Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Look for a swing towards personalized domain names - coming in 2009 to a website near you! The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has decided to relax the strict regulations concerning domain names, and make it possible to register our own.

What this means for SEO is as yet unclear, but the implications are staggering! Imagine no longer being limited to .com, .net, and .org. Up until now, there have been few others that are commonly used - although you see the odd .biz or .info popping up more frequently now.

Of course, .gov and .edu are highly coveted for linking purposes, and .mil is almost as good (military). There are a few dozen others, including .museum, .aero, .mobi, .jobs and .travel.

The new proposal would make it possible to register almost anything as a domain name, making your url end in .billdawson if you so desire. This is all well and good (although good luck optimizing ‘billdawson’ for search…) but what will this mean for the average webmaster?

Not that much, really. The .com is the .com, and people’s habits die hard. The primary search habits will continue to center around the .com domain, and the main people flocking to register their own domain name are going to be major brands.

It costs a bundle just to get a TLD set up right now, and even if that dropped considerably there comes a time when one wonders if it is worth the trouble. And what about the search engines? Google already dropped .info names from their index, and who knows if the engine will decide that the new TLDs are too spammy for their taste.

A ‘gold rush’ may ensue nonetheless, as cities, countries, corporations and individuals compete for the popular domains. Cities are expected to campain for .paris, .nyc (New York) and .London. Countries have already been lobbying for two letter language designations (Bulgaria’s .bu, for example) and private corporations are expected to take the plunge (think .disney). Individuals may find the price tag prohibitive, although .oprah and .gates wouldn’t surprise me at all. Of course, lobbying for .xxx has been ongoing for years.

It is something to take into consideration as domains become more open, but the real life consequences to SEO probably won’t be seen until a year after the domain registry goes wild.

I wonder if .seo is taken?

The last time a quarter went by without a company going public was 1978 - three decades ago! Has the market apathy reached such a level that nobody cares anymore? Even SEO isn’t giving new companies the confidence they need to take the plunge.

Or is it that going public isn’t as easy as it used to be? The Enron debacle gave rise to the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which wiped out one trillion dollars of market capitalization when it was enacted in 2002. It is so expensive to comply with that many companies are going private or staying private to avoid coming under its jurisdiction.

The economy certainly doesn’t encourage companies to go public, though I would have thought I’d see more Mom and Pop French fry grease-powered vehicle manufacturers by now. Pesky road compliance laws!

Is it possible that the whole Icahn thing is what everyone is waiting to see resolved? Bated breath time ended two weeks ago, people - haven’t we realized that all points are moot? Microsoft has bailed, Yahoo’s in bed with Google. Stick a fork in it folks; it’s done!

Same with ‘the burst of the dot.com bubble’ - can we get over it, please? It’s the new day, and free commerce thrives on the internet, at least according to reports of ever increasing revenues. Sure the competition is fierce, did you think it was going to be a pristine wilderness forever? That’s what SEO is for.

Surely there is a market out there for something. Surely we still have investors willing to make the plunge and back an innovative new idea - don’t we? Or are we slowly grinding to a halt, and the market is just a warning sign?

Venture capitalists are starting to freak out, people, and that is NOT a good sign. Takes a lot to spook those guys.

What can be done? Some say that the folks in the Valley need to pay a little more attention to the real world of investments. C’mon, if those guys had wanted to ever grow up, they would BE the investors - isn’t the whole point of the Valley to be a maturity free zone, haven to YouTubers and Twitterers? No, not big money makers…but they’re COOL, man!

Others hold that this is just a temporary slump, caused by an uncertain market in the face of overseas conflict, a controversial Presidential race, and prices at the pump. New companies are just biding their time to see how the cards fall. Now is the time to start plugging SEO and plugging it hard - whather the market goes up or down you still need to be on the top!

Whatever the reason, there was only one major player this year in the $27 billion raised in public offering - Visa, at $18 billion.

That should tell you something!

The Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy will premiere across Google’s AdSense network featuring two minute shorts that will hopefully lure consumers back to displaying sites again and again.

The series is not for broadcast or cable TV, and is acknowledged by producers to be ‘edgier’ than the controversial Family Guy ever was. Without the constraints of the FCC, McFarlane can feel free to go after the target audience - you guessed it, young males.

The 50 two-minute advertising spots cost millions, making this venture the most expensive original content deal to date. But is it a wise move?

Whether or not it will pay off is not really the question - surely there are enough Family Guy enthusiasts alone to make it worth while. Add to that the titillation that it will be raunchy and in bad taste and you have the deal in the bag. The time honored tradition of ‘not suitable for women and small children’ goes back past Mark Twain’s day, and the demographic in question is sure to lap it up.

