By: MarketBuilders

Often, when we speak to new clients, we’re asked for Search Engine placement guarantees. We have to explain to them that Search Engine Optimization is about working smarter with the Search Engines and not by just adding keywords and submitting your site to every Search Engine and directory possible.

This article is for website owners who want to separate the hype from the basics. This article is written from years of experience working with (against?)the Google PageRank algorithm – what I’ve found works and what just wastes a lot of time and effort.

Rule 1: Relevant Inbound Links.

If you’re going to rank highly with Google, you can’t have enough relevant, quality inbound links. I know, you’ve heard it before, but now it has a lot more to do with HOW you obtain inbound links. The links you acquire from other sites are the paths to your website for search engine crawlers and visitors alike. Links that are relevant to your website, and have a high Page Rank themselves, increase your website’s value with Google and links from weak sites detract from that value and credibility.

Be selective in reciprocal linking. Both reciprocal and one way links can work, if you are prudent in selecting the links. Be sure to submit your website to the relevant sections in the major directories.

The best approach is to build a ‘link baiting’ website that attracts links due to the current, interesting information you provide. Active Blogs, Press Releases, and submitting articles to eZines … these all help to attract quality, inbound links to your website.

Rule 2: Know Your Competition.

“Rank” is the relative position of a website in the Search Engines’ natural results. How competitive is the keyword or search term you’re trying to rank highly for? If there’s little competition, anyone can get you 1st page search results. It’s the competitive search terms that draw large amounts of traffic that are difficult to rank for.

How well you do in the search engine results is a function of how much hard work you’ve done in relation to your competition and the keywords and search terms that you’re most likely to rank highly for - AND that get enough traffic to satisfy your business model.

Analyze your competition’s keywords, links, keyword density, and design - but be sure to never plagiarize – don’t copy your competition, improve upon it!

Rule 3: Ranking Highly with the Right Keywords.

Ask yourself what keywords and search terms your ‘most likely customers’ will use on the major Search Engines. Many businesses make the mistake of simply attempting to increase traffic to their site rather than making their primary goal to attract internet visitors that provide the highest ‘clickthrough’ or purchase rates. You can have 10,000 visitors per day, but if they don’t buy or ‘clickthrough’ they’re just a statistic. High ranking for the right keywords (keywords used by your target audience) is imperative. Make sure the keywords you choose are attracting the best audience possible – based on your business model, of course.

Rule 4: Use a Search Engine Friendly Website Design.

A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough to encourage repeat visits by potential customers and Search Engine crawlers as well. Use search engine friendly website addresses (URLs) and avoid long URLs with dynamic, query strings.

Rule 5: Select Keywords Carefully.

You must research your keywords before targeting. There are tools that give you a good idea of a keyword’s search potential for example. It is important to know the number of searches for specific keywords in the last month, last 6 months and last year. You should also determine the number of web pages that are targeting the keyword or search term.

Start slowly. To determine the keywords with the best ROI, begin with campaigns that focus on keywords with moderate competition, but a high number of searches.

Also, make sure you have your best keywords embedded throughout your text on each web page. Don’t overdo it, but try to use them often throughout your text in a natural way.

Rule 6: Write Compelling Content.

This is pretty obvious – I mean as opposed to writing weak content. Even if your website site is technically sound for the search engine crawlers, it will not succeed unless you also fill your web pages with focused, relevant, and compelling content. Interesting content brings repeat visitors and increases the chance of conversion. Good, sound content holds the reader’s attention and appeals to your target audience. Your web pages should have your desired action embedded in the content that is the focus of the site. You should add new text or change content regularly. It’s important to keep the website fresh, with current information and news.

Rule 7: Write Relevant and Original Content.

Website content is like a business. Just as your business card markets your services, website content tells search engines the relevance and context of each web page. Resist the temptation to include everything in the Meta content, but make it detailed. Confused? The idea is to include only what is relevant to the page in the Meta Content but to include everything that is relevant.

Rule 8: There are No Guarantees.

Google alone control its indexing and ranking algorithm. Don’t try to trick Google using ‘link farms’ or other useless services. The only way to improve your search engine rank with Google is to play by their rules. And their rules are pretty simple: establish relevant inbound links and focus your website content on the services you provide. Web content has to be written so that it’s compelling for website visitors and for Search Engine crawlers as well.

Don’t fall for the ‘1st Page Rankings on Google in 10 days’ offers. The just use Adwords, PPC, or SEO for obscure search terms no one uses.

With Google, there really are no short cuts. Top ranking in natural listings with Google will take time – depending upon the competitiveness of the search term, of course. Hard work is imperative especially in developing the content of your website and the inbound links required to earn top rankings with Google.

Rule 9: Consult the Experts.

If you have the competence, there are two ways to learn - learning by trial and error or learning from others’ experience. If you have the time and can wait for the online dollars, it’s possible to do it yourself. If you want to get started now, save time and money - consult the experts.

by Scott Porter for MarketBuilders

www.MarketBuilders.TV

MarketBuilders provides professional Internet Marketing, SEO ,and creative Search Engine Marketing services that drive more traffic to your business.

SEO Article Source: http://www.eArticlesOnline.com

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

SEO for keywords and content is relatively easy. Choose your keyword. Write content around that keyword. Use an SEO optimizer program to make sure you have done it right.

Long gone are the days of writing unrelated content, and then typing “Britney Spears” 100 times at the end of the article. Today ’s search engine spiders can spot the “Black Hat” SEO techniques a mile away, and your site can be banned for life.

