• Spend More Effectively With Local Search
    "For the majority of small and mid-size, locally-focused businesses, your target market is more defined than everyone living everywhere," says Lisa Wehr. "With local search strategies for both pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and natural search engine optimization, you can refine your search marketing program, cut costs and grow your business." For paid search, go local with regionally defined and geotargeted keywords. Geotargeting helps to restrict your ads to a smaller audience and delivers more qualified leads, while regionally-defined terms can give you wider exposure, yet still allow you to hone in on your target market. Meanwhile, for …
  • Yahoo7 To Revamp
    Yahoo7, Yahoo's joint venture with Seven Network in Australia, is set to revamp, in a push to reclaim lost search market share and gain more favor with advertisers. The changes, which are slated to roll out on July 1, include bringing back the Yahoo yodel, revamping the portal homepage to include more video and user customization, and adding more access to Seven's stable of magazines. The portal redesign also includes more suburb-specific info for users, and will be supported by a multichannel marketing push beginning July 8. "The launch tomorrow night is seen as a clear pitch to …
  • Live Search Cashback On eBay Too
    Microsoft rolled out Live Search cashback about a month ago, and has since partnered with eBay to offer searchers deals on products available via "Buy It Now." Now eBay ads that show up during a Live Search will feature a cashback icon, and will take users directly to the product page. Once users get to the shopping cart, info about how much cash they'll get back from their purchase shows up alongside payment details. "The cashback gleam (icon) follows you throughout your eBay shopping experience," says Paul Dillon. "This is good continuity for the consumer and something we …
  • Get Your Site AdSense-Compliant, Or Else
    Jennifer Slegg reports on a wave of Web site owners incurring penalties for AdSense non-compliance. Google has seemingly done away with the email notices offering a three-day grace period to make changes, as Webmasters are finding their entire domain banned from serving any AdSense ads instead. "And it can take several weeks for a compliance checker to re-check the site to make sure all the problems are fixed," Slegg says. Exclusion-worthy offenses range from having adult or other otherwise banned content anywhere on the site--even if there are no AdSense ads on those pages--as well as having nothing …
  • Vivisimo Expands Government Search Options
    Enterprise search company Vivisimo has expanded its affiliate search program, offering free site and document search for a host of new government-related properties. Sites that use the free Vivisimo Velocity platform can allow users to search through news, images, FAQs and maps, as well as notices regarding government jobs and benefits. Sites running the Velocity platform include USASearch.gov, the National Library of Medicine and Womenshealth.gov, as well as various government properties in New Zealand and Israel.
  • Search Still King For Lead Generation
    Almost 80% of online marketers are using organic search as their main lead generation channel, ahead of in-house email (75%) and paid search (71%), according to the latest Online Lead Generation report from E-consultancy. E-consultancy and Clash-Media surveyed over 600 online marketers to find out about their B2C lead generation habits, and found that paid and organic search were still the most widely used lead generation tactics. Over half (52%) of respondents said that organic search was a "very effective" practice for generating leads. Meanwhile, just under half (48%) said the same about paid search, but a majority …
  • Is Google Going Behavioral?
    Barry Schwartz piggybacks on a New York Times article that focuses on Google's usage of past queries to serve more relevant ads. While the giant isn't going back by days into searchers' histories, Nick Fox (Google's director of business product management) did admit that some ads would be served based on a user's previous two or three queries. To track even a few searches, however, would require some form of cookie to be served to a user--the foundation for behavioral targeting at its simplest. "Obtaining the latest query does not require cookies to be assigned and tracked for …
  • Meal-Based Food Searches, Coming To A Yahoo SERP Near You
    Most food-based searches are of the local restaurant variety, with searchers on the prowl for late-night grub, a romantic dinner for two, or even a new cuisine in their own neighborhood. But what if you could actually search for meals on the Web, complete with pictures and nutrition-value info, and then make a restaurant choice? That's the logic behind the latest Yahoo search patent, which Bill Slawski examines in this post. The Yahoo search engine would index pictures of foods based on alt tags and sets of meta data that describe how the dish would taste (i.e. spiciness, …
  • Microsoft To Snap Up Powerset?
    Looks like the semantic search darling of many in the industry is about to be snapped up by the behemoth. Venture Beat is reporting that Microsoft is set to purchase semantic search engine Powerset to the tune of $100 million. TechCrunch, on the other hand, says that the deal is not finalized, and may be scrapped if Microsoft can still get its hands on some of Yahoo's search business. Andy Beal digs into what the strategy could be behind Microsoft's move, as well as the caveats of such a purchase. "$100M is probably the amount of interest Microsoft's …
  • Fix Your Site's Code
    Buggy, bloated or otherwise compromised source code can actually be the source of a site's drop in, or failure to rank on the search engines. So Stoney deGeyter offers a rundown on the most common code problems and solutions, starting with errors that keep the engines from crawling your page as a whole. "There are numerous coding errors that can essentially stop the spiders from grabbing, indexing and evaluating your copy properly," deGeyter says. "For example, if you forget to close your tag the search engines may not take your body copy into consideration, not knowing that …
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