Have a Look At NASA’s Social Media

Whenever I talk with new clients about social media initiatives, one of the key points is having a social media plan or strategy. Social media is a time and resource intensive effort, and if you spend the time up front developing a plan, you can distribute the work and make the overall project more effective in the long run. In this column, I’d like to take a look at how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (aka NASA) tackles social media.

Everyone has social media channels that they prefer to use, and by creating a social media hub with links to all of the social media areas they participate in, it makes it easy for end users, and search engines to discover them. Another interesting and noteworthy point, is that NASA has chosen to divide content into different channels, by mission. For example, there is a Facebook Channel for the Ares I-X program, a Flickr channel , a Twitter channel, and a YouTube channel. What this does is give them the flexibility to cross-post the best content. The best photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube were cross-posted into the Facebook account. But the Facebook account has other pictures that aren’t in the Flickr account. There’s overlap, but each channel has unique content or value add.

Another sticking point that many organizations face when engaging in social media is controlling the message. Many organizations favor a top down, tightly controlled, output of information. In fact, the NFL and Dreamworks Animation are inserting clauses and restrictions on Twitter usage for employees. In a recent interview about how NASA uses Twitter, it was revealed there are over 100 NASA employees using Twitter. While there isn’t an official policy in place, they do ask everyone to abide by their “release of government information guidelines” when using social media.

To get the most out of social media, it’s important for information be released in a timely fashion. Creating bottlenecks of very small groups of people who are allowed to publish/approve will limit your success. Instead, set up some ground rules, and let everyone who agrees to abide by them to publish freely. When you do, you end up with interesting and unexpected results, like this TwitPic of a spent rocket booster from the Ares X-1 launch bobbing in the ocean waiting to be recovered.

A New Search Options in Google: Page Preview Option

Google Operating System noticed Google has added a new search option named “page preview.” If you go to Google, search on something and click on “show options,” you can then look towards the button on the left hand side and click on “page previews.” For example, here is a view of a search for apple with page preview selected.

New look and feel for the MSN portal - Drives Nearly 50% Of Bing Queries

Billed as the first major redesign in a decade, Microsoft has introduced a dramatic new look and feel for the MSN portal. The redesign simplifies and cleans up most elements on the site. Among other things, it makes video more central, incorporates Facebook and Twitter, creates a dedicated new local area and emphasizes search.

MSN, which Microsoft says now has 600 million users globally (which would make it larger than Yahoo), is a huge asset for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it drives roughly 45% of Bing’s queries. Even a cursory look at the old and new MSN homepages reveals the superiority of the new design:

ocean

SMO Ranking Factor:

Intro to Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined in Search Industry and has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, similar comparisons to SEO. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

First of all "social media" is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot lately. But what exactly does it really mean? Wikipedia describes social media as...

the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.


Also, social media can be considered anything that can help build a community to rally around. Companies/websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, and Revver all fit the bill. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth. Buyer beware though, you can't force SMO. This is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone marketing".

With SEO the goals are clearly defined, you're trying to make a website visible in the search engines. Is SMO really as simple to define as making your site visible in the social media? Does that entail anyway possible and include buying banner ads on MySpace?

the main goals of...

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.


... and then he lays out 5 rules for SMO...

1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links
4. Help Your Content Travel
5. Encourage the Mashup

...Jeremiah Owyang gives us a couple more rules...

1. Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn't Help You
2. Reward Helpful and Valuable Users

In way it sounds a whole lot like Marketing 2.0. It is pretty much includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one, techniques such as; Linkbaiting, Usability Design, Buzz Marketing, Community Building, and anything that can be considered "pull marketing".

Here's a few more possible rules...

8. Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.

9. Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.

10. Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a whitepaper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.

11. Be real - The community does not reward fakers.

While social media optimization is becoming very important you can't forget about good old SEO either. Google and Yahoo still drive mass amounts of traffic and you ca not ignore them. It is all about leveraging new mediums and riding these waves. Even though you might be getting dirt on the white glove you still have to take advantage of these powerful channels.

Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites

The number of social bookmarking sites has exploded in the last year, leaving someone new the space probably a bit overwhelmed at where to start. If you are new to social networking understand that each social networking site is different, it attracts a different audience with different interests. Thus what interests someone on Reddit might not appeal to anyone on Digg.

So who are the main players in the social bookmaking space? And what is the profile of the typical user of these social bookmarking sites? The answers below might surprise you!

Digg.com

Digg is the most popular and notable of the social bookmarking sites. Quantcast estimates that that Digg has about 25 million unique visitors a month. The audience is predominantly male (65%), between 25-34 years of age, with a household income between 30k and 100k. Digg’s demographics have changed as it has become more popular (mainstream). Not to long ago the Digg profile was male, under 25 who made less than 30k a year. Social media topics that do well on Digg include interesting photos, anything anti-Microsoft and lists (top 10, etc).

Propeller.com

Propeller (formely Netscape) is comfortable the second biggest social bookmarking site behind Digg with over 5.8 million monthly uniques, of which 3.6 million (62%) are in the U.S. Netscape also attracts a male biased audience (54) , that is slightly older (45-54 is biggest age group), and 55% of Propeller.com visitors have an household income over $60k.

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon.com reports over 4.5 million members and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that has about 1.5 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male biased (56%) and between the ages of 45-54 (22% of visitors). The older demographic also skews the household income with 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.

Reddit.com

Reddit is becoming a very popular social bookmarking site with about 1.2 million unique visitors in the U.S., making it slightly larger than Del.icio.us. Reddit attracts a predominantly male (57%) audience that is between the ages of 35-44 (25%). With 65% of the audience having a household income of between $30 and $100k, Reddit is a mainstream social networking site. As a result, political, environmental, business and entertainment news does well with this audience.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is the oldest social bookmarking site and Quantcast classifies it as a top 5,000 site that gets about 1.1 million unique visitors a month from the U.S. The audience is male (53%) and about 47% of them are over 45. Similar to StumbleUpon, 51% of visitors having a household income of over $60k.

Newsvine.com

Newsvine is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 362K U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a slightly male slanted audience (54%) and 51% of the users have a household income under $60k.

Fark.com

Fark.com is a much more trafficked site than people expect. With 1,972,698 monthly unique visitors in the U.S., it is bigger than StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Reddit. The Fark audience is heavily male (69%), between the ages of 25-34 and a household income under $60k (52%). The Fark audience likes interesting, bizarre and amusing news stories, along with regular photo manipulation contests.

