Posts Tagged ‘google’
Google’s e-mail gets social in Facebook face-off (AP)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google is making it easier to socialize on its e-mail service. It’s unveiling a new “Google Buzz” feature that sets up a face-off with Facebook.
The feature unveiled Tuesday will enable Gmail users to create status updates on Google Buzz and read and comment on the updates posted by their friends.
Other tools turn Gmail into a showcase for sharing video, pictures and Web links to interesting stories, just as users can on Facebook and Twitter.
Gmail’s new twists are a direct response to Facebook’s rapid rise since it started six years ago.
Facebook now has more than 400 million worldwide users, many of whom post information that can’t be indexed by Google’s search engine. Facebook’s large audience also threatens to siphon away some of Google’s advertising sales.
Source:Yahoo News
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Alibaba says Yahoo ‘reckless’ on Google stance
BEIJING – China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba turned on major shareholder Yahoo Inc. on Saturday, calling the American company’s support of Google in its standoff with China “reckless.”
Google has promised to stop censoring its search results in China, threatening to pull out of the country altogether if it can’t operate an unfiltered search engine. Yahoo has said it was “aligned” with Google’s position, though it’s not clear what that means.
“Alibaba Group has communicated to Yahoo! that Yahoo’s statement that it is ‘aligned’ with the position Google took last week was reckless given the lack of facts in evidence,” Alibaba spokesman John Spelich said Saturday. “Alibaba doesn’t share this view.”
Yahoo closed its own offices in China several years ago when it sold much of its business there to the Alibaba Group. Yahoo retains a 39 percent stake in Alibaba that represents one of Yahoo’s most valuable assets.
Yahoo spokeswoman Nina Blackwell has declined to say whether the company would consider selling its holdings.
Google hopes it can persuade the Chinese government to agree to changes that would enable its China-based Google.cn site to show uncensored search results.
A Google spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, said by e-mail Saturday that Google has not closed its offices in China and that “it’s business as usual.”
Google’s threat to end its China operations has alarmed an Internet-connected public that is the world’s largest at 384 million people.
Beijing requires Internet traffic to pass through government-controlled gateways that block access to material deemed subversive or pornographic. Google’s China-based site excludes from its results any foreign Web sites to which access is blocked.
Source:Yahoo News
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Blog Optimization
by: Victoria Phee
Search engine optimization is the process done to generate traffic through search engines. It became a need for websites because 80%-90% of visitors come from major search engines. Higher rankings mean greater number of visitors. The same concept applies to blogs. However, many blog owners are not aware of their chances of being more visible on the web. They just update it once in a while and that’s it. Considering the great number of blogs on the net today, from personal to corporate blogs, all their efforts will just go to waste if they do not optimize it.
Yes, blogs can be optimized, too. It should be done for the benefit both of your readers and search engine spiders. Although the process is quite similar with the standard website search engine optimization, it is a bit different. Here are some tips that you can do to start:
Consider the Design
It is not advisable to use the default template being offered by blog publishing sites. You wouldn’t want to bump into a girl in a party wearing the same dress, do you? Same thing goes to blogs. You can hire a designer to do the work for you. If running a tight budget, you can always look for free templates offered by web design companies and you can customize it a little to make it unique.
Optimize the Tags
Use the most substantial phrase for your blog in the hard code of the title tag. Also, you have to double check that each entry’s title appears on the tile tag. This is sometimes overlooked.
Keywords
You should always use your keywords in the blog post titles and categories. You can also use many categories in one entry if appropriate.
RSS Feed
It is best that you have RSS subscription button available on your blog. This would be more convenient to your readers because it will publish your recently updated work. If your blog publisher don’t have RSS automatically available, there are RSS feed button creation tool on the net. But make sure that you place it where the readers can easily see them. You can put it in your sidebar. It is already on the blog owner’s prerogative if he/she wants to full or partial RSS.
Use Email
Because there are some people who are not familiar with RSS feeds, go the extra mile and offer them something else with the same benefits. I’m talking about You can have your blog post via email. Free tools are also available online to do this.
Compelling Introduction
Introduction about the blog post is sent out via RSS feed. Make sure that it is compelling to enough to make your readers want to have more of it so that they would click the “more” button and read the entire article. Therefore, it should be interesting.
Check you CSS
It is common that blogs come with overwhelming amount of CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. The solution to this is to place it in an external CSS file to avoid clutter in the main template and for the main entry not to go further down.
Keywords-rich Anchor Texts
In placing links in other sites/blogs and even in putting internal links, make sure that you are using keyword-rich anchor text. Remember that it is always better to use your keywords than “click here” or “more”. It would benefit you when search engine spiders crawl your blog.
Keep Your Posts Bonded
If your blog post is somehow connected to your previous posts, link them to each other. The idea is that if your reader is interested in this particular topic, then he/she probably can also be entertained of a different story with the same subject matter. You can use Related Posts Plugin for this.
Do the same in other blogs. If you see a blog entry or an article on the same issue, make them knowledgeable of your existence by placing a link going to your post.
Purchase a Domain
We all know that blog hosting companies will only be around for such a time. Once they close their business, they will be closing your blog as well. If that happens, where will your loyal followers find you? Or there are change in the domain of your blog host, it will surely affect your rankings.
