Archive for the ‘General’ Category

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Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Every now and then something comes along to shake up the world of search and search marketing. Microsoft has just launched a new service that they hope will be one of those big things to shake up searching, and they call it Bing.

Bing is not a normal search engine– instead, it bills itself as a ‘decision engine’. What this means is that instead of searching for a general keyword or key phrase and getting info from any number of angles as they might relate to that keyword or phrase, a user might type in a keyword that they have a query about in order to find out the answer (not just general information surrounding the term). This means everything from ‘Fitness’ returning results for calorie calculations and workout routines because it intuits the user wants fitness advice to ‘LAX to LaGuardia’ returning online booking options and itineraries for flights from LA to NYC.

How exactly SEO and Organic Search Placement factor into the results presented by this new ‘decision engine’ will be fascinating to develop understanding with, and it can be assured that the search community at large (not just us here at Search Placement!) will be diligently reverse-engineering the results of thousands of searches to gain such familiarity– and how it can be put to use for our clients.

What will also be interesting to observe will be the marketshare Bing stakes out for itself as a niche ‘decision engine’ in the world of Google’s hegemony and the type of searching users have gotten used to. As it stands, Bing is outpacing Yahoo! in terms of search volume; however, some of that flow can be attributed to the ‘new and shiny’ effect that loses its lustre in relatively short order. Will Bing hang on in the #2 spot? Microsoft surely hopes so, and we’ll see for ourselves over the next few months.

Posted in E-Commerce, General, MSN | No Comments »

How Has the Recession Affected Search Marketing?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Marketing in a recession is do or die for most businesses. While many stop, smart marketers just get more picky. Having been direct marketing & internet marketing for 10+ years I’ve come to realize a few things. The need for marketing services don’t dissipate when recessions hit, business owners just stop throwing money at the ones that don’t work.

Having previously worked at a firm that did direct marketing for mortgage banks I’ve seen this first hand. When interest rates were low and the housing market was booming, all kinds of mortgage banks would see success with our marketing efforts. Many banks would throw money at any possible marketing campaigns o see what sticks. However, when interest rates would rise, banks with bad loan programs and no niche would go out of business or stop marketing all together while our more successful clients spent even more on marketing campaigns that worked.

Having been in the search marketing industry for 4 years now I’ve seen the same thing with this recession. Many of our previously successful clients that sold low quality or non niche products have put a hold on their marketing spend. While our clients that provide quality products or services are only spending more.

Successful business owners and marketers are putting more effort into evaluating marketing campaign results, analytic and conversions. We have seen many of our successful clients cut their PPCbudgets in half while increasing SEO and social media marketing.

This trend isn’t limited to us, this recent study shows how most businesses allocate their online marketing dollars and what will change in the future.

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Search marketing is forcasted to grow over the years, possibly reaching as much as 24 billion in 2013. This is a significant jump from the 12 billion in 08. SEO expenditures will grow from 1.5 billion in 09 to as high as 3.85 billion in 2013 while pay per click is forecasted to grow from 7.7 billion in 08 to 14.7 billion in 2013.

Posted in General, Pay Per Click (PPC) | No Comments »

Beware of Sheep’s Clothing

Friday, February 27th, 2009

Like many SEO firms, Search Placement has numerous internal websites that allow us to test new methods for optimization before we apply them to client sites. We just recently received an email from one such website promising to “put your site at the top of a search engines listings“. We get plenty of these emails but this one in particular caught my attention. Let’s take a look, shall we?

First, let’s look at the site. The email came from KeyPlacementSEO.com. The website’s SEO page talks about how keyword placement and inbound links can improve your site’s search engine placement. It also offers a “free website analysis”. Here’s my free analysis of the basics for KeyPlacement.com:

  • Title Tag - Their title tags aren’t optimized…”Seo Engine Optimization“?!
  • Meta-Keywords - None
  • Meta-Description - None
  • Headers - Page headers are images instead of text formatted with H1 tags
  • CSS styles are not linked in an external file
  • JavaScript is not linked in an external file
  • No discernible tracking software

These are all elementary elements for search engine optimization and should be addressed even before launching a website. Furthermore, a quick check of the domain registration shows that the domain was just registered less than a month ago.

While this is all somewhat amusing to me, far too many website owners have gotten burned by ‘fly by night’ SEO companies like this one. In fact, many of our clients have had previous experiences with SEO firms that left them in a mess.

When considering working with an SEO firm, make sure you check their background! Ask for references and link building details. Make sure they provide regular, detailed reporting. I can’t stress this enough. It’ll save you from spending thousands on wasted marketing and potentially jeopardizing your web properties.

Posted in E-Commerce, General | No Comments »

New Webmasters Features!

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Last month, Google unveiled some new features to its Webmaster Tools. Two of the most significant changes are a new degree of control over Site Crawl, and the other is a completely redesigned Webmaster’s Help community for English and Polish speaking users.

The new Site Crawl tool will allow users to exercise more control over the rate at which Google’s Site Crawlers index the content on their sites. This is a boon for those who add fresh new content on a regular basis, but may be otherwise too far ‘under the radar’ to be crawled with a degree of regularity. Conversely, if the content of the user’s site is relatively static, they can indicate this via the control panel and economize on bandwidth.

Also new are user forums that replace the older style of Google Webmaster’s Help– this is a great way to assist those individuals who are delving into the wealth of tools and reporting Webmasters can provide. At the moment, only English and Polish help groups have been transitioned to this new format, but other major languages are sure to follow.

Thankfully, Google is always working to improve the end-user experience for those that are involved with their products. These new features are another step forward in being able to understand and control the variables that comprise the universe of searching!

Posted in General, Google | No Comments »

The New WordPress: Coltrane (2.7)

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

The New WordPress has been released, and it brings with it a huge number of changes and new features. Some of these are designed for greater usability, but the vast majority of the updating has been done to the dashboard and the overall look and feel.

The most significant change from an end-user point of view is that all modules and widgets of the interface can be dragged and dropped in any number of arrangements. I’ve included the video from WordPress themselves illustrating some of this new flexibility.

For clients, this new release is wonderful. Not only are many of the features much more intuitive than they were in previous versions, but direct-from-dashboard posting, replying, and editing is a huge boon for those with limited time (all of us). Beyond that, the new auto downloader/installer will be a blessing for those who have been frustrated by manual FTP-based installs of new releases in the past.

Overall, I’m enjoying the new version immensely, and I look forward to discovering all the new ways to utilize this very powerful tool.

Posted in Blogging, General | No Comments »

Web Marketing Sees Growth Even in Economic Chaos

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

The current global economic credit crisis has everyone on edge and wondering what to do with their money. What is safe? What will gain returns? What will maintain the company during this “recession”? These are the questions running through the minds of entrepreneurs, managers and general employees, because they all depend upon the income their respective position gives them.

Advertising and marketing are two areas where dollars are shifting quickly. Traditionally print, TV and radio were the venues to invest in, but rapidly web marketing is pulling those funds. The web is growing on a steadily and more increasing numbers of companies are shifting to the emerging market of web advertising.

Google whose revenues majority is gained through paid advertising has seen an increase of 26% in the last quarter as this trend continues. In 2008, 8.6% of advertising spending was used on the Internet. This is a rise of 1.4% in the last year.

Although there are many insecurities and unknown there is a small ray of light in the stability that Internet marketing is showing and growing even in this depressed time.

Posted in General, Google | No Comments »

Where to Put Your Internet Marketing Dollars

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

There is ongoing debate between the two manners to market online, pay per click and search engine optimization, the first being the one that most marketers pour their dollars into.

Pay per click campaigns are able to demonstrate immediate results for tracking the dollars being spent, but in the long run just funnel money from the marketing budget.

