Google admitted today that search spam has increased in recent months, and the search giant has outlined its plan to combat spam and the rise of “content farms.”

Google search quality and SEO czar Matt Cutts published a detailed piece on the Google Blog regarding the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its search results. He starts off admitting what we’ve been suspecting for months: there are more spammers trying to scam unsuspecting Googlers.

“Today, English-language spam in Google’s results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,” Cutts said. “However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.”

Cutts makes it clear that webspam refers to the junk that appears in search results when websites try to cheat their way to a higher position. With the launch of the new version of its search engine, Google Caffeine, Google has been indexing more content than before, including spam.

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well,” Cutts explained. “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.”

read more at: http://mashable.com/2011/01/21/google-combat-search-spam/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+Mashable+(Mashable)

Social media can be many things: a place to network with friends, a way to follow market trends and monitor brand sentiment, a customer service tool for identifying unhappy customers. But is it a tool for demand generation? I believe the answer is yes, but that it requires a different mindset for lead generation and measuring ROI.


I’ll begin with a short history of B2B marketing trends, including the evolution of social media.

The Changing Buyer and Evolving Marketing Trends

A key tenant of Modern B2B Marketing is that buyers will use search and the ready access to information to take control of the buying process – and as a result do not want to engage with Sales until they are much further along in the cycle. But this was not always true:

Before Google (more than 10 years ago)

Buying behaviors: Information was not readily available and the only way a prospect could get the necessary information way to engage a sales rep from your company. Mistrust ruled the day, and buyers created RFPs and purchasing centers to try to equal the playing field.

Marketing trends: Marketers focused primarily on brand building and awareness. Most investments focused on hard to measure methods such as mass advertising, tradeshows, and PR with traditional print media. Direct mail and cold calling made up the majority of targeted interactions, and marketers passed all new leads to Sales for follow-up.

Before Social Media (2 to 10 years ago)

Buying behaviors: Corporate websites were mature and search became the dominant way to find information. Prospects were willing to share their contact information in exchange for the information they wanted.

Marketing trends: Marketers began to focus on SEO, PPC and email marketing to drive traffic, and created content such as whitepapers and webinars to convert traffic into leads. Marketers reallocated budgets towards highly measurable channels and began to be more accountable for lead generation. The best marketers realized that their leads were often too early to send to sales, and invested in lead scoring and lead nurturing to find the hot leads and develop the rest.

The Age of Social Media (today and future)

Buying behaviors: More and more information is available off the official corporate website and on social media sites ranging from LinkedIn and Twitter to YouTube and SlideShare. As buyers tire of “marketing speak” and over-aggressive marketing tactics, they search social sites as part of their research, and interact with other prospects to get and share word of mouth recommendations. Prospects are less likely to register for early stage content on the corporate website, and typically contact the company only when they are ready to engage in a sales cycle.

Marketing trends: Marketers will reallocate investments back to brand, buzz, and awareness – but instead of mass advertising and traditional PR, marketers will invest in smart ways to build brand such as social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing. Lead nurturing will evolve to include building relationships with prospects before they ever give you their name by sharing relevant and useful information across a variety of sites and channels. These changes will have a positive impact on lead generation by increasing the number of highly-qualified inbound leads, but measurement of ROI will be a challenge.

Social media translates into higher quality inbound leads.



Original post: blog.marketo.com

A few months ago YouTube announced that organizations that are in the YouTube Nonprofit Program would be able to use the overlay advertising feature to create donation links. They call the feature “Call To Action”. While this feature was nice, it was really limiting. In addition to only appearing in a very limited way on the video, it only works on YouTube and not when you embed the video on other sites.

The good news is that now, Nonprofits that are part of the YT Nonprofit Program, will have the ability to create links to an EXTERNAL WEBSITE (not only youtube videos). All they’ll have to do, when creating an annotation, is click the “link” symbol and select “external link”. Then they’ll be able to link to external sites right from the annotation. Better still, these annotations should show up on embedded videos.

