Google has a great range of feeds offering support to a number of it’s services, such as Google News Search Feed and Google Groups Feeds which make it easier to stay on top of what is happening. Search Engine Land has pulled a list of ten of the best together which is well worth adding to your feed reader to help you keep up to date with all the latest news and developments.
Microsoft hosted an adCenter Labs event last week which saw a few hundred advertisers treated to a viewing of the latest updates and innovations to the adCenter advertising platform. Microsoft was keen to demonstrate it’s latest adLabs projects prior to the adCenter release expected in the next few months, which is set to include a pilot release of Microsoft Content Ads, the new contextually-targeted ad program that shows text ads on Microsoft-owned sites.
Future projects currently being researched by adLabs were demonstrated, with keyword optimization, video display ads, and consumer orientation emerging as the key focus for development.
Three and four word phrases were the next most popular key phrase terms, with 27.15 % using 3 word phrases and 16.42% using 4 word phrases respectively.
The 10 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:
2 word phrases; 28.38%
3 word phrases; 27.15%
4 word phrases; 16.42%
1 word phrases; 13.48%
5 word phrases; 8.03%
6 word phrases; 3.67%
7 word phrases; 1.63%
8 word phrases; 0.73%
9 word phrases; 0.34%
10 word phrases; 0.16%
The survey highlights how maturing internet users have moved away from the generic one word search phrase to refine their search requests. The increasing sophistication of user search techniques have created progressively more complex search phrases as users understanding of search engines have grown.
90% of the UK’s marketers are planning to increase their online direct marketing spend according to new research from data analysis software company Alterian.
Alterian’s survey of marketing professionals in North America and the UK found that only 14% of UK professionals were planning on increasing their direct mail spend. North American responses indicated that direct mail is much more popular across the Atlantic, with 50% of marketers intending to increase spend.
The deal may eventually be expanded to include releasing content on YouTube, the video sharing site now owned by Google.
Several large broadcasters already have deals with Google, including CBS and Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival. The BBC deal would increase the profile of the channel out with the UK, which may be seen as vital in light of recent cash concerns.
The Guardian reports that BBC executives are looking at the commercial opportunities of the agreement, such as a share on contextual advertising that will run alongside BBC content.
The deal, which involves BBC Worldwide and the BBC, follows reports in the last week highlighting the BBC’s moves to sell advertising on its website as the broadcaster seeks to recover from a disappointing licence fee increase.
21% of the UK’s mainly teenage mobile social networkers post content to their MySpace account using either their mobile or PC, with 18% using Windows Live Spaces. YouTube and Bebo getting 9% reach respectively.
The number of UK users posting content created via mobile devices has steadily increased over the past year, and looks set to grow throughout 2007.
While the run up to Christmas saw online sales in the four weeks leading up to the big day showing an increase of almost 50% on 2005’s figures, it seems that the busiest day for online retailers in 2006 was Wednesday 27 December.
In collaboration with the IMRG, market research company eDigitalResearch showed just how successful the 2006 holiday shopping season had been, with sales reaching almost £1 billion pounds per week during the first three weeks of December.
While pre-Christmas Monday’s had previously proved to be the big traffic days, the 27th saw online sales driving traffic as many shoppers researched prices online before shopping on the high street. Online sales showed a 30 % increase on figures from Monday, 11 December, the next best day of online retailing.
Exponent is a modular Content Management System (CMS) with some useful built-in modules including Weblog, News, Calendar and Search module. It offers a completely new way of managing website content without using a typical back-end/front-end approach.Exponent CMS is an open source version of Exponent Pro, a paid version of the system which offers lots of additional features. OICGroup claims to have created a CMS that enables a creation of search engine friendly websites for small and medium size businesses.
In this article we look at the search engine friendliness and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features of Exponent open source version.
t is a simple and user friendly system. The two step installation process took less than 5 minutes and no additional changes in the server configuration were necessary. This is quite impressive, as in case of other open source packages, such as PHP-Nuke or Drupal, the installation process usually requires access to the server configuration files.
After only 45 minutes with the Exponent CMS I was able to learn the interface and answer some standard questions.
Can every page have a unique set of meta tags (title, description, keywords)?
Yes, however, all meta data has to be typed in manually, i.e. a user has to fill title, meta description and meta keywords field every time a new article or section is created.
It would be great if some of the metadata was generated dynamically or a user could define static metadata elements, such as brand name or some generic keywords that should be included in all pages.
Can URL’s be written in a format that is easily spidered and algorithmically compliant?
Yes, however, Exponent does not allow the adding of keywords. An example of a URL
www.yourdomain.com/index.php?section=11
Exponent doesn’t support search engine friendly URLs, which is a standard feature of almost every SEO friendly CMS. URL rewriting is in the roadmap for the 0.96.7 version.
Can pages sit out with the CMS with custom URL’s?
Yes, there are no restrictions here.
Can they use a robots.txt file to block unwanted and duplicated pages from being spidered?
Yes, although there is no robots.txt validation.
Does the CMS allow you to use custom image file names and ALT tags?
Yes. It is also possible to change the location of images and images are saved with the original filename. However, it is not possible to change the filename from the image manager panel. Although the way images are managed seems to be straightforward, I don’t really like the image upload form, where you can specify image Name and Description but you cannot define Alt tag. Inserting images into content is not very user-friendly either as instead of a drop down menu or thumbnails, the image location has to be specified manually.
Can the CMS generate a Google site map (xml)?
No.
Can the CMS generate a traditional site map and update it every time the structures changes?
No.
Does the CMS allow you to create a custom 404 page?
No.
Does the CMS support creation of RSS?
No.
Conclusion
One of the great things about Exponent is the interface, which is based on containers. Those who require a standard CMS interface would better choosing another system. In Exponent it is possible to build new pages by clicking one of the icons in and adding a new module, - the Text Module in this case. There are however some consequences of this approach; for example a page might look quite complicated with a lot of modules and tables. I also think that for bigger sites, a back-end with a categorised content table is required to manage content effectively.
Time consuming content management for a larger site and lack of a large community behind the Exponent CMS limits the use of the system to small websites. In terms of search engine optimisation and search engine friendliness there is also a big gap between Exponent and other open source systems. The lack of search engine friendly URLs support, no dynamic metadata generation and no sitemaps support only confirms that creating a SEO friendly site is not possible with basic Exponent installation.
I would only recommend this CMS for a website with less than 50 pages of content, which doesn’t get updated very often. It might be the ideal solution for people with less technical knowledge, who want to create a simple site and are not very concerned about search engine optimisation techniques.
Although, the lack of some SEO modules, it is still possible to get search engine traffic to an Exponent built site. The golden rules of SEO, in terms of creating unique content and metadata, are still valid and can be utilised with Exponent.
With sites such as YouTube leading the social media charge over the past year, it seems as the honeymoon period may be coming to an end, as Screen Digest suggests that while more than half of all video content will be user generated by 2010, finding a business model that will make them financially viable is a complicated matter.
According to Arash Amel, Screen Digest Senior Analyst and author of the report, “As yet…no one has found a way to make real money from the huge audiences who participate on these sites.”
