Here is a great piece on someone NOT bashing Google for being the great company that they are: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/02/10-insights-from-11-months-of-working-at-google.html
Tag Archives: sem
Global search revenue will reach $60 billion by 2011
As if Google and company did not make enough money, by years end, global search revenue will reach $30.5 billion according to a recent JPMorgan report which hinted that investors still should view the web as a good “buy” or investment.
Contrary to the dot com bust of the early 2000’s, 2007 was actually a very good year for internet companies. In fact, due to the rising world GDP, according to the report, internet companies with a global reach would continue to enjoy a healthy profit due to the broad and seamless appearance of a global marketplace. Conversely, the US GDP growth has slowed in recent years.
By 2011, look for search revenues to exceed $60 billion according to the report. A lot of this groth will be tied into paid search as a global marketing vehicle. The growth will also be attributed to keyword price inflation and increased web usage. Tied to this will be an increase in the user experience and increase in click-through rates for all sites.
The Top 20 search terms for the week
It’s a new year and thus the searches have a “turning over a new leaf” type of feel to them. But not for long, as our beloved searchers show their age when they give us WWE and Dragonball. But fear not, we are still a nation/ world obsessed with absolutely anything that Britney does as well as Jessica Simpson and Lindsey Lohan. mnay thanks to the Lycos 50.
| 1 | Poker Full House, and you thought all that SPAM was worthless? |
| 2 | Golf Fore! and it’s still winter people! |
| 3 | Fashion 2008 trends. |
| 4 | Britney Spears Dating and running from the paparazzo |
| 5 | Disney “National Treasure 2” a must see. |
| 6 | Clay Aiken “Spamalot”, Who said AI Stars have no traction? |
| 7 | Paris Hilton Buddy Nicole gives birth. She’s slipping. |
| 8 | YouTube Videos, we are a nation obsessed with videos |
| 9 | South Beach Diet Low carb. Oh and we are obsessed with losing weight as well |
| 10 | Naruto Manga |
| 11 | Pamela Anderson Not pregnant and still looking, er uh.. like Pam Anderson |
| 12 | Kim Kardashian Socialite taking advantage of her 20 minutes |
| 13 | Apple Macworld, Check out the new Air Mac or mac Air |
| 14 | WWE SmackDown. Who said anything about roids? |
| 15 | Lindsay Lohan Dating Adrian Grenier? and still clean? |
| 16 | Pokemon Battle Revolution |
| 17 | Jessica Simpson Not at Cowboys game and they still lose. |
| 18 | Weight Watchers Weight loss. In 2008, I will lose… |
| 19 | MySpace Profiles |
| 20 | NFL Playoffs? Did someone say playoffs? |
Google stats for November, no surprise here.
Google accounted for 65.1% of all US searches in the four weeks ending Dec. 1, while Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 21.2%, 7.1% and 4.6%, respectively, reported Hitwise. The remaining 46 search engines it tracks accounted for less than 2.0%. Thus if you’re an internet SEO/marketer and you’re strategy is to concentrate on the second tier SE’s, you might want to rethink that strategy. Furthermore, if you are tempted to pay money to be registered in “thousands” of search engines, our question to you would be, why?
Further enhancing marketers claims that niche based selling is the way to go, Google is also growing as a source of traffic to key industries, Hitwise said. Search engines remain the primary way internet users navigate to key industry categories, with Google leading the way.
Three categories – Travel, Entertainment, and Business and Finance – had double-digit increases (Nov. ‘06 to Nov. ‘07) in the share of traffic coming directly from search engines. These three categories revert back to a comment I made in an earlier post about the top 15 web searches: We as a society only care about being entertained and making money.
SearchBoth; Pitting good versus evil.
In an effort to confuse and confound internet searching even moreso, SearchBoth has decided to add more functionality. Forget the fact that most people really don’t know how to use search properly in the first place, SearchBoth had taken a novel approach in that it would combine the results from rival search engines. And you thought that Yahoo and Google had combined forces? Hah! But there is one problem with this idea. Rather than re-doing an already busy page, SearchBoth has decided to just clutter the page with a additional tools.
SearchBoth.com places websites side by side on one split screen in order to make comparing the results of any two websites simple and easy. The site started out with just Google and Yahoo but now offers Ask.com, MSN, DogPile, MetaCrawler, Alta Vista, LookSmart and WebSearch as well. Users can select any two search engines and view them side by side on one split screen. Cool concept but…
SearchBoth.com has also included the ability to search travel sites side by side as well with the top 12 travel sites. Users can search Hotels.com, Expedia, Travelocity, HotWire, CheapTickets, SideStep, Kayak, CheapFlights, Travelation, TravelZoo, PriceLine, Orbitz, and CheapOAir side by side as well. Cool idea but…
Although these features may be useful, the UI harkens back to a pre-millenium design where designers and engineers would vomit information onto a page thinking that “less was less” and more was not enough.
If I’m wrong, correct me and show me the way. I can be swayed.
Search Quotient
I came across this site this morning and thought it was cool, but….
SearchQuotient.com looks at a URL and key words then instantly reports a composite score reflecting a website’s ranking on major search engines. The higher the “SQ”, the higher the ranking on search engines. SearchQuotient’s staff then offers a customized plan for increasing the site’s position on major search engines.
Only one problem: The site’s “free” tool didn’t work. Talk about a bad first impression! Which begs the question, Who should be at fault? Transmedia Group, who released a Press release this morning or Search Quotient for not testing to make sure their tool was ready before releasing the tool?
