Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

John Battelle's take on the current Google trademark lawsuits.

A timely article from E-Commerce Times about search engine marketing to market to holiday shoppers.

Searching books is cool, but really, who reads books anymore? How about searchable TV clips? That would be cool. Why not?" says Google. Nothing seems impossible for the search giant. Apparently, they've been secretly working on digital video search for a while, including discussions with TV broadcasters to gain access to their content. Read more about it from News.com

Chris Sherman starts off a week of articles about shopping search. Shopping search is an oft-neglected search niche that is starting to get a lot more attention in the search marketing world.

Google Backlink Update - Thanksgiving Day

In a very curious move, Ask Jeeves and Lycos have entered the seach engine optimization field. I guess since they're the search engines everyone's forgotten about, they feel like they can get away with offering optimization services--they'll mostly be optimizing for Google, Yahoo and MSN, anyway, right? Their prices are pretty steep, but I have a feeling they can attract a lot of customers by the simple fact of who they are. Who better to optimize your site for the search engines than the search engines themselves?

Chris Sherman discusses the recent paid search disclosure report from Consumer WebWatch.

News.com reports that Firefox is gaining market share in the browser war. This according to onestat.com, a web stats company based in the Netherlands. Microsoft discredits the stats from Onestats.com, saying they don't jibe with their other companies like WebSiteStory's stats. I have questions about the accuracy of Onestat's numbers (and websidestory's for that matter), but the point is that they are showing a significant change from their numbers a couple months ago, which show there is obviously some shifting in the browser marketplace.

I don't think Mozilla or any other browser will ever overtake IE in the market leadership role as long as Windows dominates the OS market (this is Microsoft we're talking about here, remember?), but it's nice to see a little competition in the browser industry again, which will hopefully drive innovation in all Web browsers.

Is there a place for ads in RSS? Overture seems to think so. Overture is working with Feedburner to test it's content ads in several feeds.

Raul Valdes-Perez, CEO of Vivisimo, gives his perspective on all the hype about personalized search. Of course he thinks clustered search is the wave of the future, that's what he does. His main beef with personalized search is that it people are dynamic and not always looking for the same type of information, so it is difficult to predict a user's intent based on web pages viewed. I agree that there are loads of problems that will arise with personalized search, but I think he underestimates the value of user profiles like Yahoo has been building on their customers, enabling them to track user preferences, pageviews, purchases, etc, over a very long period of time. Sure, there will be some flaws in the system, and it will never be 100% perfect, but I can definitely see personalized search providing significant value to the user. Look at how effective amazon is with their personalization. They don't always recommend books that I actually care about, but 90% of the time they are spot on. It's that 90% of correct assumptions that provide value to the end user.

Raul goes on to say that the best approach is to let each individual personalize their own experience by choosing from results that are clustered by theme, in folders or some similar interface...hmm, sounds a lot like Vivisimo.

I think the best approach to personalized search is probably a combination of both automated personalization and clustered results to let people find the right search results when the automated process screws up (which will inevitably happen at least some of the time).

Money grubbing queries are a sure thing in search -- especially at the beginning of the workweek when the prospect of five days of hard labor begins to hit home...

Read more on Yahoo Buzz Index

According to a report on Clickz, MSN has re-upped their contract with ppc advertising partner Overture through June 2006.

An interesting little PDF from Atlas Institute reveals holiday shopping patterns from last year (Nov-Jan). According to their nubers, last year's online shopping volume was over 70% higher at it's peak than the previous year's peak. The peak also came later in the year than ever before--mid-December. Will shoppers procrastinate even more this year? How long can shoppers put off shopping and still get their gifts on time?

While many of us were off at the WMW conference yesterday, Google unleashed another new service -- Google Scholar -- a non-commerical search focusing on scholarly literature research. Touted on the Google blog as a way to give back to the research community.

Day three started off with a keynote by Brett Tabke. Brett said they tried to line up a different speaker, including a rep from MSN, which would have been interesting, but unfortunately they all fell through, so Brett discussed the history of his site, Webmasterworld and the community that surrounds it.

After the keynote, I attended the affiliate smackdown, which featured a panel of super affiliates who talked about strategies for being a profitable affiliate by building dedicated affiliate sites and promoting them in the natural search engine listings as well as paid search listings such as Google AdWords.

