Online Marketing

There’s no better way to generate new sales and leads for your business, than a front page listing on Google and Yahoo! By advertising your website on the first page of Google and Yahoo!, you get exposure to millions of searches every day and the ability to drive thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website. Click here to see the promotions.

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Extracted from Essentials Of Search Engine Submission, written by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch

How can I get my site listed with search engines? It sounds like a pretty simple question, but sadly, search engine submission can be a complicated subject.

Have no fear. This guide will take you through the essential and relatively easy steps you can take to get listed with search engines.

Before we begin, it’s important to make a distinction between search engine submission and search engine optimization. These terms, along with others, are sometimes used synonymously to discuss different efforts to promote sites on search engines. However, within this section of Search Engine Watch, they will be used to refer to some very specific activities.

Search Engine Submission: Getting Listed

“Search engine submission” refers to the act of getting your web site listed with search engines. Another term for this is search engine registration.

Getting listed does not mean that you will necessarily rank well for particular terms, however. It simply means that the search engine knows your pages exist.

Think of it as a lottery. Search engine submission is akin to your purchasing a lottery ticket. Having a ticket doesn’t mean that you will win, but you must have a ticket to have any chance at all.

Search Engine Optimization: Improving The Odds

“Search engine optimization” refers to the act of altering your site so that it may rank well for particular terms, especially with crawler-based search engines (later in this guide, we will explain what these are).

Returning to the lottery example, let’s assume there was a way to increase the odds of winning by picking your lottery numbers carefully. Search engine optimization is akin to this. It’s making sure that the numbers you select are more likely to win than purchasing a set of numbers at random.

Search Engine Placement & Positioning: Ranking Well

Terms such as “search engine placement,” “search engine positioning” and “search engine ranking” refer to a site actually doing well for particular terms or for a range of terms at search engines. This is the ultimate goal for many people — to get that “top ten” ranking for a particular keyword or search terms.

Search Engine Marketing & Promotion: The Overall Process

Terms such as “search engine marketing” or “search engine promotion” refer to the overall process of marketing a site on search engines. This includes submission, optimization, managing paid listings and more.

These terms also highlight the fact that doing well with search engines is not just about submitting right, optimizing well or getting a good rank for a particular term. It’s about the overall job of improving how your site interacts with search engines, so that the audience you seek can find you.

On To Submission

The next few “essentials” pages cover the basics of search engine submission. If all you do is follow the instructions on these essentials pages, you’ll receive traffic from search engines. However, if you have time, you should also read beyond the essentials to understand how optimization can increase your traffic and other ways you can market your site with search engines.

From The Official Google Blog, posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Designer

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon — after all, we hadn’t in 8.5 years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set. Here’s the full set:

The design process we went through was rigorous and interesting, so we thought we would share more of it here. We tried in total more than 300 permutations. It was much harder than we thought at first. We wanted something distinctive and noticeable, so we aimed toward transparency or semi-transparency, so the image would have a more distinctive noticeable shape than just a block. We wanted something that embraced the colorfulness of the logo, yet wouldn’t date itself. Since we don’t really have a symbol that means Google, we felt it best to work with the logo and letters within it. Our design team tried literally hundreds of approaches. You can see some of our explorations here.

By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more
unified set of icons. However, we really value feedback from users and want to hear your ideas that we may have missed. If you have your own notions about the Google favicon, please send them to us. We’ll do our best to work them in, and maybe your idea will be the one that people see billions of times per day.

Remember the Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback rewards program that we told you about not so long ago? It is now working on a direct-to-merchant system with eBay’s “Buy It Now” program. That means, you’ll start seeing more cashback ads when searching for jewelries to electronics.

Whereas previously, the CashBack rewards program works only on indirect cashback system wherein a user clicks on a Live Search cashback ad and they will be directed to the cashback page before proceeding to the advertiser’s site. But now with the recent tie up between Microsoft and eBay, users will be brought directly to the advertiser’s page. The cashback gleam will follow you as you fulfill a sales transaction and then rewards you with a corresponding rebate.

