Google Partially Blocked by Chinese Government

Google has reported on Wednesday that its sites are partially blocked on mainland China. According to the New York Times, this comes one day after Google made the decision to stop redirecting users in mainland China to its unfiltered site in Hong Kong and on the same day that the deadline for the Chinese government to approve Google’s license to operate within the country.

Continued here: 
Google Partially Blocked by Chinese Government

YouTube Wins Viacom Lawsuit

After a long-winded battle in the courts between Viacom Inc. and YouTube over a copyright infringement lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York yesterday ruled in favor of Google’s video-sharing website.

Read the original:
YouTube Wins Viacom Lawsuit

Microsoft Adds Entertainment Features to Bing

Microsoft is adding some entertainment features to its Bing search engine, according to PC World. The company has added features which let users watch videos, stream music and play interactive games without leaving Bing. Some of these features are live, with others to be rolled out in the coming weeks.

Continued here:
Microsoft Adds Entertainment Features to Bing

Article Marketing – The Backlink Builder

Article Marketing is viewed by many as a long time consuming process. This is of course one way of looking at it. The other is that Article Marketing is a goldmine in terms of SEO activities.

The simple reason for this second view is that, articles function as easy backlink opportunities. Backlinks are a very important component of your page rank when it comes to Google searches. This is because, Google functions on a simple premise – If you have lots of links pointing at you, you must be popular; and if you are popular you must be given a higher page rank. Of course, if your website reciprocates the link by linking back, then Google disregards the original link in its page rank considerations.

In that light it becomes evident why Article Marketing can be so lucrative for search engine rankings. When you consider that each article is like a mini website out there pointing back at your website, the number of backlinks you can have suddenly seems infinite. But again we seem to come back to the point of spending time writing this infinite number of articles. There is a solution for this.

Instead of writing five different articles a day, just write one. Now look for re-writers on the web. Good re-writers are capable of re-writing one article in six or seven different ways and the best part is that they are cheap. Once you get the re-written articles submit it to different directories and voila! You are done. Follow this process and explore how you can get more and more articles out there. That way you will soon come out top on any search result.

Google Launches Google Voice

Google Voice is now available for free to everyone in the U.S., making it possible for users to manage all of their communications through one web-based platform. By using Google Voice, users can have access to a wide range of features including one number to ring all phones, voicemail that automatically transcribes like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada and low-priced international calls.

See the original post here: 
Google Launches Google Voice

Google to Roll Out Music Service Tied to Search Engine

Google is attempting to tie everything else to its industry-leading search engine, so why not music? The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that Google will roll out a music download service later this year that is tied to its search engine, with an online subscription service coming in 2011.

Read the rest here:
Google to Roll Out Music Service Tied to Search Engine

YouTube Launches New Video Editor

The engineers and developers at YouTube have created a new video editing tool that will make editing videos on YouTube faster and easier, without having to worry about installing and learning new software. Available in TestTube — where users can test new tools and provide creators with feedback — the new online video editor allows users to combine multiple videos to create a new longer video, edit the beginning and/or ending of videos, and add soundtracks from YouTube’s AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs.

Read the rest here: 
YouTube Launches New Video Editor

Bing Search Engine Now an Opera Browser Option

Microsoft’s Bing search engine received a small boost from an unexpected source on Friday, as The Register reports that Opera Software has added Bing to its list of available search engines from a drop-down box within its Internet browser. While Google will still be the “default” search engine used in the new Opera 10.6 search engine, it’s interesting to note that Opera has added Bing at all.

Read more: 
Bing Search Engine Now an Opera Browser Option

Online Video Viewers on the Rise

The number of unique viewers of online video increased 1.6 percent year-over-year, from 133.7 million unique viewers in May 2009 to 135.9 million in May 2010, according to new data from the Nielsen Company.

Go here to read the rest:
Online Video Viewers on the Rise

Your website should be engaging

If you think that the purpose of your website is there to provide background information about your company, then you are probably thinking wrong. Your website is a powerful marketing tool that can provide you with a strong interactive component with your customers. This is something that TV and Press ads cannot do.

Interaction is a factor that drives sales more and more today. If you think about it, it is not a new concept. Back in the day, shopping at the corner shop was a regular occurrence because everybody in the neighborhood knew the owner and there was a certain trust element. So even if some of the products were more expensive than at a supermarket, people still went to the old store because of this trust factor. This is where interactivity scores today. If your customers can talk to you and get information from you, they have a sense of assurance. This assurance can pave the way for more sales than any other form of advertising.

Using your website you should get them to join a mailing list, get some of their personal details (likes/dislikes, age, other info related to your product, etc.) and call you. This last factor is very valuable, because it is easy to capture a customer’s attention in a one on one conversation. So you should ensure that competent personnel are manning the phones.

As you can see, websites can be used to aggressively drive customers towards you. The cost in doing this is almost nothing, but the returns are great. Be positive and aggressive and you will find success!

Next Page »