The final Super Session of the conference featured a panel of three very successful search marketing women who have all started businesses and grown them to a substantial size. The title of the session was "Running with the Big Dogs". They all offered their perspectives and advice on building a successful business brand.

At the end of the show the iPod was given away to the lucky winner along with a few other prizes (I didn't win anything). Also, after a very democratic process, the place was chosen for the next WMW conference: New Orleans. The next one will take place in April or May of next year.

The second day of the WMW conference kicked off with an interesting keynote by Noel McMichael, founder of MarketLeap (now owned by Digital Impact). Noel discussed his theory of the search engine marketing ecosystem, and highlighted his Seven Imperatives for Success in the Search Engine Marketing Ecosystem:

1. Define ecosystem direction and values
2. Foster open relationships
3. Focus all participants on customers
4. Treat employees, partners & vendors as investors of human capital
5. Search Engines must define governance and rules of engagement
6. Leverage knowledge and innovation of external entities
7. Evolve or become extinct

The second session I attended was the proactive linking session featuring Bruce Clay, Jim Banks, and Greg Boser. Good insight and a different point of view from each of these guys. Not a lot of new information for people who understand linking strategies, but good information. The overarching theme was that you want as many quality links as possible (from unique c-class IP blocks), and you should always use your keywords in the text link, but not always the exact same keyword phrase. Bruce emphasized the need to manage your links just like you manage every other part of your marketing strategy. Bruce also mentioned the use of what he called the "silo" linking strategy, where you segment your internal site links into keyword themes or "silos" to maximize the themed relevance of those pages/links. He also mentioned the opportunity to include href links in PDF files that you distribute. He even suggested that PDF files are not currently subject to the same stringent spam filters that html files are subject to.

Jim Banks suggested using PPC search engines such as Google Adwords as a testing ground to test the effectiveness of specific keywords before you go out and spend a lot of time and/or money building links to your site with a certain set of keywords. The idea is that you can test to see if conversion rates and traffic/order volume is sufficient to warrant the large amount of effort required with link building.

Greg Boser advocated the use of links by trying to "aggressively replicate what happens in nature". I guess by nature he means on the web, but outside of SEO efforts, not the backwoods. Greg also said that he believes that the benefit of keywords in the text links are passed through to a site even if pagerank is not, for example a link on a PR0 site still has value to determine a site's relevance.

The next session was Site Promotion on a Budget. Panel members for this session included Adam Jewell, Anne Kennedy, and Brett Tabke. All three provided some good suggestions for additional marketing methods and tactics beyond the search engines.

Wednesday's super session was the much anticipated Webmasters and Search Engines, featuring a panel of reps from several of the search engines.

Tim Meyer from Yahoo discussed new features on Yahoo, with an emphasis on the recent release of Yahoo personalized search. Tim also addressed one of the pressing issues for Webmasters, the 301 redirection issue. He said the problems should be completely resolved within a couple weeks. They should have fixed the issues regarding redirects that have caused some sites to be dropped from Yahoo's index. Their new policy for redirects also applies to meta refreshes, being handled as either a 301 or 302 redirect.

Dan Boberg gave a dog and pony show about their PPC program and also pitched their (relatively) new service, Search Optimizer.

Michael Palka from Ask Jeeves gave a very entertaining presentation about the progress they have made as a company and their search technology. He ended up getting the bulk of the questions during the Q&A, probably because nobody has paid much attention to optimizing for that search engine for a while, so there were a lot of questions that came up.

Matt Cutts from Google was great as usual. Showed some slides outlining all the new features Google has added this year and discussed several of them. He showed some funny examples of spam he came across in Google (or more likely that didn't make it into Google). Matt said that outgoing links don't play a factor in Google's ranking currently, but he left open the possibility that they could add that to their algorithm in the future (doesn't he say that about everything?).

The final session of the day that I attended was News Search. There were some fine panel members for this one, including Rich Skrenta from Topix, Greg Jarboe from SEO-PR, Kevin Karim from Looksmart (findarticles.com, furl.net), and Matt Cutts from Google. Each explained their news-related search products and services and discussed how news and press releases can be used to increase exposure, traffic, etc. Very interesting topic that many SEOs ignore. The best point came out of Greg Jarboe, that if you want to really be effective, you need to have good, actual news to let people know about.