If you still aren’t sure what all of this means, it means that nonprofit YouTube videos can have buttons built into the videos that say DONATE NOW or SIGN THE PETITION and these buttons will work—they will link to any site you point them to. You can even go back to all your old videos that are on YouTube and make your logo into a clickable link, add annotations to donate with a link, and otherwise make your video into a center of engagement. This is now, by far, the most important reason to be in the YouTube Nonprofit Program.

People who watch videos on YouTube are very likely to do one thing when they are done…watch another video on YouTube. Not any more. With this new feature, YouTube can become a center for creating effective calls to action and engagement.

If you need more information about the Youtube Nonprofit Program click here to contact us or go to the youtube nonprofit website.

Here's a video we found explaining and showing this featured working:

Original Blog post:  beth.typepad.com

Having a Blog inside your website and blogging often, will help you with your online positioning.

How is this possible?

• If your Blog is inside your website (in the same domain and structure of your site), every time you create a blog entry, a new page is created for the site (a new potential indexed page by google).
• On the other hand if you keep your website updated google will come back more often to you for new information.
• Let say now that you also assigned tags to that blog entry, now every one of the old tags you assigned (which was a page by itself) is going to be updated and also all the new tags you created for this specific blog entry will be created as another new page.

So as you can see, a simple blog entry could make your website grow exponentially and keep your pages updated, both things google and the other search engines love.

Blog every day if you can!!! and remember to asign tags... Also remember, an external blog (not inside your domain) will only generate inbound links from the outside (which is fine and you also need) but those keywords, tags, copy, etc will not be taken as content inside your site.

Lets get Blogging...

Here's a great video showing how Social media is changing everything and why you should be doing it. Incredible numbers that show how marketing changed in the past years and why it is so important to be part of this change.

del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic. You can use del.icio.us bookmarks to help improve your SEO campaign. The public social component of del.icio.us makes it a great tool to make your website stand out form your competition. 

Here's a video explaining how to use del.icio.us and why is it SOCIAL:

 

You can also use Social Bookmarking as a great online collaboration toll. Since your bookmarks are public delicous allow you to easily share important or useful links with coworkers, customers and partners. 

We believe there really is a new era emerging in the Web's evolution. So what's next?  What will define Web 3.0?

One explanation is that:

Here are a few trends that are distilling the conversation and, in the process, defining Web 3.0:

1. Aggregators

 No one wants to manage accounts on 25 different social sites. This frustration has driven the creation of tools like iGoogle, FriendFeed and Netvibes — all aimed at streamlining your social Web into one space. But more importantly, it has led to the reinvention of Facebook as the ultimate social aggregator.

Recent redesigns of Facebook have turned it into a place where your photos, videos and blog posts can be easily (and automatically) funneled into one place. That's an approach that FriendFeed pioneered years ago, but there's a big difference: Your friends are actually using Facebook.

And now they can even comment on your shared items without leaving the social network. That's bad news for YouTube and other sites that need traffic to create ad revenue, but it's good news for users who don't want to scramble all over creation just to say "Cute video!"

2. Simple sharing

 We've all been seeing those "Share this!" buttons for years now. If you're a marketer or PR person, you've probably plastered them all over your work in hopes of helping it "go viral." But the reality is that these links to sites like Digg or Reddit just haven't been that useful.

That's finally starting to change thanks to Web and smartphone tools that simplify the sharing process.

A few examples:

 • Hootsuite's Ow.ly Social Bar: A bit more comprehensive than TBuzz, this tool shares sites but then also makes it easy for the viewer to share it again. So if you like the link I send you to, you can click a button at the top of the page and keep the share train rolling.

• Smub.it: Designed to make sharing easier on an iPhone, Smub actually works on just about any device with a Web browser. You simply add "smub.it/" in front of any URL, and it will pull up a page of simple buttons to share that site on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

3. Un-Sites

The design-heavy microsite has been under serious assault lately. Why? Because businesses and marketers are realizing that there's an infinite supply of content out there, being refreshed every day. Why go through all the trouble of creating 100% of your site's content yourself?

