Do you do any link building planning? Planning as in mapping out locations you want to get links from and developing strategies around upcoming events? If you're not, you may want to take a look at what one company has done to capitalize on anticipation. The goodwill, media attention and inbound links they generated from one small commercial is priceless and worth it's weight in gold....
Have you ever been surfing the web and come upon Internet advertising that provides a direct solution for something that you've been researching lately? Did you think that it might be related to your computer cookies, or did you chalk it up to serendipity?
This week's "In the News" video talks about advancements that companies like Southwest airlines and Ask.com are making to enhance personal touches for their uses; Southwest is adding internet access on some of their planes, and Ask is now offering customized skins on their search tools. Also, Google expands its local search results, making more options available to users but SEO harder for other sites.
According to a recent survey, people are planning to turn to the Internet for content as a way to keep themselves entertained during the writers strike. If there was ever a time to create a library of videos and publicize the heck out of them as a way to attract more inbound links, it's now!
The great thing about the Internet in 2007 is the ability to integrate several different types of media into your site. Faster internet connections, cheap bandwidth and free third party multimedia hosting services have made it easy for even the smallest of small businesses to work multi-media into their sites. Since it's well known that different people absorb information in different ways, smart small businesses are looking at the best ways to leverage social media and Web 2.0 technologies to better serve their customers.
With all the "advice" we've been receiving from search engines on how to manage our site and provide the right user experience, I was thrilled to happen upon a little experiment. I recently had the opportunity to do a little user experience testing on the various search engines. I was surprised by the result.
While vertical search is still in its infancy, the integration of vertical results through Google Universal and Ask 3D are allowing sites to draw more and more visitors from specialty indexes. One of the vertical search indexed that is becoming more and more popular is image search. Unfortunately, many small businesses are overlooking traffic opportunities by not optimizing the images on their sites. Pat B. Doyle has a great post on using images to drive traffic at her blog.
There's been a lot of talk lately about what the shift toward blended and universal search means for small business owners. On the one hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. On the other hand, those increased opportunities to snag listings allow one company to snag even more real estate on the first page. It's all good if you're the company scoring more listings, it's not so good if your competitor does it and pushes you off the front page.
To recap, Universal Search is a term coined by Google in which results from different vertical search engines (images, video, news etc...) are integrated into Google's regular search results. The idea is that textual listings may not necessarily be the most relevant result for a user's query. But when will these different search results show up? For example, what causes a video of a scene from Star Wars to appear within the organic search results for the query: "Darth Vader."...
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