SEO Tuts

One day before the Olympics in Beijing, Ominture has announced that its SearchCenter integration with Chinese search engine Baidu.com is now available.

“Successful search management strategies are paramount for enterprises and interactive agencies that do global online marketing,” said Josh James, CEO and co-founder at Omniture. “SearchCenter gives businesses increased advantages by managing search marketing campaigns to the vast Chinese Internet audience that predominantly uses Baidu.com for search.”

Baidu recently posted an 87% profit for the second quarter of 2008. By the time of the next summer Olympics, China is expected to exceed the U.S. in internet use. Baidu currently enjoys 76% of the Chinese language search market.

“While the Chinese Internet audience has continued to grow, so has the interest in targeting this large economy through paid and natural search marketing,” said Haoyu Shen, Baidu.com’s vice president of business operations. “By integrating Baidu.com’s search metrics with Omniture, we believe online marketers can better measure campaigns and increase conversion by making the search experience more relevant.”

Internet service providers love to talk about how much traffic is rapidly increasing by the year and how they’ll either need to charge more or create a different business model for it. Even Time Warner is running a test in Beaumont, TX to meter internet use and charge by usage.

But the claims by cable companies and other service providers may be overblown. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have released data showing that traffic growth is actually slowing.

In spite of the widespread claims of continuing and even accelerating growth rates, Internet traffic growth appears to be decelerating. In the United States, there was a brief period of “Internet traffic doubling every 100 days” back in 1995-96, but already by 1997 growth subsided towards an approximate doubling every year CO1998, and more recently even that growth rate has declined towards 50-60% per year.

They called out Cisco (and I hate to do this since a friend works there), whose CEO said they were experiencing 100% growth, while their white papers said they were experiencing 50% growth.

The natural conclusion by ISPs has been that increased traffic means increased costs. But researchers say not so fast:

Traffic volumes are a very crude measure of the state of the Internet. Investment is driven by profits, and those have only a slight relation to traffic.

Still, the cable companies clearly want to go after internet companies like Google, who stepped on their turf by offering TV ads. They’ve even been collaborating on “Project Canoe,” designed to create a national advertising platform as an alternative to Google.

But when it comes to the internet, innovation is almost always the route to beating the competition. The cable companies are trying to keep consumers in the past, but they won’t win that game.

What do you think of this data? Are ISPs trying to pull a fast one on us? Sound off in the comments.

via Ars Technica

Related Reading:
Google to Internet, FCC, Verizon and Viacom: Keep it Open
Google - Clearwire: WiMax Paves Internet Autobahn

Google has announced new features that are coming to the Content Network. They said the new features are part of the integration process with DoubleClick, since finalizing the acquisition of the company earlier this year.

The new features are:

• Frequency Capping: Enables advertisers to control the number of times a user sees an ad. Users will have a better experience on Google content network sites because they will no longer see the same ad over and over again.
• Frequency Reporting: Provides insight into the number of people who have seen an ad campaign, and how many times, on average, people are seeing these ads.
• Improved Ads Quality: Brings performance improvements within the Google content network.
• View-Through Conversions: Enables advertisers to gain insights on how many users visited their sites after seeing an ad. This helps advertisers determine the best places to advertise so users will see more relevant ads.

Yesterday, Google announced the sale of DoubleClick’s search engine marketing arm of Performics, to Publicis.

In May, Google integrated DoubleClick mobile with its Adsense program, as well as other mobile ad networks.

Yahoo has officially appointed Carl Icahn to its board of directors, and board member Robert Kotick has officially resigned. The moves were all part of a previously reached agreement by Yahoo and Icahn following months of drama resulting from an unsolicited bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo.

But with the track record of Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostick, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Icahn and Microsoft, this game is not nearly over. Instead, the first six months of 2008 were more like announcing the starting lineups at the NBA championships.

Or maybe an elementary schoolyard where the bullies are picking teams.

Either way, expect to see more posturing and smear campaigns, not unlike this year’s presidential election.

via Reuters

How often do people use a search engine?

The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has soared from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one half (49%), according to the latest study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

How often people search is one of the key questions in understanding the success of Google and other search engines. Search has become embedded in our daily lives.

Key finding: Search is gaining fast on email as the most popular Internet activity.

The number of people using a search engine on a typical day has gained ground on the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the Internet’s all-time killer app.

