Google Going To Lists Top 1,000 Sites & Lets You To Advertise On Them

The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today.

The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. The list ranks sites based on category, unique visitors, reach and page views. Not only has Google come out with this list, but they are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content ads to show on these top 1,000 sites.

To activate this filter in AdWords, go to your AdWords account and select “non Ad Planner 1000″ within the “category filters” section.

The top list lists facebook.com as the number one ranking site globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. The list will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites. Yes, Google removes some of their own sites.

Where does this data come from? Google explains it comes from “aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms.”

The other Ad Planner features released today include a way to export your Google Content Network Placements from Ad Planner to AdWords and you can now create lists within Ad Planner.

For more details, see the Google AdWords Blog.

Ranking In Google News Can Boost SEO Efforts

Placing content on Google News is an effective strategy for search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. However, this approach has its own set of challenges.

“Google News reaches more people than any other individual news source in the world,” explained the SEO Consult blog. “The fact that articles are selected by an algorithm makes the site even more attractive, as you don’t have to spend time courting stressed-out journalists and editors. 

This algorithm also makes things more difficult, which is why SEO experts have spent considerable time figuring out how to optimize for Google News.”

Ranking in Google News is a big challenge for any online content source, because it constantly updates rankings. Plus, Google limits the top rankings to authoritative sources only. 

This means that most of the top search results come from professional journalists.

Currently, very few online news sites can match the primacy of Google News in the online news realm.

Source : lastclicknews.com

Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

Yahoo should soon have about $150 million more to its name.  By selling 57.48 million shares, the Sunnyvale-based company is liquidating its stake in Chinese business-to-business site Alibaba.com and collecting a tidy profit.

Yahoo acquired its 1.14 percent stake in Alibaba.com during the company's initial public offering in 2007.  Now, Reuters reports that Yahoo will sell the stake at a 4.0-6.4 percent discount on Alibaba's most recent closing price.

That might indicate that Yahoo's in a bit of a hurry; there's a definite concern, at least, about how both Yahoo and Alibaba.com shareholders will interpret its move.  (A relevant note: Yahoo's stock is already down 1.22 percent this morning).  But even after the discount, Yahoo should realize a profit of 47 percent or more, which makes its investment look like a good one.

Here's another important detail: Yahoo is holding onto its 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com's parent company, Alibaba Group, so it's not getting out of China or anything of the sort.

John Spelich, a vice president at Alibaba Group, also stated, "We are pleased to learn of the Yahoo! decision because having broader ownership of Alibaba.com with increased liquidity and support among institutional investors is what Alibaba.com hoped to achieve when it released the cornerstone investors."

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Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

Google Wants to Pay AdSense Publishers Faster

Recommends Electronic Funds Transfer

Google has taken an opportunity to remind North American AdSense publishers that the fastest way to receive payments is through Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).


"We want to get you paid by the fastest means possible," says Elizabeth Ferdon of the AdSense Payments Team.

AdSense "EFT is quick and easy to set up. When payments are issued, there's no need to wait for the delivery in the mail -- the funds appear in your bank account shortly after they're issued," she adds. "That means if we processed a payment for you this month, your earnings would be in your bank account already."

Signing up for ETF through Google is a three-step process:

1. Enter your bank account info

2. Find your test deposit

3. Enter the test deposit amount in your AdSense account.

To enter your bank account info, just go to "my account" and click the "edit link next to the "payment details" header. Then in the Electronic Funds Transfer section, select the "add new bank account" radio button, and click continue. Enter the requested info and save the changes.

Test deposits can take a few days, and on your bank statement, they will be labeled as one of the following:

- AFS RE GOOGLE
- AFS RE GOOGLE ADSENSE
- ARVATO FINANCE SERVICES LIMITED
- BFS FINANCE LTD
- CITIBANK IRELAND FINANCIAL SERVICES
- Google AdSense Payment

Once you have your test deposit amount, click the "my account" tab, and in the "payment details" section, click "verify this account." Enter the test deposit amount that you received in your bank account in the box, and click "next." Your bank account will be approved and you can select it as your default payment method.

Currently, Google offers Western Union in 23 countries and courier service in a number of others as payment options. Other regions where EFT isn't offered are reminded that Google is continuously working on expanding payment options in more places.

Google Maps Gadget Aims To Help Businesses Be Found

Will provide on-site, user-specific directions

Let's be honest: someone who's incapable of copying and pasting an address into Google Maps may not be worth having as a customer. But most companies like to make things easy on people, and a new Google Maps gadget should ensure that it's easy for would-be clients to find businesses.

