By Matt McGee

Yahoo has announced that they’ll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo’s Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers.

The next “big deployment,” Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo’s 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009.

Yahoo’s analytics service is a result of the company’s purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen announced the company’s plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free.3

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By Bob Heyman

Someone’s trying to trademark the term SEO, which has roiled the SEO community. The someone is named Jason Gambert, and he has filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office, claiming to have coined the term “SEO” (for Search Engine Optimization). SEOMoz and others have moved to challenge Gambert’s claim. As the person (along with my partner Leland Harden), who actually did coin the term Search Engine Optimization back in 1995, I feel uniquely qualified to weigh in on the validity of Gambert’s claim.

Jason Gambert asserts that he was the first to use the term SEO, in a 2007 email. The actual origin of SEO happened this way, as recounted way back in 1997 in the book Net Results that Leland and I wrote with Rick Bruner. Here’s an excerpt from page 137:

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By Ron Jones, Search Engine Watch

If not, you may want to read how other educators are using Twitter as an education tool.

For those who are coming up to speed, Twitter lets you broadcast or microblog your messages (140 characters max) to a group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages, called a “tweet,” to your subscribers and their mobile phones. Since almost everyone has a mobile phone now this makes Twitter more effective as a communication tool.

Twitter in Academia

David Parry, assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, was a little apprehensive at first to use social media in the classroom, but after reading an article by Clive Thompson at Wired, he decided to give it a shot.

After giving his students a Twitter assignment one semester, Parry was curious to see how his students would react. He was surprised to see how it helped communicate with his students. After using it more and more he found “that it was one of the better things he did with the class.” He then posted these tips for using Twitter in academia.

Some of the highlights were an increase of “class chatter” as the class started using Twitter to have conversations inside and outside of the class. It seemed to develop a sense of “classroom community” as students began to develop a sense of each other outside the classroom space. Other tips are:

- Instant feedback.

- Track a conference or seminar.

- Follow a professional or famous person.

- Public notepad.

- Writing assignments.

- Grammar.

- Maximizing the teachable moment.

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By Danny Sullivan

In the old days, getting listed on Google just meant having a web site. These days, you can get in by selling products through a virtual store, by having a book, by having a small local business that’s listed in a yellow pages directory and many other ways. To help centralize submission and inclusion information, Google has updated its Submit Your Content page to make it more into what I’d call Content Central, a guide to the many ways of being listed. Google’s also launched an actual Content Central blog, to coincide with the update.

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By: Justin Pinkus

Something as basic as your web site’s site map could have more of an effect on the success of your web site than you originally may have thought. So why is it that site maps are often taken lightly or overlooked altogether? Most graphic designers, webmasters and even Internet marketers don’t grasp the many uses and purposes for a site map. And the ones who do might only incorporate one version when there is a strong value to having multiple types for different “audiences.”

In this article I will be reviewing the benefits of incorporating a site map, its prime positioning and the different types that should be considered for optimal success.

So What Exactly is a Site Map?

The simple definition of a site map is a page that contains an organized listing of links to all pages within the web site. You will usually find links to these pages somewhere on the home page of a web site, and on more proactive sites, every page. Often site maps are found at the top right or bottom navigation links, away from the main components and natural site navigation, but still positioned in areas of high visitor focus, based on eye-tracking tests that have been performed by knowledgeable Internet marketers.

There are of course many ways to structure the site map itself, taking into consideration a company’s brand colors and the special look and feel of the site itself. Some may choose to list links alphabetically while others choose a category-based approach. While the design layout choice is insignificant, an organized and easy to read and follow site map structure is.

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By Aaron Wall

What is the difference between an unremarkable no value add thin ecommerce site, and a top ranked site? In some industries the difference is simply site age. Sites that were around a few years ago had fewer competitors, so it was easier for them to rank. As they aged they got trusted more, and some of those top rankings lead to many self-reinforcing links.

If your site is brand new and you want to compete against established sites directly on their most important keywords then you need to be good at public relations, have a better brand strategy, or have some remarkable feature that makes people want to talk about you. Without conversation and links it is hard to pass up sites that have been accumulating links for years.

But what if you could roll back the clock, and quickly grab market leading positions? You can.

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“Strong international growth as well as sustained traffic increases on Google’s web properties propelled us to another strong quarter, despite a more challenging economic environment,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “As we continue to focus on innovating in our core business of search, ads and apps, we also look forward to enhancing the experience of our users and expanding the reach of our advertisers and partners with new technologies and formats, particularly as our integration of DoubleClick gains momentum and creates new opportunities in display advertising and elsewhere.”

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Mariya Moeva and Bergy Berghausen of Google posted an excellent step by step instruction manual and video on when and how to submit a Google request for reinclusion in Google. In short, the steps are as follows:

Login to Webmaster Tools and check for any crawl errors, such as “URL unreachable” or “URLs restricted by robots.txt” errors. If you find those errors, dig deeper and see if you can open up those access errors. If those are not your issues, proceed to step two.

Check in Webmaster Tools the Message Center for any notifications of site issues. If there is something there, then follow those recommendations.

Then you want to review the Webmaster Guidelines and patch up any issues with your site that may have caused your site to be deindexed form Google.

Finally, go back to Webmaster Tools and submit a “reconsideration request,” but only after you are confident your site is in compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

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By Barry Schwartz

Saul Hansell from the New York Times reported on an interesting discover that uncovered that Google may look at more than just your previous query to tailor the ads you see on the search page. Now, Google may look back several past queries to tailor your search ads. Yes, this is a major difference - let me explain how.

Obtaining the previous query of a searcher is technically different then obtaining a query conducted five searches ago. Obtaining the latest query does not require cookies to be assigned and tracked for that search. But to track a query from five searches ago, you will need to assign a cookie to that searcher and track his queries. Then Google can use that ‘cookied’ data to tailor the ads from a query done several searches ago.

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By Barry Schwartz
Over the past few days, many webmasters and SEOs have been noticing an update to the PageRank score found in the Google Toolbar. Usually PageRank updates aren’t that noteworthy, but it seems something is different about this PageRank update

In particular, it has been a really long time since I’ve witnessed such widespread discussion about a PageRank update. I have been writing about PageRank updates since 2003 and been discussing them with other webmasters years before that. The last time I have seen this much discussion was in the times of the Google Dance, when toolbar PageRank updates actually coincided with ranking changes. Those days are long gone, but yet, SEOs and webmasters seem to be even more obsessed with a toolbar PageRank update. (FYI, I am one of those that believe we should not obsess about PageRank, let alone new toolbar PageRank updates).

I have asked Google for a comment about this PageRank update, since this is sparking such discussion. I will leave it open to discussion at our Sphinn forums, where several threads on the subject have started, such as this one.

My advice remains the same as always. Do not worry about PageRank. Try on focusing on building out a better site, with better content and a better community.

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