StumbleUpon Gets into Search « GigaOM

StumbleUpon, the social Web service, is doing something pretty cool. No, it’s not going to earn back the $75 million eBay (EBAY) paid for it. But it’s going to start overlaying the information its members have provided about a Web page — whether they like it or don’t, and what they’ve written about it — onto the rest of the web.

StumbleUpon’s product is a toolbar which learns about people’s preferences for Web pages to help them find new ones they’ll like, and the company has collected 100 million ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ for Web pages and 13 million reviewed Web pages over the years.| source: GigaOM

I don't mind. I have quite a few thumbs ups and downs. The premise for many search engines is to help users find sites related to their search terms (keywords and phrases). Why not offer review ratings next to the SERPS?

Internet Marketing Plan:

Good Referrence, not specifically SEO but worth noting...

Your Internet Marketing Plan: Things To Think About Before You Go Online

Small Business Branding posted an excellent blog post two days ago on marketing plans. While I agree that marketing plans are essential for traditional businesses, they are less so for Internet businesses - at least, as they exist for traditional businesses. Internet marketing plans are a good way to keep you focused on goals so I wouldn’t say they aren’t necessary at all. But you have different considerations for your Internet marketing campaign.

A traditional business plan usually follows this outline:

• Business Summary and Overview
• Market Analysis
• Competitive Analysis
• Product or Service Outline
• Marketing Strategy
• Production Processes
• SWOT Analysis
• Business Structure
• Management Team
• Financial Information
• Your Internet Marketing Plan

First, there is a distinction between a business plan and a marketing plan. Your business plan, in its completion, could include an Internet marketing plan, which would fall into the Marketing portion of the overall business plan. When you put together your Internet marketing plan, here are some things you need to think about:

Summary and Overview - Is your Internet business an extension of your brick and mortar business or is it a stand alone entity?
Market Analysis - Yes, you need to study the market online for your particular industry.
Competitive Analysis - Your off line competitors may or may not be competition online. It is likely that you’ll have a whole new set of competitors online.
Product or Service - Will you provide the same services online as you do off line?
Marketing Strategy - You need to think about what Internet marketing strategies you will use in your online business. Will you use pay-per-click, affiliate marketing, blogging, article marketing, banner advertising, all of the above?
Management Team - Are you a sole proprietor or will you have partners?
Financial Information - This is just as essential for your online plan at is for your off line plan.

This may not be all you need to think about for your Internet marketing plan, but these are the bare essentials. No Internet marketing plan should be without these elements.

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

SEO 2.0 | The Real Rules of Social Media Marketing Unmasked!

I came acorss this article and fully thought it would be useful to post most of it's content here. Click title above to see full rules...

1. Enlarge your linkability. Be a real man! Size does matter! Enlarge your linkability by enlarging your site with a blog. Then enlarge your blog by adding content daily! Then enlarge your blog with top 10 posts, “the secret of whatever” and hot chicks with [your product]!

2. Add at least a dozen buttons for social media. Come on! The more buttons the better. Everybody can see how Web 2.0 you are and how many sites you do know. So of course everybody can see by the sheer number of them that you’re a real expert. Besides social sites’ users are so damn lazy they just bookmark or submit stuff they need just a click for.

3. Reward inbound links. If someone links to you, link her or him at least twice, submit her or him to at least 3 social sites you are a user of. If it’s a she and you are a man tell her you love her, if it’s him, tell him that his blog is greater, bigger and larger and you are just a piece of shit compared to him.

4. Throw your content at everyone and let it travel around the world. Or just wait until all the copycat bloggers and content scrapers take it and then refrain from suing them. That’s almost enough! Let people translate your posts into at least 70 languages and conquer those markets afterwards.

5. Encourage the mashup. As in 4. just stop caring for your content and do not engage a lawyer.

6. Content is King Kong! Produce the f*****g best quality content of the planet and if you can’t tell the audience that your content is the f*****g best quality content of the planet. Otherwise just do as the others do in 4 until you learn to create content like King Kong!

7. Reward users. Simply reply to comments. People are so alienated on the Net they will treat you like their brother or sister just for writing some lousy two liners.

