ATTRACT, CONNECT AND BOOST YOUR SALES

Web Design, SEO Services & Internet Marketing
by Deon Designs

The financial analysts were busy yesterday pushing out the comScore search market share data for February, which officially comes out later today. What the data show is: Google regaining some share “lost” in January and continued gains by Bing, albeit at a somewhat slowing pace.

Yahoo lost some share again and so did Ask, while AOL was “stable.” Yahoo’s search losses, attributed by the search team there to lost “default” toolbar and other similar deals, is now a kind of chronic, month over month phenomenon — a decline in slow motion. I might also argue it reflects a weakening of Yahoo’s brand in connection with search over time.

In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in February.

Googlers convicted in Italy. The biggest news in Europe in February without a doubt was the conviction of three Googlers in Italy. They were convicted to a suspended sentence after the company had allegedly failed to respond quickly to an uploaded YouTube video over a year ago which showed Italian youngsters harassing a young boy with Downs Syndrome.

Taking a page from Salesforce.com, last night Google formally launched the anticipated Google Apps Marketplace at its “Campfire One” developer event. In short it allows companies and developers to gain access and sell into Google’s “2 million businesses and 25 million Google Apps users.” The marketplace launches with 50 partners including Intuit and competitor Zoho.

Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog:

Because we are still in the research phase of PPC development, it’s important to get a very clear understanding of the advertiser’s business online and how that will affect the way we build and manage the account. Last week, I introduced the concept of the keyword landscape, the set of keywords, ads and competitors that are relevant to your advertiser. This week, I’ll dive even deeper into the keyword landscape using advanced tools that can tell us a lot more than what last week’s quick glance revealed.

In my discussion yesterday of the comScore search data I neglected to point out (as GigaOm has) that Facebook saw 10 percent search query growth in the past month. That’s significant and it validates an argument I’ve long made that Facebook could turn out to be a meaningful player in search, which would in turn benefit Bing.

Here are the comScore “expanded” search data:

Meanwhile over on the other side of the globe Motorola has made a very public statement that whatever happens with Google in China, it will be working with Bing search on its Android handsets there.

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Yahoo announced a search update to their index. The update includes possible updates to Yahoo’s crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.

Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen much discussion around fluctuations in Yahoo’s search index recently, but maybe some significant changes are coming soon?

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

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I’ve been at companies large and small, fat and lean. Whether the company is two people trying to build a business out of their home, or 10K+ employees at companies like PayPal and Yahoo, no matter what the size of the company, there are always going to be resource constraints.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Crawling and indexing issues can really put a damper on your efforts to rank well for a variety of competitive and non-competitive terms.  Solving indexing issues is definitely an important step towards increasing your keyword ranking footprint. And, the more real estate you own by solving those issues, means you’re taking the next steps in realizing your long-tail efforts.

Before I start with a problem site, I take a few measurements.  Whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, you need to figure out where you’re starting from to make sure you’re helping and not hurting your efforts. I start by pulling a variety of data:

More than a year since the three major search engines united to announce the canonical tag, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

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Online marketing firm OneUpWeb recently conducted an eye-tracking study about the impact of integrating real-time data into search results. The study involved 44 people divided into two groups: “consumers” and “information foragers.” The difference between the groups involved the tasks they were given:

The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, and were called the “consumer” group. The second group was told to simply look for information on a product, and were called the “forager” group.

The study, conducted last month, sought to answer the following questions:

1. Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results?

Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall. The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned that the Google Web Toolkit team is eager to help with any implementation questions over at their community forums.

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Google is asking for user feedback and ideas for its Google Buzz product, and has setup an ideas forum using Google Moderator. After signing in with a Google account, users can submit ideas or vote on existing ideas from other users.

According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.

Credits to: Matt McGee

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Culminating an internal project that seems to have lasted for several months, Google has published a “Google SEO Report Card” showing the results of an internal SEO audit on the home pages of 100 different Google Products. The main verdict? Like many companies, Google’s web site is a mixed bag of good SEO tactics and missed opportunities.

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I’ve found it annoying that over the years, more and more people use SEM to mean paid search, as if SEM excludes SEO. That’s not how I defined SEM — search engine marketing — back 2001. I’d still like to see the original definition retained. But I might be swimming against the tide. Below, how I think we arrived at this conflict and some thoughts on where we go from here.

Types Of Listings

To understand where we’re at now, let me start with some core concepts. There are two basic ways to show up in search results:

Many management advice books recommend that businesses should make better use of what’s often their biggest investment: employees. Yet, a lot of companies fail to inspire, motivate and exploit the good ideas of their employees. Local search marketing often has an employee component that’s overlooked as well. Read on for some tips on leveraging your employee capital for better local search rankings!

In the Business 1.0 world, employees were often treated as depersonalized, faceless drones, replaceable cogwheels in corporate machinery. This perspective often seems to be reflected in traditional corporate websites where individual employees are relegated to the background, and rarely are any individuals highlighted or recognized on those company webpages.

This is the first of a two part series on selling SEO in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences of that realization.

In many large enterprises, when SEO is first introduced, it happens because some internal person is championing its cause. If you are that person, chances are really good that you are facing some very interesting challenges related to the ignorance of others in the company. They probably think you are speaking Swahili to them.

In a letter earlier this month, members of the European Union’s data protection group urged Google to make changes to its Street View mapping/photo service and warned that Google might be breaking EU laws.

According to Bloomberg News, the letter from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asks Google to store unblurred Street View images for six months, instead of the one year that images are currently stored. The Associated Press adds that the letter also asks Google to notify residents in advance of taking Street View photos by posting information on its web site, as well as in local and/or national media.

The Pew Internet project has just released a lengthy report on online news consumption entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. There are no search-specific findings; however it appears from the survey data that “portal websites like Google News, AOL and Topix are the most commonly used online news sources, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day.”

Here are some of the high-level findings from the report:

• 92% get news from multiple platforms on a typical day, with half of those using four to six platforms daily. Fully 59% get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.  Just over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and 2% rely exclusively on the internet for their daily news.

We’re getting more and more reports from readers who are seeing a “new” Google look-and-feel for its search results. This is a three column design that Google’s actually been testing for some time. That testing appears to be accelerating.

Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature is our story from last November that takes an in-depth look at the new user interface and the features it offers.

At the time, we wrote:

For the past couple of months, Google has been telling the world that page speed is an increasingly important aspect of Web sites. The Google Speed site – which has the laudable goal of making Web browsing as fast as turning the pages of a magazine – has been featured in several posts on their Webmaster blog, and features links to various free tools that they, and others, have made available for the masses.

So, as someone responsible for a site, if you suspect that you may have page load issues, what’s your first stop? Where should you go to get an overall idea of your site performance, short of opening every page of your site while holding a stopwatch?