Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

Scoble gives the MSN search geeks a "bit of heck" and captures it on video. Some pretty interesting insight into what's going on with MSN Search.

A radio interview by Kim and Robbie from Healthy, Wealthy, Wow! will air today at Noon on 1400 AM (in Utah). I think the interview went well, even though I had no idea what to expect, so I was not very well prepared. They basically asked about my company and search engine marketing. Apparently they found out about us from the local newspaper article about our company last week.

I just saw this article on MediaPost.com, apparently Yahoo has finally wised up and eliminated their $20 monthly minimum spend. It won't affect me or probably anyone I know, but I always thought it was clueless of them to have that minumum spend requirement. It lets the little guys dip their feet in without spending a fortune, and many of those "toe-dippers" will end up being big-time advertisers and spend a whole lot more than $20/month.

On a related note, I was just talking to a sales rep at SuperPages about their PPC program, which apparently works in an auction-based format, similar to Adwords and Yahoo, except they charge a $15/month "maintenance" fee. I'm not sure what they need to maintain, but to me it sounds like they're paying them $180/year for nothing. Doesn't sound very SMB-friendly to me.

Yahoo recently published a whitepaper about RSS.

Among the key findings:

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of FSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
  
• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
  
• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.
  
• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).
  
• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.
  

I'm not really surprised by the findings. People don't know what RSS is, even most that use it. I don't necessarily think it's important that people understand the technology or even the name of the technology. The important thing is to make the data more readily available and accessible through easy to use feed aggregators like MyYahoo.

Evan Roberts reviews MSN's new adcenter beta.

Matt Cutts mentioned on his blog that there will be a backlink and PageRank update soon, which he rightly guessed would be given a name by our buddies over at WMW. They're calling this one Jagger. It doesn't seem to be the earth-shattering news it used to be when Google makes this type of update, but it's always nice to see Google recognizing your hard work in terms of link popularity and so forth. I've also noticed that Google does a lot more of their "soft" updates that Matt talks about--the ones that go largely unnoticed but where new sites are constantly added to Google's index and change position in the search results.

My SEO company, Web Targeted, was the featured business in this week's edition of the American Fork Citizen, as well as the Lone Peak Press--both local editions of the Daily Herald. That online version doesn't really do it justice. It was right at the top of the business page with a big photo of me and Nelson. I call it big exposure in a small paper (or couple of small papers). It's always fun to be in the paper, anyway, and now my kids think I'm famous since my picture and name are in the newspaper. Woohoo! My daddy's famous!

I also added a news page to my site to highlight any mentions in the press.

Aaron Wall's Interview of Matt Cutts. Matt's always been great to give useful, insightful comments to SEOs, and he comes through for us once again.

An article on Clickz talks about search engine friendly content management systems. It's got some good basic info that should be considered when implementing a CMS or for that matter a shopping cart or any other type of site. Content management systems can streamline the content creation and publishing process, but to really be effective, some good basic SEO principles need to be followed.

I just found out about a blog from Hitwise. I'm sure they won't ever give out too much info--they stil need to sell their products, but they have access to such a wealth of keyword data (and other useful competitive intelligence) I'm sure there will be some gems posted on that blog.

For example, this post digs a little deeper on the Halloween costume keyword data they talked about in a recent press release.

ComScore came out with updated marketshare numbers for the search engines. Google gained over 1%. MSN and Ask Jeeves also grew their share of the market a bit.

Google increased its share by 1.2 percent, rising to 37.3 percent from 36.1 percent in the same month a year ago, according to ComScore Networks. Among the top five search engines, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Ask Jeeves, which is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, also increased their market shares, rising to 15.8 percent from 14.4 percent, and 6 percent from 5.9 percent, respectively.

InformationWeek >From InformationWeek.com

I have a feeling we'll hear about a LOT of privacy issues over the next few years as poeople "google-up" dirt from people's past. That's the great (or scary) thing about the 'net. You can't always control what personal information is made available online and you certainly can't control what other people say about you all over the web. There's an interesting article from Wired about this very topic.

As the internet makes greater inroads into everyday life, more people are finding they're leaving an accidental trail of digital bread crumbs on the web -- where Google's merciless crawlers vacuum them up and regurgitate them for anyone who cares to type in a name. Our growing Googleability has already changed the face of dating and hiring, and has become a real concern to spousal-abuse victims and others with life-and-death privacy needs.

I try to keep this blog focused on seach engine marketing, but once in a while, I have something off topic to write about. This past weekend, I went on a little campout with my dad and brothers. We call this the "macho-man campout" -- why, I'm not sure, but that's what we call it. This year we went to Yuba Lake. The weather was perfect. it was about 80 degrees during the day and not a cloud in sight, hardly any wind, and lots of sunshine.

Part of the "macho" tradition is to see who can catch the most fish, and of course, the biggest. This year, Eric took the victory in the most fish department with something like 42, but I caught the biggest--a 22 inch rainbow trout that tipped the scales at 4 lbs. I'm really not much of a fisherman, but it was a lot of fun catching that big guy. And I was very proud to take home the victory for biggest fish since I was nowhere near the total number lead (I only caught 16). Besides three of those big rainbows, all we caught was a bunch of small perch. Oh, yeah, dad did catch one Northern Pike that had some serious teeth on it.

The secret to our fishing success? The ever-trusty Jake's Spin-a-lure (gold w/red dots). On a sidenote: Jake's could use some good SEO on their site. Although if they market themselves too well and everyone starts using those lures, maybe they won't be as effective. Anyway, those lures have been good for catching trout just about everywhere I've ever tried. The perch at Yuba seemed to like the lure, too.