8. Participate. Be omnipresent. Appear on all social networks and sites and befriend the same people everywhere. Stalk ‘em at conferences, poke fun at them. Send them your used panties! Make ‘em feel that you’re their neighbour on the Internet.

9. Know how to target your audience. Do it like the Texans, set up a target and shoot! Use all kinds of weapons and calibers!

10. Create content. Not just any content, but content that will either make em puke or dance, content that will make ‘em call Matt Cutts for help or if you have no idea what to write about let the tabloids inspire you and use headlines like “two headed search engine optimizer eaten alive by baby alligator”.

Avenue A - Razorfish Launches Link Crawler

Interactive marketing and technology company Avenue A | Razorfish has launched Super-intelligent Link Crawler (SiLC), a tool that crawls Web sites to find errors such as broken links and '404 Error Messages' that inform users the Web page is not loading.

The tool examines why errors occur and can measure a Web site's performance against competing sites. The company has combined the tool with its search engine optimization and Web design to improve search rankings for brands like U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News & World Report recently redesigned its Web site to improve traffic and search capability for the site. After using the SiLC tool, Avenue A | Razorfish found search engines were not ranking many of its Web pages because they were flagging pages as duplicate content.

U.S. News & World Report created the main content of a health page article and a 'printer friendly' version. The web crawlers were tracking both and not ranking the pages in search engine results. After the relaunch organic visits increased 24 percent and organic visits from Google increased 45 percent. | Source: WebProNews.com

LinkMoses Linking Commandments - part one

This one is rather funny (somewhat sacrilegious) but worth taking a look. Eric Ward the "Link Moses" has compiled a list of Link commandments thou should abide by.

Read LinkMoses Linking Commandments - part one

Searching for Images by Similarity

Photo sharing sites like Flickr take this a step farther, allowing users to tag images with descriptive labels. This helps improve search results, but it's far from a perfect solution. If someone uses the tag "orange," does it describe a sunrise or a fruit? Or a pumpkin or an orange house or...

Another approach to image search involves analyzing certain characteristics of an image, attempting to "see" the image in the same way humans do. And taking this approach, you can also ask a search engine to, in essence, show you images that have similar characteristics to the one you're currently viewing.

Tiltomo is an experimental search engine that works in just this fashion, allowing you to find similar images in two ways. You can search for images that have similar color and texture characteristics, or you can look for images with similar "themes," which adds an analysis of subject matter to the color/texture mix.

Tiltomo searches a sample collection of images from Flickr, both from the general images group and those included in the "catchy colors" group. You start your search by entering a tag into a search box; results display thirty largish thumbnails from Flickr. | source:SearchEngineWatch

ROR Sitemap Generator

You absolutely MUST check out this nifty tool. It is extremely easy to use and benefical for your site!

ROR Sitemap Generator - This free tool will crawl your website and generate a ROR Sitemap with up to 1,000 URLs for ALL search engines, not just Google.
ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object on a website (sitemaps, products, services, menus, images, reviews, contact info, business info, etc), so any search engines can better understand its content.

Note:To make your ROR Sitemap automatically readable by all search engines, choose the 'ror/rss' format. This will enable you to submit it to Google Sitemaps.

SEO Tools - SEOchat

I have collected a few SEO tools that I use frequently and included some links in the right nav of this site. SEOchat however has created a quick reference page of nifty tools I couldn't pass up to share. I am particularly found of the future pagerank tool. Enjoy....
SEO Tools - SEOchat

New robots.txt tool

From the Matt Cutts blog, this is a usefull tool, especially for those newbies into the SEO world...

The Sitemaps team just introduced a new robots.txt tool into Sitemaps. The robots.txt file is one of the easiest things for a webmaster to make a mistake on. Brett Tabke’s Search Engine World has a great robots.txt tutorial and even a robots.txt validator.

Despite good info on the web, even experts can have a hard time knowing with 100% confidence what a certain robots.txt will do. When Danny Sullivan recently asked a question about prefixing matching, I had to go ask the crawl team to be completely sure. Part of the problem is that mucking around with robots.txt files is pretty rare; once you get it right once, you usually never have to think about the file again. Another issue is that if you get the file wrong, it can have a large impact on your site, so most people don’t mess with their robots.txt file very often. Finally, each search engine has slightly different extra options that they support. For example, Google permits wildcards (*) and the “Allow:” directive.

