Search Engine Placement

Software Megacorp Microsoft made a bid of 44.6 billion to buyout Yahoo Inc today, in a move that could change the face of the search marketing industry. Right now Google is king with over 58.4% of online searches, with Yahoo trailing at 22.9% and MSN further behind with just 9.8%. If MSN does take over Yahoo, search engine placement companies, like us, will certainly have to change our strategies to focus on top rankings on the new MSN.
As it stands right now, most search marketers focus on Google & Yahoo search engine placement as that makes up for most of the searches. I wonder if MSN will incorporate Yahoo’s more sophisticated search engine algorithms or if MSN will take the lead.

Dell is a computer company that originally started making computers from old computer parts and selling them to college students. The company quickly gained popularity and started making original computer designs.

In these years, Dell sold custom-configured personal computers to individuals and businesses as a mail-order company.

But as the internet grew, so did Dell’s plans. Dell became an e-commerce site, in addition to a mail-order company. Dell had been selling computers via mail and phone for over ten years, so why should this switch make any difference?

If 25 percent of Dell’s sales from the phone moved over to the web just to achieve another 25 percent of sales, then nothing would be gained – or lost. But since the web requires less personnel and manpower and saves time then there would be something gained. Time and money would be gained from the decrease in time and people needed to run the website and its orders.

Or maybe, Dell didn’t even have to lose 25 percent of its sales. They discovered that there is a percentage the country’s population who prefers ordering over the internet than from over a phone line. Now, there is an additional percentage of sales coming in, just from the website.

And one last thing: it is common knowledge among professional salespersons that it easier to keep costumers and convince them to buy more than it is to get additional customers. Gaining customer loyalty is vital and building a site that will keep your customers returning helps tremendously.

Dell created its e-commerce site early on, which has helped it maintain its lead in sales of computers from the very beginning.

Any web development or maintenance requires access to the website but this is not always as simple as it sounds. Depending on what needs to be changed and how the website is built there may be a whole handful of ways to access the site, each serving a different purpose. This can often be confusing for those who aren’t a “web techie”. For those of you that fall into that category, we’ve posted an overview of the different username and password combinations that may be needed when administering a website. Hopefully, this will keep you from pulling your hair out and cursing your web developer!

Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus called the Elk Cloner, has a new challenge for the computer world. He is challenging popular search engine Google. Skrenta is designing a new search engine, which he is calling Blekko.

After leaving one of his former companies, Topix, he and some co-workers raised two million dollars in seed funding in September 2007. He received the money from Baseline Ventures and other contributors.

The company is still very underground and in the beginning stages of development. The Blekko website currently has only a picture of a puppet on it, which his daughter made.

Although not a proponent of PageRank, Skrenta has not revealed any of the details of the website or how it will be competing with Google. One of the few details that have been given is that Skrenta has been researching other improvements on indexing and query saving and user search experiences.

It may be a while before we know any more details about the new search engine. Skrenta says he may not have a public prototype until 2009.

#1: Ask them “Why is this proposal so expensive?”, then tell them you already know how to do meta tags.

#2: Don’t tell them you have 5 other exact copies of your site with different domain names until the end of the campaign.

#3: Check in every day for a status update.

#4: Make your own changes to the site at the same time they are working on it.

#5: After a week, ask how your rankings have improved. Make sure to check them every day and comment on the movement in your rankings.

#6: Ask them for a discount since you did your own “search engine submissions”, tell them godaddy does it for free.

#7: Go through the entire list of your backlinks and ask about every website that links to you.

#8: Add your own keywords using hidden text, make sure just to repeat the same keyword 500 times one each page.

#9: Assume they are now your technical support technician for your desktop and printer problems.

#10: Redesign the site in the middle of the campaign using Flash.

Google Custom Search Engine allows you to create your own customized Google search engine for your website or websites. By doing this, it will give the ability and flexibility to make your listing the highest result on the search engine results page.

Google CSE allows you to build essentially a vertical search engine. You have many options when customizing your own search engine page. You can have it in any language you prefer. It allows to choose whether or not you have ads on you page. You can put your own business or organization’s logo on the page. You can also design your page with any color or even alter it to match the design of your original website. It is also incredibly easy to use. All it takes is a very basic level of programming knowledge and ability.

Along with all these options for customization, Google also offers dedicated email and phone support when customizing and you can use Google AdSense to help make money with the search engine.

By creating your own Google CSE, you will not be increasing or decreasing your search engine rankings. What it does is give you superior results from your very own vertical search engine.

To optimize your placement in the major search engines, contact us.

This is an industry defined by acronyms and in it people often have trouble determining the difference between SEO and SEM, and PPC and CPC. Here is a list of SEO acronyms which can be quite useful and worth letting other people know.