Here are a few tips for SEO optimization:

Be focussed in your meta keywords - 1 to 3 SEO optimized keywords is enough Put your keyword at the beginning of you page title tag. Make sure you title tag is the first tag in the head section Make sure your keyword appears in the alt tag for images and in link text, but no more than 3 times Put your keyword in bold Put your keyword in the H1 section of your page, and H2 if you can Have a keyword weigh in your article between 3-6% (higher is “keyword spamming”) SEO for domain names Going back to the Nike example from my “SEO for Google” article. Since the keyword weight is 0%, how does Nike get to billing when you search for them? Easy, Google gives a rank weight to domain names.

Make sure your primary domain name reflects the main purpose of your site (domain SEO). This site, for example, is all about my desire to “retire with millions”. The site is subdivided in to many SEO optimized sub-domains each with a URL that denotes the sections. For example, all my SEO articles are in a sub-directory called ../seo.

Many articles have been written about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google. Google is the largest search engine (for now) and getting your SEO right for the Googlebot can make your site top ten site getting millions of hits a day. On the other hand, poor SEO and your site may never be ranked and your campaigns for Adsence will never net you any real money. Even worse, bad SEO might mean that your cutting edge product is un-finable by your customers.

Google page rank is determined by a number of factors:

SEO keywords SEO content SEO domain name Originality of content Number of links from external sites SEO keywords and SEO content will be dealt with in another article, lets focus on the other 2 for now.

Original Content Having original content on your site is a no-brainer. It is the “why” that escapes many SEO web content developers. We have all seen the ads promising “150000 Adsense and SEO optimized pages”. If it were this easy, all of us would be multi-millionaires by now. The reality is, Googlebot applies a penalty for non-original content, no mater how SEO you might think the page is. Think about it - why does “Nike” come up number 1 when you type Nike into Google? You or I could probably write a better SEO page about Nike than Nike. In fact, Nike keyword density for “Nike” is 0%!!!

Links from External Sites Google take into account the number of links you have from external sites. Each link is like a “vote” for your site. Before you go and sign up for a link exchange program, consider this, some links do not count, in fact, being a “link spammer” can kill your ranking, no matter how good your SEO.

There are ways to generate quality back links:

Create a blog on blogspot (a Google Site) and write about your web page - include properly formatted links Join blogs on respected sites and comment on articles, putting your URL in your signature Write “press releases” when you update your site and post them on the free press release sites around the web Take out classified ads in respected on-line newspapers Make small donations to charity sites that keep a “Thank You” page and include your web site with your name These are just some tips to compliment your SEO work to get a good Google ranking.

About the Author

Get more information at http://retire-with-millions.com Read more articles like this one at http://getlistedinternetmarketing.com

Article Source: http://www.content4reprint.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-optimization/google-search-engine-optimization-101.htm

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

While search engine giant Google has only been a player as one of the major search engines for less than a decade, it has become a goal of most webmasters to make sure that their pages are search engine optimization Google friendly so that they can achieve the best Google ranking possible.

Now, not only is Google a household name around the world, it has also moved into first place among major search engines and it wields considerable power in the lives of those who seek to make their living online.

Playing by the rules of Google SEO has become a real speciality for some marketers, and those who have gone against the rules have ended up losing significant business.

One of the reasons for Google ’s success, and their power in the search engine world, is that the founders set out to take on the major ones by focusing and refining the technology behind the Google search engine in order to better understand what the surfer was looking for and deliver better search results than their competitors.

There is no doubt that their master plan worked out and at this point Google searches account for more than 60% of all the searches done online, which means that the other major search engines share the other 40% of searches.

These numbers have certainly given Google the power to influence the search engine industry and given webmasters motivation to be sure to make search engine optimization Google style a top priority.

The primary way that Google compiles the results that they show when a search is done is by the use of “spiders” that go out and crawl the web. Two of the things that gets positive attention from the Google spiders are quality inbound linking and quality content.

For a good Google search engine optimization of your site, it will be helpful to have good quality links that point to your site from other relevant websites.

The weight of these links varies depending on the quality of the sites that link to you, if you have text links, as opposed to links off banner ads for instance, and also the quality of the text that surrounds your link, as well as the page rank of those sites.

Google also has a complex algorithm it uses to check the text of your pages to see if it is good, readable, quality content, or if is a mass of gibberish that is nothing more than a page full of keywords that don’t even comprise full and complete sentences. Having good quality content that delivers value to the visitor is a primary key to search engine optimization Google style.

Some people will say that your meta description, title and keywords are of utmost importance to rank well with Google, and they might have been true in the past, but these things do not carry as much weight as they used to. Of course having appropriate keywords defined and a good meta description can’t hurt, but more time should be spent on quality links and content.

Google also uses something they call Page Rank technology that measures the relative importance of a website based on an extremely complex equation that takes into consideration more than 500 million different variables.

Part of the analysis evaluates the quality of both inbound and outbound links and assigning a value, further complicating the search engine optimization Google uses to rank your site.

About the Author

All is revealed about making your search engine optimization google friendly at Mike Selvon portal. Don’t forget to leave us a comment at our SEO optimization blog.

