Google picked up another 2.2% of the search market over November, largely at the expense of Yahoo, which dropped 0.9% to only 17.7%.

From Web Pro News:

This gives Google 57.7 percent of the search pie. Google’s nearest competitor, Yahoo, has just 17.9 percent, and actually dropped 0.9 percent from its October standing. Things were similarly gloomy for MSN and Ask, which lost 1.8 percent and 0.2 percent of market share, respectively, and landed at 12.0 percent and 2.7 percent.

We are seeing the market increasingly centered on Google and I, for one, do not think that this is a good thing. The bigger Google gets, the less they will have to compete to stay at the top. Variety is the spice of life and it would be good to see Google take a few steps back to get them hovering closer to 50%.

What is amazing about these figures is that it shows what can happen in a relatively short amount of time. I remember the pre-Google days, back when there was a lot of competition in the search game. Some of the best search engines that I ever had the pleasure of using are now long gone and I can’t help but think that there is little to inspire an upstart search engine company these days.

When you get caught up in your website copywriting, never forget that the goal of your writing is to sell products or services. Getting people onto a website is only half of the equation, it would be nice if the website copy that you spent time and effort making, could help to push some sales. It is possible to make good web copy that also serves as sales copy. You do not have to change your writing approach a great deal, just ensure that the sales points of the product are covered, include a good hook and if appropriate a link to a purchasing page. The writing side of things is much the same with a greater sales orientation than pure SEO focus.

With website sales copy, I always close with a bang. A really good reason why someone should buy the product or use the service that your company is offering. Last impressions count as much as first impressions and who knows, it could be just the thing to turn a site visitor into a lead.

If you are not optimizing your photos then you are missing out on photo searches.  A photo without proper tags is just a slab of useless color on a page that only looks good to your visitors.  Tags help robots and people with screen reading devices make sense of the image. You can keep your alt text simple, but try to make it descriptive enough to give people an idea of what is going on.  A picture might well say a thousand words, but you will have to sum it up in one short sentence.

Another part of photo optimization, though from a design point of view and not a search point of view is the file size.  You have to remember that not everyone in the world has broadband and some countries have very strict bandwidth limits.  As a result of this, I try to keep my file sizes as small as possible.  No one wants to wait five minutes for a page to load.

Website copywriting can be a tedious task, but with the right approach, things can go quite smoothly and quickly.

• Prepare a task list - this sounds basic, but it really makes a difference if you have an actual schedule to work to.

• Make an outline - plan the course of each article that you are going to write, picking a sub-theme for each paragraph. If you have a particular wordcount that you are aiming for, allow 50-100 words per paragraph.

• End with a hook - End with a catchy sentence inviting people to buy a product, visit a website or whatever else they are supposed to do.

• Don’t overdo the keywords - It just looks spammy.

• Write for humans, optimize for robots - Keyword might be good for search engines, but robots don’t buy products. Make sure that your content is readable for human visitors too.

Have you ever wondered what the travel search market is worth? Travel search company Kayak.com just paid $196 million for their nearest competitor Sidestep.com. Both companies are involved in travel search, which allows users to find the cheapest flight, hotel or car rental prices online.

Marketing Pilgrim:

Both companies are profitable. Kayak reached about $50 million in revenue this year, while SideStep is at about $35 million. Together they hope to compete against #1 travel search site (based on number of searches) Expedia.

With plans to expand their travel search operation to China, they look set to be doing some great business in the future.

Keywords in your content is one of the most important parts of Search engine optimization. Knowing what keywords to use is only part of the battle. To reach number one you have to use them correctly to make they appearance count the best.

It takes a lot of words to convince a search engine that you are a subject matter expert. Also, most sites use images to relay their message to humans, but are now discovering that search engines are blind and do not see images. Or the site content comes from a data base and the data base has little unique content. Or the site accepts feeds from other expert sites but this makes all of their content someone else’s, and they either get no credit for it or are penalized for duplicate content. In any case, the design and content on your web site may very well need to be restructured and expanded. [If this is not you, buy yourself a drink — you have earned it!] Avoid mistakes, use clean optimized graphics and do it right, minimize the use of flash, avoid pop-up windows, restrict the scope of forms except where really needed, make javascript and css files external to the source code, always use a site map, solve obvious problems first, and by all means keep it simple. Web page layout problems really hurt SEO projects.

So where do you add keywords? It is important that your page TITLE be as descriptive as possible of what you do and that it contain your top few keywords, but generally fewer than 12 words. Listings that include the dominant search terms in the META TITLE and META description tags have a higher ranking and a higher clickthrough rate (often more than double the traffic) than those that do not! Use these keywords to make up your Search Engine Optimization targets. Also, review your content to add these keywords, especially two- and three-word phrases, into the content without losing the message. This is important for a search engine that does not reference META tags. You want to use these phrases time and again without spamming a search engine. Some search engines take site descriptions from within the page, not from the Meta description fields. Such a search engine will exclude some appropriate keywords unless you use them throughout your content. And try to keep the title and description fields as short as possible to prevent you from diluting the keyword impact.

