Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I'm speaking at WABCON this Friday. It's a business conference in Orem covering a bunch of essential topics for business decision makers. My session will be about SEO. It's supposed to be a basic SEO discussion, but I'll be answering any questions that come at me, so regardless of your experience with SEO, come on down and check it out. The other sessions look like they will be very good, too. If you use this promo code: SEO-WAB2007 - you can save $100 off the regular price of $129. At that price you can't go wrong, so go sign up now!

We just launched the new version of SEO.com. It's still a work in progress, and we plan to add a lot more cool tools and resources over the coming months, but I feel like the web design by Graphics.net is leaps and bounds better than the previous design.

The new site also marks the launch of a new SEO blog on SEO.com. I will most likely be posting most SEO-related stuff over on that blog, but I'll try to keep this blog alive, probably focusing more on interesting trends in search keywords, etc.

Labels: seo blog, seo.com

Even though Google holds back a lot of their keyword data, they've slowly been offering up more and more tools to allow people to figure out which keywords to bid on (and/or to optimize for). This post from the Adwords blog points to a couple of these tools as well as giving the idea to search forums, wikipedia, and good old Google search for ideas on keywords. All good advice. If you want to get the most out of your search marketing campaigns, you need to make sure you're covering all the relevant keywords and it's tough to think of them all by your lonesome. Use the tools that are available, and get creative!

Baidu.com beat out Microsoft for overall network traffic according to the latest numbers released by ComScore

SE Land for more

Labels: search engine stats

According to a study by Nielsen Co. (via SEW blog) only 34% of consumers trust search engine ads. That puts it right above banner ads and just below ads before movies. This brings up a lot of interesting questions. I don't have time to explore all of them, but I wonder how accurately you can really measure trust? Or do we really care about trust if customers are buying products? I mean, SEM almost always gets much better results in terms of conversion rate and cost per conversion than Radio, TV, Sponsorships, movie ads, newspapers...so do they really trust those media more, or do they just think so when asked the question in a survey? Or do they buy from a search ad even though they don't really trust the site? If so, I'd rather have the sale than their trust. (For the record, I think you need their trust to get the sale). Also, I assume whey they say 'search engine ad' they're referring to the paid ads, not organic results. Where would these people rank the organic listings in terms of trustworthiness?

Labels: market research, search engine stats

I've heard this a hundred times before...another A-list blogger is claiming that 'search is broken'. This time it's Steve Rubel who says search doesn't work. He goes on to admit that nearly everyone uses search engines (I think the 91% figure from PEW is low) and that we are largely satisfied. His argument for search being broken is that there are so many different types of content across all the various social networks, personal accounts, and whatever else, that can't be searched from one central place. I don't think that means search is broken, maybe it just hasn't evolved to that point, yet. Think back a few years compared to now and look at all the different content types we're able to search. We've come a long way, baby. And with desktop search tools like X1, Google Desktop search and others, a centralized, truly universal search is getting closer every day.

Labels: search

A list of 15 interviews of link building gurus.

Labels: link building, links