Wednesday night was the Yahoo party at the Palms. Yahoo paid for the party and provided chips to gamble with. I wasn't able to go (I had a prior engagement to take my wife to Celine Dion), but I heard it was a lot of fun. My favorite quote was heard on Thursday morning, "those geeks sure know how to party!"

It's always fun to see the people behind the names and monikers at conferences like these. There's something refreshing about talking face to face with all the people you hear about and communicate with online. There's way too much info to report on everything that happened, but I'll try to hit the highlights of the sessions I attended.

After the opening keynote address by Brett Tabke, I went to the "Big Site SEO" session. It was a fairly interesting session with speakers including Marshall Simmonds from About.com, John Marshall from ClickTracks, Joseph Morin from Autobytel, and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies (he does SEO for IBM). Bill Hunt's presention was the most informative in regards to the theme of optimizing large sites. One of the main points I got from Bill was that optimizing large sites requires the optimizer to attack the project from the opposite end that you would attack the optimization of a smaller site--that is, you need to start with reworking the infrastructure, then move to coding (templates, titles, etc), then content. He showed some impressive results from working with IBM to simply improve the URL/link structure to allow search engines to properly spider their site. After implementing those changes, the number of pages of the IBM site indexed by Google went from 10,000 to 2.2 million--with a corresponding increase in traffic of 62%.

The second session I attended was "Tracking, Conversion, and ROI". This one proved to be a very interesting session, although it was largely a push by a few metrics companies for their own products. (Urchin and ClickTracks). Dave Cadoff from FutureNow filled in nicely for Bryan Eisenberg who was originally scheduled to be on the panel. Dave gave a rousing speech about conversion and reminded us that "clicks are people" and that we need to remember that as we're working on improving conversion rates. He also emphasized that conversion is a process, not an event. Another very interesting comment he made was that everyone in the session could improve our conversion rates by an order of magnitude, that is, if your conversion rate is 1%, it could be 10%, if it's 2%, it could be 20%. Pretty bold statement, but the guy is obviously passionate about conversion and he even said he is a "persuasion expert".

After lunch, and some meandering around the display booths, all 1,000-plus attendees went to the super session featuring some famous algo-busting SEO lengends. They discussed the history of SEO, successes (including Oilman, who made over 4 million dollars selling Viagra over a several month period in 1999) and failures. They were all very strong advocates of highly aggressive SEO and all seemed very hopeful about the entry of MSN's new search engine.

The final session of the day was about Local Search. This one ended up being very interesting as they discussed the current hype and reality of local search. Lots of good info including Matt Cutts of Google using KeyHole to zoom in on a satellite picture of the conference center and adjacent Hilton hotel. If you haven't tried Keyhole, be prepared to be blown away. If Google thinks highly enough of a technology to buy it, it must be something amazing--and that's true once again with Keyhole. Matt said not to expect to go to Google Local tomorrow and find Keyhole integrated, but I can see a time in the not too distant future when you can zoom in on a satellite picture to see where your hotel or restarant is.

All in all, the conference got off to a pretty good start. Today should be even better with the much-anticipated "Search Engines & Webmasters" panel featuring representatives from several major search engines.

As the search engine wars heat up, BBC did a little test to see which search engine is the best. The results? Not very conclusive, in fact, they don't ever actually proclaim a winner, but seem to prefer the butler (Ask.com), at least he got the most positive feedback of the five search engines. Their tests and reviews are mediocre at best, nothing really new for those of us "in the know". I like the idea of putting the search engines to te test, but it needs to be more than a couple random searches to determine the King of search.

I have to side with Rusty and Danny on this one. Contrary to a popular rumor going around lately, MSN is not scraping the results pages of Google to seed their search engine. I don't think they're ethically above doing something like that, I just think they're smarter than that and there's not any real reason to do so. They can find plenty of sites the old-fahioned way, following links just like everyone else does. MSN is trying to mimic Google (looked at the UI for the beta search lately), but they're not pulling links off their search results pages, at least not directly. If it has anything to do with Google at all, I think it's more likely to be they're indexing pages that may have pulled google's SERPs like Danny suggests.

