Google has officially announced the launch of Double-Click for Publishers (DFP) a new ad management and display system that allows publishers more flexibility in their advertisements. More info should be coming soon from the Search Giant.

You can read more on their blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/next-generation-of-ad-serving-for.html

Well, in my profession/position, I’m responsible for the Search Engine Optimization for our company’s web presence. Everybody seems to have a position on whats important to boost your ranking in the various search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc). I’m here to tell you, it’s not so simple. There’s a number of factors that play a role beyond the factors that Search Engines started using back in the early 2000/late 1990s.

Today, Goggle has announced a change in how it will display search engine results. The popular Search Engine Provider will start to categorize it’s links to allow users to drill into broader areas of the desired site. For example, if you were searching for Medical Laser Safety Training, the results might show links similar to the following:

Home >> Laser Safety >> Training >> Medical

Allowing you to drill into Laser Safety, Training, etc. These changes will be deployed over the next few days and we should start to see these new results become more frequently displayed. Of course if your site isn’t designed to allow this new formatting or Google is unable to categorize your content either because the URLs are too long or too short, you would be excluded from these benefits.

Read more on this announcement from google, click here.

So I was looking through my feeds when I ran across this tidbit. The article describes a process where a message left via Google Voice is displayed on an LED panel. There is a computer that checks for voice updates and when a transcription exists that starts with the word “message,” the computer writes the remaining text to a text file. The LED screen displays the contents of this text file to display the message and, VOILA! You now have a transcribed Google Voice message displayed on an LED screen.

Check this out for more info:
http://thedavisblog.com/blog/?p=691

What can I say, one of the most influential factors to search engine page rank, across virtually every search engine is that of backlinks. To clarify this a bit further, let me overview how these backlinks work. We’ll start with the effect and work our way to the cause.

By now, virtually everyone is a search engine marketer, optimizer, or in one way or another a resident expert on the subject. I mean hey, I’m writing an article about it so what does that say? Search engines look at two primary factors, content and popularity. There are a number of influencing calculations that affect each of these. I’ve discussed content a bit in my article on keyword density. For that reason, this article focuses more on popularity.

For your website to be regarded as reliable and useful to the searcher, the search engines look at how many high-rank topic related wep pages link to you. These are the most influential links. We refer to them as backlinks. These backlinks allow the search engines to consider you as a reliable source as other reliable sources refer to you. The more quality backlinks you have referring to your specific article or page, the higher you will rank in the majority of search engine result pages (SERPs).

Be mindful, although the easy solution may seem to place your link in every possible medium and site possible, this isn’t always productive. If you place your article on non-related or very low popularity sites, it may in fact hinder your rank. Typically, I’ll contact a webmaster and ask to exchange links or I’ll write an article about them and they will reciprocate.

This is merely an overview of how backlinks work, so get out there already and build yourself some popularity. But before you do, check out one or two of our sponsor links/ads to help us to continue to bring this information forward to young and/or newer developers. We are always very appreciative.