SEO Blog

Google is the most trusted and popular Search Engine of the world and not surprisingly, it likes the money to remain in the family. Recently there has been wobbly news that it invested money in Sergy’s Wife’s company. According to Ecommerce Times, Anne Wojcicki, the new wife of Sergey Brin, co-founded a company named Biotech Start up, which received a $3.9 million funding from the search giant, Google.

Previously, Anne Wojcicki was a biotech investor herself. Last year, she co-founded 23andMe with a veteran of biopharmaceutical industry named Linda Avey. The startup was located near Google’s Mountain View, Calif, Headquarters. According to Ecommerce Times, Anne Wojcicki said the startup is striving for enabling persons to have unfathomable insights into their origin, inherited traits and genealogy.

This biotech industry, 23andMe officially plans to launch by the end of the year. The name of the company, 23andMe refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes present in a human body. 23andMe is a private company which tries to develop new and unique ways of helping a person to know his own genetic information. Even though his body contains trillions of his genome, he has probably never read of it. The company’s aim is to link him to the 23 paired volumes of his own genetic blueprint. It brings him the personal insight of his ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits. By connecting him to others, the company can also help to put his genome into the larger circumstance of human diversity and commonality.

According to the most up to date Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the IAB (Interactive Advertisement Bureau) and PWC (Price Water house Coopers), last year search advertisements were almost 40 percent of the total $16.9 billion spent in US for online advertisement. Search ad revenues (which consist of contextual search ads, PPC search ads, SEO and paid inclusion) were about $6.8 billion for the last year in total. It increased by a huge margin of 31 percent from the $5.1 billion reported in the year 2005. The next largest category for 2006 is to display advertisements, which were about $5.4 billion or 23 percent of the entire online advertisement expenditure. After that, comes online classifieds, which was $3.1 billion in total or 18 percent of total advertisement revenues.

In the year 2006, online advertisement expenditure was still dwarfed by offline strategies. According to offline stats, Direct mail was first in the list with $55.7 billion. Then, come newspaper having $51.2 billion, TV Networks (cable and broadcast) having $39.9 billion, TV Distribution having $32.5 billion, Magazines having $24.6 billion, Radio having $20.8 billion, Internet having $16.9 billion and Outdoor ad having $6.8 billion. So, we can easily observe the huge amount of money spent in online advertisement.

Kate Kaye has the complete exclusive story of advertisement expenditure at ClickZ News. As a result, search engines are still on the top of online ad spending.

Nowadays It is very common for advertisers to ask for website demographics before they decide to advertise on your website. However, certain data such as gender and age are not available on any web statistic report (such as Google analytics). The webmaster can only get the Demographic data of his website through running a website survey.

Now, Microsoft adCenter Labs might have an alternative solution to predict demographics, the Demographics Prediction.

From the demographics prediction of Seocompany, 67% visitors are male and the age is between 25 to 34. Besides predict demographics for a website, the Demographics Prediction also works for search queries. For example, “hello kitty” query is female-oriented (74%) and age: 25 to 34 and “viagra” is male-oriented query with (70% male).

So try Demographics Prediction on your sites and let me know what you think.

Do you know that you could get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search? Yes, a visitor might end up in your site just by searching for a picture. So that’s why today I’ll be sharing few tips to optimize your site for Google Image Search. They are basic tips but not many publishers apply them on their websites.

• Alt text — ALT text or Alternate Text, is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but remember to keep it short. You should use search keywords for ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt tag is used in place of that particular image. Here is sample image code with ALT text:


• File name — always use meaningful file name to your images, use image file name like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “pic123.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to ALT text. Also, try to keep the path to your image theme such as:
/images/phones/apple-iphone-covers.jpg

• Surrounding Text — always place a paragraph of descriptive text directly above and below your image, with the keywords from your ALT text and Image Name.

• Page Title — Include your keywords in your Page Title and Meta Description. It helps Google define the theme for the page which helps in Image Searches and Google Search Index.

• Page Theme — Keep the theme of each page. Do not mix the content with other topics.

• Links — Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “Picture of Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view picture”. The link text tells Googlebot that it is a link to a picture of Apple iPhone.

The Washington Post reported there have been talks between Google and another party called Salesforce.com, a CRM application vendor. This move could be a challenge for Microsoft which also offers CRM products. Adding an element to Google Analytics is a possibility and a very small number of companies have already done that - To track down offline conversions to online advertising is what we are talking about.

Visual Sciences, known as WebSideStory will be regarded as a competitor who will face impacts of this alliance. Saleforce.com API can be used by an analytic company to pass the advertising info as well as lead information. Thus it can serve two purposes and work as a two edged sword that can improve ROI.

The most beneficial fact will be the ability of improving spends that is used for offline conversions. Secondly, the ability of determining better quality leads’ origin and passing them to the right sales person is also to be considered. This advantage is really attractive to the large-scale sales personnel.
Since when the Google people had this alliance in mind is a wonder. I also wonder about the CEO of Salesforce.com, how he feels about this. Does he think of it as an opportunity to improve market share and strengthen their position against Microsoft? Well, what the two companies thinking can be seen farther from their operation in the future. Whatever they are thinking will be reflected in their actions. Let’s just wait and watch.

