Google the other day quietly unveiled what is to be their in-house answer to Digg. Since they opted out of outright ourchase of Digg, (more than likely because they felt; rightly so, that they could do a better job anyway) there was much speculation about what Google would do. Well, here it is.

Kudos to Chris Lang for bringing “Google Reader Adds Friends List, Sharing, Bookmarking and Blog Recommendation Engine” to our attention.  In his post Chris goes into much detail as to how Google will be using this new capability, and what it may mean for those of us who use social bookmarking services, want to keep up with Google, or who merely want a sane alternative to the capricious whims of Digg.

Some of the more interesting items to me include the ability to add individual pages (posts) to your Google Reader, amd then share them with your friends, which you can now import from Gmail. They even provide you a sweet little bookmarklet to make the task ever so much more simple. It also appears that your Google Reader profile will take on more significance, and that Google may even use this to base rankings upon. More to come on that one. However, it is interesting to note that does follow links that appear in each shared post. It uses the permalink to the blog post and also links to the domain in each shared item.

Another tool for the toolbox!

~Keith

One, if you’re not making Google the focus of your search engine optimization efforts, you’re making a mistake! According to Hitwise Google’s share of search now is at 69.17%. Whether this number is real or not, (some think it’s low!) it’s clear that that at least for the moment, the big G is really the only show we’d like to attend! Yahoo hovers just under 20%, while MSN has tanked to about 5%.

The other item is that Google apparently is toying with the idea of ranking your searches. This is part of a Google Labs experiment, and it’s really not clear just what their eventual aims may be, but the output does look very Digg-like! Take a look at the article on TechCrunch and see for yourself!

You may have neard this last week of two items that came across our screens regarding Google, Yahoo and Digg.

The first of these was the announcement by Yahoo that it is contracting with Google to serve up contextual advertising on their sites, and will share in that revenue. Yahoo feels it can raise some serious cash by allowing Google to place their advertising next to Yahoo search results. The prevailing sentiments are that Google is far better at targeting this kind of search anyway, and it will be a win-win for both sides, as well as for advertisers and consumers. The deal still has to pass muster with government anti-trust types, so it may well be several months before we see any of this.

Also, Digg has apparently entered into some sort of arrangement with Google as well, possibly even the sale of Digg to Google. No one’s saying anything officially yet, but Digg would fit in nicely at Google, especially as how Google is trying to make inroads into the social marketing scene. These developments both bear watching!  

There’s little doubt that it’s very possible to unleash a slew of social media traffic upon your site or blogs, and that begs the question, have you strategized a plan for all those marveleous visitors?

There would be no greater waste of time in my mind than to do all the work necessary to get this onslaught of traffic, and then not having a way to take advantage of it. Whether your intent is to sell something right from your page, collect leads, use advertising like Google Adsense, you need to know this going in and have your page set up for this purpose. Don’t try and ride too many horses at once, either! A page that asks for an opt-in, while promoting their latest ebook, surrounded by four sets of Adsense ads and banners promoting several different affiliate products is suffering from a clear lack of focus and identity. Who knows what you really want!

Instead have a plan, focus on it on the page, and reap the benefits that all this social media traffic can bring you!