Reposted from Website Magazine. In lieu of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) downtime over the past several days, optimizing websites for high performance in the cloud may seem a bit too risky for many Internet businesses.  Yottaa however believes differently, today launching a new Web performance optimization service which aims to help improve website speed and development through a variety of techniques including domain sharding, CSS spriting, and CDN balancing. “Web-based businesses understand that visitors to their sites have a ‘need for speed,’ but many are held back by the complexity and expense of manual optimization,” said Coach Wei, Yottaa’s…more»

Few Web professionals should be surprised by the 2011 forecast in SEMPO’s recently released State of Search Marketing Report. If the words “social” and “mobile” are at the top of your business plan, pay close attention to the following. If they are not, drop what you’re doing and pay even closer attention. With over 900 companies and agencies participating in the global online survey, the report estimates that the North American search marketing industry will grow by 16 percent in 2011 to a value of $19.3 billion, up from $16.6 billion in 2010. Just under half of the respondents said…more»

Is Google on the Ropes? Google’s stock is in a tailspin. Since Friday, it’s down about 10 percent, around $522 per share as of this writing. That’s what happens when you miss projections, even though earnings are again on the rise. Earnings of $8.08 missed the mark by two cents and, as reported by Adweek, expenses went through the roof — to the tune of 34 percent. What is Google paying through the nose for? In large part, employees. Out of fear. Apparently Google offered two employees a combined $150 million in stock grants to keep them from defecting to…more»

Popular self-hosted blogging platform WordPress received an update that brings it to version 3.1.1.  This version contains several important security fixes including two relating to the media uploader, an XSS flaw, and one that caused a PHP crash in certain conditions when handling “devilishly devised links in comments.” Keep in mind that failing to upgrade may leave your blog vulnerable to attacks. Current WordPress users should have already received notified about the update in their Dashboard. If not, or if you aren’t a user just yet, you can download WordPress 3.1.1 from the official website. Alongside the security patches come…more»

This week Yahoo! launched version two of BOSS(a “build your own search service”), a data API that gives developers access to web search, image and news content for a usage fee. Version one of BOSS will be shut down this summer, scheduled for July 20, 2011. The primary changes in version two are that web and image search results and now sourced from Microsoft’s search engine, Yahoo branding attribution is now required (the first version allowed for white labeling), and arguably the most significant in that developers are now charged based on query volume. The Yahoo! Search Boss v2 API…more»

Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet announced that it has begun offering its services and solutions to the Canadian market. The company currently operates in seven major markets in Europe and North America, hosting more than 11 million domain names. So why is its focus on Canada so important? According to 2010 research by Industry Canada, only 41 percent of Canadian businesses currently have a website. That presents a big opportunity for a company like 1&1 and everyone else in the U.S. considering crossing that virtual border. “While the fundamental needs of a small business are fairly consistent in all countries,…more»

Launched in beta this week, LinkedIn Today is a new social news service that strives to deliver the most-shared business headlines and stories across multiple industries to members of the professional network. The new product is designed to provide LinkedIn users with access to the most relevant news based on the information in their professional profiles. Members can get news by following what their LinkedIn connections are reading, access a digest of what users in their specific industry are reading or see what headlines are trending across multiple industries throughout the entire network. Users can also customize their LinkedIn Today…more»

The SEO platform BrightEdge is now integrating social media signals to give marketers insights for optimizing their social media activities. BrightEdge will analyze the content of tweets and Facebook likes to pinpoint the exact areas in social media that will boost SEO and offer actionable recommendations to increase activity in these places. As search engines are increasingly focusing on integrating social content into their results, BrightEdge offers reporting to identify the competitive social media strategies that impact organic search rankings. Social media results will be officially integrated into the BrightEdge dashboards and insights, and BrightEdge will call out specific terms,…more»

The reason that it is important to stay informed about feature changes at major services is because it enables you to both understand how consumers locate, identify, and experience your products (in the case of e-commerce merchants. Google made a small but rather meaningful update related to its “Instant” search feature several weeks ago, expanding the offering to shoppers in Google Product Search.  Google users are now able to see Google’s instant keyword and key phrase suggestions as they type when comparing prices, looking for local stores, or researching products. So what does this mean for Internet retailers? It means…more»

Vimeo, long playing second fiddle to YouTube, has released some new features that should be very attractive to video producers. First, Plus members ($59.95 per year or $9.95 per month) can now upload files as large as 5 GB – meaning full-feature HD film uploads, or up to 2.5 hours of HD per week. With a Plus membership, Vimeo users can also upload unlimited HD videos per week, within the weekly limit (non-Plus members are limited to one new HD video per week). Also when it comes to HD videos, Plus members can automatically embed the HD version of their…more»