In This Issue:
1. Yahoo's New Image
2. In the News
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Yahoo's New Image
Yahoo! is going to roll out a new advertising campaign tomorrow
(Thursday) with TV and radio spots, print, and online advertising
that will position Yahoo as a "life engine", not just
a search engine. Yahoo's Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway
told MediaPost.com this week that the new image will "more
directly address the way Yahoo! helps our users get more value
from their lives." She added, with no small measure of hyperbole, "Yahoo!
offers everything a person needs to accomplish things in their
personal and professional lives." The ad campaign will promote
Yahoo's shopping sites, personals, job service, email, and other
properties. And perhaps best (or worst, depending on your perspective)
of all, the TV spots will still end with that unmistakable Yahoo
yodel. Whew.
And the main reason I mention all this is so I have an excuse
to point you to The Onion, which quickly wrote this very funny
parody
of Yahoo's announcement:
Yahoo Launches Soul-Search Engine
"The new search function is even customizable. Users can
set their search to plumb their souls at varying depths, to make
shallow
discoveries or life-changing ones."
Great stuff!
_________________
In The News
If search engine visibility is important to you and/or your business,
please take a few moments to read an article I posted on owtweb.com
earlier this week called "Search Engine Success Checklist." It's
a great primer on what it takes to achieve high rankings on just
about any search engine. More often than not, when a client asks
why their site doesn't rank higher, the answer involves at least
one (usually several) of the items on this checklist that are either
not being done at all, or not being done effectively.
Search Engine Success Checklist
In other news...
Google is no longer just a search engine. They're getting into
the portal business, like Yahoo. Google last week announced
Gmail, a free, web-based email service that will compete
with Yahoo
Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail. But Gmail offers an incredible
1 gigabyte
of email storage, compared to the 4 megabytes that many other
free email services offer. And Google also announced that
Gmail would
offer an email search technology that will help people locate
old email more quickly.
But what made the most news are two things mentioned in
the small print:
1. Google plans to put content-targeted advertising in
the Gmail interface. If, for example, you and a friend
are chatting
about
getting your car repaired in an email, you might see
ads from auto repair shops or auto dealers. Google will know
what ads
to place
based on an automated (i.e. -- no human will read your
emails) review of the content of the emails. This has
privacy advocates
in an uproar, but it seems unfounded to me. Every ISP
that offers any spam or virus filtering also uses an automated
system to
review the content of emails. It's how the ISP knows
that emails that
include words about various body enhancement medicines
are spam, for example.
2. Google's admission that they may store your emails
permanently, even after you've deleted them from your
account.
Yikes! I'm with the privacy people on this one. When
a user deletes an email, it's reasonable to think
the email
has
actually been
deleted. This is a policy that I think will really
cause them a lot of trouble as they continue to develop
and
eventually make Gmail available to anyone. For now,
Gmail is being
tested internally
by Google staff and by about 1,000 beta testers who've
been invited to try it out.
Google Gets the Message, Launches Gmail
Gmail Home Page
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
UK lobby says Google mail may violate privacy laws
April 05, 2004 - Reuters
Google tops, but Yahoo switch success so far
April 05, 2004 - Search Engine Watch
Yahoo's recent replacement of Google results with those from
its own crawler-based technology doesn't appear to have
cost it visitors.
Search in the real world
April 01, 2004 - iMedia
Be sure to check this one out. Interesting article asking
'regular people' their thoughts on what's good and
bad about Internet
search.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Dear Matt,
On your web site, you talk about not liking to host web sites
that use Microsoft Front Page and you recommend some other software
to use to build a web site. What's so bad about using Front Page?
Eric
Hi Eric -- First let me say that I'm not 100% anti-Microsoft.
Microsoft has made some fine software. I used Internet Explorer
for a long
time, until Apple's Safari came along as a better browser. I
still think Microsoft's Entourage is a great email client.
Excel is a
great spreadsheet program. And even Front Page has an audience
-- but that audience should not include professional web developers
and/or anyone creating a business web site.
Front Page creates non-standard code. The Internet is built on
standards -- HTML is HTML whether it's here, there, or anywhere.
(I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.) Front Page creates
code that only works on Front Page web servers. That's a problem;
it doesn't play well with others.
Front Page creates bulky code. A 20k web page might be 40k or
60k if it's built in Front Page, so that page will load twice
as slowly
as it should. Slow web pages = bad.
And Front Page sites pretty much all look the same. You can spot
a Front Page site a mile away, and Front Page screams "Amateur!" That's
not the image you want your business to project online.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Nothing fun and exciting to wrap it up this week. Sorry. We've
got people on vacation, including The Boss, and that makes my typical
day not so typical.
See you next week when hopefully things will be back to normal!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
The OWT Newsletter is a weekly service offered free to anyone
interested in learning more about web development, search engine
optimization/marketing, and just about anything else related to
running a business web site. You don't need to be an OWT client
to subscribe to our newsletter!
Subscribing and unsubscribing can be done online at OWTweb.com.
You may share this newsletter with others as long as the newsletter
is shared in its entirety.
Private replies to emails will be written if we have time, but
we don't provide web site critiques or consulting services
for free. You can learn more about our web development and search
engine marketing services online at www.owtweb.com.
|
