Search Matters + Social Influences
The top search engines are on Twitter. Are you following their tweets?
And one of my personal favorites:
Google is the most represented of the companies, with many more accounts set up for various products: news, apps, etc. Here is a link that lists all Twitter accounts with Google in the name; just beware of immitators!
Cast your vote online until Feb. 2, 2009
What the heck’s a SEMMY? To quote the website, “It’s an annual awards event honoring some of the best articles and blog posts from the search marketing industry, as voted by the industry. We have 200 authors nominated, representing 157 blogs/sites.”
The SEMMYS was developed by Matt McGee (blog), David Mihm (website) and LogoWorks (website).
Don’t delay. Head on over to the SEMMYS website now and cast your votes because public voting ends February 2nd. Here’s the timeline:
Nominations are included in each of the following categories.
I’ m sure we will see a lot of SAMMYS chatter online over the next week. Be sure to Digg, StumbleUpon, Tweet, Blog or whatever it is you do to encourage voting. And congratulations to all of the nominees.
comScore (website) tracks the volume of searches in the United States each month. Following are their findings for December 2008, compared to November 2008.
December 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings
Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, unchanged from November, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.9 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent). Visit the comScore website to see their full findings.
|
comScore Core Search Report* |
|||
|
Core Search Entity |
Share of Searches (%) |
||
|
Nov-08 |
Dec-08 |
Point Change Dec-08 vs. Nov-08 |
|
|
Total Core Search |
100.0 |
100.0 |
N/A |
|
Google Sites |
63.5 |
63.5 |
0.0 |
|
Yahoo! Sites |
20.4 |
20.5 |
0.1 |
|
Microsoft Sites |
8.3 |
8.3 |
0.0 |
|
Ask Network |
4.0 |
3.9 |
-0.1 |
|
AOL LLC |
3.8 |
3.8 |
0.0 |
* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
You can’t turn on the news these days without hearing at least one story about the economic conditions ─ bail outs, bankruptcies, cutbacks, layoffs and more. Marketing and advertising dollars are usually the first slashes made in the budget so it’s no surprise that industry analysts are projecting advertising spending in all categories to be down in 2009 ─ all areas except one: online advertising.
Online ad spending is expected to grow between 6 – 10% in 2009. The largest category of online advertising is search, which is expected to comprise more than 47% of the ad spend online. Clearly, this creates an opportunity for agencies, but many advertising, public relations and interactive agencies have not yet jumped into organic search.
If you are one of those agencies, you’ll want to read the white paper titled“How to Grow Your Agency in the Downturn: SEO Answers the SOS.” Written specifically for owners and managers of advertising, public relations, interactive and marketing communications agencies, this white paper addresses the current market conditions for the advertising industry and shines the light on the opportunities with search engine optimization (SEO).
Topics covered include:
“How to Grow Your Agency in the Downturn: SEO Answers the SOS” is freely available for download on the Ecordia website at www.ecordia.com/soswhitepaper. It’s a must read for all agency professionals who are considering adding organic search to their service offerings. The reasons to do so are growing and with Ecordia, the barriers are shrinking.
SEO White Hat
In movies set in the wild west, the good guys always wore white and the bad guys donned black. The same is true in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).
“Black hat SEO” is a term referring to unethical techniques employed to “trick” the search engines to rank a web page in a top spot of its organic search, despite its true relevance – or lack thereof. Examples of black hat techniques include:
Although black hat SEO techniques may deliver top rankings in the short run, sites employing these run the risk of being penalized — or even banned — from the search engines.
“White hat SEO” refers to techniques used to aid search engines in understanding and ranking content based on adhering to SEO best practices. There are numerous things a website owner may do to improve a site’s SEO, but it all amounts to one thing: build a site that is very rich with quality content and people and the search engines will find the site. Google provides a lot of information about SEO best practices. Give it a read for an even better understanding of white hat SEO and you’ll be sure to have happy trails.
Happy Trails for the White Hat SEO
Natural listings, organic results, sponsored ads, SERPs — these are just a few of the terms used to describe elements of a Google results page. But do you know what each one means? If they’re Greek to you, then keep on reading.
When you conduct a search query on Google, the results page presented — also known as a search engine results page or SERP — usually contains links that are free as well as links that are purchased. Free listings are referred to as “natural” or “organic” results. They represent the majority of the results on a SERP and are found along the left side of the page. See the green box in Figure 1 below.
Purchased links are called “Sponsored Links,” but may also be referred to as “pay-per-click ads (PPC),” “Google AdWords” or “paid ads.” Sponsored links are found along the right side of the page, and may also be the top three links on the left side of the SERP. See the pink boxes in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 -- Organic results vs. Paid results
As suggested by the name, Sponsored Links are paid ad placements based on the purchase of clicks for specific search query keywords. Organic results on the other hand, are completely controlled by Google. Google bots crawl millions of web pages every day, constantly analyzing the context of pages and adding them to its index. Using Google’s proprietary and incredibly secret algorithm, it serves up organic results to your query, making every attempt to provide the highest quality web pages matching the keywords.
There is a lot more that may be said about how PPC and organic listings happen, but we’ll leave those for other posts. For now, if you would like a detailed explanation of all of the elements on a Google SERP, visit Google’s Web Help page (link).
