All about the intersection of search engine & social media marketing, optimization and online public relations.
There’s an excellent post at Webmaster World on Google Page Rank Basics. Macro goes through a pretty good explanation and ends up with this: “If PR is virtually useless from the point of view of Google traffic then why did you ramble on for so long and cover all those points?” Visit WMW to view the answer.
After you finish that, head on over to Search Engine Watch forums and read Michael Martinez’s posts on Page Rank and Google here and continued here. Nice.
ClickZ covers recent news regarding Google’s addition of VNU Business Media’s network of BtoB sites to the AdSense program.
“AdSense works really well with specialized content. The more specialized the content, the more relevant the advertising,” said David Hirsch, director of business-to-business in Google’s vertical markets group. “My group has spent a tremendous amount of time building relationships with marketers that cover the taxonomy of B-to-B, so we have a depth of advertisers to provide relevant ads to match that content.”
From CNET:
“Ask Jeeves and the Mozilla Foundation have begun discussions on the twin possibilities of a Firefox-based Jeeves browser and of donating Jeeves’ desktop search technology to the open-source group.”
My question is ‘How many Firefox browsers do we need?’ We have the original, there are rumors of a ask jeeves, mozilla, firefox, browser
Possibly due to the increasing popularity of Mozilla Firefox, or maybe just due to security issues, Microsoft has decided to release Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 later this year. The updated browser works on Windows XP Service Pack 2 only and only operating systems that are running Windows legally. No new features or enhancements have been talked about outside of security issues.
I just finished being interviewed by Rok Hrastnik of MarketingStudies.net, author of the RSS Marketing eBook (yes that’s an affiliate link). I’ll post the audio link when it goes online.
We had an interesting discussion about integrating online public relations, search engine marketing and blog/RSS marketing.
Optimizing a press release and distributing via online newswire services can gain excellent visibility within News search engines. The release can get indexed in the major search engines as well: Google, Yahoo, MSN. Each time the release is picked up by another web site, it also creates a link back to your site.
BtoBOnline.com offers an overview of the disparity between spending on paid search and organic search - $3.34 billion and $492 million respectively (research from SEMPO).
“Marketers are also realizing that they aren’t reaching everyone unless they own both the paid and organic listings. Google searchers click on organic results 72% of the time, while 60% of all clicks on Yahoo! originate on the organic side.”
I may be biased, but organic SEO brings a much lower cost per lead than PPC alone. That said, the best strategy for BtoB search marketing in many cases, is a combination of paid search and organic site optimization. A combined strategy maximizes visibility while lowering overall search marketing costs.
Steve Rubel posts about RapidFeeds, a tool to create, publish and syndicate your own RSS feeds. What’s particularly useful is the tracking options.
The IceRocket search engine has a very similar RSS creation tool called RSS Builder but without tracking.
RSS creation tools offer promising applications for sites that want to promote newsletters, press releases, etc via RSS but do not want to do so through a blog. Although, I think it makes more sense to use a blog for that type of promotion so your content can get picked up by search engines as well as RSS directories and news aggregators.
InsideGoogle posits, “Yahoo Developing Blog Search Engine?” based on the appearance of a crawler, “Yahoo-NewsCrawler Test” that appears to be indexing RSS feeds.
It makes sense that a major search engine would create a new blog search engine, or at least separate out RSS/Blog content from regular search. why Google should buy Technorati have popped up as well. Competition for the search audience is hot and acquisition would be the fastest way to deploy new technologies. I’ve been using Technorati a lot the past 6 months or so and it’s addicting.
We just received our Google Referral Partner acceptance email today - cool. It will now take 5-10 business days to generate the customized referral link.
The Google Referral Partner program enables sites to promote the Google AdWords and AdSense programs and receive a $20 referral fee. More info at the FAQ.
I’m trying out Become.com, a new shopping research search engine that avoids ecommerce sites in favor of informational web sites. The site is designed to help you locate difficult to find information. Search results display much like any other search engine (plus Google Ads on the right side) but what’s pretty cool is the list of suggestions at the bottom of the search results.
From the site: “We find buying guides, articles, forums, reviews, specs and information from across the web to help you buy the right product.”
“Newsburst is a personalized tool that tracks virtually any type of information on the Web: news, blogs, shopping lists, weather, search results, alerts, auctions and more.”
It’s a bit like Bloglines in the way you can add feeds except it’s easier to find feeds by category. TOPIX fuels a lot of the default news sources. May be one to watch. CNET Newsburst Preview Announcement - via Micropersuasion
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