The Yahoo Search Blog announced they have made “significant enhancements” to how they show news results in the web search results. Yahoo is now showing news results in different positions throughout the web search results, based on their new “News Direct Display (DD)” algorithm. In addition, Yahoo improved how they detect news queries and will show more news boxes in the search results due to that improvement.

For example, a search on spears returns a news box in the middle of Yahoo Search:

I decided to see how Yahoo handled a search for cuil (for more on Cuil, see Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?) and yes, they do show a news result at the top of the listings, just like Google:

vs:

Yes, Google ranks cuil.com as the number one result in the web search results, while Yahoo currently does not - but that is for a different blog post.

Google has also had news results within the different positions of the web search results since they launched Universal Search in May 2007.

Monitor, monitor, on the wall, “Who’s the most Internet Famous of them all?”

Wired.com has launched a new, free service for everyone who wonders how Internet famous they currently are.

It’s called the “Celebrity Meter.” It won’t tell you how whether you have celebrity friends, but it will let you know - in rough numbers - how much of an online celebrity you are.

Wired’s Celebrity Meter launched in beta this morning. The program uses data from Google’s Social Graph service to see how many people are following you on MySpace, Twitter, and a personal blog/site. It takes into account things like incoming links and number of friends or followers to give you a numerical score — which you can then compare to other big names in the blogosphere and across the Web in general.

We know Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Mike Arrrington will be battling for the top spot.

Wired writes, “Of course, it’s not a complete view. The measurement doesn’t account for FriendFeed, Facebook, or a lot of other social services just yet. But it’s still hard to resist giving it a whirl.”

In the field of online marketíng, a landing page is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search engine result link. It is sometimes known as a lead capture page and usually displays content that reinforces the message contained in the ad or search snippet.

Types of Landing Pages
There are two main types of landing page:

1) Reference Landing Page

Reference landing pages deliver information relevant to the visitor. This could include text, images, links or other elements not requiring interaction.

 2) Transactional Landing Page

Transactional landing pages ask visitors to complete a transaction such as clicking on an advertisement, filling out a form or downloading a file with the aim being immediate or eventual conversion of that prospect to a sale. To aid the capturing of new leads, transactional pages generally seek visitor contact details such as a name, email address and/or a telephone number.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is known as a conversion. Landing page quality can be measured by the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action (the conversion rate). Since the Return on Investment (ROI) of pay per clíck (PPC) campaigns is often determined by the conversion rate, advertisers should be constantly testing, tweaking and improving their landing pages. We will discuss testing methods available, such as A/B testing and multivariate testing, in a later lesson.

Why Are Landing Pages Important?

In PPC and search marketing campaigns, the landing page is usually customized very closely to the advertisement which triggered it. In PPC campaigns, landing pages are vital in order to “close the sale” and encourage visitors to take the action you want them to take. By adding a parameter to the landing page URL (and therefore forming a tracking URL), advertisers can measure the ROI on their PPC ads based on relative clíck-through rates.

While enticing ad copy is very important in order to attract clicks, effective landing pages are vital in order to “close the sale” and encourage your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

Landing pages often determine whether you make a conversion or not. Using landing pages on your site also means that some visitors won’t ever see your home page. First impressions haven’t ever been so important, so you need your landing pages to represent your business, product or service in the best possible light.

What are the Goals of a Landing Page?

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that a conversion is the main goal of an effective landing page. But attracting and capturing qualified leads is an easier and more important goal. Why? Because you can always “sell” to visitors later. Grabbing their contact details ensures you have captured them at the height of their interest.

So the main goals of a landing page are: Continue Reading »
How to Create Killer Landing Pages

Video is becoming an important part of local search marketing campaigns, and this week’s SMX Local Mobile conference features speaking talking about how small and medium businesses can use video to be more effective with their online marketing. Video solutions providers to these panels are Jared Simon, VP of Business Development of TurnHere, and Anupam Gupta, President and CEO of Mixpo are speaking. I caught up with Gupta earlier this week and asked for a preview of what he’ll be presenting at the conference.

To summarize, Mixpo is a turnkey video marketing solution geared specifically for SMBs (small-to-medium businesses), which combines a self-service platform including hosting, a interactive video player, and online editing that allows clients to simply and quickly repurpose their video.

One of the notable SEO benefits: Multiple videos can be developed from a single original client video, allowing for an easier assembly of video content applied for both search optimization and video advertising.

“This is an exciting time for online video advertising. More advertising dollars and marketing budgets are moving towards video. Big brands and big advertisers jumped into video first. Now there are millions of small brands and advertisers that are just starting to get exposed to online video,” says Anupam.

