july 2008

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If all of this is sounding quite basic, it's because it is. Singhal doesn't give any secrets of how you can get a better ranking for your webpage, but he does say that he will delve deeper into the technology behind ranking in later posts - so we will keep our eyes peeled and ears to the ground for you.

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Ask was shifting focus away from Search, however a new deal has emerged which may provide a better insight into their real focus. The former Butler of search engines has tied up a deal with photo sharing and hosting service, Photobucket, which will see Ask.com results served as the default web search results on the site. The deal will also Ask's sponsored listings and display advertising syndicated in Photobucket's results. Photobucket, who was bought by News Corp. in May 2007, is one of the top players in the photo sharing and hosting space. The site generates over 44 million uniques per month, offering some valuable search exposure for Ask's search results. "Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day," said Andrew Moers, senior vice president and general manager for Ask.com's Partner Network. Essentially the deal will see the Ask.com search box featured through the Photobucket website and the results displayed in what looks like a co-branded ask.com search page (see image below). While the deal wont bridge the gap between and Ask.com and search leaders Google and Yahoo!, it's a clever niche focus, which provides advertisers with access to a highly targeted audience.

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Last week, I attended the Perth leg of the B&T Bootcamp. It was great to spend a full day immersed in all that Digital Marketing can offer, above and beyond Search Engine Marketing.The day started out with a great presentation by Mike Walsh regarding the future of Digital Marketing. Mike focused a lot on the Asian social networks. Made me realize how advanced Asian networks are compared to their western counterparts.Marc Loveridge from Market United was next with a snappy and clever presentation on what is essentially a dry topic - Digital Marketing Definitions. Would love to see a video of Marc's presentation as it was not only informative but entertaining.SearchWorlds' Andrew Beecher was next, talking about something I was very familiar with, that being Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. Andrew's slide deck also included some basic hints for starting out in optimizing your website. Whilst they may appear to be overly simplistic to an experienced search marketer, they are the real basics which unfortunately a lot of people miss.Covering off the analytics was Nielsen Online's Megan Clarken. I had been looking forward to this topic (it brings out the search geek in me!) but found the flow of the presentation quite hard to follow. Too many slides with over use of graphs and data. It ended with an overview of all the products that Nielsen offers. At the end of the talk, I was still not any wiser as to how Nielsen differs from Google Analytics for visitor information or Hitwise for industry stats.After a break for lunch, David Green who is the Head of Mobile Advertising for Vodafone Australia presented. I found this session to be more of a "vendor push" than anything else, as he covered all of the mobile advertising options available on the Vodafone network.Hitting on a topic which is of interest to any company who sends out email communications or newsletters, e-services communication's Simon O'Day spoke about the key differences between managing it in-house versus using a professional agency. The key take away for me, was if your revenue comes from these communications, then the question isn't can you afford to outsource but rather how can you afford not to? If you are going to do your email communications in house, make sure you test how the email will look in a variety of different mail system i.e. Outlook with images off, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.Simon te Brinke (Director of Gramercy Park Consulting) talked about Social Networking in Plain English. During the presentation, Simon admitted he was one of the many thousands addicted to "crackbook" (Facebook). The key takeaway for companies - if you are going to use Social Networks to market your products and services, then make sure you engage your audience. Be proactive in claiming your company's social space.The final session of the day, was perhaps the lightest on - appropriate as the audience was getting quite tired. Rich Media was presented by Carlo Bertozzi, who used it to showcase ...

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If you, like me, are sick of the endless discussion regarding the Microsoft and Yahoo on again and off again acquisition talk, then finally there is some positive news from the Microsoft Search Team. Microsoft has bought semantic search technology company Powerset. Semantic search extends from traditional keyword based search, by using the science behind language (in particular the intent) to deliver results.At the heart of Powerset's technology is their exclusive licensing of natural language processing technology from Xerox's Research Labs. This is the same lab credited with providing the first WIMP (Windows Icons Menus Pointing Device) operating system, which was the forefront of the Apple and Windows operating Systems. Two other jewels in Powerset's crown were enough to attract Microsoft's money - namely the power to combine the natural language processing with the ability to actually search and the people behind all the technology. With Microsoft so far behind in the search race, hopefully the addition of the Powerset technology and people can close the Google-Gap. Only time will tell.

