New Study – Importance of Rankings on Brand
36% of search engine users associate top rankings with brand leadership
In addition, 88% of users will change engines or search terms if they don’t find what they seek within the first three pages of search results, up from 78% in 2002.
Brian
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Posted by Brian of Brian on 04/21/2006
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Research and Development, Tracking and Reporting Branding, Searcher-Behavior
Optimize your roof ads for Google Maps
Since SEMs and SEOs are trying to use every way possible to increase their site exposure and ad visibility in the search engines, I thought it would be a good time to provide some tips on how to properly and effectively optimize your rooftop ads to appear in Google Maps.
Now, Danny Sullivan claimed that logos on rooftops are not intended for Google Maps, but this assertion is no longer correct, since I heard a recent segment in the last week on NPR about a rooftop ad company which is specifically gearing their ads to appear on the satellite images.
An article on Wired about that same company, RoofShout.com [7/14/08: link is now defunct], indicates that this may indeed be a viable new ad medium. For tips about how you can optimize for the rooftop media (which I will refer to as “SkySense Ads”), read on…
(more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/13/2006
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, Google, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tricks April-Fools, Google, Google-Maps, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Plenty of Traffic
Plentyoffish.com was recently reported to have over $300k in AdSense revenue per month, according to an exclusive interview with the creator, Markus Frind.
In a forum on WebmasterWorld, one thing Markus Frind suggested for those wishing to be successful as AdSense publishers really stood out for me:
“Do not enter markets with a lot of competition monitized via adsense. Try and undercut paid content markets by offering a free service, or better yet create your own market.”
So, there you have a great formula for success: choose an industry that charges fees for access to info/content, and offer it for free, paid by the contextual advertising.
Newspaper Industry: are you listening?
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/09/2006
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Filed under: Best Practices, General AdSense, Google, Google-AdSense
Google Releases New Related Links Feature
Google Labs has just released a new feature called Google Related Links which allows webmasters to place a little tabbed user-interface navigation box on their site. The box will pull in links to sites related to the content on your webpage, allowing you to display related links to Searches, News, and Web Pages.
I’ve copied a screengrab below so that you can see how the real thing looks:
Perhaps this is a useful feature for some, but I’m thinking that most web editors prefer to choose their own related links and are better able to choose appropriate ones than this automated option.
So, are there other incentives to adding the code?
Their FAQ states that they do not pay publishers for adding the feature “at this time”. This would seem to hint that they’re considering paying for the referral traffic, which I think that most publishers would agree that they should.
A question: will Google bias the links supplied by this application towards searches which have better pay-for-performance ad revenue for themselves?
There’s something just a hair insidious seeming about this as well, however. On the PR face of it, Google represents that they want to help people out, make life easier, and enable people to find what they want to find on the web. But, Google is integrating itself more and more deeply into people’s websites, increasing dependency upon them. They provide search services for sites already, they’ve launched applications to allow people to design webpages through them, and they’re providing people with free web usage reporting and maps.
If there’s one thing that people have learned within the IT disaster recovery industry, placing too much dependency upon a single entity will create a single point of failure in a system. Admittedly, Google has nice infrastructure, but have you ever seen a company yet that never had a technical failure of some sort? What happens as increasing amounts of the internet itself is supported by Google, rather than by distributed systems?
In any case, it will be interesting to watch how many sites adopt this new feature without monetary incentives to do so.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/05/2006
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Filed under: Dynamic Sites, General, Google, Research and Development, Tools
New Domain Names for Brands – Very Limited
I saw this blog by Dennis Forbes which could be interesting for any of you who are planning to create a new brand name with associated domain name: The Search For A Domain Name.
If you’ve done any whois queries in hopes of setting up a new domain name, you’ll already know the frustration of being denied the names you’d like to have most. It leads one to wonder how many common names are already snapped up. Dennis has done a bit of interesting research presented in his article on some common name permutations, and what percentages are already registered or parked until someone pays fees to the companies which have speculated by snapping them up.
I’m betting that if he took a database of common dictionary names and ran similar analysis, he’d also find 100% of those already taken by the same speculators. Interesting reading, though.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/31/2006
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Reference Material, URLs
Talkin ’bout RSS… on the Chris Pirillo Show
Want to listen to me rant and rave about the power of RSS as a content delivery channel for search marketers? That was a rhetorical question. Frankly, who wouldn’t! 😉 So now you get your chance, on my interview on the Chris Pirillo Show, which was just podcasted today. Chris interviewed me last week at Search Engine Strategies. Have a listen.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 03/11/2005
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Filed under: General, Link Building, Tracking and Reporting
iProspect gets acquired
Congrats to our competitor iProspect and its founder Fredrick Marckini! iProspect just got bought by Isobar for $32 million in cash, plus $18 million in deferred compensation contingent upon reaching certain performance criteria over the next 2 years.
By my calculations, that makes my company worth at least $128 million in cash. Give or take a few million. 😉
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 12/28/2004
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Filed under: General
On Orkut, I feel like a voyeur
This weekend I finally got an invite to Orkut, the exclusive closed social network site developed and run by Google. I feel like a voyeur, inconspicuously ascertaining who’s friends with various mega millionaires like Sergey Brin and Steve Jurvetson. It’s rather surprising what some business people reveal in their profiles — stuff you certainly wouldn’t reveal to your own mother. Don’t they realize people actually read these things? Anyways, Orkut was great fun for a while but now I’m already getting bored with it.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 06/12/2004
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Aw, shucks! Another award for little ole’ Netconcepts?
Our research report “The State of Natural Search Engine Marketing for Catalogers” was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the IT Services category in the Bitpipe’s Third Annual White Paper Awards IT Services. Drinks all around! Woohoo! 😉
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 05/29/2004
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