by Chris Silver Smith

Over at Media Post, The Kelsey Group is quoted today saying that the erosion in usage of print yellow pages is likely to fall off at a higher rate this year — by 10% this year, compared with only 2% to 3% erosion in recent years.

They state that a combination of factors such as more users going to internet yellow pages and local search engines combined with a recession are propelling the rapid erosion. Concerningly, one can extrapolate that if print YP usage is dropping, advertiser dollars might also follow the herd.

As Greg Sterling points out, The Kelsey Group has historically been a very staunch defender of the print YP industry, so this article is a bit of a gut-punch to people in the legacy print business, even though anyone watching the trends over the last few years won’t find it all that surprising.

One thing the Media Post article doesn’t mention is how a number of smaller, regional print yellow pages companies have had surprising growth in ad sales over the past year, likely at the expense of the larger yellow pages directory sales. As Greg further points out, some of the smaller, nimble companies like ReachLocal (who are frenemies with the yellow pages industry) may be poised to take over the small business advertiser base as those companies’ agencies of choice if the yellow pages industry cannot retain them.

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by Chris Silver Smith

With all the focus on optimization of textual page content and near-obsessive concentration on text-oriented web search engine results pages (”SERPs”), most webmasters and SEOs neglect an area of their potential repertoire which could provide a lot of benefit to their site and business: image search optimization.

One aspect of effective optimization is to keep your eyes open for all the various avenues for referral traffic which can convert to a sale on your site. Depending upon the products or services you offer, it may be very valuable to consider the possibilities of optimizing for the Image Search utilities offered by the various search engines. Even if your site isn’t a product or services website, if you’re looking to increase organic referral traffic, optimizing for image search could work well for you. Read on and I’ll explain…

Image Search utilities are built to allow users to find images by keyword. It’s maybe not widely known, but Image Search features comprise a significant and growing portion of the traffic of the major search engines. In an article about Google in Newsweek Magazine by Adi Ignatius (”In Search of the Real Google”, February, 2006 issue), it’s mentioned that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were recently considering a proposal from some of their engineers to attach sponsorship ads to Google Image search result pages.

The developers proposing this concept provided metrics and projections indicating that the ads would be very profitable – to the tune of $80 million – but Brin and Page apparently declined the proposal out of concerns that the impact to users’ experience would be too negative. Obviously, there’s a lot of user search traffic happening in that section of their search engine. That story highlights the fact that traffic for the Google Image search is significant and could be monetarily beneficial to other websites who key into the possibilities.

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by newswiretoday.com

Four day SES Conference will start February 19 in London, UK. The conference, which is the intersection of search, marketing & commerce, is devoted to the questions of promotion on the web.

February 19-21, 2008 – the 9th annual SES Conference will be held at the Business Design Centre, London .This is a leading global conference & expo with the possibility of delegates education in search engine marketing (SEM), including SEO and advertising strategies. SES Search Marketing Events provide instruction from the industry’s top search experts, including representatives of the Search Engines themselves.

”In order to outline Company’s presence on the web it is not enough to simply create a website. The site must be recognizable by search engines, so a lot of attention should be paid to its SEO and internet promotion,” comments Mat Bondarenko, marketing manager of Eldev Company – provider of Web Development Services, on the necessity of being well-informed about web promotion issues.

White hat SEO techniques, the ones that search engines approve and recommend as part of good design, include such activities as writing optimized content (which ensures other sites will link to it), listing the website in catalogues, posting articles and press releases that spotlight company’s latest news. It all can be very beneficial for both company recognition and targeted search traffic.

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by Rebecca Allen

Part one of our Success Guide “Online Marketing for Small Businesses”

How to get started: First, make sure your site has lots of relevant content, and add fresh content on a regular basis. Next, avoid using Flash for navigation elements, and skip the Flash “intro” page; search engines can’t “see” the text or links within Flash so it creates a barrier to getting the rest of your site noticed. For those who know some HTML, review your code to be sure that the title tags (invisible pieces of code that help search engines categorize your content) of every page are unique and accurately reflect its main theme. Check to see that the most important headline on your page (which should be enclosed within what coders call h1 tags) and the page content contain the keywords you believe users will be searching for. Finally, if your site doesn’t have a site map, now’s the time to add one, and if you do have a site map, consider optimizing it for Google. ( See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ for more.)

Don’t try “tricks” such as keyword stuffing (filling your page full of keywords, to the point that the text no longer makes sense), using hidden content, multiple h1 tags, or link farms (pages that are merely long lists of links to other sites). Any of these can get your site sandboxed (excluded from search results altogether), leading to a costly loss of traffic. And don’t risk a temporary drop in rankings by doing a major redesign that changes the site structure, page names, and content of your whole site at once. Instead, change your site gradually over the course of several months, and inform important sites linking to you if any of the links they’re using have changed.

Because of the way search engines work (using programs called spiders to keep track of what content is where), it can take time to show up on Google and other search indexes. Don’t expect to see significant results from your NSO efforts for anywhere from three to six months. It isn’t unusual for companies to contract for one-year NSO engagements—avoid any companies that claim they can get you results immediately.

