October Search News – SEM Synergy Extras

Today’s episode of SEM Synergy included a tasty news segment. Of course, with all the events and issues that come up over the course of a week, we were only able to touch on a few of the stories. Here are some of the newsworthy items that were on the agenda but just couldn’t be squeezed into our time constraints.

IM Broadcast provides video sharing and networking site for Internet marketers

Our congratulations goes out to David Snyder and Jordan Kasteler for the scarily-good conference that was Scary SEO. While attendance was limited to an intimate group, everyone could enjoy a number of presentations by tuning in to a live video stream on IM Broadcast. The brainchild of Loren Baker, David and Jordan, Loren described the site as “YouTube for Internet marketers”. The video sharing and networking site launched last week and already boasts more 200 members and more than 100 videos on SEO, SMO, PPC, affiliate marketing, blogging and search engine news, just to name a few.

Google showing images in ads

Google has been experimenting with images in ads and ads in images. Let me explain. Google Image Search, which was previously free of ads, is showing ads for some users. These experimental sponsored listings are complete with a shaded box and images of their own. In similar news, Google has been experimenting with including images in sponsored search results , as well. The images in are displayed when a user clicks on the blue Plus Box that appears with some ad results. And they aren’t tiny images, either. Not a bad place to play if you have a shiny, pretty product like those described in the articles above.

RSS gets a shake up

In what amounted to a depressing abandon ship for many dedicated Bloglines users, rabid readers had enough of the borked feed subscription service. A large number of feeds continually failed to update, causing users as high up as Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher to switch to Google Reader. Google also confirmed this month that they’ll begin offering RSS feeds of Web search results through the Google Alerts program. Google is the last major search engine to offer RSS feeds of Web search results, currently only offering email notifications. [Speaking of which, I always get my Google Alerts, like, seven hours after everyone else. Why am I not important to you, Google?–Susan]

I’d also like to thank my guest Mike Moran, co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site. We had a chance to talk about the business strategies and implementation issues that he details in the second edition of his book, and it’s definitely worth a listen. Thanks, Mike!

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

See Virginia's author page for links to connect on social media.