Article Source: http://www.content4reprint.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-optimization/search-engine-optimization-google-style.htm

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

By: Joel C. Carlson

So you put a lot of work into creating a really great website only to find that noone can find it and Google doesnt rank your site very highly. You hear about a thing called “search engine optimization” and decide to give it a try. Before you go adding your keywords to every element of your pages and building links any way you can, take a step back and remind yourself of the old saying, “sometimes less is more”.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, has really taken off over the last five years as more and more fledgling webmasters have created websites, only to find that noone comes to visit. As they search around for ways to get more visitors, most of them quickly find resources on how to optimize a web page for the search engines and go right to work sprinkling keywords everywhere and building links from any place they can get them.

This causes problems for a search engine because, lets face it, you are trying to manipulate the search results and they are trying to avoid being manipulated. After all, just because YOU think your site is a great resource on a topic doesnt mean that it is. Google has already adjusted for the webmaster that is over-optimizing their website, and its called the Google “sandbox”. The sandbox is a name that disgruntled webmasters have given to the situation where a new site that should rank well for a keyword is nowhere to be found in the rankings, only to suddenly appear one day several months down the road. What is this sandbox effect and what could cause it?

My theory is that the “sandbox” is actually more of a “trustbox”, meaning that Google looks at many attributes of your site to determine if you are attempting to manipulate the search rankings. The most obvious, and the twp traps that most beginning webmasters fall into, I believe, is over-optimizing your on-page content and building too many low quality links too fast.

I believe that the newer your domain is, the less tolerance Google has for over-optimization of pages, or suspiciously fast link building. Once you trip the filter, youre placed in the holding cell (”sandbox”), because Google suspects you of trying to manipulate the results. I also believe that the tolerance for over-optimization varies based on the industry, so spammy industries such as pharmaceutical drugs are far more sensitive to over-optimization than most. That can cause some discouragement by many who are hoping to find fast success, since those industries are already competitive enough that you NEED highly optimized content and lots of links to possibly compete for top rankings, but you cant do it too quickly or you will be sandboxed.

At a recent WebmasterWorld conference, Matt Cutts from Google stated that there really wasn’t a “sandbox”, but “the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.” This means that avoiding the sandbox is merely a matter of optimizing your site without tripping the filters in Googles algorithm.

Ask yourself these questions to avoid over-optimization penalties:
- Is your title a single target keyword phrase and nothing else?
- Is your keyword phrase found in several of the following locations: title, header, subheaders, bold or italicized words?
- Does the page read differently that you would normally speak?
- Are you in a competitive industry that is frequented by spammers?
- Have you acquired a large number of low PageRank links quickly?
- Do you have very few high PageRank (6+) links pointing to your site?

In summary, the current theory about Googles “sandbox” is that it is actually more like a holding cell where the Google “police” keep your website when it is suspected of possibly trying to manipulate the search results. As the domain ages, most sites eventually gain enough “trust” to escape the sandbox and immediately start ranking where they normally would. Remember that Google is not manually ranking every website - in the end it is simply a computer algorithm and those who are able to score well in Googles algorithm WITHOUT tripping any filters will achieve top rankings and profit the most.

Article Source: http://www.seo-writing.com/free-reprint-articles

Joel Carlson works for Bitwise Logic, Inc. - a professional web development company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota which provides web site optimization services that help companies of all sizes acquire free targeted leads through top search engine rankings.

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

SEO tips can help you to get higher Yahoo or Google listings, but only if you use them. Most people think that they know better, even so called SEO professionals who have to use PPC advertising to get their websites listed highly enough to be seen. Who are they to tell us what to do, when they cannot it themselves? I have had some of them write to me criticizing my ‘crap’ HTML and also my ‘useless’ linking strategies. My site has ‘only a Page Rank of 3’. So what? It is sitting at between #1 on #5 on Google from day to day, at # 1 to #4 on Yahoo from day to day and at #1 on MSN. I will gladly accept their criticism of my HTML and linking when they achieve the same. Till then, perhaps they would be better buying my book that complaining about my websites! I would feel more predisposed to them if they stopped criticizing me – I only started to do the same to them when I got sick of their comments when they could not emulate my results. Who am I, a rank amateur, to beat them in the SEO stakes!! In fact, I have been at this for many years. So, SEO tip #1 – don’t believe anything you are told unless those telling you it have at least one of their websites in the top 5 on all the major search engines for a competitive keyword. Mine has >800 million other results on Google. Tip 2 – use classical search engine optimization. Use Meta tags because some search engines still use them. The main one is the Description Meta tag – Keywords is not so important but use it anyway. It does not hurt you, so use them. The third tip relates to the title of your website. There are two points that relate to this. The first is that it should be the best keyword that you can find that relates to your niche or website. That means a good demand and low supply, though too much is sometimes written about this since such keywords are not easy to find. If you can’t something with low supply, just use what you want and decide to compete against them. Somebody has to be top, and why can’t it be you? Too many people give up in SEO too quickly. Probably because we are told not to compete against the big boys - by these big boys!! The second point is that the title of your site need not be stated on every web page. My web page titles are those of the page, not the site. The graphics are the same, but the title is the keyword that they page is optimized for. Why do otherwise? Yet 99.99% do (just a guess!). Then fourth of my SEO tips is related to the headings on each page. The main title of the page should be in H1 tags, and the heading in H2 tags. You don’t need any more, but any subheadings can go into H3 tags, but should contain text that could be construed as minor keywords. I might be wrong, but who says? I have found that if you ignore the big guys, and compete against them, they can be beat. Check out what they are trying to sell you and you will notice that much of it is obsolete. Such as site generation and article generation software. That’s not an SEO tip, just a word to the wise, from the not so wise. I have no pretensions, but I know where my home page is on Google – and Yahoo – and MSN. Just search for ‘article services’. The fifth SEO tip is to use your keywords sparingly. Most people still think that 1% - 3% keyword density is ideal, yet it is actually too much. There is an optimum keyword density that has little to do with the keyword itself, but more to do with contextual relevance of the page content to the topic in hand. Which leads to the sixth of the SEO tips: write naturally and honestly. If you know about your subject, write about it in your own language and don’t try to meet any perceived need for a specific number of so-called keywords within your page content. Seventh, don’t forget about your links. You can get a higher search engine listing if you have lots of links back to your website from other sites. In fact, the links are from page to page, and you get a proportion of the Google PageRank of the page linking to you, relative to the number of other links leaving that page, and also give the page that you link to a proportion of your PageRank, calculated in the same way. The problem with reciprocal links is that most pages are linked to and from pages with a PageRank of zero, even though the website home page can have a PR of 6 or 7. SEO tip eight. Use your internal linking to maximise the PageRank of a selected page on your website. You don’t need every page on your site listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo: you only need one. So maximise your efforts on that one page. Visitors that page will then visit the rest of the pages on your website, and so will search engine spiders, so you know that every page on your site will be listed and with a chance of being found in a search. The important point of that tip is to concentrate on getting one page in the top 10. That’s all you need. You will have links to all your other pages once somebody reaches that page in the top 10. Tip nine: Once you get visitors keep them there. Give them useful content and something to do, even if just to click from page to page. Offer them a free gift for completing a quiz on your topic, or free vacation certificates for certain actions: these are easily found on the internet in a form that you can either post or email for them to print their own. Offer them an opt-in form so that you can keep in touch. That is the most important tip of all – if you can keep in touch with your visitors after they have left your site, then you can offer them new products as they come along without having to seduce them to visit your website again. Finally, the SEO tip number 10. Enjoy what you are doing, and don’t look upon it so much as a job as something to enjoy, and to do as best as you can. I wish you the best of success since it is very sweet when it comes – as it will come with you.

