Online Marketing Blog

Local Search Guide aims to become a “Who’s Who” of Search Engine, Internet Yellow Pages and Search Tool Companies. The guide is sponsored by comScore, SEMPO and the Kelsey Group and was launched at the Chicago SES show. Full release and additional coverage from MediaDailyNews

Jupiter Search Study Corroborates SEMPO Research: From MarketingVOX. Companies that use agencies to manage their search marketing campaigns spend significantly more than those who do it themselves.
Jupiter Search Engine Marketing Report.
SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing Report.

DMNews.com News Article: “Ask Jeeves Joins Battle for Desktop”. You can download the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search Beta here

OK, how many desktop search tools can actually make it? It will be interesting to see how many get launched and then what the distribution of use is in the next six months.

So far there’s:

Copernic Desktop Search
Blinkx
Google Desktop
MSN Toolbar Suite
Ask Jeeves Desktop Search based on Tukaroo
Yahoo is to launch it’s X1 based desktop search tool in early 2005.

SEMPO Finds Advertisers Will Spend $4 Billion Dollars in 2004 on Search Engine Marketing. 2005 estimated at 39% higher according to their recently released research paper, The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004.”

Official Summary:

ÙÄÇÉ Brand awareness is advertisers’ top objective for SEM programs, particularly
large firms
ÙÄÇÉ ROI is outpacing inflation: Advertisers say they could afford to pay on average
33% more for price of keywords and remain profitable, while they say prices have
gone up 26% on average in the last 12 months
ÙÄÇÉ SEM is poaching budget from shopping directory listings, web advertising, email
and print ads
ÙÄÇÉ Senior executives consider SEM a high business priority at 50% of advertiser
respondents
ÙÄÇÉ Advertisers plan to increase their SEM spending 41% on average in 2005
ÙÄÇÉ Most advertisers plan to manage the majority of their SEM spending in-house
in 2005

Microsoft Toolbar
Microsoft announed it’s new toolbar today. It’s in beta but includes: desktop search, Internet Explorer toolbar and a toolbar for Outlook. The new Microsoft offering joins Yahoo Companion and Google Toolbar - From CNET News

Yahoo Desktop Search
Yahoo plans to launch a beta version of Yahoo Desktop Search early 2005.

Google Suggest
Google Suggest is a tool that tries to automatically guess what you’re searching for in real-time. It’s an interesting tool. It looks like it might be useful for doing a little keyword research as well. Here’s the Google Suggest FAQ - Thanks to Pandia Search World

SEO Consultants has initiated efforts at establishing Search Engine Marketing Standards recently. Feedback from the SEO Consultants Membership are posted.

Excellent article from Amanda Watlington on the need for keyword research on blogs and blog marketing.

Of course I am very much in agreement that blogs and their pages, like any other document that can be indexed by a search engine, should be influenced by keyword research and analysis. For example, search for “marketing blog” or “marketing blogs” on Google. Our blog is #1 or #2 out of 6 million plus search results for a reason. I could have named it “Lee’s blog” or “TopRank blog”. But who would ever search on those names? Anyway, nice article Amanda.

DMNews.com | News | Article: “Clinton Helps Launch Business Search Engine”. This is interesting, they have a “Submit Site” link which directs you to a form. When you submit, it tries to send using your email client instead of a server side form process script. That’s a little cheesey. There is a streaming video of the site launch party where President Clinton speaks.

Report: Blogs Hotting Up on Madison Avenue - MarketingVOX. Full article at: Business Week - This is a pretty optimistic article on blogs.

Quite a contrast to the commentary by Robert W. Bly in DM News a few months ago. In fact, that article had so much feedback (disagreeing with his position that blogs are not worthwhile marketing tools for business) that he recently published a follow up article: Blogging Redux: Show Me the ROI

The magic that makes Google tick - ZDNet UK Insight: “The magic that makes Google tick”

* Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
* Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
* Over 30 clusters
* 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
* One petabyte of data in a cluster — so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue
* Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
* An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
* No complete system failure since February 2000
* It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet

Microsoft to Offer Blogging Service - Microsoft Watch A beta program of MSN Spaces was launched a few months ago in Japan. Hey, why not? Things are getting interesting again with MSN.

What are Blogs, and Why Your Business Should Use One - Article at Search Engine Journal by Richard Zwicky.

Blogs: Fad or Marketing Medium of the Future? - Article from AdWeek. Why do these headlines present issues as “all or nothing”? Blogging is here and like all things Internet will change as time goes on. Does that make it a Fad?