Google released the Penguin Update on April 24th which is aimed to combat "spammy" web pages. If your site is over optimized it may be affected by this update. The update addresses website content & back links:

Content: Each individual page must be Unique and Duplicate Content across your pages should be avoided at all costs. Keyword stuffing & keyword cloaking will result in penalties and lower rankings. When you look at (read) any page in your site, does it sound 'natural' or is the same information repeated with slight variation? Is ALL of the content on your page about one specific topic or "keyword phrase" ? As an example we always tell clients to make their blogs very focused on one subject/topic because each blog entry is a single page in the eyes of search engines - each blog has its own url. This is why properly structured blogs rank so well and generally very quickly. By making each individual page in your site about one topic/subject/keyword phrase you are not only making it easy for a site visitor to know what the page is about, you are making it easy for SEARCH ENGINES to know what the page is about and you will be ranked accordingly. The goal has been and will always be: Readable, Quality, Focused Content.

Backlinks: Anchor Text vs. Link Source : The penguin update appears to be assigning more "Quality" to the Link Source as opposed to the Anchor Text and for good reason. It has always been relatively easy to manipulate the anchor text of a link, which until now has always been an important factor in Ranking Results(SERP). With todays technology it is easier to determine the "Quality" and "Relevance" of a site that a link originates from. It is more difficult to manipulate the source of al link so more WEIGHT is being given to Link Source vs Anchor Text. Many Link Building companies will continue to come with creative ways to get around this latest update and will often get results - until the next update. You can take the rollercoaster route OR you can simply go after Quality Link Sources , ideally within your niche. One of the best places to find these links is your top ranking competitors. If your competitor has better ranking for a given keyword, chances are they have more QUALITY links than you do. Reverse engineering competitors linking strategies has been a tried and true technique for years and this will not change any time soon.

How can you tell if your site took a "hit" ? By looking at your "Search" traffic between April 15 and April 30th. If there is a drop of more than 20%, chances are good that your site needs to be adjusted. If you are an SEO client, we are already evaluating your site through analytics and webmasters to see if any adjustments need to be made. Over the past 30 days we have also been updating the following for all SEO clients : Page Titles, Meta Description, Meta Tags. This was done in anticipation of the Penguin Update. If you have any questions or concerns about your website and the recent Google update please contact us.

Google has launched a new tool called Browser Size on their Google Labs. This tool could help you analyze the content on your website and distribute most important information, buttons or calls to action in the right place (where they will have more visibility)

BrowserSize allows you to bring your website (thru a web url address) and showing it at the same time than a grid of visibility. This will show you the percentage of people that will see the content and help you decide if you want to move something.



Even though this is not a new concept, it is a nice tool that helps us realize where we put content and how we can make our landing pages work harder for us.

Try it, click here

 

• 300,000+ business have a presence on facebook
• Participants in online communities usually spend more $ online.
• 70% of companies plan to increase investment in social media by an average of 40% in 2010.
• Social media = Low Cost Marketing + Getting Traction
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

What do you think about social media?  Share your story and if you need more information on how social media can help your business grow please call us at 1(866) 388-2697, or click here to contact us.

You can start by checking these sites:

• facebook
• twitter
• youtube
• tumblr
• myspace

Thanks
Destiny

Here's a good example of Google maps helping you on your internet marketing campaign. If you search for SEO Sarasota (Search engine optimization Sarasota) which is one of the services we provide in one of the areas we provide it locally you'll find us on the map at the very beginning of the first page of Google.

We created a youtube channel to share videos with Internet marketing tips, good SEO practices and search engine friendly website design. Here's the first video with some of the websites we created...

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.

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

 

Here you have a couple of good videos about search privacy. They talk about how privacy works in the google search and on the other hand what to expect when searching which can help us in a way to understand how we need to do a search engine optimization campaign (SEO). On the other hand it has cool features that not everybody knows about the google account and how to manage some advance features of the google search engine. Enjoy.