The nice thing about the robots.txt checker from the Sitemaps team is that it lets you take a robots.txt file out for a test drive and see how the real Googlebot would handle a file. Want to play with wildcards to allow all files except for ‘*.gif’? Go for it. Want to experiment with upper vs. lower case? Answer: upper vs. lower case doesn’t matter. Want to check whether hyphens matter for Google? Go wild. Answer: we’ll accept “UserAgent” or “User-Agent”, but we’ll remind you that the hyphenated version is the correct version.

The best part is that you can test a robots.txt file without risking anything by doing it on your live site. For example, Google permits the “Allow:” directive, and it also permits more specific directives to override more general directives. Imagine that you wanted to disallow every bot except for Googlebot. You could test out this file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Then you can throw in a url like http://www.mattcutts.com/ and a user agent like Googlebot and get back a red or green color-coded response:

I like that you can test out different robots.txt files without running any risk, and I like that you can see how Google’s real bot would respond as you tweak and tune it. | source: Matt Cutts Blog

Step Away from the Computer

Posted by randfish Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 11:15:50 AM
Ian McAnerin has a post today on Internet Marketing 101. His ten-step approach makes great sense to me:

Step Away from the Computer
Identify the Target Goal
Identify Your Message
Identify the Target Audience
Identify Traffic Vectors
Identify The Conversion
Write The Copy
Perform the actions necessary to bring in your traffic vectors
Track and Chart Results
Go back to number one

His detailed explanations for how and why each step is important are worth a read and this is an issue I can certainly identify with. So many folks call us up seeking SEO, but needing a full-fledged Internet Marketing plan (and, in some cases, a business plan, too). If you don't have your marketing plan and business goals in place, SEO alone can't save your company. | source: SEOmoz Blog

Google censors itself for China

Leading internet company Google has said it will censor its search services in China in order to gain greater access to China's fast-growing market.

Google has offered a Chinese-language version of its search engine for years but users have been frustrated by government blocks on the site.

The company is setting up a new site - Google.cn - which it will censor itself to satisfy the authorities in Beijing.

Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.

Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

The Chinese government keeps a tight rein on the internet and what users can access. The BBC news site is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles.

Google's move in China comes less than a week after it resisted efforts by the US Department of Justice to make it disclose data on what people were searching for. | more @BBC NEWS

MSN's Answer to Search (and Maybe a Few Other Things)

Just how does MSN plan to win the search game? Based on the presentation, it's betting not just on Web search but on data search across digital platforms. Currently, it sees four components are critical to its success:
User information. People use the Web to access news, entertainment, blogs, and podcasts. All these sources must be searchable and easily accessible across multiple platforms.

User personalities. People have at least two personalities online, usually work and personal. These personalities show up in separate instant messaging and e-mail contact lists. People want and need access to both personalities, both at home and at work.

Software and devices. PC, PDA, mobile phone, Xbox 360. All are separate entities. Currently, accessing the Web across platforms isn't a seamless experience. Microsoft plans to change that, creating ease and convenience for the consumer and better targeting and advertising opportunities for marketers.

Monetization ecosystem. MSN plans to offer a product called adCenter to enable advertisers to better target their advertising and understand campaign performance. With that knowledge, advertisers can modify their campaigns. Jakubowski added, 'People can take the enhanced learning from adCenter and apply it to their Google and Yahoo! campaigns.' Essentially, it's promising more control and better reporting for the advertiser. Advertisers can benefit from knowing how their customers use not just search but all interactive environments. |source: MSN's Answer to Search - ClickZ News

Google and Jagger's Aftermath

I found this geat article by Jason Oconnor that gives insight into google's last big algorhythm change(Jagger) and useful notes of what to do and not to do on your website.

Things That Could Possibly HELP You More In Jagger's Aftermath
Aged Domains - Sites with domains that are older rank better now - the older the domain, the better its rankings with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree).

Very Relevant Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your website, you may rank better after Jagger with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree as well).

Links From Trusted Sites Help - TrustRank (or a similar concept) is more important than ever after Jagger. TrustRank is a concept that says if you get a link pointing to your site that is highly trusted by Google (trusted either programmatically or by human editors), then you will rank better with all other things being equal. (See http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF).

