Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

This article in the upcoming businessweek magazine takes on the issue of click fraud in Yahoo and Google. It takes an interesting angle as it confronts the issue of human clickers and PTR (paid to read) sites that compensate people for clicking on ads.

Yeah, Aaron Wall wrote the book on SEO (literally). The guy's got the goods when it comes to search engines, seo, etc. Well, he just published History of Search Engines: From 1945 to Google 2006 that goes back a lot further and covers a lot more history of search engines than I ever knew about. It's pretty comprehensive, but you can skim it and skip the stuff you already know or don't care about.

Andy Hagans gives some good tips on how to beat the "sandbox" and gain trusted links that will garner love and affection from the big G.

I've always drooled at the chance to get my hands on more of HitWise's data. They provide a unique look into Internet usage, but it costs an arm and a leg to get access to their data. Smallish business types like me can't afford the expense...I couldn't type nearly fast enough with just one arm.

For the longest time, they kept all their data tightly under wraps without leaking a single tidbit to non-customers. Then they unleashed the blogs, which offer all kinds of cool insight into interesting trends in searching and web traffic in general. Now they're unleased what they call the Hitwise US Data Center.

Here's a blurb from the press release email I got this morning:

Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced the launch of its new Data Center. The Hitwise Data Center features a sampling of the online usage and search data that Hitwise offers through its online competitive intelligence service in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong markets. The Data Center is available to marketers, businesses, bloggers, academics, media and the general public. In the US market, Hitwise data is based on a sample of 10 million Internet users.

The Hitwise Data Center is updated monthly and will feature key data points and statistics on a market-by-market basis such as:

* Top 25 Most Visited Websites based on market share of visits
* Leading Search Engines by volume of searches
* Top 10 Industry Search Terms from across 20 pre-selected industries, from the more than 160 industry categories reported on by Hitwise

The US data center is located on the Hitwise website at: www.hitwise.com/datacenter

Thank you,
Matt Tatham
Manager, Media Relations
Hitwise

All I can say is--it's about time they realize the power in releasing monthly updates on some of the top sites, etc. This will generate a lot of links, traffic, buzz, and all that good stuff. I'm just as happy as can be to at least get a glimse of this data.

By the way, according to their data, here's the breakdown of search engine usage:

1. www.google.com 59.84%
2. search.yahoo.com 22.77%
3. search.msn.com 12.00%
4. www.ask.com 3.30%

Is this news to anyone? Oh, maybe you're suprised that Ask's share is over 3%. Quite impressive, but I wonder who the number 5 search engine is? And what happened to AOL search? Are those searches included in Google's numbers or something? I have a hard time believing that Ask gets more than AOL.

It's been well publicized that Danny Sullivan has left Search Engine Watch/SES, and is now as free as a bird...well, it didn't take long to get him signed up as a keynote speaker at the upcoming WMW pubcon conference. I was already planning on heading down for Vegas for the show, but now I'm definitely going. Pubcon has always been cooler than SES, and now that Danny's at Pubcon...look out.

Also: Brett's interview with Danny

From BusinessWeek...AOL to offer free coverage against identity theft and computer damage. This is obviously a shot at regaining the trust of their dwindling customer base. It's essentially a small supplemental insurance policy that kicks in to cover some of the costs that aren't covered by users' home owners or other insurance policies. Not sure if it will be enough to stem the outflow of AOL customers, but it's a good idea anyway.

This is cool, but it's kind of a bummer that a lot of articles--especially the older stuf--you can find with the Google News archive search, but have to pay for full access to the article...bummer. Just one more step towards Google's total domination of the world, er I mean indexing all the worlds information.

Andy Beal offers up a list of the The Top 10 Business Mistakes Search Marketing Firms Make. He makes some very good points. As the owner of a smaller SEO firm, I've found it difficult to scale the business and provide the same top notch level of service. I've been trying to improve our business processes, reporting, training, etc. Andy's post is a good reminder of what I should be doing.

I knew a lot of these AOL keyword tools would keep popping up. Here's another one from decenttools.com. This one is one of the better ones I've seen in terms of user friendliness and usefullness to search marketers. The reports are kind of Google sitmap-esqe in the way they display the clicks and average position. Pretty cool little tool. I can't help but wonder how many more of these I'll see. It's interesting how each one kind of has its own little twist on the concept using the exact same search data.