The Defrag Conference held in Denver, Colorado in the beginning of November, played host all of the top execs in the search industry including Tom Chi of Yahoo!, Bradley Allen of Siderian Software, Derek Murphy of Isys Search Software, Tom Tague of Thomson Reuters and more. So naturally there was some incredibly interesting dialogue regarding the future of search going on there. During Steve Larson’s presentation on “Next-Level Discovery: Open Search, Semantic Search, etc.” the top question on everyone’s mind was this: What will the next-generation of search engines look like?

“The only problem with search is that it’s awful, but other than that it works pretty well.” Tom Chi of Yahoo! Corporation said of current search engines. He was referring to the fact that although search is a wonderful and useful tool, it could also be a little more user friendly and helpful. “People are still doing navigational searches for Ebay.com” he added. This is significant because not only are they getting relevant direct results on their results page, they are also getting lots of other stuff they don’t need – both in direct results and in the ads section. It’s become “flooded with too much noise” as Murphy puts it. People hardly know what to do with the millions of results they get.

As a basic internet instructor for adults I see it everyday. Students look up at the top right hand corner and see that there are millions of results for “Gardening” but I can’t get them past the first page for some reason. If what they are looking for isn’t right there in those first ten results, they just give up. They would actually rather try another keyword than venture deeper in to the website. Occasionally I can get them to page two or three, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Another problem is unintelligent search results. When users search for “eby.com” they don’t get anywhere, even though what they’re looking for is obvious. Major search engines aren’t compelled to change this because those faulty search results yield the same profits that correct ones do.

Yahoo! has started to take steps to help its search platform evolve through SearchMonkey, which I’ve talked about before. It is essentially a mix between a wiki and a search engine in the sense that it allows website owners, developers and programmers to create applications that enhance the users search experience.

Other search engines like are working on vertical search systems that give more specialized results. Siderean is interested in developing a vertical search for business tools, networking and resources. Both Yahoo! and Siderean are taking a smart step forward since part of the problem, according to Tague, is that search corporations need to solve is how to integrate search with social graphs and networking.

So what’s the future of search? Will change come in an amalgam of search, wiki and social networking? Or in an evolutionary bang in proportion to algorithms? No one seems to really know what the gen-next of search will look like. But don’t worry. Users can rest assured that the experts are on it.

Popularity: 44% [?]

About five months ago Google and Yahoo! announced an agreement that would allow Google to advertise on Yahoo!’s paid search result columns, and in turn allow Yahoo! to utilize Google’s AdSense program in the US and Canada. The deal was made in an attempt to strengthen Yahoo! as a corporation after Microsoft tried to take the company over.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

Popularity: 72% [?]

Well, SearchMonkey has been around for about a year now and there’s good news for developers and website managers/owners whose applications have been rejected by Yahoo! SearchMonkey. They may now qualify for acceptance. For those experimenting with new apps, Yahoo! has introduced their new SearchMonkey Experimental Applications Gallery. Developers can go onto Search Monkey and use the SearchMonkey Developer Tool in order to test out, post and even gain a little popularity for their Experimental Apps.

Nick Cox of Yahoo! Search states in the YSearchBlog that although guidelines for submission are pretty clear, they are willing to bend the rules a little for experimental apps that at least function as intended and don’t have any “major issues.”

Users who are looking for the newest beta applications can go to Yahoo! Search Gallery Beta and select the “Show Experimental Enhancements” link at the bottom. Right above that link it will tell users how many new experimental apps are available. From there you can play around, provide feedback directly to the developers, make feature requests and even get automatic updates on your favorites.

It’s pretty slim pickings right now, but if it’s anything like Google’s App Gallery, (and it kind of is) then I’m sure it will take off pretty quickly with the Yahoo!-lover crowd.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Yahoo! is going to start making some their new website analytics tools available over the next few months. After it’s acquisition of IndexTools last May, Yahoo! has been working hard to develop and perfect their new service, simply named Yahoo! Web Analytics, which will provide feedback for e-biz owners, advertisement and marketing agencies, and online merchants. Complete with real time data, evaluation tools and even insights on how to adjust individual website designs to draw more traffic, this new service will help e-businesses convert more visits to sales and trim down marketing costs as well.

