Google

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Since July, Google, Inc has been planning the purchase of Zao Begun, a search and contextual video and text advertising business, owned by Russian based Rambler Media.

“We are very disappointed to hear that FAS has come to this decision,” said Google in a statement. “We strongly believe that this acquisition will enable us to significantly improve opportunities for Russian users,advertisers, and publishers, as well as the entire industry.”

Zao Begun currently has a network with 40,000 advertisers covering 143,000 Russian language Web sites.

In related news, the U.S. Department of Justice is currentlyinvestigating a deal made by Google and Yahoo that would allowYahoo to show Google search ads. This program had been slated to start this month, but has been delayed pending the DOJ review.

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Before we begin - What is a Sitemap?

Google first introduced Sitemaps in June 2005 so web publishers could publish lists of links from their sites. Shortly afterward, MSN and Yahoo announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol along with Google. Sitemaps are now everywhere on the net, not just on the corporate business site.

So, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs of your website with additional metadata about each URL. It is useful for every site (or blog) to have a sitemap because it is an easy way to keep the search engines informed on when a page was last updated, how often it is updated, and how important it is in relation to the other URLs of your site.

What are the Benefits of a Sitemap?

1.    Sitemaps make your site more search engine friendly.

The more friendly your site is to the search engines, the more visible your site becomes.  When you create new content, the search engine crawlers (also known as “spiders”) can discover that content more rapidly through the use of a sitemap.

2.    Sitemaps help make your bandwidth usage more efficient.

When new content is created, search engines can find it more rapidly with a Sitemap and avoid having to crawl unchanged pages. This is especially useful for large sites with dynamic content. Search engine spiders will be able to quickly discover what is new and what hasn’t changed without scanning thousands of pages.

3.    Help index large sites.

For sites that have a large archive or a database of resources, it is sometimes very difficult to return quality search results for deep pages. If your pages are not well linked to one another, or your site uses AJAX or Flash that is not visible to the search engines, a Sitemap will help the search engines find the content.

4.    Find new sites sooner.

If your site is new and has few links to it, submitting a Sitemap will help the search engines discover it faster.
Please note that submitting and/or using a Sitemap does not guarantee inclusion in any search engine, it is just a way to help the web crawlers find all your site pages.

But - this is only the beginning. What types of tools, process can you use - if you decide to utilize these options?

Click for More…

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Google made some updates to their services.

Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This is a port to Google App Engine of an existing tool, internally it was called Dory (after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).

What does Google Moderator do? When you have company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The interface looks like this:

It’s good for prioritizing which questions are most important.

There are many tools to use, and Yahoo for example has their excellent Yahoo User Interface Library, Yahoo Pipes, or YSlow. Its just nice when companies release code or tools that benefit lots of people on the web.

Google Moderator is a free service, so give it a try sometime.

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When starting a new search marketing project, technical folks will tend to lean on a trusted set of tools to help them. New players, or complete newbies will want to know what tools to use, and not waste time with losers, and not get the correct results to complete their search marketing strategy.

The below is a fairly complete list, that will take you there. In fact, a recent article on Google Blogoscoped discusses a senior search marketer’s top choices.

Here are links to the top tools that you should use:

Webmaster Central and their blog for webmasters

Google AdWords Keyword Tool - updated with search volumes, incredibly valuable

SEO Book keyword tool - API to Wordtracker - many more features, must include

Google Traffic Estimator - number clicks and $ estimates for keywords

Microsoft Ad Intelligence Download - Excel 2007 - shows Microsoft real search data in Excel - powerful

Google Analytics - Free

Google Trends for Websites

Google Insights for Search

Clicky - inexpensive analytics tool - whitelabel for search agencies

Mint - paid, realtime data, powerful

Free rank checking tool - Firefox plugin - free - use it now

Advanced Web Ranking - paid - popular desktop ranking tool

SEO Link Analysis - Firefox plugin

Blog Search Google - Detect links from blogs (note: use the link: site (replace ’site’ with your url)

Xenu Link Sleuth - free - deep crawler for bad links and more

Advanced Link Manager - paid - track new links by competitors

Backlink Analyzer - free tool

Compete.com - free analytics search data - and paid

KeyCompete - find out what competition is buying

SEO Digger - what organic keywords are you ranked for - free and paid

URLTrends - similar to SEO Digger - free

This should be a complete list for 99% of your projects. What other tools have you found useful?

Sept 19 — UPDATE –

Recommended additions from another expert, listed below:

3 more worth taking a look at:

Escape’s Web Page Analyzer - http://www.the-escape.co.uk/tools/pageanalyzer/  - This web page analyzer breaks down the structure and content of your web page and assesses the build quality and content quality from an accessibility, usability and search engine point of view.