Blinklist.com

Blinklist.com is a top 10,000 site that reaches over 353K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male group (59%) who are between the age of 25 and 54. About 54% of the audience earns over $60k a year.

Clipmarks.com

Clipmarks reaches over 205K U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a male biased audience (58%) with a household income of $30-60k. The site attracts almost equal amounts of people between 25 and 54.

Shoutwire.com

This site reaches approximately 70,742 U.S. monthly uniques. The site appeals to a more male (60%), younger audience (38% are under 24).

So what does the demographic data tells us? One is that the typical social bookmarking site user is male, between the ages of 35-54 with a household income of $60k or more a year. Is this your target audience? If it is not, then these are probable not the main social networking sites that you should be focusing on.

Yahoo SEO

See More SearchMonkey in Your Search Results:

Want a little more SearchMonkey in your Yahoo! search results? Starting today, more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites will appear automatically in your results, putting more information and answers right at your fingertips.

First, we’d like to thank everyone who deployed microformats, RDFa, and feeds in response to our blog post in May. Thanks to your efforts, we’ve finished user testing for the new enhanced results templates and have deployed these templates in production. This means that in addition to Video, Documents, and Games, you can now add Products, Local Businesses, Event, Discussions, or News items to your pages. Anyone who provides structured data according to the specified format will automatically gain SearchMonkey default-on status, as long as it adheres to our terms of use...More

Google Adds Books to Search Options Panel

Google Adds Books to Search Options Panel:

Earlier this year, Google introduced the Search Options panel to its main search. The options allow search results to be filtered by things like time or content type.

Now, Google is adding Books as a filter on the Search Options panel. Take a look and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

comScore and Omniture Partner Up for Digital Audience Measurement Service

ComScore and Omniture Partner Up for Digital Audience Measurement Service

Less than a week after being acquired by Adobe, Omniture is partnering with comScore to provide a digital audience measurement service. Specifically, Omniture's Web analytics will be paired up with comScore's new Media Metrix 360 hybrid audience measurement to provide intelligence for media planning.

"Since the rise of digital advertising, advertisers and publishers alike have sought ways to reconcile their Web analytics and panel-based measurement data to establish a unified measure of online audiences," said Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder.

The new partnership aims to be that long sought-after reconciliation. It also aims to spur the progress of digital advertising.

"This relationship will deliver to our customers the solution that they have been seeking, thus helping to promote and accelerate the usage of digital marketing intelligence for delivering actionable business results and competitive advantage. We believe it will also help the industry overcome concerns of inconsistent measurement of digital audiences and promote further adoption of digital media advertising,"said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO.

Google Launches the DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Google Launches the DoubleClick Ad Exchange:

Finally after acquiring Double Click for a whooping $3.1 billion, Google will now try to regain what they’ve invested in the company. The Official Google Blog has just announced the launch of the Double Click Ad Exchange – a real-time marketplace to buy and sell display advertising.

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange hopes to achieve what Google AdWords and Google AdSense have achieved so far. With it, Google hopes to create more open display ad ecosystem for everyone. The ecosystem we’re talking about here consists of Ad Exchange Sellers and Buyers, Google AdWords Advertisers and Google AdSense Publishers.

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange would benefit these four players, and so Google said. For Ad Exchange Buyers, the display ad marketplace will give them access to more websites and ad spaces, as well as bid for ad space in real-time. For Ad Exchange Sellers this program would mean more advertisers and more revenues for their ad spaces. Google AdWords advertisers are also to benefit from the DoubleClick Ad Exchange through easy access to the many websites in the Ad Exchange in addition to the websites in Google’s Content Network. While Google AdSense publishers will have their ad spaces exposed to more certified ad networks in the Ad Exchange. Both AdWords and AdSense members can enjoy the DoubleClick Ad Exchange through their respective interfaces and don’t need them to get through the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

So, if you’re a Google AdSense publisher you can check out how the DoubleClick Ad Exchange will affect you at the Inside AdSense blog. If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, this is the link that you would want to check out.

Other details about the DoubleClick Ad Exchange are enumerated on this PDF file and also at the Double Click Blog.

SEO Automatic Tool: Now for the iPhone

SEO Automatic Tool: Now for the iPhone:

I’ve had the opportunity to check out by SEO Automatic’s iPhone app by Scott Hendison of Search Commander, Inc. The app is the full version of SEO Automatic, an SEO site audit tool, just made for the iPhone. The only difference is the descriptions and recommendations is slightly less verbose to fit it on a mobile window.



The app is lightning fast and analyzes your site in just a few seconds, despite it’s screen that says “This may take a minute or two.” It immediately gives you an overview of notable issues, issues worth reviewing, and stuff you are doing correctly. SEO Automatic gives great advice.

Despite being less verbose than the Website version, it is still highly text-heavy for an iPhone. It’d also be nice to see a feature that allows you to email yourself the results so you can read the results on your computer too. I guess that’d defeat the purpose of buying the Web version though!?

Big Brands & Social Media Part 3 – Putting The Plan Into Action

Big Brands & Social Media Part 3 – Putting The Plan Into Action

After my last column on how big brands should organize around social media marketing, I thought it might be useful to get tactical and look at some specific ways that big brands can begin to move the needle on social media. Again, I’m crediting Bill Hunt with inspiring some of these thoughts in a great presentation he gave here at Yahoo! last month, as well as Laura Lippay for leading the charge internally at Yahoo!.

Get the basics right

Like most things I experience here at Yahoo! that hold true for large companies, I find that we need to focus on doing some very basic things across a vast scope and scale. The same holds true for social media marketing. Focusing on a very few, important efforts and doing them well across the company represents success for us and all big brands. So let’s isolate a couple topics and make sure we get them right.

Push all the right buttons

First, enable your site to support social media. Enable your users to join your network and promote your content. Your site needs links or buttons to follow the brand or product on Twitter and Facebook at the very least. Of course, if you have many products, like most big brands, you’ll need to point to different Twitter streams or Facebook pages that are appropriate to the respective product or service. As well, if you produce content on your site, at the end of your articles you’ll want buttons that promote your content to sites like Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. Getting these buttons on your site will take some time and effort, not because the work is difficult, but because the folks who do the work will have many other priorities in their queue. At this point, you will need to rely on your previous work in creating a center of excellence (CoE), working with an executive sponsor to get the work prioritized.

