What e-commerce strategies are businesses taking during the 2009 holiday season? e-Marketer takes a look; see the full article here.

A Tortus client recently recommended Jeff Jarvis' book What Would Google Do to the Torti. According to Booklist reviewer Mary Whaley:

Jarvis, columnist and blogger about media, presents his ideas for surviving and prospering in the Internet age, with its new set of rules for emerging technologies as well as industries such as retail, manufacturing, and service. We learn that customers are now in charge, people anywhere can find each other and join forces to support a company’s efforts or oppose them, life and business are more public, conversation has replaced marketing, and openness is the key to success. Jarvis’ other laws include being a platform (help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of their own); hand over control to anyone; middlemen are doomed; and your worst customer is your best friend, and your best customer is your partner. Jarvis offers thought-provoking observations and valuable examples for individuals and businesses seeking to fully participate in our Internet culture and maximize the opportunities it offers.

Sounds good--I've added it to my reading queue!

Ever wonder what other people are searching for on the Internet right now? Go to Google Hot Trends and find out. You'll be left wondering: who is Mr. Clucky and how can I meet him? Just what was so cool about the hanging gardens of Babylon? Should I be worried about tornados if I go to Memphis? And did Michael Jackson really have a love child? But of course, you can Google it all.

By now we’re all quite familiar with the classic search engine Google. I use it hundreds of times a day, as I’m sure most of you do. Google is so popular that it’s even become a verb in the English language: “I Googled the term I didn’t understand from our meeting yesterday.” Here’s a basic rundown of how Google works: you enter your search terms on their home page. Google then combs through all of the websites it had gathered data from, looking for a match for what you typed. If I search for “web development”, Google will find any site containing those words and will return to me a list of those sites in order of the most relevant to the least relevant. Pretty simple, right?

The other day I was perusing the ‘Science and Tech’ section of Google News and noticed an article about a brand-new search engine called Wolfram Alpha. The article described how Wolfram Alpha is revolutionizing the ways in which people search on the Internet. I thought to myself, “How could anyone be better than Google?” Well, I had a surprise coming!

Wolfram Alpha really IS a whole new way to search. Instead of taking the terms you enter and looking for matches throughout the web, Wolfram Alpha has amassed a huge (and I mean REALLY huge) database of actual scientific, geographical, social, literary, and media data and searches their database to find your answers. The Wolfram Alpha data is drawn from a wide range of reputable and accurate sources, such as Encyclopedia Britanica, scientific publications of all kinds, academic web databases, and so on. Whereas Google gives you what it thinks might be the right answer, Wolfram Alpha seeks to give you the actual answer to your question.

Here’s a fun example: I typed in the search term “How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man?”, which is a lyric from a Peter, Paul and Mary song, and written by Bob Dylan. Google gave me a list of web sites that covered topics ranging from Peter, Paul and Mary’s most recent tour, to their song lyrics, to criticisms of their music, to sites about Bob Dylan. A reasonable result, and after looking at a couple of pages I was able to find the lyrics to the song and thus my answer.

However, the same search in Wolfram Alpha gave me an entirely different take on my query, getting straight to the heart of the question and simply returning the phrase “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind (according to Bob Dylan)”. Wolfram Alpha knew just what I was getting at and even told me who wrote the lyric. Now, I know my example isn’t the best form of useful information unless you’re a big folk music fan. But if you’re searching for answers to more technical questions such as “What is the atomic number and weight of carbon?”, you’ll start to see a bigger difference in the search results as compared to Google. While Google gave me a list of websites that discuss the periodic table (including, of course, a link to Wikipedia’s article on carbon), I received a much more reliable and detailed answer from Wolfram Alpha. (By the way, it’s 6, and 12.0107 respectively).

So, go on in and check out the new search engine Wolfram Alpha! Maybe I’m a nerd, but I had a blast seeing what it gave me for answers on all sorts of things. Sure, it’s still in development and we always have to keep in mind the old adage “Don’t believe everything you read”, but I still think it’s pretty cool!

You may have heard that a good way to increase your search result rankings is to get other websites to put an inbound link to your website from theirs. This practice is often referred to as a link exchange, or reciprocal linking, and is a search engine optimization method aimed at getting your website higher up in the results rankings. It sounds like a good idea, but is it? And if it is, how exactly do you go about it? These are two commonly asked questions about link exchanges that I’d like to answer for you in today’s blog article. 

What Not To Do

First off, there are certain types of link exchanges that we don’t recommend and that won’t win you any friends with the search engines. In fact, belonging to such exchange networks can actually hurt your rankings. A link exchange with a disreputable link farm or a website that offers little, if any, value to your site visitors is considered a harmful exchange. These types of mass exchanges tend to be considered “artificial” by search engines like Google. While there may be mass link exchange sites that are legitimate and relevant to your particular business, caution should be exercised with these types of exchanges. There are no magic bullets for search engine optimization success.

Do Some Research

A better idea may be approaching individuals and organizations with whom you have an ongoing relationship that will be relevant to your site visitors, and proposing a  “link trade”.  Perhaps “natural” is a good way to describe a legitimate link exchange. For example, if you donate to or work with local charities or organizations, you might ask them to post a link to your website on their sponsorship page. In return, you could then post a link to their organization in a press release on your website, or on a page showing photos from an event of theirs that you sponsored. To give another example, if you sell carpets, you could link to the carpet manufacturer’s webpage on cleaning tips. In exchange, they could post a link to your site under their vendors page. Before approaching someone for a link exchange, visit their website and look for a page where you think providing a link to your site would be a natural, logical fit. 

The Link Exchange Approach

Sending an email or broaching the idea during a phone call or meeting is a good way to approach an exchange with someone you know on a professional basis. If you emphasize the benefit to both the other party’s website and to your mutual or related clients, your proposal may be gladly accepted. If sending an email, start with a friendly greeting and a brief explanation of your request. Be sure to provide the link you’d like to have them post on their website, and of course, offer to provide a link to their website on your own. Inviting them to contact you with any questions concerning your site and to discuss how they would like to have a link to their site appear on yours is a good closing strategy. If they do agree to post a link on their site, follow up with a thank you that acknowledges the favor.

Try Deep Linking

One thing to keep in mind when doing a link exchange is that “deep” linking into an inner page in your website can be better than a link to your homepage. Not only can it bring visitors to the exact page that can benefit them most, this technique can also be helpful in search engine optimization. In the case that a link exchange isn’t a significant benefit to your search engine rankings, the links will still bring valued visitors to your site and help your customers and potential customers to learn more about the value of your organization.

Summing It Up

Trading links with respected suppliers, partners, and customers is a mutually beneficial and legitimate additional approach to search engine optimization that offers a value not just to your search engine result rankings, but to all parties involved.  When it comes down to it, the best overall approach to getting in good with organic search engine result rankings is building a site with a foundation that has optimization in mind from the very beginning of the programming and design processes. This is an integral aspect of our website development approach at Tortus, and why we tout ourselves as not merely builders of sites, but builders of your business.

I have a friend who recently traveled to Google in Boulder, CO, to meet the SketchUp Engineering Team.  He had a wonderful time with these free-range thinkers and they spoke about Google's reputation for crazy interview questions.

Here is the question they posed to him ~

A bear gets up and walks a mile south.

The bear turns and walks a mile east.

The bear turns again, and walks a mile north.

Now he's back where he started. What color is the bear?

He got the answer right!  

To find out what color the bear was - scroll down to the bottom.

Here are some other notorious Google interview questions.

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?

8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?

9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?

12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)

13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?

14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)

The bear was a white Polar Bear which lives in the North Pole.