Saturday, April 26, 2008

Content..content....content

If you want to make a splash with your new web site be sure that it has good content. If your prospects come and they do not like what they see or read then the search engines will see the same thing and bam you are dropped down lower. Good conent is important to keep attention and to get a call to action.

If you want good content, we can help you here at Rossini.com

PR advertising

Did you know that I can send an announcement around the world of a new product or announcement or a web site in a matter of minutes! Imagine a new product just being launched. Yes you spend a lot of money telling people but how about for maybe $100.00 we can send your product announcement to the world, newspapers, web sites, TV stations, radio stations and more. Call me today!!

The power of a blog!

I do not care if you do not listen to anything I say on here but listen to one thing! Havve a blog!!!! The search engines and the public at least right now love it!!!

Patience

The biggest virue when it comes to search engine optimization is patience. If someone promises immediate inclusion to Google or MSn or even Yahoo you might run fast and hold your wallet. It takes time and effort and patience but you can get there with a pro!

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Search engines are changing!

Search results they are changing

Oh boy....better look at this...........................

If you're not yet optimizing your news, image, and video content, you need to start. Another study released this week backs up previous research indicating that blended, or universal search is changing the way users search. Making sure your specialized content is showing up in search results is now even more important than it was before.

At Search Engine Strategies New York last month, comScore revealed exclusive that showed many more searchers than expected are seeing blended search results.

That data, gathered during one week in January, showed that there were 220 million universal search results, of the total 1.2 billion search queries in the U.S. That means 17 percent of all searches on Google showed at least one result with video, news, images, maps, weather, or stocks.

In fact, of the 87 million people who searched during that same week in January, 57 percent of them saw some type of universal search result. Of those, 38 percent saw a video result, 34 percent saw news, 19 percent saw images, and 15 percent saw multiple types of results.

So you're still not convinced that optimizing for universal search is worth your time? This week, search marketing firm iProspect came out with more research emphasizing the prevalence of blended search results, and the way they change the behavior of searchers.

In the iProspect Blended Search Results Study, conducted by Jupiter Research for iProspect, the data showed that searchers are much more likely to click on image, news, or video search results when they are presented in a blended format.

"A single Web page no longer reigns supreme," said Robert Murray, president of iProspect. "Marketers need to pay attention to the changes in search engine algorithms, and understand how blended results are affecting their category."

In fact, a full 35 percent of respondents said they do not use vertical search, and 25 percent do not recall if they have clicked a result after having used vertical search (60 percent combined). But when those results are presented in blended, or universal search results, 36 percent of searchers click on "news" results, more than twice as much as the 17 percent of respondents who do so when they use the vertical "news search."

For "image" search results 31 percent report clicking on those results within blended search, while 26 percent do so when utilizing vertical "image search." And 17 percent of respondents report clicking "video" results within blended search results, compared to 10 percent who do so in a vertical "video search" result.

Overall, only 19 percent of search engine users report that they have not clicked a news, image, or video search result within the blended search results.

iProspect-blended.jpg

While this information seems obvious to many search marketers, Murray insists that most companies are still not aware of the issues around blended search results. And even when they are made aware, they often find themselves facing a situation where they need to go back and acquire digital rights to the images and video they have been using in their offline marketing materials. For that reason, many of iProspect's clients are opting to create new content to use online, rather than reusing offline content.


This is an article by Kevin Newcomb

Rossini.com is certified in search engine marketing. We offer various plans that can and will get your company name listed!

More Fed regulation of advertising?

This might be coming soon!

April 11, 2008
We May Not Want Standards But FTC May Give Us Some

The standards debate may be in full swing in our industry - but the decisions may be soon taken out of our hands if the FTC continues to define allowable advertising practices.

MediPost has a good overview of the developments of behavioral targeting and how they can be used. "Ad industry players are urging the FTC not to impose any new regulations — and also argue that the proposed voluntary guidelines are too restrictive," they reported.

Where this gets close to our industry comes from the people seeking greater regulations. "Privacy advocates, on the other hand, want to see rules that will require companies to honor Web users’ preferences about whether they wish to be tracked online and to receive targeted ads," MediaPost notes.

If this occurs then search is on the horizon of these groups. And we better be aware of them if consumer advocacy groups are claiming they "want to see new rules, rather than rely on voluntary compliance with trade groups".

MediaPost quotes both Google and Microsoft at the end of the article and they have opposing views.

"Google, meanwhile, is especially concerned that the standards could affect search ads. In comments to the FTC, Google said it’s testing personalized search results, and argued that search ads shouldn’t be considered “behavioral” even when the ads displayed to users are based on their search history.

“We are currently experimenting in our Search service with providing ads based on both the current query and the immediately previous search,” Google wrote. “For example, a user who types ‘Italy vacation’ into the Google search box might see ads about Tuscany or affordable flights to Rome. If the user were to subsequently search for ‘weather,’ we might assume that there is a link between ‘Italy vacation’ and ‘weather’ and deliver ads regarding local weather conditions in Italy.”

Google rival Microsoft, on the other hand, said it supports the FTC’s goals and that the proposed guidelines should be extended “to include the full array of online advertising activities.”

Funny about the Microsoft position given I have been in a pitch for increasing our budget where they used competitors advertising information to suggest other terms and ads..... anonymous of course but not hard to reverse engineer.


Posted by Frank Watson at April 11, 2008 4:33 PM