And here's another point: A few years ago, if you wanted video on your site, you had to write or find a code that would let you host the video. Big pain in the butt. Now Google is dumping millions of dollars into making YouTube the best, most advanced video service on the planet. Why would you still go it alone, when you can just embed YouTube on your own site for free?

Right now, this concept is being pushed to its limits by ad agencies and others who want to get buzz by showing how minimalist their Web design can be. The most notable examples are Modernista's pop-up home page, the similar Skittles project by Agency.com, and most recently BooneOakley's bizarre conversion of its agency site into a YouTube video. (watch bellow)

 

For now, these kinds of projects are mostly just publicity stunts. But there's no denying that repurposed content from sites like Twitter and YouTube is going to become the norm with almost any site design in the near future.

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On another angle we've heard that if Web 1.0 was characterized by connecting people to content, and Web 2.0 is connecting people to people, then Web 3.0 is certainly connecting objects to people and to eachother. The Internet of things. Tim O’Reilly has also been talking about this for a while.

Inanimate objects can be embedded with sensors and connected wirelessly to the Internet. This enables us mere human objects to effectively communicate with those formerly inanimate objects. The hope is that as we are able to collect data from these embedded objects and analyze it we’ll be able to make better, more informed decisions based on all the available information we have.

This requires, of course, better analytics to makes sense of it all. But coupled together (data+ analytics) it’s truly the next transformative era of computing. 

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So what's your take on the term "Web 3.0"? Is it a bold new era? Or just a reorganization of all the information we have today? I'd love to hear what trends you've noticed and where you think they're taking us.

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Original Blog Posts: thesocialpath.com  and  asmarterplanet.com

First of all, what is a WIKI?, well lets go to the WIKIPEDIA definition of WIKI:

A wiki is a website that uses wiki software, allowing the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked Web pages, using a simple text editor, within the browser. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, to power community websites, and for note taking. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and knowledge management systems.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIKI

A wiki could be use for collaborative projects, events and more. In business all this is going to be published online so you could use it to promote your events and products by creating a wiki about them and having the members of these events or product collaborate. Remember to create links back to your blog (were you talk about the event) or to your website, were you have information about yout product.

Here is a good video about how wikis work and how you can create one.

 

Destiny.

Google has launched a new keyword tool called Sktool (Search-based Keyword Tool).

Google’s new Search Based Keyword Tool (SKTOOL) allows search marketers to generate keyword ideas based on the content of their Web site and back-end data.  The tool maps similar queries to each other and also maps back to the keywords you’re currently bidding on in your AdWords account.

The tool has a number of applications.  The main application is to expand your keyword list in an organized and thematic way.  However, many of the keywords suggested by the tool should not be bid on by search advertisers; in fact, an advertiser would waste a lot of money if all the suggested keywords were added to a program.  The tool should be used to consider suggestions and pick ones that are relevant to your site.

 

The tool also shows the amount of competition on a given keyword, a suggested bid for that keyword, the average monthly searches for that keyword and the best page of your Web site to land that searcher.

This tool will actually help us in creating a better, more relevant, keyword list for your SEO campaign. We will be able to find the keywords that people are searching for a specific market and apply it to your search engine optimization and social media optimization.
Even thought this tool is in its BETA phase, we think it has a lot of potential.

link: Sktool - Search-based Keyword Tool    

 

Google Wave was released at the recent Google I/O event as a demo product. It is an amazing real time collaboration and communication platform with email, instant messaging and heaps more combined to form an awesome product.

The demo product is an HTML 5 applicaion built using the Google Web Toolkit. Wave is being released as an open source product. Its open platform encourages developers to build other Wave clients, extensions and embed waves in other web pages and platforms. The product is characterised by the 3P’s namely product, platform and protocol.

The brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia are the creators of this incredible product. Their previous creation was Google Maps which is now the defacto standard for online mapping of geographical locations. This has taken a good couple of years to develop and bring it to its current form. Jens stressed this fact to the audience - You must remember that all this is happening in your browser.