Yahoo! has once again proven why they are Google’s top competitor. For small businesses, Yahoo! will provide real time “enterprise level data” on their e-store including products and marketing. The Custom Microsite service provides tools to track and analyze how visitors spend their time on a merchant’s website and give owners a better idea of how to plan online branding and make their website more user friendly. The third part of Yahoo! Web Analytics, called “Yahoo! Open Strategy” (YOS) is for the developers. It was designed to provide API users with “analytics-enhanced reporting” in order to better understand user engagement and habits. These will be custom made reports and allows developers and e-biz manager follow the latest trends and visitor behaviors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics boasts ten specific services and benefits:

An Executive Dashboard which allows managers to customize the metrics, benchmarks and gauges in order to track progress, identify issues and set achievable goals. What I like about this feature is that every employee can have their own dashboard if you want them to. Personally I would stick with strictly management access, but the point is that you have a choice.

Custom Reporting Wizard allows managers to organize reports and include/exclude data according to what your business needs are.

Advanced Campaign Management measures CPC, CPM, CPA and ROI of each form of advertising. Because it’s real-time information, managers can adjust their budget, and organize reports as needed.

Real Time Segmentation analyzes each customer demographic and segment individually. This will permit managers to view how website visitors are responding to landing pages, campaigns, layouts and calls to action. It also enables managers to identify target groups of visitors so that they can better utilize their marketing budget.

The Live Cost Analysis compares search engine prices from Google, Yahoo! and MSN and integrates the data from revenue on your website, measures your paid search ROI and analyzes keyword effectiveness.

Managers can also analyze purchasing patterns, track product and product combination sales as well as preview their carts and suggest additional items they may be interested in with Yahoo!’s Merchandise Reporting feature. Reports can be created to track cancelled or changed orders and calculate your campaign’s profitability.

Scenario Analysis actually allows mangers to track visitor paths, behavior, and task completions allowing managers to redefine processes for the future as well as how those would have worked well in the past. This goes hand in had with the Advanced Path Analysis feature which allows managers to view popular user paths as a branched map.

Yahoo! Web Analytics allows managers to view and compare multiple reports side by side with their Comparative Reporting feature. Managers can bookmark reports and analyze their history to improve future processes and campaigns.

Marketing Workflow Management allows internet marketing managers to monitor the website and manage reports. This feature allows you to see how random and planned events (such as power failures, website changes or holidays) can affect website traffic. It will also send out an email alert to bring any changes to the manager’s attention. Colleagues can communicate, share notes and reports on their dashboard as well.

Popularity: 81% [?]

Web directories are not search engines. They are categorized lists of websites and function much like an online version of the yellow pages. Web directories are also not considered to be link farms which makes it a beneficial place to put your website address and work your way up in the search engines. In fact you’ve probably come accross Google , Yahoo!, Mozilla and MSN which all have their own directory listing sites. There are many others too if you are willing to search for them.

How you get listed in a directory is completely up how much you want to pay and where you go. Some websites will offer free submission or will list you at no cost if you are willing to add their link to your page. Be wary of free directories though since depending on how legitimate they are, you could end up getting penalized for link farming. More importantly though, you should consider paid submission sites because they practically never have a no-follow application which means your website will do better in search engine rank/ratings.

You have to be careful when submitting your website for consideration to a directory. Submissions are usually evaluated by real-live humans who are looking for spammers, black hatters and bogus or scammy websites. In order to let them know you’re legit, be sure to submit your website to the right category. If the directory doesn’t have a category that you really fit into, then suggest one and explain why you think you should be put there.

Hitting the web and doing some research on the directories that you want to submit to is the best way to ensure acceptance. Create a list of directories that you would like to be placed on and start looking into them. Some things you’re going to need to know are:

Mimic the Manager/Editor’s Preferred Style. Writing a very precise description that imitates the directory editor’s style will make it easier for him/her to accept you quickly and with few, if any alterations to what you’ve written. You can find this out by searching for businesses with similar keywords that have already been accepted. Look at their descriptions, keywords and categories and submit your keywords, description and category suggestion based on what you’ve found.

Equal, but Different. Ensure that although you descriptive style resembles that of the other businesses, your description still accurately reflects your unique business services. In other words if your company provides five specialized services or has a unique target market, then be sure to include that information.

The Long and Short of it. The criteria for business descriptions can be vary greatly from web directory to web directory. It’s useful to have several descriptions ready of different lengths. Have one that’s 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 words long. You should certainly include 1-5 keywords (one for every 10 – 20 words perhaps) but don’t stuff them in or make them too obvious since that will get you rejected. Keywords are allowed by web directories, but they certainly aren’t going to accept sketchy submissions.

