SEO / SEM Recruiting and Job Listings

A few places to either look for SEM jobs or hire someone with SEO/SEM skills:

from Lee Odden's blog

Also, I'll add a couple more that aren't SEO-specific, but they are for marketing types and often list SEO/Search Marketing jobs:

Marketingjobs.com

The Ladders - charges for the good stuff

MediaPost Classiefieds (reg. required)

And, don't forget the usual suspects for just about any type of job searching and recruiting, Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilder, etc.

Searches Up 3 Percent In July

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, searches were up during the month of July.

More from MediaPost

Yahoo! Free Sitemaps - free paid inclusion

I've been so busy that I somehow missed this until now. At the most recent SES conference, Tim Mayer form Yahoo made a couple announcements, including the announcement that they are introducing a sitemap feature very similar to Google Sitemaps.

It will be interesting to see how this works alongside their paid inclusion service. I wonder if they'll have to end up scrapping their paid inclusion model all together.

SEORoundtable article

Google to Launch IM Service

USA Today reports that Google is planning to release their own IM service, based on the open source IM software, Jabber. Of course, USA Today cites their source as the LA Times article and some "unnamed source", but these rumors usually end up being true.

It will certainly be tough to get people to switch IM services, but this is Google we're talking about, the darling of the Internet, so anything is possible.

Affiliate Marketing Tools

For those of you involved in affiliate marketing (as an affiliate), Mr. Ploppy offers some good affiliate marketing tools. A lot of the standard sites, but you may find a gem or two on his list.

Great Link Building Article

Just read a great article about link building from Todd Malicoat over at WeBuildPages. Todd's spot on with his recommendations for building link popularity, the key is to balance the types of links as well as the link text you use in your links.

I also really like his "link draft", which is basically a hierarchy of link value (and difficulty to obtain) for each different type of link.

Google Searchers Male, Yahoo! Skews Young

GOOGLE USERS ARE PREDOMINANTLY MALE, but Yahoo! has a higher proportion of searchers between the ages of 18 and 34 than Google, MSN, or Ask Jeeves, according to a new Hitwise study, 'The Online Search Report,' released Wednesday. When looking at the demographics of visitors to four search engines--Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, and Ask Jeeves--Hitwise found that Google users were 53.6 percent male, while Ask Jeeves users were 58.7 percent female, for the four weeks ending July 16. Yahoo! and MSN searchers were predominantly women, who accounted for 50.2 percent of Yahoo! Search users and 53.7 percent of MSN Search users.

For that same time period, MSN Search had the highest proportion of users older than 55, while Ask Jeeves appealed to those between the ages of 18 and 24 and to those between 35 and 54 years old. Google also had the most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000.

The report also found that searchers at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN tend to enter just one or two words in the query box; an average of 87 percent of searches at those three engines are no more than two words. But a smaller proportion--69 percent--of Ask Jeeves searches are just one or two words. Hitwise attributed this phenomenon to Ask Jeeves' history of framing searches as questions written in complete sentences.

MediaPost Article

What Can Google Learn From Netscape's Downfall?

"It's been 10 years since the initial public offering of ill-fated Internet pioneer Netscape Communications, and the often-told story of its rise and fall has inspired inevitable comparisons to the industry's current darling, Google.

Like Netscape, Google had a wildly successful IPO, created a mainstream technology for optimizing Internet use and, as a result, has Microsoft gunning for them in the same way it went for Netscape's jugular."

PCWorld.com Article

So far it looks like Google is taking a markedly different path than Netscape in the battle against Microsoft. Most importantly--their product continues to be better than MS's. Not only is Google better than MSN Search, it is perceived to be even better than it really is in the minds of most consumers. That's the most important key.

Back in 1999-2000, I held on to Netscape longer than most, but I finally gave it up because it was just easier to use IE because of the integration with Windows and Netscape wasn't making the cut in terms of keeping up with new technology. After AOL bought Netscape, they let it die. Google will never do that. Search is still their core business and it's what they do best...and everyone knows it! MSN will have a hard time taking over Google's marketshare, but I'm sure they'll spend a lot more money and manpower trying to do just that.

Google,The Diva of Search

When I first heard about Wired, NY Times, AP, Forbes, and several other large national media sources.

Is Google really trying to become the Terrell Owens of the 'Net, or are they just babies? I mean, come on guys, you aren't a rock star, you're not a star athelete, you are a SEARCH ENGINE COMPANY--and a public company that people just can't seem to hear enough about, so get over it!

Who's Got the Biggest Search Engine of Them All

The seach engines have always bragged about the size of their indexes. I've always felt it's more of a marketing gimmick than anything else. I mean, seriously, how much difference could it make to have 20 billion pages versus 15 billion? After a point, it's just more stuff to sift through. If anything, too large of an index could make it more difficult to return relevant results. I'm all for indexing as many pages as possible, but I've always believed that relevancy is much more important than index size. Since relevance is so much harder to define than index size, this is a way for the search engines to claim superiority in a quantifiable number.

Don't expect Yahoo's spot on top to last, though. After Google "investigates" the claims, I'm sure they'll either dispute the numbers or more likely, come out with their own announcement that they now index 50 billion documents. That's just the way it goes in this business. Meanwhile MSN will stand by and not say anything about the size of their search index, but they'll have a press conference that says they still plan to take over the universe within the next five years, maybe even before the release of their new operating system.

This from MediaPost:

YAHOO!'S CLAIM THIS WEEK THAT its search index now includes over 20 billion Web documents and images has drawn mixed reactions from experts and rivals alike. Until the announcement, it was assumed by many that Google had by far the largest search breadth. A Google spokesman said the company is currently investigating Yahoo!'s claims.

From MediaPost

Real-Time Satellite Imagery?

Google Earth is one of the coolest things to come out of Google in the past couple years, but what if you could see real-time satellite images instead of photos that are a few years old? I was thinking about that the other day, and kind of dismissed it as something that's not likely to ever be available to the general public, at least not anytime soon.

Then I read this article on the SEW blog about an Australian company that intends to do just that. They're not talking about something 20 or 30 years down the road, either. According to their website, they plan to deliver a live, continuous true color image stream of the Earth by 2008.

The privacy issues raised by something like this will be incredible, but how cool will that be?

MSN Details Paid Search Product

A little bit more info has been released on MSN's long-anticipated PPC search product, called MSN Keywords. They're planning a limited release beta (500 advertisers, by invite) in October. Then presumaby they'll go live with it a few months later (January, maybe?). Or perhaps they'll wait until their agreement with Yahoo expires next summer. Either way, it won't be long now.

From Clickz

Yahoo! Launches Adsense Rival

Yahoo finally got on the stick and came out with their own rival to Google's Adsense. I'm surprised it took so long. As an advertiser, I worry that I'll see a drop in traffic quality, but as a publisher, I like the idea of options for contextual ads. Only time will tell the value and quality of this new service from Yahoo.

Press Release

Yahoo's blog post about their new ad network

Technology Optimists Turn off TV

I've seen several studies that talk about how people engage in concurrent media usage--watching TV while surfing the net. But there's a new study by Forrester that says Internet users are watching quite a bit less television than their unwired comrades. It's kind of a "duh" study, since there are only so many hours in a day and we all watch too much TV as it is, but it's interesting to see some hard stats about TV/Internet usage.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Broadband Internet surfers in North America watch two fewer hours of television per week than do those without Internet access, while those using a dial-up connection watch 1.5 fewer hours of TV.

The data come from a Forrester Research study released Tuesday that uses what it calls the longest-running survey of its kind, counting nearly 69,000 people in the U.S. and Canada as participants.

Article on Reuters.com