Keyword Research: Analyzing the Important Factors that Contribute to Online Marketing Success

 

One of the most important initial steps in any search engine optimization endeavor is keyword research.  Without the right keyword research, you can pretty much count out any success in an SEO project.  Keyword research can mean the difference between sub standard and exceptional performance of a marketing campaign.  So, I would like to go through the steps that I utilize and factors that I consider while performing comprehensive keyword research for a website.

1.  First, brainstorm and determine the keywords that you will target based on industry information.

It sounds more simple than it really is.  If you're targeting travel, which keywords do you want to focus on?  What competition level are you prepared to go after?  How many conversions can you reasonably handle?  How much link building can you reasonably handle?  Well, one might surmise that the travel industry, for example can include travel related keywords.  To target a group such keywords and find out search data behind them, you could try brainstorming a list like so:

Travel
Airplanes
Bus
Train
Car
Travel by airplane
Travel by Bus
Travel by Train
Travel by Airplane
Travel by Plane
Resort
Hotel

2.  From here, we can plug these keywords into the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator to determine Global Monthly Search Volume, among other stats, to help us determine the best keywords to target for our purposes:

Keyword: travel
Global Monthy Searches: 37,200,000

Keyword:  airplanes
GMS:  2,740,000

Keyword: bus
GMS:  30,400,000

Keyword: train
GMS: 30,400,000

Keyword: travel by airplane
GMS: 12,100

Keyword: travel by bus
GMS: 135,000

Keyword:  travel by train
GMS: 165,000

Now that we know our Global Monthly Search Volume, we can look at other factors to choose the best keywords to target.  The keywords travel, airplane, and bus are all way too general.  Are we looking for information on how to travel, or airplane tickets?  Are we looking for information on buses and airplanes, or the best priced tickets for these methods of travel?

Depending on the exact focus of your website, you will want to narrow down your keyword list even further.  These could be keywords like bus travel tickets, bus tickets, or train travel tickets, or train tickets.  But, the keyword research process doesn't stop there at the brainstorming level.  Other factors influence how long it will take to see results, and how much effort you or your marketing specialist needs to put into the campaign.

Searching Google, we can find that the keyword "travel by bus" is heavily saturated.  You have about 179,000,000 (million) search results to compete against.  THAT is A LOT!!  Before I go further, no legit white hat online marketing techniques are going to get you quick results.  The whole point of the game is to develop a website and establish yourself as a long term player in the marketplace, and if you get caught using black hat techniques, your site can most likely get penalized or banned, depending on the level of offensive techniques involved, which will destroy all of your efforts up to this point.  So, having said this, let's go back to our 179,000,000 search results.  How does this factor into our determination on which keywords to use?

Well, saturation is rather important.  The more saturated a market is, the more effort that you will require in order to compete against those that already have a following, and so that you can reach the clients who will plunk down money for your travel services.  A market that's not so saturated means that you have much less competition and therefore even better chances at developing a market following and making some money.  That's what SEO is all about – making sure that once you get the right keywords based on a group of market factors, that you can then go after those keywords with all the knowledge in the world what your efforts will bring to the table.

Let's take a look at some better keyword factors that can help increase your odds of success.

travel by plane – GMS 14,800

Saturation Level: 69,400,000 results

Obviously we have a lower search volume and lower market saturation, so this can be a better choice to target.  But wait, what's another factor we should consider when we are analyzing our competition and market budget?  Links.  The first site that comes up in the organic results is travel.yahoo.com/flights.  Preliminary backlink analysis reveals 38,089 backlinks.  Can you compete against this?  Yes.  Do you have the budget and manpower to obtain even more valuable links and develop a site that will dominate Yahoo Travel in the SERPs?  Do you have the moxie required to go after such a market with such wide-reaching competition?  If not, then it's time to consider less competitive keywords.

Keywords with a competition level of less than 1,000,000 and around 5-10,000 Global Monthly Search volumes are good places to start.  I AM generalizing here, so this may be rather different depending on your industry, but those are good competition levels to aim for in the beginning.  If, however, you decide that it's time to go after the ultimate keywords with the best traffic and overall conversion opportunities, be my guest.  And, if you want to be rather ambitious and take on Yahoo Travel, well, feel free to do so – I'd love to be the inspiration for you to get going on a large undertaking such as this.

