’s got huge buttons and a friendly graphical interface

TinyTwitter - TinyTwitter works or any Java enabled device and allows you to avoid the SMS fees from being incurred by having multiple tweets going to and from your phone.

Twapper - If you wish to get Twitter updates to your mobile phone you can become overrun by messages.

Twapper is an alternative that allows you to monitor your feed from a browser and it is designed for mobile browsers (but can be used by any browser as well). In addition, Twapper integrates with 30 Boxes, an online calendar.

Windows Tools

triQQr - An oddly named client from Germany. Not much information about features.

TwitBox - This desktop client has many features that I have not seen elsewhere, such as support for multiple Twitter accounts.

Twitterlicious - A Twitter client with some nice features including highlighting of new updates, and lots of keyboard shortcuts to make it much faster to use.

Twitteroo - A Desktop client for Twitter. Lots of nice features and customisation options.

Mac Tools

Twidget - A Dashboard utility to allow you to update your Twitter status, but does not show your timeline.

Twitgit - A rather simple application allowing Twitter access from the Dashboard.

Twitteromatic - A Mac tool that will post all sorts of information to your Twitter account automatically. For example, weather status, word of the day, lotto numbers, and many more.

TwitterPost - Has some unique features such as avatar caching for faster browsing, Growl support, and in built support for iTunes.

Twitterrific - One of the more widely used Mac clients. This is a stand-alone application with a small desktop footprint and boasting features such as highlighting of unread tweets, audio notification, keyboard shortcuts and lots more.

Multi-Platform / Others

gTwitter - A GTK+ based Twitter client for Linux.

Snitter - A Windows / Mac application based on the new Adobe AIR platform. This has a great many features and has been generating quite a bit of buzz lately.

Spaz - Another client based on the Adobe AIR platform. This one is open source.

Firefox Plugins

For users of the Firefox browser, there are a few nice plugins to try.

TweetBar - A sidebar for Twitter that works in both Firefox and Flock. This takes up a permanent part of your screen real estate and if you have another application running in the sidebar (I do), they can’t both run at the same time.

TwitBin - Another sidebar plugin for Firefox.

TwitterBar - This plugin is very handy if you like to tweet about web pages you are currently browsing. This will add a tiny icon into your Firefox address bar that, when clicked, will send an update containing everything in the address bar. The cool thing is that in addition to the web address you can type in additional text which is appended to the tweet as a note.

TwitterFox - Shows you a popup notification when new tweets come in and shows a number in brackets in your status bar showing any that are unread. Click on that to expand the timeline. Very discreet and efficient. Also highlights personal messages, and uses member name intellisense. I use this plugin and I love it.

TwittyTunes - This is a sibling of the popular plugin FoxyTunes. It integrates with a number of music players and lets you easily tweet what you are currently listening to.

Twitter Tools | Web Applications

Productivity / Useful Apps

LoudTwitter - Publishes a daily post on your blog containing a digest of all your tweets of that day.

Remember the Milk for Twitter- Remember the Milk (rtm) is a popular GTD web application. By adding the rtm Twitter member as a friend you can send commands to your account via the Twitter interface. This is particularly useful if you are using Twitter by SMS when you are out and about and you only have your mobile phone and no Internet access.

RSS2Twitter - Allows any RSS feed to be fed to a Twitter account. Useful if you want to keep track of blog updates when you’re mobile perhaps.
ServerMojo - Monitors your web server and will send you update notifications via Twitter.

SugarStats - If you are diabetic then check out SugarStats. This site allows you to monitor your sugar levels and gives you all sorts of graphs and charts. Plus you can send in your data via Twitter.

TwitterDigest - Twitter Digest lets you read Twitter updates in a more manageable fashion. Just pick the usernames you’d like to generate a digest for, and you will see all updates made by them during the past full day.

TwitterFeed - Automatically feeds your blog posts through to Twitter. Very handy if you post a lot.

Twitterment - A search engine for Twitter.

TwitterNotes - Make notes using Twitter and tag them for later use.

Twitticious - This little application will allow you to setup an automatic import of links from any Twitter timeline (even the public one) into a Delicious account for later tagging.

Map Mashups

There are so many web applications that are a mashup of Twitter and map software such as Google Maps Etc.

GeoTwitter - Fetches the most recent updates from the public timeline once per minute and displays them on an interactive map.

Twitter Atlas - I couldn’t really get this to work so somebody please enlighten me as to what it is supposed to do!

TwitterEarth - Shows you the location of live tweets but this is one of the prettier apps of its type in my opinion.

TwitterMap - You can search for any location in the world and see in detail, all the Twitter profiles that are registered there. Search is a bit slow but once it comes up you can use the usual map tools to zoom in and move around.

TwitterVision - Brings up selected Tweets in real time as they are posted. You can click on their profile, links within the tweet if there are any and you can even click a like/dislike button to say what you thought of it.

Just for Fun

Mobypicture - With Mobypicture instead of typing where you are or what you’re doing you can show your friends real-time. Just plug in your Twitter details, send a photo+text to your Moby address, either from your phone or normal email client, Mobypicture automatically posts the text and a link to the photo to your Twitter account.

Swotter - "A new kind of talking book". Swotter is a unique application that reads books to the world via Twitter! Check it out here.

TweetVolume - Type in some words or phrases and see how often they appear in Twitter.

Twiddeo - Twitter + Video = Twiddeo. Don’t just tell people what you’re doing, show them!

Twitstat - Monitors the updates from any users following the Twitstat account on Twitter. The Twitstat collects data about the updates and allows you to get various stats such as the most active users for the last few days.

Twitter Confessional (Possible Adult Content!) - Forgive me, for I have sinned in 140 characters or less… This is quite funny - it allows you to send tweets anonymously which appear in this profile. There is a small amount of spam on there but it’s mostly sexual confessions! If the receiver is open minded it’s quite funny, if not, it might be offending.

TwitterBuzz - Shows an aggregated view of all the domains that people are linking to via Twitter. However it’s not that accurate because the top domain is tinyurl which of course is integrated into Twitter to shorten long urls. Still interesting though.
Twitter Mosaic - Very creative pictures made just using Twitter avatars. Check out this Casablanca example.

Twitterholic - A ‘top users’ page showing the top 100 Twitter users based on either the most amount of followers, friends or updates.

Hacking Twitter

On the surface Twitter seems so simple and yet there are a load of cool things you can do with it.

The reason you can do so much cool stuff with Twitter and the reason that so many mashups / hacks are coming out is that Twitter has an open API that allows developers to build apps around, much like Facebook.

Pimp Out Your Twitter Profile

Once you start to get the hang of Twitter, you can make yourself stand out from the crowd by adding some unique touches to your profile. To get started go to your Twitter home page and click on the ’settings’ link at the top.

Set Your Bio

From your settings page there are a couple of things you can do here. First of all you can set the 'More Info URL'. This link appears in your profile page and is a do-follow link. Twitter profiles tend to rank rather highly in Google so this counts as a quality backlink.

Next you have your 'One Line Bio'. You only have 160 characters here so you need a short, snappy description about what you are all about.

Lastly you can set your Location. One option you’ll see down the bottom of this page is 'Protect my Updates'. If you are trying to gain exposure for something via Twitter then this should not be checked because it means that people have to obtain your permission in order to follow you. However this could be useful for a private Twitter account that functions as part of kind kind of paid membership perhaps.

Set a Unique Profile Picture

Arguably the most important thing is to set your avatar. Every time you send an update the image you set here is displayed. Also, your avatar will appear on the profiles of anyone who is following you. By having a distinct avatar that stands out (or at least something unique) you are far more likely to get clicked on by intrigued users.

If you have profiles on other Social media sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon etc then I suggest that you use the same picture for all of them for this reason.

Alter the Design of your Profile Page

The default Twitter colour is a bright sky blue but you can change all of that under the 'design' link. You can upload a picture but this doesn’t work all that well because it places the picture in the top left corner of the page and doesn’t allow you to stretch it or center it. You can tile it which is ok for some graphics but not for others.

Funky Twitter Mashups

Twitter Via Email

EmailTwitter is a simple Twitter gateway that allows you to send updates via email. This is useful because it allows you to send updates via SMS without incurring the usual fees. Very nice.

Send Emails from Twitter

So you can Twitter via email so of course the reverse must be possible right? Why on earth would you want to send an email from Twitter? Because you can! Feed your inner geek with this cool Twitter hack from Lifehack.org.

Use Twitter for Reminders

TwitterTimer is a special user that can send you reminders. Send a direct message in the format “d timer ” for example “d timer 30 check Caroline’s blog” and in 30 minutes time it will send you a message to check my blog.

Note Taking With Twitter

So you spend far too much time on Twitter and an idea pops into your head, what to do? You could fire up Google Notebook or similar, or you could stay right where you are and makes notes from your Twitter account to retrieve later. TwitterNotes allows you to make notes, and tag them.

Leave Twitter Voice Messages

Jott is a service that allows you to call a number and leave voice messages that get propagated to various computerised services. Jott Links is an extension that supports include Twitter so you can tweet in actual speech, rather than text.

Twitter / SecondLife Mashup

SecondLife is a virtual world which is entirely driven by user created content. Anyway, for the techies amongst you you might be interested in these three twitter apps that have been created.

Twitter / Outlook Mashup

If you are a frequent user of Microsoft Outlook then you may prefer to access Twitter directly within Outlook rather than using a separate client. OutTwit allows you to do just that.

Twitter / Skype Mashups

If you are a Skype user you can send tweets from your Skype account. See Twitter4Skype. Also, an application called Twype allows you to pull in a Twitter feed and use that as your Skype mood.

Twitter Groups

Twitter Groups is a third party service that offers functionality sorely needed by Twitter (and indeed many other social networks). One of the problems that I alluded to in the earlier parts of the guide are that you need to decide whether you want your Twitter account to represent your personal or business life.

Of course it’s never that simple is it? See the trouble is that you may have close friends and potential clients following the same account. How then do you tailor your tweets to the audience without alienating some of them? You can’t with Twitter in its current form.

Twitter Groups allows you to sort the people that follow you into groups and then send updates to just a particular group. Personally I think a simple tagging approach would have been easier but it’s better than nothing. If you have multiple audiences this is well worth a try until Twitter put in some official support for this functionality.

Multiply Your Twitter Audience

Publicize Your Twitter RSS Feed

Did you know that your Twitter feed is also available as an RSS feed? Go your profile page and then scroll down to the bottom. There on the bottom left is a ‘RSS’ button. Click on it for the link. It looks something like this:

Because this is an RSS Feed, you can publicize it! First there were web directories, then article directories and now there are RSS directories too. Here is a massive list of RSS Directories that you can submit your feed to. Be careful though… if you tend to tweet mainly about what underwear you have on, don’t go submitting it to a medical directory. Use some common sense.

Twitter / Blogging Mashup

Do you have a blog? Many blogs have a large audience, there are more people that read blogs than people who use Twitter. First let me talk about a service called LoudTwitter. This will take all your tweets from one day, package them up into a blog post and publish it on your blog.

Why is this useful? Remember that Twitter is a real time application and people on the Internet are spread all over the world. Many people watch Twitter while they are awake but not everybody will go back over their timeline from the night before.
By posting your tweets to your blog you can make sure that you’re readers don’t miss a thing. Of course you must be careful with this.

Twitter Social Button

We have Digg buttons, Stumble buttons, Delicious buttons etc etc and now we have a Twitter button. TwitThis makes it very easy for your blog visitors to publicize your blog post via their Twitter feed.

Wordpress Plugins

Now if your blog audience and your Twitter audience match and you happen to have a Wordpress blog, then you can make use of some specific plugins that allow a more fluid integration.

Why would you want to do this? In a recent blog post about the benefits of untargeted traffic. Think about how much traffic you get on a daily basis that doesn’t hang around. If your latest blog post doesn’t grab their attention then perhaps your latest tweet will. That could net you some extra followers who might become blog readers further down the line.

Anwanore’s Widget - Allows you to post several of your latest tweets into your blog and you can put it anywhere by calling a php function from within your template. The author is working on future enhancements such as an optional avatar display.

Sidebar Widget - If your theme is widget-enabled then you might want to check out this plugin which allows you to create a highly customisable widget for the sidebar.

Twitter for Wordpress - Another plugin that creates a widget for you.

