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Yesterday Google announced a new product at it’s I/O conference- Google Wave.

What is Google Wave? As developer Lars Rasmussen says, it’s “what email would look like if it were invented today.”

That’s the short answer. The long answer is really really long and I’m told barely makes a dent in what Wave will eventually be offering.

The idea is to take your email and instant messaging providers and put it into one place. This may sound familiar, as apps like Digsby and the new Trillian Astraand even FriendFeed provide services like this. What sets Wave appart from the rest is online collaboration.

With real-time online collaboration, Google Wave allows users to edit, comment and chat simultaneously. It integrates almost all email and instant messaging applications (with the exception of Microsoft) as long as it is HTML 5 compliant.

This is all just in Phase 1. Phase 2 will see Google inviting developers to learn and add to this open source application. The success and groth of the product will come from the input of those who are using it. Should these first two phases go well, Google will evolve Wave into a communication platform. There’s more information at www.waveprotocol.org.

This looks really exciting but unfortunately, won’t be available for public use for a little bit longer. You can apply to become a tester by going to the Google Wave site. I’m hoping to be one of those initial users and look forward to sharing my experience with you!

Online advertising is a completely different game from traditional offline media. You have a far greater ability to target and segment beyond geographic (newspapers), demographic (magazines) and time (TV/radio). What really distinguishes online advertising is the ability to target keywords.

Keywords come in different shapes and sizes but are vital to any type of web marketing campaign. When compiling a list of keywords and keyphrases, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Misspellings
• Plurals, synonyms
• Adding locations to words and phrases (for geotargeting and local search)
• Avoid too general of terms (example: If you’re a used car dealership in Red Deer Alberta, targeting the keywords “cars” is most likely unattainable with many online marketing methods)
• Avoid focusing ONLY on long-tail terms. Long-tail is great – such as “used car dealership red deer” but it’s really easy to let it get out of hand. Do you really think more than maybe 0-2 people are searching for “used ford pinto 1977 red deer county alberta canada”?

Your keyword list will change depending on what type of online marketing you’re doing. With search engine optimization, you’re going to want those long-tail terms on your site. With paid search, you have a bit more flexibility (especially since you have the ability to assign a category to your keywords – more on that another day).

Another major strategy that is far too often forgotten when planning keywords is making a list of negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that you DON’T want to be associated with. For instance, an airline would not want to be associated with the word “crash”. Therefore, the word “crash” would be placed on the negative keyword list. To compile your list of negative keywords, follow the guidelines mentioned above.

My final keyword tip is probably the most important – WHEN do plan your keyword strategy. You shouldn’t even be starting any sort of online marketing campaign without a solid keyword list. Your keywords determine the who what and where of your online marketing campaign. They are your guide and without them, your campaign will be lost.

For many, many years, Google has had a strangle hold on the search engine market, accounting for at least 60% of market share worldwide. Many other search engines have come and gone, all with the intention of taking that market share away. Not surprisingly, no one has yet succeeded.

However, there are two upcoming search engines that could change everything.

Announced on March 5, 2009, Wolfram Alpha is calling itself a “computational knowledge engine”. What does that mean?? It means it’s taken the technologies that search engines like Google have made and is taking them to a new level by implementing a whole new kind of search technology.

Twitter’s making an algorithm! A wise move by this very fast growing social networking site. Already, many people are turning to Twitter Search for their search queries. The benefit of doing this is finding the most recent information related to the keyword you’ve searching for, posted by people are are conversing about the topic. If Twitter can pull this off, they can become the next big power house.

Keep your eyes open, I think it’s going to be a very exciting time.

In a recent guest post over at Search Engine Journal, I look at several hurdles to clear when implementing social media in-house.

Because social medai tools like Twitter and Facebook really do need to be maintained by an internal employee, you may think that there’s no point in hiring a company to help with it. But actually, many of those hurdles can be overcome with the help of an online marketing company that knows social media inside and out.

One of the hardest part of implementing social media is selling it to the powers that be. An online marketing firm can help you with that – armed with stats and success stories, we can apply strategies to your company. Once the project is given the go ahead-, you have to decide what social networking sites to use and how to set them up. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of strategy that goes behind this. An online marketing company will know this. Finally, for those who want to do it just for the sake of doing it, there’s a lot of training and education involved. We can help you with that too.

Every day, we see more and more stories popping up about small businesses making major gains through social media sites like Twitter. Do you really want to miss out on that?

Check out my article titled Six Hurdles to Clear When Exercising Your Brand In-House and see how that applies to you.

Not that long ago, if you were fooling around in your Google account settings, you probably noticed the option to create a profile.

This is interesting because it not only lets you add tons of information about yourself, essentially creating a personal web site for you, but it is also crawled and indexed. What does that mean? It means if you set up a Google Profile with your name, it will appear in the search results if you search for your name.

Check out my Google Profile – Lyndsay Blahut to see what I’m talking about.

Why not create a Google Profile for your business? You’ll need to sign up for a Google Account if you don’t already have one. When you select your username, be strategic – it becomes part of the URL for your Google Profile.

Give it a try, and watch the traffic roll in.

In a world where it’s all about ME, it’s easy to fall into that type of advertising too.

*I* can do this.
*We* sell this product.
*Our company* offers this service.

No, no, no. Want to know a great word that works? YOU.

Who do you think a customer really cares more about? You or themselves? Of course, they’re looking for something (or maybe not actively looking, and you want to grab their attention) for themselves. Unless you have a really strong brand or some really loyal customers, it’s likely that the average person cares more about themselves than whatever it is you or your company does.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re writing some ad copy, working on a PPC campaign, or even working on the content for your site. Then, watch your conversions go up.

You’ve got a web site. First of all, kudos to you. We’re now in the year 2009 and there’s really no good reason to not to have a web site anymore. Even Joe the plumber has a web site! As both a consumer and a professional, I feel that every business (small, medium and large) should have a web site.

However, an effective web site doesn’t stop there. You need to make updates and design changes to keep up with the times. Have you ever seen a web site that just screams “1998”? No? How about this one, Yahoo!’s home page in 1998? (Times New Roman font, ouch).

Over 60% of web surfers will judge a company by their web presence alone.