Additionally, it is good to practice a basic rule: begin each word in your META keywords list with an initial capital letter. There has been a lot of discussion about the continued use of META tags. META tags (actually the major HEAD section tags) we consider important to Search Engine Optimization. What is not known is what is meant when it is said that search engines “ignore” a META tag. Our research is that they are not ignored and that they actually do count. It is commonly known that the title is vital, and that the description is often used as an abstract, but thought that the keyword tag is ignored. Knowing the history of spammer abuse for these tags, it would not be surprising to find them of lesser importance than before, and that perhaps words are ignored if and only if they do not appear in the content of the page — but they are used if they are in the content. Is selectively ignoring words the same as being “ignored”? And if you were a search engine wouldn’t you tell spammers not to bother?

Even if tags are ignored today, it only takes a few minutes to do it right, you would never be penalized for having them (unless you spam), and not all engines will ignore them and maybe not forever. You can never go wrong by using META tags, and only hurt yourself if you don’t use them.

You must also unconditionally, absolutely, positively have keywords throughout your body section. It is recommended that you have at least 400 words of clean, grammatically correct sentence-structure content on every page. You must also have your keywords appear as the most common (without excess) phrases on your pages. In many cases there are ways to do this that work well for whatever your page format or content, all of which is customized to the look-and-feel of the site and the nature of the content.

And you also need to link pages together using the keywords of the landing page in the anchor text of the sending page. This is a must… use text links within paragraphs when possible, especially when the pages are related. If the topics are not related, then you should still use relative anchor text for the page you are sending the user to.

One thing I like to do when I go into a new site development for my own websites is to register as many similar domain names as I possibly can. Over a period of time, I will research domains that apply to the concept that I have conceived. Depending on the website, there may be half a dozen or a lot more. Next, I cull that list of domain names according to my budget and pick out what I believe are the core domain names that can help to build the brand.

How many domain names you need depends largely on what the goals are with your site and your brand and just as importantly, on your budget. Truly massive sites might register hundreds of domains, but when you are starting out, one good one will suffice. Once you have your core domains registered, you can start working on others and setting up redirects or landing pages later.

Not everyone uses WordPress for blogging and if current predictions from none other than Aaron Wall of SEO Book, “In the next 2 or 3 years, Drupal will be the CMS of choice.” These are echoes of what Brain Turner of Web Pro News said a couple of months ago when he said to, keep an eye out on Drupal as a potential CMS for the future.” I must confess that before reading Aaron Wall’s article, I had not looked into Drupal much, but his write up got me interested and I have to say, it looks good.

Turner makes some very interesting observations in his article which I feel worthy of repeating.
On integrating websites:

I think it’s especially important to leave plenty of room to manoeuvre with video, because if you can make & integrate that into a website, you have become a TV channel - and that means potential syndication in the still embryonic but rapidly expanding IPTV market.

On Wordpress:

My problem as a webmaster is that while Wordpress suits blogs and small sites fine, it simply isn’t geared to community participation - featured author and commentator profile pages are not a default part of the set-up, plus Wordpress has never really integrated community forums.

I love WordPress as a blogging platform, but I do tend to agree that it is somewhat limited. Nucleus CMS is a little better, but still very much blog oriented. Joomla is an alternative and while it has some very good points to it, the blogging platform is just plain nasty.

On Joomla:

(Note on Joomla: I’ve never liked the structure or coding - seems a very bloated, over-crowded attempt to create a CMS that somehow seems to struggle with basic functionality. Having been asked to look at SEO issues with Joomla a few times, I’ve developed an complete dislike of the platform - so much so that when a charity recently approached me looking for free SEO work on their CMS, I advised they would do better if I rebuilt it in Wordpress for them.)

I tend to take a less harsh view on Joomla, it has some very good points to it. It is easy to install and pretty intuitive, but it is a little bloated and requires quite a bit of customization. In my examination of Drupal, I have to say it looks very nice indeed. There are a large number of high quality free themes and looks like it will be ready to go straight out of the box. That is a refreshing change. Keep an eye on Drupal, it looks great and I think that no small number of people are going to be thinking the same thing. I would say it is going to start taking off over 2008. I don’t see any established Wordpress blogs making the switch. Wordpress covers basic blogging needs and can be enhanced enough with plug-ins to keep doing what it is required to do.

An interesting article appeared in Web Pro News recently concerning the top three search engines. Aaron Wall posits that the biggest difference between Google and Yahoo is with their marketing techniques. Google has marketed very effectively. Yahoo! on the other hand seems to have missed something. A few interesting points were made in the article concerning Yahoo!’s lack of marketing prowess:

Overture Keyword Selector - their public facing keyword tool is unreliable and does not even promote their own brand or their own network on it.

Want to sign in to Yahoo search marketing? Go to sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com. Yup…2/3 of the companies revenues come through a subdomain of a subdomain.

Yahoo powers millions of domain landing pageviews every day, and are afraid to put their brand on it, all while Google puts their brand (and typically search box) on everything they touch.

Yahoo! is the only search engine with the potential to take on Google. Despite this fact, they have continued to bleed market percentage year after year. One has to wonder if they would do better if they took a leaf out of Google’s book and became a little more aggressive with their marketing approach. Aside from Google Documents, Google is not offering anything that Yahoo! didn’t already have. Why then has Google been able to dominate such a large portion of the search engine market?

Public Relations covers a vast spectrum of communications, from formal apologies to retractions and press releases. How you handle these situations is a reflection on your professionalism. Pick through any public relations documentation with a fine toothed comb and then check them again.

Spelling and grammar errors are of course a big no-no, but you should check carefully as to how the document reads. You do not want to write anything that can easily be misinterpreted, for every misinterpretation can result in one disgruntled customer.

Some might argue with me, but I firmly believe that formal language works the best in public relations documents. There are of course exceptions to the rule. You might want to reconsider formalities if your target audience is younger, but no one likes to be condescended to. If casual language is in keeping with the image of your company, go for it, otherwise be polite.

Keyword optimization, without a doubt, is essential. Public relations documents (that you want people to see) should be heavily optimized without seeming overly obvious. Formal writing tends to do away with a lot of indefinite pronouns, so tends to go hand in hand with search engine optimization anyway. Don’t push the SEO line too hard, but make sure your keywords are covered.

On the chance that you are not too busy, we would like to wish you all the best for the holiday season. The end of year is a special time not just for those who celebrate Christmas, but also for people celebrating Eid and Hanukkah. Whatever your celebration, it is a special time of year. You might like to take the time to wish all of your customers a happy New Year.

We will of course continue writing SEOJ throughout the holiday period, so keep checking back each day to find more great articles. In the coming week we are going to focus on a few topics that we have not covered a great deal here and we will try to keep a mix of topics for people of all experience levels. Remember, everyone has to start somewhere. If something seems to simple or obvious for you, it may not be for someone else. As always, feel free to comment and leave your thoughts and or suggestions.

Over this week, we are going to be looking at some different research techniques. Keyword research will of course be covered, but so too will good old fashioned head in the books (or head to the screen) research. We have a few tips and tricks that we have picked up over the years that can really cut down on your research time. Research posts will start from tomorrow, so if you haven’t already, subscribe to SEOJ.

There are some great metrics plug-ins for popular blog scripts. Metrics is a great way to give you further insight into what is going on in your blog, especially if you are not the only person writing. Metrics programs will give you all sorts of useful information relating to your site. If you want to know how many words your writers have written, or how well they converse with their audience, check the metrics. Metrics can help you to identify your key writers.

As a general rule, if you are running a blog as a full time enterprise and have more than one writer, then you should definitely consider metrics. Even if you are the only writer, metrics might be worth taking a look at. If nothing else it gives you feedback of what you are doing on your site.

Just the other day I got an order for forty articles on an obscure topic that requires research to be done in no longer than two weeks. The topic is complicated and requires a certain amount of research, yet I have the utmost confidence in my ability to complete it. I have been in the content development game for some time now and my approach to massive jobs works, for me at least.

• If you are creating your own topics or keywords for your content, it is a little bit easier. Sure, you will need time to do a little keyword research, but you get to face the job on your own terms. If not, it doesn’t matter, but you will have your work cut out for you.

• Group your keywords by topic. Try to break the list down into five or six loosely related groups.

Plan your articles. I write ten thousand words a day and sometimes more, yet I still plan my content development. A paragraph tends to be 50-100 words long. If you have a word count that you are shooting for, plan that many paragraphs. Make sure that your key words or phrases go into each one at least once.

• key phrase, especially if it has tricky words, place names or acronyms and make use of keyboard shortcuts. If you are using windows, Control+C for copy, Control+V for paste. You are going to be typing that word quite a few times, reducing it to a simple keystroke makes sense.

• Write your articles one group at a time. If you have to research, then you may well have to look at some source content for the first few times, but after that you should have absorbed enough information to get by. The articles will start flowing faster and faster.

• Take breaks, though it seems counter productive, taking a few minutes to relax can get your thoughts flowing freely again.

A quick tip today regarding the branding of blogs. There are a number of things that you need to consider with your blog branding.

• Does the look and feel of the template match your business? - There is nothing worse than finding a template that is just plain inappropriate for what the site is trying to sell. Match the template to your industry in some way.

• Install to the root directory - I really hate to see blogs with /blog in their URL, it looks amateur.

• Create an original header - Headers build atmosphere, make it a good one and you will be happy that you spent the time.

This is a myth that I would like to dispel once and for all, that linkbait won’t help your search engine performance. I have heard it repeated in a few places. Of course, it depends on the linkbait, but it can have a very beneficial effect for your site’s relevance as long as the article adheres to SEO principals.

The truth to the SEO myth is that a single linkbait piece will only give you a brief traffic spike and after that things will go back to normal. Where the myth is wrong is that, this spiking has the benefit of getting you brand recognition and with a little luck, some repeat visitors. If you are able to produce linkbait on a semi-regular basis, then your site will make progress.