A cast of thousands

Once your site is enabled for social media, you will want to rely on your company’s biggest asset: your employees. One of the nice things about big brands is that we employ large numbers of people who are brand evangelists. That means that at Yahoo! and other companies, there are thousands of potential marketers for our products and services. If we all spend just a few minutes a day talking up our products and services to our respective social communities, the effect will be significant.

With social media, however, we need to be careful how we behave. Social media networks are fragile when it comes to commercial promotion. If your network thinks you are spamming them with commercial messages, they will likely ignore you and you will lose credibility within your network. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that it’s OK to talk about your products within your social network, but this should generally be done in the spirit of conversation. That is, when Yahoo! launches its new homepage, it’s acceptable to post a link to it on my Facebook page and say “Hey everybody, what do you think about the new Yahoo! homepage?” In contradistinction to this, it is generally frowned upon to promote your own products and services through some of the main social channels such as Digg, Reddit, and Yahoo! Buzz. For example, if Yahoo! sports just broke a story about Shawne Merriman and Tila Tequila, I shouldn’t Digg it through my own account. However, it’s OK to share the story with my social network and invite others to “buzz it up.” You can imagine that if all my fellow Yahoos worked in this way we could really start to move the needle on our social media efforts.

Get your social social on

Another great way to increase awareness and share best practices internally is to schedule small, informal meetings with the folks in your organization who are really interested in social media. We came up with some interesting ideas around this in our SEO and Social Media Conference in Santa Monica last month. Having lunch, brainstorming with other Yahoos, we developed a formula for putting this into practice. We’re calling it a “Social Social” and we’re scheduling our first one next month, thanks to Laura Lippay. The idea is that we can have a small, targeted gathering where we can swap war stories and share strategies around social media. The goal is to make sure we’re executing in effective ways around the organization. The recipe is simple: Invite a small number of social media types. Pick a topic. Open with a Pecha Kucha. Add beer. Rinse and repeat.

Microsoft Bing Search Ads To Test Favicons:

Microsoft Bing Search Ads To Test Favicons

MediaPost reports Microsoft adCenter, Bing’s search ads, will be testing placing favicons and logos in the search ads. I have conducted about 20 queries to try to bring up such an ad, but I personally do not see them myself.

MediaPost wrote, “James Colborn, director at Microsoft Advertising and long-time adCenter veteran, believes the market is ready to experiment with more creative options. These options stray from standard text ads in search. Consumers next year will start to see a richer ad experience in search results, he says.”

Yahoo has tested favicons in search ads in the past, as did Google with favicons in AdWords and favicons in organic results.

These days, you often don’t see favicons in the Google results, but you do occasionally see them in the Yahoo search ads.

If you do see them in adCenter (Bing Search Ads) do let us know.

Google: Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It:

Google Stop Suing Over The Meta Keywords Tag, We Don’t Use It:

Google is telling the world what every seasoned webmaster and search marketer should already know: The keywords meta tag has no impact whatsoever on how Google’s search engine ranks pages. None. Zilch. Nada. And while Google often needs to be somewhat ambiguous when talking about how it ranks pages, the message in today’s blog post is perfectly clear:

“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.”

Google’s blog post also talks about an imagined clash between two web site owners, Bob and Alice, over Bob’s use of Alice’s business name in his keywords tag and copying of other words from her keywords tag. Although Google doesn’t mention actual companies and doesn’t reference a specific lawsuit, the video that accompanies the blog post does mention lawsuits that involve the keywords tag and Google’s search rankings. About the keywords meta tag, Matt Cutts says:

“It’s really not worth suing someone over because, at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our rankings even the least little bit.”

If this is a case of Google offering information in relation to a legal case, it’s not the first time. Back in 2006, Matt Cutts wrote a post on his blog confirming that an SEO company and its clients had been banned from Google’s index. At the time, well-known SEO Aaron Wall was being sued by the SEO company that had been banned, and Matt’s blog post refuted some of the SEO company’s claims.

Back to the keywords tag: It’s worth mentioning that Google’s webmaster help has an entire page about meta tags and the word “keyword” doesn’t appear on it once. And as long as we’re clearing up some SEO basics, I’ll also note that Google’s blog post confirms that the meta description tag is also not used for ranking pages. If you want even more, see our in-depth post, Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines (which among other things documented how Google does NOT use the meta keywords tag).

Google’s Indexer

Google’s Indexer:

Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google’s performance.

Google’s Query Processor

The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page. A patent application discusses other factors that Google considers when ranking a page. Visit SEOmoz.org’s report for an interpretation of the concepts and the practical applications contained in Google’s patent application.

Google also applies machine-learning techniques to improve its performance automatically by learning relationships and associations within the stored data. For example, the spelling-correcting system uses such techniques to figure out likely alternative spellings. Google closely guards the formulas it uses to calculate relevance; they’re tweaked to improve quality and performance, and to outwit the latest devious techniques used by spammers.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query. Google can also match multi-word phrases and sentences. Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by Google’s Advanced Search Form and Using Search Operators (Advanced Operators).

Googlebot, Crawler

Googlebot, Crawler:

Googlebot is Google’s web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It’s easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn’t traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google’s indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it’s capable of doing.

Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.

Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its Add URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors. So now the Add URL form also has a test: it displays some squiggly letters designed to fool automated “letter-guessers”; it asks you to enter the letters you see — something like an eye-chart test to stop spambots.

When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of “visit soon” URLs must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google’s index. Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On the one hand, it’s a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date results.

To keep the index current, Google continuously recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably current.

Google Works - Infrastructure

Google Works - Infrastructure:

Google runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. Parallel processing is a method of computation in which many calculations can be performed simultaneously, significantly speeding up data processing. Google has three distinct parts:

* Googlebot, a web crawler that finds and fetches web pages.
* The indexer that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database.
* The query processor, which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant.

Google Wants To Hire You : Yahoo Search Engineers

Matt Cutts of Google has blogged that Google is willing to hire Yahoo Search engineers. Matt said, “if you’re an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring.”

Clearly, since the Microsoft & Yahoo deal, engineers at Yahoo might be a bit concerned about their job stability. Ask.com ran a funny poaching campaign recently to pick up Yahoo engineers. Microsoft said many Yahoo engineers will move over to Microsoft if the deal is approved. And now Google is hiring Yahoo engineers.

