By Mark Daoust

Every month, it seems, a major company stares down the barrel of Google’s brand recognition gun. The company of the month right now happens to be PayPal. The Wall Street Journal published an article on Ebay’s Jeff Jordan’s preparations for Gbuy, the so called PayPal killer (PayPal is owned by Ebay). Many news sources and blogs are anticipating Gbuy to quickly become a PayPal killer given Google’s huge brand name recognition and reach with consumers.

By Sharon Housley

As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, there have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds. Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium. The ads served must be related to the content contained in the feed. If the RSS feed contains quality content, the ads are relevant, and the volume of ads is in balance with the volume of content served, advertising in RSS feeds will succeed. Take a closer look at some of the ad serving options currently available for RSS feeds.

By John Krycek

Are profitable, top search ranks possible without the help of an experienced search engine optimization company?
Can a software package or online miracle site touting testïmonials and grandeur guarantees of success elevate your online presence enough to really increase salës?

Unfortunately, unless the software or miracle website were able to research your market, find hidden niches within it, author intriguing, creative, relevant and keyword laden content, house it in a framework that meshes precisely with that content, dissect and analyze your ranking competition and apply that statistical data within the aforementioned tasks, you’ll be using that monëy back guarantëe.

By Mike Banks Valentine (c) 2006

Running ranking reports for clients is a standard part of an SEO’s job. This week I created a position report for a client - one for which we’d made significant gains in ranking for their targeted search phrase - and proudly sent off the report to them before a scheduled conference call to discuss our progress and status. The client sent an email upon receiving the report saying “There is something wrong with your report - we rank higher than this report claims.” I went back to Google and typed in the search phrases to find rankings exactly where the report showed them the previous day.

During its earnings announcement, Google noted how higher than expected taxes caused the company to miss Wall Street expectations.
Google CFO George Reyes talked about the impact of taxes on the search advertising company’s bottom-line, an impact that caused their earnings-per-share to fall short of market expectations:

By Frederick Townes
Is it a movement? A revolution? Perhaps a new paradigm? Or, is it a bunch of hype designed to sell a bunch of new software? Just what is Web 2.0? Well, the term has been around since 2003. It was coined by I-Net pioneer Dale Dougherty and introduced at a conference by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Inc., who has subsequently made attempts at defining just what Web 2.0 means. In his seminal document entitled What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, O’Reilly describes Web 2.0 as follows:

By Neville Hobson

When I started podcasting, I used the free cross-platform audio editor Audacity as my application of choice for recording and editing audio.

This is a common route that many people go when they start out podcasting.

Audacity is very good and easy to use. Good enough, in fact, for many people to stick with it. Not just for podcasts, either - it’s good enough to be one’s primary audio editor. And a new version was announced last month with some fixes and new features.

In December, I published an article on the effect of purchasing links for pagerank. Much to my surprise, I got quite a bit of feedback – most of which was negative. The feedback echoed a sentiment that I have seen from more than one person involved in the SEO industry. It is a sentiment that seems to think that Google is happily manipulating the entire SEO and webmaster community for their own profitable gain. The whole idea seemed like a conspiracy.

I generally do not like conspiracies.

What Was Said

Or - Generic vs Specific. Or - Quantity vs Quality.

There is often a misconception with people new to the world of search engine optimisation that you should be aiming to feature for the most generic phrase that garners the largest number of searches for your particular industry.

Although there is some logic to this thinking, nine times out of 10, it is simply not the right approach.

At WNW Design we try to educate our clients as to why it is better to get small numbers of visitors that have searched for more specific phrases, rather than to get a large number of visitors for the most generic phrase.

After General Motors made a call to television viewers to “Google” the Pontiac brand name, it didn’t take long for Mazda to launch a keyword counterattack. Sponsored search results carried the echo of Mazda marketing snickers as Pontiac searchers were invited to a side-by-side comparison under the link title “Pontiac vs. Mazda.”

The scenario denotes two important developments: the emerging of a new TV-to-Web advertising strategy as major companies are not only pointing to URLs, but also inviting viewers to do a search; and that bidding on competitor brand keywords can be an effective (albeit potentially expensive) strategy.