Online Marketing Blog

As Marketing Sherpa was kind enough to answer a few questions about the upcoming guides.

Do you have an anticipated date when the report will be available?
The two Buyer’s Guides will be available at the end of April — our graphic design and proofing team are already cranking on them. Check SherpaStore.com for details in a couple of weeks.

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The beta version of the new Yahoo News was made live today. I had previously posted on the Google News but does allow users to add their own news from any site or blog that offers RSS.

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The “submission” phase of Google’s video upload program we previously commented on (upload your videos to Google, you’ll need to have an account and “download the uploader”. Questions? check out the Google Video FAQ

Tag: Google Video

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For companies that do not already have a web site that want to experiment with online advertising, Yahoo Local now offers a free basic web site service as an incentive for companies to try out the Yahoo Local Listings program.

The sites options are very basic, but should be useful for the 10 million small businesses that do not have a web site and for those that are curious about using search as advertising.

My experiment with it using lots of hyphens in the url here.

Tags: Yahoo Local, Free Website

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P.C. Magazine today wrote about the launch of Google Local for mobile devices:

¬ìGoogle Local builds its database from yellow pages and addresses extracted from Google’s search engine. Surf to http://mobile.google.com/local/ from within any mobile device browser, and you’ll be prompted to enter two bits of information: What and Where. What can be a category (e.g. pizza or accountant) and Where can be a precise address or simply a zip code. The service then returns several hits and a map showing the location of each business. The maps are similar to those provided by Google’s excellent new mapping service, http://maps.google.com, but unlike the PC browser-based versions, you can’t reposition the maps by dragging, which would be a difficult task on most phones anyway.¬î

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Here are various search engine industry news tidbits for the day:

Firefox continues to gain on MSIE

Search Engine Watch forums have reorganized. A few changes of interest to me includes a new forum called “Blogs, RSS & XML Feeds” plus a new sub-forum under “Vertical Markets & Specialty Search” called “News Search”. Thanks Barry.

buzztracker plots the geographic location of items published on Google News - via InsideGoogle

Comparison shopping search engine Become.com officially launches.

List of top paying AdSense Keywords - via Eric Baillargeon

Del.icio.us Gets VC Funding - via SearchViews

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Friday was the last day to complete the survey for consideration of inclusion in the 4th Marketing Sherpa Buyer’s Guide to search marketing firms. The newest version of the report has been named the “SEO & PPC Buyer’s Guide”. There were many more detailed questions asked this year plus there were two surveys instead of one. Options to take either the SEO or PPC or both were provided.

Competition for good Search Marketing firms is heating up and this guide could provide the additional information some companies may need for selecting a vendor.

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“Yahoo Inc. is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and resources to the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation” - via ExtermeTech

The Yahoo blog posts a guest entry by Jimmy Wales president of the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia and Yahoo! Google also provides support to Wikipedia by donating bandwidth and servers.

When searching Wikipedia, I was pleasantly surprised to see someone add this SEO blog to the Search Engine Optimization page. Cool.

Tags: Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google

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As interesting as Google Maps is to use, there are many more fun applications in store.

An example is this application by Paul Rademacher using Google maps with a Craigslist Real Estate Listings Overlay - I am really looking forward to seeing more tools like this. Via Unofficial Google Weblog

How to make your own annotated Google map (endadget)

Tag: Google Maps

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Yahoo has added RSS to another service - Yahoo Shopping. Take note as consumers gain more savvy about receiving information via RSS, offering product sales offers via RSS could be a very effectives direct sales channel. The RSS feeds on Yahoo Shopping will let you monitor products available using a keyword search.

RSS is available with these Yahoo services:

Via ResearchBuzz and TW

Tags: RSS, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo, RSS Marketing

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Yahoo News now offers custom RSS feeds. If you use Yahoo News alerts now you can easily switch to custom RSS feeds and read them in My Yahoo! or any other RSS reader.

“Yahoo! News is now offering the following feeds in the RSS format. The feeds are free of charge to use for individuals and non-profit organizations for non-commercial use. Attribution (included in each feed) is required.”

The feeds are keyword-based and very easy to set up. Via makeyougohmm.com and Google BlogScoped.

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SearchEngineWatch points to a research paper, Web Spam Taxonomy, by Zolta Gyongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina from the Stanford Database Group that will be presented at the WWW2005 Conference next month.

Unfortunately, this paper gives blanket definitions of spam to most SEO activities and offers, at times, a misguided understanding of what most SEOs do for clients.

“The activity of some SEOs benefits the whole web community, as they help authors create well-structured, high-quality pages. However, most SEOs engage in practices that we call spamming.”

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