As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year’s SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling “fresh” and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it’s list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It’s boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a “Places” view that supports categories, a history view of places you’ve been and a “pull-to-refresh” feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends’ photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it’s bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don’t need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With “spot details”, including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing – real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, “Hot Spots”, tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven’t had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think – who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we’re calling it for Gowalla.

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Facebook looks to be partnering with event marketplace Eventbrite, a move may have been foreshadowed by recent design changes on the site. The announcement of a partnership was first noticed by a Facebook user who sent in a screenshot to TechCrunch this morning.

Facebook’s recent redesign has showed a much more public events page, a feature that would go along with selling tickets to events quite perfectly.

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The text of the announcement, which was hosted at facebook.eventbrite.com but has since been removed, read as follows:

Collect money for your event with Eventbrite

Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing.

Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell yours and put some delightful cash in your pocket.

Until recently, the Facebook events page was primarily focused on one thing – the events you had specifically been invited to. That’s no longer the case. Now, clicking on the “Events” link in the left column brings you to a page that lists not only all the events you’re invited to, but any public events that any of your friends are attending.

This seems like a definite shift in focus toward becoming more of a go-to place for finding what’s going on around you instead of just keeping track of invites. And if companies can get in on the game and start offering events that users can purchase tickets for through Facebook, then we’re talking.

Eventbrite had already made it easy for its users to share events they created on the Eventbrite website on Facebook. This announcement would not only be sharing events, but allowing Facebook users to buy tickets through the site.

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Facebook announced this morning that its wildly popular Instant Messaging service now supports the open IM standard XMPP/Jabber. That means that 3rd party developers will be able to build support for Facebook Chat into their websites and chat applications with ease.

Standards are great like this for making development simpler but the other promise of technical standards so far remains unrealized. Interoperability is the big promise of open standards in general and XMPP chat specifically, but at launch Facebook Chat by XMPP does not federate with other XMPP servers. So this isn’t about interoperability, it’s about further extending Facebook around the web.

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Does Facebook have plans for the future to federate with, say Google Talk, the other leading XMPP chat service online? Or with people using Jabber directly? We haven’t gotten a response from the company yet, but we really doubt it. Facebook could change the game in a big way around IM interoperability if it did so. Unfortunately, this is much more likely to be a case of an open technical standard being used to extend the dominance of a closed market leader.

Update: Facebook’s Malorie Lucich responded and told us that interoperability “isn’t something we’re announcing today, but we are looking into it.” Lucich is the same Facebook team member who advised users last month about how to use Facebook to subscribe to syndicated news sources, so she’s cool. Looking into it? We sure hope so.

Facebook is supporting the open standard, though! And thus it will be much easier for outside developers to build on top of it. That’s great. The open standard of XMPP now has all the more support behind it, all the more reason for developers to implement on it – now it offers access to 400 million Facebook users. That’s nothing to underestimate the importance of.

We sure would love to see someone step up and use open standards to support interoperability between people on different IM platforms, though. It would be great if it was Facebook that did it.

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In the words of legendary investor Mark Suster, “Entrepreneurs don’t noodle, they do.” While it’s important to be analytical in your decision making, it’s also important to act when opportunities arise. Yesterday over drinks with some investors and entrepreneurs, I marveled at the difference between the life of a startup founder and the life of an investor. Founders manage multiple staff and stakeholders with heavy emphasis on operational issues. Meanwhile, investors manage multiple portfolio companies across a number of industries. The common trait amongst both is decisiveness.

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Suster’s recent blog post speaks to the value of being able to make a quick decision. For investors, not only are most investment pitches met with the answer “no”, but investors recognize that some of their portfolio companies will not offer the anticipated returns. The ability to be decisive while also factoring in a margin of error is exactly what keeps both worlds running smoothly.

Says Suster, ” The best entrepreneurs have a bias for making quick decisions and accept that at best 70% of them will be right.  They acknowledge that some decisions will be bad and they’ll have to recover from them.  Building a startup might be a game of inches but you don’t get timeouts to pause and analyze all of your decisions.”

While it’s important to lay out a product plan, create a good business strategy and study your competition, don’t expect to be perfect. Leave room for a margin of error and don’t be afraid to pivot quickly if your company needs it. You can’t be a startup founder without taking any risks – if you were really that safe you’d be working for someone else.

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InsideFacebook has an interesting page that showcases the popularity of Facebook pages with Vanity URLs. For those interested in celebrity social media statistics, it may be worth a look.

Michael Jackson was launched way ahead after he died. Currently, the Michael Jackson page has 10,006,304 fans. Before he died, he only had over 800,000. At that point, President Obama was the leader, but now he sits in 2nd place with 6,487,191. Here’s a look at the top 30 according to InsideFacebook’s data:

Then there are the current biggest gainers:

And the current biggest losers:

It’s interesting to see that Pop Tarts are on their way up, while the guy that successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River is losing fans. It makes you wonder what Toaster Strudels are working on to up their game.

The information here may seem like the results of a popularity contest, but InsideFacebook’s data is worth keeping an eye on simply to see what brands are making it in the popular categories. If you are still looking for successful ways to utilize Facebook for marketing your business, you can see what brands are successfully gaining fans, and look at what they’re doing right.

As you may know, YouTube has a new channels design in the works. It was actually supposed to be out on July 15th, but was postponed (not for the first time). WebProNews recently ran down a nice sized list of new features that YouTube will be including in this new design here.

Last week, YouTube updated users about the delay, as well as some more features. "So when’s the new date? That part’s a little trickier – rather than try to predict it, we’d rather focus our time on taking care of the above list. But we’ll announce the new date no less than 2 weeks before it happens – and yes, it’s still coming this summer," the company says.

They also ran down some goals to accomplish before launch:

- Fix some browser-specific layout bugs – in particular, IE6 has a few issues right now

- Allow you to default your channel to "grid" view

- Allow you to re-order your uploads & playlists

- Some other small things, including fixes for some of the other bugs you’ve helped find (such as grid view not always working in IE)

Yesterday, YouTube issued another update, citing the following as new things released:

- Module transparency can now go all the way to 100% (though we cry just a little bit inside whenever someone puts fully transparent, hard to read text on a crazy background)

- You can now right (or middle)-click on videos to open them in new tabs, or in new windows

- Playlist titles were getting truncated a little too soon before – should be longer now

- Grid view should now always work in IE

- And a few other bugfixes

The new channels have of course been available in "secret" beta. This is where the feedback has come from so far. The new design has got to be close to going mainstream now, and is just one example of how YouTube has really been stepping up its game.

Let’s review a few other pieces of YouTube news from the last several weeks:

1. YouTube is working on 3D Video.

2. YouTube has doubled the size of what users are now able to upload at once. This means we will see longer and higher quality videos.

3. YouTube is becoming more of a resource for news content

4. YouTube has launched a destination for movie trailers

5. YouTube has expanded advertising options and is "closer than ever" to profits.

As you can see, lots of things are happening at YouTube. The site is already far and away the most popular video site on the Internet, and it appears that it will only continue to improve.

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Heaven help Google’s competitors if the search giant ever figures out how to consistently make money off individual YouTube videos.  According to a new report, a stunning number of clips are streamed worldwide each day: over 1 billion.

That works out to about 41.7 million clips per hour, or 694,000 clips per minute.  Or as Michael Arrington, who confirmed the billion-per-day streaming rate with Google, noted, "That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day."

 

Not everything in YouTube’s world is sunshine and roses, though.  New Compete numbers are out, and it seems that the video-sharing site saw 1.75 percent fewer visitors in May than in April.

Other social media sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, all experienced month-over-month increases in this respect, which makes the YouTube development something of an anomaly.

Plus, if you stop to remember that YouTube isn’t making money off of every video it streams, the billion-per-day rate sounds a lot less impressive.

On the bright side (as far as Google’s bank accounts are concerned), there’s a gigantic ad for a game called Prototype on the YouTube homepage at the moment.

One of the best ways to get free advertising and links back to your site is to write good articles and publish them on blogs and websites around the Internet with a link back to your site.  Doing this in a systematic way is usually called “article marketing.” I have done it for years and believe me it works!  However, my enthusiasm for article marketing is started to wane due to an avalanche of poorly written articles which do not provide end users with useful information.

