Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Section 2: Around the Net in Search Marketing

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Just 50 Matches, Please
Pandia Search News
"More often than not, a Google search will return millions and millions of results," writes the Pandia Search team. "50 Matches is a search engine that never returns more than 50. The idea is that by indexing and searching only sites that have been bookmarked, 'dugg,' etc., the quality of the results will be so high that 50 matches are all you need."

The upsides are that the results will likely contain some of the Web's most popular content and be spam free--as the engine only crawls content that has been hand-picked. The downside is that the index isn't nearly as robust as users have come to expect, and 50 Matches doesn't utilize enough (or any) of a site's own info to help categorize the results.

"And there are absolutely no ways for visitors to 50 Matches to contribute (for instance by ranking listings or commenting on results)," the team says. "Visitors to a social powered search engine will have a more than an averagely high interest in contributing and could add value to the site." - Read the whole story...

A Review Of 'Always Be Testing'
ClickZ
Mike Grehan reviews "Always Be Testing," the latest book from Future Now cofounder Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar. "The Web is awash with opinions and ideas on best practices in search marketing, but there's not so much about best practice testing," Grehan says. "This book fills the gap."

The authors of "Always Be Testing" make liberal use of real-world examples of how companies used simple and complex tests to increase conversions, and offer methods for figuring out what to test and how to test. They also encourage the use of Google's Web site Optimizer tool.

"Given that you do have an understanding of A/B and multivariate testing, the book provides some extremely useful insights and you can be on your way to testing Web pages and elements very quickly," Grehan says. "The authors are good communicators and the book is written in a way that offers a kind of two-way dialogue. It forces readers to ask themselves many questions and create a plan before jumping in feet first." - Read the whole story...

Tips For Capturing Back-To-School Paid-Search Traffic
Yahoo Search Marketing Blog
If you've got back-to-school products, then now is the prime time to shill them. And Noah Belson offers four tips for improving back-to-school paid-search campaigns for advertisers in the electronics, textbook, financial and even local retail verticals.

For laptop, mp3 player and cell phone vendors, make sure your ad copy focuses on sales for the time being, as opposed to repair. "If you happen to offer both sales and service, concentrate on sales this month to make your ads more relevant to people looking to stock up for school," Belson says. "Ads for electronics items should stress the brand names of the products, not just the type of electronics that are offered."

Meanwhile, textbook stores should note whether they offer electronic books in addition to hard covers, and grab searcher's attention by highlighting your (realistic) discounts and low prices. And for local retailers--particularly stores that reside near college campuses--geotarget your ads. - Read the whole story...

Still More Google Search Parameters
Inquisitr
Duncan Reilly serves up a list of nearly two dozen search parameters to refine your queries on Google. Of course, there are well-known tricks like adding quotes to a phrase to garner an exact match, as well as entering a stock symbol (like YHOO or GOOG) to get the most recent share price info. But Reilly also includes lesser-known query refiners like the location finder. "Use inurl:, intitle:, intext:, or inanchor: to tell Google where it should look for the term you['re] looking for," he says.

He also suggests using the modifier "filetype:" to find pictures or particular kinds of documents. "For example, 'blogging filetype:pdf' delivers pdf documents that include the word blogging," he says. You can search Google's cache by adding "cached:" to your query, and adding the "~" symbol before a word in your query tells the engine to find similar terms. - Read the whole story...

The Best Of SMX Advanced, For In-House Pros
Search Engine Land
Andrea Harris sums up some key takeaways from SMX Advanced for in-house search pros, with quick hits focusing mostly on SEO. For example, attendees learned that Yahoo has improved the way it crawls and indexes XML sitemaps. "If your Yahoo! sitemaps failed in the past, you may want to resubmit them," she says.

Meanwhile, if you acquire a domain and don't want its PageRank to be reset, don't update the host, DNS setting and content all it once. Change components gradually to avoid having all of the previous positive SEO efforts wiped out. And for paid search, attendees found out that organic search ranking signals are likely a factor in determining a landing page's Quality Score. "If that's the case, then advertisers could skirt high minimum bid requirements by switching to new destination URL domains-that is, until the minimum bids are increased for those domains," Harris says. - Read the whole story...

Mine Your Product Reviews For Alternative Ad Copy
Future Now

Hot Topics In The Search Blogosphere At A Glance
Top Rank



Search Insider - Around the Net for Wednesday, August 13, 2008
http://publications.mediapost.com/?sfa=ed&t=44&d=2008-8-13

 

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