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Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Citysearch partners with OrangeSoda for online local advertising

Citysearch, a directory of local stores and services, today announced a strategic partnership and investment in OrangeSoda, an online search marketing service, to offer customers a more complete local online advertising service called CityGrid Complete.

Citysearch, a property of web giant IAC, recently launched CityGrid, a network of local business listings and advertising available through a set of APIs that can be used on websites or mobile devices. The network includes 15 million local business and 500 thousand paying advertisers reaching 140 million unique visitors, according to the company’s announcement.

The new CityGrid Complete takes the service to the next level by offering local businesses the ability to develop pay-per-click advertising, drive search engine optimization from major search engines, and access to an analytics dashboard for tracking.

Popular local listings site Yelp offers a similar set of APIs for enhancing websites and mobile devices though it hasn’t called on a special marketing firm to help its customers with search engine optimization marketing. MerchantCircle also has a similar network of nearly 15 million local businesses. Its business model is slightly different as it creates profiles for any business it can find and then gives them the option to pay to control it. The company signed its one millionth customer in January.

Citysearch also announced it has invested an undisclosed amount into OrangeSoda. OrangeSoda, launched in 2006, specializes in search engine optimization for small businesses and large companies local outlets, including Remax and Jiffy Lube. In 2008, the company secured a first round of funding for $5 million.

Companies: Citysearch, OrangeSoda

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Did you ever wish there was a Tumblr Pro? Try ZooLoo instead

When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room.

But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine.

Wouldn’t you pay to have someone else deal with this stuff for you?

ZooLoo sells subscription blogging services for as little as $1.99 that includes a custom domain and backups, email for the site, plus a dashboard for managing your blog. ZooLoo’s Graffiti blog platform is a lot like Tumblr: Simple, attractive, easy to use because it’s not complicated.

For $4.99 a month you can remove the ads from your ZooLoo site and double your storage capacity to 2 gigabytes. (There’s no limit on image uploads, which aren’t stored on your personal space.) For $8.99 monthly, you can run your own ads and use ZooLoo’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

You can use ZooLoo for free, if you’re happy with just a blog, a dashboard, and the ability to check and update your status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin.

The company, founded in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2008 by CEO Jeff Herzog, is privately funded. The one-minute video below shows how ZooLoo works for beginners.

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What It’s Like To Write For Demand Media: Low Pay But Lots of Freedom

Editor: This is a guest post by Andria Krewson, a freelance journalist who has written for Demand Media. Given our recent focus on Demand Media and so-called content farms, we thought it would be interesting to get a perspective from a Demand Media writer.

I made $37.50 at Demand Studios in November. That money went directly into my Paypal account, on time, with no billing hassles. But it probably took me about six hours of filling out a profile, studying a style guide and learning how to navigate the system. So my hourly pay was about $6, for a writer new to the system.

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Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Reach her on Twitter as @underoak.

I had heard about Demand Studios from former co-workers before Wired wrote about Demand Media (Demand Studio’s parent company) in October, and media pundits like Jay Rosen followed up with comments on Twitter and an interview with the company’s CEO at ReadWriteWeb. [Ed: ReadWriteWeb's first analysis of Demand Media was in August.] Demand Media has been criticized for producing low-quality content designed for search engine optimization. It’s not journalism, critics say, and it’s clogging up Google searches, making good stuff hard to find.

But I suspect much of that criticism has come from people who haven’t gone inside the Demand Studios part of Demand Media to see how it really works, or they haven’t thought enough about what kind of content it provides, or they haven’t thought enough about how it feels to swallow your pride and make a little money with your strongest knowledge and skills, no matter the global hourly rate.

There are differences between the user-generated content at sites Demand Media feeds, and the content generated by Demand Studios.

So let’s get to it.

How it works

People sign up as writers, editors or filmmakers. I signed up as a writer. Contributors study the style guide, which gives specifics on allowed citations, and why citations are needed, and how to write for search-engine optimization without sounding too clunky. New writers can also consult forums and connect with other contributors with social-networking tools. Writers can then use keywords, pay rates and general content areas to search through available assignments. Generally, enough assignments exist that writers can find subjects of personal interest.

Fact sheets get $7.50 an assignment. I fulfilled one of those before I realized that rate of pay wasn’t worth the effort. The next two assignments, for $15 each, both dealt with the same topic, with slightly different angles, and I chose them because I knew the subject well. Still, I had to do some research, to back up my statements and provide links to .edu or .gov sites. No Wikipedia allowed.