Your Investment: If you have an intermediate knowledge of HTML, you can probably do some of the most basic NSO work on a small site yourself, but larger sites or sites in a highly competitive category will need the help of an expert to win. Depending on the size of your site and your industry, costs can vary from $500 to $15,000 a month during the terms of your engagement. NSO isn’t a one-shot deal, either; plan on re-evaluating your position and strategy once a quarter after that if you want to stay ahead of the pack. And if you’re doing it right, NSO also makes your site as friendly to human visitors as it is to search engines.

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by Jeff Muendel

As much as most high-quality SEOers (those who practice search engine optimization “honorably”) like to think of their pursuit as pure and intellectual, the fact of the matter is that search engine optimization is a form of marketing, no matter how you approach it.

Perhaps short of nonprofit organizations and the occasional Internet artist, people interested in getting their Web pages in top search results are interested in making money from the traffic that will come from those search engine links.

A recent Hitwise article revealed some interesting demographic numbers that the company has measured through its sources. In comparing American Google and Yahoo search users, Hitwise found that Google has a higher percentage of users in older age brackets than Yahoo.

This negates some of existing beliefs in the market about the composition of those two user groups; a commonly held belief has been that Yahoo was for the aged, Google for the youth. Maybe not:

• In the category of users 55 and older, Google has 1.5 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 45- to 54-year-old users, Google has 2 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 35- to 44-year-old users, the market share was more or less equal.
• In the category of 25- to 34-year-old users, Yahoo has almost 3 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 18-to 24-year-old users, Yahoo has 1.5 percent more of the market share.

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By Robert McMillan, IDG News Service
February 15, 2008

Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim’s browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim’s PC. “The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks,” said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.

In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.

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“When we started going into this, I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger,” he said.

It turns out the Web’s nice neighborhoods aren’t necessarily safer than its red-light districts.

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By Amy Zipkin

The Web site for Sophia Brodsky’s day spa in Philadelphia, the Body Klinic, was pretty rudimentary until a college student walked into the spa a little more than two years ago with an irresistible offer.

As she tells it, the student, Nathaniel Stevens, said that for $10 he would take her existing site and redesign it to drive traffic to her salon. If she got more business, they agreed, he would get additional money. Brodsky, a Russian immigrant, whose interests run more to cranberry facials than the Internet, thought why not.

Brodsky now maintains three Web sites and estimates that they have brought in thousands of dollars in business. “Now,” she said, “people are coming to my Web site daily.”

But small business owners like Brodsky who have a Web presence are still a minority. In its first survey of small business Web sites last April, Jupiter Research found that just 36 percent of all businesses with fewer than 100 employees had a Web presence.

Still, the Web as an alternative yellow pages is drawing increased attention. The Kelsey Group, a market research company in Princeton, New Jersey, estimates that sales revenue from Internet Yellow Pages and wireless and other searches will increase to $13 billion in 2010 from $3.4 billion in 2005.

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by digital alex 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessary part of any website strategy. The potential traffic is simply too big to ignore.The question isn’t “Should I do SEO?”

it’s “When should I do SEO?”

As a site owner, you have to make hard decisions about how to spend your always-not-enough budget and when. In this post, I’m going to talk about some of things your should consider when trying to determine…
When Should I Invest in SEO?
SEO is not direct marketing. Just because you put a dollar in today does not mean you’re going to get a $1.50 out tomorrow.

Fundamentally, natural search optimization is a long-term investment. With the right strategy and the right implementation, I do believe you will get the return on that investment and, possibly, a sustained competitive advantage.

Of course, this presents a problem: you have to spend the money now, but you might not see it for a while.

to Make the Most of SEO

Search engines don’t buy from you, people do. There a few things you need to have in place in any site to make the most of SEO:

1. Functioning Site – There’s no point in bringing people to your site if it doesn’t work. People don’t like it and neither do the search engines. Getting your site to work properly is as important as getting people there.
2. Great Product – You can optimize your site till you’re blue in the face, but if you’re product stinks, you’re fighting an uphill battle. They say the quickest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it…

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by ziggyff

Inner optimization means a set of actions directed to content changing. There are some rules to reach better indexation by Search Engines.

• Content. It means text and pictures Text. First of all content should be unique. Second: text should contain keywords. Recommended keywords consistence is 5%. Third: It was noticed that search engines rate high update of content. Pictures: There is only one recommendation in this sphere: you should keywords in alt=”” parameter.
• Meta-tags. This is special tags which influence on search engine’s attitude to your content.
• Text formatting. One note: you should use <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>.
• External links optimization. This requirement is satisfied by using of parameter “nofollow”
• Correct linking. First: you should use keywords in the text of the link. Second: you should create list of the most interesting pages of your website. Third: you should place link to your frontpage on each page. Fourth: if your website has tree structure you should place link to every branch which direct to this page.
• Clear code. Try to use java-scripts as rarely as possible, don’t use code reiterations.
• CSS. Use it to make code clear.

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