Google doesn't care "keywords" meta tag anymore

Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. Google's Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.

In fact, Cutts mentions that people have sued each other for meta tag keyword theft, when really this is just a waste of everybody's time, because they don't even play a role in the ranking of sites on Google.

"About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page," says Cutts. "In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag."

Web Development and Software Solutions in Philippines

Many top multi-national corporations have understood the benefits of cost-effectiveness of the web development solutions market and are similarly astonished by the class of service provided. Apart from this, some of the major top corporations are transmitting their assignments to Philippines to get the superior result within a restricted time frame. The successful story of Philippine software and web development market is also contributing towards escalating the living standards and economy of the country.

It is estimated, that with the pace of globalization the concept like outsourcing is going to climb in the next coming years. Experts of the market research industry feel that the future and scope of outsourcing various web solution or software services is bright and Philippines is definitely one of the emerging names that rank high in IT and web service sector. Web Solutions and Software outsourcing in Philippines is now setting new milestones, and today many organizations from all across the globe are stepping towards Philippines to get most consistent software and web solutions development services.

Linking Campaign Using Long-Tailed Keyphrases

Besides the obvious reason, it’s mainly because these keyphrases (which have been quite well tested in both PPC and SEO campaign) tend to be niche enough that they can give you expected conversions. When people get very specific, they mean business to you.

And when talking about linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases, I am not in any way suggesting that you try and bring in traffic for anything that you do not actually have.

Build a few links with long tail words as anchor text

Take a baseline. The baseline is a simple and oft-overlooked thing to do in linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases. If you’ve used any form of analytics referrals in order to identify the target phrases you want to work on, you should be able to easily get a baseline idea of how much traffic is currently coming in. If you’ve used another linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases method and you’re not currently getting any traffic from the target phrases, there’s nowhere to go but up, right? If you’re watching rankings, get an idea of where you stand with those. Just make some tips, basically so that you can later see if your efforts are paying off.

Monitor progress. As mentioned above, you want to monitor this linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases to see if what you’re doing is worth it. If you spend months linking to niche phrase x and you never see more than 3 referrals per month, it might not be worth it. If you see that niche phrase y initially brought in 15 referrals but now, thanks to your amazing linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases, it’s typically bringing in 60 referrals per month, you’ll be able to expand on this, whether it’s through additional links or some other form of SEO.

Adjust as necessary. The good thing about linking campaign using long-tailed keyphrases of any sort is that it tends to show results quicker than usual. Generic phrases, especially the more competitive ones, can take weeks or months to show any decent results. Long-tailed niche phrases, which are also commonly used to test different methods, can show results almost overnight in some cases.

SEO and Building Your Personal Brand

Online reputation management is a very important aspect of recruiting. When investigating a somebody, the most people use Google. Rather than having a results page full of information about that somebody, or neutral—or even worse, negative—listings about that person.

It’s not as difficult to influence Google search results for your own name, although the task will be far much difficult for some than others. If you are an SEO named Topm Cruise then I’d recommend changing your name!
There are clearly certain types of results that professionals want to appear for a search. And it’s great if you can control as many of the top ten listings as possible, and ideally you want this to consist of company profile pages, media mentions and so on.

You can use social media to help ensure ranking as highly as possible in Google for your “personal brand.”

Blogging - Have an author profile page which is linked to from each of your posts as this helps to build the strength and relevancy of your profile page to increase search rankings for queries on your name.

Guest blogging - Write guest posts for some of the top blogs which you admire within your industry but also make yourself available for interviews or blogger profiles.

Twitter - Interact within the community by adding value to online conversations and building a trusted profile
Business social media networking - These are great sites to show a professional profile containing your career history to browsing users, letting them know straight away the company you are currently working for, if people are looking to contact or reconnect with you.

Online presentations - This will allow people to view and download your presentations, plus it’s another chance to optimize for your name (or company name) and show that you are a highly respected speaker.

Online video - If someone is searching for more information about you and can find an online video presentation, this could go a long way towards enhancing your reputation to the searcher.

Social media networking - The obvious ones are profile pages on sites such as Facebook (grab that vanity URL!), Flickr, Digg and StumbleUpon.

Just follow these tips and you should be dominating a Google query for your personal in next to no time!

The FTC Takes On Targeted Web Ads

Jon Leibowitz, Obama's top consumer watchdog, hints that he's losing patience with the behavioral-targeting practices of Internet marketers

By Douglas MacMillan
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On a side table in his Washington offices, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz keeps a framed image of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1984 film The Terminator. It was given to Leibowitz a couple of years ago by one
of the FTC's regional offices, an homage to his crackdown on spyware that surreptitiously gathers information on Web users' surfing habits.

Now, Leibowitz wants to terminate-or at least rein in-a different practice he finds no less harmful to consumers: delivering ads to individuals based on the Web pages they visit and searches they carry out. Appointed by
President Barack Obama in February to run the country's top consumer watchdog, Leibowitz has made so-called behavioral targeting a top priority.

How far he goes in regulating the practice could have big implications for a host of companies that depend on Web advertising and engage in some form of targeting. These include Google (GOOG), Facebook, and Microsoft (MSFT),
which on July 29 announced a plan to partner with Yahoo! (YHOO) in the area of Internet search. It would also affect the way legions of companies and advertisers craft marketing campaigns.

Behavioral targeting has become more prevalent as it gets easier and cheaper to use software to track online behavior and then use the data to pitch Web users related goods and services. These ads are more likely to induce a customer to make a purchase or otherwise respond to a pitch, researchers say.

Web Ad Spending Is on the Rise

The pitches' growing effectiveness is helping to attract more ad dollars to the Web. Researcher eMarketer estimates that advertisers will spend $960 million on personally targeted ads next year, accounting for about one-fifth
of all display ads on the Web, up from $705 million this year, when they accounted for 15% of the total. The average Web surfer benefits, too: An array of free services, from Google's Gmail to social network Facebook, are partly supported by targeted ads.

But the FTC and a growing chorus of consumer advocates warn that online advertisers are not always forthcoming about their use of targeting. And some are downright deceptive, Leibowitz said in an interview with BusinessWeek. "There's a critical issue about whether consumers have notice of what companies are doing with their information and whether they're making informed choices about [sharing] information," Leibowitz explains. For example, if an advertiser sends an ad based on sensitive information about a person's health, "you might want to take that off the table."

Seated in his office in the Apex Building, less than three blocks from the Capitol rotunda, the balding, bespectacled Leibowitz hardly looks like a tech-industry Terminator. Of medium height, Leibowitz readily admits that his basketball buddy Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, "has been schooling me on the court for over a decade."

But confronted with the suggestion by one consumer-privacy advocate that the FTC lacks the technical chops for an issue as complex as behavioral targeting, his pugnacious side surfaces. "Our guys are pretty good on technology issues, and I think they're learning more," he says emphatically.

Stalking spyware perpetrators

As an FTC commissioner since 2004, Leibowitz has been outspoken about the need for stronger protections for consumer privacy online-evidenced by his aggressive spyware and data-security cases, as well as public positions he's
taken on mobile privacy and online ads. In June retailer Sears (SHLD) settled an FTC complaint charging that Sears had failed to disclose the extent to which it was tracking the activities of certain shoppers, who had been paid $10 to download a piece of "research" software to their computers. The settlement forced Sears to end the practice and destroy all the data it had generated.

Microsoft -Yahoo Search Partnership threat to Google?

Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are close to sealing an Internet-search partnership, said people familiar with the matter, ending a protracted dance and uniting the rivals against Google Inc.

Microsoft, which last year made a failed $47.5 billion takeover bid for Yahoo, would finally win what it wanted most from the Internet pioneer -- huge volumes of queries that run through Yahoo's search engine.

At the same time, Yahoo is expected to reap additional search-advertising business to expand its share of the market.


Asa Mathat /All Things Digital
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz
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Digits: Yahoo: 'We Face a Formidable Competitor'
Discuss: Can a Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance challenge Google?

The agreement, which could be disclosed as soon as Wednesday, includes Yahoo agreeing to use Microsoft's Bing search-engine technology on its own sites, these people say.

One person familiar with the matter said the Bing brand is expected to be used by Yahoo.

A deal between the two companies would immediately narrow the gap with Google.

According to Comscore, Microsoft and Yahoo combined accounted for less than half of Google's 65% share of searches in the U.S. market in June.