A “wave” contains equal parts document and conversation where people can simultaneously work and communicate together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.

 

 

How Google Wave Works

You create a wave and add contacts to it. All the contacts on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, gadgets and feeds from other sites on the web. All members can edit the wave directly and also insert replies. You can see all the edits in real time as the changes are made to the wave by others.You can be running a Firefox browser and your friend can be on Safari browser. You can add as many contacts as you want.

The playback feature is a very powerful feature. If a new contact joins the wave, she can see the collaboration and communication that has taken place in a certain form at that point of time. By clicking playback, she can see how the whole wave has evolved from the beginning to the point of time she joined the wave. This is a very powerful feature especially when teams are working on different parts of the same project document.

Some of the really cool features are:

• Google Wave offers plain vanilla type email conversation where you can send emails to contacts you choose to.
• Instant messaging where unlike the typical IM chat, you see the message - Sarah is typing
  before you get to see the message once Sarah is done typing, in a wave, you see the chat transferred character by character in real time
• Use playback to see how the wave has evolved to its current shape
• Drag and drop attachments, say photos, into the wave from your desktop and everyone else on the wave can see it almost instantly
• API for embedding your wave to web pages such as a blog
• Wave can be embedded in social media sites like Orkut
• You can participate in a wave from your mobile phone
• Editing of the wave in real time and edits appear instantly with markups denoting the different edits
• Ability to send a private message to a particular contact which others cannot see
• Teams working on a project document can collaborate in real time and communicate simultaneously when working on it

Google Wave can be viewed as a platform with a rich collection of open APIs. This allows developers to build new extensions that can work with waves and also embed waves in other web services.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the basis for storing and sharing waves with the all important live concurrency mechanism which allows edits to be viewed in real time across contacts and services. This protocol is designed such that any user’s wave services can communicate with each other and with the Google Wave service. This is going to be achieved by making the Google Wave protocol code open source.

An excellent video on the Google Wave demo by the development team will give you a great idea of the amazing features that have been built into it.

 

Google is encouraging the developer community to create some cool apps that can be incorporated into the Google Wave before it is made public. You can sign up at http://wave.google.com to be notified of the release date when Google Wave is launched as a public product.

 Original Blog Post: www.naturalsearchblog.com

 

This is a great video that explains what twitter is... Now, can you use this for your business?  Can you help your website be more prominent on the search engines by using twitter?  Yes.

1 - Follow as many people as you can, friends, coworkers, customers, etc...
2 - Do not copy paste your website link over and over again every 5 minutes...  try to create relationships, promote your business by helping others...  with their problems, etc.
3 - The Goal here is to have MORE FOLLOWERS than people you follow, IF YOU BUILD GOOD RELATIONSHIPS, more and more people will follow your feed.
4 - Promote your services, products and your website at twitter and your followers will convert into potential customers.
5 - Keep in touch, and you'll see you can get business from this and also make your web presence grow.

Facebook is the fastest growing social networking website and business owners and marketing managers should consider adding conversational marketing to their toolbox of marketing strategies. Facebook has powerful features that can help grow your business if used correctly.  Follow these tips as you implement marketing on Facebook.

1. Profile: Build an attention getting profile that will make an impact. Think of this as your branding for your business. Include a good photo, contact info, a link to your website, education, work history, personal interests, etc.
2. Networks: Take the time when building your profile to include the city your business is in, your industry, and other networking information. Let potential business partners find you and make yourself more searchable.
3. Friends: Add friends to build your networking. There are tools to find friends that are already on Facebook. Use Facebook tools to meet people with common interests, build a relationship and gather them as friends to build up your base.
4. Groups: Join online groups that are related to what you do. This is an excellent way to make contacts and build from there. If you don’t see a group that is a close enough fit, form your own. An excellent way to brand yourself as the authority.
5. Blog: Create and syndicate your own blog on your personal profile page. Broadcast your blog using RSS and increase your exposure and increase your readership.
6. Comment: Make comments on other people’s profiles. By reaching out, you will start interacting and engaging with new people and contacts. The more comments you leave on these virtual walls, the more exposure you get.
7. Events: List your events and new services by creating an events page. Instead of printing flyers and mailers, use the Facebook Events app. to get the word out. You can invite anyone you want. Guests can leave valuable feedback.
8. Gifts: send virtual gifts to show your appreciation. Send a virtual potted plant or flowers to make that great impression. There are third party applications that allow you to give unique gifts. A great way to build strong relationships.

