In addition, the new Bing video site also lets you access videos across the web including those videos from MSN video, Hulu, ABC, and YouTube.This practically translates to over 900+ T.V. shows

Bing videos was also re-organized to make it easier to navigate through the different video content and find the exact videos that you want to watch. And to make your video viewing session more pleasant, you can always turn on the “dim the lights” feature and enjoy watching videos online.  Great if you have that new iMac  or a MacBook hooked up on a 52″ Samsung plasma Tv.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Integrates MSN Videos and Video Search

1. Create a Group Tweet Widget

Say you are part of some team or a community and you want to create a collaborative widget of what you all Tweet about. Twitter lists can be a perfect way to do that:

• Go to Twitter List Widget generator;
• Provide your user name, list name and title (Setting tab);
• Customize the look and feel (Preferences, Appearance and Dimensions tabs);
• Grab the code and let your team members add it to their personal pages and blogs:

Here’s what we have for our Search and Social team:

2. Subscribe to Lists by RSS

What can be a better use of a Twitter list than the ability to stalk the group of people more effectively. While Twitter (surprisingly) doesn’t allow to subscribe to a list by RSS, there are already external tools for that!

TwiterList2RSS is a good example:

• Just create the list of people you really want to subscribe to (be very selective);
• Grab the list link;
• Go to the tool and provide the list link:

Here’s an example of our collective S&S Twitter list:

3. Monitor Popular Lists, Promote Lists

There will be plenty of Twitter lists directories and trackers, right now we already have one good example – Listorious. The site tracks popular and new lists as well as allows to share your own lists:

• Find popular media lists;
• Find popular news lists;
• Find popular marketing lists;
• Search Twitter lists;
• See most popular tags;
• Submit your own list!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 Actual Uses of Twitter Lists

For those of us who might have been too busy doing SEO and somehow missed the news Caffeine is a next-generation search architecture for Google that’s supposed to be faster and more accurate, providing better, more relevant results and crawling larger parts of the web. Of course the biggest question for most of us is not how fast the new Google is but how high our websites will rank in the new index. Until now we were able to check our sites positions in Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ but now it says:

Thank you!

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

So it’s official. Google Caffeine is going live and taking all the changes with it. If you’ve been monitoring your sites rankings in Google Caffeine you may expect your site to appear at same position in Google. Anyway don’t be surprised to see your sites rankings dance around a while – that’s Caffeine coming.

I’ve been following the rankings of a few sites in Caffeine vs Google with Rank Tracker. There were significant differences so I guess I’ll be able to tell that Caffeine is live when the actual Google rankings come close or coincide with the last checked Caffeine positions. Sure I’ll keep you posted.

Good luck and may your sites rank high in the new Google.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Caffeine Going Live!

With Hawaii now in Street View on Google Maps, you can now go on a virtual vacation, identify possible destinations that you would want to go to on your next vacation or to simply admire the state.

Checked out the Google Street View  Gallery to see the high-resolution imagery of the capitol buildings of all 50 states of the U.S.

In addition to adding Hawaii in Street View on Google Maps, Google has also added imagery from various places in Mexico including Mexico City, Monterrey, Puebla and more.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Street View Arrives in Hawaii

Yahoo will be providing free WiFi in Times Square starting tomorrow and will last until next year. This is part of Yahoo’s campaign to be at the center of people’s online lives.

Google on the other hand earlier announced that it will be offering free WiFi Internet access on every flights of Virgin America during entire holiday season.  Interestingly, Google’s promo also starts tomorrow.

Now, here’s a rather wicked deal – Microsoft is also offering free WiFi Internet access at participating hot spots designated by both Microsoft and its partner in this endeavor, JiWire mobile advertising company. The deal is, the free WiFi access will be granted in exchange for one web search, using Bing.  Obviously, this is part of Microsoft’s continued marketing campaign for Bing. According to MediaPost report, that one search is part of Microsoft’s awareness campaign for Bing.