So if you are a Yahoo engineer and you want to apply for a job at Google, use this page to get started.

Why You Can’t Dismiss All Directory Links

If you follow me here or on the Link Spiel, you know I am a loyal fan and staunch supporter of using directories to secure links. After reading last week’s Elephant in the Link Building Living Room, I wanted to present a different point-of-view as I don’t feel the directory industry or the link builders using them were presented in a positive light. To suggest all link builders sell useless submission services or the directories are white elephants is inaccurate and insulting. I have a much different view and would like to show how using the directories can be a smart part of your link building mix.

Before I begin…

If you’ve spent any time in/around the SEO industry, you know there are hundreds, if not thousands of small directories online; most of these sites lack editorial guidelines, were created to host AdSense and network links. I think it’s important to draw a distinction between these sites and the responsible, well run directories that I and most link builders I know, use.

What is a directory?

In short, a directory is a collection of websites categorized by subject and/or geographic location. Human reviewers determine what source will be added and also maintain the directory and it’s structure. While there are hundreds if not thousands of general directories online, only four stand out as heavy hitters:

* The World Wide Web Virtual Library (VLIB created in 1991)
* The Yahoo! Directory (1994)
* Best of the Web (BOTW 1994) and the
* Open Directory Project (ODP/DMOZ 1998)

If we check their PageRank scores, we’ll see each of these directories sports a greater than average meter of green. Even if it’s only half right, the toolbar tells us Google thinks well of these pages.

It is difficult to get a site listed with the DMOZ and VLIB, but it’s not impossible if you have an authority resource and follow their guidelines. Even if you’re unsuccessful in getting in, these directories are excellent research sources and can be mined for link partners. For example, when I look at the links on this page of the VLIB and click on the Gardening category, I can find no less than five niche directories listed in the first 20 links shown. If I owned a gardening site, these would be great directories to be listed in from an algorithmic and traffic standpoint.

Yahoo! and BOTW are both paid inclusion with expensive review fees, but that cost is part of what keeps the junk sites out of their indexes. Each employs human reviewers to look at the sites submitted and determine which category they should be placed in. This process of being scrutinized to determine acceptance is known as editorial review, and is why these and other directories are respected algorithmically by the search engines.

Are directories white elephants?

In my opinion, there are 15 good general directories (includes the big four) worth submitting to, and those include sites such as JoeAnt, Business, Dirjournal, MassiveLinks, RubberStamped, Illumirate, among others. Here’s what I use to qualify a directory as “good”:

* minimal/no AdSense on category pages
* no site wide links
* has full contact information available
* internal pages indexed and cached frequently

If you argue most directories display low to mid-range PageRank scores I’ll agree, but also point out while their meter of green may be low, it is more a result of their function, not their quality. Directories are hubs and hubs are one-half of the authority equation, a factor incorporated in both the PageRank and TrustRank algorithms. Keep in mind how PageRank scores are determined and the fact directories are designed to link out, not in.

Directory submission tactics as a business model

If you owned a business on Main Street and wanted to promote it to the community, it’s doubtful you’d use just one advertising method to get your message across. You’d probably begin with the basic, less expensive options such as buying ads in the Yellow Pages, your local newspaper and ValuPak mailers. Eventually you’ll move up and buy radio, television and sponsorship opportunities which will help make you a dominant presence in your community.

This scatter gun approach to building a credible reputation can be done online as well. I advocate using directory links in the first wave of linking as a way to jump start your linking program. Granted, they’re not algorithmic giants, but directory links will pass link popularity and add to your overall back link profile.

Bottom line? If you understand the editorial significance of directory links and the role they can play as part of your link building mix, you’ll see the positives outweigh the negatives. For as long as Google hosts DMOZ, for as long as Yahoo! and VLIB survive, for as long as BOTW provides a solid search vehicle and supports IM charities, and especially for as long as the directories don’t contribute to the pinking of the Web, I will support them and recommend you do the same.


Welcome to SEO Google page one Basic seo factors, organic search results are the only cost effective way to drive visitors to your website. In Basic seo factors Natural search results have no cost per click associated with them. Also research on Basic seo factors shows people put more trust in Google’s organic search than any of the paid advertising methods.

If you have a website you need people to find it through Basic seo factors, easily. Most website visitors make their way to individual sites via the search engines. Google is the most successful of the Search Engines(Basic seo factors), with the biggest share by far of the internet search market & Basic seo factors. This means if you want visitors you need a good Google search position & best keyword such as Basic seo factors. In the first 10 results to be on the first page as Basic seo factors.

Since there are only 10 slots and millions of websites you can’t just expect to be lucky enough to appear on the first page for your target keyword Basic seo factors and phrases. It takes planning, hard work and a certain amount of expertise . That’s where Basic seo factors comes in. Optimising your website involves on Basic seo factors such as both on and off of the pages. It is important that your site is built to a high standard, Basic seo factors all the links must work and the content has to be both keyword rich and relevant. Remember search engines (as a rule) can’t see pictures, videos and flash animation. So it is vital that your text tells them what they need to know Basic seo factors. It can be easy to lose focus on the important issue here and that’s your visitors. You need to engage and interest the people who come to your site too by searching Basic seo factors. Good well designed and well written sites appeal to both search engine spiders and real people, after all nobody will stick around to read your website Basic seo factors if it doesn’t make sense.

Google Gets Crop Circles Logo

Currently, most Google search properties that are currently in a time zone that is September 15th, such as Google UK, are sporting a special Google Doodle that links to a search result for crop circles. It seems likely this logo will appear in the US soon.

The logo shows a flying saucer above a series of crop circles that spell Google. Well, almost — the L has been abducted. That similar to the last Google flying saucer logo from ten days ago, where an O was taken.

If you look at today’s logo’s file name, it’s goog_e.gif — reflecting the missing L. The last logo was go_gle.gif – reflecting the missing O. So that’s O, then L — what are they going to spell?

latest seo updates

A route for your website to have the highest ranking possible? Then you need a high Google ranking SEO & follow some basic seo factors. Having a good SEO will make it easier to people find your website through related keywords when surfing the Internet.
The key to having a successful website and getting it noticed is learning as much as you can about Google ranking and placement and how this works with other search engines as well. Most all users will click on the first pages that show up when they are searching keywords, so you can see how important a high ranking can really be for your website.
In addition to just being ranked high, you also want to be sure you are targeting the right keywords. It takes someone smart on SEO and ranking to help you know which keywords are the best for you to school and market for your website. You also have to know what kind of competition you have. You want to have the best keywords possible with the lowest competition.