Once accepting assignments, I had a week to submit them to editors. While I could have written each piece without any research, citations and outbound links are required, as well as a summary (a nut graf, essentially, in newspaper terms). Frankly, the discipline of filling out boxes with words could help some professional writers improve the focus of their pieces. Certainly new writers can learn from the system. And the SEO tips in the style guide are worth study.

One piece I wrote was bounced back for further editing. The editor’s comments were gentle but clear. I made fixes, resubmitted, and got paid, through Paypal, no invoices necessary.

What’s the content?

The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They’re evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now. They’re the kinds of questions I would usually get answered through a phone call to my contractor father, or my brother the car genius, or my mother the seamstress/cook/homemaker/gardener/early computer geek.

You can tell by the assignment headlines that they’re generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement. People are actually turning to Google to ask these questions? What happened to asking basic questions from friends and family?

But indeed, we’re in a different world, and the criticism of Demand Media by some pundits strikes me as a bit elitist, as if the Internet weren’t for everyone. A personal example:

(Daughter, 19, volunteers to help me with my eye shadow for a special event.)

Me: Where’d you learn this technique?

Her: Youtube.

(And indeed, eHow videos, supplied by Demand Media, show how to apply eye shadow.)

Next page: Swallowing my pride

Twitter’s wine foray has deep roots — check out Able Grape

Twitter’s announcement that it’s launching a charitable side project and wine label to benefit child literacy in the developing world underscores the company’s deep appreciation for wine. And by that, we mean deep.

From what we hear, Twitter employees are avid wine connoisseurs that are well-versed in vintages and varietals at company parties. In fact, the company’s director of search Doug Cook launched a wine search engine called Able Grape last year as a “labor of love” and writes occasionally for Wine Business Magazine. He wins extra nerd points for leading a search engine optimization talk at a wine bloggers conference this year.

What’s Able Grape? It’s a search engine dedicated to teaching you about wine. It’s not quite Google  – no spartan interface for search results. It’s more for research and learning. You can dig deeper by year, region, grape, producer, tasting notes and on and on. It catalogues 41,000 web sites and 21 million pages. Try looking up Bordeaux vintage reports from 2005, producers of the Domprobst vineyard in Graach, or anything about a 1964 Badia a Coltibuono. (Yes, it gets that specific. Plus it should give you an idea of how narrow and powerful Twitter search could get as the amount of data they collect grows.) So the company’s jaunt into wine-making isn’t all that surprising.

But it’s their first big non-profit campaign. They’re starting Fledgling Wine, which will sell Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and donate $5 from every bottle to San Francisco non-profit Room to Read. The organization is the brainchild of former Microsoft executive John Wood and establishes libraries and promotes literacy in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and India. To produce the line, Twitter’s working with DIY winery Crushpad, which is less than a ten minute drive away from Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

The startup’s wine is $20 a bottle, and it might be pretty decent considering the company culture’s fussiness over quality drink.

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Elance Index: Online Contract Work Shows Growth

The other day, National Public Radio (NPR) featured a tech worker who has been out of work for some time. He spends his days in San Francisco coffee shops looking for work.

His job search may improve if the “Elance Work Index,” proves true. Elance reports that they are seeing a 46% increase in hiring for contract work, compared to a year ago.

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Contract work is always hot during a recession as employers look to get their work done without hiring people full-time. In other words, it’s a great time to be in consulting.

The “Elance Index,” looks at the top 100 skills in today’s online job market. The results arrive from more than 100,000 jobs posted on Elance in recent months, making it a credible barometer of online hiring trends.

Tech skills carry 11 of the top 25 spots in the index. And marketers look like they have better prospects, with skills in graphic design, social media and search engine optimization (SEO) being the kind that employers want. Writers are also in demand

First, let’s look at the top ten on the Elance Index:

Some tech highlights:

• Knowing PHP is still a great bet for getting a job. It remains the #1 sought-after skill by prospective employers.
• HTML skills jumped two notches to the #4 slot.
• People with Java skills have some reason to be optimistic. Their skill advanced 36 slots to the #24 position.
• Joomla! rose 15 spots to #6.

In marketing:

• Graphic design is a hot skill to have. It rose to the #5 slot.
• Illustrator is in the #8 spot.
• Social media marketing came in 14th on the index.
• SEO skills are still in demand, ranking #15 in the index.

In writing:

• Content Writing moves up 6 spots to #2.
• Article Writing came in the #3 spot.
• Copywriting and Creative Writing move up to the #12 and #13 spots, respectively.

Contract jobs are not a reality for many people. Health insurance costs can be steep for contractors. On the upside, skills in web development, online marketing and writing may be signs that the overall web technology market is rebounding, with employers focusing more on those types of projects.

Discuss

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