Industry vs General Directories. When submitting to a web directory, keep in mind the type of directory it’s marketing itself as. Always be sure that your content belongs in the category you selected, your information is unique and your keywords aren’t crammed in there like a pack of sardines. You also want to place your keywords correctly so that search engines can pick them up easily. Only choose keywords that your company uses in the name or title of your website. Anything else may look suspicious and the directory manager will remove them.

Additional Things to Keep in Mind:
Always submit your homepage first. You can submit more specific web pages later, but it’s good form to start with the basics. Chances are that your individual web pages will be accepted if your main web site was.

Keep in mind that directories rank websites by keyword popularity within each category. I can’t reiterate enough that if you don’t typically use a keyword for your website in the title or business name, then don’t use it in your description. It will only get you rejected for looking like a spammer.

If you do get rejected you can resubmit your website after about four weeks, but don’t resubmit more than three times. After that contact the directory manager and find out what you can do to get in there. Sometimes it’s your keywords, submission lengths or maybe it’s your website. Getting into directories can help boost your rankings and they don’t have as stringent rules as search engines. If you aren’t successfully complying with them then you certainly aren’t going to rank well in search engines either. It would be beneficial for your website to find out what you can do differently and accommodate their standards.

Popularity: 58% [?]

Google is in the middle of a very quiet revolution, changing the search results right before your very eyes, introducing a new type of search which has been dubbed “universal search” by most, others call it blended search. Whatever you call it, its changing the way that SEO professionals optimize website content.

Universal search brings together components of web, book, blog, video, news and many more different types of search onto the one results page, all blended seamlessly so that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between one or the other, they simply get results tailored to their search query from various different sources.

The interesting question facing marketers, is how to take advantage of these new elements, which feature prominently within SERPS? Do you focus your time on optimizing video content, tagging images, writing a blog, publishing ebooks?!?

Need an example of universal search? Try searching Google.com for “los angeles bars” and this is what you will see:

Universal Search Example:

Ok, so we now know what universal search optimization can cover, basically any kind of web content so here is my guide to help priotize your online content efforts, in order of easiest to hardest.

1. Tagging your images: This is a no brainer and one of the easiest ways to start to get some additional traffic from the search engines. Tagging all images contained on your website with the correct alt text and description fields, gives you the opportunity to basically show a banner ad at the very top of a search result, if Google deems your image to be highly relevant.
2. Optimizing video content: Make your video useful or informational (Don’t waste users time), tag your video with popular terms which relate to the content, keep the video short and to the point, put your logo on the video and always ensure that you name your video so that it is relevant to the content and the keywords associated with it. Another great tip is to always include your videos in a “video sitemap” so that the search engines can find it all and finally use html to describe the contents of your video because search engines still love HTML best!
3. News content: If Google or Yahoo or any other news aggregators, truly think your site is newsworthy, they will generally add you to their index on their own, however for the majority of us it’s a matter of writing content, building up a reasonable level of quality and then submitting for approval. Once approved, news based search results can deliver lots of relevant traffic and the same old rules apply, write good quality, keyword rich, feature articles and make them worthwhile for users to read.
4. Local search: Getting listed within local search results can be as simple as adding your website to the local business ads section index within your adwords account, the reason that i put this as #4 was because you generally have to pay for the listing on a per click basis. However Google will also give you that one, free, map based link if you claim ownership of your business address, via a verification process. Click here for more information on Local business ads
5. Book search: Now this is a tougher one, simply because you have to take the time to write a book! It’s not as easy as it sounds but if you have the time, write a book on something you are truly passionate about, something you have a strong opinion on and then publish it as a PDF. Do your research and find popular phrases, using tools like wordtracker or keyword elite and featuring these phrases heavily within your original content. Once you have written your book, published it, it looks all pretty. Register it for a Google book ID and you are done, if people are searching for phrases which are highly relevant to your publication, there is a good change your book will be shown.

If you currently use a third party search agency to optimize your website, make sure you ask them what they are doing for your universal optimization, be proactive and findout their guidelines and strategies and ask questions about where they think the future is heading and get in before your competition does.

Those tips above are useful, but the most important thing to remember when optimizing your search marketing, is to try and deliver unique, meaningful content to users. Google and Yahoo both love to deliver the freshest, most useful webpage’s to their users, so if you write it (and optimize it properly) they will come.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Search Engine Marketing is so often touted as the best thing ever to happen to marketing, the be all and end all of promotion and the most trackable and closely scrutinized of all marketing avenues.
Many companies start out with the mentality “Ok we need to do SEM, get it setup and lets spend some money getting all the clicks we can get” without giving a thought to what they REALLY want to get out of their SEM campaigns. The more clicks a company generally receives and the lower their Cost Per Click the happier they are and there are always lots of handshakes at meetings and happy campers.

