Provides constant updates of the latest search engine marketing and other search news from Search Engine Watch and across the web.
- SEMPO Institute Adds Advanced Search Advertising Course - 2007-06-27 12:53:57-04
SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, has added another advanced course to its SEMPO Institute initiative. Joining the Fundamentals of Search Marketing and Advanced SEO courses is an Advanced Search Advertising course.
"Advanced Search Advertising gives marketers the ability to get more return on their ad buys by providing them with a deeper level of strategy as well as hands-on tactics they can implement," SEMPO President Jeffrey Pruitt said in a statement.
The 14-lesson course covers PPC models, keywords & campaigns, copywriting for ads, bidding & ranking, landing pages, success metrics, PPC program specifics, reporting & analytics, click fraud, alternative PPC search engines and feeds & feed advertising.
All courses are available online, and students can complete lessons at their own pace. Students are tested and graded on each lesson, and must pass all lessons with a passing grade to receive a certificate of completion.
- Search Enging Marketing Council - 2007-06-27 13:24:04-04
I spoke with Lee Odden yesterday, and got an update on things going on at the Search Engine Marketing Council (SEMC), which is a special interest group within the Direct Marketing Association . Direct Marketers are the folks that have mastered the traditional art of direct response marketing, using a variety of techniques, including e-mail, (snail) mail, telemarketing, and other related methods.
Direct Marketers are becoming increasingly interested in search engine marketing. The SEMC is working to provide educational programs to direct marketers to help them climb the curve more quickly. For example, the SEMC is sponsoring tracks at the upcoming DMA '07 Conference in Chicago in October. This conference will include substantial sessions on search, and also on social media.
The SEMC also offers a Search Engine Marketing Certification Program. This program provides direct marketers with training in organic search marketing and pay per click search marketing. Courses are broken into two levels, Level 1, and Level II. The Level 1 courses cover the basics of search marketing, and Level II gets more advanced. Once you complete the Level II course you are eligible to seek a certification.
One of the interesting things from my conversation with Lee was his pointing out how important it is for direct marketers to obtain a direct measurement of results. In the world of search marketing the way you get that accountability is through the use of web analytics. In fact, a growing understanding of web analytics is helping accelerate the direct marketing industry's engagement with search marketing.
- Search Headlines & Links: June 27, 2007 - 2007-06-27 22:06:43-04
Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:
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- SEW Experts: 7 Ways to Promote Your Content as Link Bait - 2007-06-28 01:01:44-04
In today's Link Love column, " 7 Ways to Promote Your Content as Link Bait ," Justilien Gaspard offers seven ways to promote a new site project for links and exposure. If your site is already established, these links can help raise your rankings.
- 10 Cool Things to Do with IndexTools - 2007-06-28 01:02:09-04
Over the course of his Web Analytics Shootout, Eric Enge found IndexTools Web Analytics to be a powerful tool available at a relatively low price. He also found ten cool things to do with IndexTools:
- Customize Reports
- Customize Dashboards
- Ad Hoc Scenarios
- Filters
- Merchandising
- Path Explorer
- Alerts, Events, and Color Coding
- Segmentation
- Campaign Management
- Custom Fields
- Search Ad Sellers Should Help CTRs More - 2007-06-28 04:10:00-04
Where are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and others when you really need them? We think that they ought to be helping their customers even more actively. Right now, it's mostly up to the advertisers and their SEM agencies to improve clickthrough rates and buying efficiency.
Of course, creating strong paid search systems is not a trivial matter. There are, however, a variety of ways in which the ad sellers can provide incremental boosts for both advertisers and themselves.