Internet Retailer came out with their Top 50 Websites for 2005. Not a lot of surprises on the list. It's mostly a list of the biggest names in e-commerce, but there are a few newcomers on the list, most notably, Auntiesbeads.com.

Google unveiled a new Adwords training and certification to search marketing service providers. This is a great idea that is well overdue. Besides offering search engine marketing firms training and certification program, it allows them one universal login for all their clients' accounts though the My Client Center. It will be interesting to see if Overture follows suit and offers a similar service for marketing agencies. As far as I'm aware they haven't offered anything like this, yet.

As promised, MSN has launched their beta version of their new search engine today. It is making waves in the media, even though MSN has been uncharacteristically quiet about it. Perhaps part of the reason for their relative silece is that this is just a beta launch and they plan on tweaking their search engine quite a bit before it goes primetime. Or maybe they realized that sometimes people pay more attention if you kind of keep it a secret. They could also be trying Google's famous "it's still in beta" trick (you know the one where they say their service is in beta forever, i.e. Froogle, Google News, etc.)

For now, the only place I'm seeing the new results is on the beta search site: beta.search.msn.com It appears to be the same results I was seeing on the most recent version of the tech preview. (I liked the results better before the most recent tweaks).

I haven't had time to experiement with it yet, but this new MSN search is supposed to provide personalized search options as well as local searching (sound familiar?).

Here are some links to other resources about the beta launch of MSN's new search engine:

Press Release about the Beta launch of the new MSN Search
MSN Search Beta Fact Sheet

John Battelle
Andy Beal
Chris Sherman
News.com
Clickz
NY Times (login required)

Taking a cue from Google and Yahoo, MSN has launched a blog to let the world know what's going on with their new search engine.

Take a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch

Chris Sherman wrote a great article about Firefox, particularly as it relates to being a browser optimized for search. I tried out FireFox for the first time a few weeks ago and instantly found it easy to use and very efficient. I've always been stubborn about changine browsers. Back in the day (2000), I was one of the last holdouts I knew of using Netscape when everyone else in the world had switched to IE. I finally relented when I realized that some sites didn't work right in Netscape, but they always worked in IE since that's what all the developers were using. I'm not really a techie, so when I get used to a certain program, I like to stick with it since I know and understand it. Hence, I've been a diehard IE man for several years...until now.

After just one browsing session with Firefox, I knew I had found a replacement browser. There are so many things to love about Firefox and so far, nothing to hate. It loads a lot quicker than IE, it has awesome searching options built right into the toolbar, including the ability to search google, ebay, download.com, feedster, and a bunch more--plus the ability to easily add other sites to search from the toolbar. I was still using IE occasionally whenever I wanted to see the Google PR toolbar, or to quickly blog about an article or webpage from the "blog this" button...yet, how naive I was to not realize these same tools are available for Firefox at firefoxtoolbar.com and prtoolbar.organd pagerankstatus.mozdev.org to simply display pagrank. I now have no reason to go back to IE. My eyes have been opened.

I don't even have time right now to talk about all the security advantages of Firefox over IE, or the popup blocking or the tabbed browsing (I love that).

Do yourself a favor, if you haven't tried it yet, go download Firefox and give it a test run. You'll be glad you did. Getfirefox.com

Every day I see a new search engine pop up online. All these smaller search engines (including the ones you might have actually heard of) are trying to ride the hot trend of search. Every one of them seems to be hoping to become the next Google.

Recently released data from Hitwise shows that these smaller search engines aren't gaining any ground on the big boys. In fact, according to Hitwise, one in every fourtee visits to the Internet by US web users went to one of the top 10 search engines (up 7% from just a year ago).

The "alternative" search engines--vivisimo, Clusty.com, a9.com, Alltheweb.com, Snap.com--don't seem to be much of an alternative for most Web users, accounting for only one-tenth of one percent of all search engine visits. Amazon's a9.com is the only one to show significant growth over the past year. A9 is also the only one launched by a company with the market penetration and customer base that's larger than most countries in the world.

