By Bill Platt

These days, all search engine optimization gurus only seem to talk about Google, as if Google was the only search engine on the Internet.
Of course, we all know that there really are hundreds of search engines and directories available to us, and we know that some of the smaller search engines serve a very tïght niche of users.

Honestly, I can understand why there is a lot of press on Google, because after all, granddaddy Google is the biggest of the big. We know that millïons of people use Google daily for their search activities, and we know that our websites receive a lot of traffïc from Google.

Under the arrangement, sales representatives from Verizon will be able to offer potential advertisers not only print ads, but AdWords campaigns too.

Google’s latest push into local search embraces a very old-school concept - the salesperson. With Verizon signing on with Google as an AdWords Reseller, Google gets a valuable ally in reaching small businesses it may not reach otherwise.

Call it the Wal-Marting of AdWords. If Google can extend its healthy search advertising business to scores of small businesses with tightly focused campaigns, the volume could cushion drops in large-advertiser revenue.

A Verizon executive illustrated how the new program will work for its advertisers:

By Matt DeAngelis

Your domain name is the .com, .net, .org or some other dot something that people use to get to your web site. Affiliateblog.com is mine.
A group of investors headed by Jake Weinbaum (the guy behind Disney’s go.com) paid $7.5 million for the name Business.com back in 1999, aiming to make it a showcase B2B site. According to their own press they have succeeded. Yes, it’s a terrific name - short, sort of descriptive and easy to remember. There’s some cachet there, but is it $7.5 million worth? That cäsh could have bought a lot of promotion or branding for whatever name they could have had for ten bucks, or a hundred, or two hundred grand.

By Rob Sullivan

There are many ways to increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software which will auto generate it for you.
While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article, I look at another way to make your site appear as if it’s changing. That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

Feeds have been growing in popularity for some time. In fact, there are people who measure such popularity.

By Mark Daoust

Ugliness has nevër looked better. I have spent the last few days examining a surprising trend in web design that has made ugly websites look absolutely irresistible. No, it’s not the bolded, 18 point Times New Roman font shouting at me as I access the page that has me excited, nor is it the harsh colors that have actually managed to make my eyes hurt and distort my vision. In fact, it’s not even that logo which is so pixelated from being processed, resized, saved, and edited so many times that it appears to be blurred to protect the identity of the company who owns the website that has me singing the praises of ugly websites. What is it?

I’ve had several folks ask me what I think of Google Finance. There’s already a fair amount of good commentary out there on the topic (Bambi, TBAiT, Charlene, Matt, Publishing 2.0, Blodget, and others), so I’m going to answer this in a different way.

You see, I started at Yahoo! back in 1999 as an engineer working on Yahoo! Finance. It was one of the sites I used most often back then, so it was a privilege to get my hands on it and really contribute in a meaningful way. I spent roughly the next three years working with the good folks in our group, including Katie Stanton, who announced Google Finance a few days ago.

By Mark Daoust

A while back I wrote an article commenting on Yahoo’s public declaration that they were effectively conceding to Google in the search market. The point of the article was that Yahoo was not necessarily giving up as a business, but rather focusing its efforts on more modern forms of search. And what are these more modern forms of search? In a word, social networks which includes social bookmarking and variants on social bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking

EDIT: This position has now been filled. We hope to be introducing the new member of our team in an upcoming newsletter.

WNW Design Limited are currently looking to recruit a Sales Account Manager to work within our company.
We’re looking for someone with enthusiasm and motivation, with experience in a sales background, to join our team based in Exmouth, UK.
You will be managing existing customer accounts as well as building customer relations with potential clients, and must have an outgoing and friendly manner. You can find detailed information on the recruitment page here, along with instructions for sending your cv.

The search advertising company launched its financial news site last night, with an interesting take on meshing stock charts and news related to a company.

The new Google Finance presents a very uncluttered look to the first-time visitor. A Market Summary of four major North American indexes shows their prices and price changes with a Flash-based chart, and a list of finance-related news items appears below the summary.

That very simple look quickly yields its more sophisticated features. Mousing over each of the indexes in the market summary changes the chart to match the index being selected. Entering a stock symbol into the search box brings up information one expects to see for a publicly-traded company: stock price, market cap, trading volume, and the usual ratios.

By John Metzler

With moderate search engine optimization knowledge, some common sense, and a resourceful and imaginative mind, one can keep his or her web site in good standing with search engines even through the most significant algorithm changes. The recent Google update of October/November 2005, dubbed “Jagger”, is what inspired me to write this, as I saw some web sites that previously ranked in the top 20 results for extremely competitive keywords suddenly drop down to the 70th page. Yes, the ebb and flow of search engine rankings is nothing to write home about, but when a web site doesn’t regain many ranking spots after such a drop it can tell us that the SEO done on the site may have had some long-term flaws. In this case, the SEO team had not done a good job predicting the direction a search engine would take with its algorithm.