Only 11% of total Internet marketing is spent on search engine optimization yet when looking at the behavior of surfers, the pay per click ads account for the least amount of traffic.  Surfers are skeptical of the “paid” ads because like a television commercial they are aware it is exactly that, an ad to sell.  Most surfers will go through the organic results, trusting that they have reached the first and second page due to the quality of the site.

This is why search engine optimization is becoming such a thriving and important area as more and more companies transfer more and more of their marketing budgets from the traditional advertising to Internet marketing.

When a website is correctly being optimized for the search engine, the results appear natural to the search engine, this builds a more qualitative site to the crawler and your rankings increase. There are many steps and manners to help build organic traffic to the site when working with SEO.

Pay per click has advantages for tracking purposes, but is most useful in the early stages of a campaign before traffic can be generated in a natural way through SEO.

Posted in General | No Comments »

Google and Yahoo, the delayed partnership

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Google and Yahoo have agreed to delay the launch of their cooperative advertising plan until at least next week, while the plan is reviewed for US Anti-trust law violations that have been brought up by competitors. The plan is for Yahoo, who is currently the second ranked search engine is the U.S., to display Google ads on search result pages where they do not have paid advertising. The increase in revenue would be substantial for Yahoo, and allow them to wean away from Google after a period of time.

The arguments over whether this violates the anti-trust regulations are currently being examined and the partnership debated. If the partnership come to fruition, Google and Yahoo will control over 80% of the US search marketing. Those in support feel it will enable Yahoo to be true competition with Google who currently leads the market.

The proposed date for the partnership is October 11 but if it is still under review by US Justice review, there will be a short delay until they are done reviewing. A concern about how extensive Google is becoming creates more problems when trying to innovate and grown, more concern by competitors and advertisers is being raised. Similar to the obstacles Microsoft confronted as it attempted to continue to grow.

Posted in General, Google, Yahoo | No Comments »

New Gadgets, New Research

Friday, September 19th, 2008

The political sphere is the playground for Googles new gadget to be beta tested, the G-Audi. This tool is created to transcribe video feeds on the web, creating a text-based reference that can be searched.

Traditionally video has not been able to be searched because of the lack of text for webcrawlers to grab. The transcriptions of the audio feed on video will create a searchable back end document. This will be able to find words typed into the search field and bring the viewer to directly to the place the audio uses the searched word or phrase.

Currently under testing and review this function is being used for political video on U Tube. This potentially could allow surfers to find both video/audio as well as text for any and all subjects. Research will be changed dramatically with this function, especially with politics, where the primary manner of communication is video/audio rather than written materials.

Where will it go next? For now enjoy pulling up the politicians answers to taxes, health care or the war while they battle it out for presidency.

Posted in General | No Comments »

Google Helps to Bring the Past to the Present

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

Until a mere 15 years ago newspapers were the vehicle through which we learned about the world. Politics, sports, entertainment and of course the day to day happenings that we call news, were all in one easy to find place, the newspaper. The web gave us easy access, to not only our local, regional but to national and international information at the press of a button.

What was lacking? The past. In the last couple years Google has been working with The New York Times and Wall Street Journal to digitize their archives and make them available through Google news archives, but for every small town there is a newspaper with important information that most likely will not make as a national headline. What about these papers and their past?

Google is now working cooperatively with Proquest and Heritage to scan and digitize newspapers from all over the place. They are creating a news archive that will allow the public to read through the material in the original format. This service will be available through Google news but will be working in conjunction to make these archives available on the individual newspapers’ websites.

There is resistance from some publishers due to their current ability to create revenue by charging for archival services. There is a compromise Google is working out to help belay this issue, the results page for the articles will have a paid advertisements on the side, the profits from these will be shared between Google and the publishers.

The availability to research the past will be at everyone’s finger tips… this will increase the ability to look at trends in stock, find out from valid third party sources what the facts were, or at least the facts that were published were. So rather than hearing about how your dad won the game by catching the ball to score a touch down or your grandmother relating her walk through hills of snow to get to school, you can go online and check the newspaper from that time and see how much is exaggeration and how much is truth.

Posted in General, Google | No Comments »

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