You may say "But Brian, I have no time for exhaustive keyword research and determining these factors that will influence my success.  I want to get to the top of the SERPs quickly and easily by just picking and choosing randomly.  What do I do?"  Well, sir, you drive a hard bargain.  You can pick and choose randomly.  But, when you discover that your keywords have no search volume and you've been building links and doing on site optimization based on random words with no traffic, what then?  Wouldn't you rather have maximized your keyword research efforts from the beginning with traffic-laden options like in the above examples?  No online marketing campaign should be embarked upon without at least ensuring that the keywords you're targeting will deliver some substantial conversion opportunities.

Keyword research is so important, both from a strategic advantage and developing a course of action.  You wouldn't want to set out on starting a business without a business plan in place would you?  The same can be said for any website that you start as well.  Do the right keyword research in the beginning with the factors that are important, and you'll see your results soar.

Is Google's SEO euphoria killing premium writing on the net?

 

A dot com boom, a bust and a resurrection later, the internet may well have become a dream nursery for an entrepreneur to grow his dream venture, but the very tools of measurability that have made the internet a money spinner and a viable advertising medium for many, are gradually proving to be the nemesis for good writing. Technology may be constantly refining a unidirectional climb towards precision-targeting and contextual relevance, but it is simultaneously corroding its ability to differentiate between chalk and cheese – between premium writing and run-of-the mill or mediocre content.

On the internet, one word fits all. Content. From articles written by the brightest erudite brains to a proverbial essay on the cow by a barely literate rookie – it's all content. The worth of the written word is no longer relative to or dependant on either its author or its publisher. For Google's search engine algorithms, a word is a word after all – nothing more, nothing less. And now that Google controls an overwhelmingly large portion of the internet's revenue machine, publishers are only too glad to play to the search engines, than to its readers. In trendy parlance, it is called search engine optimization.

Catering to readers gets us adulation that's not monetisable. Catering to Google gets us revenue, says a prototype publisher. And how does a journalist get paid, if there are no revenues? True. And false. True, because that's the formula on which the media industry operates. And false, because the internet has fallen prey to its own strength of measurability, when it comes to commanding disproportionately high advertising tariffs, the way print and television get away with.

So, no matter how smug a celebrity iconic journalist or columnist may feel while writing an in-depth, well-researched article on a subject topping the current affairs charts, a greenhorn with a barely tolerable knowledge of the English language could well garner better revenues by blatantly rehashing and aggregating content from multiple published articles on the same subject the next morning. And one of the sources could well be the journalist's own article. Copyright violation, did you say? Not quite. Sentences can be rejigged, clauses transposed and synonyms brought in to make the "content" read different. And finally, there are online plagiarisation-detecting software tools like Copyscape that can certify "uniqueness" of any content with a single click. That's all one needs to achieve in order to qualify for Google's Adsense dollars.

Journalism, much like soulful music and aesthetic photography, has always been an art – of lyrical expression and great story-telling. The advent of 24x7 satellite television may have usurped the task of breaking news, but the beauty of the written word still commands colossal respect, which has quintessentially epitomised journalism as a profession. Writers and journalists who have recall value, are precious because readers love to read what they write and the way they write. Greater the recall and respect, the greater their market value,and the salaries they earn. A Walter Lippmann did not need to count his pageviews or his Google Adsense eCPM to win two Pulitzers or his legendary fan following.

Perceptions, one would say. Unscientific too, perhaps! Not measurable beyond a certain degree of extrapolation. But that's how newspapers and magazines have flourished through the ages. That's how journalists have become icons and celebrities. That's also how the advertiser has been evaluating publications and apportioning media spends. None of this was strictly measurable, and yet excellence was rewarded.

Google's technology prowess has brought about a major paradigm shift – it has made the formula of earning money a bit too simplistic and rendered excellence dispensable. One doesn't need to be a mega media conglomerate today to get into the online content business. An entire industry has mushroomed out of even nondescript towns, which takes advantage of this blatant commoditization. Garage operations, which once spawned technology startups, now recruit youngsters with a woefully limited hold over the English language as content writers, with paltry salaries, at times even on a pay-per-story basis. Topics don't owe anything to topicality. Whatever is hot on Google, becomes a hot topic to write on.

The volumes of content produced are published on the internet and optimised according to Google's search recommendations, so that it could get more visitors to come and click on the ads on their pages – better known as search engine optimization (SEO) to the initiated. And then the cash register starts ringing. It is an easy formula to earn revenues by simply amassing sheer volumes of content, its abysmal quality notwithstanding, and then just waving the SEO wand. And voila, you are in business.

Whether content writers are hired for a salary or paid one dollar for every 500 words, the mushrooming market for SEO content would put even a wastepaper (in India, it is called raddi) business to shame. For a country that has millions of English-speaking youngsters in search of jobs that don't expect either great degrees or shades of excellence, being mediocre or intellectually challenged is no longer a spoiler on the internet.

The demise of the internet as a journalist's playground going unmourned is understandable though. What the writer has lost, the advertiser has gained. So has the micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) sector, which forms the bedrock of Google's India revenues.

At the height of the global financial meltdown, the Indian MSME sector has learnt its most valuable lesson – the benefits and viability of online marketing. As the publisher and the advertiser celebrate their resonance, a comparatively miniscule community of established and aspiring writers, endowed with excellence, displays a mounting sense of dismissive nonchalance about the online medium being a credible career prospect.

Even now, when social media has begun to alter lifestyles and media planners are beginning to loosen up and consider apportioning a noticeable slice of client budgets to online advertising, the aspiring journalist in India thinks online for just his social networking and blogs at best, but unequivocally opts for print or television when it comes to either his business card or salary. And that leaves the rest – who may not be good enough on a journalistic yardstick, but effortlessly pass muster for the countless SEO companies, which gives them their salary.

Paid content on the internet is one experiment that has bombed repeatedly. If readers have repeatedly refused to pay up for the content they consume online, advertisers have been roped in with technological impunity to make the medium viable for content. Fair game. But that's where my eulogy stops. Excellence on the internet will be sorely missed.

Read more: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/116664/20110227/google-new-rules-web-journalism-content-monetization-huffington-post-aol.htm#ixzz1FB2c9OaR

Weekly Wrap-up: Zippy Cloud Machines, Will Libya Crisis Shut Down .ly Domains? Hotmail One-Ups Gmail, and More…

 

Our top story this week was about "zippy cloud machines," which are not, as I first hoped, personal flying machines. Instead Marshall Kirkpatrick looked at the Jolicloud operating system, which you can now run on computers as old as 10 years. Turning a Dell that's older than your kids into a usable computer isn't a jet pack, but it's still pretty cool.

In mobile news, Sarah Perez looked at what you can do if the Windows 7 update bricked your phone. The toplocation story was about how the designer of Google Images is launching a search engine for hotel rooms. Read on for more to stories.

• Got an Old Computer? Jolicloud OS Can Now Make it a Zippy Cloud Machine
• Hotmail One-Ups Gmail, Takes Facebook Chat Global
• What Happens to .ly Domains When Libya Shuts Down the Internet
• Twitter Puts the Smack Down on Another Popular App: Whither Twitter as a Platform?
• Like Windows Phone 7, Bing Gets "Live Tiles" Too

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

Searchfest Recap: My Favorite Takeaways

 

On Wednesday, the 5th annual search marketing conference, Searchfest took place in my humble town of Portland Oregon. This is always a great conference with amazing speakers and really smart people asking really smart questions. I attended the advanced track sessions and thought I'd share my favorite takeaways from the day.

Conrad Saam's rankings rant and recommended SEO KPIs: Conrad expanded on his previous ranking report rant by offering a handful of more effective KPIs to track than rankings. In addition to rankings, he tracks things like: % of links that go to the home page (important to monitor as you seek to grow deep links), number of keywords driving traffic (long tail) and the number of landing pages driving traffic (page indexation indicator). His general point is that by only tracking rankings you can miss the big picture – like what is actually driving traffic and performing well.

adCenter PPC tip: if you pause a phrase match keyword, it automatically pauses broad and exact. FYI.

