In today’s e-age, the Internet has given way to carry out many activities easily, which earlier consumed a lot of time. With the introduction of a variety of social networking websites, the world has seen yet another way to link, chat, discuss and share with utmost convenience. However, this is not all; for even the advertisers have jumped in the social networking bandwagon, and are all for applying the concept of B2B marketing with these social networking websites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, OpenSocial, Gorooze and many others.

According to the recent report published by the eMarketer, in the year 2008, the B2B marketers will spend approximately $40 million on social network advertising. The report further says that by 2012, there will be a 500 percent increase in the business to business marketing through social networking sites, which is expected to grow to $210 million. This means raking in big bucks for the Social Networking industry at large, which has many strong contenders even today.

Social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, E.Factor and FohBohare are already seeing a steep rise in the B2B marketing scenario. The popularity of LinkedIn has already increased to double in the past year, which implies that it is bracing up to devour a sizeable amount of the market share in the B2B marketing spend. At the same time, Facebook has also witnessed the joining of more and more business peoplewhich also enhances its B2B marketing prospects.

However, the question which instantly comes up in many of our minds, is that will B2B marketing through these channels prove effective? Someone has rightly said that it will, provided it is used in an effective manner. However, it still lefts to be seen how well it would be accepted by one and all.

Here’s some bad news for all the SEO and SEM specialists. The Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool has been officially discontinued by the IT giant, Yahoo. This news has created waves in the entire SEM industry, which heavily depended on the tool for their keyword searches.

Even those of us, who criticised the tool for its lack of accuracy, have now realised its value in shaping the industry. Earlier known as the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool and later christened as the Yahoo Inventory Tool (YIT), the application helped the users to find out about the number of times a particular keyword was searched for in the Yahoo network in the course of the past one month. Also, almost one hundred synonyms of the keyword searched were also provided with the search. And the process moved forward, where clicking on any of these derivatives or synonyms also offered another set of hundred or less derivatives to the user.

So, by searching in the free to use tool, in a matter of minutes, you would have access to all the details of specific keywords. In this way, you could easily track the changing tastes of customers, find out about queries or even find out the impact that media campaigns have on people, and also do a host of other things alongside.

For most of us, not having the tool to use anymore will be a huge setback, as it was Yahoo which pioneered in the technology of keyword search. Although there are more dependable keyword search tools available in the market now, you need to login to them with your unique User ID and Password. However, for all SEO specialists and experts, it will be great loss. And, if you happen to open up the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, as a matter of habit, you would instead be redirected to the Yahoo Search Marketing landing page instead of the tool!

All of those who own or run a website are sure to be aware of the importance of internal linking. As we all know, internal linking in a website improves navigation within the website for all the visitors. However, there is much more to this. A cohesively integrated website, with effective internally linked architecture also improves the search engine ranking of the entire website. The internal linking ensures that a particular website is properly spidered and all linked pages of the site are found by the search engines.

However, before we proceed, let us also understand what internal linking exactly means. In a layman’s terms, the internal link is a hyperlink that connects a page in the website to another page or document in the same website. So, with effective internal linking, you can boost the page rankings of your website (including the internal links to the internal pages). This will ascertain that the site gains a lot of popularity, which will automatically translate into business flow for the company.

Now, there are also some aspects that you need to consider while carrying out the internal linking of the site. Firstly, you should always have a text link instead of a graphic link. To aid this, you should also make your anchor tag keyword rich. Secondly, it is also important to have a sitemap for all the links in your website. Essentially, a sitemap is a page that contains all the internal links in your site. This helps the search engine in crawling the entire web site easily. Keeping these attributes in mind, you will be able to have effective internal linking to your website.

Also, depending upon your specific requirements, you would have to choose from the three different internal linking patterns which are Hierarchal, Looping and Extensive internal linking. As per the objectives you want to achieve for Pagerank optimisation, user navigation ease as well as site theme, you can select any of these.