Article Source - http://www.articlepros.com/computers_and_internet/Search-Engines/article-96525.html

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

If you are new to internet marketing, you are probably facing the horrifying task of trying to get your site listed on the first page of the search engines. You probably have no idea how to improve your ranking or where to begin. For the purposes of this discussion, we will outline the procedures you should follow to do better on the search engines, while still making sure that you attract qualified traffic that will actually be receptive to the products or services that your website offers.

The first thing you need to understand is that your search engine ranking will not improve overnight. Watch our for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants. They will charge you a hefty sum for their services, sometimes as much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines within a few months, and they will usually offer a money-back guarantee.

However, once you pay the initial deposit and the SEO company begins working on your website, they will rig your website so that you will be able to quickly rise to the top of the rankings for insignificant keywords that will not attract any visitors to your site.

For example, if your website provides auto insurance quotes, any SEO consultant knows that it will be extremely difficult to get your website ranked on the first page of Google for a highly sought after phrase such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES. So, instead, they will pick a less popular phrase, such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES FAST, for which there is no competition, and you will quickly rise to the top. The only problem is no one will ever actually use that exact phrase when searching for auto insurance quotes, so even though the SEO company delivered on its promise to improve your ranking, you will still not receive any traffic.

So, you need to use a different approach if you want to not only improve your ranking, but also attract qualified traffic to your website. The first thing you need to do is optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer. For example, if you sell candy, you would want to improve your ranking for the phrases BUY CANDY or BUY CANDY ONLINE. To optimize your website for your chosen keywords, you should either hire a web designer that has experience optimizing websites, or you should purchase search engine optimization software that will show you how to optimize your HTML code so that your site is set up properly. You should also try to have a decent amount of free content on your website that relates to your subject matter.

The next step is to submit your site to the search engines, if you have not already done so. There are hundreds or even thousands of legitimate search engines and directories in cyberspace, and you should submit to all them. I recommend that you look for search engine submission companies on Google and pick one that charges a small monthly fee to submit your site to the search engines once every month.

The last and most crucial step to improving your ranking is increasing your link popularity. You can write articles and submit them to article submission directories. At the bottom of each article you write, you are allowed to include a link to your website. As the articles you write are put into circulation and are published on other websites, your link popularity will increase. Also, you should do some pay-per-click or other paid advertising in order to promote your business, and eventually you will acquire some links as the word spreads about your site.

If you employ each of the strategies we have discussed, you should be able to improve your search engine ranking. No website can improve upon its ranking overnight, but if you are persistent, eventually, your hard work will pay off.

Article Source - http://www.articlecircle.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-marketing/getting-ranked-higher-on-search-engines.html

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

Tuesday, April 08, 2008 3:20 AM PDT

Google is offering to host enterprise web applications on its own infrastructure with a new tool for developers, App Engine.

It isn’t the first to do so — App Engine will compete with similar services such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Salesforce’s Appexchange — but it may be the cheapest, as Google’s basic services will be free.

Google’s goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web application, and then make it easy to scale when that application reaches the point where it’s receiving significant traffic and has millions of users, Google said in its new App Engine blog.

App Engine is based on technologies Google already uses. It is powered by Bigtable, a distributed storage system currently used by its Google Earth service, and by Google’s own file system GFS.