Variety of Links - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing your rankings and are more important than ever. (It\'s vital to get links form a wide variety of websites. Just like your investing, you need to diversify your IBL\'s. (This has probably been true even before Jagger).

Aged Links - The older the link that points to your site, the more weight it\'s given now. (This also has probably been true even before Jagger).

Embedded Links - Links that are embedded in sentences and paragraphs instead of stand-alone links are weighted more heavily now. (This may be true soon if not already).

Article Links - Articles are what directories had been a year or two ago for link building. Links from the author by-line or within the article that point back to your site will positively affect your rankings. (And this is one reason I\'ve chosen to write this article).

Fresh & Unique Content - Now, more than ever, regularly updated and added ordinal content will help your rankings. (This is almost definitely true.)

Be a Big Guy - If you are a big behemoth site like Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you did before Jagger.

High Traffic & Stickiness - User popularity statistics now, or will soon, affect rankings. In other words, user actions on your website, like how long they stay (stickiness), how many pages they visit, and even how many people visit your site in a given period, can all affect how Google ranks your site. (This may be true soon if not already).

Read full article and other tips that may no longer help your website post Jagger at site-reference.com

Meta Data is Mega Important in 2006

As we move into 2006, with our respective digital marketing strategies, meta data -- content that describes content -- will become extraordinarily important to the digital marketer.
...
I'm talking about a different kind of meta data than what we're used to.
We've known about meta data as it applies to search engine optimization for a few years. How many of us populated our websites with keywords trying to boost our level in the search engines? But the practice of meta data creation from an organic SEO standpoint has ironically become counter-productive as the search engines (especially Google) began penalizing websites that tried to trick the system. And thus, on the eighth day, the internet industry begat the SEO consultant.
Meta data is becoming increasingly more important for the digital marketer -- not from a search engine perspective, but rather from a content identification perspective. As the internet and the amount of information on it evolves into overwhelming proportions, filtering content and providing users with an easier way to locate that content will be a hugely necessary task.
As you start your next website re-design or content strategy, strongly consider putting significant thought and strategy around your meta content: content that identifies and describes content. If you're a publisher it means identifying titles as 'titles,' articles as 'articles' and authors as 'authors.' If you're an ecommerce provider, it means identifying your products and the particulars of those products. | read full article by Rob Rose at iMediaConnection

Nivi : The Trillion Dollar Web 2.0 Matrix

This is not related to SEO but nevertheless a great read.
Nivi : The Trillion Dollar Web 2.0 Matrix: "personal expert social world"

Google's Newsletter for Librarians

How does Google collect and rank results?
One of the most common questions we hear from librarians is 'How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?' Here, from quality engineer Matt Cutts, is a quick primer on how we crawl and index the web and then rank search results. Matt also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students. - Read full article

GOOGLE-AOL ALLIANCE GIVES TWO BROADEST AD REACH ON WEB

The AOL and Google deal, sealed yesterday, gives the two advertising power and reach that no other entity on the Internet possesses. It will also give AOL what appears to be a preferred position among Google partners. And it gives Google and its ad clients access to rich content through AOL programming.

AOL and Google finally wrapped up details on a business partnership yesterday that will create cross-marketing opportunities for both companies. Under the terms of the pact, Google will pay AOL parent Time Warner $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL.

The cross-marketing aspects of the deal give AOL advertising clients a chance to bid for search ad sponsored links through Google's contextual-advertising AdSense program. AOL sales staff can also sell sponsored links across AOL search. AOL search will continue to be powered by Google, a cooperation that has existed since 2002 and which brings in about 10% of Google's revenue. Also, Google's ad clients will be able to purchase display ads, of the sort that AOL sells, across Google's network.
'We will build a system for AOL whereby AOL will be able to sell into search for AOL search and those same advertisers will be able to sell into Google AdSense advertiser network,' said Patrick Keane, director of sales strategy, Google, in an interview late last night. He added that details have yet to be hammered out. But that the focus of the partnership 'means a greater inventory of ads,' he said. 'There are going to be interesting relationships and cross-selling across all the inventory.'

