How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding Information Outlook Summary This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook. Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians. Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians. Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products. Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers. Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues. Continue article Advertisement SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity). If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence. Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation. Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link t ...

How search engine marketing tools can work for you: or, searching is really all about finding Information Outlook Summary This is the second of three articles. Part 1 appeared in the August issue of Information Outlook. Search engine optimization and marketing covers a wide range of activities, many of which are similar to what a reference librarian, systems librarian, or market researcher does. Although the focus is the World Wide Web, many of the tools that are used have broader applications for special librarians. Internal corporate processes. Web analytics tools measure and analyze corporate sales, customer preferences and problems, viable products and channels, and other issues that may provide answers for questions received by special librarians. Competitive intelligence/market research. Keyword research, Web site saturation and popularity tools can provide information on a company's competitors: how they are marketing on the Internet, what they are spending on online marketing campaigns, how they are pricing their products. Legal issues. Who Is tools can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues. Link Popularity tools can show who is deep-linking to your site. Log files, in conjunction with Who Is tools, can tell you who may be committing click fraud on your paid placement campaigns or spamming your e-mail servers. Back end knowledge of how Web sites work. These tools can show you what may be keeping search engines from indexing your site and can highlight customer service issues. Continue article Advertisement SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES Web site saturation and popularity tools show how much presence a Web site has on search engines through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on each search engine (saturation) and how many times the site is linked to by other sites (popularity). If your company wants to generate leads from Web site traffic, you need to understand your organization's Web presence, particularly in relation to that of your competitors. Generally, the more Web presence you have, the easier it is for people to find your site; that is, if those pages contain the keywords people are looking for and if they rank high enough in search engine rankings for people to see them. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Pay attention to this so you can learn the number of sites that are linking to yours, which is very important. Knowing where your site stands in these two areas can give you a good idea of what you need to do to improve your Web presence. Many tools measure various aspects of saturation and link popularity. My favorites are Link Popularity +, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation. Link Popularity + (http://www.uptimebot.com) shows much more than its name implies. It measures the number of back-links (incoming external links to your site); linked domains (all pages that link t ...

Published: November 15, 2009 Josh Cohen is the Senior Business Product Manager for Google News. He is responsible for global product strategy, marketing and publisher outreach for Google News, which is currently available in 26 languages and more than 50 countries. Prior to joining Google, Josh was Vice President of Business Development for Reuters Media, the world's largest news agency. While there, he led business development for Reuters' Consumer Media team, including all activities with major strategic partners. He was responsible for agreements with AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and numerous media companies around the world for content distribution, revenue generation and strategic investments. Before joining Reuters, Josh was Director of Business Development for SmartMoney.com where he led business development and licensing activities for the site, a joint venture between Dow Jones and Hearst. Cohen holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia Business School, where he graduated Beta Gamma Sigma. Interview Transcript Eric Enge: Can you tell me what your responsibility is within Google? Josh Cohen: I am the business product manager for Google News. I work with other folks on the news team, on figuring out what is our roadmap, what are the features that we are working on, what we want to do with the product in the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and so on. A big focus of my job is really working with people outside of Google; so talking to publishers, talking to people in the media and at conferences; just putting a face on Google News and trying to demystify it as much as possible. I also work with a lot of the different cross-functional teams who interact with publishers on a day-to-day basis and try to tie those efforts together a little bit better. Eric Enge: Tell us what Google News is and what it does, and who uses it. Josh Cohen: Google News was launched in beta back in 2002. The idea behind Google News is really similar to what we are trying to do in search. Not to throw the company mantra at you, but, it really is about organizing all the news information out there and making it even more accessible and useful for users. We are trying to do this in every single country, and in every different language. We want as many different sources as possible, so that when people are looking for that information, they can find it. The interest in news overall is probably higher than it has ever been. More and more people are getting this online, and so the challenge is trying to find that information and to provide some context and organization. So, we really are operating as a search engine specifically for news. Eric Enge: How do you define news versus other types of content? Josh Cohen: We really try and keep as much as possible as black or white, and we don't get into qualitative discussions about the nature of the news site. We don't include any hate speech and pornography. What ...