Rand's link building signals of the future: although he repurposed one of his recent blog posts, this was an insightful and forward thinking presentation. Rand talked about how things like brand signals and author authority may possibly play a larger role in ranking factors in the future. He also shared some tests that they had run at SEOmoz which had indicated that social sharing actions such as retweets of a given blog post can have a lasting impact on rankings.

Joanna Lord's general enthusiasm: Joanna gave a fabulous synopsis of the latest and greatest coming from Google AdWords. The biggest takeaway for me was to remember to take advantage of the Opportunities tab in order to mitigate management paralysis and consider Google's ideas because most likely, competitors aren't using this yet and there may be some great nuggets.

Log file analysis: this session left me wishing with all my heart I had Todd Nemet's skills. At Nine by Blue, Todd has created a web log parser that can provide incredibly valuable SEO data. Through this "old school" approach, webmasters and SEO's can track metrics such as most crawled pages by bots, time to discovery for pages, new referring links and crawl efficiency. In addition, analyzing log files usually results in identifying issues that if addressed, will improve organic visibility. For example, the 503 response code (server unavailable) will often cause Google to back off and crawl your site less.

In short, there were tons of big ideas and little helpful tips from some of the best and brightest in the industry. The future of search engine marketing will (hopefully) move away from being obsessed with keyword position, move towards a more sophisticated way to determine rankings and even include a throw back to analyzing log files to understand bot behavior.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

View full post on Search Engine Journal

Google Versus Microsoft: The Battle for the K-12 Cloud Contract

North versus South. Rural versus urban. Add to those delineations now, as schools and government agencies across the U.S. move to the cloud, Google versus Microsoft.

On the surface, at least, it's a public relations battle. Google announces one state or school district has adopted its cloud offerings; and then it's Microsoft's turn to respond with a new list of cloud clients. Google touts 10 million Apps for Education users. Microsoft touts 15 million for its Live@edu.

Oregon Goes Google, Portland Public Schools Goes Microsoft

In this light, today's announcement by Microsoft seems like a veritable coup. On the list of the 16 new cloud computing agreements it has signed is the Portland Public Schools, the largest school district in the state of Oregon with more than 46,000 students. Oregon, if you recall, was the first state to "go Google" in April 2010.

Of course, "going Google" doesn't mean that – presto, change-o – every student, teacher, and administrator in a school, district, or state are suddenly up and running on Google Apps for Education or even that they will be someday. Rather, the Oregon Department of Education now gives schools and districts the option to pursue their own IT solutions and doesn't force them to go with one particular contractor.

A Difficult Choice, A Difficult Move

Nick Jwayad, chief information officer at Portland Public Schools said that the decision to move to Microsoft's Live@edu "wasn't easy by any stretch." He said the district weighed its options carefully, listing the things he said made Microsoft's service more appealing: security, support and synergy.

To be clear, this isn't an abandonment of Google Apps for Edu. The school district is moving away from an on-premise Novell environment towards what Jwayad describes as a "Microsoft-centric" infrastructure. Microsoft, he told me, was the "product-of-choice," as, among other things, the Portland Public Schools plans to provision email accounts to students for the first time.

When Jwayad described to me of the school district's decision to "go Microsoft," he made it sound like a technological one. That's not too surprising. He's the CIO, after all. And as I learned when I attended a K-12 summit for Oregon school district tech coordinators, sponsored by Google, the challenges around moving schools, students, teachers, administrators to the cloud – whether it's Google's or Microsoft's – can be pretty daunting. Today's announcement from Portland Public Schools will mean that the district will have migrated to Live@edu by the beginning of the 2011-12 academic year.

The challenges for school districts migrating to the cloud include the infrastructure. There are the policies (COPPA and FERPA). There are the parents. There are the permissions. And of course, there are the teachers and students, who now not only want email (let's pretend, for the sake of argument here that the kids want email) but demand a whole suite of online products and services where they can easily communicate and collaborate – in the classroom and at home.

