In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for June 19, 2007:

Add your reviews to businesses on Google Maps [Google LatLong]

Google has been indexing review-style information for businesses in Google Maps for a while now. But a new feature added to the service now lets Google Maps users add their own reviews… without ever leaving Google Maps. It’s pretty simple: do a search… click a result… click “More Info” inside the pushpin bubble… then “Reviews”… and finally “Write Review”. Or… you can simply click the link in each listing that says “X Reviews”. It’s not an obvious addition to new visitors… but they should be able to find it relatively easy if they click around on the results. More commentary at Techmeme.

What Type of Traffic Can You Expect From Yahoo Ads Compared to Google Ads [Search Engine Roundtable]

Well? How many traffic can you expect from Yahoo! ads? According to WebmasterWorld forum members, 20 - 25% of the traffic you get from Google Ads. The thread - started by a user getting only 3% - talks about not only Yahoo! Ad traffic, but also mentions MSN/Live.com and Ask.com advertising traffic as well. As a general rule of thumb… the percentages usually line up with the search engine’s market share.

Search Engine Optimization Is NOT About Useless Rankings [Bruce Clay]

I like the message behind this post: rank for what’s important to your site… not just any ol’ words. It doesn’t matter if your site on gophers ranks well for pickles (unless those are related in some way I don’t know about). If you can find a way to successfully convert the pickle-seekers into gopher-buying customers, more power to you. But generally speaking, those accidental “side” rankings that have nothing to do with what you’re trying to do are useless… and shouldn’t be “optimized” for.

YouTube in 9 more domains [Official Google Blog]

YouTube now offers fully localized and translated versions of the site for: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - the YouTube founders - announced the new sites at Google’s Press Event in Paris today. The announcement has created quite a buzz in the blogosphere - which says that a lot of people were waiting for this. According to the Google Blog post, switching between the standard YouTube homepage and one of the localized versions is “seamless”… which I assume means the content is identical save for the interface language.

After several days of frustrating testing, reinstalling, database manipulation and trial/error, we’re back in full swing around here (albeit at internetmarketingmonitor.org).

Have a great night, folks! We’ll be back in the morning.