SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

eMarketer, an Internet marketing firm, reported that unique viewers of retail online videos grew 40 percent from October 2007 to October 2008, totaling 152,857 for the latter. The eMarketer report was based on figures from comScore and includes additional calculations. But the trend is clear. Consumers are willing to watch retail videos and smart retailers will respond by providing more rich media content. In fact a separate study that Knowledge Marketing conducted for Internet Retailer, showed that more online retailers plan to add video content to their sites in 2009 than any other new feature or function. Voting with their development dollars, retailers seem to be clearly indicating that think product videos will improve their sales ...

A much rumored about Google project named "GDrive", a virtual hard drive that would allow users to easily store a vast quantity of data on the net, is said to be potentially able to revolutionize the world of personal computers of today, but many skeptics doubt the project has any real chance of doing so.

In Booklist, we ask ecommerce professionals to name books they believe are useful resources for ecommerce merchants. For this list, we asked Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com,, an online retailer of shoes, bags and other accessories. Made to Stick Whether you're trying to get a message out to your customers or employees, Made to Stick provides really great insight. By Chip Heath and Dan Heath Tribal Leadership If you're looking to build a company culture for the long term, "Tribal Leadership" can help you figure out how to get there. Free audio book download is also available. By Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright Happiness Hypothesis and Peak Both of these books are great for personal growth as well as figuring out how...

There is one important factor to remember whenever you are involved in improving the organic rankings of a website, and that factor is time. One of the most common questions I receive as an SEO is “How long till I start to see results?” This article is dedicated to anyone who has ever asked that question.

As company investors are expecting the latest Q4 revenue report to assess the company's performance in the latest trimester, Yahoo has decided to freeze all employees' salaries in an attempt to improve its poor financial situation.

Online shopkeepers can use good customer-oriented content to improve PageRank and increase sales. In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), link baiting is the practice of creating web content that is virtually irresistible to bloggers, Diggers, or other members of the linkerati (people who can link to your site and are popular on social media sites or through their own websites). These folks link to the bait from their blog, social media site, or web page, boosting the bait's PageRank and improving the bait's position on search engine results pages (SERPs). Some SEO experts speak about link bait like it is beyond the reach of ecommerce web sites. They imagine that there is nothing an ecommerce site could create that would be ...

Recently Google mentioned that 100,000 different articles have been posted to Google Knol. I’ve been meaning to talk about Google Knol for a while, because there’s a few things you need to know. It seemed especially relevant after I saw the Silicon Alley Insider article about Knol on Techmeme, so I figured that I would weigh in.

Google Knol does not receive any sort of boost or advantage in Google’s rankings. When Knol launched, some people asked questions about this. I dutifully trundled around the web and said that Knol would not receive any special benefits in our scoring/ranking for search. With the benefit of six months’ worth of hindsight, I hope everyone can agree that Knol doesn’t get some special boost or advantage in Google’s rankings.

In my opinion, Knol is doing just fine. It’s weird that in just a few months, the conventional wisdom can change from “Google will give Knol unfair boosts in ranking; it will dominate the space!” to “Oh, Knol gets so little traffic that it’s not a success.” The rapid change in perception gives me a little bit philosophical whiplash. The fact is that neither of these perceptions is true. Mashable made a point that “it took Wikipedia almost two years to reach a similar number of pages.”

The Knol team is not standing still. Some of the ways I’ve learned to estimate whether a team will be successful is how high-impact their project is, but also 1) how quickly they can iterate and 2) how they react to feedback. I consider the Google Chrome team very successful, for example. They roll out a new version of Chrome about once a week, and I see them pay attention and prioritize based on feedback. In the same way, you probably haven’t noticed it, but the Knol team has been steadily delivering new releases over the last six months. Knol has more polish, more features, and the team has listened to the outside world when they plan what to work on next.

My personal conception of Knol is that when you want to write a quick article or put some information on the web, Knol is a great place to do it. If you already have a blog, you could always stuff the info on your blog. But a ton of people occasionally want to post some info but don’t have or want a blog. Imagine if you’ve searched the web for some piece of info and didn’t find exactly what you wanted (maybe there isn’t any good content about using red widget A with blue operating system B). By the time you’ve finished searching, you might be an expert about that micro-niche. That’s a perfect time to document what you’ve learned, and if you want an easy place to store that info, Knol can serve that need.

I recently did a Googlebomb post over on the Google Public Policy Blog. I’ve talked about Googlebomb phenomenon before (also see more Googlebomb background here). Just as a reminder, a Googlebomb is a prank where a group of people on the web try to push someone else’s site to rank for a query that it didn’t intend to (and normally wouldn’t want to) rank for. Typically these queries tend to be unusual phrases such as “talentless hack” that don’t really have any existing strong results.

Danny Sullivan asked a good question in this most recent round of coverage about Googlebombs:

Obama no longer ranks for “failure” on Google. The White House hasn’t changed anything. The link data that Google has been using to rank the Bush page — data inherited by Obama’s page — hasn’t changed. So the Googlebomb fix for this that hasn’t worked since earlier this month just happens to kick in a few hours after I post this article? That’s going to kick off another round of questioning over how “automated” that fix really is…

I wanted to address that question. The short answer is that we do two different things — both of them algorithmic — to handle Googlebombs: detect Googlebombs and then mitigate their impact. The second algorithm (mitigating the impact of Googlebombs) is always running in our productionized systems. The first algorithm (detecting Googlebombs) has to process our entire web index, so in most typical cases we tend not to run that algorithm every single time we crawl new web data. I think that during 2008 we re-ran the Googlebomb detection algorithm 5-6 times, for example. You can think of it like this:

The defusing algorithm is running all the time, but the algorithm to detect Googlebombs is only run occasionally. We re-ran our algorithm last week and it detected both the [failure] and the [cheerful achievement] Googlebombs, so our system now minimizes the impact of those Googlebombs. Instead of a whitehouse.gov url, you now see discussion and commentary about those queries.

Product Research

One key to selling any product online or offline, one eBay or anywhere else is doing the proper research on your product ideas. When you sell on eBay there are fees associate with selling, so the better prepared you are to sell a product the better you will be. There are two good ways to research products for eBay.

www.terapeak.com This site has a free tool that you will find in the navigation bar at the top of the page. When you click on it, the program will allow you to type your product idea in the search box and it will give you some results on the item.

Completed listings. Use the completed listing sections on eBay to research product ideas. This can be done by searching for your product. Once results come up on the screen you will see an option on the lower left hand corner of the screen. The option there will be titled completed listings. From there you can search the completed listings section to get an idea on well your product idea might be selling.

Product Sourcing

One of the biggest challenges when selling on eBay is finding what to sell and where to get it. There are several ways you can go about finding products. Here are a few.

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Articles are written information on a topic product or service. An article may be a review of a product, information regarding your web business. One strategy to step up your web business SEO is writing articles this will help promote your site. We do this by writing one article per week, include it on your site and then submit it to the search engines, your content is constantly changing and updating, search engines constantly crawl your site, not only does your content update it creates and builds targeted links back to your site trough the submission process.

We are going to cover how to

• Write a focused article for your business
• How to submit to article submissions sites
• How to manage duplicate content.
• Building Links by Submitting Articles
• Avoid Duplicate Content
• Learn which types of article links are best

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is spelled out by google as: …”duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content or are appreciably similar… In some cases, content is a duplicate across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long tail queries.” Some strategies to using content correctly
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