Online Marketing Blog

Two weeks ago, Ask Jeeves announced their new sponsored listings program and today the company has announced the general availability of the program.

“Advertisers will receive premier placement on Ask Jeeves above Google AdWords, which will also continue to be distributed on Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings is available immediately at http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com.”

Steve Berkowitz gave the keynote presentation at last week’s Search Engine Strategies conference where he described the new PPC program as a way to connect directly with advertisers and that he does not see the relationship with Google changing.

News Corp. in talks to buy search engine - via CNET. Hmmm, I wonder which search engine they’re going to buy?

Yahoo to pay $1 billion for 40 percent of Alibaba.com - China’s biggest online commerce company. Marketwatch has an interview with Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel with many of the details.

There’s been speculation for a while in the SEO community that Matt Cutts is the “googleguy” that provides the voice for Google in WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch forums. If he’s not “googleguy” he’s certainly “Google’s Guy” as he is the consumate PR professional when answering questions about all things Google.

Matt Cutts has now started a blog. Using WordPress no less. Where’s Blogger? Actually, his rationale for using WordPress makes sense and I agree. That’s why in the next 30 days this blog will move to a top level domain and use another blog CMS. I contacted Blogger support and they cannot offer any type of redirection, so I’ll need to leave this blog and just start up at another address. Redirection will have to be done at the page level.

I received our invitation to participate in the Yahoo Publisher Network Beta program today. This is cool. There’s a lot of support info and sign up was easy. Ad formats and customizations were a snap.

I’m just not sure if there are some problems with publishing YPN ads on blogspot.com because the site I’m testing it out with will not display them. I have an inquiry into YPN support though and I’m sure I’ll have it worked out soon. They also have a support number which is pretty impressive.
Tags: Yahoo Publisher Network, YPN

Moderated by Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch, this session covered alternative ways to use and measure search engine marketing.

There are many ways to track the effectiveness of your search marketing campaigns. The downside is that you can become “a slave to the numbers”. This panel serves to expand your horizons on using search marketing and measuring effectiveness.

Anne Frisbe - Senior Director, Strategic Alliances Yahoo

Many companies are asking: What can search do for me? One of the primary characteristics of search marketing is that if offers an engaged audience. Through search, consumers pull themselves to you.

At the SEMPO meeting, Yahoo Search Marketing announced the Marketing Alliances program.

The new program “offers a variety of programs designed to assist agencies, search engine marketers (SEMs) and web professionals in furthering their businesses by providing essential resources to help them acquire, retain and refer clients.” according to the site.

Google offers a similar Certified AdWords Professional program and an AdWords / AdSense Referral program for webmasters.

It’s been a great first two days of the conference with some significant improvements in many of the session content and quality. At the NYC SES show earlier this year, I was left with a bit of a disappointment in many of the sessions I attended as many seemed to be exactly as the last few shows. That’s not the case with this show.

It may just be my perception or the sessions I’ve been attending, but this show has been full of great information and new case studies and topics. The search engine patents session was super as well as the blogs/RSS session, although I am not sure how a speaker can give a decent presentation with out some sort of PowerPoint as one of the speakers attempted to do.

Thomas and I ventured over to the Yahoo Search Night Off and it proved to be a great time. Yahoo hosted a pretty good sized event with an all you can eat/drink barbeque.

After running into a few search folks including Chris Sherman of Search Engine Watch (who has a new search book out called Google Power btw) and catching up with Andrew Goodman of Traffick, who’s long overdue second book on Google AdWords should be out any day now, we decided to venture out to the Top Gun rollercoaster nearby. I have not been on a roller coaster in years. All I can say is, front row of the Top Gun coaster is nothing less than awesome. Great enough to ride it 3 times.

Google Blog has announced that Google News is now available in RSS and Atom formats. You can get feeds by news section or by search result. More details here. Kinda took a while, but this is great “news” - pun intended.

Tags: Google, Google News RSS

Yahoo has announced they are now indexing over 20 billion documents - web pages, images, etc. Google reports about half that amount.

Tim Mayer of Yahoo Search provides a very good rundown on many of the improvements Yahoo has made this year on the Yahoo Search Blog.

In this case bigger is not necessisarily better, as Google still commands the majority search market share. According to comScore’s June report, Google holds a 36.9 per cent share of the U.S. search engine market and Yahoo holds 30.4 per cent.

Update: Rand has provided this link to a copy of his presentation.

Moderated by Search Engine Watch editor, Chris Sherman, the first session (out of 5 to pick from) of the conference dealt with patents filed by the major search engines how they “might” affect the way web sites can be optimized for better rankings. Ranging from fairly general to breaking down information retrieval mathmatical formulas, there was enough content in this session to fill 3 or more posts so that is what I’ll do.

I recently recieved a review copy of the new book, Search Engine Marketing Inc by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. I’ve seen Mike and Bill speak at past Search Engine Strategies conferences regarding their search engine optimization work on the IBM web sites.

While I only had an opportunity to briefly review the book, I can say it may be one of the most comprehensive search marketing books available. Since it will be at least a week before I get a chance to read the whole book, here’s a link to an excerpt available at Webreference: Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site. Part 1.