Online Marketing Blog

By accident I ended up on mywebsearch.com with a search for my company name. What did I see in the “sponsored” results (from Google) but an ad from a large west coast SEM firm.

It’s not that they ran an AdWords ad on my company name that was so annoying, that’s been happening for a while, it was a less than flattering ad on SEO in general: “Don’t be fooled by quick & dirty SEO firms.” I’ve always thought negative advertising wasn’t very effective.

Yahoo has acquired a software application called Konfabulator. Konfabulator runs little programs on your desktop to give you easy access to things like stocks, traffic, weather and much more. Konfabulator was born a few years ago for the Mac platform and was recently created to work on the PC too. Konfabulator is very similar to Apple’s Dashboard only Konfabulator’s widgets run on the desktop, not a separate area. Until now Konfabulator was shareware but, starting today, it’s freeware!

-Thomas

Technorati Tags: yahoo, Konfabulator, apple, dashboard

Nielsen//NetRatings released stats on search engine market share for June:

• Google 47.00%
• Yahoo! 22.00%
• MSN 12.00%
• AOL 5.00%
• My Way 2.00%

My Way is an Ask Jeeves site and this is the first time that search engine has appeared in the top five. It looks like Yahoo but without the ads.

Danny Sullivan provides an excellent breakdown at SearchEngineWatch.

A common problem with many web sites that need improved rankings is a lack of fresh content. If you don’t have a dedicated writer in-house, where can you get good content? Here are a few suggestions:

• Archive your newsletters
• Archive and syndicate your own press releases and media coverage
• Add syndicated news
• Add press releases content syndicated from other sources
• Use articles open for re-use from article directories
• Use Yahoo Creative Commons search to find available content
• Publish a glossary
• Publish client testimonials
• Publish product/service demos
• Publish a Q & A and/or FAQ

I came across this Adsense demo which is pretty slick the way your own web site is used in the presentation.

Search engine humor: Interview with the Ask Jeeves search engine.

New Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox

New blog search engines via Scoble

Blog Comment Snobs: Loren Baker and Steve Rubel

I don’t keep to up-to-date on the Google directory, however I found an alpha area yesterday.

http://www.google.com/alpha/Top/Computers/Hardware/Storage/

Not sure if there is any significance behind it, however I thought I’d share.

-Thomas

Intelliseek has added features to the BlogPulse tools. I spent some time playing with the BlogPulse Profiles (Beta) tool. Here’s the skinny:

• Overview - Rank according to citations, post frequency and a rank trend graph
• Posts - A list of keywords used in recent posts (I did not find very accurate) and links to posts
• Citations - Broken out between citations from top-ranked blogs and all other blogs
• Trends - Post and citation trends let you see if there is a correlation. Interestingly, in the case of this blog there is no correlation.
• Sources - Lists recent news articles and blogs cited along with trend and track conversation tools for each link.
• Neighborhood - Shows a list of “related” blogs with links to their profiles. I did not find the list to be very relevant for this blog.

Overall, it’s a pretty cool tool. More companies are taking the time to track conversations and mentions of their brands and products within the blogoshere. Advertisers can do their homework on potential blogs as well. MediaPost has more info.

Blogs and search engine optimization go hand in hand for promoting a web site. So, smart guy and fellow Lockergnome writer Glen Stansberry has created Blogfuse.

This new service offers free, search engine friendly blog hosting. Blogfuse, as in the fusing of search engine optimization and blog marketing, offers an exceptionally easy setup process and is full of features including:

• search engine friendly blog templates
• your-blog-name.blogfuse.com
• multiple authors per blog
• multiple blogs per account
• custom RSS feeds
• easy-to-use WYSIWYG visual editor for article posting
• comment spam filtering
• automatic integration of: Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati

AdWords blog clarifies issues with “keyword states”

Aaron Wall interviews Dan Thies, Keyword Research Guru

Search Engine Market Share - Google Dominates. No kidding?

Meta blog search with Clusty - via SEW

Podcasting Whitepaper - via Rok

Article Marketing - via Robin

If you’re looking for alternative keyword research tools, check out Keyword Discovery from Trellian. It lists keywords that drive traffic to web sites based on their DMOZ site category classification.

Speaking of keyword research, Gavin Appel, VP of Search for Hitwise was kind enough recently to provide a demo and walkthrough of their new Keyword Intelligence product. I will be posting a review/article from that interview later this week.

Tags: keyword research, search engine optimization, seo

Yahoo Search Marketing Workbook Updated - Aaron, Barry

MSN Shopping beta open again. - Erin. We also reported on PCWorld

Google updates AdWords requirements - SearchEngineWatch

Andy Beal leaves KeywordRanking, practices some blogger CYA

Google updates toolbar PageRank. Who cares? Future PageRank, SEJ

Danny Sullivan has launched a blog for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. (hat tip Aaron)

There have been 30 shows so far and the conference is now going into its seventh year. Here’s a great post about the history of SES. I think it’s pretty impressive what Danny and friends have made this show to be.

The next Search Engine Strategies conference is next month August 8 - 11 in San Jose - the heart of Silicon Valley. I’ve been to the San Jose and New York SES shows and San Jose is definitely my favorite. Yahoo and Google tend to do a lot of promotion there and it’s great to be at a conference where plenty of people “speak SEO”.