Google launches Google Insights for search marketers

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 5, 2008

Today Google Insights launched, a tool developed for AdWords advertisers to better understand trends in search terms. You can use this tool to compare the traffic for a keyword or phrase and filter by vertical (Category) and region. This is useful for search marketing professionals both for their efforts in PPC and natural results marketing. In both cases knowing the search volume is one of the most important strategic variables, after all why spend time and money on terms with less traffic than others that you can work or spend on?

In the past, Overture was the most reliable way to get free query volume information from one of the major search engines. But they have discontinued their tool and Google has been releasing more search volume data around their AdWords PPC product and now has several of the most important keyword research tools for your webmaster arsenal.

Read more about it on the AdWords blog.

SEO Friendly Titles – The first WordPress plugin you should install

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 5, 2008

One of the very first things I do when installing a WordPress blog is to hack the titles. By default the page titles that WordPress generates are not SEO friendly, and the individual post page titles put the title of the post after the blog and archive wording.

The all in one seo pack plugin allows you to modify the blog’s meta tags through the WordPress admin panel as well as on the individual posts through the post editor. Its defaults are sensible and it represents a cleaner solution than hacking at the code to do it yourself because of the abstraction gained through the WordPress plugin architecture.

It’s now part of my standard WordPress install and should really be a part of the core software.

Yahoo search update for August 2008

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 4, 2008

Quick heads up for the SEO crowd: Yahoo search is being updated with new indexing and ranking algorithms today. You should see significant changes in their results as they are being rolled out.

Yahoo launches the Yahoo Music API

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 4, 2008

Yahoo announced their Yahoo Music API today, releasing another tool in their open strategy of providing services to web developers. Their music API allows other websites to tap into some of the Yahoo Music content. Their API can be used for catalog data, such as searching Yahoo Music by artist, or getting charts like the new releases or popular music or for user data, like recommendations for the user. The user data requires Yahoo’s browser-based authentication while the catalog data does not.

Right now, the rate limit is 5,000 queries a day, which is too low for me to consider it worth building on yet but hopefully they’ll announce a paid service for commercial sites that want to build something serious on it.

Check out the API and apply for an API key here or have a look at their example application (Facebook app, requiring Facebook login).

Yahoo claims that Yahoo Buzz is social bookmarking leader over Digg

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 3, 2008

On Friday Yahoo held its annual shareholder meeting, and while the Yahoo board’s deal with Carl Icahn’s opposing slate of directors has removed a lot of the drama from the meeting it was still interesting. And one of the things I’d like to highlight is a claim made by Yahoo president Susan Decker about Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo’s social media site that’s currently in BETA.

Steven Shankland blogs on CNET that at around 11:13 am Decker boasted that Yahoo Buzz has “displaced Digg as the top way to find content across the entire Internet”.

Without supporting information it’s hard to assess the validity of this claim, but given Yahoo’s size and audience it would be foolish for Social Media Marketers to ignore this service in their online marketing efforts.

Right now, it is a bit of a walled garden, and it seems that they will differ from Digg in that some editorial control comes from relying on trusted publishers. Whether relying on feeds from screened publishers is a BETA restriction or a long-term approach to Yahoo Buzz is unclear. But you can get a head start and apply to be a publisher with Yahoo Buzz here.

Sitemeter disables IE browsing, hopes no one notices.

Posted by Nick Ashley – August 2, 2008

Web Analytics service Sitemeter pushed out an update to their tracking code sometime early this morning. Unfortunately, it contained a bug that would stop Internet Explorer users from being able to access any site using the code. Apparently Sitepoint needs a few more QA testers on their team.

A bugfix has now apparently been pushed out, and the issue no longer exists. Whats interesting, however, is that Sitemeter has made no mention of their snafu. I understand that when the bug is discovered, their primary goal is to get it fixed, not issue official statements. However once they pushed out the fix, a simple “Sorry we screwed up, we just pushed a fix out, let us know if there are any more problems” should be in order.

Google testing related queries under individual search results

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 2, 2008

Aaron Wall noted on his blog that Google is testing related search terms under individual sites in the results pages. Have a look at his screen shot here for an example:

The new del.icio.us at Delicious.com

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 1, 2008

Yahoo launched the new del.icio.us at Delicious.com, releasing its long-awaited new version of the popular social bookmarking website. According to their blog, the release focuses on changes to:

  • Speed – Yahoo claims to have addressed scalability issues for Delicious and improved page loading times.
  • Search – The search feature has been rewritten to work better and handle more social filtering of the search results.
  • Design – The site has had a complete design overhaul. They have a what’s new page to explain the new navigation and layout.

Yahoo Search now uses Yelp and LinkedIn apps by default

Posted by Robert Gentel – August 1, 2008

Yahoo’s response to Google’s universal search is SearchMonkey. Inspired by the JavaScript-based website extension from Greasemonkey it is a Facebook Apps style platform where apps (called “Enhancements”) run on Yahoo’s search results, extending them with structured data. Yahoo allows users to add and remove these apps from their search results through the Yahoo Search Gallery.

Have a look at what it looks like in practice. In this search, Yelp.com’s result in the search now has structured data from Yelp’s search enhancement.

Microsoft launches new Live Search homepage design

Posted by Robert Gentel – July 31, 2008

Microsoft has launched a new design on the home page of their Live.com search engine that you can see in the screen shot to your left.

The image has squares that link to different searches (image, map and web). For example, in the screen shot here the tool tip reads “What will you see on your Safari to Botswana?” and links to an “animals in Botswana” search.

I expect that they’ll use other images and search in the future, and this has a lot more to do with the branding of their search assets than any functional change. Because there is a lower cost of entry to having mapping and image search Microsoft’s maps and supplemental search services sometimes have more bells and whistles than Google’s equivalent features and Microsoft is keen to get these in front of people.