TwitterTools - This plugin by Alex King allows you to archive your tweets, make blog posts out of them, send tweets from your sidebar and lots more.

TwitTwoo - Twitter in your sidebar, AJAX style - so no reloading of the page is necessary. Very stylish and easily customisable from the options page.

Third Party Twitter Integration

A whole bunch of third party tools have been developed for Twitter. Some of these tools can be used to send out your tweets to audiences on other networks and the cool thing is that these people do not need to be directly following you on Twitter.

Integrating with Facebook

Twitter have developed a Facebook application that integrates your Twitter feed into your Facebook feed. This is only useful if you actually have friends on Facebook :-) If you don’t have many, you can start now

When you login to Facebook the first page you see is the news feed which displays selected news items from all of your friends.

With this application installed, your tweets appear in the news feeds of all your friends! Of course they only stay there for a certain amount of time until they get bumped off but still, this is exposure without direct followers and I think it’s pretty damn cool!

There is another Facebook application called TwitterSync that will actually cause your latest tweet to become your Facebook status. One thing to note - any links will be stripped down to plain text so don’t think you can get a load of backlinks with this!

So why is this app useful? Well it depends on your Facebook usage - I often forget to update my status so it doesn’t usually say anything. By using this app, it makes my Facebook status more interesting which can encourage people to check me out.

MyBlogLog

I don’t think that MyBlogLog has quite the support that it has enjoyed in the past but this is still somewhere else that you can propagate your Twitter feed to and of course once it’s setup, you don’t need to do anything.

Login to MyBlogLog and then click the ‘Edit Profile’ link from the green buttons on the right. From there click ‘Services’. It’s easy to miss this. From here you can link in your profiles from a ton of other networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and of course Twitter too.

Jaiku, Pownce & Tumblr

Jaiku is the biggest competitor to Twitter and it has recently been acquired by Google so it will become an important platform. Pownce and Tumblr are also micro-blogging Twitter competitors. Now before you panic about having to choose between them all… relax!

HelloTxt is an aggregation service that allows you to post once through their interface and have that message propagated to all the major micro-blogging networks - Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr and a few smaller ones as well. Of course the tricky bit is getting followers on all those other networks!

If you only use Twitter and Jaiku then another solution is TwitKu which provides an integrated interface to both networks.

Twitter Badges

So we’ve covered your blog, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other micro blogging platforms. But there’s more… There are lots of places in which you can own a little piece of the Internet - MySpace comes to mind.

Twitter have released support for official badges which you can customise in a number of ways. There are Flash and Javascript versions so wherever you put these needs to have support for those technologies.

How Twitter Promotion Can Go Viral

When something is publicized via Twitter it can sometimes go viral. For example, person A tweets about a site they are browsing and that goes out to their followers. One of those people picks it up, likes it, tweets it also but it now goes to a whole new groups of people and the effect goes on. Of course this will only happen if the content is tweet-worthy but it is much easier to twitter about a url than to link it in a blog post.

Let me try to explain this more clearly with this somewhat messy diagram:

So the first tweet comes from someone whose audience is the yellow group. Perhaps it is you promoting your latest blog post… all the people in the yellow group see it. One of those people likes it and also twitters it to their group - they are the red group. Suddenly your link has hit a whole new crowd. Now someone from the red group picks it up and tweets it and this goes out to the green group and so on.

The beauty of this effect is that it happens with absolutely no participation from you! All you need to do is attract twitter followers to your blog.

But it doesn’t stop there… Ed is Twitter-savvy and his tweets are automatically posted to his blog which has another large audience. You could argue that any form of link bait can have the same effect. True, but there is one vital difference - link bait requires that people have the ability to link. They need to run a website or blog etc, they need to get out their editing software, write a post etc. That’s a lot of effort. But with Twitter, 2 seconds and you’re done. It’s just so damn easy to Twitter-promote something!

Google Logo: First Laser Logo

2008-05-17T04:09:00.000-07:00

Google has a special logo up on the home page today, a laser logo.

The logo links to a search results for first laser, which shows image results at the top, followed by search results from University of Chicago, Wikipedia and then Propeller.com. Why does Google have a laser logo up today? Theodore Maiman, 48 years ago - demonstrated the first laser on May 16, 1960.

Theodor Maiman died just last year on May 5, 2007. He demonstrated the laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080516-084405.php]

Google Feeling Green: Testing Green Color Scheme

2008-05-17T04:02:00.000-07:00

iCrossing reported noticing that Google is showing a green user interface within the Google Directory search results and also, in some occasions, for main Google web search results.

The most shocking green interface is when you look compare the typical blue bar to a green bar, when Google is showing yellow ads. Here are screen captures I posted at the Search Engine Roundtable, comparing the two looks:

The Green User Interface:

The Standard Blue User Interface:

I have never seen green used in this fashion at Google web search. But as iCrossing points out, Google has gone green in an extreme way at the Google Directory. For example a search on ipods at the Google Directory shows a green background behind the search ads, as opposed to a yellow background. Here is a comparison of the new green background, in contrast to the standard yellow background:

The Green Ads:

The Yellow Ads:

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080516-085336.php]

Google Adds Real Estate Pull-Down Filter To Maps

2008-05-17T03:51:00.000-07:00

Google has offered the capacity to search real estate listings for a long time. For example, when entering queries such as "homes for sale in San Francisco," a "one box" result used to show pull-down menus for "location" and "listing type." Activating these boxes would then lead into a specialized "Google Base" screen that allowed for further refinement. I found those screens as recently as earlier this week but today couldn't duplicate them. However, earlier this week Google explosed a "real estate" filter, among others, on Maps.

Google, in the text view, also offers some refinements: by price, bedrooms and bathrooms. These appear to be successive, meaning that they build upon one another.

The data are apparently coming via Google Base through a range of sources. But they're not comprehensive, which is important in the real estate context. However, if Google were to do deals with the various sources of MLS data around the US, it could build a fairly comprehensive listings database. That might make it more competitive with vertical search engines and real estate sites such as Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, Move.com and so on. By comparison to most of those sites, Google's real estate search and overall experience in this category is rather "skeletal" at the moment.

When entrepreneurs are pitching a new startup idea or prototype to venture capital the perfunctory question often arises: "Why wouldn't Google do this?" In the vertical context it's typically the case that Google won't go to the lengths of others to build a specific vertical experience (there are some exceptions). The imperative for Google is to scale its applications globally -- and that is often at odds with developing rich content and community around a particular subject area.

It is possible, however, with several tweaks and improvements, that real estate search on Google could get much better and become much more competitive over time.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080516-094922.php]

Google Now #1 Web Destination, Beats Yahoo

2008-05-17T03:46:00.000-07:00

For the longest time, Yahoo was the U.S.’s most-visited website and Google was the most popular search engine. That has, however, changed. Google is now both the country’s top-visited website as well as the most popular search engine. Losing the title surely is a disappointment to Yahoo, who are currently trying to turn around their company and deflect take-overs.

According to a recent comScore ranking, Google has surpassed Yahoo in terms of its unique monthly visitors for the first time during april 2008. Google’s lead, however, is small at about 466,000 visitors out of roughly 141 million each. May 2008’s stats will be interesting to take a look at next month, to see whether Yahoo can come back and close the gap and regain their crown, or whether Google can continue the trend and widen the gap.

Google’s unique audience in April was 141.1 million, which is an 18% increase over the same month in 2007. Yahoo grew 7% to 140.6 million, and Microsoft, as expected, pulled in at third with 121 million.

As far as pageviews goes, Yahoo still has the most. This means that either visitors tend to return more often, or look at more pages of the site. Google had just 28.7 billion pageviews compared to Yahoo’s 33.6 billion.

Via [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-now-1-web-destination-beats-yahoo/6905/]

Yahoo Glue Pages Launches In India

2008-05-17T03:41:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. Glue Pages are specialized pages that contain an enhanced visual search result page, for select search queries. The search results that trigger the special "Glue Pages" run across searches in health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology, and finance categories.

The Glue Pages combine classic search results on the left hand column with more visual information related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more. For example a search on diabetes returns standard search results on the left, in the middle we have WebMD results, followed by HowStuffWorks.com results, then results from Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo News, and even Google Blog Search. Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India said:

Searching on Glue Pages Beta will result in an experience that promises more than just web links. Users will receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the Web in one topical page. The new Glue Pages Beta feature for Yahoo! India Search supports our strategy to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Internet and demonstrates our commitment to provide a compelling online search experience.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080508-023038.php]

Search Illustrated: How A Search Engine Determines Duplicate Content

2008-05-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

With so much good content on the web, it's inevitable that the same information will be displayed many times over. Whether it's a blog post pointing to good statistics, an RSS feed pulled into a complementary site, or blatantly copied material, duplicate content can be an issue.

This week's infographic shows how search engines make distinctions between original and duplicate content:

Via: [http://searchengineland.com/080513-080033.php]

More Than Half Of Yahoo's Paid Search Clicks Come From Partners

2008-05-14T00:47:00.001-07:00

Efficient Frontier is out with new research looking at how the major search engines get search traffic outside their own search engines, including the remarkable stat that less than half of Yahoo's paid search clicks happen on its own search sites. "Search syndication" is when a major search engine provides search results beyond its own core services. For example, Google quite famously provides the search listings that AOL uses. Ask.com, while it generates its own editorial listings, also gets some of Google's paid ads through a syndication deal. And many sites across the web use Google's AdSense For Search program to get both paid and unpaid results.

Efficient looked at paid search clicks that it buys on behalf of a number of large advertisers to determine what percentage of those clicks were happening on the major search engines themselves as opposed to partners.

Yahoo was found to have the highest number of partners generating clicks -- 1,196 of them beyond Yahoo Search itself. These partners generated 55% of all of Yahoo's paid search clicks. Yahoo itself generated 45%.

Though Yahoo generated fewer clicks on its own, those clicks on its own site converted better. Of all Yahoo search clicks (on its own site or through partners), 58% of the converting clicks came from Yahoo itself.

How does this show Yahoo converts better than its partners? The idea from Efficient seems to be that if partner and "own site" clicks convert the same, then the percentage should be the same. In other words, if Yahoo's own clicks make up 45% of total paid clicks, then you should also see 45% of total converting clicks coming from Yahoo itself. Instead, you get 58% of converting clicks from Yahoo. That suggests Yahoo ads convert better than those coming from its partners.

That's probably right, but it would have been better if the exact conversion rate for partner sites and Yahoo's own sites were given. Then the figures could be compared directly.

Google has many partners, too -- but at 431, far less than Yahoo. Google also generates the majority of its own search traffic, 59% -- partners make up 41%. Of all paid clicks, 75% of those generating conversions came from Google's own site.

That's good and bad for Google. Good that it's less dependent on partners. Good that traffic on its own site seems to convert so well. But bad that partner sites seem to convert more poorly than Yahoo's sites. But bear in mind, without exact conversion rates being provided, this might not be entirely accurate.

As for Microsoft, it has only 5 partners -- and those are other sites within MSN. I wouldn't consider these partners myself, and it suggest that at least a small number of those "partners" counted for Yahoo and Google are actually sites they own. But still, we're mainly talking about what percentage of paid clicks come off the "main" search site. For Microsoft, that's 99%. And not surprisingly, the percentage of paid search clicks that convert from Microsoft's core search engine is 100%. Those partners just don't matter.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080513-083548.php]

Google Incorporates Geodata In API, Partners With ESRI, Yahoo Introduces "Internet Location Platform"

2008-05-14T00:45:00.000-07:00

Google's John Hanke keynoted the Where 2.0 conference this morning and discussed the development and evolution of the "geoweb." But he also announced that KML files (now a public standard) and GeoRSS data (I believe) being indexed by Google are now going to be available to third parties via the Google API. That means things like Panaramio and geotagged YouTube videos, among other datasets, will be available through the API. Google also announced a partnership with geospatial software platform and provider ESRI. ESRI will also be a kind of additional gateway for thousands of live datafeeds that can be equally tapped by third parties to do mapping mashups and other applications. The key here is that data is coming from feeds, which are more accurate and complete than conventional search indexing.

Hanke didn't speak at length about the details but what it appears to mean as a practical matter is that huge amounts of data will now be available to others to incorporate into existing sites and applications and/or to build new sites and applications around.