In the same way that reciprocal linking was destroyed by misguided users trying to “game” the search engines, article marketing stands in a precarious position today. I publish three article directories and I can assure you that most of the articles submitted should be consigned to the recycle bin because they go against the basic idea of providing good useful information in an easy-to-read fashion. In case you are writing articles, or about to have some articles written for you, here are three important tips for doing it properly.

1. Provide Information and Not a Sales Pitch

It is futile to write directly about your product and explain how great it is. If this is what you want to do, it is better to write a press release and explain the newsworthy features of your work.  An article for publication on another website should be related to your area of expertise, but should not be bragging about you or your product.

For example, if you operate a garden supply business, then write “how-to” articles helping people to solve some of the gardening and landscaping problems that they might be facing. You don’t have to say how great your garden supply business is. If you write well and provide useful tips, then the readers will be impressed and they will want to click through on your link and find out more about you and your business

People who visit your website after reading a good article are high quality visitors, because they have been “pre-sold” on you. They already regard you as an “expert” and will be more inclined to buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters than someone who clicks through on just any old link.

2. Write the article properly or get the article written by someone who can write!

If you were to submit an article to your English teacher in high school or college, would you want to hand in something with obvious grammatical mistakes even in the title itself?  Of course you wouldn’t but that doesn’t stop people from hiring unqualified ghostwriters to write tons of sub-standard articles for them at $5 per article.

Try writing an intelligent 500 word article. Can you do it in ten minutes or even twenty minutes? Probably not. Take the time to write your article well and if you are hiring someone then you should opt for a native English speaker who will give it a reasonable amount of time. You may have to pay more for it, but you will gain in the end.

How will you gain? Well written and informative articles get reprinted at a much greater frequency than the junk or filler articles.  You will gain with more links and most importantly you will get more credibility as an expert in your field.

3. Format Your Articles Properly

One of the keys to effectiveness is the readability of your article.  Do you like looking at a long block of printed words without any paragraph breaks? Take the time to divide your articles into short paragraphs punctuated by sub-heads.  It will give your readers a chance to assimilate your message more easily.

The reason why I am particular on this point is that many people use automated article submission systems which push all the paragraphs together. Editors have no time to make these corrections for you and may delete the articles.  Alternatively, your article may be published, but in a way that turns off the reader, rather than inspiring her to read the whole article. Submit your articles in a proper format and make sure that your submission system sends a well formatted version to the publishers.

If you follow these three tips then you will be “adding value” to the Internet rather than clogging it with useless filler. You will be doing a service to the public, and in the end it will work to your benefit too.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Three Tips for Effective Article Marketing

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Bruce Clay, who has been in the search engine optimization game since 1996 (before Google), sat down with WebProNews to discuss how the search industry has evolved over the years. Discuss search industry changes with WebProNews readers.

More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Keywords are ground zero. They are essential to your online success. You must get your keywords right or it’s game over before you even get started. Mainly because keywords are the most important element of your online marketing.

It can’t be emphasized enough, especially to beginning online webmasters or marketers, choosing the right profitable keywords will largely determine whether or not you succeed with your online endeavors. You simply must get this element right or your marketing will be in big trouble.

What Are Keywords?

Lets start at the very beginning, keywords are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they’re looking for on the web. Some keywords are valuable/profitable, while others are virtually worthless.

Profitable keywords are the ones that convert into a sale, a lead or potential client/customer for your company or product. These are the words someone is searching in order to buy a product or hire a service. Someone searching for “honeymoon vacation packages” is probably in the market to book a honeymoon vacation and could turn out to be very profitable for the right website or business.

Profitable keywords are the ones where the searcher is in the right “mind-set” or frame of mind to buy what they’re searching for on the web. Tailor your online marketing to target these profitable keywords and it can spell success.

So what’s the whole process for finding or choosing profitable keywords to use in your marketing? Lets look at some ways to proceed…

Number of Keyword Searches Made?

You need to find out how many searches are made for your chosen keywords each month. Simply use WordTracker or a site like SEOBook. These will give you a preliminary number of searches made each month for your keyword. Highly popular, well-searched keywords with hundreds of thousands of searches each month will be extremely hard to rank for because you will have stiff competition from major companies with limitless resources.