It's not an easy move nor necessarily a cheap move (despite the promises of eventual cost savings). It may be a technological move ("to the cloud!"). And as Paul Nelson, an ed-tech specialist for Oregon's Northwest Regional ESD (a Google district), once told me, it's a cultural move, one requiring district, administrator, and teacher buy-in. In the face of all these challenges – despite the PR from Microsoft and from Google – migration to the cloud is a slow move for most schools.

To Improve Search Quality, Google Must Penalize Sources of Link Pollution

 

If you've been in SEO for more than a few weeks, it's a safe bet you've seen poorly moderated blog comments or forum threads that have been polluted with  spammy links. It's also likely you've found evidence of "link hacking," the unauthorized placement of links on an otherwise quality website via some sort of hacking mechanism. These are forms of link pollution, and much like real-world pollution, they can damage our search environment if left unchecked.

A must-read example of link pollution is documented in an SEOMoz blog post from late January, which shows that blog comment spam, forum spam, and hacked links placed on trusted websites led to spammy Google search results on a variety of competitive terms. This post is one of dozens that illustrate the immense task faced by Google and Bing: not only must they deliver excellent search results, but they must do so while dealing with an ever-increasing amount of link pollution.

While some people propose algorithmic adjustments to counter the effects of link pollution, I think it's time to put a simpler and more obvious solution on the table: force website owners to take responsibility for allowing this pollution in the first place.

To be blunt, link pollution is often caused by poor and/or incompetent website management.

• Moderation of blog comments and forum posts has never been easier – there is no excuse for spammy links on blogs and forums, yet this problem doesn't seem to be going away.
• When we find links that were placed by hackers, we're reminded that password security is often the culprit. A 2010 password study shows that nearly 50% of Internet users have easily compromised passwords, and it's a safe bet that many FTP passwords, WordPress passwords, etc. fall into the "easily compromised" category. How else could all these hacked links be explained?

While it's true that even the best security and anti-spam measures can be compromised, it's also true that these occurrences are relatively rare and – if a site is properly managed – easily corrected. If Google created a system that penalized irresponsible website management, link pollution would be drastically curtailed. Here is what I would propose:

1. Google should only index sites registered with Webmaster Tools. Assuming that all website owners valued Google search traffic, Webmaster Tools registration would be nearly universal. This would give Google a direct connection to website managers.

2. Mandate regular interaction. If Google were to send website managers a monthly "suspicious link report" – and then require the website manager to acknowledge receipt of this report – they would encourage website owners to actively manage the security and quality of their website.

3. Alert website managers to obvious spam links. While it is impossible for Google to detect every instance of link spam, there are certain occasions when a site has obviously been spammed. In these instances, Google should email the website manager immediately and request that the site be fixed ASAP.

4. De-index sites that fail to acknowledge alerts. Once Google has contact information for each and every website owner, there's no excuse for failing to respond to Google spam link alerts in a timely manner. If a website manager fails to remedy a warning within a certain time frame, the site should be de-indexed for a period of days or weeks. Repeat offenders should be de-indexed for longer and longer periods until they either a) fix the problems or b) give up and go away.

While my plan to de-index non-conforming websites might sound draconian, imagine the benefits:

• Webmasters would close security gaps, reduce the incentive for hackers to attack websites, and subsequently make all of our sites a little safer.
• Blogs and forums would improve their moderation systems.
• A reduction in link spam would probably make paid links easier to detect.
• The rewards for ethical link-building would become even greater.
• Social sites like Twitter might do more to reduce incredible amount of spam generated on their platforms.
• Most importantly, Google would provide consumers with a better search experience.

To those who would argue against my plan on the idea that universal webmaster registration would make Google too powerful, I would submit that the current "unknown webmaster" free-for-all has no basis in reality. If we can't drive a car without a driver's license, why should we expect Google (or any other search engine) to send visitors to our website if we don't identify ourselves to them first?

Besides, it's not as if participation in my plan is compulsory. If a website owner doesn't want to register with Google, they don't have to…they just won't be listed in Google search results.

To be clear, I'm not picking on Google. Google's results are only as good as the websites they index. If tens of thousands of poorly managed websites are compromised with spammy links, it's unreasonable to expect any search engine to overcome this problem algorithmically. My plan is focused on Google because of their prominence in the marketplace, but Bing could just as easily take action. Perhaps Google and Bing could even collaborate.