Either way, though there are lots of free tools out there that do virtually the same thing. I’m sure they would like another shot at proving that what they have to offer works.
A Word to Mobile Marketers: Dumb it Down.
By 2010, over 300 million people will be using mobile phones and PDA’s. The five big verticals of mobile marketing and search will be : Consumer Package Goods, Fast Food, Entertainment, Travel, and Financial. Two other industries not to ignore however, are gaming and adult. In all of these market segments though, there will always be a need to vomit the information to the consumer, if you will.
Graphic analogies aside, what marketers need to have, to steal a line from “Top Gun”. Is a “need for speed”. having said that, internet marketers and web designers have to build their mobile sites in a completely different way for mobile users. Below is a short list of things that will need to be done in order for the experience to be a positive one for mobile users.
1) Keep the layout simple and compliant to the device(more on this later)
2) Small URL’s. At some point, someone will have to type in your mobile URL into their device.
3) No Forms. Why you would want forms on a mobile site escapes me, but if you stay in the business long enough, you tend to see it all.
4) Make the naviagtion simplistic and linear. Keep the user going down a logical path.
5) Be specific in the content, so that the user finds what they are looking for quickly. Bear in mind that mobile users have an immediate need and reason for surfing mobile content, give them a quick result.
6) Limit the number of clicks and drill downs for the user to get their information.
7) Refrain from using graphics and ads. They will only cloud the page and the result and slow the results to a crawl.
8) No scripting, no plugines and no tables.
9) Try and develop a page that can be navigated using one hand. I know it’s virtually impossible but, put yourself in the users place.
10) Make the content accessible regardless of device and regardless of bandwidth needs.
11) Keep the following specs in mind as well:
- 120 pixel screen width
- Use XHTML
- Use UTF-8 character encoding
- Use JPEG’s and GIF’s
- Page size should be 20Kb’s
- Color: 256 min.
- No scripting
- Css1 style sheets
- Http/1.0
- No image maps
- Limit Links
You’ll save yourself a lot of grief and headaches if you, wanting to cash in on mobile marketing, subscribe to certain design constraints when building your mobile ready websites. I know there are others that still need to be discussed, but the above should help in at least giving you a small checklist to utilize in your quest to be part of the next great marketing boom. Remember KISS! (Keep it simple, stupid.)
Click Fraud is on the rise.
Recently The Click Fraud Index run by Click Forensics showed that click fraud rate was on the rise. What you will find interesting about these numbers are
Key findings from data reported for Q3 2007 include:
- The overall industry average click fraud rate was 16.2 percent for Q3 2007. This is an increase from 13.8 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and from 15.8 percent for Q2 2007.
- The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.1 percent in Q3 2007. That’s up from 25.6 percent for Q2 2007, 21.9 percent for Q1 2007 and 19.2 percent for Q4 of 2006.
- Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud
- In Q3 2007, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (4.2 percent) China (4.1 percent) and Germany (3.7 percent
Publishers and advertisers have recently felt the impact click fraud is having in the content networks. Increasingly, publishers are seeing a performance drop in the content network traffic quality. Advertisers are seeing their conversion rates drop significantly on content networks because of bad traffic coming from parked domains and other low quality sources.
“Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks,” said Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics. “Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth
Are your websites optimized for Google’s Universal Search?
Google is changing the way we all view search. Back in May, it introduced a “Universal Search” system that blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages.
The move potentially should be a huge boon for searchers, while search marketers who have paid attention to the importance of specialized or vertical search will see new opportunities.
But it has now become more imperative to include video, images, news articles and other content that search engines will want to crawl. Because of this search engine marketers are going to now add this to the mix of “things to do” in order to rank well in Google’s SERPS.
Where this is all going is towards a more vertical type of search result. By being more vertical, the result is more targeted. The end result is a blend of everything in one column, hence better and more relevance.
Because of this change in a more targeted approach to search results, it means that you as a web afficionado, better have more quality content on your site. The better your content, the more of it that which will be pushed up. By better I mean variety as well.
Google’s ultimate vision for universal search is to search across all its content sources, then comapre and rank all the information in real time, and then deliver a single integrated set of precise and personalized search results.
So when designing a page, or a site, as your goal once was to be in the top 3 on the first page, it’s now important to be on the first page. Why? Because you are now competing with images, videos, blogs, and new results in the organic listings. So the more eye catching your graphics are that appear in the results on the first page, the better your chance of being clicked on, even if your not in the top 3. So the more diverse your site is in it’s approach to content, the better your chances.
So how prepared are you?
The Most Frequent Searches On The Web
The world’s most frequent searchers for Web sites using the keyword “sex” on Google search engines, according to statistics provided by Google are Egypt, India and Turkey. And you thought all the pervs were here? The term “Jihad”–Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan. That’s right people in those countries just “want” to learn what the word means. Nothing more…errr. right! Taking it to the next level are the party nations of Ireland, The US and The UK who all need information on the term”Hangover”. I wonder if the term “remedy” was inadvertently omitted.
Worried about your sexual performance? People in Italy, The United Kingdom, and Germany were the most prolific when it came to searching for the term “Viagra”. I’m not really sure why they just didn’t check their email.
And lastly, for those who of course don’t inhale, “Marijuana” was searched on the most in Canada, The United States, and Australia.
Direct Marketing Observations 