Not a month goes by without someone launching a new real-time search engine; but after trying out most of them, there are few I use on a regular basis. Factery Labs is about to change that with today’s launch of its real-time fact engine at 1:00 pm ET. Where other real-time search engines focus on hot tweets, popular links, and the like, Factery Labs skips all that and surfaces the facts behind the day’s trending news.
(image provided by Factery Labs)
The Early Bird Rate for Search Marketing Expo – SMX West expires Saturday, January 30th. Save up to $350 on your All Access ticket by registering now! Here’s why:
A few weeks ago I watched the movie called “Julie & Julia“. If you haven’t seen it yet, you definitely should because it is all about blogging (well, not all but blogging has played a huge role in the main character’s life).
Basically, the movie is about an ordinary woman who is so bored with her work that she starts blogging about how she is learning cooking. Her blogging style and schedule is ideal: she blogs daily, one or two recipe a day, and each post contains her personal, quite emotional coloring.
Everyone in the SEO industry knows and understands that most websites cannot live by on-site optimizations alone. After you perform your keyword research, complete your analysis of competitors who rank well for the terms and phrases you want to rank for, and highly optimize your site for optimal search engine placement, you are left with the mundane task of building links that point back to your website.
If there is one thing that I have learned over the past few years that I could share with newbies to the SEO world, it is that you have to build a well-rounded backlink portfolio in order to get long-term results.
Microformats should be one of those development trends that are going to change SEO as we know it.
Therefore it is a must that you start learning them and implementing them now.
Since the beginning of the year I have started regularly posting on microformats: I’ve looked at hCard microformat and the related tools and WordPress plugins, over-viewed most REL attributes and where we can use each of them, reviewed some tools recognizing and analyzing microformats like Semantic Checker.
This post looks at three tools that can extract various microformats from web pages and turn them into usable format:
I’m assuming most of you are already somewhat familiar with StumbleUpon. For those who aren’t, Ann wrote a great post last year StumbleUpon Essential Basics A beginners Guide.
As most of you already know, StumbleUpon made some significant changes to the interface last year that weren’t received very well by the SU community. Besides changing the look and feel of SU, they made other major changes, including taking away the ability to share en mass to all of your StumbleUpon friends with only a couple of clicks. As shown by the screen shot below, on the new StumbleUpon if you want to share a piece of content with your SU comrades, you have to select each friend one by one and then hit “share now” once you have finally finished selecting all the friends you want to send to.
Ask UK (uk.ask.com) has a new game where you can dress up the lovable Jeeves character. Just search for [want to dress up jeeves] at Ask UK and you will be presented the opportunity to place khakis on the famous butler. You can dress up Jeeves at uk.ask.com/dressupjeeves.
UTalkMarketing.com reported “Gieves and Hawkes together with Ben Sherman have supplied virtual outfits that allow users to transform butler Jeeves from his usual smart two-piece suit.” The Flash dressup wizard was created by Framestore and Moonshine and offers 100,000 different outfit combinations.
Here is a video of me dressing up Jeeves:
Lisa Barone has screen captures of Twitter testing a localized version of Twitter Trends. Twitter Trends shows you what Tweet topics are currently hot and trending on Twitter. The local trends version does all that but breaks it out by region, country and city.
Here is one of the pictures from @LisaBarone:
You can see more pictures at OutSpoken Media and TechCrunch.
Credits to: Barry Schwartz
Both Google Maps and Bing Maps offer ways to see the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti. Below, a look at how to see before and after images, taken by satellite. Plus, several 360-degree ground level videos you can view.
360-Degree On-The-Ground Video
Immersive Media has released a number of 360-degree view videos of someone actually walking in the disaster area. You can move the video around and get a true on-the-ground view. Here’s one of them (sorry that it starts auto-playing — I can’t find a way to prevent this):
Bing Maps
What do you get for Bill Gates, the richest person in the world? How about a little free SEO advice for his new blog? It could use some.
Bill, I went looking for your blog today on Google. Sorry, like many people, I have a habit of using that search engine first. What did I find for bill gates blog?
Good, you’re there in the top 10 results, listed fourth. And your official page at Microsoft shows at number one. But your blog could be so much better. Look at all those fake parody blogs! One of them is out ranking you. Some simply seem real because they have titles that actually say “Bill Gates Blog” in them.