Update: I just spoke with John Hanke directly. What he said is that all the third party data from ESRI will be converted into KML files so they can be easily rendered in Virtual Earth, Google Maps/Earth or on any site that can take these files. You will be able to search all the data as well to quickly discover what's available. This will effectively mean huge amounts of additional data will be easily accessible and available to work with on mashups, mobile sites, etc. (for free).

I neglected to include Yahoo's announcement, also coming out of the Where show, of its new Internet Location Platform. Here's more explanation from the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080513-141609.php]

Google Penalty: Probable Causes and Solutions

2008-05-14T00:04:00.000-07:00

Google penalty is a nightmare for SEOs. Just imagine losing all SERP rankings for your website just because Google has penalized your website. Sometimes it happens due to sheer ignorance. Many SEOs are unaware of the factors which can cause the penalty. There are certain guidelines, which if followed properly can save your website to get penalized by Google. I just researched on the probable causes and solutions for Google penalty and consolidated the data at one place so that it becomes handy for those who want a solution to this problem. I found two websites very helpful to prepare this material http://www.growler.com/Pro/SEO/aaSEO2/Google-penalty.htm and http://www.ksl-consulting.co.uk/google_penalty.html.

What Exactly Triggers A Google Penalty?

Hidden text or hidden links
Sneaky redirects or cloaking
Sending automated queries to Google
Stuffing pages with irrelevant words
Creating multiple domains, subdomains, or pages with substantially duplicate content
Creating "Doorway" pages only for the Search Engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs containing little or no original and unique content
Link buying and selling
Excessive use of keywords
Linking to banned sites
Linking from banned or spam sites
Getting links from BAD sites
Violate Google Webmaster guidelines
Excessive linking in a short span of time
Affiliate links on the site

GoogleGuy Says:

Abigail, do you have a lot of links/keywords on a page that could look like stuffing? For example, if a page is pretty fair but then has 200-300 keyword-stuffed links, I wouldn't be surprised if that would go over a threshold at some point. Do you have a lot of those sorts of links, or affiliate links or something similar on your site?

In general, anything hidden from the human visitor but visible to the robots or vice versa is asking for a Google penalty. So don't put coloured text or links on backgrounds of the same color - Google penalty. Same for teeny tiny font sizes, especially if they carry links - Google penalty. And offpage content that only a robot sees - Google penalty.

If you're creating content for humans, it is very unlikely that you will trigger a Google penalty. But if you're making an effort to fool the robots, you're messing with the potential for a Google penalty, big time.

Google Penalty Checklist

Linking to banned sites - Run a test on all outbound links from your site to see if you are linking to any sites which have themselves been Google banned. These will be sites which are Google de-listed and show Page Rank 0 with a grayed out Toolbar Page Rank indicator.

Linking to bad neighbourhoods - Check you are not linking to any bad neighbourhoods, link farms or doorway pages. Bad neighbourhoods include spam sites and doorway pages, whilst link farms are just pages of links to other sites, with no original or useful content.

Automated query penalty - Google penalties can be caused by using automated query tools which break Google's terms of service as laid out in the webmaster guidelines. Google allows certain automated queries into its database using its analytic tools and when accessing through the Google API account. Unauthorised types of automated query can cause problems.

Over optimization penalties - These can be triggered by poor SEO techniques such as aggressive link building using the same keywords in link anchor text. When managing link building campaigns, always vary the link text used and incorporate a variety of different keyword terms. Use a backlink anchor text analyser tool to check backlinks for sufficient keyword spread. Optimising for high paying keywords can further elevate risk, so mix in some long tail keywords into the equation. For brand new domains, add no more than 5 new one way backlinks a week and use deep linking to website internal pages, rather than just homepage link building.

Website cross linking & link schemes - If you run more than one website and the Google penalty hits all sites at the same time, check the interlinking (cross linking) between those sites. Extensive interlinking of websites, particularly if they are on the same C Class IP address (same ISP) can be viewed as "link schemes" by Google, breaking their terms of service. The risks are even higher where site A site wide links to site B and site B site wide links back to site A. If you must use site wide links, make sure they are not reciprocal links. Link schemes built around links in the footer of each webpage are particularly risky. The reality is that site wide links do little to increase site visibility in the Google SERPS, nor do they improve Page Rank more than a single link, as Google only counts one link from a site to another.It is also believed that Yahoo! now applies a similar policy. There is some evidence that the extensive use of site wide links can lower website Google trust value, which can subsequently reduce ranking.

Hidden text or links - Remove any hidden text in your content and remove any hidden keywords. Such content may be hidden from view using CSS or alternatively, text may have been coded to be the same colour as the page background, rendering it invisible. These risky SEO techniques often lead to a Google penalty or web site ban.

Overt keyword stuffing - Remove excessive keyword stuffing in your website content (unnatural repetitions of the same phrase in body text). Always use natural, well written web copywriting techniques.

Automated page redirects - The use of automated browser re-directs in any of your pages. Meta Refresh and JavaScript automated re-directs often lead to a Google penalty as the pages using them are perceived to be doorway pages. This technique is especially dangerous if the refresh time is less than 5 seconds. To avoid Google penalties, use a 301 re-direct or Mod Rewrite technique instead of these methods. This involves setting up a .htaccess file on your web server.

Link buying - Check for any paid links (I.E. buying text links from known link suppliers / companies). There is some evidence that buying links can hurt rankings and this was implied by comments from Matt Cutts (a Google engineer) on his Google SEO blog. Matt states that Google will also devalue links from companies or suppliers of text links, such that they offer zero value to the recipient in terms for improving website rankings or Page Rank.

Reciprocal link building campaigns - may also trigger a Google penalty or cause a SERPS filter to be applied when the same or very similar link anchor text is used over and over again and large numbers of reciprocal links are added in a relatively short time. The dangers are made worse by adding reciprocal links to low quality sites or websites which have an unrelated theme. This can lead to a backlink over optimisation penalty (known as a BLOOD to SEO experts!). a Google backlink over optimisation penalty causes a sudden drops in SERPS ranking (often severe). To avoid this problem, reciprocal link exchange should only be used as part of a more sustainable SEO strategy which also builds quality one way links to original website content. Adding reciprocal links to unrelated sites is a risky SEO strategy, as is reciprocal link exchange with low quality websites. If you can't find a website's homepage in the top 20 of the Google search results (SERPS) when you search for the first 4 words of a site's HTML title (shown at the top of the Internet Explorer window) then undertaking reciprocal link exchange with that site may offer few advantages. Don't forget to check that prospective reciprocal link partners have a similar theme as your homepage too.

Check Google Webmaster Guidelines - Read the Google webmaster guidelines and check website compliance in all respects.

Google Webmaster Tools - According to Matt Cutts's Blog, Google is improving webmaster communication with respect to banned sites and penalties. Google is now informing some (but not all) webmasters the cause of a website ban or penalty, via their excellent new Webmaster Console. In addition, a Google re-inclusion request can be made from the same interface. For this reason, if you've been hit by a web site ban or penalty, it is worthwhile signing up for Google Webmaster Tools and uploading an XML Sitemap onto your site and then to check site status in the Google Webmaster Console. This is an easy 15 minute job and may help to identify the cause and fix for the problem!

Initial Tests for a Penalty

Just because you lose rank does not mean you have a Google penalty. Your ranking for keyword sets depends on many factors, including how many others are competing for the same keyword sets, how much content exists for that keyword set, and off site links. Also, the search engines are constantly updating the algorithms that determine rank, and as these change, ranks do as well. There are sites, and pages from sites that temporarily disappear from the index, but return later for no obvious reason, so don't be too quick to blame a Google penalty when your ranks are swirling.

But you can definitely tell if your site is still in Google's index. Simply search for the url ("mysite.com"). If there is no information returned, the url is not indexed. You can also see all pages that have been indexed by searching for "site:mysite.com" If you were ranking before, but show nothing for this search, you have a Google penalty. If you have many pages on your site, but you only see the homepage in the result, something's very wrong, and you may have incurred a Google penalty.

It is also possible for Google to impose a manual suppression of your site that is impossible to detect, a kind of lower level Google penalty. Recently a case was unwound with such a penalty who had been told by Google that there was no penalty imposed, that his poor ranks were a result of his lack of content. The tipoff to the suppression was that all the other search engines showed high positions for the same keywords, and the company's trade name was not in the #1 rank, but on page 4.

When a penalty is suspected, start by checking with Google the number of URL's it has indexed. This can be accomplished by using the site:yourdomainname.com -asdfasdf command within a Google search window. If no URL's are indexed and no backlinks show up when the link:yourdomain.com is entered then there is a high probability of a Google penalty, especially if your site used to be indexed and used to show backlinks. The exception to this rule is a new website with few backlinks, which may not be Google indexed since it is still waiting to be crawled. Such websites frequently show no backlinks, but this doesn't imply they have received a Google penalty!

Not all Google penalties result in a loss of Page Rank. For example, various Google filters can be triggered by irregularities in backlinks and by excessive reciprocal link exchange, backlinks from spam or banned sites etc.

If you suspect your website has received a Google penalty, you can contact Google by sending an e-mail to help@Google.com to ask for help. They will usually check the spam report queue and offer some form of assistance.

Interestingly, in a recent move by Google, web sites which are in clear violation of Google's webmaster guidelines or terms of service may receive an e-mail from Google advising them to clean up their act, warning of a penalty and website de-indexing. When the breach of Google's terms (e.g. spam or hidden text) is removed from the offending site, Google will usually automatically remove the penalty and re-index the site when the webmaster completes a Google re-inclusion request.

How to Check for A Google Penalty?

To check for a Google penalty with any degree of certainty is very difficult. The very first thing you need to do is determine the exact cause of the Google penalty. This is often not obvious. But if you know you have violated one of Google's published guidelines, that is where you should start. Unwinding a Google penalty means removing the offensive content, links, or strategy, and then informing Google that your site has achieved compliance with their guidelines. A Google penalty will not go away by itself, and a strongly proactive approach is required to both uncover the offensive material, and be certain it is completely addressed before approaching Google.

It is strongly recommended NOT contacting Google immediately upon discovery of a Google penalty. You really want to be certain that after expending time and energy arguing your case, that the Google penalty will not be reimposed later because of an oversight on your part. Make sure your site is completely Google compliant before contacting them. A demonstration that you understand why the Google penalty was imposed is instrumental to unwinding it.

Here's where to go when you're ready: http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

If you are uncertain as to the cause, you should seek help. It is not recommended that you contact Google until you can approach them with knowledge. Their contact form will generate an automated reply (if any), and they do not provide a service to diagnose the cause of a Google penalty. Unwinding a Google penalty usually requires an acknowledgement of the problem by the site owner, a clean site, and a statement of compliance with Google's guidelines. More than one attempt will probably be required to undo a sitewide Google penalty. Even in cases where the Google penalty involves only a limited number of pages from a site, be prepared to commit significant time and energy to setting things straight.

Check for a Google Website Ban

If you've used unethical SEO techniques your website could be Google banned and de-indexed. Check for a Google website ban using the free SEO tool at http://www.seojunkie.com/2006/05/09/google-ban-checker/. Please note that the results from this free site ban tool may not be entirely accurate or reliable!

Google Penalty Recovery Strategy

Recovering from a Google penalty normally involves fixing the cause of the problem and then waiting for Google to remove any over optimisation penalties or SERPS filters. To fully recover Google ranking may take around 2-3 months after all website problems are corrected. The Google algorithm can automatically remove a penalty if the affected website is still Google indexed. If your website has been Google de-indexed and lost Page Rank, then you will need to make a Google re-inclusion request. Where the reason for the penalty is clear, it helps to provide details of any changes you've made to correct violations of the Google webmaster guidelines.
The best recovery strategy from any Google penalty is to check for any recent Google algorithm changes and to evaluate recent changes made to your website prior to the sudden drop in Google ranking. Don't forget to check your link building strategy as poor SEO often causes Google penalties. Start by removing any reciprocal links to low quality websites, or sites having no relevance to your website theme.

Google Dominates Online Video Market in March

2008-05-13T03:56:00.000-07:00

If Google is planning on running video ads, there’s no better time than now. New data from comScore is showing an ever increasing trend in the viewership of its YouTube property. Running ads on YouTube would certainly give them some good old advertising revenues.