SEO services and bolgs success

For a blogger biggest achievement is when his blogs get successful and recognition all around the world. SEO services, To make blogs successful one needs to do so many things apart from writing good blogs. SEO, that is, search optimization services play an important role to make blog a success. Both of them are correlated and it should be well taken care of that SEO services should be best of all. Major benefit from SEO services is that they help in generation of traffic. They get more and more readers for your blogs and thus make your blog a big hit. They also help you in developing links with other websites and thus help you in getting good page rank. They help in promoting your website with new ways and methods. Go and spend some quality time in searching best SEO services for your website. Talk with them and tell about what you need and other specifications. You can leave rest of the work for them.

Directories Back links

Submitting sites in the online directories can be done by manual or automatic directory submission. However, Directory submission is one of the major aspect in seo factors, when you submit your respective website on these directories, it should attached with a back link which follows to your own website and explains every thing about it in detail. It should be done properly and efficiently as it’s important for the viewer to know where it has been originated from. Link building is an important method to make back links and help them work more effectively. It also helps you generate more money while you own a website. There are many methods of creating links and building links which are popular all over the globe. Article submission, forum posting and RSS submission are some important ways by which you can post a back link on the web site. Using directory submission software is a really effective method for creating good back links.

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES FIND YOUR PAGES!!!!!!!!!!!??

You might have heard about search engines but there are very few who actually know how they work. Search engines analyze your website from every perspective and then only give it the rank it deserves. The working of search engines is quite interesting. Search engines send robots or spiders to your website through links present in other websites. If your link is present in many websites then you will get an added advantage. When it reaches your website it scans each and every page of your website very carefully. Then spider is sent back to a database where all your details are stored. In this database details of millions of websites are being stored. Considering all Seo factors specific position will be assigned to your website and that becomes your rank. You should always keep your website updated with changing rules and regulations of search engines if you want to stay on top of all other websites.

Want to best social media user???????

Simple 10 Ways to become Best SMO User

1. Socialize

Remember when your mom dropped you off for Kindergarten and told you to go make lots of friends? This is essentially the same thing, choose your social portal and use it for the reason it was made: SOCIAL NETWORKING. If you’re working on Twitter, be sure to speak with those you’re following and get to know them. I’d much rather have >1000 followers that I actively engage with than tens or hundreds of thousands of people I’ve never said word one too.

If the social news sites are where your focus is, be sure to network with the friends you find there. Go beyond just voting on their stories, comment and share them with others in your group. Not only will your friends begin to notice, but they’ll reciprocate.

2. Diversify

If your goal is better brand yourself or just simply to network, choose more than just one outlet to do that. Twitter is probably one of the best ways of interacting with your followers, but adding those same connections to Facebook or LinkedIn tends to take that relationship to a different level where you can share connections, photos and more. In my opinion it helps to solidify the friendship that you were building on the other portals.

3. Participate

It’s one thing to have a Twitter or Digg account, it’s another to use them. Twitter currently has over 70% of accounts that are considered “inactive”. I’ve had periods of time where Twitter was the last thing on my mind and with the myriad of ways I could update my status, I just didn’t want to. I feel like I’ve missed out on a bunch of things and have let some relationships stagnate because of those deserted periods.

One way to make your Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon account obsolete is to ignore it. I’ve unfortunately found that out the hard way, but I’ve also talked with many people who’ve had the same problem. Accounts just aren’t as strong and don’t garner the votes they used to when you socialized and participated in the past.

4. Contribute

Sites like Digg and other social news sites wouldn’t even be around with the submissions of its users. I’ll take this a step further and say you should really contribute quality articles (there’s enough spam as it is already). Along with supporting your friends’ accounts, build up your own by constantly looking and submitting good articles. Digg/Reddit/SU users notice someone who submits quality over quantity.

5. Be Real

Whether the account is your own personal one or business’s, don’t be fake…anyone can smell a fake from a mile away. A great example of this is the @10e20 account, there’s a great mixture of comedy, news-worthy links and communication amongst its followers. I gather the added snarkiness has come from bringing @rebeccakelley to the team :) Be who you are and who you know how to be and you will get REAL followers that want to follow you because of what you say and what you share.

6. Consistency

As I stated above, I highly regret the depressions in usage on Twitter in the past. Hubspot did a pretty interesting article on the optimum number of tweets per day to gain the most followers. While those graphs are nifty, I think this goes back to my previous mention of being real. If you’re a talkative person, tweet to your hearts desire. Don’t feel obligated to tweet/digg/submit a certain amount of times per day because it’s “statistically better”, that’s when things can get sloppy. Find what works best for you and stick with it.

7. Be Meaningful

Above all, the thing that will make you shine the most is to show people that you actually give a crap! So many people out there are trying to reach that 10,000th follower or reach a certain number of front page stories they’ve submitted. My philosophy is, if you continue to do the simple things listed in this article, you’ll eventually get there. It may not be the path that gets you there the quickest, but it’ll be a path filled with meaningful relationships and friends that will gladly share your stories, upvote your submissions, have a conversation with you on Facebook chat or whatever. I love the piece Lisa Barone wrote on How to Be Remembered. It really struck a cord with me not in just networking, but it blogging and client work as well. Make it a priority to genuinely care about the people you’re interacting with and you’ll build more than just a number on a follower’s list.

8. Get Creative

I know this isn’t necessarily the most hyped of the group, but another way to stand out as just another Twitterer or Digg user is to be different. If you’re trying to get the attention of a certain person or group of people, do more than just Retweet their story…make comment on the blog or attempt to strike up a conversation regarding the matter. Take a great story you saw on Digg and submit it to Reddit or Stumbleupon and help to get that story some more attention there through cross-pollination.

Probably one of the best examples of creativity on Twitter is @darthvader’s account! I don’t think I’ve seen a funnier set of tweets for another account than his, taking somewhat of a Robot Chicken-ish approach to his tweets, like this:

9 .Monitor

This may be more for a business than for a personal account and probably more so for Twitter than most places, but listen to those who talk to/about you. Comcast did an awesome job of this by creating their slew of Comcast employee accounts as well as the main @comcastcares account. They were able to turn the majority of bad tweets into solutions for those with the issues.