More information about this new program can be found at the eBay’s Terms and Conditions page for the cashback offer:

Extracted from the Search Engine Journal, written by Arnold Zafra

Recently, changes to Google Trends have been noticed, and today Google is finally announced a new version of the tool on the Official Google blog. The latest version includes a numeric metric dubbed ‘relative scaling’ and the ability to export trends data.

With relative scaling, the numbers will not provide exact data, but will give you ballpark of how certain terms are trending. Here’s how Heej Hwang of the Google Trends team explained relative scaling:

You’ll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don’t refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you’ve entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period. So in the example above, 1.00 is the average search volume of vanilla ice cream from 2004 to present. We can then see a spike in mid-2006 which crosses the 3.00 line, indicating that search traffic is approximately 3 times the average for all years.

The export function offers two options: relative scaling or fixed scaling. Fixed scaling is data scaled to a specific timeline.

Previously, users noticed the removal of the ability to view trends hourly.

What do you think of the new Google Trends? Give us your thoughts in the comments.

Fully extracted from Search Engine Watch written by Nathania Johnson

Today, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have come together to post details of how each of them support robots.txt and the robots meta tag. While their posts use terms like “collaboration” and “working together”, they haven’t joined together to implement a new standard (as they did with sitemaps.org). Rather, they are simply making a joint stand in messaging that robots.txt is the standard way of blocking search engine robot access to web sites. They have identified a core set of robots.txt and robots meta tag directives that all three engines support:

Google and Yahoo! already supported and documented each of the core directives and Microsoft supported most of them before this announcement. In their posts, they also list the directives they support that may not be supported by the other engines.

For robots.txt, they all support:

• Disallow
• Allow
• Use of wildcards
• Sitemap location

For robots meta tags, they all support:

• noindex
• nofollow
• noarchive
• nosnippet
• noodpt

With this announcement, Microsoft appears to be adding support for the use of * wildcards (which will go live later this month) and the Allow directive. The biggest discrepancy is with the crawl-delay directive. Yahoo! and Microsoft support it, while Google does not (although Google does support control of crawl speed via Webmaster Tools ).

This isn’t the first time the major search engines have come together for an announcement regarding how they support publishers. In late 2006, all three joined together to support XML Sitemaps and launched sitemaps.org, followed in April 2007 with support for Sitemaps autodiscovery in robots.txt and in February 2008 with more support for more flexible storage locations of Sitemap files. In early 2005, the engines declared support for the nofollow attribute on links (in an effort to combat comment spam).

Extracted from Search Engine Land, written by Vanessa Fox, 3 June 2008

“Microsoft’s live search will be the default search engine on all PCs made by Hewlett Packard for the US and Canadian markets from January 2009.”

Under pressure after calling off its bid to buy search engine Yahoo, Microsoft hopes the deal will attract more people to live search. The toolbar will also have links to HP’s online services.

Google dominates the internet search engine market, handling 10 times more traffic than Microsoft’s live search. Yahoo attracts more than twice as much traffic as live search.

“This is the most significant distribution deal for live search that Microsoft has ever done,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division.

Microsoft has a similar but smaller arrangement with China’s Lenovo Group, while Google has a distribution deal with Dell and Mozilla’s Firefox web browser.

Hello everyone!

I’m Gabriel, a current student of The University of Western Australia - UWA, where I’m undertaking a Master of Electronic Marketing and Information Management, to be finished by the end of 2008. Experience as Online Mkt Manager at - clickhoteles.com - an online tourism company of hotels booking ’til 2005; a bit of travelling - Brazil to Europe and then Australia -; and now back to internet mkt at ineedhits.com in Perth, Australia (Search Engine Mkt and Google AdWords).

Now proud to present this new blog, willing to come up with news, ideas, researches and all about Electronic Marketing and Search Engine Marketing. I’ll try to include the hi-wanted Submission, Optimisation, and Pay-per-Click information, our experiences, thoughts and up to date news on the web.

I expect this to help fulfilling our needs within the range of the marketing on internet. The advertising on the web is growing very second, and so are techniques to make websites more and more acceptable by search engines, also users nowadays are more aware of quality on the web and requirements much higher.

Keep your antennas directed to this blog, soon bringing great info!