Search Engine Placement

Microsoft Corp. announced Friday it plans to buy online marketing conglomerate aQuantive Inc for almost $6 billion. Merger mania continues as the three main search engines scramble to buy up as many online marketing conglomerates as possible. While Microsoft is still far behind Google in overall acquisitions and mergers this will surely make an impact in Microsoft’s online marketing efforts.

The New York Post has also also reported that Microsoft is urgently trying to buy competitor Yahoo. It is clear Microsoft is sick of being runner up to Google in almost every aspect of online marketing. But will the purchase of aQuantive and Yahoo be enough?

I think not. Microsoft is already busy competing on so many fronts how will it ever get past all the bureaucracy and management problems a company of its size must face? I believe Google will remain the hundred-ton Gorilla of all aspects of Internet marketing for the foreseeable future.

Relocate-America.com recently release their list of the Top 100 Places to Live in 2007 and Asheville, NC has topped the list at #1! Relocate-America accepts nominations throughout the year and weighs these nominations based on user input and important city data including education, employment, economy, crime, parks, recreation and housing.

Asheville is not only a great place to live, but it’s also an excellent choice for business as well. Forbes.com cites North Carolina as “the clear winner” for “the best place to do business or start a career”. Raleigh snagged the top spot with several other NC cities ranking including Asheville at 23rd. Forbes notes that will many careers garner more income in the west, the cost of living in the southeast more than makes up for this discrepency.

We also think Asheville is a great place to live and do business as well, although we may be just a little biased. ; )

Once again Google has published their PageRank data. Here at Search Placement, we were pleased to debut with a PR3 for our homepage. However, several of our subpages (contextual web marketing, paid search marketing, and our blog) debuted with PR4’s. At first glance, it appears that the update is for pages that previously did not have a PageRank assigned to them. We’ll keep an eye on any more changes in the near future and post them here.

Google recently changed the color in of the top Sponsored Results listing box from a very light natural blue to a yellow color in its SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Google has done this to draw more attention to the top listings in the sponsored results.

According to a popular blog on SEO news, Google probably chose yellow because:

“Visually it is the most difficult for your eyes to focus on… However, if used with short burst of text as a background, it grabs your attention and helps hold what you read in your memory banks.”

The common thought is Google has been testing click through rates with the different colors and found yellow to increase clicks to the ads in the top sponsored results, and thus Googles overall profit increases.