Yahoo readies iTunes rival for launch

As previously reported, Yahoo has been working on the project along with digital-music wholesaler MusicNet since before the $160 million purchase of rival music company Musicmatch. Sources familiar with Yahoo's plans said the new store and software had been scheduled to debut early this week but that the launch date was pushed back.

Representatives from Yahoo and MusicNet declined to comment for this story.

Yahoo's full-fledged entry into the digital-music retail business could help shift a market that has remained tilted strongly in Apple's favor. Yahoo has already built a large and loyal following for its streaming-music and video service, and could parlay that into music sales.

Indeed, the company's Launchcast radio services was the highest-rated Webcasting service online in January, according to ratings firm Arbitron and ComScore Media Metrix, attracting more than 2.2 million people that month.

However, Apple's dominance has been challenged by other giants, ranging from Sony to Microsoft, without substantially decreasing the iPod maker's market share. Last week, Apple said it had sold more than 300 million songs through its iTunes store since its launch.

"You have to look at how to create a linkage between a device and the online service," GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But given Yahoo's traffic and their very active communities, the potential (for success) is there."

Yahoo has begun to streamline its music and multimedia properties over the past few months, changing the name of its Launch site to Yahoo Music and consolidating its entertainment businesses in a Santa Monica, Calif., office near Hollywood.

The new MusicNet-powered music service will be integrated into Yahoo's existing infrastructure, possibly including features such as links to its popular instant-messaging program, sources said. MusicNet's technology allows companies to offer subscription services or per-song downloads, and is used by Virgin Digital, America Online and others.

Sources close to the company said the new service is likely to launch by the end of the month.

Google Caffeine - A new Search Technique for Next Generation

Google is turning to the public (or rather, web developers) for help testing its next-generation search infrastructure, code-named "Caffeine." The changes have to do with the way Google crawls the web and indexes content, so you shouldn't notice any changes int he search engine interface.

In order to try out the new version, visit www2.sandbox.google.com, and start searching. You can share feedback with Google by hitting the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" box at the bottom of the page and sending a message with the word "caffeine" in it.

Overall, the search results look pretty similar, but there are a few minor changes. Some items may be ordered a little differently, while the text descriptions of some pages look different.

If you aren't particularly interested in testing the new technology to help Google out, here's another reason to give it a try: As far as I can tell, there are no ads on the Caffeine interface. I've conducted a few dozen searches, and so far I haven't seen a single sponsored result. Of course, that'll change by the time the new code is integrated into Google's main product. But it's nice while it lasts.

What other changes have you spotted? Let us know in the comments.

Why Is SEO So Popular?

SEO is without a doubt, the most popular of all the online marketing tactics. Is it the best? That’s a matter of personal preference and what you’re looking for, but it is the most popular. In fact, SEO has become so popular that its name has become synonymous with internet searching (have you ever SEO you website?).

There are a couple of reasons that SEO has risen to the top of online marketing.

SEO should be performed by a specialist who is ethical and has experience in the optimizing website before. A popular SEO consultant who have been constantly delivering innovative techniques for SEO.

SEO Delivers
SEO delivers a good ROI. When you do optimize a website, the search engine scours the web and brings back what it determines is relevant, content rich, websites. Most of the time, search engines brings back something you can use. It has a massive database of sites, so it gives you a lot of sites to choose from, and does it extremely fast.

How to Start PPC Campaign?

As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.

How PPC works is that the advertisers have to setup an account with Google and/or Yahoo first. Once the accounts are ready, the advertisers then can start building up their Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, keywords, and so on. The account managers at Google and Yahoo then will look after the accounts and make sure everything works (no violations of guidelines, ads are showing up, etc).

At this point, a lot of advertisers will assume that everything is done, and they can just sit at home waiting to count their cash. Well, that maybe the case in fairytale wonderlands, but definitely not in the world we live in. The reality is, a lot of times the teams at Google and Yahoo get so overwhelmed by their work and they lost tracks of what have been done and what hasn’t, resulting in a lot of updates being not approved (because no one had reviewed them).

This is more of a problem with Google than with Yahoo. With Yahoo’s system, if the newly submitted updates are still under review, you can see their status being editorial pending”. If it’s been ten days since you first submitted your update and the status is still editorial pending”, you know someone has forgotten to do their job. Just send an email to your account manager at Yahoo and state what the problem is and the problem should be sorted out in a day or two.

Google is somewhat different. Once you’ve submitted an update to Google, you will immediately see its status being reactive”, same as all the existing ads, keywords, ad groups you have. So if after ten days and you are still getting no impressions from the new update, and you intuitively check to see if the update is actually running, and when all you can see is it being reactive”, you will just think oleo, I guess no one has searched for it yet”, when in fact, Google’s just forgot to review them.

So monitor your accounts frequently, and the moment you sense something’s weird, fire an email to your account manager. Don’t be shy to send multiple emails in a day if that’s what it takes to get things fixed.

Summary: As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.

Google Browser Size - Tool to see how others view your website

To help you understand how everyone sees your website, Google have created a tool called Browser Size. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. People can use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.

To try it, simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page you'd like to examine. The size overlay you see is using latest data from visitors to google.com, so this should give you a pretty good indication of what parts of your UI are generally visible and what aren't.



How Google Browser Size Works:

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page's user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a "donate now" button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.

To view your own Web site with this same visualization overlaid on it, simply type its URL into the "Enter URL here" textbox at the top of the window and click Go.

Avoid Getting Banned in SE

Most of webmasters do know the importance of having high search engine rankings. High rankings means high traffic, translated into increased profit.. Webmasters look for all sorts of tactics to improve a website’s position in search results.. However you need to avoid some tactics, generally termed Black Hat SEO, because it may cause a website to be penalized/Banned from search engines.

So below are the six popular Black Hat search engine optimization tactics:

• Keyword Stuffing

The more often you use your keywords on a page, the higher you keyword density. However, search engines don’t look for exceptionally high keyword density, but reasonable keyword density. If you repeat your keywords too often, search engines might think that your website is spamming.

• Cloaking

Cloaking is when websites serve one web page to search engine spiders and a different to human visitors. This can be used to mislead the search engine with regard to the content on the website. There are, however, some methods of cloaking which are not regarded as a deceptive, such as delivering unique content to users based on their location, or allowing search engines to index password protected pages.

• Hidden Text

Another method of deceiving search engines with regard to a website’s content is by including hidden text. Text can be rendered invisible by setting it as the same color as the background, using negative margins, or placing it in an invisible containing element.

• Gateway Pages

Sometimes additional websites or web pages are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search engines and generating traffic for another website. If these pages provide no value to visitors and are only used for rankings, your website may be penalized.

• URL Redirection

This occurs when a user, or search engine, is unknowingly redirected to another website. Sometimes this practice is used to acquire the pagerank of the destination page. At other times, it is used to redirect users to a malicious website.

• Link Farms

Google Pagerank and other similar ranking algorithms for other search engines place a lot of weight on link popularity. Black Hat search engine optimizers often take advantage of this by creating something known as a link farm, which is consists of a community of websites which link to each other.

Search engines have gotten progressively smarter in their quest to deliver highly relevant search results. So even if these tactics give you some success, it will only be temporary and could result in an indefinite ban of your domain name.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds,blogging. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links
4. Help Your Content Travel

Google May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.

Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what's a better title, what's a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that's really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they'll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don't think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that's a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones?