Twitter for Busy People

Interested in using Twitter as a business tool but concerned that you don’t have the time to check your friends updates? If you answered yes, there is a new site called Twitter for Busy People that you might want to try out. This site requires you to enter your Twitter name and then provides you with icons of your friends who updated in the last hour, the last day, and more than 1 day ago. When you place your cursor over the icon you can read your friends updates. This is a very easy way to skim your friends updates in a couple of minutes.

Focus Group on Bing Versus Google

A recent study performed by TechCrunch compared search usability on Bing versus Google. To sum up the study, most people prefer the design of Bing, but will stick with Google due to familiarity, the fact that they already use many other Google applications, and Bing’s new features are not large enough to make them want to switch.

The focus group consisted of 12 people and before the test all of them said Google was their main search engine. After the test, 4 out of 12 people said they prefer Bing.

June 2009 PageRank Update

Google has once again rolled out more updates to their PageRank Toolbar. Typically Google makes PageRank updates about every 3 months, but this update comes very close to it’s last update in May. So if you are engaged in SEO on your site and see a change in your PageRank, don’t be too alarmed.

Bing’s New Features

Are you wondering how Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is going to affect your organic rankings? Microsoft now offers a white paper for webmasters outlining Bing and it’s new features.

After reading through the white paper, it appears that Bing is still following the standard SEO practices. Click here to download the PDF.

Google Places “Discovering the Web” link on their Homepage

With the continued buzz of Bing, Google is taking precautionary measures to make sure they maintain their position as being the #1 search engine. Google hasn’t had to do much to hold this spot in the past. They have now added to their homepage a link saying: Discovering the web: Explore the world of Google search. When you click this link you are taken to a page that outlines Google’s features. This page seems to be very useful for beginner internet users. Google has had help pages before, but the help pages have never been featured on the Google.com homepage. Many of the features that Google offers are also available on Yahoo and Bing.

Show Search Results Across Engines in One Window

Looking for a way to view search results across different engines without having to switch back and forth between windows (or tabs)? There are many tools that give you the opportunity to type in a search query and will show you search results for the top search engines all in one window. One tool in particular that I have been using is Mixxr. Here you can compare the results for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter right next to one another. This tool is very useful if you need to compare results across the different search engines fast!

Dell Uses Twitter as a Powerful Marketing Tool

Dell outlet uses Twitter as a marketing tool to “tweet” specials on their dell outlet website. This strategy has led to a direct $2 million in sales, and another $1million as a result of attracting large numbers of customers to the dell.com site.

This is a prime example of how micro-blogging can be used as a strong marketing tool for all different types of businesses.

Bing TV Commercials

Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a tremendous amount of Bing television commercials. I have been impressed with the commercials that position Bing as the first ever decision engine.

What have you thought of these commercials? Do you think they will entice people to start using Bing over Google?

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Change of Address

Google has added a new feature to their Google Webmaster Tools where you can notify Google when you are moving from one domain to another. For example, let’s say that Getupdated.com was going to move to GetupdatedUSA.com, we would now be able to login to Google Webmaster Tools and specify the change. According to Google this is going to allow them to update their index faster and will make the transition of changing domains smoother.

To check out this new feature login to your Google Webmaster account, click on a website, then Site Configuration, and finally Change of address.

For the best results, follow the steps that Google recommends on the Change of address page and then submit your new URL.

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Usernames in your Facebook URL

Facebook has announced that on June 13th they will allow users to select a username which will show up in their individual Facebook URL. Currently Facebook users all have an assigned number which appears in their URL. Having a username will allow for users to easily connect with family and friends by being able to provide them with an easy to remember Facebook URL. This is also great news for search engine optimization, because Facebook profiles will have a better chance of ranking organically for people’s names once there is the option to include a name in the URL.

Here is an example:

My current Facebook URL: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=652579865

On June 13th I can change it to: http://www.facebook.com/allison.goldberg

But, keep in mind that selecting your new username is on a first come first serve basis, so if you have a common name (like mine) and want to be able to change your URL to include your full name you might want to set your alarm for 12 am EST on June 13th.

For more information on this change you can visit the Facebook Blog.

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