Based on comScore data for March Google has emerged as the top U.S. video property, registering more than 4.3 billion videos of the total 11, 476,886 videos viewed online. This is a 2.6% increase as compared to Google’s online video market share in February. And of course, we don’t have to tell you that YouTube accounted for most of these videos, 98% in fact.

Following closely behind Google are Fox Interactive Media with 4.2% videos viewed on its site, Yahoo! sites with 2.9% and Viacom Digital with 2.2%.

In terms of videos viewed per viewer, Google sites accounted for 85.7 million of the total 138, 536 unique viewers for March. Followed by Fox Interactive with 54.3 milion unique viewers, Yahoo! sites with 37.5 million and Viacom Digital with 26.6 million.

Via: [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dominates-online-video-market-in-march/6892/]

Move Over Facebook and MySpace, Here Comes Google Friend Connect

2008-05-13T03:49:00.000-07:00

As announced last weekend, Google is launching the mother of all data portability features. After Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Portability announcement, here comes Google beating the two social networks with its Google Friend Connect features.

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors. any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming — picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community. Basically, with Google Friend Connect service, any visitors to any type of sites can see, invite and interact with each other within the boundaries of that site or through secured APIs with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Plaxo and others.

Google Friend Connect is set to be activated later tonight at this URL http://www.google.com/friendconnect/. Until then, we will have to wait and see how nifty this service would be.

Via [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/move-over-facebook-and-myspace-here-comes-google-friend-connect/6889/]

Squidoo

2008-05-12T03:16:00.000-07:00

Today, everyone is talking about Squidoo lenses. Although it is not new for the regular web surfers and Internet user, but thought it might be of interest for those who are new to this field or by any chance have not come to know about this site.

Squidoo is a website which was launched in October 2005 by Squidoo.com, LLC based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Squidoo is a platform that is designed to make it easy for anyone, free of cost, to set up a single page on any topic one knows or cares a lot about. In march 2006, Squidoo came out of beta testing.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. These lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, hobbies and sports, people or places, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Squidoo lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content. More emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content that is present on the web. Annotation, organization and personalization deliver context and meaning.

Users who create these lenses are called lens-masters. A lens-master uses the tools available online to provide links, feeds, abstracts, and lists to users who are trying to make sense of a topic. For example, a single lens could point to any blog or Flickr photos, eBay auctions, Google maps, YouTube videos, and or other links. Lens-masters are encouraged to promote personal agendas, products, expertise, causes, and opinions.

Squidoo splits its revenue with its "co-op" of lensmasters. 5% goes straight to charity, first. Then 50% goes to the lensmasters. 45% goes to Squidoo. The site is estimating that nearly half of all the lensmasters on the website are donating their royalties to any of 65 featured charities, ranging from NPR and The American Heart Association to smaller organizations like Chimp Haven and Planet Gumbo.

Squidoo was founded by author, speaker, and notable blogger Seth Godin. On Godin's founding team was his book editor Megan Casey, Fast Company employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr. According to Alexa, Squidoo's traffic has grown more than 40% monthly beginning in the spring of 2007. It is now in the top 500 of all websites tracked worldwide.

What's A Lens?

A Squidoo lens is one person's view on a topic that matters to the lens owner or simply lensmaster. A lens is an easy-to-build, single web page that can point to favorite links, RSS feeds, blogs, Flickr photos, Google maps, Amazon books or music etc. That way, when someone is looking for recommended information, fast, these lenses get him started and send him off in the right direction.

Building lenses is fast, fun, easy and free. (And you could also earn a royalty from each one--for you or for charity).

Why One Should Build A Lens?

To share the knowledge: When you know a lot about something, it feels good to share. You can help other people discover what you found out the hard way.

To increase the profile: A popular lens gives credibility to the Lensmaster. A popular lens on Squidoo reinforces your role as an "everyday expert." which makes you the go-to authority for those looking for help.

To increase the traffic: Your lens points (if you want it to) to your blog and to your website. Lenses have huge credibility with search engines, so your lens can help your other sites rise to the top of Google searches.

To earn a royalty: for you, your organization, or your favorite charity.

Who Should Build A Lens?

You should, if you...

have a Website and want to increase its online presence and want more ways for people to discover it. A lens is another signpost online that can point people your way.

have a blog, a lens is a great way to highlight your best posts or to feature a commented version of your blogroll. You can also point to the products and services that you write about, read about, enjoy, or want to see succeed. A Squidoo lens will allow you and your blog to have a bigger share of the commentary and influence on your topic of choice.

are a yo-yo expert, your lens could be nothing but links to tricks. You'd rank your favorite 100 tricks and point, one by one, to the best examples of those tricks on the Web. And maybe you'd point to Infinite Illusions, the online yo-yo store.

are a nonprofit or charity (say, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) you could invite all 45,000 of your most important donors to build sites on their favorite topics. The invitation would set the default royalty cash flow to "Donate my royalties to JDRF." If each lens generated as little as $2 a day, that'd be a whole bunch of money earned for the charity. You'd also earn a bounty on every successful lensmaster you brought in.

are a newshound, a lens allows you to highlight important mainstream and non-mainstream stories for your readers. And if you go on vacation, RSS feeds can automatically update your lens with select news stories.

are a podcaster, you should definitely have a lens. It would list the details of your podcasts, point to transcripts that some fan had posted, point to your six most recent podcasts, and include the RSS for subscribing to the podcast. The lens would also have a set of links for getting started with podcasting and getting a podcast reader.

are a fan, a lens lets you share your personal take on the object of your affections—without the grind of manual updates. Automatic feeds could add current sports scores and headlines, music news and iTune releases and more.
are an author, your lens could include links to all your books on Amazon. You could include links to other authors you admire. And an RSS feed from a Technorati search, showing surfers the recent blogs that have mentioned you. And links to conferences where you're speaking, and perhaps a top-ten list of the best ways to understand your writing. You could even have a box pointing to your best (and worst?) reviews.
are an entrepreneur, your lens on a popular topic could generate two or five or twenty dollars a day in clickthrough and affiliate income. Which doesn't sound like much, until you start thinking like an eBay PowerSeller and build twenty or even fifty lenses on a variety of topics. Did you know that 750,000 people make a full- or part-time living on eBay now? The same effect will probably happen with lenses.

are a person (and you are), you should have a lens about...you. A lens that lists your blog and recent posts and your bio and work history and your Amazon wish list and your Flickr account and whatever you want the public to know about you. Would you hire someone if he or she didn't have a lens?

What's A Module?

Modules are the building blocks of lenses. A module makes it easy for a lensmaster to point to links, images, blogs or even things to buy. Some modules are curated (you enter all the links and content manually) and others are automatic (you configure the inputs and then the lens draws on RSS feeds to update your lens without any work from you). Similarly, some modules are commerce-oriented and others are just content based.

What's This About Earning Royalties?

It's simple. You make a lens. You recommend great stuff. Sometimes these you'll recommend a product from Amazon or eBay or CafePress or one of our hundreds of other commerce partners.

Since Squidoo is free to use, but have to run a few ads on your lens in order to keep our doors open. So you'll see a few Google ads and SquidOffers on your lens.

Now, since you're the brain behind the lens, you should get a cut! And better than a cut: you get HALF. That's right. Any time someone stops by your lens and buys a product you recommended or clicks on a Google ad, you get 50% of the royalties.

Some lensmasters are in it for the content and not the money. Maybe they earn $0.50 a month. More often than not, they select one of the 80+ nonprofit partners to donate these royalties to. Other lensmasters make lots of lenses, work hard, and earn thousands of dollars a year. Still other lensmasters are here to fundraise for charity, and group up to send thousands of dollars to their favorite organizations each month.

What's Squidspam?

Squidoo passionately believe that everyone deserves a voice online, and a free service for sharing and spreading recommendations, ideas, products and passions. Not just the gatekeepers. Not just paid editors. Not just A-listers and marketers. They also believe that to be featured in Squidoo search results, and to there community, and to the rest of the world, is a privilege. Authentic pages built by real people with good intentions are the future of the web, and are more focused than ever before on making it easy for you to do that.

The Top 8 Reasons Your Account Could Get Deleted

Here's a quick overview of what is considered as SquidSpam. There's a lot more, but these are the usual cases.

Lenses that autoredirect surfers to another site. (No iframes, no other hacks, nada).

Lenses and accounts that just pump out uncurated, copied and pasted content.

Lenses that are egregiously irrelevant to the Squidoo category they're posted in.

Anything else that smells spammy to Squidoo official and the Squidoo community.

Spamming bloggers with trackbacks, comments, or links to your Squidoo lens.

Email spamming people you don't have permission to talk to, pointing them to your lens.

Spamming our lensmasters, via the Contact form, or in Guestbooks.

Hacking the Squidoo site in any way that outputs spam to people anywhere online.

What Will Happen To You If You're A SquidSpammer?

In short, hit the road, Jack. Your account--and all its lenses--will be deleted. If you come back and try it again, they'll just boot you again. And, if you spammed bloggers and other pages outside of the Squidoo network, they'll start booting you too.

So try and focus on creating something you're actually proud of.

Don't Do It!

They don't permit spam (the verb, the act of bothering people with messages they don't want to get, or blog comments they don't want to read). They don't permit misleading labeling or content either. They do permit junk. They don't like it, and they try to help people transcend it, but it happens. You are welcome to build a lousy lens, or a shallow one, or one that people are not crazy about. It will get ranked low, though, and no one will look at it (why should they?). BUT, they don't permit spambait. These are lenses about areas that are almost exclusively in the domain of spam. Don't go there. They have a team of people reading lenses, looking for spambait. They have an automatic filter that blocks spambait lenses. Every lens has a 'report this as spam' button on it. Not so people can flag pages they don't like. No, not that. It's for people to complain about lenses that were the subject of spam activity like email blasts, inappropriate comments, and blatantly misleading marketing.

Play hard, play fair.

How Can You Make More Money?

Every lens carries Google AdSense ads. Those are used to generate royalties for the whole co-op (ie, everyone gets a cut). If you want to increase your direct royalties, though, you should consider adding commercial modules that the visitors to your lenses will appreciate. Their top moneymaker modules include: Amazon, eBay, CafePress, and The SuperStore. Every single one of these modules generates directly attributable revenue for your lens, and they pay a royalty to you or to your chosen charity based on that income. Build good lenses, feature great stuff, share your lenses as much as possible, and earn more royalties.

Bottomline:

Squidoo is an effective method to increase the traffic as well as generate revenue but caution should be taken as it follows very strict anti spam rules.

Google Joins Venture for Mobile WiMAX Next-Gen Wireless Internet Access

2008-05-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

Google has teamed up with a number of partners investing in a new venture to develop and deliver high-speed WiMAX internet access for mobile devices. The venture, which is being led by Sprint, also includes including Clearwire, Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner, and Intel, amongst others. Thus far, deploying a nationwide Mobile WiMAX network has proven to be quite a difficult task. With new partners involved, however, it is hoped that the task will be easier to complete. Sprint and Clearwire have entered into an agreement to combine their next-gen wireless broadband businesses to form a new wireless communications called Clearwire. The new jointly created Clearwire will build on their existing customer bse of 400,000 wireless broad band subscribers and Sprint’s XOHM WiMAX network build-out in certain markets this year.

Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks have collectively agreed to invest $3.2 billion into the new comany. The investment is based on a target price of $20.00 per share of Clearwire’s common stock. Sprint will own the largest stake in the company, at 51%. Existing Clearwire shareholders will have 27%, and the investors group will own 22% of the shares.

Contributing money to the deal, however, is not where the partnership ends. Each of the partners have also agreed to certain terms and involvement in deploying the WiMAX network.

Google will partner with Clearwire in the development of internet services, advertising services, and applications for mobile WiMAX devices. They will also be the search provider and preferred provider of other applications for Clearwire’s retail product. Google has also entered into an agreement with Sprint, whereby they will become the default provider of web and local search, which will also be enabled with location information for Sprint. Sprint will also be pre-loading several Google services, including Google Maps for Mobile, Gmail, and YouTube, on select mobile devices.

Intell will be working with various manufacturers to embed WiMAX chips into Intel-based mobile internet devices and Intel Centrino 2 -based laptops. They will also market Clearwire’s services in association with their notebook PC brand.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks will enter into 3G wholesale agreements with Sprint, and will become bundled providers of Sprint’s wireless voice and data services. They will also enter into wholesale agreements with Clearwire to become 4G providers of the company’s mobile WiMAX service.

Google and Intel also have options to enter into 3G and 4G wholesale agreements with Clearwire and Sprint, however neither currently has any plans to do so. But that option remains open for the future, should either decide it to be worth pursuing. Actually, thinking about it, this could explain a recent Google purchase of the domain googlebroadband.com.

Via [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-joins-venture-for-mobile-wimax-next-gen-wireless-internet-access/6854/]

Subdomains or Subfolders : Which are Better for SEO?

2008-05-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

Subdomains and subfolders both have their advantages, especially when setting up blogs.

For blogs, I prefer a subfolder (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/) because the link juice which is sent to that blog is going to be naturally distributed to that main domain, and other subfolders under the domain.

Futhermore, the forum/blog will default logo, home page and other links back to the subfolder. If you set this up with a subdomain, by default, the links in the forum/blog itself will all point back to the subdomain. So, with a subfolder, both the inbound and internal linking structure favor the entire site. With a subdomain, the forum or blog will be listed as a separate entity in the Google search results, which is good for owning the results and one’s reputation management. However, Google and other engines will generally not list more than two of these subdomains in the search results, unless those subdomains can prove to Google that they are independent and relevant entities.

I would like to reference Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler and contributor to Search Engine Land :

Google is no longer treating subdomains (blog.widgets.com versus widgets.com) independently, instead attaching some association between them. The ranking algorithms have been tweaked so that pages from multiple subdomains have a much higher relevance bar to clear in order to be shown.

It’s not that the “two page limit” now means from any domain and its associated subdomains in total. It’s simply a bit harder than it used to be for multiple subdomains to rank in a set of 10 results. If multiple subdomains are highly relevant for a query, it’s still possible for all of them to rank well.

Home Depot is one site which has cleared the relevancy bar at Google with subdomains at HomeDepot.com that are actually marketed as individual sites. Take careers.homedepot.com and look into its backlinks, even if this subdomain was on a whole different domain, like HomeDepotJobs.com, it would probably rank just as highly.

So, in conclusion, if you’d like to build the equity of one web site or entity, I suggest using a subfolder. If you’d like to build an entire new entity with its own equity, launch a subdomain.

Via [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/subdomains-or-subfolders-which-are-better-for-seo/6849/]

CEO Tells Wall St. Why He Invests in SEO

2008-05-07T03:58:00.000-07:00

Nothing's tougher than facing Wall St. analysts when the economy's sliding into a recession. Tom Evans, CEO of Bankrate, Inc., faced one of the toughest quarters in the company's history in Q3 2007. During the earnings call, he explained how and why Bankrate survived the early days of the subprime crisis. Tom Evans, President and Chief Executive Officer, Bankrate, Inc.

I am quite sure that the last quarter was without a doubt the most difficult quarter for our advertisers that they have seen in a long time. There is obviously a lot of noise about the softness in the housing and mortgage industry, negative news about subprime loans, and concerns about bank liquidity. However, I think our business seemed to have weathered it pretty well.

Traffic for the quarter was up 14 percent versus a year ago, and 6 percent ahead of the second quarter 2007. We were pleased at the strength of the traffic, given that it was such a crazy quarter.

When the subprime crisis broke, analysts and search industry pundits wondered whether paid search marketing had somehow contributed to the rapid growth of approved subprime loans. Soon it became clear though that paid search, if anything, had helped banks screen unqualified leads.

Most major banking institutions and mortgage lenders close the marketing loop for online leads. Banks can not only pre-qualify leads, they can score them. That means unqualified applicants can be filtered before entering the bank's database.

Bankrate depends not only on paid search marketing to generate leads, but natural search traffic as well.

Evans noted during the earnings call that organic direct traffic accounted for 75 percent of Bankrate's total traffic for the quarter. Of the total, partner traffic accounted for 11 percent and paid search made up the remaining 14 percent.

So what did Evans tell analysts he planned to do in the face of a recession? He said, "We continue to increase our search engine spending."

That makes sense, given the quality of paid search leads and the relatively low cost per acquisition (CPA) of search engine marketing leads. In recessionary times, people turn to the Internet more often for research. What they expect to find is quality content that helps them solve problems. But should that content reside only on the Bankrate.com Web site?

Evans said, "As we have said many times before, the growth in organic traffic points to the strength of our core business and reinforces the value of our content, the value of having our data and our brand exposed on as many Web sites and in as many newspapers as possible."

What role then does natural search traffic play in an integrated marketing plan? How important is it for companies to spend time and resources on search engine optimization? In a recession, can SEO contribute to higher margins?

Again, Evans trumpeted the value of organic search:

We believe that organic traffic is less susceptible to competitive market dynamics, and is reflected in driving higher margins to our bottom line. Organic traffic continues to grow at double digits, and free traffic is always a good thing. We also see a positive trend reflected in the number of unique visitors to the site. August, with over 6.1 million uniques, was our highest month ever. And uniques for every single month this year have been higher than the same month last year.

While many hard-working SEOs may argue whether the traffic was "free," all would agree on its value to top-line revenue and bottom-line profits.

Wall St. analysts, though, are no longer impressed solely by a CEO dropping SEO into a conference call. The best analysts ask probing questions and test the breadth and depth of a CEO's search engine optimization strategy.

Fortunately, Tom Evans gets it.

Canaccord Analyst, Colin Gillis, asked a tough question: "So Tom, what elements of the site redesign are being added to improve SEO performance or perhaps drive more links to Bankrate?"

Evans replied, "Well, one of the things that we have always been very conscious of is, and we sort of have an inside metric, we don't play any games to try to trick the search engines and to try to improve the rankings, via tricks or games."

For SEOs who think standards aren't important to CEOs, they're sadly mistaken. CEOs care about their brand and whether the company follows Google and other search engine webmaster guidelines.

Evans noted, "I think the reason we do so well in SEO is we have an enormous amount of content. We have an enormous amount of tools and calculators, and I think we have done a good job from SEO with, we have got literally millions of links into the site and out of the site, and I think that it really helps."

He couldn't be more right. Here's a CEO who got down into the weeds of SEO and learned what works and what doesn't:

You know 170,000 rate tables that are all dynamically generated. I mean, we are just a site that does well from an organic traffic standpoint because of the depth and breadth of the content and the quality of the content. The quality of the clicks and things like that, so we'll continue to enhance that.

We are always adding more from an editorial standpoint. We are going to be launching lots of new calculators in the next three months and concurrent with the redesign. So we are going to be doing a lot of things. But we rank pretty high organically in a lot of different areas.

So is that all there is? SEO has worked wonders on the site. Now is it time to sit back and rest on the company's laurels? Not at all. Nor will SEO spam, tricks, or gaming take Bankrate higher in the rankings as the company diversifies its offerings.

"As we beef up other areas like credit card, like college finance, like insurance, that will help us in those areas," said Evans. "So we think we have got a pretty good focus right now. We think we have got a pretty good position. There is always room to improve, but it is not by any magic tricks or any game plan that we are going to improve."

Via [http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629390]

The Power of Branding

2008-05-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

A very famous proverb goes: What is in a name? A rose will still smell the same, even if it is called by another name!

However, with the advent of latest technology and changing trends, the time has come when we need to do some rethinking. Today, everything is online and virtual: virtual money, online business and so name or rather Branding is the most important facet for anything. Not just any business, but for any particular entity, branding is the key word. A brand is the identity of an entity. Just think of Marilyn Monroe and the first thing that comes in your mind is flying skirt. When we talk about online business, the brand identity is the foundation for building a relationship with your customer beyond product, distribution, pricing, or location of your business. It plays an integral part behind the success of any product. Brand is the relationship that secures future earnings by securing customer loyalty.

Usually consumers have lot of choice of products in the same market segment so brand loyalty plays a very important role for your business growth. A company with high credibility and brand loyalty succeeds in keeping consumers re-buying their product rather than going to a competitor. Statistics tell that it takes 5 times as much money to gain a customer as it does to retain one. Moreover a satisfied customer also helps in generating word of mouth publicity which increases your potential customers.

Branding goes beyond marketing. All aspects of your business should reflect and support your intended brand to create a long term and fruitful relationship with your customers.

A lot of effort goes in developing a brand. It involves more than just picking a catchy name. The following steps may be followed to create a brand:

Define your brand

Determine the objective of your brand

Identify your target audience

Identify the barriers and crush them

Package your brand

Sell and market your brand

Branding plays a very important role in case of online business, as in this case, you are using a very different medium to interact with your customers. Following medium and techniques can be used to communicate the right message to your target audience and create a powerful online brand:

Logo

Domain name

Highly impressive and user friendly website

Internet marketing

Social media marketing

Logo: A meaningful and appealing logo with a global appeal creates a long lasting impression in your consumers’ minds.

Domain name: The domain name should be unique, easy to remember, short and if possible should reflect the image of the company.

Website: An innovative website template, with good and user friendly navigation structure, product display and description, meaningful images, authentic contact information will help in building a unique shopping experience for your consumers and they will turn into repeat customers.

Internet marketing: Internet marketing will give your website the right exposure in the online world and consumers will be able to find you more easily.

Social media marketing: Social media marketing and optimization like blogging, social networking etc. will help in creating fans. Fans can do wonders for your online business as they help in generating word of mouth publicity which is the Mantra of Branding.

So now, don’t just think of marketing, start creating a brand identity which is the reflection of your business.

Search Engine Ranking: Is It Enough to Generate Online Business?

2008-04-25T02:11:00.000-07:00

To rank well in the top SERPs does not fulfill the pre-requisites of business generation in the virtual world. A top ranking site with less or no reputation at all is likely to generate much lesser traffic or leads as compared to a website with good credibility and brand presence.

Your online reputation says a lot about you or your firm. This decides the fate of the business you are likely to generate through Internet. Your online reputation is the complete picture a prospect can access by visiting your website or by typing your name into their Web browser and reading what has been said about you.

Now, the question arises, how you can create or manage brand popularity in this virtual world? The answer is through socializing. To create your brand in the world of Internet, spend some time networking with common interests and welcome business inquiries. These activities can be carried out by exploring second generation Web communities and social networking sites. These activities don't replace your prospecting efforts, but they can enhance them.

With the advancement of technology, it has become pretty clear that Web 2.0 will revolutionize business practices. Web 1.0 was all about getting your message out to your target audience. It was more like a one way communication through the more traditional media like websites, e-mail and banner ads. Today the scenario has completely changed in the world of marketing and advertising. Today, consumers are controlling the online environment and the consumer or the audience is not listening anymore, but the audience is creating, selecting and participating.

Web 2.0 is all about conversation and participation. With various tools and techniques such as social networks, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks & tagging etc. the user -not the sender- controls the message.

You can build your relationship with your target audience and grow your network with them through social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace etc. Wikis and forums are other handy tools to communicate with your customers. You can also develop a conversation with like-minded individuals on blogs. The choices are endless. Only, you have to select the most feasible techniques that can work well for you.

So, now don’t just try to get that top ranking in the Search Results, but start developing a relationship with your target audience, socialize with them and make your presence felt on the WEB.

On Page Optimization

2008-04-15T04:24:00.000-07:00

On page optimization is the process of making any website Search Engine friendly or optimizing the site according to the guidelines suggested by the Search Engines. This process helps the crawlers to index and crawl the pages easily and helps to get better ranking in the SERPs. The term on page has come into existence since the activities are done on the web pages directly. The process includes various steps which are as follows:

Unique Title and Meta Tags
Code and Design Optimization
Website Architecture and Site Navigation
Content Optimization

1. Unique Title and Meta Tags

Unique title and meta tags are prepared and placed on all the pages based on the theme of the page.
Proper alt tags are added for the images.

2. Code and Design Optimization

All the inline css are shifted to an external file.
The unnecessary spaces are removed.
The broken links (if present) are removed.
The page size is optimized.

3. Website Architecture and Site Navigation

The website hierarchy and text links are made proper so that all the page can be reached from at least one static text link and within three linking levels or clicks.
All the pages are linked and the site navigation is made structured.
The pages are linked with proper anchor texts (keyword oriented).
The important pages are linked directly with the home page.

