ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results.

We will not be publishing on Thursday, November 27, or Friday, November 28, in observation of Thanksgiving Day. I hope those of you that are celebrating the holiday can stay off the Internet and spend some time with those you love.

For those of you that aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, or have had enough quality time with your family, here are a few things you might find interesting:

* If you haven’t checked it out lately, I suggest looking over the articles in our Search 101 section. It’s been updated with articles covering the basics of search engine optimization, search advertising, and several other topics. Keep an eye on that section, as it will continue to be updated on a regular basis.

* We’ve been collecting quite the archive of Search Engine Marketing Webcasts. We’ve got one-hour presentations with Q&A available on demand on topics from Holiday PPC campaigns to search trends, to Profitable PPC fundamentals. You can also sign up for upcoming webcasts, including one next week on Advanced Keyword Research.

* Catch up with other Thanksgiving refugees on the Search Engine Watch Forums, or browse the archives to find the best advice on a range of search marketing topics.

* Head on over to Facebook to join the SearchEngineWatch Facebook Group or the Search Engine Strategies Facebook Group. Or check out our LinkedIn Groups for Search Engine Watch, SearchEngineWatch.com Forums, or Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo.

We’ll be back on Monday with plenty of new Experts columns, blog posts, and more. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

I spoke at PubCon last week — about How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns To Grow Traffic and Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO.

But, enough about me. Let’s talk about the top trends spotted at last week’s search engine and Internet marketing conference and expo in Vegas, baby!

For the record, I not only spoke at PubCon, I also looked at the 88 articles about it in Google News, the 77 articles in Yahoo! News, the 406 posts in Google Blog Search from the past month, and the 799 posts that IceRocket has found from the past month.

Then, I used a new tool called Twist, which lets you see trends in Twitter, to chart the hundreds of Tweets about PubCon over the past 30 days.

But, I could have just as easily looked at the session agenda grid for PubCon. Why? Because Brett Tabke, PubCon’s organizer, had set most of the agenda for 2009 when he selected the keynote speakers and creating the conference tracks. That’s why.

So, it was dead easy to spot the top trends at the six-track educational conference hosted by SearchEngineWorld and WebmasterWorld. Heck, even the most sleep-deprived attendee would know they were video, blogs and Twitter.

Video is hot — and YouTube video is red hot. This was reflected in the choice of George Wright, the VP Marketing & Sales at Blendtec, as one of the keynote speakers.

Described as the “The best viral marketing campaign ever,” George’s viral marketing campaign, “Will it Blend?,” has changed the face and the future of online marketing. Seen by more than 100 million people on the Internet and reported on by traditional media outlets like the Today Show, the Tonight Show, and the History Channel, Will it Blend? continues to deliver unprecedented corporate awareness through social media channels. This new form of marketing has delivered a 700% increase in sales for Blendtec, a small Utah based blender manufacturer, with an initial investment of $50.

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice that video is hot, Brett added a Video and Multimedia track with five sessions to drive the point home.

Blogs were big, too. This was reflected in three tracks at PubCon: one on Social Media Marketing, another on Social, Brand, and Reputation Management, and a third on Linking as Social Media Networking.

Now, blogs certainly aren’t considered the “newbies” of the social media scene – “granddaddies” is probably a more appropriate name. But that gives them an advantage from a marketing perspective – the medium has matured and moved from early adopter phase to the mainstream. That means more consumers are not only reading blogs; they are being influenced by blog content when it comes to what they decide to buy and who they decide to buy it from.

If you want a second opinion, sign up for tomorrow’s free webinar: “Consumers and the Influence of Blogs: What it Means for Your Marketing Mix.” It starts at 2:00 P.M. EST/11:00 A.M. PST and will be moderated by Kevin Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair and CEO of Motivity Marketing. It will feature Barry Parr, Analyst, JupiterResearch, and Rob Crumpler, President and CEO, BuzzLogic. They will be discussion a new BuzzLogic-sponsored research study conducted by JupiterResearch, entitled, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs.”

But, you could also see the power of blogs at virtually ever session at PubCon.

In fact, there were tables in the sessions so the dozens of bloggers who were live blogging the event could blog more comfortably. (I think this is a first: I’m not sure that I’ve ever put bloggers, blogging and blog in the same sentence before.)

And what about Twitter? No, none of the keynote speakers was from free social networking and micro-blogging service. And, no, there were no Twitter tracks. And I can’t even find Twitter mentioned in the title of any of the 85 sessions.

But, trust me, you couldn’t miss the Twitter trend if you’d hit every one of the special events — from the exhibitor cocktail reception sponsored by Bruce Clay and Apogee Search, to the SEOmoz WereWolf Event, to the WebmasterRadio Search Bash, sponsored by Microsoft Live Search.

For example, I was sitting in the session entitled, Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What’s The Worst That Can Happen? It was moderated by Ken Jurina, and the speakers included:
• Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC,
• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing,
• Michael McDonald, Managing Editor, iEntry Inc.,
• Barry Schwartz, President, RustyBrick, Inc.,
• Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz.

When it came time for Q&A, one of the first questions came from a woman in the audience, who said, “I asked my circle of friends on Twitter what I should ask you, and I got eight questions. If I eliminate the seven that are inappropriate, here’s one that the panel can answer….”

That brought down the house.

Oh, PubCon also had lots of tracks and sessions on SEO, SEM and interactive site reviews. But they’ve had those for years. The new news is video, blogs and Twitter. These are the top trends that I spotted at this year’s PubCon.

