Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Not everybody is a fan of websites that feature a lot of Adobe Flash (count me among those), and from an SEO standpoint, Google’s inability to crawl Flash files made it easy to recommend website developers to refrain from using a lot of Flash, especially to display relevant content.

But not so fast. In a move to counter the more simple crawlability of Microsoft’s xml-based Silverlight, Adobe has developed a Flash player for the search engines that crawls through SWF files and pulls out relevant text and links and translates it into something search engines can work with. Javascript and text embedded in images are still a problem, however.
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While Google is getting accustomed to being beaten in the search engine battles raging in China and Korea, Russia is proving to be a difficult market as well.

Russia’s biggest search engine is Yandex, and while Google is increasing its share at a rapid rate of speed, Yandex currently holds 44% of the market share in Russia, which is more than ten points ahead of Google. Yandex also has some share in other European countries like the Ukraine, making it the second biggest search engine on the continent.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a plan that will open up top-level domain names to just about anything possible–so long as you’re willing to pay the price.

Early estimates put the price tag for the TLD’s at anywhere between $100,000 and $500,000, which means the .francis domain will be available for a good time yet to come.
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Google has released another tool to make live easier for Internet marketers. After entering demographics and other sites marketers are targeting, Google Ad Planner will find other sites that reflect a desired audience.

Most appealing is Google’s refusal to only provide information on sites in their own ad network. All sites are available for perusal, and it’s good to see Google provide the technology without any strings attached.

Google claims that this program is targeted directly at media planners and provides the means to concoct a .csv file that can be exported and presented to clients and managers. Ad Planner is currently available by invitation, and those interested can apply here.
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A recent study by BIGresearch of 16,000 mobile device users reveals that the vast majority of adult mobile users are not responsive to either mobile video or text ads. In fact, the average number is around 6 to 7% of respondents who admit to being influenced in an electronics purchase by mobile media.

However, with 18 to 24 year-olds, the number who report mobile video influences them jumps all the way to 14% and near 16% for text messaging, double the average for adult users.
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