Search Engine Optimisation - SEO

As expected, Google announced today that it has acquired Feedburner. The move brings feed distribution and management tools, as well as potential RSS distribution of AdWords ads.

Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo shares his thoughts on the Feedburner blog.

Bill Slawski, of SEO By The Sea, wrote an interesting article about mapping visitor intent to help develop effective categories and keywords for your marketing efforts.

Between his detailed report and some perceptive comments, this is a post well worth reading and using to improve your search marketing.

Talk about a maze. I was checking one of my keywords at Yahoo and found down at the number 10 spot a listing for what would appear to be a Google Group covering the subject. The url should have told me something was most probably amiss.

groups.google.com/group/loan-loans-bad-bad/web/currency_trading.html

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Are you giving search its due credit when you look at results of other marketing campaigns? Are you taking those campaigns into account when you plan your search activities? In today's SearchDay, In the Mix: Search in the Overall Marketing Mix, Impaqt's Pat Stroh explains that without knowing the full details of a client's media mix, an agency is limited in how well it can optimize a paid search campaign. But once an agency is armed with at least some of this historical data, it can begin to explain the mountains and valleys in those paid tracking reports.

Jason Calacanis, former CEO of Weblogs Inc. and GM of Netscape, has revealed his latest project: a human-edited search engine/wiki/directory called Mahalo.

The idea is to hand-craft search results for the top search queries. At launch (in Alpha, meaning "not ready for users, but looking for feedback"), Mahalo has results for 4,000 terms, and expects to have 10,000 by the end of the year. There are currently 40 editors on staff, with 100 planned by the end of the year. Calacanis, currently an "entrepreneur in action" at Sequoia Capital, is the CEO of Mahalo. Investors include Sequoia, Elon Musk, and Newscorp.

Calacanis has no pretensions about replacing Google, since the human-edited model would not scale to match the billions of pages in Google's index. Instead, he looks at Mahalo as a way for searchers to get a better answer for top queries, while defaulting to Google for those not served by Mahalo.

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Google Developer Day kicked off today with the announcement of Google Gears, an open source project focused on the development of offline web applications. While the phrase "offline web" may seem like an oxymoron, it speaks directly to the goal of Google Gears, which is to increase access to data and applications even when there is no Internet connection available.

Google's announcement indicates that Google Gears is a browser extension that is being "made available in its early states so that everyone can test its capabilities and limitations and help improve upon it". In addition, Google is proposing that this concept evolve into a "single standard for offline capabilities that all developers can use". Google Reader has already implemented Google Gears and as a result is offering offline capabilities.

The underlying technology uses JavaScript APIs for data storage, application caching, and multi-threading. Companies announcing support for Google Gears include Adobe, Mozilla Corporation, and Opera Software.