The search giant is treading lightly, so far. The version launched on Monday is a preview release, and is by no means feature complete, according to Google.

Only 10,000 developers will be able to sign up initially, but that number will increase.

During the preview period, capacity will also be limited. Applications will for example be able to use 500M bytes of storage, and transmit up to 10G bytes of data per day. Google expects most applications will be able to serve around 5 million page views per month within those limits.

Google is keeping mum on how it will price the service, but applications operating within the limitations of the preview release will remain free, even when App Engine goes live.

App Engine will initially only support applications written in Python, but Google is looking to add support for other languages as well.

Article source - http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/144242/google_offers_to_host_services_on_app_engine.html

For more info please visit us at – Offshore Software Development & SEO services

Vanessa Fox:

Why Get Involved with Social Media?
Deeper engagement with customers
Get insights not available any there way
Your customers are online already
Happier Customer > Provide Feedback > Create Better Products > Evangelize > More Customers

Social Networking is Anywhere People are Talking Online
YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Niche Forums
Verticals - social shopping, real estate, lawyers
No matter what you do - there’s likely a social media niche for you.

Social Media Submissions -
Mixx, Sphinn, Digg - this likely goes back to the keynote about social media being a fad.  These most people think about as a place for links. 

Rating & Reviews
Yelp, Epinions, Amazon - whether its negative or positive you want to know what’s going on

Twitter:
Technorati uses it to know about outages, Dell for it’s outlet promotions, NYTimes for Stories, Southwest Airlines for specials, Vanity searches on your name

Dell - Ideastorm
Helps with Dell’s customer research, the community decides what Dell should work on next

Facebook
Not a good place yet for advertising, but growing.  Mostly use it for brand awareness rather than paid advertising.

Evolve What You Do Already
Assess your customers
Who Are They
Where are they

Have a Plan
What are your goals
What are your guidelines
What will you measure

What Not To Do:
Flogs - Walmart RV Across America
Dell:  Told bloggers to take something down - only inflamed the situation

Social Media helps you improve your conversation audience

Per Jacobsson from Nimble.ie

Nimble is Ireland’s own social networking site
Re-launched in Sept. 07
109,00 members in Ireland
New , fun and exciting design and functionality
For Advertisers:  sponsor functions, corporate profiles, banner advertising
Nimble’s future:  several hundred thousand users in Ireland, adding more fun stuff to the website, looking for partners and advertisers

Social Networking in general
It’s local activity after all
Non-excluding
Future holds integration between sites - 3rd party developers are already doin this
Social networking websites are a new media
The m ore successful networks fully utilize the networks of friends

Search Marketing
Tested radio, college magazine some web pages
By far most effective:  viral networking; friends inviting friends
15% of users through search engines (Google) but search terms have not been interesting: “nimble” “nimble.ie” www.nimble.ie, etc.

Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes
5 facts
1.  We’re dealing in a networked world
2.  You are not in control
3.  If you are thinking about your website being a destination site, you’re dreaming  (think about the distributed world)
4.  Social Media isn’t just for kids anymore, 55% of users to YouTube is over 25 - it’s not about kids!
5.  Content is free, glitz and glamor (Craig’s lists) don’t matter

Opportunities
1.  idea storm from dell - the community promotes ideas.  from this dell has cut out focus group.  creates a buzz in the market before products even come to market
2.  ratings and reviews - huge opportunities.  own it and host it before someone else does  (negative reviews actually helps, people are cynical,  people set expectations and that helps with return rates dropping)
3.  start listening to the networks & conversations - use Google alerts.  know who the influencers are in your marketer
4.  widgets - helps to deliver your message out to a wider audience

Networked world, Not in control, Not big destinations, demographics are excitingly broad and dynamics.

Article source - http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/2008/04/search-market-2.html

For more info please visit us at – offshore software development & SEO

Pay-per-click marketing and web analytics – they go together like peas and carrots. Why you ask? Because the reports provided by the PPC search engines aren’t always enough! Services like Google Analytics provide advertisers with a wealth of knowledge for fine-tuning and perfecting their paid-search campaigns. This includes data like bounce rate, time on site or goal funnel visualizations. For advertisers who are using Analytics in tandem with their AdWords PPC account, the process for tracking data is a cinch. Google has an auto-tagging feature that will pull all of your PPC data into Analytics – including keyword level data. The question then becomes, “How do I track this data for my Yahoo! Search Marketing PPC campaigns?” Today I’m going to quickly explain how you can build custom tracking URLs to get the same comprehensive data for Yahoo!.

The first step is to head on over to the trusty Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool will let you input your landing page and variables including term (keyword), name (campaign), source (search engine), medium (cpc vs. email or organic) and content (ad version). After you manually input your data, the URL builder will provide you with a full tracking URL that you can copy/paste into your Yahoo! ads. Here’s a quick example:

This example would basically only work for a single keyword and a single ad text. If you have the time to create a separate URL for every keyword in your Yahoo! account, all I can say is go for it! If you’re like me, you need a much quicker process for capturing data. It just so happens that Yahoo! has an auto-tagging feature. In your account, go to the Administration tab and click on Tracking URLs. Select the option Tracking URLs On and save changes. This will tell Yahoo! to append your destination URLs with information ranging from the keyword you bid on, to the actual search query and account specific information like campaign and ad group IDs.

