Google is expected to join the social network data portability crowd with "Friend Connect" on Monday. TechCrunch speculates that Friend Connect will be a set of "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites."

Google will join Facebook and MySpace, which launched ways to port user data to partner sites this week. Facebook Connect will provide the hooks to let users port their friends, profile photos, events, and other data across the Web to partner sites. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data. Read More..

Source: http://www.news.com/8301-13953_3-9941039-80.html

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) just announced that they now power AdSense for Search. Another nice new change is that if you provide a Sitemap, Google will use that to improve the coverage of the custom search engine.

We just announced today that AdSense for Search is now powered by Custom Search. Custom Search (a Google-powered search box that you can install on your website in minutes) helps your users quickly find what they're looking for. As a webmaster, Custom Search gives you advanced customization options to improve the accuracy of your site's search results. You can also choose to monetize your traffic with ads tuned to the topic of your site. If you don't want ads, you can use Custom Search Business Edition. read more

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/sitemaps-offer-better-coverage-for-your.html

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a method of optimizing web pages in order to gain traffic from online communities and community websites, also referred to as social media sites.


What are some social media sites? Popular social media sites include Digg (news), Youtube (video), Myspace (social networking), Flickr (photo sharing), Wikipedia (information), Netscape, Reddit, and Stumbleupon.


How can social media optimization help

Potential Customer: Social media optimization will not only make your website visible to larger group but also will also make it easily connected or interlaced with various online communities and community websites. Popular SMO tactics carry the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to a website. In short, success is just a click away.

Quality Traffic: If you are planning to have more quality traffic to your website do not rely only on one source of traffic. For instance, 80% of your traffic is coming from Google and suddenly their algorithm changes. This will cause your site to lose its ranking and also 80% of your traffic wiped out. So, the question here is how to proceed in this. To cater this problem SMO is the exact backup plan. SMO tactics have the potential to create and direct huge amounts of traffic to your website

Search Engine Ranking: Adding SMO features to your website significantly increases its chance to grow, gaining more natural links and increased traffic. As web crawlers begin to recognize your website’s “community,” it becomes more valued by the search engines, which leads to higher organic rankings.

SMO Activities
A) Video Optimization
B) Press Release
C) Forums
D) Book Marking Sites (delicious, Digg etc)
E) Discussion Boards (Mouthshut, yahoo Answers etc)
F) Social Networking (Orkut, hi5 etc)

Video Optimization Video Optimization is the part of SMO, adding a video on You Tube, as an example, might attract more targeted traffic for a popular brand instead of spending money on other online advertising, such as PPC.



Brand Promotion: SMO is not about building incoming links and associated traffic only, nor is it about only increasing your search engine. When we look at the above description of SMO, its focus is on the marketing mainstream and on building buzz online, and then generating website traffic from these interested parties (what we call targeted traffic). SMO is become more popular for brand promotion, SMO can convince to user to visit your site very quickly.

Increase Popularity of Websites: Social media equals more talk about your brand online. SMO means that more people become aware of your content and are inclined to discuss and use your content on their own sites and community portals.

Get Incredible Traffic (Press Release) Many individuals are getting their news and information from news aggregator services and news websites offered by major search engines. These news search engines are offering latest information on every political, historical and social topic. Be it an editorial listing or a sponsored link, a good search engine ranking can bring thousands of visitors to any site; in fact, with top rank on search engine listing a website can get numerous page views and extended press coverage. Deep linking is a link to a page other than your home page. In many cases, this is where the majority of your revenue is generated. You need to have keyword rich content A place to post your content Create links pointing toward your website Example Article Press release Blogs etc.

Social Book Marking In a social book marking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Social Book marketing and its benefits:- • The benefit of social bookmarking is that once you add site then you can access it from anywhere on internet.

• Social bookmarking sites are tagged based so when you add any site you also add tags along with it so that other can easily find your site.

• Search engines indexes these tags and the link so you get a free one way link by social bookmarking. If 1000 or so people add your site to their account then you are directly getting 1000 of free high quality backlinks which will bring you immense traffic and Pagerank in Google.

• Instant Traffic: - You starting getting traffic at the same time when the site got submitted, when you submit website, it remains on the home page for some time in many of these sites and you get lot of Direct Traffic, However this traffic keeps decreasing day by day!

• Fast Indexing :- Google bot index these community web sites very fast, for example, digg, stumble and technotary stories are indexed evry 15 to 20 minutes, So when you get the web site submitted in these social sites and they remains on home page or innner category page, they get indexed very fast!

• More Natural Links - Link Baiting:- If other members like your web site or story, they will surely publish that story with your web site URL in their own forums, blogs and websites, So you keep getting natural one way links!

• Help in SEO :- Having web site in social communities provides more importance to your website, google and other search engines consider your website as important, So you get natural advantage of weightage and rankings in google.

Social networking services Social networking services are becoming more plentiful and more utilized daily. These services exist in order to allow social networks sharing a common interest the opportunity to stay connected. Example:
• MySpace
• Orkut
• Hi5
• Facebook
• Friendster