Whatever the solution, it's clear that the current system has a fundamental flaw: there is no penalty levied against websites that are a source of link pollution. While our search environment is resilient enough to deal with some link pollution, regulation is the only way to prevent long-term damage.

Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

 

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices.

I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format:

• Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones.
• Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content.
• Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this may change)
• Google said they "expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.
• It does not mean you can't serve a special style sheet to smartphones, Google said, "the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users."
• URL structure: For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too.
• Using the same URL "is not considered cloaking by Google."
• Mobile sitemaps: you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.

5 Free Tools for Competitor Keyword Research

If you're trying to figure out what keywords to go for, chances are you are going to take a look at some of your competitors to see what keywords they are ranking for. But if you don't have access to professional and premium SEO tools, how do you find out this kind of information?

Here are five free tools to get you started in finding a variety of keywords being used by your competitors. These tools will help you see what keywords bring them traffic as well as other interesting details that can help your SEO campaign.

1. SEOmoz Term Extractor

To use this tool, you will need to register for a free account at SEOmoz. You will then have access to this tool as well as a variety of their other free SEO tools.

Once you're logged in, head over to the SEO Tools section and choose the Term Extractor. Enter the URL of your competitor to receive one word, two work, and three word phrases the website is targeting as well as the HTML elements those terms are found in on the website.

Needless to say, the bottom area is a good way to learn some on-site optimization tips as well!

2. Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer also falls under the SEOmoz tools umbrella, so once you're logged in to SEOmoz, you have access to this as well. To use this tool for keyword ideas, enter the competitor's URL and go to the Anchor Text Distribution tab.

This will show you up to 20 of the keywords that your competitor uses for anchor text when link building, hence letting you know what they are targeting and how strong their link building campaign is with the number of root domains and links using that anchor text.

3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

I know, I know, we all know about Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Usually I use the type in a word and let it make suggestions for me aspect, but for this exercise, I entered a domain to see what would happen.

The key is to go to the Columns, and check Extracted From Webpage. Then you will find that if you entered domain.com, it focuses on a particular page from the domain, and not the domain homepage. So if there isn't a domain.com/index.html or other similar type of page, you won't get the homepage's keyword suggestions. But for other specific pages on the site, you can pin down the keywords that AdWords recognizes from those

4. SEMRush

SEMRush allows you to enter a domain and view ten of the top keywords that the website ranks for organically, showing the keyword, position in search results, traffic percentage, and other useful information, especially if you are going to use CPC for your website.

It also shows what URL on the site ranks for the specific keyword, but I removed that column to make the image fit in the space above.

5. Alexa

Aside from just giving you your traffic score, Alexa also gives you the chance to see keyword queries that bring a high percent of traffic to a particular URL. Just go to the Site Info tab and enter your competitor's URL. Once youGet Details, go to the Search Analytics tab to see top queries driving traffic to the site, and keywords that are on the rise / decline.

If you scroll down from here, you will also find lengthy lists of keyword phrases for high impact search queries for the URL, search engine marketing activity based on ads for particular keywords, and additional keyword opportunities that the competitor (or you) could pursue.

 

How the Cloud Flattens Formats and Changes the Way We Create and Edit Documents

It's a gradual move that we see people make to the cloud. It may seem slow at times but it is happening. What moves it along are the incremental changes to applications that make the services just a little bit easier to use.

Here are three news items from this week that demonstrate how this shift is occurring. These news items have a common thread. All represent how Web operating systems (OS) flatten document formats for universal use and collaboration.

 

Google Docs Supports 12 New Formats

Heavy Google Docs users know that not all file types can be imported into Google Docs. There's always some way around the problem but the formatting is usually lost in some manner.

Google Docs

 now supports 12 new file types that should lessen the issue to some extent.

• The new file types include:
• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Turn Your Tablet into a PC

This week, the

 Laptop Magazine blog reviewed a service designed for the new Honeycomb tablets. Quickoffice for Honeycomb uses the wide screen capabilities of the tablet as it runs the Android 3.0 operating system.