How do you pull this information into Analytics? It’s relatively easy. If you look at the custom tracking URL example above, you will need to make modifications to the term, content and campaign variables. You will need to insert Yahoo!’s identifiers into each of these variables to pull the auto-tagged information into Analytics. Some of the basics include {OVKEY} for the paid keyword, {OVRAW} for the actual search query, {OVADID} for the ad text ID number and {OVCAMPGID} for the campaign ID numer. Here’s another quick example:

Now you can use this customized destination URL for an entire campaign (if applicable) and you will still pull detailed information into Analytics. I should point out that using Yahoo!’s auto-tagging identifiers will only produce real data if you have turned auto-tagging ON in your account! Otherwise all of your Yahoo! PPC visitors will register keywords as {OVKEY}. And trust me when I say, that isn’t very helpful. Discovering this process and putting it to use in my Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts has proved to be an invaluable asset. I would recommend to everyone reading this blog to set this up for your accounts as soon as you get the chance! And check in next week – I’ll explain how to do this for your MSN adCenter PPC accounts, too!

Article source – http://www.ppchero.com/2008/04/03/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/

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NEW YORK

Shares of Google Inc. gained Friday as an analyst said the company is poised to gain from changes to its online ad platform, AdWords, which should drive revenue higher.

Google’s stock rose $17.99, or 4 percent, to $473.27. In the past 52 weeks, the shares have traded between $412.11 and $747.24, and are off 34 percent since the start of the year.

Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said Google is changing its AdWords program to drive up pricing. Google gets paid when users click on a sponsored ad that comes up as the result of a Google search.

According to data from comScore Inc., Google’s click-through rate grew 3 percent in February compared with a year earlier, and January saw no increase compared with January 2007.

But Lindsay said Google is “slapping” low quality advertisers and arbitrage marketers off its search results pages by re-pricing many low-cost keywords used by these companies. This is driving down paid clicks, but also driving keyword pricing higher, which comScore doesn’t detect.

“What ComScore doesn’t give is the other side of the story — the pricing or cost per click, which Google has been successfully driving up for several quarters now,” Lindsay wrote in a client note.

However, Lindsay said it’s unclear whether these pricing changes will be reflected in first-quarter results.

Lindsay rates the stock “Outperform” with a $750 price target.

Article source - http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8VR7AKG1.htm

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Winners in FCC Auction Talk of More ‘Open’ Networks

By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer  Saturday, April 5, 2008; Page D01

Verizon Wireless and AT&T said they plan to create faster and more robust networks with a new chunk of radio spectrum they won at a recent federal auction of airwaves. They also talked about moving toward more “open” networks, offering consumers the ability to use a greater number of devices and more applications over their handsets.

The companies disclosed plans for their purchase of 700-megahertz radio frequencies after rules restricting them from discussing the Federal Communications Commission’s auction were lifted Thursday night.

Carriers currently control the types of phones and services their wireless subscribers can use.

Even though the companies touted their new networks as open, some said they won’t offer the extent of consumer choice that some public-interest groups and Internet companies sought.

The carriers’ definitions of an open network vary. AT&T argues that its use of SIM, operating and memory cards already allows the use of any device with those technologies on its network. It said it invites developers to create technologies for its networks, but it must approve their use.

Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, refused to elaborate on how it defines “open access.” It purchased a segment of airwaves at the auction that came with a requirement that it must build a network open to all devices and software applications. The company said it would begin testing technologies on its existing network by June.

“We don’t want to get into definitions at the moment that are ‘regulatory-ese.’ We want to get people to close their eyes and imagine all the possibilities,” said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.

Google, the Internet phone service provider Skype and some public-interest groups had hoped to push the FCC and carriers to offer more unfettered consumer access. They also sought clearer regulatory definitions from the FCC.

“Our objective is to bring the ethos of the Internet to the wireless world . . . gathering the world’s information, making it universally accessible and easy to use,” but carriers still can control what users can do over the wireless network, said Rick Whitt, telecom and media counsel for Google.

Google, which bid in the airwave auction but didn’t win, said it will continue to stay involved with the implementation of rules to ensure that Verizon Wireless carries out the openness principles.

Wireless carriers, meanwhile, said they are being friendly to consumers.

Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam said yesterday that the company’s purchase “will make Verizon the preferred partner for developers of a new wave of consumer electronics and applications using this next-generation technology.”

Article source - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040403508.html

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Yahoo is still fighting off Microsoft’s marriage proposal. But it’s open to making more friends.

On March 25, Yahoo, the largest online destination, teamed up with two other Web titans—search goliath Google and leading social network MySpace—to form the OpenSocial Foundation. The not-for-profit, which is scheduled to launch within the next 90 days, is dedicated to preserving open source programming codes that allow Web developers to build applications that work across all major Web sites. “We believe common sets of specifications are beneficial to the developer community at large and enrich the experience of the Web both on and off Yahoo,” said Wade Chambers, Yahoo’s VP of Platforms, in a media conference call.

Google launched the OpenSocial platform in October in hopes of solving two problems created by the increasingly social Web. The first issue concerned developers. Facebook’s May decision to open up its popular real estate to applications from third parties spurred thousands of developers to create programs for the social networking site. The enthusiastic response of Facebook users to the new programs encouraged other social networks to follow suit. Soon most sites were allowing outsiders to create programs for them.

All the opening up, however, presented developers with a dilemma: who to program for? Most social networks had unique codes that demanded developers build programs specifically to work on their site. Most development teams, however, had staffs composed of only a handful of programmers capable of creating just a few such specific applications at a time.

