Industry Watch June, 2011

1. Facebook Turns On Facial Recognition For Tagging By Default:

http://mashable.com/2011/06/07/facebook-tag-suggestions/

2. Google Acquires PostRank, An Analytics Service For The Social Web:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/google-acquires-postrank-an-analytics-service-for-the-social-web/

3. Search Advertising Forecast to Hit $14.38B in 2011:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2077633/Search-Advertising-Forecast-to-Hit-14.38B-in-2011-Report

4. Apple plays customer loyalty, anti-Google cards with iCloud:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217443/Apple_plays_customer_loyalty_anti_Google_cards_with_iCloud_say_analysts

Top 10 Overall Search Terms

Top 10 Overall Search Terms

Industry Watch Aug, 09

1. Wall Street Journal gunning for LinkedIn: Go here http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/wall-street-journal-creating-new-linkedin-killer-called-wsj-connect/

2. Twitter offers crash course for businesses: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/23920.asp

3. Burger King’s Apology for Hindu Goddess Ad is not the first of its kind: http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10002906/burger-kings-apology-for-hindu-goddess-ad-is-not-the-first-of-its-kind/

4. Twitter now BLOCKING bad URL’s: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136218/Update_Twitter_now_blocking_bad_URLs_but_imperfectly?source=rss_news

5. Google’s Schmidt resigns from Apple board: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136185/Google_s_Schmidt_resigns_from_Apple_s_board

What can we do with Social Media Sites?

Integrating Social Media Sites

Driving ROI from Awareness to Advocacy

Tips for B2B Marketing with Video

1. Identify stages in your customer lifecycle where you can use video to deliver your message.
2. Choose a tactic and focus your efforts on executing it well.
3. Hire a video production company who can partner with you to create content.
4. Produce your first video content and publish it with an online video platform.
5. Monitor the success of your initiative and use the insight to plan your next move.

Make Web Content More Discoverable – With “Common Tag”

Common Tag is an open tagging format developed to make content more connected, discoverable and engaging. Unlike free-text tags, Common Tags are references to unique, well-defined concepts, complete with metadata and their own URLs. With Common Tag, site owners can more easily create topic hubs, cross-promote their content, and enrich their pages with free data, images and widgets.

The companies involved in the development of Common Tag — AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag — offer services that help publishers get started.

An Update on Google Sitemaps

1. Google and the other search engines which are a part of Sitemaps.org now support up to 50,000 child Sitemaps for Sitemap index files (instead of the previous 1,000). This allows large sites to submit a theoretical maximum of 2.5 billion URLs with a single Sitemap Index URL (oh, and if you need more, you can always submit multiple Sitemap index files).
2. The Webmaster Tools design update now shows you all Sitemap files that were submitted for your verified website. This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file.
3. The indexed URL count in Webmaster Tools for your Sitemap files is now even more precise.
4. For the XML developers out there, we’ve updated the XSD schemas to allow Sitemap extensions. The new schema helps webmasters to create better Sitemaps by verifying more features. By validating Sitemap files with the new schema, you can be more confident that the Sitemap files are correct.
5. Do I need to mention that Sitemap file processing is much faster than ever before? We’ve drastically reduced the average time from submitting a Sitemap file to processing it and showing some initial data in Webmaster Tools.

Most firms unaware of Web Domain changes!!!

Two thirds of businesses are unaware they will be able to use their own name in
place of domain extensions such as .com, .org, or .net when Internet domains
are liberalized next year, according to a survey.

For Full Article visit http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSTRE5576DM20090609

IIS SEO Toolkit Beta – Now Available

Microsoft released the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – a free, downloadable toolkit that helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators improving their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly. The SEO Toolkit Beta is available for installation via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta.

The IIS SEO Toolkit will:

• Improve the volume and quality of traffic to Web site from search engines
• Control how search engines access and display Web content
• Inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing

The IIS SEO Toolkit includes three modules that integrate with IIS Manager:

• Website Analysis, which suggests changes that can help improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines;
  • Report Summary Dashboard
  • Detailed URL information
  • Route Analysis
  • Word Analysis
• Robots.txt Exclusion, which makes it easier to control and restrict the content that search engines index and display; and
  • Selecting URL paths from physical & virtual/logical view of website – the paths that are specified for “Allow” and “Disallow” directives in robots.txt file
• Sitemaps and Site Indexes, which can help inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing.
  • Selecting URL’s from physical & virtual/logical view of website

• For more information, visit: http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit

On-Page Image Usage Analysis Tools

1. Juicy Studio Image Analyzer – is a handy online tool that will look at each image on a given page and evaluate the following parameters:

• image width / height;
• alternative text;
• An URL to an image long description.

2. Alt Text Checker – (by Durham University) will list alt text information next to each image found on the page

3. Page Size Extractor – will give you a quick idea of how the page images influence the page size and hence load time by giving:

• total number of on-page images;
• The largest image size;
• The total image size.

4. Web Developer Firefox: Toolbar offers an array of image analyzing tools:

• display alt attributes;
• display image dimensions;
• display image sizes;
• display image paths;
• find broken images;
• outline images missing alt attributes;
• hide images / background images;

5. Firefox Accessibility Extension offers a most useful feature summarizing all page images in the form of a handy table (the feature can found under “Text equivalents” => “List of images“). The table is extremely easy to use as (1) it highlights “the problematic” images and (2) it can be sorted by any of the following parameters:

• Image alt text;
• Image source link;
• Image width;
• Image height