SEO daily links: Hotelfinder, enterprise SEO, diversity, Page Speed, Promoted tweets

August 1

• Learned about Google’s new hotel finder service/experiement from Mike Bluementhals blog.
  Good timing: I wanted to reserve two nights for later in August today. Played with the interface, but the price range didn’t go low enough for my budget. Nice interface though, particularly the mapping of the geographical area where one is looking for lodging.
  
• Daid Roth summarized 3 key points for enterprise SEO: Executive Support, SEO involvement early in the project, SEO ownership of standards
  Good points for the future when/if I will be responsible for enterprise level SEO and not just for SMB.
  
• Myles Anderson rehashed why and how diversity is important in SEO.
  Yet another article, where every points are supported by common sense, and the value of the piece is the collection, editing and explanation.

July 28

• Barry Schwartz introduced Google’s new “Page Speed” service: Google fetching the content on your web site and then serving it up with speed improvements of 25% to 60%
  Sounds great, but I feel that there should be a watchdog over Google ensuring that they don’t rank higher unfairly pages sped up by them. This feeling comes from the observation, that Google serves more and more like a utility in our life as opposed to a public company. Different rules apply to business and governmental environment.
  
• Vic Drabicky mused whether Has Paid Search Become The New NYC Mailbox?
  It is a lamentation of poorly written and misleading adwords, with the bottom line on focusing value. Just makes simple business sense to me.
  
• Pamela Parker reposted and analyzed Twitter’s announcement about “promoted tweets”, that can stay on top of the queue until the follower checks in or removes it.
  I’ve been waiting for ideas how Twitte can monetize their business. This is OK from their perspective, but I personally might be annoyed by the minor change in user interface. Tweets should sank lower as time passes, shouldn’t they?
  
• Barry Schwartz retold Searchmetrics results concluding that images, videos and Google’s own materials show up often in Google’s blended/Universal search.
  On one hand: D’uh, that’s the point of blended search. On the other hand this is a reminder to produce more pics and videos and tag/alt them correctly.