A post on the LatLong Blog explains, "This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. . . . The gadget allows you to pre-fill the 'To' field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are then able to print their directions with a single click."

This should increase the convenience factor of businesses' sites, even as it allows firms to make sure potential shoppers don't wander away. A nice touch is that companies can keep messy street addresses out of the "To" fields, as well - it's possible to use more recognizable names and aliases.

As you can see, Legoland California's already taken advantage of the Google Maps offering. More serious entities like Emeril Lagasse restaurants and Harvard have put it to use, too.

The gadget's available in 23 languages, so it's probably just a matter of time until businesses all over the world are on much better terms with Google Maps.

Source : webpronews.com

Google Maps : Voice Search Feature for Android Device

Recently Google announced that you can search Google Maps by your voice using Android device.

These new feature includes:

1) Voice SearchingGoogle Maps Voice Feature
2) Transit and Walking Directions Talk
3) Reviews and business details
4) Updates for various Latitudes


Google fixed the latitude background location updates and that will continue to update.

But there are various things which need to kept in mind while using these facilities:

1. Google Maps Update will be useful for users with system updates for SDK 1.5+ version called as CupCake version.

2. If you experience the Installation error for Package file, then it is because your device is not on a user build identified as kila-user, opal user etc. If you have a user debug build then these update will not be installed on your system.

3. Street View was not removed but it is now available within Maps as its own mode. If these mode is available then you will have the option of seeing the imaginary view along with rest of options for that location.


Source : seoupdatesdaily.blogspot.com

Google Web Analytics How important Is It ?

Web Analytics have major importance in on line business. Tracking the history of visitors and keep doing research on analytics is must and should. We can know about visitors and their views through these analytics.

Analytics usage are increasing day by day. Analytic professionals have higher demand in the market. Everyone can't become an Analytic expert. It needs great thinking, visualization and case study.

Every On line business should take care about :

Bounce rate :

Bounce rate is something which will helps you to know that how visitors are going away from your site. Higher bounce rate means visitors aren't interested on your site. Lesser means visitors are happy to stay on your site. It's always better to make bounce rate 0%, however it's not possible, so it's better to keep it less.

Visit Length :

How long visitors are staying on your site in average? If most of the visitors are staying good amount time on your site means they are reading some thing on your site which is useful for them. So visit length always matters to know the interest of viewer on your site. According to this metrics you can optimize your site.

Visit Depth :

Visit Depth means "Are the visitor is showing interest in visiting the other pages of your site too?" If a visitor visited most of the pages on your site and spent good amount of time on each page says your site awesome. visited all pages and spend less amount of time is not good. Not visited other pages is bad. So higher visit depth helps to grow your business as well as brand.

Returning Visitors :

More returning visits means you have loyal readers for your site. If a visitor come again and again to your site means he liked your site and found it useful. These kind of readers are called as loyal readers. More loyal readers you have, that much popular your site is. It's very important to have more returning visits. Always try to increase the number of normal visits as well as returning visits.

... Most of the search engines will consider all these factors, to show up your website in top search engine results for a particular keyword. So it's important to make note of all these topics and keep working and optimizing it to succeed in your business. Comment your thoughts :) ...



Source : seodailyupdates.blogspot.com

Google’s Tetris Logo

Google Australia, China and some other places where it’s Saturday already are displaying a special logo doodle celebrating Tetris. The alt text reads “Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect - courtesy of Tetris Holding, LLC”, and the logo is linked to a search for tetris. Wikipedia knows: “Tetris ... is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984”.

And did you know? One of the original makers of Tetris is now working at Google – Google Australia, specifically, on the Google Wave project. Sydney Morning Herald reports: “Vadim Gerasimov was just 15 when he was taken under the wing of two Russian computer engineers – Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky – at the Moscow Academy of Sciences and helped them create Tetris ... Since around 2003 Gerasimov has lived in Australia, where he worked in complex systems research with the CSIRO [Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization] before joining Google about a year and a half ago.”

[Thanks Hebbet, Tom & Tony!]

Google’s Tetris Logo by Philipp Lenssen


Source : blogoscoped.com

Manage Unfollowers with 5 Twitter Tools

Tools to help you take control of your Twitter account.

Twitter has an insurmountable number of various applications from the very useful to the rather comical . It’s hard to weed through and find the true great applications/services.

To better help you in your Twittering efforts, I’ve put together a list of 5 really great tools to help you monitor your followers and unfollowers… since we all know is about that ratio. Hopefully you find the list useful. If there are some I’ve neglected to add or if you know of other ones please leave a comment with a description and a link.