Google is converting their Help Forums to a new system. The new features include:

• improved search results, including posts from current and new forums
• the ability to designate especially helpful forum members as “Top Contributors”
• a reputation and ranking system
• the ability for users, Top Contributors and Googlers to mark questions as answered
• easier access to Help Center content
• expanded user profiles that highlight your forum activity

Forums that have already been converted include:

• AdWords
• AdSense
• Android Market
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Most of the Polish products

For a more detailed look, check out this vid:

Related Reading:
Google Groups Becoming a Gold Mine for SEO Information
AdSense Adds Help in Hebrew

Blogger has released a cool new feature that lets readers offer quick responses. It’s called Reactions, and it allows bloggers to create a variety of responses for their readers to choose. One possible implementation of the feature looks like this:

You’re not limited to “LOL” or “Fail.” You can set your own annotations:

To use the feature, go to Layout > Page Elements. Click the “Edit” link under the Blog Posts element. Check the Reactions box and enter words, separated by a comma. Hit Save and you’re ready to go.

Related Reading:
Blogger Releases Two Updates Regarding iGoogle and Commenting
Google Upgrades Blogger With Privacy Features & More

New Blog Post - Twitter Updates for 2008-10-18:
How to Tell if You’re an Alco.. http://tinyurl.com/57q573 #
New Blog Post - Didactic Poetry: What it is and when you might use it.: Thirty days .. http://tinyurl.com/5jfc7r #
Botox: Not Permanent but One of the Safest Posted By : Baywood Clinic: You have probably have heard.. http://tinyurl.com/5vwtyj #
Workout Routines [...]

Seems legendary investor George Soros, who supposedly made a billion dollars trading on the foreign currency exchange, will have some competition from Google as they are now hedging against fluctuating currency exchange rates by investments in the forex market.

Cnet reports that Google has invested over $80 million dollars in forex trading hedges to offset the strengthening dollar against the global currencies many of their advertisers are paying them in.

Given that 51% of Google’s revenue comes from outside the United States, many large advertisers are given credit in their own currency which could be worth less at the time they actually pay Google.

The value of the US dollar against the euro, Canadian dollar and the British pound has increased substantially in recent weeks, thus Google gets less US dollars when someone pays them. The actual value of the clicks is done in US dollars at the base of the calculations, so Google advertisers get to pay less than what they would if there was just one currency used in the actual bidding.

Maybe the brothers Google want to emulate Soros who was part of the Google Author series that had CEO Eric Schmidt as part of the presentation.

His Wikipedia entry about his currency speculation profits may be alluring to the Google founders who have shown a penchant for aggressive investments into a number of markets.

“On Black Wednesday (September 16, 1992), Soros became immediately famous when he sold short more than $10 billion worth of pounds, profiting from the Bank of England’s reluctance to either raise its interest rates to levels comparable to those of other European Exchange Rate Mechanism countries or to float its currency.

Finally, the Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and to devalue the pound sterling, and Soros earned an estimated US$ 1.1 billion in the process. He was dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Be careful guys, it is a highly volatile market and we wouldn’t want you to lose money.

Today, there are more updates to Google products than you can shake a stick at. So intead of writing a bunch of short, little posts, I have consolidated them into one for you, faithful SEW reader.

Both my awesome husband and my awesome 11 year old son have pointed out to me the new changes to iGoogle. I personally don’t use my iGoogle page all that much (Keepin’ it real [simple]), but I did browse over to it and found some cosmetic changes (The Foo Fighters theme was already there.)

Notice the tab on the left hand side. It includes links to the widgets on your iGoogle page. When you click on one of the links, it switches to a screen with that widget. Some take up the whole page. Others present a list of similar widgets as suggestions. Still others make use of Google reader to present a feed.

Moving on to other Google properties….

Webmaster Tools now testing a Message Center warning that alerts webmasters to possible vulnerabilities with their Content Management Systems (CMS).

Google TV ads has announced new partnerships with COREMedia Systems and Harris Corporation. The COREMedia partnership allows CoreDirect customers to view their Google TV ads right along with their CoreDirect data. The Harris Corp. one adds more inventory for Google TV advertisers.

AdWords has separated the metrics for Google and search partners such as Ask, AOL, etc. This is probably in preparation for the implementation of the Yahoo search advertising partnership.

Last but most important is the changes to the Google algorithm regarding Adobe Flash. Brian Ussery has a writeup about it on his extremely minimalistic-looking blog. Basically, he finds that indexing of Flash still isn’t ready for prime time. I know there may have been some hope with recent news of Adobe working with Google to provide better indexing, but we’re just not there yet, folks.

And that concludes the flurry of Google updates for Friday, October 17, 2008. Leave your thoughts, impressions, etc in the comments!

Google Releases Display Ad Builder

" 20 jQuery Plugins for Unforgettable User Experience
(tags: jquery javascript)

SEOmoz | The Internet Marketing Handbook
(tags: seo seomoz seo-tools)

Twitter Updates for 2008-10-15

Twitter Updates for 2008-10-15

links for 2008-10-15

Rate this: 2.6

Google beat Wall Street with its third quarter earnings, announced today. Their revenue is up 31% year-over-year and up 3% over Q2.

Analysts have been worried that a weak economy would mean worse results for the search giant, due to tightening advertising budgets and decreased consumer confidence.

But, of course, almost the opposite is true. Advertising on Google is much more affordable than traditional marketing methods such as print and television. Search advertising is also more easily measured and has the opportunity to provide a wealth of behavioral data.

Google Blog Search has redesigned and added meme trackers like Techmeme and Megite on the front pages of several categories and the homepage itself.

I’ve shared a screenshot and you can see how the blog posts are separated by story along with how popular they are. This allows for easy scanning, which is useful if you’re looking for blogs talking about a hot topic.

What do you think of the update? Let us know in the comments.

Related Reading:
Google Blog Search Adds Ping Support
Google’s blog search engine takes over top slot
Roundup Of Google Blog Search Commentary