Online Marketing Blog

Google to build monster office on NASA property -“Google Inc. confirmed Wednesday that it will build up to 1 million square feet of offices at NASA Ames Research Center and collaborate with the space agency on research surrounding topics such as supercomputing that could benefit everything from moon launches to online searches.” - SFGate

Yahoo Desktop Search Out of Beta and adds contextual web search - Yahoo Search Blog

Many marketers are still clueless on search engine optimization via OMMA East conference. A bit of an understatement I’d say. At the same time, that also means huge opportunity for search engine marketing firms. - MediaPost

Several SEO blogs have noted today that Yahoo has made the Yahoo Site Explorer tool live. This tool lets you check all the pages of a site that have been indexed as well as all the inlinks.

You can also save the search results as a tab delimited file and subscribe to the search results as a feed. Very cool.

More info here and there’s an API. Yahoo Search Blog has now added a post.

Search Engine Tags: Yahoo Site Explorer, Yahoo

As time goes on it seems there are more and more misconceptions and outdated ideas floating out in forums, old articles and even in some presentations about how search engines rank web pages. On occasion, a well-meaning SEO will write an article that describes what is currently understood as search engine ranking methods and I’ve included two examples here.

The first is an interesting list of Google Ranking factors I’ve had bookmarked for a while which lists quite a few considerations on how Google (may or may not) rank web pages. Some of the info comes from observations and experience and some comes from a review of Google patents.

FeedShot.com is a blog submission tool that differs in that it sends you a confirmation email with a status of each submission. The tool is free and submits an RSS or Atom feed to 20 blog search engines. To see how well it works I will use it right after saving this post.

A bit late on this I know, but better late than never! Andy Beal who was previously VP at Websourced - KeywordRanking has started Fortune Interactive.

“an interactive marketing agency that focuses on search engine marketing - and have joined forces with an expert in linguistics, LSI and artificial intelligence, Michael Marshall.”

From the looks of the content on the site, they’ve focused on solving what most dissatisfied SEO clients complain about - proactive, ongoing communication. That, in addition to something called SEMLogic - which uses clustering and latent semantic indexing to examine a client?Ǭís industry, competition and key phrase selections.

The Times Online reported today the results of a recent survey of PR consultants on blogs and brand reputation:

“Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm‚Äôs reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs”

For companies evaluating whether they should start a business blog or not, consider:

The first issue of the SearchReturn Discussion List was sent out today. Good things from Detlev Johnson about “Understanding Internet Search Technology”.

Detlev used to moderate the I-Search discussion list way back when. I had posted about subscribe to SearchReturn.

For the past year or so, I’ve used Bloglet to manage the email notifications of blog posts. Today I’ve transferred that function over to FeedBlitz. If you are a subscriber to Online Marketing Blog email alerts, then the next email update you’ll receive will be from FeedBlitz.

Google decides today is it’s birthday. I had previously posted that Netvibes so I checked it out.

Wow.

Netvibes is a very customizable content aggregator, rss reader that was just launched a week ago. It’s very much like Google’s personalized search and MSN’s start.com functionally because of the use of Ajax. With Google, you have to login to drag and drop content. With Start and Netvibes you don’t. All three offer preset news feeds, weather, etc.

I recently became aware of a newer social bookmarking tool called SearchFox. I’ve tried it out and it works pretty slick.

What got my attention was that SearchFox Now offers a new machine learning RSS reader in beta that prioritizes “new content from feeds based on your historical reading behavior, as well as data gathered from the SearchFox community as a whole.” Since most most RSS readers list feeds only in chronological order, SearchFox offers an advantage by learning what interests you along with other users’ interests and rank feeds accordingly. You can toggle this filter on/off.

MarketingSherpa’s released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Survey with 3,271 marketers participating.

This new report includes new statistics on clicks, costs and conversions as well as information on SEM test effectiveness. There’s some pretty compelling data regarding outsourcing your SEO as well. For SEO, overall site traffic lift six months after optimization was:

Agency optimized 110% increase
In-house optimized 38% increase

While marketers using SEM were much more pleased about their PPC campaigns this year over last, 8-12% were planning on cutting SEM budgets.

Lots more info at Marketing Sherpa’s site.

Tags: Top SEO Firms, Marketing Sherpa, SEM, SEO, search marketing , survey