Symetri Blog

Chris Sherman, Associate Editor for Search Engine Watch wrote this 2 part (Part 1, Part 2) article about RSS. It does a great job explaining what RSS is and how it can be used by marketers. It also looks at RSS software and tools.

What's different about RSS feeds vs. straightforward web content? Not much, really, but one key difference is crucial: Content published in an RSS feed is typically set up to send out notifications whenever new material is available.

This makes the new content immediately available to feed readers and RSS search engines. Contrast this with ordinary web pages, which are essentially passive and generally aren't accessible to most of us until search engine crawlers find and index them. And then, once indexed, these pages stand relatively little chance of being surfaced by web searchers.

That's why RSS is important, and why its something every serious web searcher should be using. RSS feed readers allow you to subscribe to feeds that you know contain important or useful information, and your feed reader will notify you immediately whenever new content for your subscriptions is available. In short, once you've identified a useful resource that publishes an RSS feed, you can virtually skip searching for it altogether.

RSS has other virtues, as well. Because RSS is popular with both bloggers and news media organizations, you can use RSS search engines to find information in near real-time. For example, with the Indonesian tsunami or the London bombings, RSS search engines allowed users to locate information, images and videos posted by people on the scene hours before traditional media sources had similar eye-witness coverage.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Google Inc. is set to introduce its own instant messaging system, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday, marking the expansion by the Web search leader into text and also voice communications.

Citing unnamed sources "familiar with the service," the Los Angeles Times said that Google's Instant Messaging program would be called Google Talk and could be launched as early as Wednesday.

Google Talk goes beyond text-based instant messaging using a computer keyboard to let users hold voice conversations with other computer users, the newspaper quoted a source as saying. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on the company's product plans.

If confirmed, the combined computer text and voice-calling service would put Google in competition with a similar service pioneered by Skype, which has attracted tens of millions of users, especially in Europe, to its own service.

Separately, independent journalist Om Malik on his blog at http://gigaom.com/ pointed to technical clues that suggest Google is preparing to run an instant messaging service based on an open-source system known as Jabber.

Jabber technology would allow Google instant message users to connect with established IM systems that also work with Jabber, including America Online's ICQ and Apple Computer Inc.'s iChat, Malik said.

"This is the worst possible news for someone like Skype, because now they will be up against not two but three giants who want to offer a pale-version of Skype," he wrote.

Earlier this week, Google said it was branching out beyond pure search to help users manage e-mail, instant messages, news headlines and music. It introduced a new service called the Google Sidebar, a stand-alone software program that sits on a user's desktop and provides "live" information updates.

Over the past year or so, the company has expanded into e-mail, online maps, personalized news and more.

The product push comes as rivals Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL are all pushing to upgrade existing instant messaging systems and expand into new Internet phone-calling services.

Google's moves take it beyond its roots in Web search and closer to becoming a broad-based Internet media company.

With instant messaging, Google would be breaking into a market in which its major competitors boast tens of millions of subscribers to their established instant messaging services.

America Online, with its AIM and ICQ brands, counts more than 40 million IM users in the United States alone. Yahoo has around 20 million and Microsoft's MSN Messenger numbers some 14 million users, according to recent comScore Media Metrix data.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

We all know that click fraud is a growing concern for Paid Search Advertisers. Here is a 4 part article that covers Click Fraud and how to counteract it in Ad Campaigns.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Google has released a new version of its desktop search tool, offering features such as integration with Outlook, a sidebar with nifty widgets to display photos, headlines and much more.

The enhancements will likely have folks at Microsoft and Yahoo nervous but Google users pleased. Some of the changes will also no doubt kick off another round of speculation that a Google OS may be coming.

Take a closer look at this article from Search Engine Watch which provides more detail.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Research published by SEMPO

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization recently completed its first comprehensive survey of the search engine marketing industry. This survey established important benchmark information about the SEM industry, including:

The size and rate of grow of the industry A breakdown of spending between pay per click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and paid inclusion (PI) A breakdown of in-house vs. outsourced SEM Attitudes and concerns about industry issues including PPC bid inflation, click fraud, and ethical standards.

