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IFN Daily Focus:
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 AOL
Spreading China News Online
Using content from the Shanghai Media Group, AOL will broadcast various shows
on its Chinese-language portal to serve news, entertainment, business, and social
interests. |
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News |
GNOME
Released With New Search
Version 2.14 of GNOME's desktop for Linux or UNIX systems contains a new integration
of a desktop search bar that can search the local machine or several search engines
online.
VoIP
Growing, But Not Grown Up Yet
Though awareness of Internet telephony services is significantly higher in the
US and Britain for 2005 than the year before, VoIP still has a ways to go...
States
Look To Tax Your Digital Assets Off
More and more states, especially ones with Democrat controlled legislatures, CNet
points out, are dipping into the digital media pot by imposing taxes on purchased
downloads.
Google
Travel Rumor On The Road
Google is still advertising for vertical market account executives and strategists
in Chicago, but the travel position has triggered the "Google enters travel
sector" talk.
Mac
Opens Windows To Confusing New World
Not too long ago, it was considered sacrilege for a journalist to choose a PC
over a Macintosh - it was like telling veteran reporters (the guys that served
in Nam) that The New York Times was a bunch of liberal alarmist gobbledy-gook,
which, of course, it is.
Return
Path Takes On Email Fray
As advocates and detractors of the impending implementation of Goodmail's Certified
Email service at AOL and Yahoo continue to battle, Return Path thinks commercial
senders can all benefit...
Weather
Channel Pops Ads Over Alerts
It appears the popular weather reporting channel has found a new way to ensure
users of its Desktop Weather application view ads, by popping them up when users
go to check a severe weather alert.
Yahoo!
Executive Moves, Executive Options
Some shuffling of towels in the executive washroom took place in Sunnyvale, CA,
as Yahoo announced a pair of employee moves around the corner offices...
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Tuesday Apr 18, 2006 |
A session on local search at WebmasterWorld's PubCon Boston covered some of the essential points on making one's business part of an Internet user's local experience; our Mike McDonald passed along the details.
Editor's Note: Do you think AOL blocked DearAOL.com emails
purposefully? Or is this a disasterous accident that activist opponents have exploited
to further their cause? Discuss in WebProWorld.
"When's the last time you went into Yahoo Local to see what people are saying about your company?" Justin Sanger, president and founder of LocalLaunch, asked of the audience. "You should all be doing that."
He noted the shift from the directory model to the search model online, when it comes to finding local businesses. "Internet yellow pages are dead, in their current form at least," Sanger said. "What these things are becoming is local search utilities."
In that shift, Sanger noted entrepreneurs need to know just what is being said about them online. That's why he thinks those business owners should visit Yahoo and other sites that track opinions.
Jake Baillie, president of TrueLocal offered his perspective as a top SEO professional on the issue of being found in local search.
He noted how people look for certain terms, like product names or brand names, or even slang and industry-related words. "People don't look for accountants or tax preparation, they look for 1040," Baillie said.
Baillie also noted how regional phrases, like pop versus soda, should be part of the consideration when building a campaign. Knowing one's target audience, especially how they speak, is important.
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Baillie, like Sanger, touched on the importance of tracking conversions. He suggested open source options for auto-generating coupons and creating unique graphics that can be tracked. [editor's note - perhaps Zixxo might be an option - see a review here]
"Look for local specialty/industry groups," said Baillie. "These people are just waiting to be bribed. They'll throw up a banner or a link - whatever."
(Mike's note: Too many people are wasting too much money on ppc programs for their offline businesses by not making smart decisions about terms and locality. Spending the coin you have to spend on a PPC program for generic terms is the result of business owners' poor understanding of how Google and other search engines work in relation to their localized businesses.)
Thai Tran, Product Manager for Google Maps and Local Search, noted a couple of ways small businesses can quickly get their content into the leading search platform.
By using Google Local, business owners can create and display a listing for free, and update it whenever they wish. Entrepreneurs who have a lot of listings to contribute should try Google Base and its bulk uploading procedure instead.
Next week, Google plans to release more detailed error messages about bulk uploads, and increase the number of messages displayed as well.
About
the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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For Curt Hopkins and Brian Schartz, a meeting between U2 rocker Bono and President
Bush doesn't go quite far enough to highlight Africa's ongoing struggles with
HIV/AIDS. What is needed, they say, is a view from the inside, utilizing the point-of-view
power of the weblog.
Through advocate organization Committee to Protect Bloggers, a group dedicated to highlighting free speech and humans rights violations international bloggers face, Hopkins and Schartz created "Blogswana," a one-year pilot project designed to give a voice to Botswana citizenry otherwise unable to tell their stories.
The project will enlist a group of 20 college students from a major university who will devote a year to "blogging for others" in the southern African nation with the aim of highlighting those affected by HIV/AIDS.
Students would have a "partner" for whom they would set up a blog in addition to their own blog. All students and partner blog posts would be funneled to a central website.
"In other words," writes freelance journalist and Committee to Protect Bloggers president Hopkins, "they would create a blog for someone, say a farmer in a remote village who had neither the money for the hardware, nor the expertise, nor perhaps the time or literacy, to blog himself, or to an urban prostitute, or a nurse in an AIDS hospice, or a politician, or a minister.
"They would go out, at least once a month, interview this person, maybe take photos, video or audio, return to their computer and blog for this person. They would take the comments and questions out to the person the next time they went out."
Hopkins expresses the concern that traditional journalism, with its stings of editors, sponsor pressures, and memetic tendencies, is naturally limited in the attention that can be given to what many in the West see as an "abstract tragedy." In addition, journalism can also lack the "insider" feel that weblogs are so adept at providing.
Read
the Full Article
About
the Author:
Jason is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Corporate Site? Pay Attention To Bill Hartzer.
One of the benefits of having a successful ebusiness forum with a substantial subscriber base and readership is, if you are fortunate, you gain a member like Bill Hartzer. Bill's specialty lies in the SEO field (and Internet marketing as a whole) and he's very knowledgeable about what he does. He is also kind enough to share this knowledge, in the shape of some very extensive, well-written articles like the one we've used for today's spotlight post.
Bill's latest deals with SEO for the corporate web site. If you are apart of corporate
America, or if you are doing any kind of site work for a corporation, his article
is a must read. Check out the first couple of paragraphs below then continue
reading and share your comments at WebProWorld.
|| Chris||
SEO
for Corporate Websites
Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your businesses’ brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.
There are several things that can be done that will make a corporate website more search engine friendly—and making sure that the search engines like your website will help it get indexed properly. It will also increase the number of targeted visitors to the site, increasing it’s overall ROI.
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WebPro Question: |
Are there any directory submission services that are worthwhile?
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