By admin -

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is releasing a new policy in which anyone can start a top-level domain (the part of a URL to the right of the period, such as “.com” or “.net”).

According to ICANN, this service will enable entrepreneurs to sell specialty addresses, such as .shoes, .ibm, .movies or .apple, to interested parties.

via ICANN Avails Top-Level Domains at High Price-Point – MarketingVOX.

By Erik Small -

Microsoft announced the Beta release of Bing, a new search service launching in Europe. We often see new products and services trying to slice off some of Google’s search market share. Coming from Microsoft, Bing is at least worth following as it rolls out. The Bing Press Release indicates full rollout won’t happen until June 3.

The mission of Bing is straight-forward:
“Microsoft has designed Bing to help people quickly find the information they need on daily routine searches and in order to accomplish tasks, including making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

Sounds interesting, eh? We shall see.

By pete -

LifeHacker gives a nice rundown of the new Google Search Options:

Google’s honchos unveiled the new “Search Options” at a Searchology event, one that coincides with the two year anniversary of the Universal Search unveiling that put brief looks at images, news, and other Google-powered search results on the main page. The new Search Options, along with richer “snippets” underneath results that can show reviews and specially-formatted information, should start showing up for most users immediately, but further down the line are more interesting experiments.

Handy Youtube vid from Google, explaining the new features:

Along with these new options comes talk of Google Squared – which will appear in Google Labs this month. Google’s VP of Search Products notes:

Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic – instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

Google Squared sure sounds like a another blow to the coming release of WolframAlpha. Google’s first strike on that was their Public Data in Search Results.

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event [Official Google Blog]

By Erik Small -

If you’re a webmaster or a marketing person managing a website, a simple SEO best practice is to optimize your URL structure. Key phrases are picked up by the search engines on your web pages AND in the URL. But remember, keep the URLs as short as possible and try to structure the URL so the keywords are closer to the beginning of the string.
With many new web technologies and content management systems, they tend to construct URLs with dynamic components and characters, which are unfriendly to the search engines.
Search engines queries are getting more specific, with more keywords in the string. Take a quick read of this article from Website Magazine Online:
SEO for Multi-Keyword Queries

By Hugh Garber -

Three people told me this past week that their New Year’s Resolution was to finally learn how to create a simple website.
There are lots of great tools that make creating a website pretty simple. Here’s a good overview of some of the “how-to’s” of website creation.
The article does a good job of suggesting tools and software to get you started. And it’s nice to see my personal favorite secure file transfer software is recommended: “Use a file transfer program (FTP) such as Ipswitch WS_FTP to upload and download your website creation and any updated pages between your computer and web site host computer.

By Erik Small -

I have come across a nifty online search engine optimization tool, called Website Grader, that scores a website and generates a ‘grade’ for website optimization purposes. It scores the website in areas relating meta tags, inbound links, indexed pages, etc. It’s free and worth a run through! A couple of simple tweaks can optimize your website to generate more no-cost inbound website traffic from the search engines.
Check out this website analysis tool at http://www.websitegrader.com