When we talk about promotion of a website over the web, it doesn’t mean just to make a website visible on the web, it means that people should know about it and also about the services you are providing. There are so many methods to make people aware of your website; one of them is Press Release.

A news release, media release, press release or press statement is a written or recorded communication directed towards the members of the media for the purpose of some announcements or claims which have news value. Generally, such news items are faxed or e-mailed to assignment editors at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations, and other networks for commercial press-release distribution. The news release is common in the field of public relations. A press release is generally inclined towards the objectives of the author. A press release is written in order to highlight an important event, program, or piece of information by an organization that briefly describes the who, what, where, when, why and how of the story.

Now, the question arises why we should use press release distribution when we are already using other SEO techniques like link building, blog writing, SEM, article submission, directory submission etc; for promotion. So here are some reasons for using press release distribution services:

1. Smooth Media Relations - By utilizing a decent press release distribution, businesses and individuals have the ability to send out one press release which will reach a wider audience including journalists and websites that cover that particular industry. This will immediately generate more publicity in the form of Google news rankings, media stories, product reviews, and links to the company’s web site which, consequently, helps in the integrity and sales.
2. Search Engines Recognization - Online press release distribution is an easy, fast and effective way to have a press release indexed on Internet news channels such as Google News, Yahoo News and RedTram. It means that the message is communicated directly to target markets that subscribe and read those news sites. Thus, this method generates more brand awareness, more traffic to the company’s website and a marked increase in sales.
3. SEO Benefits - One of the biggest advantages of online press release distribution is search engine optimization. Search engines always welcome optimized press releases and a rise in the website’s rankings will reflect that fact.

Most of the times, a press release submitted through a PR distribution will benefit from rankings in the top 10 spots on Google News within a few hours and delivers targeted visitors to the company’s web site for months after. The relationships and knowledge serve as the currency of PR and without them, the ability to connect stories, earn trust, and build exciting communities is implausible. I am providing you some interesting press release sites, hope you my found them useful:

• http://www.i-newswire.com/
• http://www.prlog.org/
• http://www.betanews.com/
• http://www.free-news-release.com/

Yahoo recently launched a new note-taking research tool called Search Pad. The intention behind this is to automatically detect research intent among people using Yahoo! search.

Once the tool start detecting the user’s intent, it may prompt the searchers with an invitation to use Search Pad. The tool can be used with drag and drop and also includes the ability to write free form notes as well.

The tool has rolled out to several countries as mentioned below:

United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina

It is harder to type in one language as compared to another. When we’re searching for content in a specific language, it is often convenient to think in that language, but type in another, e.g., English. i.e. one can get the search results in different language that the language of the search term.

Google made this easier to do in Custom Search. They have enabled transliteration in Custom Search for a set of languages. This will make it easier to find news in Arabic, Indian news in Hindi, one’s favourite Bollywood song lyrics, or local content in a bunch of other Indic languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. Soon this feature will be enabled for other languages also.

Transliteration is available to use in your search box in the following languages:

Arabic

Hindi

Kannada

Malayalam

Tamil

Telugu

http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com

Google has just added external resource loading to their Flash indexing capabilities. This will mean that when a SWF file i.e. Flash file, loads content from some other file - whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.- Google will index that external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.

Prior to this launch, this result did not appear, because all of the relevant content is contained in an XML file loaded by a SWF file.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, It can:

Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file.

Discover links within Flash files.

Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.

Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

This means that now it won’t be a big task to get the Flash based sites ranked in the Google SERP’s.

According to Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers of Google indexing team, Google has improved its ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, Google is also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into their crawling pipeline - just like they do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if the Flash application contains links to pages inside its website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Presently, there are three main limitations on which Google is working to resolve them:

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

Google currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by the Flash files. If the Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in the Flash file.

While Google is able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, Google will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

Google recently incorporated some changes in the iPhone version of Google to allow searchers to send Google their location, which willhelp make the search results more tailored/specific to that searcher.

We can open Google.com on our iphone and click on “preferences” after signing in.

Select “Yes” on “Allow use of device location”:

Google will then load our last location, if they have it and ask us if we want to update that location. This can be done by clicking on “update”

Then Apple asks you if Safari has your permission to grab your location:

Then Apple asks you if Google has your permission to grab your location:

Then we can see Google searching for our location…

Finally, Google updates with our new location and then allows us to update that location manually again, if we like to do so.

Currently this feature is available for iphones operating in US and UK

Bing has started capturing online market share. It has been noticed recently that Bing nibbled at Yahoo’s slice of search market for the month of June ’09.

For the month of June, Microsoft’s search of U.S internet searches rose to 8.4% of queries from 8% in May ‘09. Yahoo’s share gone down to 19.6% in the month of June from 20.1%. Google remains flat at 65% of overall market share.