One company that I think has failed in this area is AT&T (of which I will thankfully no longer be a customer of in 3 hours). Toward the beginning of August, AT&T was a trending topic on Twitter for nearly 3 weeks straight (on and off). If the tweet wasn’t about the iphone, it was usually something about how AT&T screwed up their bill, being on the phone with tech support for over an hour or some other negative tweet. Unfortunately, for AT&T, they have done little, if nothing to quell the barrage of negativity online. And while it may not be a big deal now to a large corporation, I’m sure there will come a time where no company will be safe, large or small.

10. Relevance

Staying relevant can be a key factor in why someone does and does not follow you. It’s understandable to be random on your own personal account, but if you’re looking to brand yourself or your business account, it’s important to share and promote stories within your industry. This will lead to more followers that talk about what you talk about and can help in further promoting your stories and building beneficial relationships with those who you share common interests with.

So there it is…10 ways you can personally become better at social media. Not the standard, by any means, but one that has worked for myself and many others I’ve spoken with. I’d love to hear of any ideas and practices that you have used to better your social accounts. Note that each social portal is different and users on each will likely be so (like when I was on Plurk a long while back), so find what works best for you.

The Change of Bing's Home Page Picture

Bibg Home page past pictures search:

One of the most talked about features of Bing, Microsoft search engine, is not the search features at all but rather the pictures they show on their home page. It truly keeps people coming back every day. But sometimes people miss the picture shown on a day and they want to go back in history and find it.

The Main Reason the attract user to find Bing is not search features, but the pictures that shown on there main page.They have started backing up there home page picture so that user can find even though they miss a day. They have added to see past images. where you hover your mouse over the right bottom corner of the image and it lets you scroll back in time to see past images. Here is a picture of that scroll feature:

Preview Your Google Rich Snippets With Google Webmaster Tool

Preview Your Google Rich Snippets With Google Webmaster Tool

Google starts supporting rich snippets in the search results. Whihc meant Webmasters could mark up their HTML with richer data using microformats and RDFa and Google could then, if they deemed it to be appropriate, display the richer snippets in their SERP.

One of the issues on the webmaster front with this is that a webmaster had no idea how the Google snippets would look like, until Google actually displayed the richer snippet in the Google results. Webmasters wanted a way to (1) preview the snippet and (2) validate they coded the page correctly.

Brian Ussery spotted that Google released a beta version of the Rich Snippets Testing Tool that does just that. What is interesting is that you can plug in any URL, not just URLs that you own via the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools, and preview the snippet data. For example, my LinkedIn profile is available for preview without me owning LinkedIn, and I bet you can see it also.

Should You Alter Your Current Backlinks?

What about if you see a link pointing to a page that really isn’t the best page for the anchor text/content? Maybe you started your site with just a few pages, and everyone linked to your home page, but now you have hundreds of pages of great content and there are links that could go to more relevant sections? Well, if that’s the case, you have to decide whether it’s worth the effort to contact the site owners and point them to the more relevant page. That can take a lot of time and, after all, nothing’s broken.

Depending upon whether your deep link profile is any good or not (and with many sites it’s not, sadly) you may want to simply shoot an email to the webmaster, alerting him or her to the more relevant page, and say by the way, thanks so much for the link. If a link still goes to the same basic URL but goes to a different page on the site, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Common linking advice will tell you to look for mentions of your site/company that do not currently link to you, and ask for a link. I think that’s sound advice. It’s a very natural thing to link to a site or company that you’re mentioning, but not everyone has always done it, so if you can, ask the webmaster to add in the link for you. Most will, from my experience. If the anchor text matches the link URL, again, I can’t see why this would produce any negative effects.

Not all links are created equal

However, what if you find a negative mention of your site or company? View it as not only a chance to get a link, but also a chance to make amends, something that always tends to be good press. If the mention has to do with something you can fix, by all means contact the person who wrote it and try to work it out. This type of situation isn’t limited to major corporations who do bad things. Many people, for whatever reason, will become upset with you and blog about it. They’ll get on Twitter and call you out (and also blog about it) so it can easily become a public relations nightmare for you.

The other day when I was at Starbucks, a customer wearing a suit asked to speak to the manager so that he could complain about someone who had been in the same Starbucks the previous day, and seemed to not like men in suits. Yes, I am serious. There’s always someone who’s going to get upset about something. If you see a mention that you can somehow change to make it better for you, take the chance and do it. All that can happen is that the person says no. And maybe blog about it…

In summary, yes, by all means check out your inbounds, and if they don’t look as great as they could look, take some time (or make your intern do it) and reach out to those people who have been gracious enough to link to you, and nicely ask for the change that you want. If it’s not going to happen, at least you’ve made an effort, and you’ve again made contact with someone who has somehow been affected by your site and what you represent. If that isn’t interacting with your community, then I don’t know what is.

What should you do, as a polite and plucky link builder, if some of your inbound links just aren’t up to snuff? Do you risk alienating a well-meaning webmaster by pointing out that he’s linked to an old page that no longer exists? That he’s spelled your company’s name incorrectly, or, even worse, your URL? Do you ask for a link where your site is mentioned, even if it’s an unfavorable mention? How will making changes to your existing inbounds affect your site in the future?

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Should You Flaunt Your Search Engine Rankings?

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on the topic of promoting the fact that you rank number one in a search engine for an important keyword. Does it make sense, in some cases or any case, to promote the fact that you are the top result in Google, Yahoo or Bing?

Clearly, if you are an SEO company and you need to show your results to prospects, it would be wise to show off your success. But do you plaster the specific search terms you rank well for on your web page for all to see?

If you are a web site that ranks number one for blue widgets, do you flaunt the fact on your web site? Or do you keep it under the radar? I would assume your competitors already know, so does it hurt? Can it help if you promote that fact to your potential customers?

As you can see, there are many variables mentioned here and many I have not mentioned.

What do you think? Is it wise to show off your success or are you asking for a beat down? Take our poll:

Have We Lost All Control?

I don't know Charlene Li. I can't truly guess who she is as a person or what she's really like. But I was fortunate enough to see her speak at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a couple weeks ago.

If I had to guess, I'd say she's an analytic-type of person. She didn't strike me as someone who was flamboyant or over-exaggerated. She seems like a person who tells it like it is, matter-of-factly.