How does the growth rate of search compare to the growth rate of email over the same time period?

Underscoring the dramatic increase over time, the percentage of internet users who search on a typical day grew 69% from January 2002 to May 2008. During the same six-year time period, the use of email on a typical day rose from 52% to 60%, for a growth rate of just 15%.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that these new figures propel search further out of the pack, well ahead of other popular internet activities, such as checking the news (39%) or checking the weather (30%) on a typical day.

As our readers know, search engine users more likely to be upscale, with at least some college education and incomes over $50,000 per year.

Microsoft has just released an update to their Webmaster Tools. It’s a significant update, with lots of new functionality in it. My guess is that a large number of SEOs will adopt this new tool as a part of their tool set. Let’s take a look at the opening screen:

As you can see, you start with a nice clean look. Note that this is a screen shot for Microsoft.com. Not every site has 186 million pages indexed …

One of the new features is the “Crawl Issues” report. This provides information on 404 errors, pages blocked by the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and dynamic URLs that have excessively long query strings. One interesting sub-note is that the review guide I received says: “Live Search flags URLs that have exceptionally long query string that could lead our crawler into an infinite loop trying to crawl all the variations due to the large number of potential parameter combinations.”

I though that the note about a potential infinite loop was pretty interesting. Clearly that would be a scenario that would dramatically affect the crawling and indexing of your site in a material way.

The Crawl Issues report also provides information on unsupported Content-Types. This will help webmasters pages that are not being indexed by Live Search because of the Content-Type returned by the pages.

Next up is the backlinks report. First, let’s take a look at an example:

Once again, a nice clean look. Just being able to get at this data and download it is powerful. SEOs will want to make use of this for analyzing the backlinks of the site(s) they are working on. However, if you look more closely at the screen shot, you will see an example of the filtering capabilities in the product. Our example shows the backlinks for Microsoft.com being filtered to show only the links received from latimes.com.

Other filters are available. For example you can also filter the data based on top level domain. Overall the filtering capability allows you to dig a bit deeper into the content of your backlinks. Results in Webmaster Tools can also filter data by up to 2 subdomains or 2 sub-folders. This again can lead to faster analysis of the data.

The program does provide a download option, but it is limited to 1000 results. For sites with over 1000 backlinks, this will be a bit frustrating. Nonetheless, the ability to get at the data, and into a spreadsheet is an important addition.

In summary, this looks like a solid upgrade to Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools offering. I think many SEOs will adopt this. The access to the backlinks data alone justifies giving the product a close look.

Google has sold its Performics search marketing business to the Publicis Groupe.

Chicago-based Performics has about 200 employees in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Singapore and Beijing. The business will report into Curt Hecht, president of Paris-based Publicis’ VivaKi Nerve Center. Hecht is the former EVP Chief Digital Officer, GM Planworks, a unit of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG)

“Publicis Groupe has been a leader in the advertising industry for decades, and we believe Performics’ growing business will benefit from being part of it,” said Google Chairman and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in a statement. “We look forward to working with Performics as a partner.”

The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.

Newsflashr.com launched a new type of search engine for news stories today. Users are prompted to enter keywords and the search results are polled and displayed in real-time from many of the leading news services such as MSN Live, Ask Big News, Google News, Yahoo News, MSNBC, Digg and Twitter to name a few.

Newsflashr will also feature the Techmeme Leaderboard.

The site is the first to add a social twist to news reporting, in an attempt to leverage contributions of citizen journalists and the collective intelligence. For the first time, we’ll be able to determine whether Twitter is actually a news source. Plus, Digg - one of the key drivers of searches on Google Hot Trends - will be featured as a news source.

The sites is shooting for a hip, ironic image. The front page graphic is no Google Doodle. It’s a pic of The Joker superimposed on nuclear missiles, with the caption the Joker’s line from The Dark Knight, “Why so serious?” (see below)

“As a small company, we think that we can challenge the big guns with our new approach that pulls from all their results and pushes them on to a single results page. Say someone is really thirsty for any news updates on a given person or company, using Newsflashr, they’ll never miss a beat,” said Gal Arav, founder of Newsflashr.com, in a statement.

The new service complements Newsflashr’s existing free news portal launched in February 2008. The existing portal is a news interface that highlights keywords (topics) representing the “collective intelligence” of hundreds of the top news editors as it updates throughout the day for a wide variety of mainstream news and blog categories.