If developers didn’t make their programs work across sites, they risked losing out on valuable audiences who might use their program only if they could get it to work on their favorite Web destination. Worse, developers risked their program failing to get virally distribution because a user’s friends were not all on the same site.

The developers’ dilemma presented a problem for Web site owners as well. If developers had to choose one or two sites to program for, and your site wasn’t on the short list, you could miss out on the hot new program. Web surfers wanting to use a particular widget—such as Slide’s popular photo sharing widget or iLike’s music sharing and discovery service—would potentially ignore your site if that particular application wasn’t available.

Many sites, including Google, found themselves quickly faced with the flipside of the developers’ dilemma. Facebook was already on most developers’ short lists, thanks to the early release of its APIs and its global audience, which now reaches more than 70 million people. Without common codes, MySpace, Yahoo, Google’s Orkut social network, AOL, and myriad other sites would find themselves competing for the remaining slots on individual developers’ lists.

It’s no wonder then that Google, whose own Orkut social network lagged behind MySpace and Facebook in the US, chose to create a common set of codes for developers. It’s also no wonder why MySpace, which opened up comparatively late, quickly signed on.

Despite already being the most popular site on the Web, Yahoo has a lot to gain by joining. The company suffers from a lack of innovation. Several of its social properties, such as Yahoo 360, have failed to take off. Moreover, it has lost some mindshare among young people—those most likely to pass around many developers’ applications — to hotter social networking properties. By joining OpenSocial Yahoo ensures it doesn’t miss out on some developers’ next great creation. It also gets an opportunity to increase adoption of its own properties such as photo-sharing site Flickr by enabling developers to more easily create programs that spread Yahoo’s offerings onto other popular sites.

Getting on the OpenSocial bandwagon now is particularly important because of where the Web is going. Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, sees a future where social applications will live on nearly every site and audiences will take their favorite programs and content wherever they wish. In that world, making sure your content is easily distributable and that your site can support a variety of different programs is key.

Moreover, cute little widgets are quickly evolving into full-fledged programs. It may not seem so bad if your site doesn’t support an application allowing people to turn each other into vampires. But it could be terrible, say, if everyone began using a widget notifying them of important business emails and they couldn’t see alerts when on your site. “In the future we see applications for OpenSocial and the MySpace developer platform moving beyond toys and widgets and becoming real features,” said Steve Pearman, MySpace’s SVP of Product Strategy.

OpenSocial is far from perfect. Developers often still have a lot of work to do to customize their applications so they truly work across all the sites that have signed up. Also, like any open source standard, there is some worry that competing developers will be able to easily copy existing applications built upon the APIs.
The other problem with OpenSocial is that it is still far from comprehensive. Microsoft has, notably, not signed on. But, even Yahoo says it would welcome the tech giant’s friendship in this respect. “I think any large platform should be able to participate and we would welcome anyone to participate,” said Chambers.

Article Source - http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/03/yahoo_myspace_a.html

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Google is pressing the US government to allow the unlicensed frequencies of TV “white space” to be used for wi-fi.

The firm has written

an open letter to regulators saying the US spectrum was a “once in a lifetime opportunity”.

White space is unused blocks of frequencies in-between channels broadcast on analogue airwaves.

“The vast majority of viable spectrum in this country simply goes unused, or else is grossly underutilised,” wrote Google’s Richard Whitt in the letter.

“Unlike other natural resources, there is no benefit to allowing this spectrum to lie fallow,” he added.
Google has said the white space could be used to bring “ubiquitous wireless broadband access to all Americans”.
In the past TV broadcasters have opposed the use of white space, fearing it would cause interference with television programming.

But in its letter, Google urged the FCC to adopt a series of overlapping technologies, including “spectrum sensing,” designed to prevent signals from interfering with each other.

Mr Whitt said there was enough unused spectrum for businesses to create a wide range of options, such as building small peer-to-peer networks or even establishing an alternative national wireless network.

Google has said that devices designed to take advantage of the white space spectrum could be on the market by the end of 2009.

Other countries are also looking at using white space spectrum.

In the UK much of this space is being dedicated for use by services like wireless microphones for broadcast use, and for cognitive radio, a smart wireless technology that allows for the use of wi-fi.

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Users gain ability to strictly monitor who can access content they store on the social network

By Heather Havenstein

March 19, 2008 (Computerworld) After enduring withering criticism late last year for the lack of adequate privacy controls in its Beacon advertising system, Facebook Inc. today garnered positive reviews for new controls that let users more strictly monitor who can access the content they create on the site.

The privacy controls launched Wednesday let users limit access to information like photo albums or contact information to specific Facebook friends or friends lists, the company said. Facebook had rolled out the friends list feature in December as a way to help users communicate with groups of friends on the network.

Nick O’Neill, a blogger on All Facebook, noted that the new features

provide users with more granular privacy by specifying various settings for each friend list. “This means that, in theory, all of my professional contacts will no longer be able to access my photos, and I can start posting those photos of my crazy times in college,” he added.

“These new settings have theoretically transformed Facebook, making it possible to manage all of my contacts from one site,” O’Neill wrote.

The All Facebook blogger also noted that the social networking firm today also launched a new option that allows users to opt-out of personalized SocialAds that integrate into photos a notice telling his or her friends about recent purchases made at various online retailers.