So, when she said, "In the future, everyone is a marketer. The time where you control the message has come and gone," I was shocked.

This sounds like the kind of apocalyptic extremist talk I'd say, not something that came out of the mouth of an analyst.

I'm always looking for the shock factor in my speeches. I recently told a group of 100 people that if I had a choice of selling Gutenberg's printing presses or selling social media, I'd sell social media every time. "Social media is the greatest media revolution in the history of humanity," is what I like to say.

But Charlene isn't that kind of person. She's a straight shooter.

"The time where you control the message has come and gone."

That's heavy.

It's also true.

In 2005, Thomas Friedman wrote "The World Is Flat." He was describing a flattening of the global economic market. This is a pivotal book that describes precisely what has been happening in the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Jumping ahead four years, this flattening continues at a fierce pace.

Twitter, specifically, has pushed this flattening to even greater extremes. As Clay Shirky described at his keynote at SES San Jose, we're witnessing, for the first time, a medium that allows "the many to communicate with the many." This has never been possible before.

We see it all the time now: Iran, "Bruno," and most recently "District 9." These are a couple examples of the power of Twitter that have jumped out at me recently.

I bring this up because if you ever want a sell-out business event right now, make it about social media. Every time I speak about social media it's to a standing-room-only crowd.

I get a sense that the crowds are there out of fear and curiosity. I don't usually feel like they are there because they are super-excited about this "social media revolution."

I feel like they're there because social media is like a freight train heading right for them. Or they're there to validate their beliefs that social media is a fad or "not for them."

I bring it up to you because: "The time where you control the message has come and gone."

That is the fact. You can participate in the message. You can pay for your message to go out. But you can't control the message like you used to.

So, instead of getting run over by the freight train, jump on board. The next time you have a promotion, ask yourself what you can do to get people talking about it.

Your concern shouldn't be about what they say. You just want them to say something.

I've been involved with promotions where the marketing director has scoured each and every blog post about the promotion. Virtually every posting of the promotion had something unacceptable in it. The blogger didn't say this right. They forgot to mention that. They can't legally say such and which.

That kind of micromanagement is gone. You have to stop that kind of thinking.

"The time where you control the message has come and gone."

I'm not saying this as some kind of social media zealot. I'm telling you this because it's the truth.

Send this to your brand managers. Send this to your public relations people. Send this to your attorneys.

This is the world we live in.

You aren't in control any more.

The people are in control.

Accept it and move on.

Google AdWords Continues To Test New Product Ad Formats

A reader emailed us a screen capture of Google testing a new form of display product results in the AdWords listings. This is the third significant test of how the product data is shown in the search ads. We have the way most people see Google AdWords product plusbox and some more recent quick link version and top right ad box format.

This new format, shows the product images and pricing, without clicking on the plus box. Here is the screen capture:

Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations

My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.

So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.

Url Capitalization & SEO : How there important to SEO?

Many people are really surprised to learn that URLs are actually case sensitive (unlike the actual domain name). Simply put, while it doesn’t really matter how you spell your domain name (domainname.com or DomainName.com or DOMAINNAME.com), it DOES make a huge difference how you spell your URLs (domainname.com/page1 or domainname.com/Page1).

Let’s say, you have started promoting capitalized version (domainname.com/Page1) because you think it looks prettier and is better to remember. Let me explain what may happen (I guess a table is better to explain this because you can always use it as a cheatsheet):

	domainname.com/page1	domainname.com/Page1
Your site is hosted on a Windows-based server
Header response when requested either of the two	200	200
Google’s reaction	Both URLs will be indexed and ranked. Obviously, this will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most obviously be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.
Your site is hosted on a Linux / Unix-based server
Header response when requested either of the two	200	404
Google’s reaction	Google will try to index both but will drop the 404-one. Again, you are wasting your link juice in this situation. What’s also important, you confuse your visitors by sending them to the non-existent page.

So what’s the best way to handle the problem?

• While most basic SEOs factor that will recommend sticking to only one version, I recommend to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version);
• If for some reason you start seeing URLs with capital letters get into index (someone linked to it or you changed your content management system and it capitalized some URLs), use 301-redirect to let people, search crawlers and links go to non-capitalized URLs to avoid any problems.

Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.

Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies, basic seo factors and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.

Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.

Hows Of Multiple Metric Optimization

The beauty of online marketing is that every step in the click path is visible. And some basic seo factors that follows in searcher clicks on an ad, lands on a merchant’s site and navigates to purchase—all of which can be viewed and analyzed.

This process is often referred to as multiple metric optimization. However, this term is often misused so it is worth spending some time on explaining the process and how marketers can use it to their advantage.

Simply put, In some basic seo factor they multiple metric optimization refers to the class of methods that seek to maximize a marketing goal (for example, ROI/Revenue) using more than one event in the click path. Examples of these metrics are clicks, leads, revenue, purchase, visit time, times of day etc. It is important to note the word “optimization” in the context of bid management necessitates the need for statistical algorithms. Applying arbitrary rules or filters to five or so metrics does not mean you are optimizing to multiple metrics. Perhaps an example will make it clear....Read More

Common SEO Mistakes

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is the ongoing lack of recognition it plays in getting traffic to your Web site. This can be especially true in larger organizations where key members of management aren't familiar with it, and how it works. Uninformed senior managers can easily make decisions that are catastrophic from an SEO perspective.

Here are some of the most common mistakes made as a result:

1. Not Starting Early Enough

Even organizations that are aware of SEO's importance have a tendency to start the process too late. People in these organizations may think that SEO is about keyword selection and copywriting, but not realize that SEO also plays a critical role in technical implementation decisions. The key to remember here: it's easier to do it right the first time than to do it over.

2. Picking a Poor Content Management System

Unfortunately, many CMSs lack even basic SEO features, such as the ability to select title tags, headings, and anchor text. Other CMSs may allow these basics, but aren't crawler-friendly or create massive duplicate content.

3. Use Crawler Unfriendly Development Methods

Sometimes a senior marketing manager insists on using Flash for the whole site. Search engines are doing a better job at understanding the content within Flash files, but they still don't deal with it as well as plain HTML text. There are ways to completely block search engine spiders too, such as implementing links in JavaScript that can't be parsed by the crawler.

4. Duplicate Content Pages

There are many ways to implement duplicate content, such as creating print pages or referring to pages on the site with more than one URL (example: www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html.