4. Content Optimization

Content is prepared with SEO copywriting and placed on the pages. The important keywords and their synonyms are used with adequate keyword frequency and density.
The headings are optimized with the help of header and bold (or italics) tags.
If required different font colours and sizes can also be used to optimize the content.
The content should be informative and related to the theme of the website.

On page optimization is a very important step towards getting high ranking in the SERPs. Don’t overdo it as the Search Engines penalize for over optimization.

Successful SEO Campaign - 10 Basic Thumb Rules

2008-04-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization is the stepping stone for developing Internet Marketing Strategies for any website. It lays the foundation for the success of web marketing and advertising for any entity. If you want to increase the online presence of your website, then SEO is the first step. The basic performance of any successful SEO campaign can be measured by examining the ranking of the website in the Search Engine Result Pages or simply SERPs. SEO is an ever evolving and fast moving field. There are several techniques which can be followed to accomplish the task but the big challenge is to decide the techniques which should be adopted for any particular campaign to get the desired results. The best practice is to do proper planning before proceeding with the SEO process and adopt a combination of the most suitable techniques which depends entirely on the website theme and goals. The success depends upon how intelligently you use that technique.

The new and evolving trends are always good to try and experiment but don’t forget to implement the basics of SEO. There are 10 basic thumb rules, which, according to me should always be followed to create a solid foundation. These are:

1. Unique Titles and Meta Tags: All the pages should contain unique and descriptive titles and meta tags.

2. Original Content: There is a proverb which is very famous in SEO fraternity that content is king. So always put unique, high quality and informative content on your website.

3. Quality Link Backs: Get quality back links for your website. Don’t run for junk, high in quantity links.

4. Ethical Approach: Don’t try to fool the Search Engines. Always adopt the ethical approach to optimize your website. It may take some time to show in the SERPs, but believe me the results will be long lasting.

5. Website Architecture: Have a proper architecture and navigation for your website. It helps the Search Engine spiders to do deep crawling of the site.

6. No Unnecessary Code: Remove all the junk or unnecessary code from the site. Make it a neat and clean website.

7. XML Sitemaps: Always create and submit xml sitemaps at regular intervals for proper indexing of the website.

8. No Broken Links: Check and remove all the broken or not found links from your website at regular intervals.

9. Regular Updations: Search engines love the websites which have something new to offer to the visitors. They do not like dead sites. Update your website regularly with fresh and original content.

10. Be Consistent: Consistency is the key to success. So keep on working on your SEO project to reap the benefits.

The 10 points mentioned above are the basic SEO ranking factors and if followed with proper planning, show the sure shot success path to a successful SEO campaign.

Search Engine Submissions and Index Inclusion

2008-04-05T04:32:00.000-07:00

Index inclusion is the first step towards practical SEO. It means ensuring that maximum pages from your website are included within the main index database of search engines.

It is very rare for a site to be dropped from the index of the Search Engines completely unless and until it has been penalised or banned. However, temporary variations in the number of indexed pages are common.

So it is very important to notify the Search Engines about a new website by Search Engine submission. Submitting your websites into Search Engines help them to get indexed by the Search Engines. However it is not necessary to submit a site into Search Engines because they tend to find a new site through natural links etc. but it is always a good practice to submit a website which catalyses the process.

Index inclusion is the first step towards practical SEO. It means ensuring that maximum pages from your website are included within the main index database of search engines.

It is very rare for a site to be dropped from the index of the Search Engines completely unless and until it has been penalised or banned. However, temporary variations in the number of indexed pages are common.

So it is very important to notify the Search Engines about a new website by Search Engine submission. Submitting your websites into Search Engines help them to get indexed by the Search Engines. However it is not necessary to submit a site into Search Engines because they tend to find a new site through natural links etc. but it is always a good practice to submit a website which catalyses the process.

What is Index Coverage?

Index coverage refers to the proportion of the pages of your site which are included in the index of Search Engines.

Google Sitemaps are very helpful tools for increasing index coverage and notify Google of the changes occurring on the site. Sitemaps do not guarantee to improve the rankings of your site for existing pages, but it can enable more pages to be included in the indexed database of the Search Engines which in turn increases the visitors. It can also determine the frequency of the visit of Googlebot.

Excluding Pages from the Site Index:

At certain occasions, you may not want the Search Engines to follow links and index certain pages of your website. In this case you may instruct the Search Engine Bots not to follow and index those pages by adding following code on robots.txt file:

User-Agent: * Disallow:/demo/

The above code will disallow all the robots from crawling the entire demo folder. Simply adding a / will disallow the robots from crawling of your whole website.

You can also restrict the robots from indexing a particular page by adding noindex, nofollow attributes.

Search Engine Optimization - A Step by Step Guide for Beginners

2008-04-05T03:55:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization, as the name suggests, is the act of changing or altering websites so that they can rank well in the organic, crawler-based Search Engine listings or Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). The main aim is to get top rankings on the first page of Search Engine listings. The process of Search Engine Optimization includes - choosing targeted or theme oriented keywords or key phrases that are related to the website, and ensuring that the site shows on the top listings of SERPs when those keywords and phrases are searched. The process includes optimizing a site according to the criteria of Search Engines and increasing the number of visitors also called traffic to a Website. Normally, Internet uers do not click through pages and pages of SERPs, so the position where a Website ranks in SERPs is very important for generating more traffic for the site because, the higher a Website ranks, the greater is the chance of getting visitors.

SEO Ranking Factors:

Planning and Strategy
Search Engine Submissions, Index inclusion and Coverage
On Page Optimization
Link Popularity Building and Off Page Optimization
SEM Process
Conversion Efficiency

A. Planning and Strategy:

Planning is the first step to SEO. Never launch any strategy without proper planning. In this section, I will discuss the following steps:

Goal Setting
Keyphrase Research, Analysis and Selection
Competitors’ Analysis
Market Analysis

1. Goal Setting: Before starting SEO process, it is very essential that you set some realistic goals for the campaign. Common types of high-level goals used for Search Engine Marketing:

Position Based Goals and Targets: It is important for position based goals that these targets generate high volume, high intent keywords and key phrases in the major search engines.

Visitor Volume Based Goals and Targets: This includes getting a particular number of clicks from unique and returning visitors. For example to achieve 5,000 clicks from the targeted phrases per day, week or month.

Outcome Based Goals and Targets: This includes setting conversion based goals. For example to generate 10,000 leads or sales from SEO per day, week or month.

Market Share Based Goals and Targets: There are various tools such as the Google Traffic Estimator or Hitwise, which make it possible to calculate a ‘share of search’ within a product category with detailed keyphrase analysis. However, care must be taken while setting this type of goal with these tools because they may not be 100% correct being mislead by automatically submitted searches from rank-checking, link-building or click fraud software tools. For example to achieve 25% share of the searches within a year for a particular key phrase.

2. Keyphrase Research, Analysis and Selection: Keyword or key phrase analysis and selection are the core to success in Search Engine Marketing. Identifying the most relevant key phrases for a Website is the most important and crucial starting point as it forms the base of your SEO campaign. Since this is very important aspect of SEO, I shall discuss it in detail in a separate section.

3. Competitors’ Analysis: Comparing search performance of competitors against that of yours is a big part of analysis and improvement for SEO. The first step is to identify your online competitor types for search traffic. It is not always necessary that the competitors for particular keyphrases are your traditional competitors. For example, for a mobile phone retailer, when someone searches for a product, you will be competing for search visibility with these types of websites:

Mobile phone retailers
Network providers
Handset manufacturers
Affiliates and partner sites
Gazettes and news sites
Review sites
Blogs and personal sites about mobile phone technology
Mobile phone related articles

This makes it very important to identify your actual competitors and their SEO strategy to compete with them and beat them.

4. Market Analysis: Market analysis is very essential to get more visitors to a website and convert those visitors into long term customers.

Google News: Fact & Fiction Edition

2008-04-04T03:35:00.000-07:00

The Google News blog has an excellent post on the truths and myths of how Google News works. Here is the short version: * Images don't help your articles rank higher (there is a but...)
* Google News currently can't fetch revisions to articles
* Timing your articles for specific releases won't help it rank better in Google News
* You need text in your articles, Google can't include a picture with no text in the news index
* Google Webmaster Tools has a section for News content, so you can see Google News specific errors
* Google Sitemaps do not help with boosting the ranking of an article in Google News
* A site redesign, specifically new site and url architecture, may impact your performance and indexing by Google News
* Google AdSense has no impact on your Google News ranking

If I had to add my own, based on reading the SEO forums on a daily basis, I would add that the only way to get included in Google News is to be reviewed by a human and be manually included in the Google News index. Good SEO won't get you included in Google News, no matter how many links you have - you still need a manual review. You can request such a review using this form.

The major takeaways I had from this post are two things:

(1) Google News is working on a way to check your articles for updates. So sometime in the future, if you make changes to a story, Google will be aware of those updates. This is something most publishers want from Google News.

(2) Good images can be featured in Google News and if you click on the image, as opposed to the story hyperlink, the story hosting the image will be the destination URL. So although images won't help you rank your story headline higher, the image may be feature next to other stories and can increase your traffic from Google News.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080403-083445.php]

Real Estate Search Engine Zillow Opens "Mortgage Marketplace"

2008-04-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

Zillow doesn't see itself as a real estate "vertical." Instead it regards itself as a media company that creates advertising opportunities around what is arguably the most significant "life events" purchase: buying a home.

In that spirit the company is developing numerous interesting marketing vehicles aimed at consumers in all phases of home buying (and in the future home remodeling). One critical piece of that equation is getting a home loan or an equity line of credit. Zillow doesn't see itself as a real estate "vertical." Instead it regards itself as a media company that creates advertising opportunities around what is arguably the most significant "life events" purchase: buying a home.

In that spirit the company is developing numerous interesting marketing vehicles aimed at consumers in all phases of home buying (and in the future home remodeling). One critical piece of that equation is getting a home loan or an equity line of credit. Enter the new Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.

Basically the site is a lead-gen tool for lenders, but without any fees. Lead-gen isn't the business model; lenders can use the site for free. Zillow makes money on ads that will be served to consumers visiting the various pages of the Mortgage Marketplace. If the site is successful with the new offering it will put pressure on conventional lead-gen sites for lenders such as LendingTree, among others.

One thing that's very interesting about what Zillow is doing is that it's going to allow borrowers to rate lenders so that consumers can make determinations about whether to do business with them accordingly. This is a unique feature of the site in my understanding and may spur others to do the same. That should flush out some of the "bait and switch" tactics that exist in the home loans market.

Consumers, (would-be borrowers) apply online to receive loan offers from multiple lenders. They have to provide a good deal of information, including an estimated credit score. But borrowers are allowed to remain anonymous and don't offer their SSNs. This prevents aggressive lenders from hounding consumers with calls, which happens in other mortgage lead-gen scenarios.

Participating lenders are verified by Zillow and loan "offers" are submitted to borrowers in something like a reverse auction. Lenders can see the other offers submitted to an individual borrower and try to "one up" the best offer on the table. Consumers can then choose which lenders to contact.

In my call with Zillow I got into an arcane discussion about consumer perceptions, contracts and potential liability for Zillow. The company has thought through nearly 100 percent of the legal issues associated with brokering these potential deals. Indeed, no "transaction" takes place through the site. Ultimately lender and borrower have to strike a deal independently with the information exchanged through Zillow as the foundation of that potential deal.

I was told also that mortgage brokers and lenders were already very heavy users of the Zillow site and that the company sought to create a mortgage product that would benefit those lenders and consumers simultaneously and improve upon lead-gen products already in the market.

Zillow said that it already had "hundreds of lenders registered and confirmed at launch even without product details," indicating a high degree of demand -- somewhat surprisingly -- in a down market.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080403-092734.php]

Recent Google Updates Have SEOs Scrambling

2008-04-04T03:03:00.000-07:00

Like a celebrity sitting down with Barbara Walters, Google News has decided to clear up rumors surrounding how articles are included and ranked. In a post on the official Google News blog, software engineer Andy Golding addressed some assumptions floating around about how articles are indexed. Like a celebrity sitting down with Barbara Walters, Google News has decided to clear up rumors surrounding how articles are included and ranked. In a post on the official Google News blog, software engineer Andy Golding addressed some assumptions floating around about how articles are indexed.

