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+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ OPTIMIZING VISIBLE RESULTS IN SEARCH MARKETING ********************* Catch and cache past installments of SearchWrite SearchNews in the http://www.searchwrite.com/Pages/searchnews.htm ********************** ++++++++++++++++++++++++ It's that time of year again when we take stock of the Web world's keyword zeitgeist. This week, Google User Experience VP Marissa Mayer announced the top ten "fastest gaining" Google search queries of 2007. And the winners are: Yahoo has also revealed its top queries for 2007. The top 10 news stories: The top 10 environmental searches: The top 10 troubled stars: The Year of I, You, and Wii - The top 10 in Tech: Tag, You're It - The top 10 on del.icio.us
Our spies have filled us in on the latest buzz surrounding the new Google phone, dubbed GPhone. The word on the street is that the new feature set could be the piˆ®ce de rˆ©sistance in terms of pure Web marketing bliss. Picture this: You're traveling on business in a major city you have never been to. On the way to your meeting you notice that you have spilled your breakfast on yourself. You don't have time to return to your hotel, but you do have time for a "spot cleaning" for your shirt. You grab your GPhone, press the "Hot Button" and say "Dry Cleaners - Near Me". Google pinpoints your exact location via GPS and then offers you up to five options of dry cleaners nearest you. A push button selection brings up options to "Call Now", "Read Reviews" (which includes an option to have them read to you via text reader), "Download Coupons", "Turn by Turn Directions", and other choices. Pretty cool, huh? But it gets better. If you own one of the dry cleaners, and you are the only one who advertises on AdWords, you can choose to "beat any competitor's price" so when a prospect chooses a competitor, it will give them an option that "Bob's Dry Cleaners Will Beat or Match ..." which allows you to literally "sandbag" your competitors. Now THAT is marketing. Can you imagine the sheer power that can do for a local business? It will take online marketing to the extreme and allow Google to truly be the "go to" provider for both online and offline business. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ask.com has launched the AskEraser, a tool that deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries. You will find the AskEraser link in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages. The AskEraser is implemented on Ask.com’Äôs major search verticals: Web, Images, AskCity, News, Blogs, Video, and Maps & Directions - and can be turned ’Äúon’Äù or ’Äúoff’Äù by the user. The AskEraser FAQ adds that: ’ÄúWhen AskEraser is enabled, all Ask.com cookies will be deleted from your browser, one cookie will be set to remember that you have AskEraser turned on, and going-forward, your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com servers. AskEraser will remain ’Äòon’Äô across multiple visits to the Ask.com site provided that you do not clear your Ask.com cookies and provided that you’Äôre using the same computer and browser.’Äù ’ÄúFor people who worry about their online privacy, AskEraser now gives them control of their search information,’Äù says Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. ’ÄúAskEraser is simple, straightforward, and easy-to-use. It is an idea whose time has come.’Äù AskEraser is now available in the United States and in the United Kingdom ’Äì and will be deployed globally in 2008.
For several years Google has used something called ’Äúhost crowding,’Äù which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but complaints were levelled that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks Google changed its algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future. According to Google Guy Matt Cutts, the change doesn’Äôt apply across the board; "if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com." Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’Äôt affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed.
Yahoo has announced that it will now support four new types of exclusion tags in the robots.txt file: NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET, and NOFOLLOW. The benefits of being able to declare these directives in the robots.txt file enables folks who store PDFs, Word Documents, and other files on the web and cannot easily place these directives in the header. Google actually expanded its robots.txt protocol in July with the unavailable_after tag, and the Noindex: / directive to block Googlebot from crawling your entire site. The downside to these changes is that you'll have to check the robots.txt file to see if link juice is passed. The changes are being made as part of an incrementla update occuring this week. As Yahoo announced: Along with this change, we'll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process.
While it may appear that LinkedIn has no answer to the recent surge of people moving to Facebook for their business networking, the company has quietly been working behind the scenes to revamp itself. Announced this week, LinkedIn is rolling out a host of new features which the company hopes will convince members to use the network as a business dashboard’Äìwith snapshots of key information and events in your personal business network. The first new addition is the introduction of company news. Your LinkedIn homepage now shows the five most read news items about your business and you can click through for more items. Other new elements of the new LinkedIn site include a series of useful widgets and a LinkedIn Answers feature that will allow users to ask other people in the network questions, similar to Yahoo Answers. An Intelligent Applications Platform - called ’ÄúInApps’Äù ’Äì announced simultaneously to the site’Äôs redesign, will integrate its features into outside developers’Äô sites, allowing them to create software for LinkedIn. As a partner in Google’Äôs OpenSocial network, LinkedIn’Äôs representatives have said that InApps structure will include ’Äúthe ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the Google OpenSocial development model.’Äù In all, these new features create more reasons to use the site on a daily basis or put the brand in front of you more frequently. Frequency had been a persistent issue with the site: there were few things to do after accepting an invitation to connect.