This mentality is WRONG!!!!! Let me explain why. Before any search marketing campaign starts you should truly consider what your business goals are, some examples would be; Customer Acquisition, Information Requests (customer submitting a request for more information from your company), Click Volume, Revenue Per Visitor. Now there are many more potential positive outcomes from your search marketing but they were just a few examples. The reason why basing your SEM success purely on click goals or cost per click is that it doesnt accurately reflect your businesses ROI and this is where conversion tracking comes in.

Conversion tracking works by inserting code onto your website which allows marketers to track actions on your website and correlate which keywords, ads or adgroups are driving the greatest amount of real value to your business. This isn’t rocket science and let me reiterate what i am saying here; Without conversion tracking or properly defined business goals which allow for some kind of real world measurement of success you are THROWING YOUR MONEY AWAY!

Ok, so now that we have my little rant out of the way you may be asking “what options are there for tracking success on my website?” Who would have guessed that there are literally hundreds of free solutions out there however the two most obvious and most powerful are Googles conversion tracking and Yahoo’s conversion tracking tools. Both of these are good, free, solutions which allow every aspect of your campaigns to be measured against your business goals, optimised to increase the performance in relation to that and also to easily be reported on.

The distinct advantage that Google’s conversion tracking has over Yahoo’s tool is that it ties directly into Google Analytics and then becomes a far more powerful tool for tracking every aspect of your sites performance.

If you have any questions regarding conversion tracking and how it can benefit you, or if you just think you need some help in defining your business goals. Come on over to LoveClients.com and we are more than happy to speak with you!

Popularity: 59% [?]

In case you have been hiding in a cave for the last few weeks and don’t read newspapers or watch the tv, You would know that Microsoft made a bid for the once mighty search engine Yahoo in a deal worth over 44 Billion dollars! After roughly a week of deliberation on the offer Yahoo has now officially rejected the offer saying that it substantially undervalues the company and is a predatory move designed to take advantage of the current share price slump.

Analysts and search guru’s have been a buzz over the possible implications a merged Yahoo and MSN would have for the broader search community and i have just one comment to make regarding this. Any kind of serious competition to Googles almost total market dominance has to be a good thing, regardless of who the player that consolidates the number two search spot ends up being.

More recent reports have come in that News Corp is supposedly in talks to merge its myspace and fox web properties along with some private cash on the side as well with Yahoo in order to gain a 20% stake in the company which would value Yahoo at roughly 50 billion total.

No doubt there will be more updates to come as the battle for Yahoo continues.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Ok, so everybody on earth has used Google or Yahoo or some kind of search engine. So chances are, you have come across paid search campaigns before! Did you recognize the ads as paid?.. Chances are if you have been around the internet for long enough you would be used to these ads and they probably blend into your everyday searching without causing a stir.

Did you know that quite often people are paying $1,5 or even $50 per click to get traffic via these paid links??! You may think, why the hell would somebody pay $50 per click? Well the truth is, that if you were making $100 per click, paying $50 isnt that bad! – It’s sort of like poker, you are never going to be 100% sure that spending $50 on a click is going to pay off every time, but by making the educated decision and the “right play” more often than not that click is going to deliver a good return on investment!

Paid search is a science and the basics premise behind it is to buy clicks that are valuable to your website and get a good ROI from the campaign as a whole. Lots of individual elements come together across the whole campaign to deliver the end results. Paid search combines elements of marketing, advertising, copywriting, analytics, accounting and many other smaller elements together.

The main differences between paid search and organic search is that paid search can deliver instant traffic on demand which is highly accountable and can be constantly optimised towards many different end goals including a lower cost per click, higher traffic volumes, more conversions or any other metric which you desire.

Paid search isnt going to do everything for your business, it wont make your site convert better if it sucks. It wont do the ironing for you or cook you dinner It CAN however deliver real value to your business by getting your brand in front of consumers when they are in the right frame of mind to purchase your products or become a loyal follower of your message. The difference between an average search marketing campaign and a good one can be the difference between buying a ferrari or a fiat!!

I haven’t gone into too much detail in thos post about the inner workings of SEM but stay tuned for some far more detailed insights into the world of paid search!

Popularity: 13% [?]