Rich Snippets offer a way for Web sites with certain types of content to enhance their site’s search result listings in Google. All the Web site has to do is add some HTML code (in the form of microformats or RDFa) to structure that data in their pages so the search engines can recognize it. And even before Google started offering this six months ago, Yahoo! enabled microformats in SearchMonkey back in 2008.

Read more here!

Google Wave has a lot of innovative features, but here are just a few:

- Real-time: In most instances, you can see what someone else is typing, character-by-character.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games.

- Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.

- Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said.

- Natural language: Google Wave can autocorrect your spelling, even going as far as knowing the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly.

- Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

While these are only a few of the many features of Google Wave, it’s easy to see why people are extremely excited.

Check out the launch of Google Wave for more detailed information.

There are plenty of eBooks, studies and surveys on the benefits of blogging for businesses. And one survey receiving a lot of blog posts and Tweets at the moment is that of HubSpot (creators of the popular Website Grader SEO tool). From their data of over 1500 businesses they found that those with blogs attracted:

• 55% more traffic
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more indexed pages

Source: http://copywriterscrucible.com

There are a number of ways to monetize a site. Aaron covers the options in extensive detail in the “Monetization” members area , however today we’ll take a close look at just one aspect of monetization, Affiliate Marketing.

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“tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.”

Read More…

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html“/>

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

Here’s the link where you can Learn More about the Canonical Link Element.

Source: Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2008

Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don’t know which flavors to serve, or suppose you’re responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file.

How can you use this data to build your business? Read more here

Measuring what sources are driving the highest quantity and quality visits to your site is one of the fundamentally most important (and easiest!) things a web analyst can do.

Your traffic sources report usually doesn’t look much different than this:

Then if you’re really lucky you get a slick visual summary of that data in the form of a pie chart!

Here are some useful tips I’ve found for really getting insight out of your traffic sources reporting :

• Decide on your sources

• Set up tracking on your sources

• Report and find those insights!

• Go ask for that raise!

Learn more about these practical and powerful tips. See how it was presented in a way which provides insight and analysis. Read more –>

source: http://www.comscore.com

James Lamberti draws the conclusion that the popularity of video is mostly driven by a combination of consumers and Google itself. However I’d disagree, and argue that Google is not responsible at all, simply Google is responding to what the consumer market is naturally demanding.

It would make sense that this would lead to a greatly increased volume in entertainment traffic as the nature of web usage changes, and thus an increasing popularity of video and YouTube in universal search results. Looking at the popularity of YouTube beyond Google this also matches our research into social bookmarking service DIGG.com which showed that YouTube was by far the website that reached the homepage of DIGG most frequently.

Definitely this will be an ongoing trend, and would not be surprised to see YouTube taking an even more prominent place on Google in the future.