Speaking of reinvention, is Classmates.com a casualty of the Facebook revolution? In what seems to be a death knell for what looked like the first pure-play social networking IPO in U.S. United Online has canceled the proposed IPO of its Classmates.com social networking unit. The company originally announced its plan to hive off the company in August, and in late November it said it expected to raise $177.7 million via the sale. But, citing the standard ’Äúmarket conditions,’Äù the company now says that such a move wouldn’Äôt be in the interest of stockholders. In other words, the interest wasn’Äôt there. While there had been some excitement over a social networking pure-play IPO, Classmates.com, with its subscription-driven business model and earth-bound growth rates, couldn’Äôt fully capture the buzz. United Online said it will take a $4.5-$5.5 million charge in Q4 associated with the aborted process. Release. A recent report from Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland spells out exactly why United Online couldn’Äôt cash in with Classmates. One line sums up his thesis: ’ÄúWe expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012.’Äù Much of the report hones in on the fact that Classmates is no Facebook. The biggest difference is that Facebook is free and offers far more robust features. Other factors weighing on Classmates. According to analyst Joe Weisenthal, the following were the most critical deficiencies in sizing up a prospective Classmates IPO.
Speaking of Facebook, the Facebook’Äôs Beacon ad system, which launched three weeks ago to include off-Facebook purchases in users’Äô news feeds, has undergone significant changes to make it easier for users to keep their third-party site activities private. The social network was forced this week to save face after MoveOn.org, among other users and privacy groups, campaigned against the practice. Users must now click on ’ÄúOK’Äù in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. "We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice," Facebook confessed. Instead of launching an opt-out system from the get-go, Facebook should have learned from the uproar caused just over a year ago, when they launched news feeds without any warning and without a way to let users control how their information was being broadcast to their friends. Of course, news feeds are now the cornerstone of Facebook, one being duplicated soon by rival MySpace, but the issue with Beacon was its use of information from third-party sites being used to sell to your friends. Mashable rightly notes that as more outside sites sign on for Beacon, all those notifications are bound to get really annoying.
If you've been on the fence about integrating SEO into your corporate marketing program, or need more ammo to convince your CXO why now is the time to take SEO very seriously, well 2008 ought to be your year! 1. Search is now tied with e-mail as the most popular online activity. 91% of all Internet users use search regularly. Organic search engine marketing is no longer an optional activity for revenue-producing Web sites: It is essential, if a site is to compete effectively on the Web now and in the future. Lastly, twchnical SEO is no longer wnough. SEO up to now has been mainly technical (and tactical) in orientation. But as basic SEO skills become increasingly commoditized, SEO will require more than just technical ability to grow brands and companies on the Web ’Äî it will require a keen understanding of business, marketing, risk management, resource allocation, and creative problem solving.
"Make your elevator pitch. Code it up and throw the switch." http://www.metacafe.com/w/958560/
For 2008, it's time to think Web 2.0 and add the ingredients to your site for a tasty Social Media recipe. To whet your appetite, picture yourself in the sassy new burger eatery just launched in NYC. With the perfect name for modern Web times: yep, it's called BRGR!, this bistro is totally Web 2.0! Blogger Allen Stern has ground up some inspired suggestions for additions to the BRGR menu that follow the Web 2.0 theme. Now you're cooking! * The Mashable: Comes with 49 types of cheese, 16 sauces, 32 packets of salt and 9 varieties of beef. * The Twitter: Small beef burger which may or may not arrive at your table but if it does, everyone will know you are eating it. * The Facebook: Burger comes without anything on it, you add whatever you like later on. * The Scoble: Burger comes with free video explaining how the burger was made, what's on the burger and a free Seagate burger manager. * The Digg: Twenty burgers are served tableside. Whichever burger receives the most amount of votes from the other guests is the burger which you shall eat. Some burgers will appear better than others. * The Skype: Burger will be missing one of the items you requested; the establishment will blame the store down the street for not including the missing item. * The Microsoft: It's not sure what type of burger it wants to be. * The Apple: The most beautiful burger ever. * The AT&T: Will be served with a side of 400 potatoes in a box even though you asked for no potatoes. * The Google: Upon purchasing The Google, all other burgers currently on order will be acquired by The Google. * The YouTube: You will watch yourself eat the same burger 1 million times. * The SecondLife: You won't feel full after eating this burger. * The GoDaddy: This burger comes with a variety of large-breasted women all of whom have nothing to do with burgers but don't they look good? * The Mahalo: The burger won't be fully cooked but it will come with a how-to on how to properly eat a burger. * The Real: Comes with a string that once eaten, will follow behind you everywhere you go. No matter how hard you try, you can't remove the string. * The Popurls: This burger will take pieces from the other burgers to make its own. * The Clicky: After you eat the burger, stats will be provided on fat consumption, miles to run to burn off burger, where the burger meat came from, and to what extent others may have eaten the same burger. ******************************************
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