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.