Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Google has announced that it is well underway in its plan to index the Human body.  This  news was announced by Google VP of Product Development Eric Hind who commented:

“We’re happy now to extend search to information about human bodies, mine and yours, inside and out, from the number of follicles on my head to the length of the President’s toenails.”

Google’s body scanning project, code named “Google Body” is in partnership with US public entities such as transport departments and public libraries who place scanning equipment in high traffic entrances.

This news has brought about concern from various privacy advocacy groups who claim that early adopters of Google Body include insurance companies and recruitment firms.

 Responding to privacy concerns, Google stated:

“We are very concerned about user privacy, and that’s why we will not make publicly available any information about anybody who let’s us know they do not want to participate by wearing an Opt-Out headband when in public. Google archives information about those individuals, but does not make it searchable.”

Access to Google Body is currently by invitation only as the system is still in Beta but its expected to be launched soon.

If you’re a good writer then a good strategy for increasing your website’s link popularity is to distribute your articles to article syndication sites.  

If you have the time however, its better to write unique article and place them on unique site as discussed in this post about a reciprocal linking strategy that works, this is important because links located in duplicate articles may be devalued by search engines.

One of the sites that has recently allowed writers to contribute unique articles is NewsTarget.  News Target allows you to publish your own article and include “reference links” back to your site.  The site also allows you to monetise your article by placing your own adsense code within the article. 

Article syndication sites include:

• http://www.constant-content.com/

• http://www.articlecity.com/

• http://www.goarticles.com/

• http://www.ezinearticles.com/

• http://www.ideamarketers.com/

• http://www.thewhir.com/find/articlecentral/

• http://www.associatedcontent.com/

• http://www.articlealley.com/

Good luck with your link building efforts!

Google will launch Adsense video units over the next few days according to the official Adsense blog.  The video ads will be rolled out to English-language publishers in the UK, Ireland, and Canada.

Video ad units are similar to adsense ad units except in that they have an embedded, customizable video player in them that can display relevant video content similar to the content of a publisher’s site. 

The videos displayed on the publisher’s site have ads embedded in them and so a publisher will only get paid when a user views the ad.

This new feature from from Google’s Adsense programme is in collaboration with YouTube another Google company bought just over a year ago.

Google’s adsense programme is an extension of adwords which extends advertising from the sponsored listings in Google’s search results onto publisher’s sites.

If you’re stuggling to gain links pointing to your website then you might want to try this technique.

Email the owner of a site that is similar to yours in content and ask them for a reciprocal link but here’s the trick, instead of asking them for a straight reciproacal link (ie I link to yours from my links page and you link to mine from your links page), find an intersting piece of content on their site and tell them that you will link to it from your site in exchange, ask them to do the same for you.

Make sure to ensure that the link pointing from their site is an “in-content” link and not a link that’s in a footer or side navigation.  Also make sure that the link is placed in a prominent position, ideally towards the top of the page and that its surrounded by relevant content.

If you follow this simple linking technique, you’ll soon be getting many relevant links pointing to your site and staying within the guidelines of the search engines.

Good luck with you link building efforts!  

Google has upgraded its AdWords programme to allow advertisers to target specific content on websites.

This feature is not entirely new, as Google -in the past-  had allowed advertisers to target niche content within websites, it now simply made it more targeted. 

So, for instance, instead of targeting the entertainment section of a certain content portal, advertisers can now bid to show up on the movies subsection, or even more specific, the section where movies are showing in a certain location of the country. 

This is straight from the adwords blog announcement:

“We’d like to announce two changes to site targeting in Google’s content network. First, because site targeting now offers more precise targeting options, we’ve given it a more appropriate name: placement targeting. Second, we’re introducing a new cost-per-click bidding option so you can now pay per click or per impression.”

This is a fantastic new development and a huge opportunity for advertisers to target specif niches and minimise their ad spend by minimising wastage of their ad budget on un-targeted clicks.

Well done Google, another great step in the development of online advertising!