The Rank Magic Blog

Google Earth Debuts

June 28, 2005 ::: Google has released a geographic search tool. It's a new application that combines local search with satellite images and maps.

Google Earth is a standalone application that's an upgraded version of its Keyhole 3D satellite imagery product. As Google has done in the past, it's made the application free to all users. Google Earth Plus with additional features will cost $20/year.

Google Earth is designed to make it easy to "fly" to aerial views of many locations on the planet. Currently, the application has detailed imagery for the U.S., Canada and the U.K. and 38 major cities in other countries, as well as medium to high resolution terrain imagery for the entire world.

What Is Mindset?

June 26, 2005 ::: Mindset is new twist on search from Yahoo! that uses machine learning technology to give you a choice. You can view search results sorted according to whether they are more commercial or more informational (i.e., from academic, non-commercial, or research-oriented sources).

Sometimes you want to buy stuff and sometimes you just want to do research. In a typical search page, results point to commercial pages that are mixed together with non-commercial pages, so it's harder to find the type of information you're looking for. Mindset is our attempt to help solve that problem.

Google: The Professionals' Choice

June 23, 2005 ::: Google is the search engine of choice for professionals, but Yahoo is the overall favorite web site according to Internet Retailer. In a study by Changewave Research, Google garnered a 97% approval rating and Yahoo got a 98% approval rating.

LOL is a TLA

June 15, 2005 ::: LOL (laughing out loud) is a TLA (three-letter acronym). Are you ever confused by the geek-speak of TLAs? There's help at last with a brand new search engine called, suggestively, Acronyma. AFAIK it's the only SE currently devoted to TLAs, FLAs, ETLAs, and SFLAs. Have fun looking them all up!

AOL Switches TV Ad Money to Search Engine Marketing

June 13, 2005 ::: AOL is preparing to promote its new, free Internet portal by buying pay per click ads on Google and Yahoo!, which are, of course, its main rivals. It's also using SEO techniques to position its pages to rank well in the natural search results. The goal is to promote many of the millions of pages of content that AOL is moving from its paid subscription service to the new portal, which will start public previews this month.

AOL had initially considered spending as much as $50 million on TV  ads to promote the portal. But that changed after the company noticed that the biggest source of traffic to its free music site was free and paid listings on other search engines. Well, we could have told them that! <knowing grin>

"We started seeing the results and said, 'Oh, my God, what if we took this money and put it into search engine marketing,' " said Jonathan F. Miller, AOL's chief executive. Now more than half of AOL's marketing budget for the portal will be used to pay for ads on search engines and optimizing Web pages so they rank highly in the free search results.

This is from a New York Times article. You can read the full article here.

Google Salutes Frank Lloyd Wright

11 Tips to Improve your Landing Pages

June 8, 2005 ::: Landing pages are the pages people land on when they click your link in a web site or in the search engine results. Digital Web Magazine has a good article on how to make sure those landing pages retain your visitors and convince them to read on and to take some sort of action (like buying your product!). It's worth a look. It's called 11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages.

Top Search Engines in Europe

The Open Directory Has Widespread Use

June 4, 2005 ::: The Open Directory, www.dmoz.org, is an important link source for any site, and is one of the general purpose directories we always submit our clients to. Its database is reportedly used by about 400 separate web site directories. Here's a list. The Open Directory belongs near the top of your list in any link building campaign.