Not a month goes by without someone launching a new real-time search engine; but after trying out most of them, there are few I use on a regular basis. Factery Labs is about to change that with today’s launch of its real-time fact engine at 1:00 pm ET. Where other real-time search engines focus on hot tweets, popular links, and the like, Factery Labs skips all that and surfaces the facts behind the day’s trending news.
We’re pleased to announce you that we released new features that enables users to search for images of Twitter, Funny and Sports in GazoPa. http://www.gazopa.com/.
Images on Twitter
Twitter is getting popular as sharing images well as sharing comments. Since images on Twitter may not have enough tags, it’s not easy to search for them afterward. Now GazoPa allows users to search for similar images on Twitter.
Click ‘Twitter’ link on the top line and latest images on Twitter are displayed in time line. Or click Twitter tab when users set any image as a
search key. Images on Twitter that are similar to the search key are searched. Images uploaded by Twitpic, TweetPhoto, Fotolife and direct image URL can be searchable now and we will add images that are uploaded by other tools in future.
How much do you search daily? If you are a reader of this blog, I bet you search quite a lot. That’s why I am sharing more and more various search tools here every week. Today I am going to offer another cool search utility that you may find useful.
FastestFox is a FireFox addon that adds some more fun to web searching with FireFox (huge thanks to Edward Khoo who shared the tool in his top 10 FireFox addons post).
Basically (and among other features), the addon allows to quickly access more search options:
It is no news that Google is displaying local search results in the SERPS these days. If you are looking for anything from a dentist to an Italian restaurant, then you will most likely see a map with a list of local businesses in the searched for city. But what about a statewide search for something like “Colorado Used Cars”?
Google has been rolling out local results on Statewide searches for some time. It seems that it initially started with smaller states like New Jersey, but recently state wide results can be seen in the likes of much larger (in land mass) states such as Utah, Washington, and even Alaska.
Quite a long time ago we discussed best practices for URL structure – that old post needs both an update and more details to discuss. So I decided to start a new post summarizing and discussing various strategies for URL file naming.
URL is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that affect both SEO and usability.
It affects:
If John F. Kennedy were an internet marketer, I think he would say, “Ask not what your marketing can do for your site. Ask what your site can do for your marketing.” Kennedy understood the idea of cause and effect in his original quote: that people make a nation effective, and not the other way around. Online, the site makes marketing effective because the majority of what determines your ROI is not the media itself but what happens after the user clicks. And that’s what marketing analytics needs to focus on.
The problem
I test a lot. Different ideas and techniques pour out of my brain; to be honest, some of them are utter crap. I learned the hard way not to take leaps without testing the takeoff and landing first.
One step that seems to be overlooked when people are starting to test their own websites is developing a benchmark or baseline. Knowing where the starting line is makes the finish line visible, if you don’t know where you started – how do you know where you’re finishing?
On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Facebook garnered 7.56% of United States internet traffic market share, whereas Google had 7.54%. Subsequently on Christmas Day, December 25th, Facebook’s piece of pie ballooned to a whopping 7.81% while Google dropped a bit to 7.51%. The day after Christmas, December 26, Google regained its stature as most visited site in the US with 7.33% share, while Facebook retained 7.12%.
The ramifications of these stunning statistics, which truly reflect the massive girth of Facebook’s 350 million users, simply can’t be stressed enough to brand managers. To my mind, failure to consider Facebook PPC might now be considered negligent, analogous to dismissing the importance of using traditional PPC for branding.
Way back when, in the dying weeks of 2009, I asked the question, “Where does search go from here?” It seems that everyone agrees we’ve barely scratched the potential that is web search, but what might that scratch reveal? What will our searching look like in two years? In five years, or even in ten years?
| Rank | Company | Job growth |
U.S. employees |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SAS | 2% | 5,487 |
| 2 | Edward Jones | 8% | 37,079 |
| 3 | Wegmans Food Markets | 0% | 36,770 |
| 4 | N.A.% | N.A. | |
| 5 | Nugget Market | -16% | 1,342 |
| 6 | DreamWorks Animation SKG | 13% | 1,825 |
| 7 | NetApp | 0% | 5,033 |
| 8 | Boston Consulting Group | 3% | 1,737 |
| 9 | Qualcomm | 3% | 12,255 |
| 10 | Camden Property Trust | -6% | 1,743 |
| 11 | Robert W. Baird & Co. | 6% | 2,286 |
| 12 | Bingham McCutchen | -7% | 1,859 |
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