Posts Tagged ‘Google’
Online marketing becoming mainstream
It’s not often that you hear of Online Marketing in mainstream media, however your attention is certainly caught when it’s publicised by a major newspaper.
TheAge.com.au recently published ‘the beginner’s guide to Google Adwords‘, targeted at people unfamiliar with Adwords.
The article briefly explains the importance of positioning in the SERPs, the cost of advertising, and targeting ads for your audience.
It unfortunately doesn’t go into detail of how to setup a campaign, nor the time involved and the requirement of managing and refining your ads, or how sophisticated adwords campaigns can be with Geo Targeting and use of the content network, but it is sure to pike the interests of new start-ups, and may artificially increase competitive keyterms for the short-term whilst amatuers experiment on their campaign.
Google Street View Blocked in England
A villager in Buckingham shire, England has challenged the Search Engine Giant, Google’s efforts to capture 3D images of the town’s streets for Google Maps’ Street-view.
A blockade of residents formed in front of Google’s streetview car on April 1st, protesting that they didn’t want images of their homes on the internet, with information and directions to their homes, including what their homes look like, fearing that the service could encourage burglary in the area.
Paul Jacobs, 43 of Broughton in Buckinghamshire first noticed the car from his home, and ran out to confront the driver. He then gathered residents to help form and called the police to the scene.
Jacobs says the service is “not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime”. He cited three burglaries in the community in the past weeks, and believes said “If our houses are plastered all over Google it’s an invitation for more criminals to strike.”
Google’s popular street view is a 3D version of Google Maps, which allows the user to take a 3D virtual tour of a street or neighbourhood. The 3D Images are created by a car driving around a street with various cameras mounted on the car to take pictures of the street to form a 360 degree image, and is later placed into the 3D map.
Google’s street-view is claimed to block out legible images of people’s faces and number-plates of cars, and whilst being a handy service, many privacy groups are concerned over the potential to abuse the service for wrong-doing.
Much of Washington DC including the White-house is removed from Google Satellite maps, amid security concerns, and it is alleged that terrorists used Google maps last year to plot the horrific bombings in Mumbai, which led to a petition asking for the service to be banned.
Paul Jacobs and his fellow villagers in Broughton will continue to oppose the service from entering their village to uphold their privacy, and more importantly, their security.
SEO Experiment Part 3 - Update
Following on from our SEO Experiment we’ve been conducting over the past month, we’re excited to bring you the following update
- Our experimental site was crawled by Google within hours
- The site was indexed in Google and ranking at the top of page one within 2 days for it’s key-term
- Crawled by Yahoo, MSN & Ask within the first week
- Indexed in MSN & Ask SERPs within two weeks
- Indexed within Yahoo! SERPs within three weeks
This was achieved with standard on-site SEO Practices, and minimal off-site SEO including a single link from a reputable website.
This demonstrates the power and value of Search Engine Optimisation, the benefit of using a domain name that matches your search term or topic, and how implementing a few of the simple recommendations by Google Webmasters can help your site rank well in the Search Engines.
Now our focus is to take the site to the next level by adding further content updates and some additional on and off-site SEO, and ranking for a range of other related keywords.
Stay tuned at Search Engine News for the latest on this SEO Experiment, and further updates on Search Engine News and Developments.
Yahoo-Microsoft-Bid-Update
In the ongoing saga of Microsoft’s continued attempts to buyout Yahoo!, Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft has come out publicly saying he still wants to buy Yahoo’s search company.
In a recent interview by AllThingsD with Balmer at this week’s 2009 Media Summit this week in New York, Balmer has said that Microsoft has made a significant investment in Research & Development into Search, which is something Google has clearly led the way in, but he believes Yahoo isn’t in a position to make such an investment.
Balmer believes that by combining Live Search with Yahoo’s search, the company will pool it’s resources, customers and advertisers together to add scale, and he seems to think therein lies the real value of merging the two businesses, with a goal of holding 15-20% of the search market in the next few years.
Balmer declined to comment on the new Kumo Search product, but did go on to say that search was updated at Microsoft every 9 months.