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- MySpaceTV – Look Who's Chasing YouTube - 2007-06-28 10:26:33-04
Today MySpace re-launched its video sharing site, renaming it MySpaceTV. The New York Times reports that this is a serious attempt by News Corp, the owner of MySpace, to challenge YouTube. Users of the new service do not have to be signed in as members of the MySpace community to share their videos. This feature should in fact attract new users to MySpace and expand its reach for quality video content and viewers
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- 9 Tips for Getting Started with Link Building - 2007-06-28 11:55:47-04
Putting together a strategy for get links to a site is one of the hardest parts of SEO. Too many people jump right in to trying to get people to link to their site, when they should be taking the time to lay the proper groundwork in place to have a link worthy site. Here are 9 quick tips on how to approach the task:
- Understand the anatomy of getting a link - Since we shy away from buying links, or pursing link swaps, you are left with the task of getting someone to provide you with a one way link. I.e. getting something from them, and providing nothing in return. Or is that true? Not really. What you end up giving out, is your expertise and knowledge. This can be embedded in articles, tools, or special promotions. People who care about their visitors will link to good content, and this ends up being a fair trade. It also gets you links that are unassailable in the eyes of the search engines, and it's the best way to get links from authoritative web sites.
- Understand your target audience - Who are your prospective customers? What type of content would they like to see on a site like yours? Since relevant links count most, answering this question is a big key to success.
- Develop a map of the places where you are going to get links - Blogs, magazines, trade organizations, industry associations, distributors, resellers, colleges and universities, government sites, ...? Be creative in coming up with ideas. A potential target for linking to you is ANY site which is related to your site's content, or that can reasonably publish an article related to your business. For example, if you run a sailing web site for the Massachusetts area, Boston.com is a great target. They could certainly run an article about sailing in the Boston area, and if they cover your site as a resource, you get a great link.
- Develop a content plan for your site - Now that you know your audience, and where you are going to get links from, come up with a plan for the great content that you are going to put on your site. To succeed, you need to put things of value out there. People will not link to you to help you make money. But they will link to you if your content, or tools, or promotions provide a truly unique value to the visitors to their site.
- Develop a content syndication plan - Here you can broaden your thinking even further. The concept here is to write high quality articles and give them to other web sites for placement on those sites. You only do this type of work to get very high quality links. But you can get some awesome links this way.
- Consider social media sites - While these are great sources of huge spikes in traffic, the traffic is not always of the best quality (although this varies from site to site). The big win is in the links you get out of it. A really well structured campaign can bring you lots of links, and in some cases, high quality links, including links from traditional media sites. To do this well, you need to really understand the audience on the social media site you are targeting. You will need to develop content that targets that audience, while keeping it related to the theme of your site.
- Implement a PR campaign - This is much, much more than simply sending out press releases. You need to have a plan to reach out to traditional media and bloggers as a follow up to your press releases. Unless you have lots of contacts and a great reputation with the media in your space, our recommendation is that you do this with the help of a PR agency, and leverage their contacts.
- Understand the investment cost - All of this takes resources. In particular, developing content on an ongoing basis, building relationships with related sites, syndicating content, pursuing social media sites, PR campaigns, ... It's a lot of work. Make sure you build into your plan the resources to execute your plan.
- Be in it for the long haul - Link building is not a start up activity, it's a permanent one. It is an ongoing cost to your business that never goes away.
- AdSense Rolls Out Referrals 2.0 - 2007-06-28 17:37:29-04
Beyond the text and image ads AdSense offers - the release of Referrals 2.0 now incorporates products that you can sell on your site. The product that had been in beta previously is now being launched globally - well I did see instances in French, German and Italian.
Like the text ads, the Referral product looks at the content on your page to determine a good product fit.
The press release issued today is below.
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- Testing the Kid-Friendly Search Engines - 2007-06-28 18:15:21-04
Are kid-friendly search engines worth using, or are they better served by the major engines? Debby Richman put them to the test, comparing them in categories like visual appeal to a child; relevance to a child; commercial vs. educational results; and ease of navigation for 7-10 year olds.
See how the kid-friendly engines stacked up against the majors in today's SearchDay, Savvy Little Searchers.
- Search Headlines & Links: June 28, 2007 - 2007-06-29 00:22:18-04
Want a snapshot of the day's search marketing news? Here we've collected today's top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:
Click to read the rest of this post...
- SEW Experts: Video Search Optimization Tech Tips – Knowing the 4 P's - 2007-06-29 01:01:47-04
In today's Vertical Challenge column, " Video Search Optimization Tech Tips – Knowing the 4 P's," Grant Crowell explains the technical aspects of video optimization and viral linking.