At its Searchology event, Google announced several things. Two of the most interesting aspects among those have now been the topic of discussion for some time.

During his presentation, Udi Manber, Google’s VP of engineering, talked about two upcoming query enhancements intended to serve the user interest better. First one is a technique that will add a supplemental and related query that Google’s algorithm determines to return more relevant results. Since people don’t always say what they think they say, Google is hoping to find what they mean, Manber said.

For instance, if a user searches for a catalogue of a certain mobile set to know its features, price, availability etc, Google will perform that query, and later it will also perform a second set of query for elements of the Mobile set. In another example, a search for distance from Zurich Switzerland to Lake Como Italy would lead Google to add a query for train from Milan, Italy to Zurich, Switzerland.

The second interesting enhancement which was discussed by the VP of Engineering was Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR). With this system, Google will translate a query into another language, find results, and then translate those results into the original query language which was provided by the user. This service allows users to search documents efficiently in foreign languages as efficiently as they search in their own language. Google is expected to launch this service later in this year.

Recently it has been decided to set chief communication channel providers, Telcos, to have the authority to charge for whatever they provide. They are now able to set fees for delivering net content, the gratitude (!) goes to the senate committee.

The new bill will allow all the cable operators and cable carriers to avoid any restriction, giving them the right to charge fees for any sort of channel or content providing that they feel fair enough. Companies like AT&T and Verizon were investing billions in underground fiber cables but not having any turnover even from major players like Google or Yahoo for their service. But with this new enforcement coming into action, they will be beneficial by any standards.

But question remains whether the net speed will remain the same after this is formulated as the content presenters have to pay for whatever they get. Many people are suspecting that it will, and with some affect on the overall condition, producing less upgrades and a sluggish speed of information to everybody. I would call this an ‘information superhighway robbery’; the reasons being pretty simple. It seems somewhat ridiculous that even the small businesses like bloggers, who are generally regarded as independent content providers, will also have to pay for the bandwidth consumed by their users. However, nothing more could be done other than wait for the congressmen to gather some acumen over the totality of the concept and hope for the best.

AAPL Apple markets the iPhone

RIMM Research In Motion markets the Blackberry

NOK Nokia has 35.8% of mobile phone market

MOT Motorola has 23.3% of mobile phone market

An update has been released last month by Google Analytics, declaring to add some additional selected features based on its latest feedback (recent upgrade back on May 8, 2007) about its service. Summation of these changes are discussed below-

1. Hourly Reporting: The former Google Analytics interface had the facility of hourly reporting. But the feature was not available in the products May 8th. But realizing user’s disappointment and problems, Google decided to reintroduce it and now Google Analytics will offer hourly reporting again.

2. Clickable URLs: You can now click on URLs in different Sites, Top Exit Pages, Top Content, and Top Landing Pages reports and get quick access to them. This change will definitely help the referrers to browse through sites.

3. Cross Segmentation by Network Location: Using the option of network location, Google Analytics now can support cross segmenting reports.

4. Increased number of data rows per page: Now you have the opportunity to list your desired data up to 500 rows provided that the data refer to those sites or search key phrases. Previously the maximum was 100. This new service will obviously help you to look over the data easily than before.

5. Bounce Rate color change: Formerly, Google Analysis used the color RED to point out the decreasing bounce rate whereas GREEN used to point out the increasing bounce rate. Google flipped it as it meant the reverse.

6. AdWords Integration: Google now enables you to easily integrate AdWords into your account in Google Analytics. This could also be done before, but the process was a bit clumsy compared with the new one.

Yellowpages.com has announced their text-based local search tool made for mobile devices, which is quite similar to Starbuck’s search tool for SMS. Any user of the cell phones can send business names or categories by text messaging to YP411 (97411) to receive top listings for the term.

Many brands tried the SMS search tools and received not much response in return. It has been seen that there is less adoptions of mobile search amongst the users. In the case of Starbuck, it might get a better response, as there is addictiveness for its product among the users, adding to the power of the brand name that it has. SMS search will be a success if the search products come from brands that are trusted names that would aggregate the results for local search. Current offerings now include Yahoo! Local, GoogleSMS, Superpages On the Go, and Yellowpages.com, with a few others adding to the total.

Now, the supply outweighs what the current demand is. Still this is a smart move to get mobile search included in yellowpages.com. And the search is done using the user-friendly form (SMS). There are other services for mobile that Yellowpages.com has offered already. There is a send-to-mobile feature, and by this, business listings are sent to any user specified number. The company also worked on to develop new versions of its web pages that suit mobile phones’ screens and the WAP browsers.

It has enhanced DA products in some markets, 1-800-YellowPages- could act as a foundation for wireless voice search goods. They have the SMS product and with this video search product, they can create a multi-modal search product for mobile devices. AT&T is casting all these and getting users to use many types of mobile search.

The development done and the strategy used behind this can be considered as one of the reasons for AT&T wireless to be a hard nut to crack in the cases of allowing other third parties that provide mobile search applications in their devices and networks.
Now we need SMS based mobile search that is available to even non AT&T wireless users. We have to wait how it does and AT&T has what else up its sleeve for the mobile search.