Twitter is a free online social networking and micro-blogging application which gives its users the ability to send updates (up to 140 characters) called “tweets” to people who are following them on Twitter in their profile. The users, who have subscribed to tweets, are known as followers. Senders can restrict or allow anybody to access tweets. So what you have here is a publishing tool that can be either public or private. Users can send and receive tweets through different mediums like IM, cell phones and the web or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but for SMS, service providers may charge fees.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and business associates to communicate and exchange anything on twitter without any boundaries. In Twitter, even the most ordinary updates about your life can be pretty exciting. If used correctly and efficiently twitter is a great marketing tool from business perspective. Send out a tweet like “Have some breaking news you want to get out quickly?” Update your blog or web site and lets other aware about it instantly with a Tweet. You can promote your projects, books, movies, or whatever by offering a free download or showing a preview? Send out a Tweet with a URL to the free download.

Moreover twitter offers a great functionality which connects your blog and a Twitter Page through RSS feed of the blog. This functionality is known as “Twitter Feed”. With the help of this, your Twitter page gets updated each time you add new content to your blog.

Much like how blogging has become a staple for today’s society, Twitter and “twittering” is on the same path to becoming ingrained in today’s culture despite only being around for less than two years. So simple in its execution yet powerful in the marketing opportunities, it offers ease of use. Twitter is one of the top web technologies to gain worldwide prominence.

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

Google Wave is the creation of the same team that was behind Google Maps and the bunch seems to have run into something revolutionary, right from the outset! This five-person startup looks all set to be one of the most talked about Google products ever.

According to a Software Engineering Manager who introduced Wave at Google I/O, :

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the Web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave.

To simplify things, consider it to be an extension, or rather an evolution of existing e-mail, IM and file-sharing technologies. With Wave, users can share images, videos, converse in what Google terms a collaborative conversation stream.

In Google Wave users can create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved.”

You can then refer back to a Wave to see the whole conversation and document thread. When a Wave is open on two users’ screens, messages bounce right off Google’s servers into another user’s browsers to enable instant messaging-like communication.

Users don’t even need to hit send to communicate their message as each typed character shows up in the other Wave user’s browser less than a second after it’s been typed. True real time.

You can also check a box to keep communication private until you’re ready for the recipient to see what you’ve written. Want to add more participants to the conversation? Just drag and drop the contact into the browser window.

Another facet of Google Wave is that this happens to be an Open Source project, and more of a platform, less a finished product. So, what we’re talking bout here is an entire new API that allows developers to do almost anything they please, like integrating a Twitter client, playing games on to a wave. From gaming or official work to a simple chat, the Google Wave might just change the way we communicate with our buddies, in the near future.

There are plenty of other features, all of which make the product more fascinating. Have you signed up for the test coming later this year? It’s good to get in at the ground floor. The more you test it and give Google your precious feedback, the better the product should be in the end.

Bing is all about the users preferences. It is build with a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions. Usually search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they are unable to let them use the information they find. And now Bing is here to solve all these problems. Bing yields more relevant and more up-to-date search results.

Bing is not just about reinventing a search engine but it also promise a new brand in the market. Microsoft has acknowledged repeatedly that Live Search suffered from a branding perspective, and Bing is the answer.

Bing is positioned as a filter for the information overload users have to navigate with traditional search engines. Bing aims for an increased relevancy, a new way to organize search results, task simplification and greater insight.

It is a story of déjà vu all over again. Reinventing the search engine is an attempt to make some progress in the search engine wars. The question is whether Bing will actually end up making any difference?

The challengers in the field of battle plays out as follows. Google controls a gigantic chunk of it and is looking dangerously aggressive regarding those parts it does not control. Microsoft controls a very small section of the field, but has hordes of ammunition [cash] and is looking for a way to use it. Yahoo has its own section, but is under siege and appears ripe for the taking. This leaves Microsoft and Google as the two main predators.

