| Breaking News |
CBS Apologizes To Viewer
A senior executive at CBS News Corporation has issued an apology to a viewer who complained via email about anchor Katie Couric's reporting from Iraq and was insulted in CBS's reply.
The emailed reply, which came from Evening@cbsnews.com, implied Errol Siegel of Austin, Texas, who's in the email security business, was unintelligent and the author of it devalued information found on blogs.
Initially, CBS would not confirm that the email came from within CBS, but IP tracking revealed that it had come from inside CBS's New York headquarters.
After the news broke, Mr. Siegel pursued CBS further, seeking public confirmation of the email, an apology, and clarification of CBS's position on blogs and those that read and contribute to them.
Mr. Siegel says Linda Mason, Senior Vice President of Special Projects for CBS News Corporation, issued him this statement:
"Thank you for contacting us directly about the confusion over the source of an email you were sent in response to your thoughts on the CBS EVENING NEWS in the Mid-East. On behalf of CBS News, I want to confirm to you that the email reply you received did come from someone at CBS. The identity of that person is being investigated and the matter is being taken very seriously.
"Let me also note that CBS News has its own blog, Public Eye, where we encourage viewer input. We also read responses on Evening.CBSNews.com. We welcome a dialogue with the public and we are very sorry you received the response you did, but we thank you for calling it to our attention so we can correct the situation."
(Editor's Note: WPN writer Mike Sachoff confirmed Ms. Mason's statement to Mr. Siegel after this reporter's request for comment was rebuffed by a CBS mailserver. An automated response to the first request, from this reporter's personal email address, indicated the address has been placed into a blacklist on that mailserver.)
By Jason Lee Miller
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Thursday, Sept 20, 2007 |
Link building, done correctly and without causing the search engines to think you're doing something wrong, can turn the right anchor text into SERP ranking gold.
Editor's note: Anyone offering a shortcut to link riches may be giving you an exit from the search engine rankings. You've probably done some link building work already. Let us know what's worked and what hasn't in the comments.
WebProNews has been covering the Shop.org Summit, taking place in Las Vegas. You can catch our conference interviews at WebProNews videos right now.
Work, work, work. That's the message from Todd Friesen at Range Online Media. Nothing else will substitute for the work needed to build links.
Anchor text attracts spiders on the Internet just as juicy flies pull in arachnids for a sticky web-based feast. To find out what's going to attract the desired audience, Friesen said people need to know what their competitors have been doing in the same space.
That competitive research is at your fingertips. A visit to Google to look for link:www.somesite.com, or to MSN or Yahoo's Site Explorer to seek out linkdomain:somesite.com -site:somesite.com, can help.
| Shop.org Take aways |
 Follow the leads of other
(successful) sites
Create a semantic agreement
between anchor text and
target pages
Use the major search engines
to research links
For Google-specific
information, use the
TouchGraph Google Browser
tool
For Yahoo-specific
information, use Greg
Boser's Tattler tool
More ways to build links,
comment here
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Even better, Friesen highlighted a couple of useful tools for link research. One works on the Web, the other as a desktop download.
TouchGraph features a browser-based tool written in Java that can show the relationships between sites as seen by Google. TouchGraph can look for relationships based on keywords or URLs.
Greg Boser has a tool called Tattler available, for pulling links from Yahoo's Site Explorer into a format suited for an Excel spreadsheet (hint: the good info is available by right-clicking a URL in the spreadsheet.)
Once you know how others have brought in links, you'll have a better idea of what you need to do to help make your site more prominent in the search results.
WebProNews anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this story.
About
the Author:
David A. Utter is a WebProNews editor and writer covering business and technology.
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| Shop.org: Take aways |
Use more than one source to
find keywords
Use common sense, not just
computer data, when
selecting keywords
Stick to key phrases of three
words or less
Track internal site searches
Mine your site's logfiles
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Looking for great keyword choices for your ad campaign? What you've found so far could be damaged goods.
Those great keywords you found may have room for improvement. Ken Jurina of Epiar said at the Shop.org Summit that people need to rely on multiple sources when researching keywords.
Read the rest of the article.
| Shop.org: Take aways |
Use secondary domains (or
subdomains) with keywords
in the visible URL line
Highlight user reviews in your
ads
Use superlatives and
mainstream references
Numbers and symbols can
draw attention to your ads
Use traditional SEO tactics on
landing pages
Look for "long tail" searches
in your referral data
Check and recheck existing
campaigns
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Click-through rates could be so much better for your site if you only...well, keep reading to see what some sharp industry pros had to say with their Paid Search Tips.
Secrets of paid search? Sure, they're out there. Attendees of the Shop.org Summit picked up a few.
Dana Todd suggested a few ways to improve the CTR from paid search advertisements. Secondary domains or subdomains with keywords in the visible URL line can help grab attention...
| Shop.org: Take aways |
Make use of consumer-
generated media (especially
video)
Optimize through social
media
Investigate the idea of
human-filtered search (to
improve search accuracy)
Offer customers control
through customization
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Whether an online retailer is also on top of the (virtual) world or is just starting out, they’ve likely got a lot to learn. And as worlds both physical and virtual move forward, Donna Hoffman of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing (and UC Riverside) has shared “10 Trends You Can’t Afford to Miss.”
Hoffman spoke at the Shop.org Annual Summit 2007, and asserted that we are now moving into Web 3.0 (from an era generally defined as Web 2.0). One of the more interesting things she believes will come along with this transition is the concept of “ABBA” - atoms to bits, bits to atoms - as seen in 3D printing.
Read the rest of the article.
| Shop.org: Take aways |
Encourage conversation
among - and with -
customers
Make your own contributions
to the blogosphere
Use online video
Stay on top of new trends
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Well, all that cute Web 2.0 terminology – you know how you guys do, combining two words to make one or leaving vowels out and stuff – is now the sole property of bloggers and developers, because marketers, if you'll forgive the Kentucky boy in me, done went corporate boardroom on it.
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