So which has the better deal?  Google’s offer  seem fair enough while Microsoft is wickedly conceptualized although it might work somehow.  But the best deal is of course Yahoo’s one-year free WiFi Internet access at Times Square. Would have been better if other places were included also.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Search Engines Battle for Users via Free WiFi

Gizmo5 is a voip service that lets users dial from their computers and will probably be a key component in the expansion of Google Talk and Google Voice. I’m going to do a write up about Google’s mobile aspirations as build up to the Pubcon State of the Search Industry panel, but n the meantime, here’s a great quote from Mike Arrington @ TechCrunch :

This looks to me like Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product. And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Buying Voip Startup Gizmo5 for $30 Million

Here’s what both companies have to say about the acquisition deal:

“Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time. AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup – generating impressive year on year revenue growth – and we’re excited to welcome this talented to Google,” says Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management at Google.

While AdMob Founder Omar Hamoui has this to say about the deal:

“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made towards accomplishing this goal, and joining Google will only accelerate this process, ultimately leading to very real benefits for end users around the world. As publishers and developers generate more revenue from their mobile products, they will invest more, and their mobile offerings will become richer, more creative and more robust.”

According to the official info site put up by Google to coincide with their acquisition of AdMob, the deal

• will bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising, and will lead to more effective tools for creating, serving, and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats.
• will benefit developers, publishers, and advertisers by improving the performance of mobile advertising, and will provide users with more free or low-cost mobile apps.
• will make the mobile ad space remain highly competitive, with more than a dozen mobile ad networks. The deal is similar to mobile advertising acquisitions that AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo have made in the past two years.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Buys AdMob for $750 Million

We’re happy to announce today that we have signed an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company based in San Mateo, CA. AdMob is a great Silicon Valley story — founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui when he couldn’t find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site. Over the past few years, Omar and his talented team have built a thriving company with great mobile advertising products, and we are looking forward to having them join the Google team and work with us on the future of mobile advertising.

What does this mean for mobile advertising?

For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue.

For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats.

Read more

• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355609,00.asp
• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/investing-in-mobile-future-with-admob.html

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Mobile Display Ad Firm AdMob is Acquired by Google

(!) Generate keyword suggestions;
(!) Group and manage keyword lists;
(!) Research and monitor PPC competitors;
(!) Create ad groups;
(!) Export keyword lists and ad campaigns;
(!) More!

I found the tool useful enough to make a thorough feature overview:

Major Feature 1: Competitive Research

Start by adding a new project: provide your website URL and let the tool analyze the page content and retrieve base keywords. The tool will then fetch those base keywords and generate the list of suggestions based on Google’s API . Next to each suggested key phrase, see:

• The average monthly search volume,
• The search volume for the past month,
• The advertiser competition.

Select the words you want to further work on and add them to your new project:

After your project is created, you will be redirected to the PROJECTS folder where you can click your new project link and get access to lots of useful information:

Project Summary

Select the data type you want to be summarized: top advertisers ranked by impression share or top advertisers ranked by Ad Coverage and number of the words in the project.

Keywords

The table of your selected keywords contains:

• Average CPC for each key term;
• Average search volume;
• Google unique advertisers;
• Yahoo! unique advertisers;
• Bing unique advertisers;
• Latest ads.

Advertisers

The table contains the following data:

• Your competitor’s domain;
• Impression share (The impression share is estimated based on the advertiser’s ad coverage of each individual keyword, as well as the keyword search volume);
• Average ad coverage (The individual keywords ad coverage divided by the number of keywords that triggered the first page ads);
• Average ad position.

You can compare two or more advertisers. Select the competitors you want to compare and click “Compare” – the tool will compile a summing up table giving the following information for each competitor:

• Search engine the competitor advertises in;
• The number of words associated with the ad;
• The ad itself;
• The landing page;
• The latest position;
• When the ad was last seen;
• How many times the ad appears;
• The affiliate network:

You can add each competitor to the watch list to be alerted on new ads and new keywords the advertiser stats to bid on:

Related Keywords

For each key term you decided to manage, you can also find “related keywords” – a bit extended version of the base one. You can view each word stats (average search volume, Google, Yahoo and Bing ads).

You can add any word to your project ad export the table into a text or Excel file.

Major Feature 2: Keyword and Campaign Builder

While the previous feature set was all about the competitors, this toolkit is more about creating and organizing keyword campaigns.

Start by typing in your base word and let the tool generate the list of related keywords. Your next step will be to select those you want to focus on (like in the previous steps, average search volume and advertisers’ competition will help you to choose).