Here are the Myths:

* Having an image next to your article improves your ranking
* Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking
* There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News
* Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings
* If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve

And now the Truths:

* Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News
* Articles that are just images or video won't be included
* Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News

Things to keep in mind:

* Google News only visits each URL once. If you make updates, it won't be reflected in Google News results. This could change in the future, however.
* If you try to game the system with duplicate content or constantly rewriting stories, you might get flagged in the system as spam.
* Use Webmaster Tools to help analyze your coverage
* A sitemap helps Google News find your content, but not rank it

Via [http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080403-095920]

Google Gets Out of the SEO Business

2008-04-02T21:38:00.000-07:00

Google is getting itself out of a somewhat sticky situation by deciding to

sell Performics Search Marketing, which it acquired as part of the DoubleClick deal. It will retain the affiliate marketing portion of the DoubleClick Performics business.

Since Google announced its intention to acquire DoubleClick last year, Google had faced criticism of the potential conflict of interest that would be created by Google owning a search marketing firm. After all, why wouldn't customers assume, even if it weren't the case, that a Google-owned agency would have inside information?

According to Tom Phillips, director of the DoubleClick integration at Google:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

So that only leaves one major search engine who's also in the SEO business: Microsoft, which acquired Avenue A | Razorfish and its SEO business with the aQuantive acquisition.

In the meantime, the New York Times is reporting that Google will lay off 300 at DoubleClick. This comes as no surprise, since CEO Eric Schmidt hinted at cuts when the acquisition closed last month.

Via [http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080402-204611]

Google Selling Performics -- Thanks, Google!

2008-04-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

Last month, I did an open letter to Google wishing they'd quickly sell off Performics, to avoid the conflict of having a search marketing firm that works to improve results on Google's own search engine. Well, thank you Google! They've acted far more quickly than I would have hoped for, announcing today that the company will be splitting Performics into two separate companies (affiliate marketing and search marketing) and selling the search marketing business off. Now to see if Microsoft will do the right thing and make a similar move with Avenue A/Razorfish, as I covered in my open letter and in my Ad Age column this month. Below, Google's statement on the move:

Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

We plan to integrate the affiliate marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our affiliate advertisers, and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. Together, we believe that we can continue to grow this business and deliver on the high expectations from partners.

Where it’s applicable in Europe, these plans and their implications for employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives. During this transition, we will ensure that all affiliate and search marketing customers receive the same high level of service they have always experienced.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080402-172222.php]

Megachart & Analysis: Google Management Changes, 2000-2008

2008-04-02T21:32:00.000-07:00

With two high-ranking Google executives leaving the Big G within a month's time, I thought it would be interesting to go back through Google's executive management page over the years and see how it reflects changes among the higher-ups. Below, there are a series of tables and commentary that hopefully let you understand the shifting currents at-a-glance.

Some notes. First, I think who gets listed on this page -- and the order in which they are listed -- is important. This has to be a perk for some execs -- that they'll get to show up and be profiled on that page. In addition, the order is not always alphabetical. With the exception of the big three -- CEO Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin -- I think who shows up first when it's a non-alphabetical listing can be significant. There can be some exceptions to this, and I'll note them as part of the charts. Let's dive in.

The charts below reflect the exact order people were listed on the executive management pages, for the dates shown at the top of each charge. There may have been other changes between dates, of course. Maybe eventually I'll go back and redo this to reflect all significant changes to the pages. I might have missed some key updates.

Each row in the chart shows where an executive was listed, in a white background. If you hit a gray background while reading across, then that person moved somehow. They might have gone up or down on the page, and I show this with a notation. I also note if someone was given a title change (usually a promotion). Keep in mind that sometimes titles at Google don't reflect that much. Matt Cutts, for example, remains (I think) a senior software engineer. In another company (or if he were a different type of person), he'd probably be called "vice president, search quality." Still, seeing how titles change among the top execs is still useful to note.

Be sure to read the summaries below each chart. Sometimes people will drop in positions, but that doesn't mean they necessarily have dropped in "pecking order." Indeed, speculating that there is a pecking order to some of these pages is just that, speculation.

Finally, if you see orange, that's when someone actually left Google. Why orange? Hey, red looked too bad, and I'm color-challenged. Like I need Garanimals for adults, OK?

Google Management: 2000 to 2002

Jan. 20, 2000	March 31, 2001	Feb. 7, 2002
		Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO (NEW)
Larry Page, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer	Larry Page, Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products (TITLE CHANGE)
Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology (TITLE CHANGE)
	Omid Kordestani, Vice President of Business Development & Sales	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Business Development & Sales (TITLE CHANGE)
		Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales
		Joan Braddi, Vice President, Search Services
	Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering (NEW)	Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering
Urs Hölzle, Vice President of Engineering	DROPS: 3 TO 8	Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow
		Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology
		Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Marketing (TITLE CHANGE)
Omid Kordestani, Vice President of Business Development & Sales	RISES: 4 TO 3
Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Communications	Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Communications	DROPS: 5 TO 10
Tim Armstrong, Vice President, National Sales	DROPS: 6 TO 7
	Joan Braddi, Vice President, Search Services (TITLE CHANGE)	SEE ABOVE, STAYS AT 6
Joan Braddi, Vice President, Licensing Sales	RISES: 7 TO 6
	Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales (TITLE CHANGE)	RISES: 7 TO 5
	Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow (TITLE CHANGE)	SEE ABOVE, STAYS AT 8
Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology	Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology	SEE ABOVE, STAYS AT 9
8 Execs	9 Execs	10 Execs

In 2000, only eight executives get spotlighted on the page. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the remaining six aren't in alphabetical order. My assumption is that Urs Hölzle got third billing because he was over at engineering. At Google, engineering rules, as will be seen later on.

Omid Kordestani came next. I'd say that was a nod to the man who became Google's early breadwinner. Cindy McCaffrey, the woman who guided Google toward its public relations greatness, came fifth. After that, my assumption is that both Tim Armstrong and Joan Braddi were deemed important enough to deserve management page credit with an alphabetical listing between them used as a tie-breaker.

Of course, all four VPs I've mentioned oversaw different areas. Could it be that they were listed alphabetically by those areas (Business Development, Corporate Communications, National Sales, & Licensing Sales)? Not with National Sales coming before Licensing Sales. Perhaps seniority was involved.

Craig Silverstein in "last" place? I'd call that more "pride of place," similar to when you've got an important actor who gets the last credit. He's also the only director level position on the list. And I could be overthinking all of this.

In 2001, Wayne Rosing came on to head engineering, apparently replacing Urs Hölzle, who shifted over into being named "Google Fellow." But Omid Kordestani bumped the VP of engineering slot out of third billing, likely a reflection of how important he was to actually building Google a business income.

Joan Braddi and Tim Armstrong did a flipflop in terms of how they were listed. I wouldn't be surprised if this was something thought to be fair, flipping two execs seen as co-equal in the billing, to make things fair.

Am I reading too much into the order? Perhaps -- but alphabetically by name isn't used, nor is alphabetically by the area each VP governed used. And if it were seniority, then McCaffrey would have been over Rosing.

In 2002, the big change was Eric Schmidt coming on as CEO. That moved everyone down a notch. Larry Page became "President, Products" and Sergey Brin, "President, Technology." Kordestani got promoted to Senior Vice President and kept his spot after the big three.

The three VPs other than Cindy McCaffrey might have been shifted to be listed in alphabetical order by last name -- so movement here might signify nothing. Then the non-VPs, Hölzle and Silverstein, are listed.

So why's VP McCaffrey at the end? Look, Cindy was important. Very much so. That drop had nothing to do with any decreased importance, in my view. To me, it would have been much more an honor of last billing sometimes being more noticed.

Google Management: 2003 to 2004

Feb. 7, 2002	Feb. 7, 2003	April 2, 2004
Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO
	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology
	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products
	George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer (NEW)	George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer
	Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering	Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering
Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	DROPS: 2 TO 3
Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	RISES: 3 TO 2
Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Business Development & Sales (TITLE CHANGE)	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations (TITLE CHANGE; DROPS: 4 TO 6)	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations
		Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Marketing
	David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development (NEW)	DROPS: 7 TO 9
	Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management (NEW)	Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management
		David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development
		Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations (NEW)
Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales	Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales (DROPS: 5 TO 9)	DROPPED FROM PAGE
Joan Braddi, Vice President, Search Services	Joan Braddi, Vice President, Licensing Sales (TITLE CHANGE; DROPS 6 TO 10)	DROPPED FROM PAGE
Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering	RISES: 7 TO 5
Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow	Urs Hölzle, Google Fellow	DROPPED FROM PAGE
Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology	Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology	DROPPED FROM PAGE
Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Marketing	Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Marketing	RISES: 13 TO 7
10 Execs	13 Execs	10 Execs

For consistency with the earlier chart, I've continued on from 2002, which was already covered above.

In 2003, three new key executives were added. George Reyes was named Chief Financial Officer and took over the number four spot previously held by Omid Kordestani, who slipped down slightly past engineering VP Wayne Rosing. David Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development, was added and jumped above existing execs like Tim Armstrong and Joan Braddi. The same was true for new exec Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management. Larry Page, long either in the top spot or second spot, swapped places with Sergey Brin. I doubt it meant anything more than the two deciding they should rotate from time-to-time.

In 2004, there was spring cleaning. Long-standing execs Armstrong, Braddi, Hölzle, & Silverstein were dropped from the page. They were still at Google, but they no longer got listed as top management. Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations, came in as the only new exec to make the page. She took over Cindy McCaffrey's spot at the end of the list. In doing so, that last spot no longer felt like a place to spotlight an exec but rather that the list was showing a pecking order of who was rated most important.

Google Management: 2005 to 2006

April 2, 2004	March 3, 2005	Jan. 1, 2006
Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO
		Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products
		Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology
Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	DROPS: 2 TO 3
Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	RISES: 3 TO 2
George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer	George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer	George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer
		Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development (TITLE CHANGE)
		Alan Eustace, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
		Jeff Huber, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
		W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
Wayne Rosing, Vice President of Engineering	Wayne Rosing, Senior Vice President of Engineering (TITLE CHANGE)	LEFT GOOGLE IN MAY 2005
Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Field Operations	RISES: 6 TO 5
Cindy McCaffrey, Vice President, Corporate Marketing	LEFT GOOGLE IN DEC. 2004
Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management	Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management	Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management
David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development	David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development	David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development
Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations	Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations	Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations
		Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs (NEW)
		Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales (RETURNS TO PAGE)
		Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience (NEW)
		Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management (NEW)
		Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations (NEW)
		Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations (NEW)
		Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations (NEW)
		Norio Murakami, Vice President and General Manager, Google Japan (NEW)
		Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist (NEW)
		Miriam Rivera, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel (NEW)
10 Execs	9 Execs	21 Execs

Again, for consistency when moving between charts, I've repeated the previous year. Moving along...

In 2005, there was only one major change -- Cindy McCaffrey was off the chart. She'd left Google by then (in December 2004), the first high-ranking exec to take her well-deserved winnings and move on.

In 2006, there was another absence. Wayne Rosing became the second high-ranking exec to depart, having left in May 2005 (and see here) to focus on his passion for astronomy. But the real change was the addition of many new execs to the page. Elliot Schrage took over from Cindy McCaffrey, so his addition was no surprise. Same too for the three separate VPs of engineering that came in to fill Wayne Rosing's spot.

But many pre-IPO Google employees gained new recognition, such as Sheryl Sandberg, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and Marissa Mayer. Meanwhile, Omid Kordestani moved back higher in the seeming pecking order and Tim Armstrong finally returned to the page. Joan Braddi, who he'd long been twinned with on the page, did not, despite still being at Google then (and today).

