Online Marketing Blog

InfoSpace to buy Switchboard - Snippet: “The companies together account for 23% of total online Yellow Pages searches.” - From Business Wire

Yahoo! plans to acquire Kelkoo, a European online comparison-shopping service, for about $570 million - Snippet: “Commerce has emerged as a key component of search, and the combination of Web search, product search and comparison shopping will help further Yahoo!’s goal to create the most comprehensive and best user experience on the Web globally…Yahoo CEO Terry Semel” - From AdWeek IQ Interactive

Gen X and Y have embraced the Web in a big way - This is news? It is for babyboomers. From MediaDaily News

GuruNet Desktop Search Tool Returns Answers, Not Just Search Results. Snippet: The value proposition of GuruNet.com is, “I know it’s out there somewhere. I don’t want to hunt for it. I just want to know about it quickly.” - Article From eMarketer

Thomas Global Register Partners with Findwhat.com for BtoB Directory. Snippet: The deal is the fourth private label deal FindWhat has struck, including one with Verizon to power the paid listings on its SuperPages.com Internet yellow pages site. - From DM News

Yahoo News 2.0 (Beta) - Yahoo is testing a new version of its news search engine with an exapanded source database and media search options.

Interesting stats regarding the use of keyword optimized press releases:
Neilsen//NetRatings reports Yahoo News with a unique audience of 19.8 million visitors in January 2004 and Google News with 4.1 million unique visitors.

According to a Middleberg/Ross Survey, 98% of journalists go online daily, 92% for article research, 81% to do searching, 76% to find new sources or experts, and 73% to find press releases.
More information on keyword optimized press release services

Compare Yahoo and Google search results

Submit to Yahoo - You need to have a Yahoo account for this. Other than Yahoo’s new Paid Inclusion + Pay Per Click program through Overture called SiteMatch, there may not be another way to get into default Yahoo search results.

Tech Marketing Budgets Turn Around - Projected to Increase. Snippet: “…tech marketing departments are now emerging as either ‚ÄúLeaders or Laggards.” From IDC CMO Advisory Service

66% of US IT budgets will grow over the coming year. Snippet: “Companies with under $100 million in annual revenues will increase their IT budgets by 8.3% this year.” - From AMR vie eMarketer

Forester: “”Google can’t be everything to everyone.” From netimperative

Yahoo Launches Geotargeting into it’s Mapping Service - From The Kelsey Group

Ask Jeeves to Buy Group that includes Excite.com and iWon.com
Some of the coverage:
Ask Jeeves Press Release
Brand Republic
InfoWorld
IT World
San Jose Mercury News
ClickZ News
ZDNet

Yahoo and BlackHat Optimization - from webproworld

Check Out New Google Web Page Format - From Jesse Ruderman via Google Weblog

Representatives from Google, Yahoo!, America Online, and AskJeeves sounded off at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo in New York City in regard to the evolution of search. Personalization and content integration. Yahoo justifies combining paid and organic listings while Google argues searches appreciate a distinction between paid and organic listings.

As a searcher, I would rather know whether search results are paid or not. If they are relevant, I will click on either. From Media Daily News

AOL’s ICQ launches Friendster-style service From Reuters

Took a look at our main site server logs and noticed this interesting list of visitors over the past few weeks:

citicorp.com
hilton.com
bankofamerica.com
intuit.com
fedex.com
kingston.net
lucent.com
norwest.com
nutrisystem.com
ford.com
disney.com
ballyfitness.com
mmm.com

Now the question is, how many of these companies contacted us? Answer, one. But that’s not my point for the list. It’s to show that major brands do indeed click on organic search engine listings when researching online marketing vendors. Each of these companies found our TopRank site through a search on Google or Yahoo using variations of: search engine marketing firms, search engine optimization firms, online marketing firms, etc.

Google Dance. This is sort of old info for those of us in the SEO industry by now, but it’s not a bad take on Googles updates in the past few months. From Media Daily News.

Sullivan: No One Will Win Search War - Great interview with Danny Sullivan and I agree: increased competition within the search engine space leads to better search performance for users and spreads traffic opportunities for companies. It used to be that a web site could gain excellent amounts of organic listing traffic from any of 5 or 6 top search engines. In the past year or more, it’s been all about Google. If Google makes an update that does not favor a particular site any longer, the vast majority of traffic is lost. With multiple primary sources of organic listing traffic, any one engine is not as critical to a site’s success. From ClickZ News

Yahoo! to charge companies to ensure search index placement - Site Match, the commercial paid inclusion component of the new program, will be available on a subscription or full-service basis directly from Overture and other resellers.

eWeek’s Take on Google Relevance Snippet: “Google’s reliance on link popularity may have finally hit a wall. Past a certain point, link counting rewards “optimized” sites rather than lesser-known sites that may contain exactly what you need.”

Practical Guide to Basic SEO - Not a bad rundown of tactics, shameless plug included. From iMedia Connection.