Page Rank Checker for Internal Links - http://www.livepr.info/internal-pages-page-rank3.php  — Check Page Rank of Internal Pages - This is one of my favorite SEO tools and particularly useful after every pagerank update. The only downside is, it only registers 100 entry before it comes to a stop.

Seo Site Checkup - http://www.seositecheckup.com/  — Analyze your site to rank better in search engines and get more traffic!
 

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Acquisition expected to increase search engine’s market share, presence in Asia.

September 17, 2008—Google, Inc announced today that it has purchased Korean-based Tatter and Company, a blogging software firm.

“We are excited to welcome Tatter and Co.’s engineering team to Google Korea,” a spokesperson for Google wrote in an email to DMNews. “Acquiring Tatter and Company will allow us to enhance our online publishing tools in Korea, benefiting the large number of users who already depend on and enjoy Google and Tatter and Company’s products.”

TNC co-CEO Chan-Won-Kim compared TNC to the open source blogging project, Automattic in a blog entry last Friday.

“To my knowledge,” added Kim, “we are one of the first major acquisitions done by Google in Asia let alone Korea, if we don’t count Australia and also exclude share-taking activities in China for licensing purposes.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed at press time.

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September 16, 2008

At what Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn). is calling his request, YouTube Inc. has updated its acceptable content guidelines to effectively ban videos with the potential to incite violence.

The video uploading and social media site had previously turned down a request from chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental affairs to remove videos produced and sponsored by terrorists which showed assassinations, deaths of US soldiers, and other violent acts.

The new guidelines, which state that “predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment, intimidation, invading privacy, revealing other people’s personal information, and inciting others to commit violent acts or to violate the terms of use are taken very seriously.”

Sen. Lieberman is also asking Google, Inc, the parent company of YouTube, to remove all videos that have been created by terrorist organizations, whether they violate the guidelines or not.

While some are in favor of the new guidelines, others believe that they infringe on the right to free speech, and that Internet-based sites should be free of governmental intervention.  Some people, like CEO of IT research firm Techdirt Inc, Mike Masnick, question the lasting effectiveness of banning terrorist produced videos from being posted to YouTube.

“Those videos will quickly pop back up on other sites that won’t take them down,” Masnick told ComputerWorld.com in an interview this week. “Second, most of those videos are preaching to the choir. It’s highly unlikely that very many people are being recruited by terrorists’ causes by a grainy video on YouTube.”

Failure to adhere to the new video submission guidelines could result in a permanent banning from YouTube.

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Pagerank (Google Larry Page & Sergey Brin responsible) has been written about - a lot. What does Google say about it themselves?

We stand alone in our focus on developing the “perfect search engine,” says Google co-founder Larry Page. … Something that, “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

To that end, we have persistently pursued innovation and refused to accept the limitations of existing models. As a result, we developed our serving infrastructure and breakthrough PageRank™ technology that changed the way searches are conducted.

Read excerpts from Google Corporate and what their senior spam officer has to say about Pagerank. Enjoy!

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Recently, we came across a brilliant interview on “How to linkbuild” - and answering questions like these:

What are the three most important criteria a search engine robot might consider when it is evaluating an inbound link?

How does PageRank play into natural search rankings and what does PageRank really mean?

Once you’ve established SEO best practices for internal linking procedures, is it worth the time to go back and adjust the entire website? Or should you just move forward with these new practices?

How does the actual text in a hyperlink play a role in SEO?

Will I be passing link value to my competitor if I link out to their website?

From an SEO point of view, when is it advisable to link out to a resource, and will linking out actually help my natural search rankings? If so, can you explain why?

For a under the hood discussion to find answers to these questions and many more articles, please look at this linking article.

Also, as a refresher - make sure to read the “Top Ranking Factors” (SEOMOZ) official document, you’ll understand better how to balance onpage and offpage (links) factors for optimum ranking.

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September 9, 2008 - search marketing news pick for the day:

A proposed search advertising deal between search engine giants Google and Yahoo has prompted some major national advertisers, including Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Ford, and Sara Lee to send a letter of protest to the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to ComputerWorld.com, the Association of National Advertisers—the group responsible for representing the corporations involved, the letter, sent to Assistant General Thomas Barnett is a result of a “comprehensive independent analysis of the deal, which under Yahoo Inc. would run advertising from Google Inc. alongside its search results.”

“A Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90% of search advertising inventory,” said ANA President and CEO Bob Liodice in a recent post on the ANA website.

 When asked for comment, Google’s senior manager of global communication and public affairs, Adam Kovacevich  released the following statement: “Numerous advertisers have recognized that this agreement will help them better match their ads to user’s interests, and that ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.”

The Justice Department is currently reviewing the proposed four-year deal, which would generate an estimated $250 to $50 million in operating cash flow during the first year and up to $800 million during subsequent years.

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