Twellow, The Twitter Yellow Pages, has many features that range from extended profiles to Twellowhood (one of my personal favorite Twitter tools on the Internet).

Mixed in with the plethora of features that Twellow offers is an unsung hero which is just simply called "Followers". With this you can easily see who is reciprocally following you. But, the best part of Followers is... you can follow or unfollow directly from Twellow. No clicking to got back to Twitter, you can get the job done without leaving the page.

Qwitter is a nice little service that emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message, below is an example.

That's pretty much it... no extra frills.

Friend or Follow is pretty self-explanatory, you enter in your Twitter username and it gives you three tabs of information.

Following (who your following, but not following you back), fans (who’s following you, but your not following them back) and friends (people who you follow and they follow you back.

TweetLater is an online service that has an abundance of features ranging from scheduling tweets to Ping.fm integration. They offer a free account as well as a payed professional account.

Buried deep within the features of TweetLater is the option to "Follow those who follow you" and "Unfollow those who unfollow you". This is completely automated and set by the user.

Twitterless is an online service that notifies you when any Twitterer stops following you, and gives you their username. But, they don't stop there. They take it one step further and give you a graphed out "follower history" over a period of time to help you understand where your gaining or losing followers.

They also offer follower filters that give you a more descriptive view of your followers. You can filter in real time and search using keywords to see if your followers are talking about anything that interest you.


Source : webpronews.com

Advanced SEO Tactics

If you're like most online webmasters, then you have probably read one article after the other about search engine optimization. Most of them rehash the same old information and you end up wading through tons of fluff. However, this isn't one of those articles. Listed below are 7 advanced SEO tips that you won't find on every digital corner.

1. Syndicating Articles that Link to Your Sitemap

As you probably know, syndicating articles is one of the best methods for obtaining one-way backlinks. They are also valuable pieces of search engine bait because search engine crawlers are frequent visitors to many high-profile article directories. If you want to get the spiders quickly crawling your site, simply submit an informative article to a site like EzineArticles, GoArticles, or ArticleCity. However, there's another article marketing strategy that isn't mentioned much in marketing circles. This tactic can get the crawlers searching deeper into your site and indexing more of your pages. Simply link to your sitemap within the resource box. This will send the spiders straight to a content buffet where they can quickly slurp up all of your pages.

2. Translating Your Website Into Other Languages

Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages. One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffíc is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. If you are a seasoned SEO, you'll be happy to hear that the competition in foreign search engines is much less than in those of the United States. In addition, online foreign language markets are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets. You have the opportuníty to tap into this market while it's in an exponential growth phase.

3. ROR Sitemaps

As you probably know, sitemaps are important for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search engines. Unfortunately, many of these sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. For this reason, there have been a number of Google and Yahoo site map generators produced in recent years. However, there is an alternative that is even more exciting. These are ROR sitemaps and they are readable by all search engines, not just by Google or Yahoo. ROR is an exciting new sitemap tool that uses XML feeds to describe your website. These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can better understand your products, services, images, newsletters, articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.
For example, if you are selling products, a ROR file enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affilíate programs, and any other
relevant information. Search engine crawlers like the Googlebot have an enormous job to do. It's time we start helping them to better understand our content.

4. Keyword Phrases that Convert

Selecting the right keyword phrases is the single most important aspect of any SEO campaign. Unfortunately, many webmasters target the wrong keywords. Too many of us target very general keywords like "real estate" or "internet marketing". Although these terms get lots of visitors, it is unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffíc produces very low conversion rates because it does not target prospects. You will be much more successful, if you target keyword phrases that are 3-4 words long. These terms are much less competitive and have been proven to convert much better than keywords that are 1 to 2 words long. Who do you think is more likely to buy; someone who goes to Google and searches for "ipod" or someone who searches for "4gb black ipod nano"? Obviously, the person who searches for a more specific phrase is much closer to making a buying decision.

5. GoogSpy

Would you like to get an in-depth view of how your competitors run their business? Well, you can do exactly that with an online service known as GoogSpy. GoogSpy is a free research tool that will tell you what keywords your competitors are bidding on. This tool tracks over 500,000 keywords every day from Google and then loads this goldmine of information into the GoogSpy.com database. Using this tool, you can browse by company or by search term. This tool is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, many people take it for granted. This service basically hands you a business strategy on a silver platter. Maybe we should just keep this one to ourselves and enjoy the benefits of being one step ahead of our competition.