Did anyone ever check the alternatives to Google AdSense? That is, besides Google AdSense, is there anything else? Most of the online marketers are trying different alternatives to earn their online income. Running Google AdSense ads on their websites/blogs is one of the most preferred ways. However, there are other alternatives as well to monetize blogs or sites besides Google AdSense?

The quickest way to earning an online income through website is to find products, memberships, or services which pays recurring commissions.

The most popular way bloggers earn their income is by the contextual ad program from Google called AdSense. However, other alternatives are also available to increase this income.

Below are some of other alternatives of monetizing blog or website besides Google AdSense :

- WidgetBucks
- Chitika’s eMiniMalls
- Tribal Fusion
- Azoogle Ads
- Adbrite
- AdHearUs
- Kanoodle
- Clicksor
- BidVertiser
- FastClick
- ValueClickMedia

Also, the following affiliate programs can be tried out:

- ClickBank
- Commission Junction
- LinkShare
- Amazon

In conclusion, if someone wants to increase online earnings through website or blog then these above mentioned resources can be looked upon.

Using the Twitter marketing can be very effective for businesses looking to gain traffic through social media optimization/marketing. Social Media marketing can bring loads of traffic when used in the proper ways. Websites such as Youtube, Facebook, MySpace and now Twitter bring great amounts of traffic. Twitter is becoming a huge social media site that can be very well utilized as internet marketing tool and can be used to drive traffic to the websites.

It is essential for online marketers to stay up to date on the strategies that are efficient and effective in promoting the products or websites, and Twitter is one of the upcoming methods. It is important to first acquire the basic knowledge of Twitter community before going ahead with marketing on Twitter and other social networking sites. The very first step in planning a Twitter marketing strategy is to understand all that we can by first experiencing Twitter and setting up a demo account and starting to participate in the community.

Once the basics are acquired than a more descriptive plan on how we can set up specific Twitter marketing strategies can be completed. One strategy that can be tried by a Twitter marketing beginner is to join groups which are related to the niche we wish to promote. This will attract more specific followers. First of all, we need a build relationship with followers before actually offering anything through Twitter account.

It is now possible for search engine marketers to use Twitter for search engine promotion. Online Marketers can actually use Twitter marketing to get on the Google first page very quickly.

There have been many instances where I have seen a Twitter account ranking on the first page of Google for both competitive and long tail keywords. Also, this is a fact that Twitter’s links are no followed and a result they are practically useless for link building purpose. However, the account can be ranked on the first page of Google. Followings are the steps to harness Twitter for SEO:

1. Extensive use of keywords/key-phrases in Tweets.
2. Creation of backlinks and social book-marking to Twitter account.

There have been many rumors for quite a long time that Google is planning to buy Twitter. The founder of Twitter, Biz Stone and Evan Williams has recently announced that they do not have any such intention to sell the company at this point of time. To operate its business successfully, Google has opened over 40 official Twitter accounts in order to help visitors get all the news about company’s products and services.

Followings are the Twitter Accounts Created by Google:
twitter.com/Google–Google’scentral account
twitter.com/Blogger – Bloggeraccounts
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar–Tips and update for users using Google products
twitter.com/GoogleImages - news, tips, tricks on Google’s visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews–Updates on Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader–Updates from Google’s feed reader team
twitter.com/iGoogle - News from Google’s personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents–Google news of student’s interests
twitter.com/YouTube - YouTube
twitter.com/YouTubeES - Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork–IT Solutions

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp - SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH - 3D Warehouse of SketchUp
twitter.com/Modelyourtown–Building 3D figures
twitter.com/EarthOutreach–Tools such as earth and maps for NGOs
twitter.com/GoogleMaps - Help
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap– OS Application - Android

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense – AdSense users
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper–Adwords help
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah - AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics - websiteseffectiveness insights
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder–how to build display ads
twitter.com/GoogleRetail–To help Google retail advertisers
twitter.com/TechnologyUK–Tech Advertisers of U.K
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE– Adwords for German customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE–Help for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT - language publishers for Portuguese
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia–Russian Adwords news & tips
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords - AdWords Spanish update
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI–API tactics

Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch–Tips fromresearch scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC–Information for Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode - Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData - standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine - Google infrastructure to run web app.
twitter.com/DataLiberation - import/export data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI–How to useGoogle Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO - Google’s annual developer event

Culture, People
twitter.com/googletalks - notes from Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs–from Google recruiters

Country or Region
twitter.com/googlearabia–from Google Arabia Blog
twitter.com/googledownunder–About Google in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/GoogleDE – From Google Germany
twitter.com/GoogleLatAm–Google in Latin America(en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt - Google policy issues in Italy

Again, “if you can’t beat them, join them” seems to be the mantra here, and join them they did in a big way.