April 2008: Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from April 2008: ======================================== Top 10 Most Popular Stories: April 2008 ======================================== 1) Twitter Wrote This Column For Me – By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so what the […]

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Below are
Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular
stories from April 2008:

========================================
Top 10 Most Popular Stories: April 2008
========================================

1) Twitter Wrote
This Column For Me
– By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk
about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so
what the heck is Twitter really and why should I care? How is it going to help
my business at the end of the day? Rather than writing this column myself, I
decided to let Twitter (or more specifically, my extended Twitter network)
write it for me. This is me on Twitter (feel free to add me). So let’s get
started… The best way to demonstrate the usefulness or power of something is
to show real examples. I started this experiment at approximately 5:20 PM EST
on Monday afternoon. Within 1 hour, I had over 80 different replies that
answered all of my questions and more. Within 1 hour I had reached out to
people from all over the world and they had reached back. It all started with
this simple question: "How would you describe twitter in 140 characters or
less?"

===================

2) Google Now Fills
Out Forms & Crawls Results
– One of the biggest search challenges has
long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that
can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out
those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has
announced.

===================

3) Hitwise: Google
Hits New High; Microsoft & Yahoo New Lows
– Last week, Hitwise
released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States
for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo
hit all-time lows.

===================

4)
Why Mixx Hasn’t Gotten
The Following It Deserves – Yet
– Mixx, a social media submission
site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for
it to catch up with older sites like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.
That said, this article looks at the current state of Mixx and the potential
future of its small but devoted community. This might come as a surprise, but
Mixx serves approximately 500,000 unique visitors per month and is breaking
their engagement record every month, even though the site is barely 6 months
out of its private beta. One of the reasons for this is that so much of the
activity takes place in the form of conversations (in the private groups as
well as user-forums) that isn’t reflected in the metrics.

===================

5) A Small
Business Marketing Success Story: John Tuggle, Guitar Teacher
– A
small business can have millions of dollars in revenue and dozens of employees
… or it can be a one-man-band, turning passion into a living. This month’s
small business marketing success story is about the latter. Meet John W.
Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar
for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music
instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site
to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he
thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going
to play gigs and be a studio engineer.

===================

6)
Google Gets Whois
Answers In Search Results
– Looks like Google’s gained a new direct
answer service, whois information for domains. Enter a query like whois
searchengineland.com, and you’ll be told when the domain was registered and
expires, along with a link to more information from the Domain Tools site.
Here’s a screenshot:

===================

7) Link Development
Tool Shortcuts For Firefox
– A few weeks back I did a post on my blog
about creating Firefox quick search bookmarks. I was surprised at how well
received it was, though I think people were most pleased with the fact that I
had created a download of a very small selection of the large list of SEO
related Firefox quick searches that I use.

===================

8) "Previous Query"
Refinement Coming To Hit Google Results
– Yesterday (technically still
today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search
products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We
covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will
soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get
StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might
have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

===================

9)
Tools For Engaging In
Social Media
– We all know Social Media Marketing can be pretty time
consuming. There are numerous social media communities, each requiring you to
sign up, make a profile, and participate, in order to have any success with
them. So it is only natural that you would like to have some helpful tools to
short cut the process wherever possible. Below we will go through each of the
major social communities that I use and outline some of the best tools to help
you manage and maintain your accounts.

===================

10) How Flash Can Be
Search Engine Friendly
– For a long time there has been a tug of war
between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how
bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants
the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It’s
a tough situation, but there are ways to implement Flash and still provide
something for the crawlers to chew on.

To see all of our most popular stories over time, visit our
Most
Popular Stories
page.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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