For example, let's say you wanted to do some in-depth research on Overstock.com, one of the largest companies online. You would simply go to googspy.com and type in overstock.com. You will then be shown thousands of words that this company bids on. These keywords are proven profít generators. Research like this would normally cost thousands of dollars, but they are providing it free of charge.
If you want to find keywords with high conversion rates, simply type in words such as buy and purchase. You will be shown keyword phrases that are bid on that include the words buy or purchase. These are very lucrative keyword phrases because the person who types in "buy sony playstation 2" knows exactly what they want. They're not just looking around, they are in buying mode. These are the type of keywords you want to bid on. Using GoogSpy, you can uncover these hidden gems in seconds.
Other high-converting keyword phrases include brand names and product names. Type in the keyword "camera" and you will find thousands of different brands and product names for cameras. These keywords are some of the best keywords because of their high conversion rate.

6. Internal Links Within Content

The navigation of your site is a crucial element of your search engine optimization campaign. Each link within your navigational structure should correlate with a keyphrase that you are trying to rank for. However, you can also include internal links within your content. For example, let's say you have written an article about online marketing. Within the article are a number of keyword phrases. Some of these phrases include "link popularity" and "web site traffíc". If you have other articles within your site that pertain to these topics, then you should definitely link those keyword phrases to those articles. By doing this, you can increase the link popularity of other pages within the same site. There are very few sites that take advantage of this optimization technique. By doing this, you enable the search engines to find and index much more of your site. These internal links also contribute to a higher ranking because of the anchor text that is used. Many people only think of inbound links from outside websites when trying to raise their link popularity. However, the internal link structure is also a major ranking factor.

7. Using Your Log Files for SEO

Your server logs reveal very important information about your site. If you learn to use them properly, they can quickly help to maximize your site's traffíc and conversion rates. One of the most valuable pieces of information found in your log files are search phrases. The log files will tell you exactly which keywords people are using to find your website. Once you have optimized a page, the log files will tell you how people are finding that page and what keywords they are searching for to get there. If you find that people are using keywords that you hadn't thought of to get to a certain page, it would probably be in your best interest to further optimize that page for those keywords. You might also want to create a new page optimized for that particular term. This is especially true if a new page would enable you to serve better information on the phrase being searched for. In addition, by looking at how your site is found organically, you can determine whether the same keyword phrases belong in your paid search campaigns. Only choose the ones that are highly relevant. You will find that these keyword phrases have the best conversion rate.

Article Source : ifergan.org

Bing Bing: Microsoft’s Search Engine Unexpectedly Live, But Not Live

Microsoft has made its new search engine available ahead of schedule, and is redirecting searches from Live Search to the new site

If you fancied using Microsoft’s new search engine, it’s unexpectedly live at http://www.bing.com/ . (According to Microsoft, it was being opened at the SMX search marketing conference in Seattle on Wednesday.)

Or rather, Microsoft’s new “Decision Engine and consumer brand” is unexpectedly live. Microsoft says:

“Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

Bing is not Live Search, though obviously it’s based on it, and the current UK beta version still has Live’s front page layout, rather than a menu down the left hand side, which is the format for the US version. The UK also doesn’t seem to have any image hot spots, and other features. To get the “real thing,” go here.

It’s too soon to say whether Bing will attract long-term users, rather than tyre-kickers. However, the reception on Twitter has been reasonably positive.

It does seem to work much better than Google for finding real product info and reviews, where Google’s results are loaded with spam and price comparison rubbish. As @studentsoftware noted on Twitter: “Keyword stuffing that skews Google search results doesn’t quite work in bing. Bing 1 Google 0. Over to you SEO gurus…”

Some Google commands also work — for example, try ["psp go" site:guardian.co.uk] — which could ease the changeover.

The Search History feature, which keeps a list of your previous searches down the left hand side, is obvious but excellent.

But in most respects, Google still rules. The fact is that Bing is an incomplete beta, and while it’s not bad, it’s not actually a match for Google at the moment.

Microsoft knows perfectly well that it’s going to take it “years and years and years” (in Steve Ballmer’s words) to get anywhere in search, if it ever does. It knows it has to overtake Yahoo first. In that sense, comparisons with Google are misguided, though we’re all making them. In reality, Bing is competing with Yahoo and Ask to be the leading Google alternative, and that’s how its success — or failure — should be evaluated.

Acronym note: Microsoft PR reckons Bing is “the sound of found” but the common joke is that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google. This has prompted another acronym, Wanger, for Wolfram Alpha’s Not Google Either, Really”

Source : guardian.co.uk