5. No Canonical Redirect

Many Web sites allow http://example.com and http://www.example.com to co-exist without 301 redirecting one version of the URL to the other. This is actually a duplicate content problem, but it's so common that it deserves its own mention. A somewhat rarer cousin to this is where http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com are allowed to co-exist.

6. Pseudo Duplicate Content

One example of this is an e-commerce catalog that offers alternate sort orders for its products (e.g., a shoe catalog that allows you to sort on price, color, or size). To a user, the content on all these pages is different; to a search engine, they aren't because all the same elements of text are on the page.

7. Thin Content Pages

Many sites implement pages that have too little content per page. These can even be pages that the user sees as content rich, such as a page with images showing a product, and basic product information such as price. However, if the only text on the page that differs from other product pages is the title and heading tags and the price, the page will either be seen as a low quality page, or a duplicate.

8. Poor Use of Internal Anchor Text

A surprising number of sites still use "click here" or "more" as the anchor text on many links. This is a loss of a golden opportunity to help search engines understand what the page being linked to is about.

9. Over-Optimized Pages

Sometimes people go off the deep end after learning about SEO. They start creating overly keyword-rich pages in an effort to move their rankings upwards. This can quickly make for a poor user experience, resulting in a decrease in conversion rates and/or the site being less attractive for others to link to.

One warning signal of this is when you hear people talk about "SEO copywriting." This is a flag that the content author is thinking about search engines and not users, and that will get you into trouble. You're almost always better off having the writer focus on creating quality content, but controlling the title of the article so you can make sure that the keyword is in it.

10. Not Investing in Site Promotion

Many organizations think that the process is complete once a site is launched. They don't realize that the Web site needs to be promoted much like any other product or service. Inbound links (and in the future other references to your Web site, company, or products on the Web) are the primary voting mechanism that search engines use to tell them which are the most important sites related to a particular search query.

Social, Search, and Branding

Social media is frequently looked at by search marketers as an exercise in SEO. And, in some cases, it might be. But looking at social media from an SEO perspective will get you into trouble.

What's Your Definition of Social Media?

What is frequently referred to as "social" is a universe of activities covering anything from user-generated content and blogs on your site, to blogger outreach and social networking, bookmarking, sharing, and back scratching (OK, that last one's made up, but I hold that it can't be too far behind). You may as well say that SEO and the tax code naturally go together.

Social media is about interacting with your target audience, creating bonds with your brand, and then giving your audience outlets to exercise those bonds, either directly with your brand (e.g., purchases, signups) or spreading the word to others. To focus on mere content and links is not only missing the point of participation, but is probably setting you up for PR headaches.

Public Relations

Speaking of PR, the symbiosis between social media and SEO is a lot like the leverage between public relations and SEO. The ultimate goal of PR is to grow the brand: To put a human face on your brand, to draw people into conversations, and to encourage interaction outside of typical mercantile settings through content of many varieties.

Can you use PR to grow your search engine rankings? Sure. Can you use it purely as a means to that end? Technically.

Article submission and press releases are a tried and true method for building links -- but if performed solely to win authority with search engines, you miss out on winning authority with the people you're ultimately looking to influence much more than search engines.

A well-written release, a well-executed video, or a well-done publicity move that's performed with SEO value included -- but not as the primary goal -- will gain you more link value to your site than the link value you get from a dozen spammed-out releases that you spent five minutes on.

A good PR execution should be designed to get people to interact with your creation by sharing it with friends, followers, and readers across a range of channels. This expands the resulting inbound links from your efforts, and also draws more people to your site, giving you the opportunity to earn links, subscriptions and purchase from visitors. Can you say the same of an article that you randomly threw together, added links to, and posted somewhere?...more

My Favorite Link Building Lie

People will tell you it’s no longer possible to obtain links by asking for them via email. Spend even a little time reading the SEO/SEM blogs, forums, comments, etc., and you’ll find a reasonable and well-meaning post, something like this beauty I read over at the UK version of TechCrunch. “The days of asking a site [...]..more

Get Traffic Data To Maps

Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data. According to the Google Blog: If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends [...]..more

Curious Case Of Google’s Bizarre UK Search Results

SEOs are wracking their brains over what Google is up to in the UK. The Twitterverse has been buzzing over the last three months about Google’s strange search results, and many bloggers have addressed the problem since early June.

What’s happening? Last June several UK SEOs started to notice changes in the UK SERPS. At first it seemed as if the Vince Update, which hit the US last February, caused the change in rankings. But in the UK there seemed to be more than just Vince affecting results.

The Vince update, for a short period, caused a change in rankings for brand-related searches. In the last couple of months, however, it was not just big brands that dominated search results—.com sites were taking over the results in the UK, gaining prominence over .co.uk sites based in Great Britain.

Something like this happened before in 2008, when UK searches were mixed with US searches. But this time it was different. Not just American results started popping up. Australian, South African and even Dutch results started ‘beating’ the local UK results. Some results were pretty surprising. Where you would expect UK results for local searches now (in many cases irrelevant) US-results appeared.

Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise, also a Search Engine Land writer, was one of the people who noticed the US results first. After that more and more started to notice bizarre search results.

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Crowdsourcing road congestion data

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Searching For Jessica Biel May Be Dangerous To Computer’s Health

Danger, thy name is Jessica Biel!

No, we’re not turning Search Engine Land into a celebrity gossip blog … we’re talking about the risks of searching online for certain celebrities. And, according to a McAfee report issued today, Jessica Biel is the most dangerous celebrity on the web, passing last year’s master of search disaster, Brad Pitt.



McAfee explains the risks involved in being a search engine-using fan of Jessica Biel:

“Fans searching for “Jessica Biel” or “Jessica Biel downloads,” “Jessica Biel wallpaper,” “Jessica Biel screen savers,” “Jessica Biel photos” and “Jessica Biel videos” have a one in five chance of landing at a Web site that’s tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware.”

Here’s the full top ten, according to McAfee’s study:

1. Jessica Biel
2. Beyoncé
3. Jennifer Aniston
4. Tom Brady
5. Jessica Simpson
6. Gisele Bundchen
7. Miley Cyrus
8. Megan Fox & Angelina Jolie (tie)
9. Ashley Tisdale
10. Brad Pitt

Every One Will Monetize there 15 Min

We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account: