Monday, July 28, 2008

Section 2: Around the Net in Search Marketing

, July 28, 2008 Subscribe | Back Issues | Reply to Editor | MediaPost Home

Local, Seasonal PPC Tactics
adCenter Community
"Confronted by the high price in gas and air travel, many people are seeking out events, activities and other opportunities for entertainment that are closer to home," says Ryan Bigby. And small business owners can tap into this trend by running geotargeted ads, as well as campaigns that spotlight local events and activities.

First, Bigby suggests tailoring your ads to local searchers. "If, for example, you sell camping equipment out of a store located in Bend, Oregon, you can target your campaigns for searchers located in the central Oregon area that are searching for keywords like 'sleeping bags,', 'tents,' 'camp stoves,' etc."

Meanwhile, adCenter also allows advertisers to make incremental bid changes based on demographic info like age, gender and weekpart or daypart. So a 50-cent bid for keywords like "camp stoves," could automatically be raised to $1 if an advertiser's coveted target searcher happened to run a query. The increased bid could help said ad snag prime placement, though the top spot wouldn't be guaranteed. - Read the whole story...

Shopping Engines Should Focus On Price
ComparisonEngines.com
In the midst of offering social media features, reviews and cashback, Brian Smith says that comparison shopping engines are missing the boat when it comes to what their primary value proposition should be--particularly given the tough economy.

"All those things are nice and should be part of a strategy, but right now, this is the perfect opportunity for the shopping engines to step up their marketing efforts (or at least run some bold tests) highlighting the fact that they save consumers money," Smith says.

While companies like Pronto.com and Smarter.com have fought to be considered as more than just "price bots," capitalizing on the fact that price is becoming the primary deciding factor for a greater numbers of consumers just seems like smart business sense. - Read the whole story...

IAC's Black-Friendly Search Engine To Give Away Range Rover
Search Engine Watch
RushmoreDrive.com, IAC's search engine geared toward the Black community, has rolled out a sweepstakes to help drive membership and usage. Members can enter to win a 2009 Range Rover Sport in the contest, which runs through Sept. 8.

"RushmoreDrive.com hopes to change the way the Black community searches the World Wide Web for information, jobs and news," says Kevin Heisler. The engine combines core search with social media features, as well as news, and its technology pulls in results from Web sites that are heavily trafficked by Black users.

Though the Range Rover giveaway was heavily promoted at the Michael Baisden Live event in New York, Heisler notes that "there's no mention of the Sweepstakes on the search engine's homepage or media pages." - Read the whole story...

Search Spam-a-licious Government Sites Via Google
Bill Hartzer
Google powers a vertical engine that strictly searches government Web sites, including NASA, the CDC and NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), offering fast, easy access to pages upon pages of civic info. And spam.

"Being the curious one, I thought that I would take a look to see how polluted the US Government websites really are," Bill Hartzer says. In the midst of a search for "online casino," Hartzer found various kinds of spam, including spam blogs and even log file or analytics referrer spam.

Of course, Google can't be blamed for the glut of spam. After all, the custom search engine is just doing its job by indexing all of the government-sponsored content that it's presented with. Hartzer says this trend does raise concerns about data security network safety, however. "Just imagine how secure these websites are," he says. "If an online casino viagra Texas holdem spammer can get their links all over home pages of US Government websites, what's next? Access to sensitive data about you and me?" - Read the whole story...

Cuil Goes Live
WebProNews
The latest Google-killer's claim to fame is that it actually indexes more content than the search giant. "The debut of Cuil (pronounced 'cool' they say) comes with a boast of an index triple the size of Google's, at more than 120 billion pages," says David A. Utter. But in addition to depth of content, users need relevancy, and Cuil's team also says its results are more relevant than the other choices out there.

Utter says that Webmasters can expect to see a crawler named Twiceler combing through their code as Cuil continues to index more sites. Currently, the engine is facing server load issues, so the question of whether it can handle millions of niche queries coming in at the same time remains. - Read the whole story...

Baidu's Stellar Q2 2008
Vnunet.com



Search Insider - Around the Net for Monday, July 28, 2008
http://publications.mediapost.com/?sfa=ed&t=44&d=2008-7-28

 

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