BL: Backlink (the incoming link from another website)
CPC: Cost Per Click (the cost that is paid to a publisher every time anyone clicks on a pay per click ad)
CSE: Comparison Shopping Engine or Custom Search Engine (Google)
CSS: Cascading Style Sheet
DC: Data Center
DMOZ: Directory - Mozilla
HTML: HyperText Markup Language
IBL: Inbound Link
IPB9: Internet Business Promoter
LSA: Latent semantic analysis
LSI: Latent Semantic Indexing
OBL: Outbound Link
ODP: Open Directory Project, See DMOZ
OWBL: One way back link
PPA: Pay Per Action
PPC: Pay Per Click (an advertising campaign where the advertiser pays a specific ad publisher only when anyone clicks on their ad)
PR: PageRank (Google’s measurement of a website link popularity, which is shown on a scale of 1-10)
RI: Regular index
RSS: RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication
SE: Search Engine
SEM: Search Engine Marketing (a set of techniques used to increase a website’s visibility in the search engines)
SEO: Search Engine Optimization (optimizing a website or web page as to create better search engine placement for particular search phrases)
SERP: Search Engine Results Page (the web page results of a search that a search engine finds when someone has made a search query)
SI: Supplemental Index
SSE: Yahoo! Search Submit Express
SSP: Yahoo! Search Submit Pro
SWL: SiteWide Link
TBPR: Toolbar PageRank
TR: Trust Rank
VIPS: Visual-block Page Segmentation
WP/WP4: Web Position/Web Position 4
XML: Extensible Markup Language

Always brewing up something new, Google has two hot new pieces of technological genius on their doorstep.

The first is the GDrive. This new device would let users store on Google’s own computer essentially all of the files users might keep on their personal computer hard drives (like digital music, videos and images, and word-processing documents).

Microsoft offers a program like this already, but for a fee. Google, as usual, has the means to offer this service for free, which is always a plus to drawing users to use their services. Reports are still uncertain to whether Google will be displaying ads in this storage service. But it would open a whole new world of online ads if Google chooses to do so.

The second is the “Gphone,” though not actually a phone in real matter. The Google phone is really called Android and is the “first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.” Android includes an operating system, user-interface and applications. Basically, Android has all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.

Android is working cooperatively with Google’s Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technological and mobile leaders including Motorola and T-Mobile. Through these partnerships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, Google hopes to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform.

If you’d like to optimize your placement in the major search engines, contact us!

Created by Shop.org, the “holiday” is considered to be the first official online shopping day. Just like Black Monday where retailers offer sometimes ridiculous deals to lure shoppers in, on Cyber Monday online stores offer incredible discounts and savings to those buying items that day.

The day brought in over $700 million in sales, up from $608 million in 2006 and $485 million in 2005. Despite it being ranked as only the 12^th most popular online shopping day (according to Business Week’s Robert Hof), retailers expect their numbers to continue to rise as the day becomes more known.

Although Cyber Monday happened almost perfectly well, there was at least one glitch with the online shopping. Yahoo Merchant Solutions’ shopping cart software crashed on Cyber Monday, leading to a dramatic loss of revenue for over 10,000 merchants using the Yahoo software.

Beginning at 8:31am (PST) a message on the Yahoo Merchant Solutions System Status page characterized the problem as an “Error Message During Checkout.” As the day went on, this messaged continued for many people trying to checkout. Nothing else was updated until 5:12pm (PST), saying that Yahoo was investigating the issue. The system wasn’t fully repaired and running until 11:00pm (PST). Yahoo’s only explanation of the mess up was that they had experienced “technical glitches.”

There are some common and basic paid search engines out there that we all use and love. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, and Ask.com Sponsored Listings are always good, safe choices. But going outside of your comfort zone will pay off when you try out these eight other sites that are less known but just as good in the long run.

Some of the benefits of at least testing out these other sites are some to consider. One benefit is that they will charge considerably less per click then the more well-known sites, but they will often feed the same quality of traffic to your website. The result: a much higher ROI that will increase the impact of your advertising budget nicely. Also, by using these other sites you will be tapping into an audience that has been hidden from the bigger search engines.

Myspace SelfServe Ads: Still in the works and to be released in early 2008, this engine has a $10 minimum advertisement purchase amount and has many people talking.

7Search: This search engine has a low $25 account start up fee and has no minimum bid.

FaceBbook Ads: Offering very affordable rates, this engine was formally known as FaceBook Flyers. It reaches a very large demographic.

MIVA: An underrated yet growing search engine that distributes ads over two networks. The engine also owns SearchFeed.

Looksmart: Known to have very good customer service, this search engine distributes through many different partners.

Search123: Delivering consistently high levels of traffic at incredibly low prices, this engine has been involved in PPC since October 2000.

Superpages: The traffic available to those using this engine is interested and ready to buy, and the engine is perfect for restaurants and local services.

GoClick: Having a high customer retention rate, the engine has quality traffic at low prices.

To learn more about search engine optimization and how it can help your business, contact us today!