Google Inc.'s Jan. 12 announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China prompted concern about possible commercial fallout. The company postponed the launch of its own smart phone in China but others are developing Android-based phones and could be hurt if Beijing tries to penalize Google by barring its use.

"As long as it fulfills Chinese laws and regulations and has good communication with telecom operators, I think its application should not have restrictions," said Zhu Hongren, a spokeman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, at a regular news briefing when asked whether Beijing would permit use of Android.

The comments reflect the conflicting pressures on the communist government, which insists on controlling information but needs foreign companies like Google to help achieve its goal of making China a technology leader.

The operating system is the foundation of a mobile phone's features and changing it after products have been launched would require expensive basic redesigns, said Ted Dean, managing director of BDA China Ltd., a Beijing research firm.

"There's a pretty significant upfront investment in developing a phone on one operating system," Dean said. "So you don't want to change course on so basic a system as what opeating system it works on."

Google is in sensitive talks with the government, trying to keep an important Beijing development center, a lucrative advertising sales team and access to China's booming market for its fledgling mobile phone business.

A Google spokesman, Jessica Powell, declined Wednesday to comment on the status of talks or confirm whether top managers from the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters were in Beijing.

Zhu gave no indication of the possible fate of Google's own phone, planned with local carrier China Unicom Ltd.

China is the world's most populous mobile phone market and any restrictions on Google might hamper its effort to expand into mobile. The country has more than 700 million accounts and strong demand for advanced services.

State-owned China Mobile Ltd., the world's biggest phone company by subscribers, is developing its own smart phone, the OPhone, which uses a system that has Android as its foundation.

The involvement of such a major state company, a key player in Beijing's technology development plans, could add to pressure on authorities to contain the commercial consequences of the Google dispute.

Dell Inc., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Corp. also plan to sell Android-based phones in China.

Google allows use of Android for free, which might boost costs for manufacturers and phone carriers if they switch systems, Dean said.

Microsoft Inc., Nokia Corp. and others charge royalties for their mobile operating systems.

"It's a significant enough share of the price of a phone that it changes the economies of the smart phone business if you're paying someone else for the operating system," Dean said.

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On the Net:

Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (in Chinese): http://www.miit.gov.cn

So how does Search Engine Optimization work? What is it?

Search engine optimization is a concept which covers a wide variety of different tools in which a web developer would use to boost overall traffic and popularity to their own website. Some of the general concepts which are categorized into the Search Engine Optimization market are keyword densities, topic relevance, meta tags, script coding, domain names, back linking, search engine submissions, advertising, and much more.

Here are some things to consider when optimizing your website for the internet search engines;

Keyword Density – Keyword density is using a specific percentage of words which hold a significant relation to the overall main topic of your website. For example a key word for a website specifically about optimization would be "search engine optimization." This allows web crawlers also known as search engine spiders to crawl your website and identify the main search-able topic of the site by keyword densities used most commonly in all of your website content. But with keyword densities if the keyword is used too much you may be black listed as spam. But if you use the keyword to little you may be listed in an unrelated area of the search where your visitors will not have a common interest with your website.

Topic Relevance – The relevance of your topics to your website, which also goes for the keywords will create a higher ranking in the search engine along with site search ability. For example if a website had many topics which were about ducks, but the site was about frogs, than you are going to be listed possibly in an unrelated part of the search engine. While a website about ducks, with many different articles and content with ducks in it, will have many different search engine listed pages which the searcher can see when looking up ducks. This makes it more likely that the person looking for information will visit your site.

Meta Tags and Scripting – These two concepts are in too much relation to each other to explain separately. Meta tags are specific words submitted into the sites overall header through professional scripting which pose as the main keywords which you want to be creating densities for in your content.

There are many different script alterations which can also be used which automatically detect meta tags and put them into the script for you based on densities, but is not as advisable unless you are very sure of what you are doing.

Domain Names – Your domain name is the key, the start of everything. Unfortunately the success of your entire website could be faltered simply by selecting an non ideal domain name. First domain names should be topic relevant, meaning that the domain name should be an overall description of what is in the website, or a business name. For example a news website should have a domain name with short clear general words in relation to news, and not a domain name which describes something like dating. Otherwise your visitors could be people looking for a dating website, and then leaving. Domain names should also be kept either dot com or dot net. These two domains rank in the top numbers for the Google search engine.

Why do I need Google?

Google is one of the most complicated search engines to stay on top of, and yet one of the most popular search engines on the internet. This makes Google one of the most important concepts in search engine optimization being more than 50% of the entire worlds population uses Google when searching the internet.

Should I do Search Engine Optimization on my own or through a paid service?

Although search engine optimization is complicated if you are a very experienced web developer it would save you a few bucks. The only problem is doing optimization yourself is time consuming, back-linking to thousands of websites legitimately, editing your scripts and fixing errors, this could all cost you a lot of time as to where your website could have already been receiving traffic and making income.

A paid service which offers search engine optimizations are often companies with many different people who work all at one time to get many angles of your website mastered all at once. A professional company can do for you in just a few days to a week what could take you several months. If your website is sponsored by advertising or your own products using a professional service to optimize your website would pay off its own costs in profits from the time you would not have had your website up and running without the service. So really the decision is up to you and your own specific preference.

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

The problem? Google’s drawing on Wikipedia and picking the wrong Michael Jackson, the writer rather than the King Of Pop. That’s wrong in terms of what people currently spiking searches for “michael jackson died” are expecting. Those interested in the writer did spike queries back when the writer died. The more recent spike is due to the pop singer’s dead (you can see both spikes on Google Trends).

It’s pretty amazing to see this happen. I’m pretty sure I’ve done that exact search in the past day or two since Jackson’s death and not seen it. Why is suddenly would pop up — and why Google isn’t keeping a better eye on a query it knows is drawing traffic — is strange.

Source: Search Engine Land