Original Blog Post: webdesignseo.com

Yes. If you embed a video from youtube inside one of the pages of your website, Youtube automatically will create a link back to that page on the youtube video page at www.youtube.com
This is great since you will have a video inside your website which will bring fresh content, it will help you improve your AVERAGE TIME ON SITE and also this link back will create a new INLINK to your website, helping your SEO campaign and your web presence.

So keep adding those related videos and always remember to include some relevant text talking about the video and why it could be important for your audience.

Destiny

MAKING YOUR SOCIAL PROFILES WORK THE EXTRA MILE FOR YOU:

1 - USE THE SOCIAL NETWORKS:

The best way to make these profiles work for you is by actually using them to communicate with your customers, colleagues and other professionals. If you can don't have much time at least use ONE of the many social networks like FACEBOOK or TWITTER, to start communicating and you will see improvement into the web presence of that specific profile and so forth an increase in links from it to your website which will translate in a better SEO campaign and increase in your ranking online.

We recommend taking one of them to start, it could be facebook for example...

Start by writing a different blog entry there or putting part of a blog entry and say "read more here" with a link to your website... You can also publish more pictures (very easily) and having them link to your website.

This will make your social network profile grow even more and also have real communication, since people will start sending you messages about those entries and you may be able to help someone with a problem and even get a customer using this new way of communication.

2 - INVITE MORE PEOPLE:

The other way you can make those social network profiles grow is by actually inviting as many people as you know to join them... the more friends and followers you have the better that social profile will work for you.

 

 

Here you have another recommendation for improving your SEO CAMPAIGN...

  Profiles:

To be able to create a youtube profile you need a video first.  so if you already have a video you created for the company you can ask the people who did the video for you to send it to you in digital format to upload to youtube. Then you go to www.youtube.com and create your new profile. Upload the video and then in your profile information can put text explaining what you do with a link to your website. Then you can also include this video inside your website with a link to this same youtube profile.

If you do not have a video, we have a good example from a customer who took pictures from a project and then created a video with their own computer just making a slideshow of the project using the pictures. You can do that too, most computers have the ability to do it... and then upload it to youtube.

This will create new inlinks to your website and improve your internet marketing campaign.

Destiny.

 

As part of our SEO campaigns we are always looking for new and different ways to put your name out there...  this is going to be a series of tips you can use to make your WEB PRESENCE grow.

 

Linkedin is a professional's social network. Linkedin is not linked to a company but to a person, so you need to provide some personal/professional  information from you for the main people in your company to be able to do this kind of profile...  It will be named after your personal name and then have information about your company website, etc.  We recommend to include your website address, and a litle blurb of what you do. In the future you can even use this tool to connect with other professionals online.

We recomend doing this for the 3 or 4 key people in your company. Ussually these profiles require this information from yo:

• First name
• Last name
• Date of birth
• Place of birth
• City were you live now
• Education
• Business name
• Your place in the company: CEO, manager, etc...
• And  a picture if possible to put in the profile...

Contact us if you need help with your SEO campaign, Internet marketing or any website design services.

Destiny.

 

Internet Marketing

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
• Social Media Optimization (SMO).
• Organic Positioning.
• Viral Online marketing.
• Google Adwords: Marketing campaigns just a click away.
• Traffic Analysis and Website Optimization.

As an Internet marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogsphere and special blog search engines.

Social Media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Destinsy Soft can help you with your INTERNET MARKETING CAMPAIGN.