Thirty one Chinese and joint venture operators have been granted a first group of Internet map service licenses by China after authorities tightened market access amid concerns that the booming market for the service might undermine state security.

The operators included a national-level map publisher, several map service providers affiliated with major Chinese portals such as Baidu.com and Sina.com and obtained a class-A license from the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping.

From in.news.yahoo.com:

It is not clear whether Google which recently renewed its license to operate in China after a protracted spat with the government over privacy laws has obtained the license to operate maps. Operators who obtain a class-A license will be allowed to conduct services including map searching and locations, marking geographic information, downloading and copying of maps, and map transmissions and quotations.

Class-B licenses will restrict companies to offer services of map searching and locations, as well as geographic information marking, state run Xinhua news agency reported. All Internet map services providers will have to apply for a license, while those operating without the license will be prosecuted in China in accordance with the law, an official from the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping said.

The official did not elaborate on the deadline for license applications. Foreign-owned or foreign-invested Internet firms can apply for the license in the capacity of joint ventures or through cooperation with Chinese businesses, he said.

A joint venture between Nokia and New Alliance, Nokia Alliance Internet Services Company Limited, which is part of the Shanghai Alliance Investment Limited, is among the businesses that have obtained a class-A license.

Nowadays, studies have shown the rise in use of facebook among users rather than Google search engine. The figures show that facebook users spend 9.9 percent time of web surfing time and for Google only 9.6 percent time of web surfing time.

From timesofindia.indiatimes.com:

US Web surfers are spending more time socialising on Facebook than searching with Google, according to new data from researchers at comScore Inc.

To be sure, there’s wiggle room in these estimates, which comScore bases on a combination of reports from a panel of two million users around the world and data from websites’ servers. But the time spent posting photos, updating status messages and scrolling through news from friends has at least grown to rival just about everything else people do online.

People now really don’t bother to surf news site since all the updates are shared through the network and commented. These social networking sites have now taken the charm of search engines and news sites among the youth.

With more searches on YouTube than Google, no online business can really afford to ignore the usefulness and benefits of this video promotion site. This video by Greg Jarboe, author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day is part of an interview that was taped in December 2009 at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Chicago.

There has always been a tough competition among the search engines by Yahoo, Microsoft and Google. Recently, Bing was introduced by Microsoft and this gave a blow to the web designers of yahoo. Bing overpowered the already existing Yahoo search engine and Google now had to revamp their properties to stay number one in the market.

From Searchenginewatch.com:

As you might recall, Microsoft has recently unveiled their new search engine, Bing. And with the recent announcement that Microsoft’s Bing is going to soon power the Yahoo organic search results, Google needed to do something to keep their market share of search.

Google has unveiled a new test version of their search engine, which is being called “Caffeine”. This is being touted as the “next generation of search”.

What is different between the old version of Google (what we currently see at www.google.com) and this new “Google Caffeine” version of Google? Some are saying that this new version is much faster than the older version of Google.  Mashable’s conclusion is that “This search is not only faster, but in some instances in our few tests, seems more capable of producing real-time results.”

One of the claims of Google Caffeine is that it does a better job at including recent search results. Let’s take a look at a recent search phrase, one that Google most likely would not have indexed a few days ago, and look compare the results. One of the “trending topics” on Twitter as I write this is “RIP Eunice Kennedy“. So, let’s use this keyword phrase as a test.

This brought Google to start a new upgraded venture called “Google Caffeine” which is much faster. For a feedback, Google is targeting the real audience to review and give their comments on the new search engine.

If you are a business entrepreneur or online marketer striving for reaping and optimizing the benefits of online marketing, you need to keep a close eye on the constantly evolving nature of marketing.

In addition to that, online marketing should be complemented with split testing and optimizing so that metrics are improved over a period of time.

From Dmnews.com:

Be granular: Use the power of the Internet to custom tailor your campaigns as much as possible. If you’re buying search ads on Google for blue widgets, then make sure your text ad creative is about blue widgets, and once the user clicks this ad, the landing page should be all about blue widgets too.

Google is not your only friend: While Google is a great way to build your sales, it’s not the only game in town. FaceBook, MySpace, Yahoo and MSN have great self-serve products as well and generally there is less competition on those platforms for you to make a bigger profit, especially if you can be creative.

Bring them back: You may have noticed that after you visit a commerce site, their ads start showing up all over the web whenever you are doing your search for weeks afterward? That is behavioral targeting (BT) at play, and one of this strategy’s major features is retargeting. A number of companies allow you to display ads to users that visited your site but didn’t buy. The idea is to target users that have expressed interest but for some reason didn’t checkout. Give them a better deal in your retargeting efforts.

By having strong metrics, online businesses can outbid competition for ad inventory and spend more on advertising.

In the first of the two-part series, we read about how search engine keywords can make a difference. In this second and last part, we will read how to optimize benefits of keywords.

One should not forget that search engines such as Google do not pay heed to graphics or flash. This means that you are wasting your time and efforts if relying only on them to yield results unless you have opted for pay-per-click (PPC). Once rewarding keywords have been identified, they must be complemented with a call for action. This is purely because keywords and site content without a call for action are like broken arrows in the quiver of a shooter.

It is worth nothing that selected keywords must be used for a reasonable period of time and should not be removed or altered when results are not coming in a short span of time. One thing that should not be forgotten is that future-oriented planning and care must be followed and developed for the present as well as the future. The selection, implementation, and monitoring processes directed towards optimizing the effects of search engine keywords should be flexible but result-oriented and long-lasting in the first place.

Most importantly, a business must be honest about its keywords and their relevance and quality for the site visitors or potential customers because a customer can be attracted with hype for once, but cannot be retained for more than once.