He explains that SMBs are in an ideal position to take advantage of video marketing and Video SEO. “Video is a powerful mechanism for communicating what your business is all about,” says Anupam. “Video drives more qualified leads and conversions, all in a way that is measurable and where we can show accountability. Measurability and accountability is what made search marketing successful, “and that’s what SMBs and SMB advertisers need to be all about to succeed.”

Adding to the benefits of video are interactivity technologies for direct customer engagement. In the top-right hand corner of each Mixpo video is an icon, which allows the viewer to choose from a series of calls-to-action any time during video play.

“We’re already seeing a lot of interest from the SMB industry. Video is in the early stages where we’re going to see a lot of ramp in even just the next number of months to come.,” says Anupam.

He explains that Mixpo has two constituents: The actual advertiser (client) who wants to be more effective in their online marketing; and the aggregator, who already has a relationship with these customers. Mixpo refers to “aggregators” as interactive agencies, directories, publishers, etc.

“What we hear from agencies - including firms involved in search marketing and SEO - is that they need more effective tools and capabilities to serve their clients in a better way, and show them how they can drive measurable results,” says Anupam. “What we hear from advertisers, is what they’ve been traditionally doing online hasn’t necessarily worked, or they can’t really measure the effectiveness of all of their marketing programs.”

Both of these constituents do understand search as a measurement tool, “and really love the ability where they can measure things on their own” says Anupam. “Everything Mixpo provides is backed by a very solid measurement platform,” which allows for optimization of both performance and visibility online.

As for Mixpo’s business model, it’s rather simple: cost-effective opportunities for SMB advertisers, and sharing advertising revenue with their aggregator partners, whatever their sharing model may be. “Their success is our success,” says Anupam.

As for a sneak preview into his presentation, Anupam shared with me that people attending his session can expect to learn about Mixpo’s recent partnership activities and how they will benefit search marketers involved, or looking to get involved, in the local video space. He also mentioned that their own solution is a good compliment to the fellow video speaker TurnHere, which concentrates more on the creative agency side of video production compared to Mixpo’s focus on their self-service platform. Mixpo does offer their own creative agency services, but Anupam looks at TurnHere as a technology and marketing ally for the emerging local video space, and not really a competitor.

Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware from News.com reports Google’s Blogger accounts “for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts.” Sophos, an antivirus vendor, published a report showing the state of malware injections and attacks throughout the web.

Specifically, hackers can set up “malicious blogs” on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs.

The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn’t it ironic that Google hosts the number one problem of malware on the Internet?

Yesterday, I said that we had reports of spam on Google Sites, as well as spam on Google Groups. But this report shows that Google’s Blogger is worse then both of those.

A Google spokesperson gave News.com a statement:

Google takes the security of our users very seriously, and we work hard to protect them from malware. Using Blogger, or any Google product, to serve or host malware is a violation of our product policies. We actively work to detect and remove sites that serve malware from our network.

Microsoft Senior Vice President Satya Nadella announced at the company’s financial analyst meeting that their partnership with Facebook has been extended to include search.

The existing partnership has Microsoft serving up banner and sponsored ads on the popular social network. Last year, Microsoft paid $240 million to own a 1.6% stake in Facebook, a private company.

Microsoft expects Facebook members to see the integrated Live Search, including search ads, by the end of the 2008.

Earlier today, Facebook announced a new initiative, opening up its platform to aggregate feeds from other sites, including local search site Citysearch and other social networks such as Digg and Twitter.

In March, Microsoft announced its alternative to Google’s OpenSocial, a data portability partnership across 5 social networks: Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced a reorganization which will split the Platforms and Services Division into two new divisions: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services.

Twitter is a relatively new web 2.0 site that is starting to gain a lot of popularity. That means that a lot of people have heard of it, but it is also quite common to run into people who haven’t heard of it.. yet. Twitter.com is this social site that encourages users to post often about what they are currently doing.

A lot of people are using it to improve their marketing reach, by being an active twitterer they gain followers who are interested in what they have going on. This means people being exposed to their updates on a regular basis. For example, if you have hundreds of followers in Twitter and you decide to post an affiliate link, that means hundreds of people have instantly been exposed to your offer. In this article, I will discuss ways to maximize Twitter for your marketing as well as a big mistake you need to avoid.