Google Management: 2006 to 2008

Jan. 1, 2006	Feb. 2, 2007	April 2, 2008
	Executive Management Group (EMG)
Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO	Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Chairman and CEO
Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products	Larry Page, Co-founder & President, Products
Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology	Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology
		Laszlo Bock Vice President, People Operations
George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer	(MOVES TO EMG; SEE BELOW)
	Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations (TITLE CHANGE)	Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Business Operations
	W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering	W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering
	David C. Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development (TITLE CHANGE)	David C. Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer (TITLE CHANGE)
	Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Research (TITLE CHANGE)	Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering & Reseach
	Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Google Fellow (TITLE CHANGE; RETURNS TO PAGE)	Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Google Fellow
	Jeff Huber, Vice President, Engineering	Jeff Huber, Senior Vice President, Engineering (TITLE CHANGE)
Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development (TITLE CHANGE)	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development (MOVES TO EMG)	Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development
	George Reyes, Chief Financial Officer	George Reyes, Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer (TITLE CHANGE; ANNOUNCED RESIGNATION IN AUGUST 2007; STAYS UNTIL REPLACED)
	Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management (TITLE CHANGE)	Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management
	Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications & Public Affairs	Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications & Public Affairs
Alan Eustace, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)	MOVES TO EMG; GETS SENIOR VP TITLE
Jeff Huber, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)	MOVES TO EMG
W. M. Coughran, Jr., Vice President, Engineering (NEW)	MOVES TO EMG
Jonathan Rosenberg, Vice President, Product Management	MOVES TO EMG; GETS SENIOR VP TITLE
David C. Drummond, Vice President, Corporate Development	MOVES TO EMG; GETS SENIOR VP TITLE
Shona Brown, Vice President, Business Operations	MOVES TO EMG; GETS SENIOR VP TITLE
Elliot Schrage, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs (NEW)	MOVES TO EMG
	Google Management Group (GMG)
Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales (RETURNS TO PAGE)	Tim Armstrong, Vice President, Advertising Sales (MOVES TO GMG)	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Laszlo Bock Vice President, People Operations (NEW)	MOVES TO GMC, SEE ABOVE
	Adam Bosworth Vice President (NEW)	LEFT GOOGLE SEPTEMBER 2007
	Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist	MOVES TO ENGINEERING EXECS, SEE BELOW
	David Eun Vice President, Content Partnerships (NEW)	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Dave Girouard Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise (NEW)	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management	MOVES TO PRODUCTS EXECS, SEE BELOW
	David Lawee Vice President, Marketing (NEW)	MOVES TO LEGAL EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Kai-Fu Lee Vice President, Engineering, Product, and Public Affairs & President, Greater China (NEW)	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Udi Manber Vice President, Engineering (NEW)	MOVES TO ENGINEERING EXECS, SEE BELOW
Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience (NEW)	Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience (MOVES TO GMG)	MOVES TO PRODUCTS EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Douglas Merrill Vice President, Engineering (NEW)	MOVES TO ENGINEERING EXECS, SEE BELOW
	Norio Murakami, Vice President and General Manager, Google Japan (MOVES TO GMG)	MOVES TO SALES EXECS, SEE BELOW
	David Radcliffe Vice President, Real Estate (NEW)	MOVES TO FINANCE EXECS, SEE BELOW
Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management (NEW)	MOVES TO GMG; SEE ABOVE
Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations (NEW)	Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations (MOVES TO GMG)	LEFT GOOGLE MARCH 2008
	Kent Walker Vice President & General Counsel (NEW)	MOVES TO LEGAL EXECS, SEE BELOW
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America Operations (NEW)	MOVES TO GMG; SEE ABOVE
Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations (NEW)	MOVES TO GMG; SEE ABOVE
Norio Murakami, Vice President and General Manager, Google Japan (NEW)	MOVES TO GMG; SEE ABOVE
Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist (NEW)	MOVES TO GMG; SEE ABOVE
	Susan Wojcicki Vice President, Product Management (NEW)	MOVES TO PRODUCTS EXECS, SEE BELOW
Miriam Rivera, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel (NEW)	DROPPED FROM PAGE; LIKELY LEFT IN 2006
		Engineering Execs
		Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist
		Stuart Feldman, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
		Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
		Udi Manber Vice President, Engineering
		Nelson Mattos, Vice President, Engineering, EMEA (NEW)
		Douglas Merrill Vice President, Engineering LEFT GOOGLE APRIL 2008
		Shiva Shivakumar, Vice President and Distinguished Entrepreneur (NEW)
		Alfred Spector, VP of Research and Special Initiatives (NEW)
		Benjamin Sloss Treynor, Vice President, Engineering (NEW)
		Jeff Dean, Google Fellow (NEW)
		Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Fellow (NEW)
		Amit Singhal, Google Fellow (NEW)
		Products Execs
		Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Management
		Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience
		Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, EMEA & Latin America (NEW)
		Lorraine Twohill, Vice President, Marketing, EMEA (NEW)
		Susan Wojcicki Vice President, Product Management
		Sales Execs
		Daniel Alegre, Vice President, Latin America and APLA Business Development (NEW)
		Tim Armstrong, President, Advertising and Commerce, North America, & Vice President, Google Inc. (TITLE CHANGE)
		Nikesh Arora, President, EMEA Operations & Vice President, Google Inc. (TITLE CHANGE)
		Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, President, Asia Pacific and Latin America Operations (TITLE CHANGE)
		David Eun Vice President, Content Partnerships
		David Fischer, Vice President, Online Sales & Operations (NEW, REPLACES SHERYL SANDBERG)
		Dave Girouard Vice President & General Manager, Enterprise
		John Herlihy, Vice President, Onlinel Sales & Operations, EMEA
		Kai-Fu Lee, Vice President, Google Inc.; President, Greater China (TITLE CHANGE)
		Dr. John Liu, Vice President, Sales, Greater China (NEW)
		Norio Murakami, President & General Manager, Google Japan & Vice President, Google Inc. (TITLE CHANGE)
		Penry Price, VP, Advertising Sales, North America (NEW)
		Dennis Woodside, Vice President, UK, Benelux and Ireland (NEW)
		Legal Execs
		Kent Walker Vice President & General Counsel
		David Lawee Vice President, Corporate Development (TITLE CHANGE)
		Megan Smith, Vice President, New Business Development (NEW)
		Finance Execs
		Brent Callinicos, Vice President & Treasurer (NEW)
		Francois Delepine, Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis (NEW)
		Mark Fuchs, Vice President of Finance and Chief Accountant (NEW)
		Julio Pekarovic, Vice President, Global Sales Finance (NEW)
		David Radcliffe, Vice President, Real Estate
		Business Operations Execs
		Francoise Brougher, Vice President, Business Operations (NEW)
21 Execs	31 Execs	54 Execs

As with the other charts, I've repeated the last year of the previous one, 2006, so that comparisons can continue.

In 2007, we see a major change. Google execs were divided into two groups. First there's the Executive Management Group, of EMG. These are the most senior executives. There's no pecking order in how they are listed after the top trio of Schmidt-Page-Brin. Everyone else is listed alphabetically by last name, regardless of job title. All elevated to the EMG had been previously listed on the management page before. Several gained promotion to senior vice president level (Brown, Drummond, Eustace, Hölzle, & Rosenberg). Hölzle is notable for being the only one to return to the executive page after an absence. He was on the original executive page way back in 2000 as a VP; he changed to being a Google Fellow in 2001 and was dropped in 2004. His return reflected gaining SVP in addition to his Google Fellow title.

Other executives are listed under the "Google Management Group" heading. These include all the new additions from 2005 (such as Mayer, Kamangar, Sandberg, among others). In addition, many new execs get added, such as Susan Wojcicki and Douglas Merrill, among others. Only one person goes, Miriam Rivera, formerly listed as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. I don't recall any news coming out about her leaving Google. But she definitely left at some point, currently serving on the Stanford University Board Of Trustees.

In 2008, another big shake-up. The executive page listed over 50 people, more than ever before.

The EMG section remained largely the same. The only addition was Laszlo Bock, Vice President, People Operations, jumping into it. David Drummond got a title change, picking up Chief Legal Officer to add to his SVP title. Jeff Huber gained an SVP title, as did CFO George Reyes. Reyes, of course, also announced he was resigning in August 2007. More than half-a-year later, he continues to serve and seek a replacement. Forbes looked at that challenge back in December.

The Google Management Group section added in 2007 did not survive. Instead, all the execs there other than three departures I'll come to were added to one of several groups: Engineering, Product, Sales, Legal, Finance, & Business Operations. Within each group, people were listed alphabetically by name, regardless of title.

I said earlier that engineers sat on top of the Google pecking order. Anyone familiar with Google culture will tell you this, and the order of the groups reflects it. Engineering comes first. That just alphabetical? Sure, Product and Sales would come next, but then Legal & Business Operations ruins that pattern.

Within the group are names long on the page, such as Vint Cerf. But many new names were added, such as engineering VP Stuart Feldman and Shiva Shivakumar, who is also Google's only Distinguished Entrepreneur. Still listed today but soon to go missing is Douglas Merrill, confirmed to be leaving and expected to head to EMI. Missing from the group is Adam Bosworth, who left in September 2007.

In the Product group are (again) familiar names (Kamangar, Mayer, Wojcicki) along with two new ones (Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, EMEA & Latin America, and Lorraine Twohill, Vice President, Marketing, EMEA).

Sales is the biggest group (13 people) outside the EMG itself (14 people), just edging out Engineering (12) and Products (5). Lots of new additions to the page show up. Notable is David Fischer, Vice President, Online Sales & Operations, filling the spot vacated by Sheryl Sandberg in March 2008, though Fischer doesn't get the "Global" moniker that Sandberg's title carried. Also notable are some additions for areas outside the US, such as Daniel Alegre, Vice President, Latin America and APLA Business Development.

We also see the first "President" titles showing up beyond those that the two founders carry. Indeed, while I previously said that at Google, engineers rule -- on a title basis, it's the sales side that would seem to outrank. Tim Armstrong, Nikesh Arora, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and Norio Murakami all carry a president's title, joining Kai-Fu Lee, who already had one. That's six sales-side presidents to only one on the engineering side (Sergey Brin) and one on the product side (Larry Page). Of course, most of these sales presidents oversee areas outside the US (China, Japan, Europe & Middle East; Asia & Latin America), and there might be regulatory or other reasons why it's helpful to have someone at least carry a president's title.

In the Legal group, one new exec is added (Megan Smith, Vice President, New Business Development) and David Lawee stays on the executive page but seems to make a lateral move, becoming VP of corporate development. Previously, he was VP of marketing. Oddly, this means that Google seems to be without a VP of marketing, at the moment.

In the Finance group, four new execs get named in addition to David Radcliffe, Vice President, Real Estate, who was previously on the page. And Francoise Brougher, Vice President, Business Operations, becomes the sole person listed in the Business Operations Group.

Departures, In Summary

So with all the talk of a brain drain, how's it looking in terms of executives on the Google management page that have gone? Year-by-year:

2000: 0 departures
2001: 0 departures
2002: 0 departures
2003: 0 departures
2004: 1 departure (Cindy McCaffrey; this was also Google's IPO year)
2005: 1 departure (Wayne Rosing)
2006: 1 departure (Mariam Rivera -- may have left in 2007)
2007: 1 departure (Adam Bosworth; George Reyes announced departure; Louis Monier also left and may have been listed on the page at a time point I didn't check)
2008: 2 departures (Sandberg & Merrill)
Total To Date: 6 departures

That's it -- only six named execs to depart (though there might be a few more, if they were named on pages between the time points I picked). Frankly, that seems a great retention record to me, four years after the company went public, when plenty of the execs are pre-IPO and wealthy. But as I said in my post today about Merrill's departure, I'm sure Google will continue to see execs go because they want to show they can succeed on their own, out from under Google's shadow.

Eventually, Google might also suffer Yahoo's problem, that post-IPO execs leave not just for the challenge but because they potentially can make IPO money by working for actual start-ups, rather than a former start-up that simply can't deliver the same perks (payoff, lack of bureaucracy).

By the way, be sure to check out this cool Google organization map that's being maintained at the Cogmap wiki.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080402-170216.php]

Google Update Dewey - Google Confirms Algorithm Change

2008-04-02T21:26:00.000-07:00

Remember a couple days ago I reported on some major shifts in the Google search results? Well, this morning I spotted Google's Matt Cutts requesting feedback on the change at WebmasterWorld.

In short, Matt said he did not see "large differences in rankings between these datacenters," but he would like more feedback from the webmaster community. To submit feedback, he asked for webmasters to use this form and place the word "dewey" in the "Additional details" text area on that form. By doing so, they will review specific cases to this Google algorithm change and use that feedback to help improve the quality of the search results.

So since Matt asked us to use the word "dewey," why not code name this Google update the "Dewey" update? It has been a while since we named a Google update, and this is the first major update we have seen in a while that has really been widely noticed.

Via [http://searchengineland.com/080402-090926.php]