A lot is changing with Yahoo!, and even the famous yodel is subject to change. In fact, earlier last week, Yahoo! set up a mobile recording studio in the middle of Times Square and invited anyone passing by to record their version of the yodel. Lucky winners with the best yodel will become famous and earn bragging rights that their yodel is the official Yahoo! yodel. The yodel was one of the things discussed in the interview with Elisa Steele.
She offered assurance that Yahoo! was going to continue using the original yodel; however, to align properly with their promise of making Yahoo! all about about person relevance, they are going to be collecting personal yodels around the globe. In fact, in addition to setting up mobile studios, such as the one in Times Square, Yahoo! has created a web based Yodel Studio.
So you might wonder why would Yahoo! want to re-brand after 15 years of being one of the most widely recognized and successful companies in the world. It may seem strange that Yahoo is investing time and money into creating one of the largest re-branding campaigns ever. Yahoo decided to launch their new brand campaign is to remind consumers where Yahoo! is today, and the kind of services they can offer people in the modern era of the Internet today. Check out this video below that captures the exclusive thoughts of Elisa Steele behind the new Yahoo! marketing campaign.
This Q&A with Elisa Steele is the first in a new series of videos called Yahoo! Yodelcasts, hosted by Nicki Dugan, blog editor for Yahoo!
To stay on top of current events and news about Yahoo! I recommend reading their Yodel Anecdotal blog and subscribing to their RSS Feed. It wouldn’t hurt to pick up a subscription to their YouTube Channel as well.
What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo! and do you think that their new marketing efforts will cause you to switch to using Yahoo! Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Knowing and understanding what people think when they visit your blog or website, and what impressions they have is critical towards building, growing, and maintaining your site. As a site owner, it’s a good idea to open lines of communication with your site visitors. Doing so, enables you to receive vital feedback, which in return can help your site maintain forward direction.
Last year Google released a service called Google Moderator. Matt Cutts made an entry on his blog about it, and six months later the White House even found a use for it. Since then, not much else has been said about the service, nor have many people been utilizing it. Personally though, I think Google Moderator is an excellent tool, and one that you should put to use on your site right away. It’s an excellent instrument where everyone has the opportunity to submit ideas, ask questions, or even offer suggestions. From there, individuals can vote the submitted feedback up or down, which will then display the most popular topics based on total vote count.
Google Moderator is a perfect system for finding out what people think about your blog or website, what you can do or stop doing to enable growth, and what topics or questions could be answered or covered towards continuing to help people that visit your site. All in all, it’s all about feedback, and using Google Moderator is an excellent way to get the best feedback from people who visit your site.
What’s more, Google Moderator can be used to create a feedback system as simple or as intricate as you want. It can be a system that allows site visitors to express their opinions about things, or if you’re a blogger, it can be used as a system that enables you to receive material for covering future topics. To get a general idea of how to use Google Moderator, check out the series called Ask a Google Engineer. Try creating your own series and share it here with everyone in the comments.
Google suggests that it might be worth your effort to request to have links removed that are pointing from low grade sites to yours. The easiest way this can be done is by searching the site for a “Contact Us” page, email address, or a phone number. If none can not be found then a Whois search can be performed. A Whois search will typically return the contact information of the site owner. Sometimes site owners block their contact information with a private registration. If that’s the case, then it may be possible to pass a message to the owner through the hosting company.
Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.
Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.
My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.
So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Last month, Yahoo! unveiled the new and improved Yahoo! Search. One of the key elements of their new and enhanced version of search claims to give users more control over the results they see by allowing users to filter results by website. Consequently, offering control to advertisers is something Yahoo! wants to deliver as well. They are doing so by including sponsored ads in the filtered search results.
With Yahoo!’s new search page, users can search for various keywords and phrases, and then refine the search results by clicking on the names of sites that appear on the left side. These sites appear based on what other people have found useful in the past. When users click on these featured sites, the results are then filtered to display results only from that particular domain.
How that works with advertisers is when a user selects a site that is also a sponsored search advertisers, that advertisers’ advertisement will be displayed again in the new set of results. The advertisers will only pay if the user clicks on the ad. All in all, the advertisers still receive the same opportunity to receive clicks prior to any filtering. However, advertisers whose sites show up on the left side as a filtering site option will receive futher opportunities to receive clicks.
I like the idea of Yahoo! displaying sponsored ads in filtered results. Doing so creates a very strong opportunity for advertisers to experience an increase in CTR simply because once a users has applied the site filter, ads are going to be displayed to more relevant traffic, and existing there is far less sponsored ad competition.
Some people might question the amount of exposure the filtered ads will receive. I have to say that I think having the navigation options on the left really increase the awareness of the features being available. I think advertisers might find that they’re getting pretty good exposure, clicks, and qualified leads for the money invested. If you’re interested in advertising online, advertising on Yahoo! is something I would consider looking into.
Last week I explained that in May of 2009, Google launched a new side panel called Search Options, that allows users to filter search results in different ways. The idea behind this started churning about eight years ago, and was first unveiled May of 2007 as universal search. Yesterday, Google announced that they have made search options available for high-end mobile phones, specifically Android, iPhone, and Palm WebOS.
Using Google Search options allow results to be filtered in a number of ways. The search options available are: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, and reviews. Within that, you can also filter by: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, and specific date range. I offer a positive review of this update. As an iPhone user, I have to say that Google is one of the only companies who I feel is really taking full advantage of the high-end mobile market. It’s obvious that millions of people have iPhones and other high-end mobile devices, and yet, it surprises me not to see other companies taking advantage of that.
In my previous article, I had mentioned that there is SEO value in knowing how Google search options can filter search results. Now that these options are available for mobile search, coupled with the fact that Google also released a new version of AdSense for high-end mobile devices, optimizing your site for mobile users is especially important, especially if you’re participating in the Google AdSense program. All in all, not many bloggers or webmasters are taking full advantage of the mobile market. Climbing the ranks in mobile search results is quickly becoming more of a vital source towards overall traffic. At least that’s the case when I check my own personal stats.
In my research I have noticed multiple users asking that Google focus some attention to the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile market. As a former BlackBerry Curve user, I can say that surfing the web using this device was a little less than desirable. While my opinion for BlackBerry users is to upgrade, I do know that Google does have a very nice Blackberry Mobile App available that might interest you. That said, take a moment to check your stats. Compare them to last year and I believe that you’ll see a significant increase in traffic from mobile users. Seeing this for yourself, I think you’ll also agree that more can be done towards capitalizing on the mobile market even further.