In order to have a fan base per se of followers in Twitter, you must be able to keep their interest in you and what you are doing now. “What are you doing?” is the whole foundation of what Twitter is about in the first place. Make sure to post daily, if not several times throughout the day, updates about what you are doing. The magical thing behind this is that many of your contacts will be able to feel like they know you so much better, will trust you more, and feel much more comfortable about working with you. On the other hand, when you follow others you can learn about them and their possible needs.

The big mistake to watch out for is only posting affiliate links or offers on your Twitter page. This looks like Spam and many people will see you as just abusing Twitter for your personal gain. Think of it this way, if you would not want to invite your friends or family to keep up with you via Twitter, then you are going about it all wrong. As with anything you send out or provide, ninety percent should be content and ten percent (at most) advertising.

So this concept is quite simple… constantly post throughout the day what you are doing.. it is usually very simple and only takes a few seconds to post! Secondly, if you write articles or provide content online, provide a link for those in your Twitter posts. You may post many things within one day, but the last thing you post for the day is usually the most important because it will be there the longest. This means that your last post for the day should contain a link that you want your followers to see before your start Twittering again the next day!

Another part of Twitter is contributing. As with any social site it should be a give and take relationship. Notice that give comes first… the more you give the more people will want to work with you and the more attention you will receive. Make sure to read and follow other users in Twitter. If you read something interesting or helpful, then make sure to reply and say so, or even put a link for it on your Twitter so that you are directing others to more quality content. This can also be as simple as connecting with other users. If they know you are reading their Twitter page, they will be much more likely to check out what you have going on too.

To get started in Twitter you should first invite contacts who aren’t using Twitter and also find contacts who are already using Twitter so that you can start following them and also start getting people to follow you. Twitter has a nice invite and find feature that makes this incredibly easy. To grow your reach even more you can start following people who follow or are followed by the people who follow you.. or that you follow. You might need to read that sentence again.. but basically you can find other users to connect with that are already connected to other users.

Now for a big tip. If you really want to maximize the potential with Twitter, you should make sure to take advantage of any plug-ins or sites that support Twitter. Here are three, but I’m sure there will be many more in the future if not already.

Squidoo allows you to input your Twitter account info into your Squidoo account and then it can automatically post updates to your Twitter account when you create or update Squidoo lenses.

Facebook has an application called Twitter, that automatically updates your Facebook status when you make a Twitter post.

The other tool is a free WordPress plug-in called TweetMyBlog that allows you to create a two-way connection from your blogs to Twitter. TweetMyBlog allows you to use a widget on your Wordpress blogs that will display your current Twitter feed.. that way all visitors to your blog can look at the widget and see a running feed of your latest Twitter posts. If they clíck on that, they will be brought to your Twitter page. In addition, when you make a new post to your blog, TweetMyBlog will automatically make a post to your Twitter page with a link to your latest blog post. Imagine the extra exposure you can receive by using these tools that help people see more of what you are doing.

Lastly, have fun! Twitter is a social site… so interact and enjoy!

There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld discussing if Google will ever fully “forgive” a site after it has been penalized.

For example, let’s say you have been slapped with a link penalty, and you remove all those bad links. Will Google every rank you as well as you once ranked? The thread has some excellent experience to quote:

Senior member, netmeg, said that Google does completely forgive:

one of my clients was completely banned from Google for a spammy link exchange program; we cleaned ‘em all up and filed a reinclusion request, and they are currently #1-3 for just about every relevant search phrase you could think of. They’re ranking higher now than they ever did before the penalty - but it did take about a year to work their way up to that point.

Yes, I agree that it takes a long time to earn back your trust from Google.

But WebmasterWorld administrator asks a key question, Google may forgive, but do they forget? Tedster said:

I do think Google always has a record of the past penalty somewhere, and any future infractions might be dealt with quite harshly.

I am very confident Google records each and every penalty for a website, historically. This is incredibly important data for Google to have when manually reviewing a reconsideration request. Does Google have a three-strikes and your out rule? I doubt it, but all this information is 100% relevant for the process.

comScore has released the top 50 ad networks and top 50 web properties for June 2008.

In ad networks, AOL’s Platform-A takes the top spot, reaching 90% of American internet users. Yahoo comes in second, reaching 83% and Google comes in third with 81%. Here’s the full list:

In web properties, Google leads the pack 140.2 million unique visitors, but Yahoo comes in a very close second at 140.1 million. This past April, Google’s sites beat Yahoo’s properties for the first time. Microsoft trails in third with 119 million. AOL is in 4th with 110 million and Fox Interactive rounds out the top 5 with 85 million. Here’s the chart: