A few weeks ago I wrote about building your website from the ground up. This article did not dive into great detail on any specific topics, but rather touched on the key points you will want to address. In this article I will place most of the focus on the promotion aspect of this previous article.

While at times new websites can experience organic search rankings in a matter of months, for the most part, it can take well over a year before you start to see any progress, and that is if you start promoting right away! Read more…

Google shares are at a considerable low today. They opened with a value of $420 and by 12:26pm ET, had dropped below the $400 mark to $396.29 (according to a Google search for “goog”)

At one point the stock had reached a new 52 week low of $395.34 – a far cry from the 52 week high of $747.24 set in November of last year. That’s a drop of more than $350 since the peak which is a lot of coin for all serious Google shareholders. Read more…

Funding to the tune of $28.7 Million, led by Highland Capital Partners, will be used over at Digg to incorporate a number of changes, Jay Adelson announced in the official Digg blog Wednesday.

Changes will include improvements in infrastructure, new feature development, international expansion, and hiring new employees to make the whole thing happen. New features will include personalizing the “Digg Experience” and incorporating a number of user suggestions from over the years.

Adelson notes that nearly half of their 30 million monthly users are from outside of the US, so making adjustments for localized tastes and languages are on the forefront for their growth strategy for 2009.

He also notes that they will be hiring, so if you are a techie in need of a job, you may want to take a look at their jobs page!

Yahoo has opened up another location, this time with a research center in Grenoble France. This follows shortly after news that Yahoo may also be opening up a location in La Vista Nebraska creating at least 50 news jobs.

Layoff notices for more than 1000 employees were also handed out near the start of the year, and Yahoo’s shares have just hit a 52 week low – interesting that they are expanding in all this turmoil.

Regardless, it looks like the new facility will employee 220 engineers and be Yahoo’s biggest center in France. The French minister of economy is offering sizable tax credits for research based operations, which helps to explain the choice of location.

How would you like to have Google cut you a check for a few million dollars? Well, if you have the right ideas that could help change the world you just might get some cash from Google. There is of course a catch.

If your idea to help make the world a better place is chosen by Google, you will get a share of $10 million, but the money you get must go directly towards putting your idea into action. Google is putting up $10 million which will be divided up among the top five submissions to be used for project funding.

Submissions must be made by Oct 20, 2008. In late January 2009 Google will select 100 of the ideas and leave it up to the public to narrow down the list to 20 semifinalists. The five winners will be chosen and announced in February by a Google-sponsored advisory board.

To submit your project ideas or for more information, visit Google’s project10tothe100.com.

The latest search market share figures are in at Nielsen, ComScore, and HitWise, and, for the most part, Google continues to rise.

Depending on which provider you prefer, Google saw yet another increase in market share in August as did Yahoo. MSN has dropped according to all three providers. Read more…

So, you have finally decided to build yourself a website, but really have no idea where to start. The following 10 steps will give you some insight into what you need to address when creating a search friendly website from the ground up.

While this article is not an exhaustive list of everything you need to know, it does touch base on many of the important aspects of creating a new website. Read more…

When poking into twitter earlier today I saw a post from Matt Cutts who had linked to an interesting TechCrunch article.

It seems that Kristin Armstrong used a GPS and Google Earth to help her train for her Gold Medal performance in Beijing last month. Read more…

For those of you out there who use WebPosition Gold, you will be happy to know that it is now properly reporting on Google results. While news had circulated all over the forums and various SE News sites that WebPosition had been banned by Google, apparently this simply was not true.

Supposedly Google had changed the way in which they display results within the HTML of the site, a change not visible on the site when performing a search. As a result of this change, it essentially broke WebPosition, and the software then required some updating to correct the issue. Back in August Google posted to the official GoogleBlog that they were testing a number of items within the search results. One test included creating slightly more whitespace between the first and second listings. It is some of the small HTML changes like these that are likely the culprit to the temporary down time experienced by WebPosition.

As of earlier this month, the leader in reporting software did in fact complete the update and now reported results do appear to be correct. While there is much speculation as to how long reporting software will continue to work without being permanently banned by Google, for now, things are working once again.

Like most websites Google keeps a log of IP addresses in order to track visitor behavior, and to help serve up more useful ad targeting. Previously they held onto this non-identifying information for 18 months following your visit to their site.

Over the past couple of years regulators and policymakers have had privacy concerns over the storage of this data, and as a result Google has cut the time it holds onto this information by half, down to 9 months. Read more…