Microsoft handled 8.4% of searches that month and Yahoo accounted for just under 20%.

Internet users won't notice a dramatic difference on either Yahoo or Microsoft's sites, since the technology involved in the exchange operates behind the scenes.

Yahoo would continue to handle sales of the text ads that appear next to the search results for its own sites, as well as some Microsoft sites, said the people familiar with the matter.

These people said the deal would involve revenue-sharing from advertising sales. The two aren't expected to exchange hefty up-front payments.

The companies would argue any deal will eventually lead to better search results, in part by giving Microsoft more data to refine its search technology.

Yahoo may also argue that the pact will be a boon to Internet advertisers, helping them more easily reach people conducting searches via Yahoo and Microsoft.

The deal could make it simpler for advertisers to choose an alternative to Google as a vehicle for online-search advertising, said industry observers.

"They should be worried," Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, said of Google. "It's going to give Microsoft in one fell swoop a much bigger share of the search market."

Bryan Wiener, chief executive of digital advertising agency 360i, said the proposed deal would make Bing more attractive to advertisers who have been excluding it from their campaigns because its search traffic is relatively
low.

Any deal would free up Yahoo to invest in new search ad-sales staff and technology, areas where, he said, it has trailed Google.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Still, Mr. Wiener said it remains unclear whether Yahoo and Microsoft will be able to greatly increase their current combined market share.

"The only thing that can increase that is product development and smart marketing and there is nothing in this deal per se that changes that landscape," Mr. Wiener said. With Google's commanding position, "as long as
they focus on their customers, they are going to be fine."

A Google spokesman declined to comment.

Both companies have expressed concern that a deal that reduced the number of search competitors might be opposed by antitrust authorities, the people familiar with the talks said.

These people said Microsoft and Yahoo plan to argue that the deal would enhance competition by helping them provide a stronger alternative to Google.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Continuing to sell search ads could reduce the cost savings that Yahoo could generate from selling its search-advertising business outright.

But it would help Yahoo maintain its relationships with advertisers who buy its other online advertising services, such as selling graphical ads on Web sites.

The deal comes as Microsoft has begun garnering positive buzz for its Internet search engine with the launch of Bing in early June.

But even with Bing, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer made it clear in a recent interview that he still favored a deal with Yahoo to help accelerate Microsoft's search business and the creation of a more serious
competitor to Google.

The Internet in the next six years

The turnover of sales doubled the next six years from 4 billion to 8 billion. This expectation goes GfK research in the Internet Market Monitor.

Especially the tourism sector and the telecom industry, the coming years be affected by internet shopping, GfK predicts. Expected turnover in these markets in 2015 for half done. According to GfK, sales via the Internet in the next six years, from around 4 billion euros in 2009 to 8 billion euros in 2015 in the markets which the agency identifies. Approximately thirty percent of all GfK measured turnover in 2015 via Internet. Shown Today's figures from the GfK Internet Market Monitor.

The Internet GfK Market Monitor

GfK Retail and Technology is expected to meet this year around 25 billion turnover in more than 15 different classes by the day collection of POS data. For Internet Market Monitor this information combined with a large consumer research in 7000 which respondents were asked about their online behavior purchases. The results of the Internet Market Monitor give insight into the role of the Internet now and in the future.

A third of consumers buy only through product comparison Comparison sites are becoming increasingly important in the choice of a consumer for a given product. Six of the most used product comparison sites together account for 83% of all searches. These are the sites Compare, picky, Price Compare, Resolved, Tweakers and Kelkoo. More than one third of consumer purchases in this time a product through a product search and comparison does not go on
Internet or in the physical store. 37% of consumers with a fridge want to buy, compare the first models on the Internet. In less products such as drills, this percentage is lower, at 29.9%.

Travel and mobile telephone in 2015 through most Internet purchased

Internet Shops are currently particularly strong presence within the markets for gaming, music, DVDs, books and consumer electronics. It share of the online game sales rose rapidly, from 2% in 2006 to 14% in 2009. Also IT products like computers and printers and small household items readily go shopping in the Internet. One fifth of net sales in espresso machines in 2009, for example, obtained online.

Within all GfK Retail and Technology markets measured online turnover in the coming years to grow. The tourist sector and the telecom industry, the next few years most affected by Internet shops: expected sales in these markets in 2015 for half done.