To read an abstract of key survey findings, please see SEMPO's research press release.

To view a summary of our research findings, please download this report: Summary Report:
The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004 [108k PDF file].

To read the full 123 page report, please download this file: Full Report: The State of Search Engine Marketing 2004 [459k PDF file].

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Take a moment and visit Hitwise and signup for a free report about the Search Engine Landscape.

The report shows that search engines are the preferred web navigation tool for many users, sending searchers to their favorite sites as well as helping them find information, goods, and services. Search is part of the Internet user’s daily routine – indeed, visits to search sites accounted for 7 percent of Internet visits in July 2005.

As the search engine landscape has evolved since Google’s IPO in April 2004, industry observers have speculated as to whether Google can hold on to its audience in the face of increasing competition. In recent months, MSN re-launched its own search tool, and both Yahoo! Search and Ask Jeeves revamped their advertiser networks.

Despite these threats, this report will show that Google has not lost market share, and further examines differences in the way Internet users search on each engine, what kinds of sites they go to after searching, and who is visiting each engine.

Following is a summary of key findings from the report:

• The top three search engines, Google, Yahoo! Search, and MSN Search, dominate the search landscape, accounting for 72.8% of visits to Search Engine & Directories sites for the week ending July 23, 2005.

• Google received a larger market share of visits than visits to Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves combined for the week ending July 23, 2005. In addition, Google’s share of searches has increased by 14.1% over the past year.

• Shopping is a top priority for search users, with Shopping & Classifieds sites receiving the most downstream visits among all the major search engines in June 2005.

• Yahoo! Search and MSN Search are dependent on their parent portals for the majority of their traffic. Thus Google’s dominance in market share and share of searches is particularly noteworthy considering that it does not have a portal to drive traffic.

• Yahoo! Local has a larger market share of visits than Google Local and Ask Jeeves Local. Local search visitors tend to be female, and go to map sites after leaving the local search engines.

• Across Google, Yahoo! Search, and MSN Search, an average of 87% of searches contain one or two words, while more than 30% of Ask Jeeves searches contain three or more words. This reflects Ask Jeeves’ history as a “question” site, as question searches typically consist of 3 or more words.

• Search engines are being used navigationally – shared among the top searches on Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search are terms like “ebay,” “mapquest,” “yahoo,” and “hotmail.”

• The term “google” is the most searched for term on MSN Search and Yahoo! Search, which may be explained by the fact that MSN and Yahoo! portals may be home pages for many Internet users, and the search box is being used like the browser address bar. It also points to Google’s brand strength – searchers prefer to go to Google rather than use their portal’s own search engine.

• Google has slightly more male than female visitors, while MSN Search and Ask Jeeves visitors are mostly female.

• Yahoo! Search and Ask Jeeves are strongly represented in the younger age groups.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Here's some quick tips on implementing a 301 redirect for your site or pages. Make sure when you modify your site's structure that you account for search engine issues. There are some code snippets here for you to implement in order to maintain your site's ranking. Enjoy!

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Yahoo! local (local.yahoo.com) drew 4.4 times the number of visitors as Google Local (local.google.com) in July 2005, according to a new report from Hitwise.

Despite Yahoo! Local's visitor dominance, Google local saw its market share increase by 61 percent between February and July of 2005. During the same period, Yahoo! Local grew by only 14 percent.

Growth in the local search category continues as both Yahoo! and Google's respective map sites develop. In July, Hitwise reported 17 percent of Yahoo! Local users accessed maps directly through Yahoo! Maps. Google Maps now holds the number three spot in the Hitwise Travel Maps category.

Overall, Google continues to dominate all the major search engines with a 59.2 percent share of all searches in July 2005 as illustrated in this graph. That's a 14 percent increase over July 2004. Yahoo! Search came in second at 28.8 percent, and MSN Search placed third with a 5.5 percent share. Google, Yahoo! Search, and MSN Search represented a combined 93.5 percent of all U.S. Internet searches in July 2005.