I think the point of this article is that the search engine market is not an easy one to enter. The big guys continue to get bigger and ill continue to do so as long as they provide relevant, useful results and their users remain loyal. I think there is still room for smaller search engines to enter the market if they focus on a particular market or niche, but it will be tough for any Joe Blow to come in and dethrown Google--especially if they don't offer some kind of significant and compelling improvement to differentiate themselves from what's currently available.

Read the article on InternetRetailer.com

Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer made some bold statements to shareholders on Tuesday,
"'We will catch up, we will surpass,' Ballmer told shareholders at the world's largest software maker's annual meeting."

(referring to their position as 3rd place search engine behind Google and Yahoo)

Is Microsoft finally going to get serious about competing in web search? This could get interesting.

From Reuters.com

Well, it's about time!!! MSN will be releasing a public beta of their new search engine on Thursday. This one has been so long in coming, including several false alarms, I wonder if anyone even cares anymore. Does anyone really care (besides search marketing geeks) if Microsoft has their own search technology? I doubt it will make much of a difference to most MSN users. Based on the last techpreview site, the results are very comparable to what they're getting from the current Yahoo/Inktomi search results. My sites seem to show up better in the new MSN results, though, so that's a nice bonus.

This article also says Microsoft will have their own version of desktop search ready to release by the end of the year.

Read article on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (not too many details, yet)

"Yahoo officially kicked off the holiday shopping season Thursday with the launch of a site that brings together content, product search and comparison tools.

The new Holiday Gift Center will include lists of the most popular products in various categories, free shipping offers and information on shipping. Featured products will be a mix of paid placements and editorial picks. At a briefing event here, Yahoo said it will promote the center internally to Yahoo users, through its e-mail newsletters and also do some online advertising."

Read the article from Internet.com

Since the birth of Google Adwords, there has been some confusion about what their policy is regarding what type of ads they allow. They have finally published their Content Policy

"Google is committed to providing an advertising service with fair and consistent policies that benefit our users, advertisers, partners, and Google. To achieve this goal, we maintain high standards for ads accepted into the AdWords program. The policies listed below complement our Terms and Conditions and describe Google's advertising policies with regards to products and services..." Read it

"Google shares topped $200 on Wednesday as investors' search for growth stocks fueled interest in the Web search leader.

In breaking through that threshold, a level reminiscent of the Internet froth of the late 1990s, the stock is now up more than 150 percent from when Google went public two months ago at $85 a share. "

More from News.com

Check Google's Current Stock Price

Not wanting to be left behind with all the excitement about Google's desktop search utility, Yahoo! announced they too will offer their own version of desktop search. Big surprise there. Yahoo's business model of copying Google as closely as possible has worked well so far, it makes sense that they would want to continue that effort. They also said they plan to increase the role of personalization within their search results, which is actually one area where Google has (so far) been lagging behind in.

"Yahoo! named TV veteran and dealmaker Lloyd Braun to head its media and entertainment properties. In the role, he'll oversee a huge online division that includes movies, TV, music, games, news, finance, sports, health and kids content and businesses."

More from Clickz

Fredrick Marckini wrote an article on Clickz today about his predictions for how Google's desktop search will affect search engine marketing. So far I love Google's desktop search and I agree with Fredrick that it will change the way many of use use our computers, but I'm not convinced that it will have a big impact on search engine marketing as he's saying. I think the impact will be very slow and gradual. I mean, look at how long we've had web search, and most people are still searching on simple keywords and phrases to find what they're looking for. Very few searchers are uing the available advanced search tools. Google's desktop search is so easy to use, (just like Google's web search), so people don't have to be sophisticated searchers to get acceptable results most of the time. If it ain't broke... So, I'm not sure people will need to develop advanced search skills to find what they're looking for, whether that be on their desktop or on the web.

According to a national survey from eMarketer, holiday shoppers are set to start their shopping early this year. I question the accuracy of this survey, since I'm sure people INTEND to shop earlier, but whether they actually start shopping or procrastinate like usual is another matter. We'll see what really happens, but either way, if you don't have your search marketing in gear for this holiday season, you're running out of time.

On the eve of the election, you might be interested in checking out Google's Election Zeitgeist page. Kinda interesting stuff.