Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

Yahoo Local offers search by neighborhood and RSS – PC World

Amazon to offer SEM services through Efficient Frontier – Hosting News

Battelle releases second book excerpt – Search – How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

Google AdSense Blog goes live – Search Engine Roundtable.
RustyBrick also points a link to Jensense who will be on WebmasterRadio later today talking about YPN and Google AdSense.

Yahoo and Google nearly tied on customer satisfaction – SEW

Wordtracker has just announced a new keyword research guide, “A practical guide to using Wordtracker to conduct keyword research for an online business”.

The guide provides an overview of Wordtracker features and offers a case study of how a company might use keyword research in various stages of building an online campaign.

Contributors include: Bryan Eisenberg, B.L. Ochman, Kevin Lee, Stephen Mahaney, Ken McGaffin, John Alexander, Neil Davidson, Robin Good and Nick Usborne.

The guide provides a great overview of how important keywords are in developing an online marketing strategy, understanding your marketplace, target customers and paid search placement.

Link to guide in pdf format

Tags: Wordtracker, keyword research, online marketing

The blog search engine, Feedster published their list of the top 500 blogs for August and I’m happy to say that Online Marketing Blog weighs in at 182. That’s higher than Google Blog (213) and Yahoo Search Blog (197)! Amazing.

Rankings for other blogs I read include:
IT Conversations #26
Om Malik’s Broadband Blog #52
Micro Persuasion #56
Seth’s Blog #70
Scobleizer #74
Jeremy Zawodny #103
gapingvoid #106
Dave Sifry #136
John Battelle #139
Blog Herald #157
WebmasterWorld #164
Robin Good #167
Yahoo Search Blog #197
Chris Pirillo #202
Darren Rowse Problogger #203
Google Blog #213
Jakob Nielsen’s Useit #237
Adrants #254
MarketingVOX #347
Ensight Jeremy Wright #348
InsideGoogle #436
Search Engine Roundtable #500 (this one really should be much, much higher)

The LA Times reports that News Corp is in talks to buy the Blinkx search engine.

Rumblings started last week when Murdoch said he was looking for a search engine to buy.

Search Engine Journal speculated this morning that potential targets might be Looksmart, Mamma, Technorati or Gigablast. Blinkx was not on that list.

I will update this post in a bit, but want to get the initial announcement out now.

Tags: Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, Blinkx

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.

Ask Jeeves is the 7th largest global web property with a portfolio of web sites including: Ask.com, Teoma, MyJeeves, My Way, iWon, Excite and Bloglines. Ask Jeeves became a wholly-owned business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ: IACI) in July this year.

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.

Search puts consumers in control – Citing Forrester Consumer Technographics study.

Consumers were asked:
How have you found web sites in the past month? Search #1, Links #2, Email #3

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.

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.

However, Yahoo is providing some very stiff competition and it will be interesting to see what those market share numbers are in a year.

Tags: Google, Yahoo