Both Yahoo! Search and MSN Search derive the majority of their visits from associated portals. Seventy-three percent of Yahoo! Search visitors originate at yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com, while 61 percent of MSN Search visitors get there through msn.com, my.msn.com, and dellnet.msn.com.

Hitwise commented that Google's growth is notable particularly since it doesn't have portals pushing traffic to it like Yahoo! and MSN do. "Clearly the next big challenge for Google will be the arrival of Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, which is said to have far tighter search integration." said Bill Tancer, Hitwise's general manager of worldwide research, in a statement.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

One of the big news stories announced at the SES Conference in San Jose was the announcement of Yahoo Site Explorer. Dan Nielsen and I were there at the conference for a demo of the tool from Yahoo's Tim Mayer.

The new product named Site Explorer is located at http://sitexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. It is a place for people to go to see which pages Yahoo indexed and to let Yahoo know about URLs Yahoo has not found as of yet (submit URL or URLs). He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API, good good), then you hit explore URl and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo Index and also shows you the number of inlinks. You can sort pages by “depth” how deep pages are and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format. Links have been very popular, he said Yahoo! has been moving towards the social community aspect and probably will go in that direction with link pop. He said, create natural links, make it look natural.”

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Web marketers lack both the confidence and analytics to properly assess results, according to a study from WebTrends.

Confidence in marketing efforts varied among those surveyed. Only five percent of marketers were very confident in the measurement of their current online marketing efforts. Just over a quarter (26 percent) admitted they were flying blind, while the same percentage (26 percent) was moderately confident. Forty-three percent indicated they were fairly confident with their efforts.

WebTrends asserts the low confidence comes from a lack of knowledge when it comes to measurement. Only one in five respondents indicated they have a complete handle on their conversion, marketing ROI, and revenue metrics. Twenty-three percent reported they don't currently have any metrics, and 29 percent rely on clickthrough rates alone.

The study also finds 39 percent have no idea what method of user identification they use for their online marketing efforts. True first-party cookies were reported by 19 percent, while vendor-supplied first party cookies were used by eight percent of those surveyed. Identification by IP address was reported by 13 percent, and 10 percent went a half-step further by identifying users based on IP and agent. Ten percent reported using third party cookies.

Third party cookies are increasingly rejected by Web users. WebTrends reported in a quarterly update on cookie rejection that in June 2005 the overall rejection rate for third party cookies was 13.2 percent, a 5.2 percent increase over April. JupiterResearch reported 28 percent of users in its own study claim they have rejected third party cookies selectively.

Most Web marketers (76 percent) know where users enter their Web sites, a point that WebTrends calls inflow, and nearly half (48 percent) know the point at which their site is abandoned. Forty-five percent were aware of their site's fall out point, a term that describes users not moving from one step to the next within the conversion scenario.

The detours users take within a site after leaving a conversion scenario were only known by 20 percent of respondents, and only fourteen percent were aware of the non-linear paths a site visitor takes during a conversion scenario (what WebTrends calls step jumping).

WebTrends collected the data for the survey between May 23 and June 3, 2005 as an element of a free webcast.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Well Dan and I survived the third annual Google Dance. Check out this link of the festivities . They really have too much money to spend. Anyway after we made our way through the food line we found the Cold Stone ice cream line. Yum!

Then we found where the engineers were and spent the rest of the time talking to them and getting info from the horses mouth. We learned a lot about their approach to page rank and some insights into what they are planning for the future.

Afterwards we found the volley ball court that was nicknames "the Sandbox". We took the opportunity to stand IN the sandbox and then of couse we made it out of the sandbox much quicker than many companies unfortunate enough to get stuck there.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

"This update includes just over 19.2 billion web documents, 1.6 billion images, and over 50 million audio and video files. Note that as with all index updates we are still tuning things so you’ll continue to see some fluctuation in ranking over the next few weeks." Follow this link to Yahoo's blog.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Google has just joined many news engines (Topix.net, Findory, Yahoo News, RocketNews, and others) and is now officially making Google News http://news.google.com search results available as RSS or ATOM feeds. You're also able to create feeds from customized Google News pages as well as various Google News sections (business, technology, etc.). Google's email-based alerts www.google.com/alerts remain available. You'll find the details, examples, and terms of use here http://news.google.com/intl/en_us/news_feed_terms.html

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Yahoo has launched an audio file search engine that allows web users to search more than 50 million audio files from major music services and independent publishers.