Some, however, are already grumbling that the deal will give AOL preference over other Google clients. "It's an extension of the partnership," Mr. Keane said. He added that there will be no special placement or preference for Google's algorithmic, natural search results. | source: NEW YORK (AdAge.com)

SEO Overkill Can Destroy Your Site

Are you using search engine optimization tactics that lead to SEO overkill? You may not think so, but according to several SEO experts at the Search Engine Strategies conference held recently in Chicago, Illinois, you might be using what is called "SEO Overkill". Michael Murray from Fathom SEO, Matt Bailey from The Karcher Group, and Heather Lloyd-Martin from SearchEngineWriting.com all discussed SEO Overkill.
According to Mark Murray of Fathom SEO, SEO is not a shopping spree. You need website traffic, but you need to pace yourself --even sound practices may fail if they're rushed.
source: SEO Overkill Can Destroy Your Site
By Bill Hartzer - December 21, 2005

Search Marketing Book Reviews

Search Engine watch has compiled a list of books for "search technology". While reading this latest article I came across another list that I think are extremely beneficial for this audience. Below is a collection of reviews relating to search marketing and search engine optimization. I personally like to read various newsletters and blogs but think it's a great idea to check out these books as well. Many of the authors names featured in these collections I recognize are frequent speakers at the SES conferences and are well respectively as experts in the field. | source: SearchEngineWatch.com

Search Marketing Book Reviews
Use the alphabetically arranged links below to go directly to a review. Scroll down the page for a reverse-chronological listings and a brief description of each book review.
The Buyer's Guide to Search Advertising Agencies, Marketing Sherpa
The Buyer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization Firms, Marketing Sherpa
Call to Action, Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg
The Keyword Research Guide, Wordtracker
Maximizing Search Engine Visibility, Shari Thurow
Search Engine Advertising, Catherine Seda
Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Mike Moran & Bill Hunt
Successful Search Engine Copywriting, Heather Lloyd-Martin
The Search Engine Marketing Kit, Dan Thies
Winning Results with Google AdWords, Andrew Goodman

Inbound Link Strategies: Movin' On Up

This is a very good article I highly recommend you reading, if you haven't already. Here's a snippet of the intro:

If you've ever done SEO (define) work for a business that leverages affiliate relationships, the phenomenon recently dubbed "Google Bowling" is nothing new. Hotel chains, home mortgage resellers, and travel agencies brokering cruises and cheap airfares indiscriminately rob top search results from business partners and rivals alike.

The intent to do harm to another business on the Web adds a new twist to the age-old issue of bad linking strategies. Google's ongoing attempts to curb search result manipulation by way of link popularity appear to have reached fruition with its latest algorithmic update.

The good news is by link dampening, filtering, and, in some cases, penalizing sites that purchased or sought out low-value incoming links en mass, Google has finally instituted a way to make search results for highly competitive terms more relevant.

The bad news is some legitimate businesses always seem to have their search positions washed away by improved results. If your results have been affected by the latest Google update, don't despair. You can do much to move out of a bad-link neighborhood into a better one... | read more @ ClickZ

Google Adds Library Texts to Search Database

Google said yesterday that it had completed the first major expansion of its Google Print database of searchable books, adding the full text of more than 10,000 works that are no longer under copyright, culled from the collections of four major research libraries.
The additions, from the university libraries at Michigan, Harvard and Stanford and from the New York Public Library, represent the first large group of material to be made available electronically from those libraries, which along with Oxford University contracted with Google last year to let the company scan and make searchable the contents of much or all of their collections.
The new material includes works of literature, like 'Transatlantic Sketches' and other works by Henry James, from Harvard; government documents, like the collected appropriations bills passed by the 50th Congress in 1888 and 1889, from Stanford; history, like the 1903 work, 'The Seventh Regiment Rhode Island Volunteers in the Civil War,' by William P. Hopkins, from the University of Michigan; and biographies, like the New York Public Library's collection of the annual publication, 'The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York.'
The entire text of the works can be searched and read online through the Google Print site (print.google.com). Users can also save individual pages and cut and paste excerpts from the material. The ability to print is currently limited, however, to single pages at a time, said Adam Smith, a senior business product manager at Google.| source: NYtimes