In case you have limited resources and can only settle to free hosting companies, look for those who offer to display your own domain rather than displaying their own like Wordpress and Blogger.
Proper URL Naming Convention
It is always a bad idea to use dynamic URLs whether on websites or blogs. You should always take advantage of any chance you have to use keywords, without keyword stuffing, including this one. Meaning, instead of using “www.dollartoolbox.com/?246”, you can consider “www.dollartoolbox.com/blog-post-keywords-here”. When you cannot do anything about it, use mod rewrite.
Good Navigation
If your blog is just a part of a website, it is not ebough that you a have a link going to your blog’s main page. Use the sidebar to syndicate your new posts because the visitors of the website might get interested in your articles if they see the titles.
Fast Page Load
The amount of time involved for a page to load all depends on your host. There are some blogs that takes about half a minute just from the snippet of RSS feed to the full article. You can lose a lot of readers just because of this reason alone.
Moderated Trackbacks and Comments
Spammers are everywhere. They always find a way to abuse your blog by putting non-sense comments with links going to their website. It is annoying and it can also affect your rankings. There are numerous tools available online which you can use to moderate and avoid comment and trackbak spam.
Don’t just create a blog to share great information or to prove that you know a lot about the field you are into. Do not settle on the number of followers your blog has. Start to optimize now and see the great changes on the next few months.
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Integrated Approach to Internet Strategy for Business
by: Ajay Prasad
Technology and the Internet have transformed business in ways that very few people could have predicted years ago. Increasingly the internet is being used as a cost effective solution for many of the business operations. An internet business strategy is basically a plan that how you want to manage your online presence for your business.Adopting an integrated approach in devising a successfully internet strategy to benefit your business, a well planned web presence can increase the market awareness and branding of your business that brings you tangible results.
Just as you have a strategic plan to grow your business, you need to develop an internet marketing plan that integrates the most effective online strategies for increasing website traffic and converting visitors into buyers.
An internet strategy for any business includes website planning, development, marketing and management. Planning ensures that your content targets the right type of customers. For that you have to customize your web plan to fit your company rather than following any well-written formula. Even so, there are standard components you have to follow them such as market analysis, strategy, any specific development plan, marketing and most importantly expense budget.
1. Market research- It is a fundamental part of any business strategy. This normally includes a target market analysis, market research and a market forecast.
2. Website strategy- This includes your mission and objective of starting an internet business, web development and marketing strategy.
3. Specific development plan- Any web plan is measured by the result it produces. Therefore, implementation of your plan is more important than brilliant ideas. Start taking action on the tasks that you have created during the planning stage.
4. Identify your organization goals. Every company has a set of tangible and intangible goals and identifying yours will help you better focus on it and implement them in time.
5. Online marketing- Getting the most out of the online marketing channels requires specialized techniques like search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media optimization, e-mail marketing and many more to reach out to your customers.
6. Expense budget- This includes details to track expenses month by month and follow up with your plan vs. actual analysis.
7. Returns (ROI) – Business is driven by ROI and it is only natural that the online marketing efforts need to lead into a positive ROI determined by the key performance indicators.
8. Survey- Get feedback from website visitors regarding what bought them to you or how their experience has been on your website.
The Internet presents a wide range of marketing and communication opportunities for every business. Making those opportunities a reality requires careful planning, thoughtful assessment and directed focus.
Web design is very important to search engines. Messy, over-complicated or bad code give the search engine spiders a hard time crawling your pages. If the spiders/crawlers can’t crawl your pages properly and retrieve all the data they need, the search engines can’t rank them properly.
There are more effective methods of attracting your customers to your website than search engine listings. PPC is great for targeting potential leads in every phase of the buying cycle and it is measurable. Studies show that regular contact with customers helps to maintain your relationship with them and generates referral business.
Many companies consider web advertising a viable technique to benefit your online business. The ability to target has been one of the main things that have attracted people to the internet for advertising. You can target big to very small websites that give real, vertical information and at the same time, it is also interactive.
The scope for business on the Internet is fantastic-there is so much potential there and all you have to do is have an integrated strategy or plan to make it happen.
About The Author
Ajay Prasad is founder of Global Marketing Resources LLC that runs a number of ecommerce websites under its umbrella. Ajay’s functional expertise includes website strategy, marketing management, business development, consumer research, market analysis and strategic planning. GMR Web Team is an Orange County Website Design company that aims to develop an overall Internet strategy for your business.
The author invites you to visit:
http://www.gmrwebteam.com
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Getting the most out of Google and Search Engines
Getting the most returns from a search engine such as Google is not that hard, all is necessary to be known is how to work the site contents in order to be always up to date with Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.
All Search engines work differently, but, mostly, all of them use the same concept, a web crawler that checks the site time from time and gather information.
To get best results you must work hard to make possible that your site brings leads from Search Engines and after that all you have to do is to convert those leads into customers.
Take a look in the example bellow:
As you must have noticed above, on the Traffic Sources Overview we managed to achieve 91.02% of visitors originated through a Search Engine with a not so high bounce rate.
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