Yahoo Audio Search provides access to a variety of files including podcasts, music downloads, albums and spoken word such as newscasts, speeches, and interviews, as well as other audio related information including music videos, album reviews, artist images and artists websites.

John Thrall, head of multi-media search engineering at Yahoo Search, said: "With Yahoo Audio Search, users have a starting point for finding all audio related content available on the web making it easy for users to find, use, share and expand their knowledge of audio-related content."

Yahoo Audio Search is currently available through Yahoo Next at http://next.yahoo.com as well as http://audio.search.yahoo.com.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Yahoo and Microsoft are both stepping up efforts to challenge Google's success in selling online advertisements linked to user searches.

Yahoo's Network


On Wednesday Yahoo released the beta of an expansion to its existing Yahoo Publisher Network, which enables large Web sites such as CNN.com and ESPN.com to run Yahoo sponsor ads and receive revenue when users click on those ads. Now Yahoo is extending that opportunity to small and medium-size Web publishers through a beta self-service platform that allows companies to choose what kind of ads they want to be placed on their sites, according to the company.
The beta will be tested with 2000 invited publishers and is expected to be in full release by the end of the year, according to a Yahoo spokesperson.

Through the self-service center, Web publishers such as Weblog and e-commerce sites can choose not only ads linked contextually to the topic of their sites, but also ads in other topics that they think users might be interested in, which they select from a scroll-down menu in a service called YQ Beta, according to Yahoo. They also can choose the look of the ads so it fits into their sites, and also block URLs from sponsors that might be competitive to their site.

The Yahoo Publisher Network self-service beta also provides access to other Yahoo products, such as "Add to My Yahoo." This feature gives publishers the opportunity to promote and distribute their content on Yahoo via RSS (Really Simple Syndication), drive traffic back to their sites, and develop repeat daily relationships with their readers, according to the company.

Microsoft's Offering

Microsoft, too, aims to snare more advertising dollars through its search engine on MSN.com, and is readying a new paid-search solution as part of its MSN AdCenter platform, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.

Microsoft will debut a pilot of the paid-search offering, part of its AdCenter online advertising platform, in France and Singapore beginning in October, the spokesperson said.

The company first announced AdCenter in March at the MSN Strategic Account Summit, positioning it as a way to help advertisers connect with their desired audience through the MSN network, according to a press release at the time of the announcement.

With the paid-search component of AdCenter, Microsoft is looking to address what it thinks are several "pain points" with online advertising and paid search, such as the lack of rich targeting capabilities, lack of business intelligence reporting, and lack of tools for smaller advertisers, according to the company.

The paid-search solution in AdCenter will eventually give advertisers a self-service platform to plan, execute, and adjust their online campaigns, according to Microsoft.

Emulating Google

In addition to its plans to garner more ad revenue to battle Google, Microsoft also may emulate rival Google's matter-of-fact start page through work the company is doing in an MSN incubation project called Start.com.

The project, which can be found on the MSN Sandbox site that previews MSN prototypes and other ideas from the MSN team, offers a stripped-down start page rather than the current content-heavy MSN.com start page, according to the MSN Sandbox Web site. The page has a simple search toolbar, as well as headlines presented as simple text links with no photos or multimedia.

According to the Sandbox site, Start.com is an "experimental project" aimed at making the Web "faster, more organized and personal for consumers." The project was launched with start.com/1 in early March, followed by start.com/2 a few weeks later, and is now in its third incarnation with start.com/3, which went live on June 3.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

"In a June report, the audience breakdown by gender at Google was 51.5 percent male, compared with 49.7 percent at Yahoo, 49 percent at MSN.com, 48.1 percent at AOL Search, and 46.3 percent at Ask Jeeves."

More men than women tend to use Google, and women prefer Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves (to varying degrees), reports Internet Retailer, citing comScore figures. But the significant differences for marketers regarding paid search have more to do with searcher buying power and intent, according to the research.

In June, the audience breakdown by gender at Google was 51.5 percent male, compared with 49.7 percent at Yahoo, 49 percent at MSN.com, 48.1 percent at AOL Search, and 46.3 percent at Ask Jeeves.

ComScore research indicates that June visitors to Google sites were 42 percent more likely to buy online than the average internet user. Yahoo visitors were 31 percent more likely to purchase; MSN users, 48 percent more likely; AOL users, 3 percent; and Ask Jeeves users, 17 percent.

Apparently, though, other factors may make a bigger difference to marketers regarding search results among various search engines, at least in terms of direct conversions.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Market research company Nielsen//NetRatings has recently released search growth numbers for the top five search engines.

AOL and Ask Jeeves rose 15 and 16 percent, respectively, in the number of searches conducted, while Google and Yahoo! maintained single digit growth.

AOL and Ask Jeeves grew three times as fast as the big three search engines.

Google is first with 47 percent of all searches conducted online, Yahoo! at 22 percent and MSN at 12 percent. AOL Search held five percent of all searches, and for the first time, My Way Search made its way into the top five rankings with two percent of all searches.

My Way is a banner-free web site that allows you to choose Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Looksmart as the provider of the search results.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Search Engine Watch was created back in 1997 by Danny Sullivan and was sold later that year to the then Mecklermedia, which became Internet.com, which became INT Media, which became Jupitermedia. Now Jupitermedia has sold Search Engine Watch --along with the ClickZ network and the Search Engine Strategies shows -- to Incisive Media.

What's this mean for SEW readers? Nothing but good news. Incisive wants Danny and the SEW team to continue prooducing the quality editorial product about search just as they have been doing -- but their also looking at getting more resources to do that.

For those curious, Search Engine Watch, SES Shows Sold By Jupitermedia http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050802-110803 on the SEW blog gives you some more details on the sale and Jupitermedia Sells Search Engine Watch & SES Shows.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

This is the best way to ensure Google is indexing your site properly and thoroughly. This URLdiscusses the Google Sitemap XML structure in detail.

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Google Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can not reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface i.e. users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links. For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Here is a link to a collective report of Fireclick's web analytics clients, broken down by several categories. The categories it shows are - Top Line Growth, Fashion and Apparel, Electronics, Catalog, Specialty and Outdoor & Sports It’s being offered as a free, public benchmark of site statistics for companies to compare (themselves too). Check it out!

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics

After weeks of rumors, Ask Jeeves unveiled a new automated paid listings service today -- Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings -- that will allow anyone to purchase ads directly on the Ask Jeeves network rather than having to buy placement via Google or work through an Ask Jeeves account rep.

Google is the primary way most advertisers currently appear at Ask Jeeves. Those buying ads on Google also automatically show up at Ask Jeeves and other Ask-owned properties through a partnership that began in September 2002, unless an advertiser specifically chooses to opt-out of the Google Network to run ads only on Google's own sites.

The Ask Jeeves-Google partnership isn't ending. Google's ads will continue to show up on Ask Jeeves. But now, any advertisers that wishes will easily be able to purchase placement directly through Ask Jeeves itself.

Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

This is the obligatory "Hello World" first blog post of the Symetri Blog.

Greetz to all the SEO/SEM and Web Design and Development peeps out there.

Symetri is a Search Enging Marketing and Optimization and Web Design and Development company serving clients of all sizes across the Southeast -- Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, etc. We have offices in Greensboro, NC and Altanta, GA.

We'll be posting blog entries regularly on current events and best practices for SEO/SEM and Web design and development.

Feel free to visit our company web site (http://www.symetri.com) or email us (blog@symetri.com).