“If you hadn’t noticed already, once in a while your friends’ photos have been showing up on ads promoting applications and fan pages,” O’Neill said. “Many were turned off by those ads complaining that making money off of our profiles is crossing the line. This is a significant step by Facebook, highlighting that Facebook has granted a higher priority to user privacy over monetization. This is an encouraging step and greatly welcomed, considering there wasn’t much controversy over the ads as they existed.”

Josh Catone, a blogger on ReadWriteWeb, said that when the friends list feature was rolled out in December, he called it a necessary first step in attracting the business networking crowd to Facebook. However, he also noted that the feature “had no teeth” because of a lack of privacy controls. That has changed because the new features give users the option of showing private information to only specific friends or “friends of friends,” which is similar to features in the more business-oriented LinkedIn professional networking site, Catone added.

“While going after the business networking crowd has never been an objective expressed overtly by the company, it does make sense,” he said. “As Facebook’s core early audience — college students — grows up, they’ll need a more secure environment to network with colleagues and friends. Facebook is slowly positioning itself to be a place where both casual and business networking can take place at the same time, which means that rather than maintaining two accounts — one at Facebook and one at LinkedIn or Xing — users could stay at Facebook and use the tools they grew accustomed to in college.”

Not all industry observers were pleased with the changes. Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy — one of the strongest critics of Beacon’s initial lack of privacy controls — noted that Facebook still has to ensure that its members are candidly informed about any personal data shared with advertisers and marketers.

“Its incremental improvements — all due to the increasing scrutiny in the EU and U.S. and from privacy advocates — are occurring at a snail’s pace,” he said. “Facebook’s senior managers still have not come to terms with the need for them to ensure transparency and full user control.”

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By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

March 20, 2008, 4:56 PM

Google yesterday announced the availability of a plug-in for Windows Mobile devices, which provides a shortcut on the home screen to Google’s search.

The plug-in was first made available to BlackBerry devices last December, and then to Symbian-based phones more recently. Making it available on Microsoft’s popular mobile operating system was only a logical step for Google.

The plug-in can be found at mobile.google.com, where Google offers its other mobile services. It comes as a 300KB file called “googlesearch.CAB,” which upon installation makes a Google search field appear on the home screen of the phone.

By eliminating the need to open a browser and navigate to Google, the company claims that searches have increased 20% among those with the Symbian and BlackBerry versions of the software.

Google’s dominance in mobile Web searches was the subject of debate at the Visiongain Mobile Web Search Conference in London. While some said the company is the last word in Web searches in both traditional and mobile settings, others accused Google of lacking innovation in its mobile search delivery, where more appropriate (e.g. location-based) results are required.

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Posted by Elinor Mills

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites.

For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it’s geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by Google Finance and for motion charts.

These visuals can also be pushed out to appear on an iGoogle home page or any other site and they will be dynamically updated as changes are made to the spreadsheet.

Gadgets will soon be coming to other apps in Google Docs and eventually search, to help people find relevant content and links, says Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager for Google Docs.

Google has also added new features that make using Spreadsheets easier. For one, there is a notification system that will e-mail you when somebody has made a change to a spreadsheet that is being collaborated on. You can set it to alert you once a day or after each new change is made. The changes are highlighted so you can easily detect what is new.

There is also a column-based auto-complete function that looks for cues from adjacent cells to try to guess what you are typing, an updated color palette and function editing capability that uses the arrow keys, as well as an auto-complete function for typing long formulas.

In addition, spreadsheet creators now have access to historical stock market data through a Google Finance function and new functions to automatically sort and filter data.

Google is doing something interesting with its Gadgets platform, making gadgets a data source for spreadsheets as well as a data distribution method for developers.

“If I’m collecting census data and putting it into a spreadsheet, I can also make that data available to statisticians,” through the Visualization API, says Rochelle. “It doesn’t have to be in a spreadsheet form” to distribute.

Spreadsheets is just the first data source that can be handled this way.

“We’re making the spreadsheet almost a platform for simple development and delivery,” he says.

With the enhancements, Google is ratcheting up the competition its free Web-hosted apps are giving Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, which companies pay for.

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Google continued its war or words Monday against Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo, with its CEO, Eric Schmidt, saying he was worried about the free flow of information on the Internet if the merger were to be completed.

“We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft,” Schmidt told reporters, Reuters reported. “We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be.”

Without citing examples, he cited Microsoft’s history and “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone.”

Microsoft has a long history of antitrust problems, and last year the European Union upheld a 2004 decision that Microsoft abused the near-monopoly power of its Windows operating system to undermine rivals, issuing Microsoft a $695 million fine.

“We are concerned that there are things Microsoft could do that would be bad for the Internet,” said Schmidt.

Microsoft and Google are rivals on a number of fronts, increasingly willing to criticize each other as their products compete. The rivalry over Internet strategies is intense, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer vowing recently that that his company would significantly gain in online advertising and Web searching against Microsoft, even if led to his “last breath” at the company.

Schmidt made his remarks in China, where he is planning to announced a redesigned Website in the coming weeks, the Wall Street Journal reported. There is some irony that his holier-than-thou remarks came in a country where last year, Google was criticized in the U.S. Congress for co-operating with China’s controversial censorship policies.

Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo in a deal originally worth $44.6 billion, but that offer has been rejected by Yahoo’s board as inadequate. Schmidt’s remarks come on the same day that senior executives from Microsoft and Yahoo sat down together to talk about the takeover bid, Reuters reported.

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