Yahoo goes drag-and-drop for mapping

Yahoo is expected to release on Thursday the public beta of its new Yahoo Maps service, which is designed to make maneuvering the map easier and allow users to quickly create multiple-point driving directions.
The upgraded Yahoo Maps is more tightly integrated with Yahoo Local, allowing users to quickly find, for instance, the locations of Mexican restaurants in a particular neighborhood by typing in things like 'best margarita' or 'outdoor seating' or other category types or descriptions.
In addition, users can now type in a business address and the service will display the business name, phone number, user rating and link to additional information.
The new service also aims to make it easy to map out driving directions with multiple stops, including the ability to drag-and-drop specific businesses into the route. The map is larger and includes a collapsible mini-map with a shadow box that can easily be dragged around to shift the neighborhood displayed in the larger map.
The service automatically stores frequently referenced destinations, which can also be set to automatically fill in a search box using a nickname. Users can click on the browser's 'back' button to see the previous map action, and the map can automatically be configured for a printing layout.
'The interface is cleaner and better' than before, said Greg Sterling, an analyst at The Kelsey Group. 'You can drag the map around without reloading it and the data changes as you drag it.' more @ ZDnet

First Metasearch Engine Powered by RSS Debuts

The first metasearch engine to be powered by the efficient fuel of RSS technology, Gada.be, went live on Monday.
Gada.be strips away the multiple layers necessary to search, which is particularly painful for those attempting to visit a Web site over a mobile device. Instead of plugging in a URL for a search engine, then visiting each page in search results, visitors can merely type in their search term as a subdomain with 'gada.be' at the end.

What results is a savable, transportable URL whose results are constantly refreshed, as the search results are returned in RSS feeds. Read more...

New Features at AOL Search

AOL continues to improve its web search capabilities, today adding a number of new features designed to appeal to casual searchers and power users alike.

Spotted in preview last week by our hawk-eyed news editor Gary Price, the new tools are live today at search.aol.com. AOL says the new features are the result of extensive consumer research and testing.

AOL Search is powered by Google, but offers many features not found on Google, and other features implemented in different ways. If you're a Google fan, it's worth checking out how AOL differs even though it uses essentially the same underlying index of web pages. Continue...

Authority Finder Meta Search Source Code

nice little tool - http://www.myriadsearch.com/
Myriad is an ad free meta search tool created by www.seobook.com

Intro To Search Engine Submission

Nice Article...
Part 1 of Essentials Of Search Engine Submission By Danny Sullivan, Editor
July 5, 2004

How can I get my site listed with search engines? It sounds like a pretty simple question, but sadly, search engine submission can be a complicated subject.

Have no fear. This guide will take you through the essential and relatively easy steps you can take to get listed with search engines.

Before we begin, it's important to make a distinction between search engine submission and search engine optimization. These terms, along with others, are sometimes used synonymously to discuss different efforts to promote sites on search engines. However, within this section of Search Engine Watch, they will be used to refer to some very specific activities.

Search Engine Submission: Getting Listed
"Search engine submission" refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Another term for this is search engine registration.

Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms, however. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist.

Think of it like a lottery. Search engine submission is akin to you purchasing a lottery ticket. Having a ticket doesn't mean that you will win, but you must have a ticket to have any chance at all.

Search Engine Optimization: Improving The Odds
"Search engine optimization" refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms, especially with crawler-based search engines (what these are will be explained later in this guide).

Returning to the lottery model, let's assume there was a way to increase the odds of winning by picking your lottery numbers carefully. Search engine optimization is akin to this. It's making sure that the numbers you select are more likely to win than purchasing a set of numbers at random.

Search Engine Placement & Positioning: Ranking Well
Terms such as "search engine placement," "search engine positioning" and "search engine ranking" refer to a site actually doing well for particular terms or for a range of terms at search engines. This is the ultimate goal for many people -- to get that "top ten" ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Search Engine Marketing & Promotion: The Overall Process
Terms such as "search engine marketing" or "search engine promotion" refer to the overall process of marketing a site on search engines. This includes submission, optimization, managing paid listings and more.

These terms also highlight the fact that doing well with search engines is not just about submitting right, optimizing well or getting a good rank for a particular term. It's about the overall job of improving how your site interacts with search engines, so that the audience you seek can find you.

