If you've been following my posts about real-estate agent advertising, you'll have gathered that these people are pioneers in the ad world. Give them a lemon, and they'll dress up in a lemon costume, come up with a clever pun and sell lemonade.
Recently, Google removed the “beta” label from a bunch of apps, including GMail. Now they’re at it again. The new AdWords interface is the latest to say goodbye to beta.
If you haven’t made the upgrade, you’ll eventually be required to. But you can do so now, and here’s what to expect when you do:
- Performance graphs: Quickly recognize trends in your account performance via custom graphs on every page
- Roll-up tabs: Identify top priorities by viewing and editing all keywords, placements or ads in an account on a single tab
The editorial team here at Search Engine Watch is proud to announce the finalists for the 2009 Search Engine Watch Awards. We had a great turnout this year, with nearly 100 entries for the 14 categories.
We’ve winnowed down the entries to three finalists in each category. Once our judging panel completes their deliberations, we’ll announce the winners in each category at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.
Look for my smiling face, along with several of our SEW Experts, in Booth 327 of the Expo Hall. We’ll be announcing the winners throughout the day on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 11 and 12.
The conventional SEO strategy goes like this:
- Research keywords
- Optimize site for those keywords
- Link internal pages using keyword loaded terms
- Get links from other sites with keywords in the link
These days, this strategy isn’t working as well as it used to.
If a site isn’t genuinely interesting and isn’t worth remarking upon, it can be difficult to get links, attention and rankings.
These are essentially marketing problems.
By basing our SEO strategy on fundamental marketing principles, we stand a much better chance of dominating the rankings, no matter what niche we choose to target.
Yahoo! has made some UI changes to their local search results. The update is centralized around the idea of reducing clicks.
When you’re viewing a result, the links to Yahoo! Shortcut information (reviews, photos, etc.) now load the content directly on the page you’re viewing.
Additionally, when you do a category local search on Yahoo!’s main search, a local section will pop up, enabling the Yahoo! Shortcut content to be accessed in the results page.
Raleigh must be in some kind of vortex, though, because I couldn’t get this feature to work for my hometown. But I can get it to work for other cities of varying populations.
A bright young couple decided to have a non-traditional beginning to their St. Paul wedding. The entire wedding party, bride and groom included, danced down the aisle of a church to “Forever” by beleaguered R&B singer Chris Brown. They put the video up on YouTube and it currently has received over 12 million views.
While watching the video, links pop up allowing users to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes. Many have done just that.
One of the biggest questions regarding the new Microsoft-Yahoo! deal is what will happen to Yahoo!’s search offerings in its Developer Network. Yahoo! is known for being pretty open, which was a major reasons that many thought last year’s Microsoft acquisition offer was a bad idea. The cultures just didn’t seem to mesh.
Fast forward to yesterday and the deal was severely watered down from 2008 proposals. Yahoo! will maintain the UI in its search pages and the two companies will essentially engaging in a revenue-sharing agreement, powered by Bing.
Microsoft and comScore are teaming up to create a new digital ad planning tool. Dubbed the Reach and Frequency Planner, the tool will enable advertisers to predict reach, frequency and audience composition at the ad placement level. Audience measurement will combine ad serving data from Microsoft with demographic information from comScore.
After the ad is placed, tracking will be enabled to see how closely the end result reflected the prediction.
Ultimately, the Reach and Frequency Planner is designed to measure branding efforts in digital advertising.
Posted by great scott!
Dr. Pete Meyers of UserEffect drops by the studio this week to teach us some incredibly valuable tactics for e-commerce site architecture.
E-commerce folks know that once you get up to thousands (or even millions) of products, it can be difficult to make sure the bulk of your juice goes to your most profitable products, while still getting long-tail traffic for the rest of your inventory. Pete shares some great tricks for large-site architecture that will help you focus your traffic and rankings on your top items, while maintaining visibility for your whole catalog.
An iPhone user gets creative in voicing his frustration with AT&T.