The biggest thing about Bing is the new search parameters. Microsoft has actually tried to create a new niche search approach. The Bing search function is tailored to four verticals to enhance the search results. They include the buying decision, finding local businesses, making health decisions and planning trips. Put another way, the engine is designed to emphasize product purchases, health, local businesses and travel, which just happen to be four of the bigger niches on the web.

Google has always relied on the pillar of its search engine. Generally, Google is viewed as the best when it comes to producing quality results. Although the last Microsoft search engine, wasn’t terrific, but wsith Bing, it hopes to change that.

Whether users will end up binging over googling will confirm or deny the relevance of Microsoft’s efforts in search. Both the tools proves that the user experience for both search engines is different, in many ways. Fact is Bing is hard on changing everything, and the Search Wars are heating up. Think on this.

In a bid to “reinvent the Web”, as said by the company, the new service is part of Opera’s Web browser, enables direct downloading from personal computer to personal computer and removes any need for data storage at servers in the middle. Files can be viewed with any browser.

Similar technologies have been available before for tech-savvy consumers, but these have required downloading separate software, paying usage fees, or a long process of uploading content — limiting take-up of the services.

The new feature will be useful for Internet users who are uncomfortable sharing their files and interacting with friends over privately owned Web sites, which set their own rules for privacy, and can’t always be counted on to store files permanently.

Opera Unite lets users set passwords for access to selected files on their computers. In addition, Opera Unite helps users save time they would otherwise spend uploading files to the Web or sending them in an e-mail. Users can choose from a number of pre-installed services to share files, photos, set up a chat room as well as create a personal Web server. Further services will be available to download and when the Opera Unite service officially launches could become a thriving community. The whole process is no more complex than adding a desktop widget.

Opera Unite is quite easy in operation. The product opens up many possibilities for close-knit personal communities. All users have to do to start one is send their address to others and watch them interact with the pages. Access can be public, limited to specific URLs or private, which lets only the creator access their own files, turning Opera into a useful storage facility for when they’re away from the main PC.

Opera has a small share of the desktop browser market, but its mobile browser is the most widely used browser on handsets. Opera is a product that many have heard of and its unique features could help it capture a lot of market share and spark a new wave of personalized Internet. If you can handle the reliance on Opera’s servers to handle the proxy side, Opera 10 is well worth investigating.

Bing shot up to over 10% of the UK search traffic the days following its launch. But came down to 3.15% of the UK search traffic.

Another key parameter in the favour of Bing as reported by Hitwise is that people are spending more time using Bing rather than visiting Bing out of curiosity. On average a visitor spends under 9 minutes in Bing which is just a little under the time a visitor spends in Yahoo UK and around 50% of the time a visitor spends in Google.

The UK version of Bing is highly scaled down compared to the US version. Microsoft launched Bing as a decision engine enabling users to compare and buy products faster, to book flights, hotels and holidays cheaper and even receive cash backs for purchases.

None of these features are available in the UK version. The success of Bing in UK could well depend on these features being released in UK and how the UK online users react to it.

Microsoft has also earmarked around $100 million for a marketing campaign to promote Bing. Only time will tell how much impact Bing will have on the online search engine market and how successful the software giant Microsoft will be in tackling the search giant Google.

Source:http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/

Marketing budgets are under the microscope now more than ever, but some simple and relatively inexpensive moves can help companies gain higher placement in search results. Steve Riegel of marketing firm Faction Media offers six SEO tips that can bump up the page views

Every marketing tactic gets more scrutiny when budgets face the severity of a struggling economy. Marketers are increasingly responding to the accountability found in digital marketing, placing their budget toward efforts that they can clearly measure against.

Put SEO under this microscope, and it consistently delivers. But marketers need to insure they are getting the most out of search engine optimization (SEO), especially during a recession. Every search matters, and an “optimized” SEO effort can yield ever more value to an organization. With this in mind, here are 6 key tactics to maximize your SEO efforts.

Eliminate Navigation Barriers

Search-engine spiders prefer easy-to-navigate sites as much as your end users, with all seeking to understand where to find information on your site. Providing clear pathways to all the pages on your site is essential for “findability.”