Just select those phrases you are interested in and click Add Selected to “My Keyword Bag” (the option hides behind “Actions” link).

Clean Up Keyword Lists

You can now go to “Keyword Clean Up” tab to sort and clean up the list:

• Sort the list;
• Remove duplicates;
• Keep / Remove lines containing any specified word;
• Keep lines with the specified number of keywords;
• Remove the specified characters (e.g. @$#/%^&*~_=+);
• Remove the specified words:

After that you will be offered to save the list, create an ad group or build one-keyword-per-ad group campaign.

Group the Keywords

Start by giving a name to your campaign for further reference. Now provide the grouping criteria:

• Create a group by base word (Keep lines containing this word); AND / OR
• Create a group by excluding some words from the list AND / OR
• Create a group based on the number of words in a phrase (Keep lines with the number of keywords).

Don’t forget to give each group a name (I suggest giving a descriptive name based on the grouping criteria: e.g. “3-word”, “no-stop words”, etc):

Create an Ad Campaign

When you are done grouping your keywords, you can now go to “Campaign Builder” tab to create your ad campaign:

• Name the project;
• Set the search engine;
• For each group specify the match type (broad, phrase, exact) and the maximum cost per click:

After that in the “Ad Setup” you should give your ads details (each ad headline, text and destination URL) and generate the output once you are done (export it to the text file or Excel).

Create Customized Alerts

“Alerts” option was one of my favorite ones. It allows to set up alerts on the project level (e.g. “Alert me when new advertisers that use the keywords from XX project appear in Google“) or more specific alerts (tracking the selected competitors).You are allowed to provide up to 6 email addresses to send alert copies to.

Pricing

The packages vary in features and rates: the minimum price is $19 per month while the most popular package costs $129 per month.

Our Verdict

The is a useful tool for search marketers looking to get competitive intelligent data to improve or optimize their campaigns. It will also cut down the time it takes to create campaigns especially for keyword research and launching the campaigns in the three major search engines.

Now, would you like to play with the tool?

SEJ is giving away 3 iSpionage professional accounts with free access for 3 months (one prize is thus $387 worth!) – to win one of them, just follow SEJ on Twitter and retweet:

Win free access to iSpionage kwd research tool: follow @sejournal and RT! http://kl.am/4JEB

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

iSpionage: Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis Tool

There have been more and more people recently who are complaining about how inaccurate SITE: command actually is. People report either sudden drop in the number of results returned for site:domain.com command (with no change reported in Google Webmaster Tools) or inconsistent data (again, compared to verified Webmaster Tools account data).

Here’s what smart people say about this:

There are a growing number of people noticing the strange results from the site: operator. Bottom line for me, this report cannot be trusted any longer – most especially not the number. Just because a url is not in the site: operator result doesn’t mean it isn’t indexed and getting search traffic.

However, while agreeing to the command being largely inaccurate, people still see the effect on actual site rankings:

Anyhow, while I found “site:” to be maybe 65% reliable (I’ll expand on this) I still find the correlation (between the ’site’ number and SERP traffic) to be fairly significant.

This forum discussion suggests the need of checking throughout a number of Google data centers before driving to any conclusions:

I think the datacenters hold all the data and that data gets filtered down to regular google. Google knows all the pages are there, it just chooses which pages are deemed more important. This has always bugged me in the past until I noticed that a lot of unique phrase searches will show a page that is not part of the 1950 that the site operator returns.

So, let’s share our experience?

Here are a few tools that will help you to check SITE: results for any of your sites to compare to regular Google:

• WebRankInfo Data Centers Tool (17 Google data centers at once);
• SEOchat “Multiple Datacenters Search” (12 data centers at once, 3 ranges of data centers are available);
• LinksAndTraffic Datacenters Search (10 Google data centers at once);
• IWebTool Google Data Center Search (10 Google data centers at once, 4 ranges of data centers are available).

Please check your site and share your numbers in the comments (if you have Google Webmaster Tools data, please share it as well).

Numbers for [site:SearchEngineJournal.com]:

• Regular Google: 22, 600 (for November, 3)
• Datacenters: range from 9,980 (!) to 23, 100

What about you?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How Inaccurate Google’s SITE: Operator Is and How to Fix It