EBay has admitted that it has been eyeing up the Korean auction site and Internet retailer, Gmarket.
About 40% of Gmarket is owned by Seoul-based Inter Park and the brothers Lee Ki Hyeong and Lee Sang Kyoo, who founded the online store in 1999. Gmarket went public a couple years back (in 2006), and just last June, it racked up a whopping $15.4 million on fees charged from the $927.7 million worth of goods sold over the auction site.
EBay’s pending transaction with Gmarket might seem minor, but is largely strategic as the stake would be a rich opportunity to reach the market of a region where the American-owned online store had some difficulties before.
According to eBay, it is true that the company (eBay), Interpark, and Interpark’s Chairman, Ki Hyung Lee have sat down together to discuss the probability of eBay buying up enormous shares of Gmarket. It is too soon to tell what the result of the discussions will be, but a voluntary preliminary filing has been made with the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) together with seeking KFTC’s preliminary approval. At present, no word is out about KFTC’s approval. Nor is there an assurance that a final agreement will be signed. Neither the people behind Gmarket nor eBay are set to give remarks on the issue, until such time, if opportunity permits, that a definitive agreement is reached.
What Is A Blog?
A blog is used to write about anything, it’s a journal of sorts. You can include links to other sites, images, videos, news articles, news reports in video or audio format, etc. People can comment on your blog, which evokes conversation and essentially creates a community within your site. I wrote an article about a new search engine that is supposedly trying to compete with Google’s market share – cuil.com. I received 247 hits that day alone to my website – solely because of the article. Blogs start with an existing framework (software) and can be customized to look exactly like your website.
What Is A Blog’s Purpose
In your blog you would write about things that are relevant to your business or hobbies. The goal is to give search engines more to index, thus serving more to searchers. Topics could be virtually anything that interests you. If you’re interested in the topic chances are someone else is too. Your opinions and advice are good when blogging – especially if you position yourself as a professional. The benefits are tremendous, and blogging is certainly the trend of today, and tomorrow!
David Meerman Scott, ex-director of marketing for Microsoft now a consultant, wrote the book The New Rule of Marketing & PR. Essentially, it says blogging, podcasting, video-podcasting and social networking are the ways to market not expensive media like billboards, print advertisements, radio spots and television commercials.
To Casual observers Google is known only as a search engine. Everyone knows exactly what you mean when you use the household phrase “Google it.” But what is the deal with Gmail? Or the even lesser known Google Docs and Calendar? Some might say these online applications are simply jabs from Google CEO Eric Schmidt towards his longtime nemesis, Microsoft. Others, including Google, claim that online applications are they wave of the future.
Google Calendar
Still in it’s beta stages, Google Calendar completely online based, free, and fully sharable. You control who your calendar is shared with, and what information others can see by adding their email to an event, or your entire calendar. Other users can then have the option to see your two calendars layered together, only your calendar, or only their calendar. Sharing an entire calendar can be useful when you’re part of a group that has shared events, like a softball team.
Some other features of Google Calendar are:
Views by day, week, or month or next four days
You can invite people to events on your calendar by adding their email addresses in the Guests section of the event.
Guests can RSVP to your invitations by email, whether or not they use Google Calendar themselves.
Reminders help you keep track of important events. You can choose to be notified by email, popup window or text messages sent right to your mobile phone.
You can set up multiple calendars for different areas of your life, like one for your softball team’s practices and games.
You can search your calendar, and events that are made public by other Google Calendar users.
Google Docs
Boasting similar sharing/networking features of Google Calendar, Google Docs consists of a word processor (which this was written with), spreadsheet, and presentation program, all online, no downloads, all free.
In it’s basic form, Google Docs are similar to Microsoft in that you can create documents from scratch, or from a template, and all the standard functions are covered including:
bulleted lists,
sorting by columns,
adding tables,
images,
comments,
formulas
So why are Google Docs any better? Because of the sharing capabilities. You choose who can access a given document by entering their email address and sending them an invitation. Anyone you’ve invited to either edit or view your document, spreadsheet or presentation can access it as soon as they sign in. Multiple people can view and make changes to a document at the same time. There is an on-screen chat window for spreadsheets, and document revisions show you exactly who changed what, and when. As for presentations, anyone who has been invited to view a presentation can follow along with the presenter.
There’s nothing to download; you can access your documents, spreadsheets and presentations from any computer with an Internet connection and a standard browser. Additional features include:
Online storage and autosave — no worries about local hard drive failures or power outages.
Save your documents and spreadsheets to your own computer in DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODT, PDF, RTF and HTML formats.
Organize by dragging and dropping your documents into as many folders as you want.
You can publish your documents online, as normal-looking web pages
Publish to the entire world, just a few people or no one. You can also un-publish at any time.
Gmail
The central hub that all of this revolves around is Google’s best known side project: Gmail. A free web based email service that offers 1 gigabyte, or 500 times as much storage space as a free Microsoft Hotmail account. Gmail features a built in search engine that uses the same search technology as a standard google search, making it simple to locate emails, even by only typing in a phrase from the email such as “sailing this weekend with BillyBob.”
Other features include:
Quick load times by using a plain layout, sparse graphics, and unobtrusive text ads.
Messages are grouped together in a string. This conversation view continues to grow as new replies arrive, so you can always see your messages in context.
Built in chat, reply to emails via chat. And Gmail can archive all of your chats, making them searchable.
Gmail uses labels to help you organize with more flexibility. A conversation can have several labels, so you’re not forced to choose one particular folder for messages. You can also create filters to automatically manage incoming mail.
Is someone really trying to compete with a search engine that has successfully secured 70% of the online search market share, introduced a revolutionary means of revenue for many firms and businesses, and become a daily activity instead of simply a website? The phrase “just google it” is the new “Kleenex” or “Xerox.”
What do you think will happen? Will Cuil be able to successfully secure a fraction of the search engine market share?
Created by a team with a successful track record, many founders coming from Google, funded by $30 million – does it have a chance?
If you are familiar with Robert Scoble, author of the blog Scobleizer, you know he is one of the great opinions of the web. According to the Scobleizer:
Is Cuil going to be able to get into the game?
No way, no how.
So, why is Cuil here?
I think it’s a play for Microsoft money. Microsoft needs to get back into the search game, so will continue buying companies to try to get back into the search game. Yahoo, if run by management that’s rational, will probably start doing the same thing.
Yesterday when I first heard about the ambitious new engine I tried it out on phrases related to my website – which I have spent a great deal of time ‘optimizing.’ Much to my dismay my website was absolutely no where to be found. Naturally, this did not make me too happy – especially after my July 16th post: Axis’ Own SEO Campaign. I searched for several keywords and key phrases. Overall – I am leery about the new ‘magazine style’ layout and the fact that with many of my searches it return no results – zero!
In an interview with a technology forecaster, Paul Saffor, and ABC News, Saffo comments on Cuil:
“You don’t get $33 million to compete against Google. That’s a suicide mission. You get $33 million to create a search experience that’s different from Google.”
“While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks.”
If Cuil is trying to offer a search solution that truly differs from (for the greater good) Google and the other mainstay search engines, good for them – it’s going to be a long road.
It will be interesting to see if only $30 million can change the way the world searches the Internet.
Former employees of Google.com have developed and launched a rival search engine called Cuil (pronounced “Cool”). Cuil, Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, claims to do a better job of indexing online information.
The ambitious new search site, Cuil.com, maintains a minimalist appeal – similar to Google.com. While Google has stopped reporting the number of pages it uses to build its index, Cuil claims that its 120 billion is greater than that of Googles.
While many others have tried to compete with Google and failed, Cuil believes that by deviating from the traditional methodologies of Google it can overcome the giant.
For more information: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7528503.stm
Who would have thought Sen. Barack Obama would be working with a 24 year old co-founder of Facebook to help with his political campaign?
Chris Hughes, co-founder of facebook.com, left the company in October of 2007 to work on Obamas new-media campaign.
For all the details visit: The Facebooker who friended Obama
In response to Rachel’s comment from a post on July 17, 2008 titled Axis’ Own SEO Campaign here is some food for thought when planning your website and/or SEO campaign.
Content
Relavant Content: Write good copy that is relative to your site. When writing the content keep your customer, viewers, ideal market in mind – write copy they want to read. Write copy they will link to.
Professional Copywriter: We recommend (of course) that you use a professional seo copywriter to write the copy for your website. Writing copy for your website is not as simple as putting words together to form a sentence. First, you must research your keywords – we recommend using Google’s Keyword Analysis Tool. After researching the phrases that best fit your goals incorporate the site-wide phrases at a rate of 1-3% and the deep phrases at a rate of 2-4%. Although it’s not a complete science thats a good rule of thumb. Don’t forget your audience is still a human – NOT Google. First and foremost your copy must read well and make sense to us humans – Google comes second.
Update Often: through the use of blogs, press releases, dynamic database-driven systems, and content management systems, you should update your site as often as possible. Get yourself into a routine of updating your site on a regular schedule – maybe every day or every week at the same time. With modern content management systems and blogs you can add a post or update content in literally minutes. This will keep viewers coming back for more. Don’t be afraid to share information with your websites’ users - after all you are considered a professional and expert in their eyes.
Structure & Usability
User-Friendly: I don’t like going to the grocery store and walking down the produce aisle for cleaning supplies – do you? Organize your website in a logical sequence. If you have different product categories; widgets, gidgets and gadgets, arrange them within a single products page. Add links to each category page, from the products page, which will link to each individual product within that category. Each page should have UNIQUE copy and content relevant to that product. Make it easy for your users to get back to the main page or to another categories page. Consult with usability experts if you already have a website that you fear is not user-friendly.
Page Names: Search engines like to know what the page is about. For example if you have a page about how to install a gadget into your gidget name the file; gidget-installation-into-gadget.html – again, this is not a science but sometimes it helps.
Functional & Accurate Sitemap: Make a sitemap for your users and link to it on each page. List all pages of your site in a logical structure.
SITEMAP EXAMPLE:
Home
About Us
History
Press Releases
Management
Products
Gidgets
Blue
Black
Purple
Gadgets
Hot
Medium
Large
Cold
Widgets
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Contact Us
Link Building & Directories
Directories: Subscribe to, or sign up for directories that relate to your field or product. These generally have the most relevant information about your field. It’s a one-stop-site for Internet users to get information about that product genre. For many fields and industries when searches are conducted these sites come up first. And, depending on the searh it might feature the page you are listed on, or, even better it might feature your listing.
Social Networking: Social networking in terms of SEO can be fun. Go on sites like myspace.com, youtube.com, facebook.com, linkedin.com and others. Register yourself and your business.
Get Involved: In general, you want to get involved with the Internet community that is internal and external of your field or industry. Share information, posts messages on forums, blog, answer message board posts and have fun doing it. You’ll learn a lot – I have.
Only a few weeks ago we started optimizing our new website. There are many variables that play into good search rankings; creation date of your domain name, keywords, keyword research, backlinks (read our other post on backlinks), content, copywriting, … the list goes on.
We are targeting primarily local and state-wide traffic. The majority of our focus has been spent optimizing for Google as they hold nearly 70% of the search engine market share. Our site is progressing equally as well in Yahoo and MSN Live.
Long story short we wanted to share our results. Within 3 weeks we are on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) 1-3. We still have a lot of work to do but we are off to a great start. Look below for some of the phrases where our site shows up.
GOOGLE RESULTS:
What are backlinks? To answer this question I am going to introduce Google’s ‘define’ command. Google’s define command provides the definition of the word immediately following the command. For example you could type, define: blog, and Google would return the definition of the word ‘blog.’ For more information on Google’s Advanced Search Operators visit this website: http://www.google.com/help/operators.htmlSo, back to our original question of, What are backlinks? Backlinks are links from other websites and web resources back to your site. Backlinks are also referred to as; reciprocal links, inlinks, incoming links, inbound links and inward or inbound links. Yes, they all mean the same thing.
As the video above states backlinks are incredibly important. There is a fine line between quality and quantity when talking about backlinks. If you are an attorney you might want backlinks on legal directories, free web resources that offer advice or information related to the area of law you primarily practice or, if you specialize in real estate law, you might want links on real estate websites. What you would not want are links from any old website that will list you. The sites linking back to your website determine your popularity. If your backlinks all relate in some way to your field you are more popular in that field.
I recently read the book, Get to the top on Google – Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings – and Stay There, by David Viney ‘The SEO Expert.’ In this book Viney compares the likeness between in-text citations in research papers and backlinks to a website. In the eyes of many, the more an author or source is cited in research papers and text, the more legitimate their information is. Similarly, the more valid and relative backlinks you have the more credibility your site has.
Stay tuned for more!