I like to pick less popular keywords that get only a couple of hundred of searches each day because my chances of getting on the first page greatly increases. But don’t get fixated on the number of searches, some keyword phrases that only get four or five searches daily, can still be very profitable.

For serious keyword research in a particular niche market I like to use Brad Callen’s Keyword Elite which is professionally designed software that makes all your keyword research so much easier. But there are plenty of free keyword tools you can use. One handy keyword tool is Google Adwords external suggestion tool which will help you find valuable keywords.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Commercial Intent of Keywords?

But how do you know if a keyword is profitable? Well, one convenient tool is from MSN which helps you with “Detecting Online Commercial Intention” of keywords. Just type in a keyword and it will give you a percentage or probability your keyword query has commercial benefit or intent.

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx

Conversion Rate of Keywords?

Once you have your chosen keywords in place, next you want to have a landing page that converts those keywords or traffic from those keywords into buyers or leads for your online business. This is another crucial element of your online marketing – you must have a landing page or content/site that converts into a sale or you obviously won’t make any revenue.

Keep in mind, if you’re into affiliate marketing, you main goal is not to sell but to “pre-sell” your products or services. One effective way I have found to do this is to give potential customers/clients valuable information they can use in making their final purchasing choice. Comparison sites do well, as do review sites, top ten sites… potential customers use the Internet and keywords to not only find products but more so, to find information on those products. Your goal should be to provide this valuable information to make their task a little bit easier for them and they will reward you with a sale.

What are Long-Tail Keywords?

Long-Tail keywords are simply that: long three or four word phrases that searchers use to find what they’re looking for on the web. Because they are highly specific, long-tail keywords have proven to have better conversion rates than general keywords. This is also just common sense, someone searching for a “2005 ford mustang convertible” may just be in the right mind-set to buy such a vehicle; as compared to someone searching for a more general keyword phrase such as “sports cars.”

Study your website traffic logs religiously to find long-tail keywords that turn into a sale. Target these long-tail keywords in your marketing. Even buy PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in the three major search engines – Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing and MicroSoft AdCenter – for these valuable/profitable keywords.

And build higher rankings in organic search for these long-tail keyword phrases. It’s really not that difficult for long phrases, especially if they’re related to your site; many times you can reach the top spot in a matter of days, especially in Google.

How To Rank High For Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?

Of course, the million dollar question is: HOW do you rank in the top spot for your chosen keywords? I believe the key to ranking high in the search engines (especially Google) is to be persistent in building your rankings for your keywords. Take a long-term view or approach, sometimes it may take months, even years, to rank in the top Five for your highly competitive keywords.

The best strategy is to “stick to it” and keep building relevant links to your keyword landing page. Create related blogs with valuable content linking back to your keywords. Write keyword related articles and distribute them all over the web. Create Google Alerts for your keywords and them place comments/links in the newly formed pages on the web that Google is indexing.

Be pro-active, download the SEOQuake toolbar and find your main keyword competitors. Check out their links and then go out and get the same links. Write better higher quality content than your main competitors because Google always rewards great content. Plus, use the free http://www.Addthis.com button and let your visitors bookmark your great content in all the social bookmark sites and build your keyword links for you.

Do keyworded Press Releases with your embedded links and spread them all over the web. Get these Press Releases into Google news and other important places on the web. http://www.PRWeb.com is really a great place for your press releases since you can embed your keywords in your links.

If you can try to get your most important keywords in your domain name. Many SEO experts argue the merits of this but from my own experience and marketing – it is much easier to rank high for your keywords if you have them in the domain name. Again, it is just common sense, if you have your main keyword in the domain, this keyword is obviously telling the search engines this is what your site is all about. I have even bought domains and created sites specifically around certain keywords just to rank high.

Always remember, you have to be persistent, I have been fighting some keyword battles for over four or five years! For really profitable keywords, it can be a constant struggle to remain on the first page, but the trick is not to give up, just keep fighting away at your competitors. Persistence usually pays off in the end and those profitable keywords will have your links in the top spot. Make ranking high for those profitable keywords your number one marketing strategy. Concentrate all your marketing efforts towards getting plenty of quality traffic for those keywords and you will succeed online.

About The Author:

Titus Hoskins – The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools. If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7-Day Marketing Course here: Internet Marketing Tools

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Keyword Strategies: Increase Your Keyword Rankings