Given that it’s a Friday morning and I can hear the weekend calling me already, instead of being hard at work (shh don’t tell anyone) I’ve been catching up on Digg and some of my favorite blogs.? Two particular posts caught my attention today and the one made me realize why the other feels the way they do.

The first is currently the top story on Digg.? It’s a New Yorkers map of America:

Shortly after I say this, I read this post over at Geeks are Sexy – Google Maps Gets its Georgia’s Mixed up. It’s about Google Maps getting the state of Georgia and the Country of Georgia mixed up.? That’s not the funny part of the post though.? It’s when they hopped over to Yahoo Answers and someone in the State of Georgia was asking where the invading tanks were – “I live in georegia but i dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worrie, i herd on the news that rusia has invaded but i dont see them no where wats going on”. Well I can clearly see now why New Yorkers label the red section of the map the way that they do.

Now back to work so I can actually get out of here today.

* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity

The talks between Google and Digg are over. It was rumoured that Google was offering Digg around $200 for the acquisition. Sometime last week, Google walked away from the deal. According to Tech Crunch:

• “Google was in the due diligence stage of the deal, where they peer deep into Digg’s technology and financial statements. Most term sheets are non binding, so anything that gives the buyer pause can be used as an excuse to walk away – but generally the buyer already has a very good idea what they are getting well before the term sheet stage.” Full article here.

This isn’t the first time that a potential acquisition deal has gone sideways for Digg. For an overview of bouncy past Digg has had in acquisitions, check out the Tech Crunch article.

The other week I wrote about Twitter and Facebook and asked the question is Twitter the new Facebook?? One thing that I pointed out in the post is Twitter’s issues with down time and functionality issues and the problems they’ve created for the Twitter community.? Well this week I’m turning my attention and ire to YouTube.

Oh YouTube, why hast thou forsaken me.? Once upon a time you were my go to destination for all of my internet video needs.? We had such a great relationship.? I watched and uploaded videos and you got revenue dollars from the impressions you recieved.? A truely give and take relationship where both of our needs were fulfilled.

Oh but YouTube, it was not meant to be.? You go and marry the great Google.? The relationship was supposed to do great things for you, but alas no!? Ever since your union, you’ve gone downhill.? Why have you turned into a housewife that stops taking care of herself?? Why?? You are no longer fun to look at.? With all of your buffering problems and video unavailable issues – when I know that it is because someone at the desk next to me is watching it.

So it has come to this.? You need to start taking care of yourself again and be a hot soccer mom – a milf even.? But if you remain in the sorry state you are currently in, I may have to go and find a new online video relationship to satisfy my online video needs.? ? Sorry, but you’re just not cutting it for me anymore!!

One of the most prevalent errors in SEO is to optimize solely for Google and overlook the other major search engines. Google does currently have the largest market share in the search industry, but Yahoo and MSN combined have an approximate market share of 39% – a demographic that you do not want to overlook. Although the algorithms for each of these search engines are unique, there is overlap, albeit with different weighting, as to what factors the search engines consider important when determining ranking. When designing/optimizing your website, it is critical to keep these factors in mind. Below is a list of some of the factors that the search engines use when determining the rank of a website for a given keyword.

First you need to ensure that your website is search engine friendly. Search engines cannot read flash or images. If you have these elements on your website, you need to ensure that you have written alt tags for all of them that are descriptive and contain the keyword(s) you wish to optimize for. This will start you on your way to ensuring that the search engines can successfully index the content on your website.

Your website also needs to have unique Meta tags for every page. These Meta tags need to be unique to avoid duplicate content penalties that will hurt your website in the SERP’s. You should also keep in mind that these tags are what are displayed in the SERP’s. Therefore, you need to ensure that the copy is also human friendly, as it is counter productive to rank well in the search engines if no one clicks on your result – in the end which is more important, rankings or traffic? You can get both if you properly optimize for both people and search engines.

The copy on your website is a critical factor in determining your search engine ranking. You need to have your targeted keywords sprinkled through out the copy on your website, making sure that you do not try to optimize each page for too many keywords. Be careful here though, you do not want to stuff your website with keywords, you will want to ensure that it is comprehendible to the people who visit your website. You can also get your website banned from the search engines if they determine that you are trying to game them by keyword stuffing.

A site map is also really important element to have on your website. It lets the search engines know that you have deemed those pages in the site map as important and helps the search engines to crawl those pages more efficiently. Google and Yahoo now have a feature that allows you to submit a site map to them directly.

You will also want to ensure that you implement proper 301 redirects to avoid any canonical issues with the search engines.

The most time consuming part of SEO is inbound linking, this is also one of the most important things that you can do to help your website rank in the search engines and if done incorrectly, one of the ways you can hurt your SERP’s the quickest. You want to get quality inbound links from websites that are related to yours. You will also want to keep track of the anchor text that you use when doing the inbound linking – as this is one of the factors that the search engines use in their ranking algorithms. You need to ensure that you adhere to SEO linking best practices so that you do not get your website banned from the search engines – you must not engage in linking to areas that the search engines deem to be ‘bad neighborhoods’ and your inbound linking must appear to be natural and should not consist solely of reciprocal linking.

If you have covered all of the above steps, you will have started your journey towards improved search engine rankings. For more information on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, contact Invoke Media.

Newspapers are able to set a minimum price for the ad space, which Google advertisers will then be able to bid above. This is similar to Adwords’ method, but the minimum prices are not set by keyword popularity, or even related to keywords at all.

This foray into print media will give newspapers more power over the advertisements than Google’s previous attempts at print advertising. Googles’ Tom Phillips says that advertisers will “bid on inventory and then allow [newspapers] to decide on whatever makes sense.”

The alpha test of this new program will launch this week. Google plans to expand into weekly newspapers and magazines before long. We are expecting Google Billboards and Google Skywriters in second quarter 2007.