Create an XML site map for spiders and a user-friendly site map for your visitors. XML site maps provide guidance to spiders in regards to what pages exist on a site, and how often you update them. They are becoming the standard for crawl submissions. User-friendly site maps provide additional navigation links throughout your site for users and spiders alike.

Check Your Code

If the spiders can’t understand your code, they will miss your entire page around a few “simple errors.” Is your code valid? Validate your code often through tools like those available from W3C.

Check your robots.txt file to make sure that it’s not blocking spiders for any content that you want indexed. It’s surprising, but companies have blocked spiders from their entire sites with a misplaced backslash or other errors. Don’t let this be you.

Go for Quick Wins

Searchers rarely go beyond the top 20 search results, but you should check your rankings across engines for phrases just outside the top 20 and target those for additional efforts.

Nudge these rankings up by creating additional on-site content and placing an additional emphasis on on-site promotion such as featured home page links.

Meta Info - Describe Yourself

You should not have “home” as a descriptor of your business in search results unless you are either a Realtor or a builder (Google “cat” to see what I mean). Every page on your site should have a unique title and description based on the page’s content.

Title tags are still one of the most important elements of most search engines’ algorithms. Keep the title tag under 128 characters and keep any branding to the end. Meta information helps the search engines define your content as well as provide added relevancy to the searcher as they find you in the search engines. Added relevancy may bring additional visitor opportunities.

Optimize Your Keyword Platform - Be Analytical

When combined with site analytics to measure campaign success, there is a fundamental path to be in the right place at the right time for your audience no matter how they may change search behaviors. You can generate and measure keyword targets for search engine marketing (SEM) by evaluating your Internal Search, pay-per-click (PPC) and SEO successes.

First, make sure that you are capturing your site’s internal search results to understand the content navigation needs in your audience’s voice. Isolate the terms that are leading toward success events and then test these directly in a PPC environment. Your PPC test terms should drive your audience to the landing page identified in your internal search success. In turn, take the successful PPC terms and place an emphasis on these terms for future SEO efforts. This is Keyword platform optimization.

Be Reachable

Whether you sell directly or through distribution channels, you can support Linux MPS Pro - Focus on Your Business - Not Your IT Infrastructure. $599.95/month. Click to learn more. your sales efforts directly by placing detailed sales contact information on your site. On average, 7 percent of searches include some sort of location modifier.

B2B sites tend to show locations only when a searcher goes to a career page. Let your audience know where and how they can contact you or your distribution partners at the most local of levels. Highlight each location; create a directory with standalone location pages to widen your search footprint.

Place your address, or at the very least, city and state contact info on every page. Let the world know where you exist and how to contact you.

Marketers should get ready for three primary changes. Integrating the search options together with planning of other media options, inasmuch as the search volume is driven by any offline event or media campaign of significance and this is essential in capturing the demand.

Next is to achieve best results, planning well the SEO and paid search is important. It has been well proved by studies that by clubbing Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing together, great results can be achieved.

Finally video media and transparent display of search results are going to be prominent for future searches through popular search engines and such others. Result is, simple clicks on the lists and conversions effected by them into business will not be enough, and they have to transform into meaningful engagements. Brand marketers of large volumes will be attracted by these offerings of Search Engines. In addition, the Search Engines as well as portals would like to have more up-sell options continuously, considering the effectiveness of Search Engine Marketing. In short, the way search engine result pages are shown to viewers will be changing dramatically, in view of the fact the present templates used are much older by a decade now and a change is imminent.

Migration to new search options:

Online searches are no more the monopoly of few traditional search engines alone and this extends to newer platforms and portals as reported by the trusted sources – Ad Age and comScore. Within days of their reporting, that Yahoo is relegated to third place by YouTube as search engine, the latter announced a brand new platform for advertising.

Myspace is emerging as bigger search engine with 563 million queries from US, as reported by comScore, in 2008 October, compared to AOL with 424 million queries and Ask.com with 362 million queries. Similarly MSN.com with 1.04 million queries is almost touched by eBay, Amazon and Craiglist by handling combined queries of 980 million totally.