The question really lies in how committed Google is to video based advertising opportunities. Many have wondered why YouTube lies unmonitored and seemingly forgotten - when there seem to be so many golden opportunities for monetizing this already booming and healthy video based behemoth.

YouTube at this point is a drain on Google’s resources, (it costs a million a day for the necessary bandwidth required to keep it up and running) and it doesn’t seem like Google is any closer to figuring out how to start making YouTube turn a profit than they were two years ago.

Part of the problem seems to be that Google has forgotten how to approach the average Joe. The AdSense reached out to anyone with a website, and the brains to sign up. So far, revenue possibilities on YouTube are directed at professionals, who make up less than 25% of the total sources for content on the video playground.

Maybe Google just needs to concentrate on a program similar to their original promotion of AdSense, and target the average video poster. People jumped at the chance to ad advertising to their websites - surely there is a way that this can translate across and make everyone some more moolah.

In the meantime, watch for the new McFarlane Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. (Women and small children prohibited.)

We all know that social networking is the wave of the future. FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, and a host of other social and networking sites have pushed to the forefront the nations insane need to know what everyone else is doing, thinking, saying.

We love to vote, to critique, to make fun of. We want to share our opinions, (and even hear what other people have to say!), spread the good word (or gossip), and we absolutely love pictures, videos and music. Mash-up, anyone?

With all this attention, it’s not surprising that Google has decided they need to step up the pace and get a little more into the game. The familiar iGoogle is expanding. The top-of-the-page tabbed navigation feature is shifting to a sidebar, and the gadgets will be getting an expanded interface, called ‘Canvas View’.

Canvas View is designed to show a broader range of information for your gadgets, from your friends and all their doings to your own faves and projects. The richer content value and functionality are expected to encourage more people to use the interface, and Google hopes it will come to rival some of its competitors.

Feed will also be available to track such things as Google Reader, Picasa WebAlbums, Google-Talk message statuses and shared themes and gadgets. The Canvas View should allow a seamless Google Reader-like interface, and later this summer the social site aspect should be completed as iGoogle becomes able to support the application.

Google passed on MySpace several years ago, and Microsoft snapped up FaceBook. Yahoo has its own version of A social site in Yahoo buzz, and Google seems to think it needs to ratchet up the competition.

Could this have anything to do with the growing trend towards social networking as a marketing tool? Certainly Google wants to keep their fingers in all the pies it can! A serious iGoogle social network could be a viable tool to keep advertising dollars ‘in house’, so to speak.

In the meantime, Google still has YouTube, which should work well with the proposed new Networking plan. Videos and pics are shared much more often as plain textual information, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an added feature in the future allowing an easier interface to YouTube as well.

The Google APIs are not supporting quite all of the new gidgets and gadgets yet, but hang in there; we should be fully supported by the end of the year. OpenSocial promises to be quite a ride, so be prepared to spend some time exploring!

In a bold move, Yahoo has filed a patent for the idea of ‘meal searches’ on the web, which at first glance seems mildly preposterous.

The patent application reads:

“Method and system for searching for a meal using the Internet are disclosed. The method includes receiving a user request to search a meal on the Internet, presenting one or more pictures of food dishes to the user, where each picture of a food dish is associated with metadata describing characteristics of the food dish, receiving a user selection, analyzing the user selection according to the characteristics of each food dish presented, and providing additional information to the user according to the user selection.”

“Huh?” you say, confused.

Well, basically you could search by what you felt like eating, and pull up pictures of dishes offered. Info would be provided with the characteristics of each dish, possible sides, beverages and desserts, nutrition information, etc. Maybe even recipes could be included, or suggestions of food markets where you could find unusual ingredients.

OK, now you’re saying, “So what?”

Aha. Remember that pesky new thing called mobile search?

Suppose you are out with your cousin from Cleveland. Your friends call and want to grab lunch. They suggest a certain type of ethnic food, and you all search on your phones for a centrally located restaurant that provides the type of food desired, but doesn’t use a particular type of oil your cousin happens to be violently allergic to.

Maria is counting carbs, so she wants to be sure they offer weight watcher portions, while Josie wants to know what kind of dessert they have! Ben can only make it for an hour, and wants everyone to decide what they want ahead of time so that you can order right when you sit down and not waste time with menus. You promised Chuck to bring home something for dinner, so you call him too and tell him to pick what he wants.

Normally, you would have to roll the dice, pick a restaurant and take your chances. You wouldn’t actually know how it was going to play out until you got there, had the menus in your hands and got to see the selection for yourself. You might have to cross your fingers as cousin George took that first bite, hoping that he doesn’t swell up and fall over.

First option sounds better, doesn’t it?

This could all be possible if Yahoo could pull it together.

Now I’m hungry…