Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

Google launched Google Web Accelerator today. It’s an add-on to Internet Explorer or Firefox on a PC and supposedly speeds up the rendering time of web pages. It even comes with a built in timer to tell you how much time you’ve saved over all. It shaves just seconds or even milliseconds off rendering time, but it adds up after a while.How does Google Web Accelerator work? According to Google…

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

Barry from Search Engine Roundtable is covering the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Toronto. Be sure to visit his SEO blog for posts about the sessions he’s attending.

So far he’s posted on the Organic Listings Forum and Cleaning Up Spam & Other Messes.

Update: Here’s a link to a summary of all the SES Toronto sessions Barry attended

Tags: SEO, SES, search engine optimization

Urchin On Demand Price Drop – Price reduction from $495 to $199/mo.

Specific benefits of Urchin On Demand:

• Better Intelligence: Urchin helps site owners and advertisers understand how visitors find, navigate and convert on their websites.
• Higher Conversions: Urchin tracks visitors from all online sources including search engines, natural links, and any variety of paid advertising campaigns such as paid banners, keywords, emails, etc.
• Actionable Data: The service provides many reports designed to help users visualize their data and take quick action including: Funnel Analysis, Website Overlays, GeoTargeting, Ecommerce Reporting, Campaign Comparisons, Keywords Suggestion Tools, etc. – via

SERoundtable

Interestingly I had just traded emails last week with Barry from SERoundtable and Brett Crosby of Urchin about Urchin’s conversion tracking abilities. We’re looking forward to implementation, particularly with the new pricing model.

I’ve signed on to write for Lockergnome’s new Internet Marketing channel recently.

“Read this channel for the latest information on internet marketing strategies and processes, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, online public relations and blog marketing. Search engine industry news, resources and tactics will be posted daily from some of the top experts in the industry.”

There are just a few posts so far, but definitely check it out. My posts will concentrate on search engine marketing /optimization and blog marketing drawing on 7+ years of marketing on the Internet. There are other contributors that will cover the gamut of internet marketing strategies as well. Go ahead and subscribe to the Internet Marketing feed.

An iMediaConnection article this morning points out research from JupiterResearch overviews how increasing numbers of young adults use the Internet for news.

Here’s a distribution of top news web sites from comScore for March 2005:

Total Internet Population 164,263

General News 93,449
MSNBC 26,953
Yahoo! News 26,099
AOL News 24,009
CNN 23,317
IBS Network 10,467
New York Times Digital 8,744
Knight Ridder Digital 8,372
USATODAY Sites 7,234
ABCNEWS DIGITAL 6,996
Tribune Newspapers 6,890
BBC Sites 6,747
Google News 6,700
CBS News 4,723
FOXNEWS.COM 4,692
Advance Publications, Inc 4,456

Slashdot posts a link to an article on NewScientist.com regarding a Google patent that has garnered so much attention in the SEO world. The article describes how Google will use a variety of factors to determine the quality of news sources to rank news stories rather than the current method of date posted and keyword relevancy.

“The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.”

I was reading a post of a great Small Business Marketing Blog called Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch. I noticed he had posted about Marketing Sherpa’s call for nominations on best marketing blogs. There’s even a category for “Best Blog on Online Marketing”.

He showed examples of his blog’s rankings for “Best Small Business Marketing Blog” on several top search engines. Pretty impressive.

Since there’s a category for “Best Blog on Online Marketing” I thought I would check our rankings for: “online marketing blog”. Below are rankings for Online Marketing Blog on the top search engines for “online marketing blog“.

• Yahoo – #1
• Google – #1
• Ask Jeeves – #1
• MSN – No love from MSN. In fact, you won’t find any blogspot.com blogs ranked at MSN.

GoogSpy is a new third party tool that lets you put in a companies name and return what Google Adwords they are targeting. This is great if you want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting. It can also tell you where a company ranks naturally in the top ten for certain keywords.

How does it work? According to the press release “GoogSpy.com is powered by Velocityscape’s flagship data extraction product, Web Scraper Plus+. It extracts 500,000 search results per day from Google and loads them into the GoogSpy.com database.”

Check it out now though, the logo looks very similar to Google and it’s functionality may raise red flags at Google. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google’s lawyers step in.

The Findory news and blog search/aggregation site has changed it’s home page layout to a tab format. Now you can switch between news and blogs pages by clicking on tabs at the top. The news/blog/web search option is now at the top right. General categories display on the right and selected posts appear in the main part of the page.

If you’re new to Findory, it’s a news and blog search site that personalizes the information displayed based on the searches you perform and the links “articles’ you click on. This is a welcome feature considering the large number of news and blog sites available. If you want to track a particular blog, like SEO Online Marketing Blog, you can bookmark the unique url. Findory offers RSS feeds for news and blog categories as well.

Significant changes to Google AdWords are in store in the next few weeks:

* Target users by site – pick which sites your ads appear on, allowing you to view who Google content partners are.
* New max CPM bidding option – The CPM ads will compete with traditional AdWords ads with a minimum CPM of $2.
* Additional ad formats – banner, leaderboard, inline rectangle, skyscraper, wide skyscraper.

SearchEngineWatch:
“What we’re expecting customers to do here is open themselves up to all of the types of opportunities at Google,” said Tim Armstrong, vice president of ad sales for Google. “This will be a way to keep the scale but use the feature to also target.

The beta version of the new Yahoo News was made live today. I had previously posted on the Sneak Peek at the new Yahoo News a few weeks ago listing several of the upcoming features.

Yahoo News beta selects news from a smaller universe of media properties than Google News but does allow users to add their own news from any site or blog that offers RSS.

The new design allows you to quickly tab through different sources and the Y!Q feature has also been incorporated. The Y!Q feature highlights a particular term and places an icon next to it to let you know alternative sources of information regarding that word or phrase are available. Clicking on the the icon displays a Y!Q popup window with links to related search results.

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.

I have asked for the availability date and cost for this newest edition and will post when Marketing Sherpa gets back to me.