Marketers have a lesson or two to learn from these statistics. Although we can not equate these queries with regular search engine enquiries, as they come from a totally different platform of video sharing site or social network site, the message is clear. The fact remains they are very great in volumes, judging by the numbers and search marketers can do well to keep an eye on these non-traditional sources of search and keep their sites positioned right there as best as possible.

SEO Models take a change:

First of all these non-traditional search platforms, where millions of viewers make their search, are having their impacts on the traditional Search Engines as well. The concept of Search Engine optimization undergoes a major change. It is not any more that a site is getting the prominent rankings in the Search Engine Listings that could make best conversions of business. It is how it reaches all the top listings of any given result page of the Search Engine that warrants merit.

There are consumers reaching the marketer’s site directly through Search Engines, by the prominent placement of the site in their result pages. There are also consumers who get access to the given site through intermediaries, such as social networks, blogs, photo-sharing sites, Wikipedia, Twitter and the like. These consumers are steadily rising in numbers, with a striking popularity and the site marketers should never let go this opportunity. What is required is the change of mindset to optimize their Web presence, rather than optimize their site concerned.

Search Engines are getting replaced by other devices:

The surest possible change in 2009 will be that consumers will be not entirely dependant on their computers alone for making searches. Irrespective of the Search Engines, they have started using other devices – mobile phones for one. For entering their searches mobile devices like iPhone which perform the applications of a hand-held computer or Google Android SDK software stack, providing the tools and applications have emerged. The search queries raised from these devices are surprisingly large and with an array of novel features enabled by these devices, marketers should give importance to these devices.

Along with the primary task of getting top rankings in Search Engines alone, the new features of devices such as iPhone like text messaging by SMS; mobile couponing; click-to-call should be made best use of. The targeted audience should be reached through these devices to optimize their landing page and increase the opt-in traffic of consumers to the best advantage.

Again, Internet searches are extending beyond PCs to overlap other devices – for instance new TV models and set-up boxes enable searching the net through the TV screen using the remote, obviating the necessity for a computer screen. Besides there are vehicle telematics like GPS device to make on the spot searches for locating navigation to a drug store, important tourist attraction or restaurant. All these devices are growing wider and faster to occupy the place of computer and enhance the web experience of the consumers.

Marketers will do well to take into consideration these existing devices as also those yet to come, to play a vital role in consumer searches and be ready to modify their strategies for popularizing their web presence.

More over Google Reader can work well with off-the-shelf screenreaders, as well as Fire Vox, the self-voicing extension to Firefox this in turn increases the content feeds and feed readers to the vast majority of visually impaired users. With the help of this functionality one can download the posts for the offline viewing and when some body views it online any other time it is found well synchronized. Google Reader is two pane feed reader. Shortcuts are also there which makes the navigation much easier.

Google reader is well known because of its wonderful features like:

• Easy Navigation : It is one of the best feature of Google reader. It allows to read the feeds in a big pane scrollable pane. One could choose according to the requirement to view the read or unread items.
• User Interface : It is one of the best pane feed reader because of its so user friendliness. Due to its this property it allows sorting feeds according to time. It also permits starmarking type of reference like if one wants to view just specific items later.
• Feature Rich : It lets you export and import the subscription list. It allows grouping similar feeds in folder or tags. It also does automatic marking of feed items as read as you go through the list of items. Automatic Updates and auto discovery of feeds is also there.
• Supports ATOM & RSS : Like most of the on line services, it supports both types of Feeds i.e RSS and ATOM.
• Reading Trends : It deflects the most updated and the most ignored updation feeds and hence reflects the users reading habits so that one could after accessing this can keep the feeds priority wise.
]]> http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/23/high-featured-google-reader-catching-popularity/feed/ http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/08/excellent-sign-for-any-internet-marketer-google-reader/ http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/08/excellent-sign-for-any-internet-marketer-google-reader/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:15:31 +0000 admin http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/08/excellent-sign-for-any-internet-marketer-google-reader/ For optimizing your site to increase your rank with Google, the Google Reader should make you smile. The fact that this reader is both free and very easy to use means that millions of people will be searching for and adding their favorite blogs to the Google Reader. This means that blogs and RSS feeds will become even more important on the internet than they are now, which is an excellent sign for any internet marketer. Even better is the fact that the gurus at Google have added a search box to the Google Reader. This means that a user can type in a word or phrase, possibly to search for a blog post they read weeks before, and all of the top matches will come up. There is nothing an internet marketer likes better than to have their site be pushed to the top by Google.
So how does this help in SEO well the ease of use means that by adding your own feeds and feeds that are from your favorite location then Google is now recognizing these feeds as well. The more popular your feeds are and the more they are used by others then the higher up your results will be when others are looking for relevant content to add to their reader and the more importance Google places on your content.
The face of the internet is changing so much and unless you are keeping up you are going to loose out. The value of internet users is now being taken more seriously then ever before and the more valuable your content is the more popular you become in the ranks.
Where to Start
The first thing to do is to set up your own Google Reader. It’s quick and painless and will give you an idea of exactly how the program works. In order to do that, just head to http://reader.google.com/ to begin setting up your account. Then just figure out what you’d like to do with your account. You can sit back and enjoy being able to read all of your favorite blogs in one area, or you can take it a bit further by using Google Reader to optimize the potential of your website. One thing is for sure, Google Reader has amazing potentials, no matter how you want to use it.
]]> http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/08/excellent-sign-for-any-internet-marketer-google-reader/feed/ http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/03/tips-to-getting-internet-traffic-to-your-blog-website/ http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/03/tips-to-getting-internet-traffic-to-your-blog-website/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:55:16 +0000 admin http://www.thewebmarketingblog.com/2008/12/03/tips-to-getting-internet-traffic-to-your-blog-website/ Everybody has a blog. No matter the topic or discussion someone has got it covered. From online diaries in the mid nineties to becoming one of the foundations of the internet, blogging along with video and social bookmarking is changing not only how we get our information but also the manner in which online business is conducted.

This is why it would be a good idea for you incorporate blogging into your overall internet marketing plan. What blogging can do very effectively is to build your target markets and bring you a steady flow of internet traffic and customers.

Blogs are free and easy to run. Just go to Blogger or Wordpress.com, signup and start posting. Try to start out posting on a daily basis or at least a three to four times a week then use these tips to get traffic to your blog

Email Marketing List

In a recent survey, 100% of online users say they communicate using email. This is a good way to send messages to your opt in email list with links going back to your blog web site. Let them know you’ve posted a new article or video on your blog. Use snippets or summaries to entice people to click on the link and get further information. The more times people on your list see your blog the more they will get to know you and give a second look to some products or services you maybe offering.

In addition you can gain more viewers to your blog by giving away a subscription along with free report. Advertise in ezine publications that target your niche as well as forums and classified ad sites like US Free Ads.

Free RSS Feed

Rich Site Summary also known as Really Simple Syndication is the process of delivering constantly updated content to your blog by pacing a block of code (known as a feed) on your webpages. In our fast paced information age, RSS fits perfectly. It allows your visitors to stay up to date on any new information you’ve added to your blog without necessarily having to visit every page on your blog. Instead they view a window that list the headlines followed by a quick summary of what each article is about.

Having a free RSS feed accomplishes two things besides getting more site traffic. First since the content is updated frequently it keeps the search engines coming back to your site and crawling for the new information. Second it can increase your visibility among your blog visitors. This is important because while they may not visit your blog everyday, providing a feed to your subscribers is a good way to for them to stay in touch.

Network

A blog network is a compilation of blogs under a sole domain or company name. Some web visitors take comfort in clicking a link that takes them to different bloggers who cover the same topic. This is also an excellent way to get free advertisement and free web traffic to your site since people who visit the network will invariably be exposed to your blog.

You can also submit to blog directories or just ask your readers to give you feedback on something you posted (the search engines view comments as updating content on your blog). No matter which technique you choose, blogging offers a new way to connect with your readers. Simple, unfiltered and a perfect fit for today’s internet, blogging is a smart resource to have in your internet marketing online tool kit.

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