On To Submission
The next few "essentials" pages cover the basics of search engine submission. If all you do is the instructions on these essentials pages, you'll receive traffic from search engines. However, if you have time, you should also read beyond the essentials to understand how optimization can increase your traffic and other ways you can market your site with search engines.

Links along the way will explain where and how you can learn more within Search Engine Watch, should you have the desire. Some of the in-depth information is only available to Search Engine Watch members. See the membership information page to learn more about becoming a member.

Google buys IM company?

Google has reportedly agreed to buy upstart software maker Meetroduction, based in Chicago. The company's premiere service, Meetro, lets people find one another online within a local radius of a quarter of a mile, or from across the Atlantic; and then chat instantly with those strangers or friends. Meetro's free, downloadable software also doubles as a social-networking application, allowing people to add profiles of themselves and stake out the personal details of other conversationalists.
...
Google already owns IM software through its acquisition of Picasa, a photo-sharing service. Picasa developed Hello, instant chat software that lets people swap photos, too.

Combining Hello and Meetro, Google could create a special brew of IM that features social and local networking, photo-sharing and geographic search and mapping. A prospective "Google ME (for messaging)" could help people meet and chat, then exchange photos to make sure there's potential chemistry. If so, two people could search for and read reviews on the local coffee house together using embedded Google search and find a map to the meeting location. Nifty. | source: CNET News.com

MSN Details Paid Search Product

MSN has a name and expected due date to its in-utero keyword bid management platform. The product is a critical component of the portal and its strategy going forward.
The paid search offering will be called MSN Keywords and launch in a closed beta come October, a spokesperson said. The pilot will be limited to 500 invitation-only marketers. The details come on the heels of Ask Jeeves' heralding its own sponsored listings platform.
MSN's paid search product will be the first component of MSN adCenter, a broad toolset that will enable ad placement throughout the whole network. In March, Microsoft demonstrated how adCenter would work, and said a keyword bidding tool would be its first component.
A version of MSN Keywords is now being tested in Singapore and France, Microsoft said.
Until the wide release of the Keywords product, MSN will continue to rely on rival Yahoo! to provide pay-per-click listings alongside its search results. Their agreement expires next summer.
Microsoft shares details of the PPC platform amid buzz over a similar product from Ask Jeeves, announced Monday. AJ parent InterActiveCorp hopes the offering will eventually replace the syndicated paid search listings it now receives from Google." | source: ClickZ News

Yahoo! Debuts Audio Search

MediaPost Publications - Yahoo! Debuts Audio Search - 08/05/2005: "Yahoo! Debuts Audio Search
by Gavin O'Malley, Friday, Aug 5, 2005 6:00 AM EST
ADDING AGAIN TO ITS ENTERTAINMENT offerings, Yahoo! on Thursday launched a free audio search engine capable of sorting through a hodgepodge of some 50 million songs, interviews, speeches, and podcasts. At the new Yahoo! Audio Search site, users can also search for photos and random information related to their musician or group of choice.
Yahoo! threw the digital downloading space for a loop in May when it gave individuals unlimited access to a catalog of more than a million songs for bargain basement prices.
The new audio search service, which can be found at audio.search.yahoo.com, has been integrated with Yahoo!'s video search, both of which encourage independent publishers to submit videos and music through Media RSS. "

Ping-o-Matic!

Ping-o-Matic!

How Americans Search

What are people searching for? Most people (88%) said they were researching specific topics specifically, information about hobbies. And women (61%) were more likely to search for health and medical information than men (35%). Surprisingly few people researching specific topics are looking for job or career information (28%).

Other common things people use search for include:

Getting directions/maps - 75%

Looking for news - 64%

Shopping - 51%

Looking for entertainment web sites - 47%

The study also affirmed data from the major measurement services, showing Google as the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves. However, the types of information people looked for with each engine varied.

READ MORE

Google Unveils Sitemaps Tool

The Sitemaps program aims to optimize Google's crawling activities, leading to better search results, and to give site owners more input into how their sites are crawled. The process involves a site owner creating and posting an XML file on the site's server describing which pages on the site should be indexed, when those pages were last updated, how often they're updated, and how important each page is relative to others on the site. Google created an open-source tool, Sitemap Generator, to assist in the process. | read more: Google Unveils Sitemaps Tool

Google's Human Quality Evaluation:

The Google testers are paid $10 - $20 for each hour they filter the results of Google. Payment is done through Payroll. The international agents are instructed by the Human Quality Evaluation Team of Google. How does Google decide if a site is offensive or not?