The Quickoffice service abstracts the formats in Microsoft Office, allowing documents to be edited on mobile devices. A lot of talk at the Mobile World Congress was about the Web operating system for mobile devices. My view is that formats are an example of the breakdown in hierarchical systems that has lead us to the new Web operating systems such as Hewlett-Packar's WebOS and the Google Chrome OS.

The Laptop blog reviews a few of the capabilities that come with Quickoffice:

For example, the file manager which appears when you first launch the app is a three-paned menu with a list of both local and cloud-based storage drive son the left, a list of files and folders in the center, and the files in the currently selected folder on the right.
In the Quickpoint presentation editor, a panel on the left allows you to scroll through the list of slides in your presentation and reorder them by tap and dragging. In the Quickword document editor, you can see a list of thumbnails of the next and previous pages while you finger scroll and a context menu in the top bar changes to allow contextual search or formatting when you highlight a piece of text. The Quickpoint spreadsheet editor is also impressive, as it includes 140 formulas built in and the ability to handle multiple worksheets.

Crocodoc Launches HTML5 Viewer

Crocodoc

 launched an embeddable HTML5 document viewing and collaboration tool this week. The HTML5 viewer replaces its Flash-based viewer. The company is seeking to disrupt Adobe in the PDF editing and document collaboration space.

Adobe is a classic example of a company that can be disrupted in this new innovation cycle. Crocodoc is further extending its reach by offering a new partner program.

 Yammer, for instance, will be integrating the Crocodoc service into its product.

Formats for a Desktop Age

Looking at these announcements, you get the sense of what happens when older technologies become less useful. We talk a lot about the rate of change and how it takes longer than we think for trends to take footing. The online editing space has gone through a number of iterations over the past few years. In the process, the usefulness of services like Google Docs has lead to a shift that is affecting millions of people who just need an easier way to get things done.

We will see formats flatten to fit the needs of users who want the simplicity of the Web OS. We're in a different time now. It's more about group collaboration than the singular task of creating documents for the purposes of one-way communication.

02/19 Webmaster News

 

Original News - the Google Way

SEO Consult (blog) - ‎5 hours ago‎

Fancy a traffic boost in your SEO marketing campaign? One way to do so is to get a news post you've written and posted onto your website into Google News. News posts can be great for regional SEO, national SEO and more. A massive amount of traffic uses ...

 

SEO for Google News

Last Click News - ‎7 hours ago‎

Online companies that want to strengthen their search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns can benefit from ranking on Google News. With so many SEO campaigns competing for the same keywords, it's tough to rank on the major search engines. ...

 

Get better ranking FREE

Altinkum Didim Today - ‎15 hours ago‎

You can get better ranking and have your sites top of the search engines with little effort this days. Anyone who owns a website wants it to be extremely popular with high amounts of traffic that converts to new business. This is the always the case ...

 

Bangalore SEO Company Web Traffico Announces the Launch of Small Business ...

BigNews.biz (press release) - ‎22 hours ago‎

BigNews.Biz - Feb 18,2011 - webtraffico.com, a web-based SEO company is offering a Small business package with low cost and high online ranking for small businesses owners who want to succeed with stronger online presences and a higher Google ranking. ...

 

Keeping up with Google's changing algorithms challenges search marketers

InternetRetailer.com - Mary Wagner - ‎Feb 18, 2011‎

With Google attracting most of consumer searches, retailers perpetually wrestle with how to boost their rankings in Google's natural search results. Trying to figure out how to keep up with the search engine's relevancy criteria is a challenge for any ...

 

Presence on Google News can aid SEO campaigns

Vertical Leap News (press release) - Deborah Bates - ‎Feb 18, 2011‎

Ensuring a company has a presence on Google News can help to boost its search engine campaign; generating traffic and creating higher click-through rates (CTRs). That's according to expert Horst Joepen, writing for EConsultancy, who claimed that Google ...

 

Google Webmaster Tools Advances Towards Analytics Savviness

Search Engine Land - Daniel Waisberg - ‎Feb 18, 2011‎

Lately, Webmaster Tools has been improving its analytical capabilities significantly. This trend comes as a great benefit to webmasters and search marketers, both of whom are gaining access to important data in order to understand how their Search ...