Social Media Optimization - A New Angle to Your Online Promotions

The term SMO or Social Media Optimization is termed by Rohit Bhargava. SMO seems to be the buzz of the virtual land these days. But what is it all about?

SMO or Social Media Optimization is a set of methods that generate publicity of a website, a service or even a concept through the various channels of social media like RSS feeds, content communities and community websites like Digg and Del.icio.us etc. Rohit Bhargava gave 5 rules for conducting Social Media Optimization:

1. Increase your linkability.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy.
3. Reward inbound links.
4. Help your content travel.
5. Encourage the mashup.
   

What are the ways you can utilize Social Media Optimization?

Well you can include RSS feeds, add a ‘Digg This’ button, dedicate blog space to what you want to promote and also include third party community functionalities like Flickr photos and You Tube videos.

What are the benefits of Social Media Optimization?

The benefits that you will gain through Social Media Optimization are two folds –

1. This is a great way to promote your site or whatever you want to promote. When done in the most efficient way, it gives you high popularity and your fair share of limelight.
2. Social Media Optimization also helps in search engine ranking. It pushes up the Page Rank and also increases web traffic. This sure helps in search engine marketing.
   

In a way, Social Media Optimization is a holistic approach to popularity and promotion in different ways.

Novel Advanced Search Page of Google

Google advanced search is really advanced and I am sure it will entice you if you are a regular Google user.

It is more user friendly than the older advanced search page. The whole page is divided into 11 boxes with distinguished titles. There is a new box at the top of the page that shows the keywords, as you input information on the lower search box.

All the search boxes are divided under three headings. The first heading is “Find web pages that have.” There are 5 boxes under this heading in which you can stuff your specific keywords. You can put words or exact phrase.

The second heading is “But don’t show pages that have”. Here you can put the unwanted words.

Moreover, third heading is “Need more tools”. Here you can choose various options like results per pages, language and file type. The last box provides you an opportunity to do your search within a specific website or domain.

I don’t want to compare the new page with the older one but I want to say that the new one is crafted a bit differently and the wordings are more user-friendly.

Omniture Summit 2008: Mecca of Online Marketing Professionals Concluded

March 2008 would be a significant month for the Internet marketing professionals worldwide. Omniture Summit 2008 was concluded in Salt Lake City on the 7’Th of March and the event has seen overwhelmed response from Web analytics and online marketing professionals. It was a huge gathering of nearly 2000 customers from industry leaders in various sectors like financial services, travel, retail, automotive, media etc.

The event was full of delegates from different industry leaders like GM, Kelly Services, HP, Microsoft, Bentley, Think jobs.com, Napster, TNT, Deutsche bank, Healtholgy, Xerox, CNN, Redcats, Pepsi, Avis etc. and HP was the hardware sponsor of this online marketing professional’s great event.

Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong and marketing author and thought-leader Seth Godin were the eminent speakers for these customers. The event was a huge success in which Omniture revealed its integrated marketing suite of products for online marketers with the release of SiteCatalyst 14, SearchCenter 3 and Omniture Test&Target.

According to the attendees, the presentations were helpful and informative, the networking opportunities were invaluable, and Omniture showed they really know how to cater to their customers and put on a first-class event.

Furthermore, at Omniture Summit, the company announced the addition of Adobe Systems and Baidu.com to the company's Omniture Genesis Network of partners.

So, from a period of 4’Th March 2008 to 7’Th March 2008, the Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, was confronting 30 % of the world’s online marketing spend gathering which was represented by 2000 marketing professionals.

Yahoo! Marking Strong Presence in Israel

The central advanced research organization of Yahoo! Inc., Yahoo! Research, is a leading global Internet brand. They strive for big inventions and for creating the next generation of businesses for Yahoo! One of its primary goals is to develop leading-edge algorithms and technology to empower the next generation of Internet search.

The latest news is that Yahoo! is opening a new research laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Haifa is the third largest city in the country.

The lab will focus over the research and development in the areas of Web search and information extraction. The sources say that the office will be led by Dr. Ronny Lempel, who is an information organization and retrieval expert. Of late, Dr. Lempel worked for the Information Retrieval Group at IBM's Haifa Research Lab.

The Yahoo! Research Israel Lab will focus on boiling down complex technology problems into simple solutions to simplify the Web search. As a demonstration of its commitment to next-generation search, Yahoo! recently opened Yahoo! Labs in Bangalore, India, and appointed eminent scientist Dr. Rajeev Rastogi to head the new India lab.

These expansion plans of Yahoo! may result in some of the major developments in the area of Web search as according to a Yahoo official “search is still in its infancy.”

Google Analytics: Sometimes it skip updating statistics of your website?

One service of Google which has proved itself one of the premier services is undoubtedly Google Analytics. This service has been redesigned so that the website owners learn even more about the activities of their website visitors. Since Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers and website so they can learn easily how the visitors interact with their website.

The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve the results of different websites online. Various website owners are utilizing it for this service only.

Now, Google analytics hardly fail to update the daily reports. But, sometimes it may happen that the statistics are present but they are just not being displayed for a particular date (say March 26, 2008) in the graph. If you highlight the previous day’s date you can see the numbers below the graph.

It is true, while the visitors graph seems a day behind but if you change the date in the date drop down to today, it will actually show the correct statistics in the detailed reports.

It happens sometimes. So don’t worry your Google analytics is working efficiently for you.

Google Benchmarking and how it can generate more traffic

So far, Google has launched various services under its three categories of products, i.e., desktop products, mobile products and online products. Now, under its online products it has a service by the name of benchmarking service. This is an optional Google Analytics service which shows how your website's statistics compare against other industry verticals.

In the beta version of this service you can compare your website's visits, webpage views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites.

If you have such a data then you can easily understand where your website lacks in terms of content or services. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics.

You might be thinking that how can you enable the benchmarking. The process is simple and easy to understand. To enable the benchmarking service for your account, the Google must first opt in to share the account data in an anonymous and aggregated format. In order to do that select the option to share your Analytics data "Anonymously with Google and the benchmarking service" from the Edit Account and Data Sharing Settings page.

The Google takes up to two weeks for the benchmarking data to appear in your account. If you do not choose to share your Google Analytics data anonymously then benchmarking will not be enabled for your account.

So, if you are an advertiser, website or any company offering some services through the Internet the benchmarking can be of great help to you.

Google Benchmarking - Beta Version

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website's statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site's Visits, Page Views, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics.

Source : Google

Latest invention of the Google for the information hungry

There is no limit of innovation, at least for Google! Sometimes, it makes me astonished as what kind of brain they have. They are continuously developing the search patterns and it is becoming more user-friendly. Let see their latest technology.

You were seeing single search box on the Google webpage. Now, sometimes you can find one more search box in it. What does it mean? It means that if you are going to search some big websites like naukri, Sulekha, YouTube, Indiatimes and some of more high traffic and popular sites on Google, you can get one more search box with the search results. Find the image below



A question may arise as how it is going to help you. It will refine your search and now you don’t need to visit more sites which are of no use for you. You can get what you want in one go.

This facility of Google is for some big websites right now but it is gaining popularity and in coming times you may get two search boxes with more number of websites. It may save a lot of time and you can find your specific page quickly from the specific websites from Google. So keep searching!

Yahoo Search Index Update - Weather report

Yahoo has started some changes in the crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. As this is in progress and not completed, you may see some changes in ranking, page shuffling, etc.

With this weather update you might also experience drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.

To know more visit Yahoo Search Blog