- SEW Experts: Stop In-house SEO Disasters Now! - 2007-06-29 01:01:59-04
In today's In-House column, " Stop In-house SEO Disasters Now!," Kevin Ryan pens an ode to the in-house SEO practitioner, with a few best practices and a guide to identifying problematic personalities.
- Yahoo Upgrades Panama's Tools - 2007-06-29 09:21:04-04
The keyword selector tool is offering suggestions, copying and moving keywords amongst groups, and an improved helpl section have been added to Panama's features.
The changes are detailed at the Yahoo blog.
- Google Maps Gets Click-and-Drag Functionality - 2007-06-29 11:00:58-04
Users of Google Maps have been able to click and drag a map to move about the area, but now they can also change their destination and route by clicking and dragging as well. According to Google's Lat Long Blog, the new feature allows users to pick a destination on a map by right-clicking, and move that destination by clicking on it and dragging it to a new location. For driving directions, users can specify that the route includes a certain bridge or highway by clicking on the route and dragging it to a new path.
- WSJ's Mossberg Likes Ask3D - 2007-06-29 11:16:52-04
Wall Street Journal columnist and All Things Digital organizer Walt Mossberg compared Google's Universal Search with Ask.com's Ask3D, and found Ask3D to be a better way of presenting search results. In Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results, Mossberg writes:
Now, Google and Ask each have rolled out new ways of presenting search results. Google's approach, which it calls "universal search," is a modest thing, a first step in what it says will be a long effort to break down barriers between different types of information a user may be seeking, such as Web links, images and news.
But Ask's new system, called "Ask3D," is a much bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and use.
Ask.com is currently trying to become a legitimate contender in search, with a new ad campaign and new features like Ask3D. A favorable review from Mossberg can help spread the word to the masses, but it will take much more than that to get users to change their behavior.
- Presidential Candidates Need Some Help with their Reputations - 2007-06-29 11:51:22-04
The majority of U.S. Presidential candidates have a negative reputation on search engines, according to a new study by Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. The 2008 Presidential Election Candidate Reputation Study found that 15 of 18 candidates had negative results within the first 20 when a user searched for their names on Google and Yahoo.
Democrats Barack Obama and Mike Gravel, and Republican Ron Paul were the only candidates with no negative search engine results.
"The study demonstrates that with more than a year to go until the 2008 presidential election, candidates are not fully managing their search engine reputation," said Beal, founding principle of Marketing Pilgrim. "As the election race heats up, voters will be influenced by what they discover on the web. A single negative Google result could be enough to lose the election."
- Spock - The People Search Engine - 2007-06-29 12:02:52-04
People search engine Spock is still in invitiation only beta, but I had a chance to review the product. One of the first things that becomes evident is that all of its search results are about people. This is a vertical search engine through and through. This approach gives Spock substantial leverage. For example, if you enter in the query "NFL", you will get a list of people that have been tagged "NFL".
Spock appears to use a combination of algorithmic tagging, where it develops tags for people based on web crawling, and people powered tagging, where users can add their own tags. So the crawler will be a driving force in populating the search engine data set pre-launch, but over time input from people will have an increasing impact on the results.
As this article by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb observed, the result will be that famous people will receive far more tags than others. This leaves the question as to how much information you will receive on the less famous.
This question aside, Spock provides a remarkably clean and efficient people search engine. The results are easy to interpret, and you can navigate among people who are "related" (i.e. that share the same tag, as in my NFL example above). I look forward to its public release.
- The Day The Music Died: Internet Radio Goes Silent - 2007-06-29 14:26:19-04
In protest of the increase in royalty fees internet radio stations had a 'day of silence' yesterday. Instead of finding their regular music channels, many web radio listeners were told about the increase in fees and were asked to contact their Congressmen in support of the Internet Radio Equality Act, and they did. Servers were overloaded and Congressional switchboards were constantly busy.
WebProNews has a videocast covering the protest.
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- 'Short Tail' Analytics: Getting to the Meat - 2007-06-29 14:49:02-04
SEO and web analytics company Engine Ready reminds us that while the 'long tail' is not something to forget about, the 'short tail' of search provides the majority of your conversions. And as such should be of major concern to all search marketers. Their report shows how the top 10 terms get as much as 60% of the conversions.
The San Diego-based company provides a quick case study that is worth the read.
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