Google's Human Quality Evaluation: How To Spot Offensive Sites & Google's Whitelist - Henk van Ess's Search Bistro

ZabaSearch.com People Search

Your address and phone number are in this search result and it's pretty scary how accurate it is. Go ahead type your name and see what the results show.
ZabaSearch.com Free People Search

Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search

Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search
SearchDay, April 27, 2005

Yahoo has beefed up its personal search with a number of new features and tools, expanding the capabilities of the My Yahoo personal search features that the company launched last October.

Yahoo Launches My Web Personal Search

Personal Reference

For personal use, please ignore this.
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How Affiliate Programs Can Affect Search Rankings

Interesting article from ClickZ relating to link strategy and the position Google takes against certain back links.

This is something to definitely consider with deals similar to Commission Junction & Overture. http://www.clickz.com/

Key snippets from article:

Rapid Link Expansion
Google reveals in the filing its ranking algorithm is organized to thwart overly aggressive marketers. It confirms something search marketers have long suspected: Google watches how fast new links to a site appear as a way to detect and penalize search engine spam. If too many new links appear in too short a timeframe, the site may be penalized, or even banned, by Google.

According to the filing, Google also watches how many new links with identical anchor text emerge. This is another clue links may be suspect or mass-manufactured.

Quality vs. Quantity
Before scuttling your existing affiliate network, remember: it's link quality, not quantity, that counts. We've seen two or three high-quality links very quickly catapult a site's rankings into the top-10 results in all major engines.

Be cautious and go slow. Alternative affiliate network strategies are fine, but any decision to work with a particular network provider should never be based solely on the ability to increase links. Link growth that leads to increased rankings and traffic can be realized in all affiliate networks.

Meta-Tag Optimization Tips

A long time ago, stuffing the meta-tag description with keywords often resulted in a top ranking in Infoseek listings (remember that search engine?). Today, this strategy no longer works. Very few search engines use meta-tag content to determine relevancy.

So why are meta tags important for search engine visibility? Because meta-tag descriptions are often used in SERPs - BY Shari Thurow
Meta-Tag Optimization Tips

Google Debuts Satellite Images

Google has added high-resolution satellite images to its Maps and Local search services, offering a birdseye view of millions of locations throughout the U.S. and Canada. More details in this story. See also from Gary Price on the same day, Super Cool: Interact With Satellite and Aerial Images With NASA's World Wind Program [http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050405-121616]. (Google: Maps | Search Types: Maps)

Google Tips

Here are also some insider tips I've recently discovered relating to Google optimization techniques that we have not taken advantage of yet. Source:
: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Optimization-Secrets-From-The-Trenches/

Google relies first and foremost on its “PageRank,” and other factors for determining your position in Google’s results are secondary.

Google has become rather savvy to the frequency a site is updated with new content, so you’ll want to continually add new “stuff” to your site, again using the H1 tag, so that Google will come back to your site and re-spider. The more frequently Google thinks it has to come back to re-spider your site, the higher your site will rank.

And as a side benefit, Google can (and does) read/use the OPML file if your site has one. It will use that file to obtain more indepth heirarchial information about the way the data on your pages are laid out.

You can get the entire OPML spec at http://opml.org/. Understand that the whole issue with OPML is still one of those "hush-hush" things within Google, so you’re really getting the inside scoop on this one.

With that said, the folks over at Google aren’t stupid. First, your OPML file must be used to describe content that actually is on a page that can be reached from your site's main page. Second, the OPML file must be a reasonably close representation of the actual page, and third you must provide a link from the page to the OPML file so the Google Spider can find it.

If you adhere to these rules, then Google will use the additional information that can be obtained from the OPML file, and that will help to drive up the rankings for your site, because of the additional meta data within the OPML file that can’t be found on an HTML page.

Personal SEO resources

I've come across way to many sites and tools that it's beging to be hard to manage. What better way to keeps all these tools at my finger tips than to post them here, for everyone to gain access to and benefit from them as well!