Google has launched their own web browser today with the promise to better handle complex web programs and video rich content. Google had mailed a copy of a promotional comic book prematurely. The comic book can be found here. It was immediately followed by a post on Google’s blog site confirming the rumor that quickly spread across the web. The browser is called Google Chrome. It is considered “a fresh take on the browser”. Their plan is to make all of Chrome’s software code open to developers similar to Mozilla’s Firefox format.

This launch follows a recent update to Internet Explorer 8 as well as Firefox 3. It also follows a recent 3 year partnership extension between Mozilla and Google. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera being the main players, Google enters a very highly competitive space.

Google continues to produce different softwares and applications with the intention of having them fully integrated with one another. With office applications, desktop search, a new browser, email, google earth, Android among many other programs there is definitely a long term goal of providing an all-in-one fully integrated solution for their consumers. Most likely it will also be free of charge.

Call it another shot at Microsoft. Microsoft needs to figure out a strategy to counter this movement or they will continue to see their market share erode.

Thoughts? Please comment!

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google has finally launched Google Suggestion, a tool which was started back in 2004, but was never released. If you go to Google.com and start typing out a search query, you will now see “suggested keywords” appear in a drop down. This seems to only work on their homepage. Once you make a search query you will no longer see the suggestions. For people who need keyword suggestions for the SEM campaigns, this can be a pretty handy tool to use.

Don’t forget that this is a great way to discover negative (google) or excluded (yahoo) keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you specify in your SEM campaign as keywords you DO NOT want your ad to show on. For example if you are selling books, but don’t sell education books, you would have the keyword books, but negative out the keyword education.

Yahoo! has had a suggestion bar for a while now. How this affects the way searchers behave remains to be seen. One affect it could have is to lower the cases of misspellings. Another is to potentially increase the use of longer search queries by users who previously only used 1-2 word queries. If there are any dramatic changes in either of these areas, it could potentially shift the way you should setup and maintain your Google SEM campaigns.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Getting your news article posted on Google News or Yahoo News can be a big boon for gaining website visitors. In one day you could potentially get thousands of visitors coming to your site for the first time. Yahoo News is the most popular news aggregator in terms of usage. Google News hasn’t picked up such a following yet but it serves the results with a similar type of algorithm like its normal search counterpart. It serves news it deems to be relevant and from sites that it deems to have authority.

You can always go through a PR firm which will help get your articles shown on these sites, but did you know you can directly submit them to the engines yourself? If you’d like to get your article listed on Google News, you need to go ahead and submit your site or blog directly to Google News or Yahoo News. The catch is that your website will be reviewed and either accepted or rejected depending on several factors.

Originality & Validity
1. Is the content original or just rewritten news found anywhere on the web?
2. Organization Information
3. Author Information, Multiple Authors is better
4. Transparency - Name of Author in each post
5. Focus of the site (is it a specific news category, segment or industry) and its relevancy?
6. Frequency of Articles (should have multiple posts per day)
7. Look and Feel of site - is it like a news site? Are there images and videos?
8. Is there advertising on the site? (a sign of traffic volume)

URLs
9. URL for each article must be static
10. URL for each article must have a unique number consisting of at least 3 digits (this has been debated, but always safer to do)

Others
11. Site Load Speed

To further enhance your case you can provide
1. Statistics
2. Historical Background of site
3. List of Awards
4. Talk about Editors and Authors
5. Who links to your site

Here is where you can submit them.
Google News
Yahoo News

Hope this helps!

Please feel free to comment with thoughts, suggestions and questions.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM