Archive for June, 2006
The idea came to me for this short SEO research project from this post interesting thread in Search Engine Watch forum. The thread posed a question: “Which 5 skills would you improve to become a better SEO Expert?” The theme appeared to become rather popular and many SEOs posted their lists and opinions there. The skills mentioned are various but I’ve summed up about 20 lists from different people and got the top list of most wanted skills - exclusively for our readers.
What are they? How hard will it be? Below I’ve listed the skillsets in the order of popularity:
Web technology skills – include skills of coding and understanding of how web servers work
- Copywriting skills – include skills of creation fast and effective copy, language analysis skill
- Programming skills – include skills of programming on different languages, in-depth databases knowledge
- Marketing and financial skills – include knowledge of marketing strategies and basic financial aspects
- Organization skills – includes management, self-organization, time-management
Among other skills in the with list were mentioned the following: presentation skills, understanding of traditional advertising technique, sales skills, ability to learn quickly, design and usability skills, patience, math skills.
What do you think about this list? Is there anything you’d like to add?
As per the recent news on Google Earth, Google is all set to new version of Google Earth 4.0 with various new features and localization with Linux support. Google Earth user interface is now localized in various languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish along with local search and geographical intuitive directions.
Google Earth has will also have an increased coverage area along with much better resolution images. Google also is implementing a unique information layer for newly supported countries - similar to the OpenLayers Geo Maps project?.
We can expect more updates by end of this year as they are working hard to bring better results and cover the entire globe with all possible information in a single click!
Good news for those who is involved or planning to start publishing ads on his site to get revenue. One more opportunity of contextual advertising will be added by eBay.
As Michael van Swaaij, eBay’s chief strategy officer, claimed eBay plans to allow affiliates to run contextual ads for eBay auctions and to be paid a cut of resulting eBay sales.
The new eBay advertising program looks much the same as Google, Yahoo and MSN contextual advertising systems with the only difference that is will serve not general ads from any advertiser but ads linked to eBay.
What goods will be displayed on a particular page will be determined be the keywords on the page (just like in any contextual advertising system).
Publishers and web site owners, eBay provides you with additional opportunities of traffic monetization!
Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that the company was likely to abandon its China-based search engine Google.cn due to lack of marketshare and censorship issues. Other sources have expressed the announcement as inevitable, citing the recent Chinese government threats to shut the service down less than 6 months after it’s debut.
Earlier this year - Jan. 25th, Google established Google.cn a Chinese government censored version of the search engine which operates on servers based in China in co-operation with Google.
Recent reports have also revealed that Google.cn make up less than 1% of the people who use Google.com, a fraction of the original anticipated audience projections. According to third-party estimates, Baidu has gone from 2.5% of the search market in 2003 to 46% in 2005, while Google’s market share in China has rapidly declined.
In our opinion it’s looking like the government censorship has scared off a lot the potential users, and the people aren’t adopting the tool like they do in other countries. One prominent internet source Reporters Without Borders stated that “The launch of Google.cn is a black day for freedom of expression in China”.
Released in January, Google AdWords Editor is available for all to use now. AdWords Editor allows advertiser or Search Engine Marketing specialist to manage AdWords accounts directly from the desktop.
I have already downloaded it and found it rather convenient. The main features that make me like it better then standard way of managing AdWords accounts are the following:
1) it lets to navigate between the campaigns easier
2) it makes your campaign editions faster and easier (just copy and paste)
3) it let you make bulk changes
4) it favors collaborative work and you can send account information to other before publishing it in AdWords.
5) it lets you work offline from your computer and upload the changes to the account whenever ready.
The latest AOL attempt to profit from advertising has caused a wave of indignation among its paying email subscribers. The reason is that several weeks ago AOL started to show ads along with email messages to increase the delivery of its online ads.
This Tuesday AOL spokesperson claimed that before starting to deliver ads along with the email messages, AOL surveyed its subscribers and ran the test the results of which showed that the inclusion of banner ads will not generally bother them. At the same time, thousands of subscribers are greatly irritated with those ads distribution as animated banner ads disturb them from reading their private mail and are not even targeted to users based on content of the email.
To my mind it is twice unfair to distribute ads the way AOL does it – unfair relative to customers who pay for their email accounts and should not be obliged to view annoying ads as well as unfair relative to advertisers that pay for distribution of their ads along with irrelevant content and to the users that are not interested in the product. AOL, is this a ethical way to raise funds?
Philipp Lenssen reports that Google introduced a new feedback request for the ads it displays. Can this be considered a new parameter to measure ad and consumer relevance?
A “Was this link useful” option appears when an ad is clicked and the back button pressed. You may choose “Yes” or “No” answers.
In my opinion this new feature will be one more component of the quality scoring of Google ads (Quality Index).
And, don’t forget, this will also be one more cause of click fraud 