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There's no better feeling than seeing your traffic trend chart hovering over a competitor's site/s. And should the opposite be the case - nothing is more frustrating.For those of you who want an easy way to see how your site compares to your competitors in terms of traffic and reach, here are the top traffic benchmark tools - and best of all, they're free (well for the most part - many offer premium services too).Descriptions below are taken from the respective tool's website - so any ridiculously impressive claims are purely the opinion of the site's copywriter. But they're listed here because they're worth your attention (in my opinion).Compete.com[it now includes website comparison based on the same technology]So without further ado...get going. See how your site compares to your nemesis. If you don't even rate on their charts - then you've got some serious traffic generation work to do!

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Google has just launched a new blog (Let's Take It Offline), which will be the home of news and updates on its growing range of traditional media advertising options.The search giant has been busy acquiring and developing various traditional media advertising options which include radio, TV and newspapers so far. The new blog will be the place to find the latest developments on these and any other traditional media advertising releases.Kate Pacher, a Google AdWords Account Manager, was given "first post" honors. She shared the vision and goals for the new blog as follows:"We've created this blog as a place for you to turn for the latest in feature launches and tips to help you run effective traditional media campaigns.We'll also share recent industry findings, which we think will be interesting and useful for both individuals who are new to TV, print, and radio, as well as those of you who have been using those mediums for a while. Additionally, we'll give you a glimpse into the life of our team here at Google, so you can learn more about who we are and what we do."For anyone looking to explore or further improve their performance across Google's new traditional advertising choices - it's probably worthwhile subscribing to the feed, as Google's product specific blogs are usually a good source for the latest info that could impact your Google campaigns. You can access the "Let's Take it Offline" feed here.

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Yahoo! recently announced another update to its search index. With the announcement, comes the usual warning "you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index".Yahoo! conducts these updates almost monthly, and as Yahoo!'s reputation has steadily declined over the past months, it seems the "care factor" on these updates has suffered a similar fate.So, should you care when Yahoo! undertakes a re-shuffle of its search index? YES, well maybe!Sometimes its easy to get caught up in the pessimism of the industry and make judgments based developments that don't really matter to your business (e.g. what jerry's doing at an exec level).At the end of the day, the importance of Yahoo! updates is directly related to Yahoo!'s contribution to your website and business. Whether you like Yahoo! or not, if it's sending you valuable traffic - then you're crazy to ignore index changes that could impact your website's performance.Having just reviewed the ineedhits' traffic data for June, I know that Yahoo!'s US Search index delivers over 19% of our organic traffic. That's still a significant proportion of our overall SEO traffic volume. Enough to warrant a cautious eye over each update. While Yahoo! is still well and truly over shadowed by Google - it's still the "next best thing" and really shouldn't be "totally" ignored. While the updates are often, only minor - you never know when a certain tweak will be your undoing. On several occasions, we've seen our Yahoo! Search Submit Basic clients suffer significant traffic drops at the hands of a Yahoo! index update. So, ignore them at your own peril. For those of you who do care, here's some of the feedback on the update from the forums:"I lost 40 percent of my YH traffic two days ago and pages per visit plummeted to 1.2 for the remaining traffic.""I'm seeing some bouncing today as well. Appears that some test pages of mine are ranking better due to anchor text."

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Adobe has just made it easier for Google and Yahoo! to uncover Web content that was previously "invisible" to Web searches.

With technology provided to them by Adobe, Google & Yahoo! will be able to better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications including Flash files.

Currently, search engines index text and links with Flash files, but up until now rich Internet applications and dynamic Web content have been elusive to search engines.

Google has already got the ball rolling with this news by announcing that they have launched a new Flash indexing algorithm which will index content from Flash menus, buttons, banners and entire Flash sites.

In a statement from Google:

Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability ...