Online Marketing Blog

Even though she’s moved on from Google to Zillow, Vanessa Fox still carries quite a bit of passion for her creation, Google Webmaster Tools which was renamed from Google sitemaps about a year ago. She was even spotted at the Google Dance giving advice to SES attendees at the Google Webmaster Tools product demo table.

Many webmasters and beginning search marketers could benefit a great deal from the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools so I asked Vanessa if she’d do a short video with me to provide a few tips.

For more info on Google Webmaster Central visit the blog.

Day three of Search Engine Strategies San Jose started off with Danny Sullivans’ last keynote presentation where he talked to Marissa Mayer of Google, who was giving her first keynote. Overall they talked about universal search, touch on video, personalized search, iGoogle and the iPhone.

Marissa sated that they felt users were happy with the new universal search. A lot of work had to go into chainging the algorithm to incorporate the additional sources but they were happy. She did say that they had a long way to go yet and other sources, such as scholar, may be added in the future. Google’s goal with universal search is to be more like an encyclopedia with as much relevant information right at your finger tips.

Google did it again last night with a cast of thousands partying their way from 7-11:30 pm at the Googleplex. The rock ‘n roll theme with tattoo inspired artwork set the stage for another festive post conference event. There was dancing and buffets both inside and out, chess, pool, karyoke, meet the engineers and many, many kegs of beer/bottles of wine. Nothing ran out this time except the very cool looking T-Shirts.

Always looking to shake things up, the TopRank blogging team convinced Google security to cough up a volleyball and promptly started a game in Google’s sandy volleyball court.

Are Paid Links Evil? Optimus Prime versus Megatron.

As I attended “Are Paid Links Evil?” as my last session of Day 2 at SES San Jose 2007, I was glad to see that everyone there was still in high spirits after the long day of learning, blogging, networking and preparing for the Google Dance. However, I didn’t expect to see a battle of the Autobots against the Decepticons.

Today Rob Key from Converseon pinged me on how fast their work promoting reforestation through a video as part of an American Express promotion hit the Google SERPs. The project is a great example of the power of social media for a great cause.

In just 4 days the video (Second Chance Trees) ranks #2 for the phrase “American Express Members Project“. It actually ranks higher than the Amex web site for the project, which is pretty impressive with over 4 million search results for the term. Maybe after indexing this blog, the link above it’ll be doing even better.

This weekend I was able to get an invite (thanks Adam!) and try out Google’s recent acquisition, GrandCentral which is in private beta.

GrandCentral allows you to use one number to manage all your phones: home, cell, work, etc. The web interface allows you to manage greetings for each number, archive all voice mails indefinitely, setup notification preferences and many more options. There’s even a nifty phone spam option to filter out telemarketers and other unwanted calls. The basic idea is that if your work or home numbers change, you don’t need to update anyone because they would have your GrandCentral number.

Jeremiah Owyang did some blogging of the Searchonomics conference today and captured some great info from Marissa Mayer’s keynote. Looking at a list of speakers for this event is like a who’s who of silicon valley and web 2.0 fame.
From Jeremiah’s post it looks like Google is counting on gadgets as a new advertising channel. It’s all very interesting.

He has notes on other Google initiatives as well, including:  Language Translator “Clear”, Google Book Search, Images and Video, Speech Recognition empowers Video Search, Universal Search, Mobile Search, Maps and Local, Google APIs, Gears, Gadgets, iGoogle and Gadgets Ventures.

“titel” is “title” in German for you spell check enthusiasts.
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.

Nothing in the analysis will be new to long time search marketers, but since so many people new to search engine optimization ask for nice, concise lists of what’s important to rank well in the search engines, I thought I’d indulge.

• Keywords in the title tag

If you’re an active feed reader, you may feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of feeds in your reader at times. An easy way to slim down the number without removing any, is to show only feeds that have new posts.

If you’re using Google Reader, click on the Show: updated link. This will then hide any feeds and folders that don’t have something new to offer. Plus, as you read through feeds, once you have all items marked as read, they disappear from the sidebar. Not only does it make you feel a bit better about the number of feeds you track but it also helps those that have unread items stand out a bit more.

I just had a chance to watch part of the webcast of Google’s Searchology presentation with Marissa Meyer, Craig Silverstein and others.
Software Engineer Ben Gomes talked about PageRank:

Kerry Rodden talked about usability testing:

and the various Google search products were also discussed.

Danny lists links to live blogging of the event from TechCrunch and AppScout.

While there were hints by a few blogs that have been talking about Searchology day that an announcement of some sort would be made, my “in and out” viewing of the web cast did not catch anything in particular. However, if something of note was presented, I’m sure Search Engine Land will cover it.

Normally when related queries are suggested after doing a search on Google, they appear at the bottom of the search results page (SERP). I noticed this weekend Google is testing the display of other Google categories as well as related search queries above the right side column ads. (Outlined in red)

The example above shows a link to Google Products. However, other keyword queries generate links to other Google search products: Google News, Scholar, Blogs, Books, Video, etc. I am only able to create these results on Firefox using Google, not via MSIE or Opera browsers.

A few quick links of worthy happenings in the industry:

More MSM foolishness and incomplete reporting at Forbes, “Condemned to Google Hell“. Yeah, that’s right. On this one I am drinking the Google kool aid.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Greg Jarboe reports on a recent Hitwise report about emerging trends with online news in a SearchDay article, “A Perfect Storm Hitting News and Media“. The affect of video on news, Topix and local news as well as the non-effect of sites like Digg on news are revealed. Interestingly, a recent study by the Newspaper Association of America reported that the average daily circulation of 745 newspapers reporting data fell 2.1% for the six months ended March 31, compared with the year-earlier period. There are huge marketing opportunities with online news folks.