PromotionWorld
Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. “Google, regardless of it’s [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals,” he says. “It’s important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process.”
For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you’re positioning a product for the younger set, “there’s still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo,” Henige says.
Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online–and tended to attract searchers from the “affluent suburbia” and “upscale America” brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, “gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start,” Henige says.
Search Engine People
Blog posts tied to breaking news often suffer from a limited shelf-life–but they can help garner lots of juice-passing links that can help propel your blog (or the encompassing site) to the top of the organic listings. And there’s a new plugin for WordPress bloggers that lets you automatically create 301 redirects so that you can pass the juice on from those highly-trafficked posts.
Search Engine People developed the free plugin, which is available at http://www.searchenginepeople.com/tools/wp-301redirect.zip. It allows you to redirect any blot post or page to any other post or page–whether its internal or external–simply by entering the new URL. And you can even choose a specific time and date to have the redirect occur.
WebmasterWorld
What happens when you tweak title tags across a swath of pages on your Web site at the same time? Apparently, tumbling rankings, a decrease in the number of pages indexed and an ensuing slowdown in traffic, according to one Webmaster’s account. Internetheaven, a WebmasterWorld forums user,explains that organic traffic to his site dropped by 65% in the wake of him changing the title tags for about 60 of the site’s 250 pages.
“Last week I went through about 60 of them and adjusted the title tags to something I thought would be more appropriate,” he said, “E.g. from: ‘CompanyName - Get your keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 & keyword4 Quote Now from Company Name’ to CompanyName.com ¦ Company Name Keyword1 & Keyword2 Quotes’.” And while it wasn’t a drastic change, as the site wasn’t generating much traffic from the deleted terms, the ensuing results were awful. So the discussion focuses on whether Internetheaven fiddled with too many title tags at once and sparked Google’s “excessive optimization” radar. As one reader says: “Unless you are a super trusted authority site (ie you can throw up a page on a long tail and rank Top 3 in an hour), then Google is very cranky about title changes lately.” The reader suggests that Internetheaven should change the bulk of the title tags back to their original setup, leave one “optimized” and see how/when the rankings fluctuate.
Another reader suggests that including “Companyname.com” as the first word of every title tag was likely the culprit. Google weights the first words of the title more than later words,” says Steveb. “Putting Companyname.com as the first words of every page is suicide, and odd anyway. Change is not a problem, literally completely useless duplicate content is.”
MarketingSherpa
MarketingSherpa recently surveyed marketers about their most under-used campaign performance metrics when it came to search, and found that conversions and ROI came out on top.
Over 40% of marketers said that they didn’t track conversions (23%) or ROI (20%) for their search campaigns. It seems that while search has been lauded as one of the most accountable ad channels, a significant number of companies are not maximizing the ability to track it to actual sales (or other conversion action).
“With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who will optimize and balance their spending,” the report said.
Search Marketing Standard
Yahoo shares a wealth of usability testing data and Web site design experience with Webmasters through its new Developer Center, and Kevin Gold reviews some of the Center’s offerings. “Yahoo has exposed their testing results on issues ranging from ratings and reviews, reputation, navigational structure, ad placement layouts, bead-crumb navigation best practices and wire-framing tools,” he says. “In my past experience, I have spent considerable time searching for this grade of information and have often paid for best practices based on valid testing. Now it’s free.” For example, Yahoo has tested a number of reputation monitoring tools and has posted the results in the Developer Center, including case studies as well as precautions. Gold also suggests tapping the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) blog for more design and usability info.
Get Elastic
Excluding irrelevant or low-performing keywords (i.e., negative keywords) from your campaigns can greatly increase relevance (and efficacy), particularly when using broad and phrase matching. Linda Bustos offers some tips for negative keyword research using a trio of Google tools–the Keyword Tool, Google Suggest and Google Product Search. With Product Search, for example, you can find shopping-related terms, particularly brand names of products that you don’t carry, that should be excluded from your campaigns. “When a search query involves a brand name, it’s a strong signal that someone is looking to research or purchase a specific item, not check out other brands,” Bustos says. “So your general ad will have lower click through, which lowers the click through rate of your entire AdGroup, hurting all your keywords’ ad positions and possibly raising your cost-per-click.”
Search Engine Guide
According to Stoney deGeyter, a “Destination Web site” is one that “truly deserves to be ranked well in the search engines.” It’s likely that every business owner wants to have a site that ranks well, so this post is the fourth in a series that details how to build and market Destination Web sites.
The four factors that go into marketing a Destination Web site are: strong on- and off-page SEO that involves more than just search engine rankings; compelling content that drives conversions; synchronized on- and offline marketing efforts; as well as business management and customer service that extends beyond the sale.
“The difference between a Destination Web site and any other is that all of the strategies above must be used together and you have to be at the top of your game with each one,” deGeyter says. “Too often businesses focus on only one or two of these areas simply looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales. These boosts are often effective, but are also just as often very short-lived.”
Adweek
A new survey claims that America’s slumping economy is having an effect on online ad growth. Conducted by William Blair & Co, the new survey forecasts that the gloomy economic outlook will contribute to slowing growth. The investment bank queried 150 Chicago-area interactive marketing companies about their budgets, and two thirds of respondents said economic conditions would affect spending.
According the results, the respondents expect Internet advertising to grow slightly more than 16% in the next year, less than the 19% William Blair tracked in previous surveys. Respondents pegged paid search and ROI-based direct response ads as the sectors most likely to thrive.
“Online’s healthy, but the economy is definitely having an impact,” Sean Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, a Chicago ad service for newspaper sites, told Adweek. “In a weak economy, people are going to move more towards direct response. We’re seeing brand advertising take a much bigger hit this year.”
SEO Scientist
If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the “juice” to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts.
Rihtman’s test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first link on each page carries all the weight. He tested one start page with two links to the same destination page, and found that Google only indexed the first link. Even with a nofollow tag, the giant’s spider still picked up the initial link and ignored the second.
The New York Times
Google is partnering with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane to distribute two-minute episodes of a new cartoon, “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” through its AdSense advertising system. The search giant will syndicate the program to thousands of Web sites that typically attract young men. Instead of static ads, clips of “Cavalcade” will appear where AdWords ads usually go on these sites.
Advertising, of course, will be incorporated into the clips in a variety of ways, including prerolls, banners, or a simple “brought to you by” note appearing at the beginning of each clip. For more money, MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials for “Cavalcade.” While none of the launch advertisers are being revealed, MacFarlane and Google are both saying that several deals are among the largest ever for Google’s 5-year-old advertising system. Google refers to the new service as the Google Content Network. “Cavalcade” carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag.
MacFarlane described the installments to The Times as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.” As part of the deal, MacFarlane will receive a percentage of the ad revenue from the 50 two-minute episodes.
