Tuesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbook announced the launch of Facebook Ads. This new ad platform will allow advertisers to focus their precise target markets.

Facebook’s Ads consists of three major parts: “a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.”

With the announcement of Facebook ads, a number of brand specific pages were released Tuesday to the tune of 100,000 pages covering the world’s biggest brands. Users can share information about businesses they like acting as a trusted referral, sending qualified and highly targeted individuals to the main businesses page.

Users can also write on the wall of the business, add reviews, and interact with the business based on the features the business chooses to install.

According to Business Week, AOL has acquired pay per click search engine Quigo for a reported $300 million. The acquisition includes the AdSonar and Feedpoint platforms.

Quigo has been serving up ads for a number of Time.com properties, and with the success they have been having, saw the potential and went forward with the purchase.

The deal which is expected to close later this year, will allow for expansion of their contextual advertising on AOL as well as their partner sites. For the time being, Google will continue to provide AdWords ads alongside AOL search results.

A large part of my time at StepForth as a search engine optimization consultant is spent conducting competitor research on behalf of our clientele. This service is focused on deconstructing the marketing campaigns of each competitor while identifying the tactics that appear to have fundamentally contributed to their search engine success. As you might imagine I come across many intriguing techniques that work and many that don’t. In this article I will account for a couple of techniques that appear to be overlooked by many but have proven time and time again to work; the creation of an on-site glossary and frequently asked questions (FAQ) section.

Read more…

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Round Table posted screenshots of Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Portal in Beta. Head on over and check it out. So far nothing appears to be all that dissimilar to the other portals out there but it is still an interesting peek

Around 8 am PST today Google finally put the tiresome rumors to rest… there is NO GPHONE. Thank the gods! All the speculation over the GPhone was silly and getting sillier. It never made sense for Google to create its own phone so it was a real relief when they finally announced Google’s development of Android with the cooperation of the Open Handset Alliance. Read more…

The Fantomaster blogged about a rather interesting new service called SubmitLinks.com that has launched despite the war Google formally started on paid links.

The service uniquely provides users with the ability to buy one way text links for a one time fee (guaranteed for 6 months). Here is a quote from the home page:

SubmitLinks.com offers permanent one way text links for a one time fee. The text links we provide have a Google PageRank between 1 and 5 and are placed on a wide variety of different web sites. In addition, links are placed on web pages relevant to your web site subject.

There is a minimum purchase of $300. Text Link pricing: (one time fee)

• Page Rank 1 Links: $8.50
• Page Rank 2 Links: $13.50
• Page Rank 3 Links: $20.00
• Page Rank 4 Links: $25.00
• Page Rank 5 Links: $36.00

It should be interesting to see how this pans out. In my opinion this company has a good chance of doing well but this is certainly not a market segment I would be interested in jumping into right now.

All-in-all it merits mentioning that buying text links is playing with fire these days. That said, if you do it carefully your rankings are very likely to improve.

Since finally getting in touch with the coolness of Twitter (thanks to Jennifer Laycock and Caroline Middlebrook)I have become rather addicted. I find it extremely powerful because I can see into the activities of many of my peers and catch fresh beta products that might have taken me a while to notice.

To that end, Jeremiah Owyang tweeted about TwitterPoster.com (exactly 13 minutes ago) and I have to say it is a pretty cool little app. It shows the top Twitter personalities and in a very cool format that makes it easy to learn more about each person. More and more I am really seeing the vast marketing possibilities of Twitter… here is my Twitter profile

Yesterday Ask launched an improved version of UK Maps in a bid to get more users of the utility in the UK.

I am not too familiar with the pitfalls of version 1.0 but according to Ask’s press release the new system accounts for the US-english vs UK-english language barrier (i.e. an ‘exit’ on a motorway is considered a ‘junction’ in the UK). The other improvements included:

• Receive driving directions for up to ten different destinations at one time. In other words, plan your driving route for an entire day of errands – pretty cool.
• It now includes walking directions.
• “Landmark Assistance” is included which, I presume, allows you to find your way to particularly popular points of interest; this would be quite handy on a holiday!
• Subway stations are marked for those who wish to get around a little quicker.
• Curious about how everything might look in a particular location? Try the satellite view which will give you a decent photo view of the surroundings.
• Satellite shots are available for purchase on the fly… odd but okay.
• If you search for any UK city within Ask Search you will be presented with a myriad of city details including hot spots, links to maps, tips, etc. Read more…