Marketing Pilgrim is bragging about Ask.com again.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Ask, but 20% of 3.something isn’t much. I remember when it was a big deal that Ask jumped from fifth place to fourth in search volume (last year). Apparently, they’re back in fifth and have been for some time. Even AOL, which is an aggregator, not a search engine, is ahead of them.

That’s not to say that Ask won’t ever move beyond the 4% of the market range. It’s just not where they are now. Yes, they had the biggest jump (in percentage) among all the search engines, but how many search queries would Google have to have to increase its search volume by 20%? When you consider that, 20% just doesn’t seem like much, does it? At 7.7 billion searches in January, Google would increase its search volume by more than Ask’s total search volume even if it grew only by 10%. If Yahoo! increased its volume by 20% then it would grow at a rate equal to Ask’s total volume. Does that put it a little bit into perspective?

None of this means that Ask isn’t doing things right. Having come awfully late to the search game, Ask is outstripping all the other search engines in a couple of areas, one of which is universal search. It’s local listings seem to be a big improvement over the other search engines as well. And I really do like its new social news site, BigNews. One could easily criticize them for not allowing users to submit stories, but there are already so many news sites that allow users to submit stories that we just don’t need another one.

20%? OK, wonderful. Let me know when they’ve grown by 5% and that’s enough to move up into third place. Keep struggling Ask. I’m behind you 100%.

(Source) Last month, NetSol came under fire for automatically registering domains that customers had searched for on their site and then jacking up the price of the domains for a four-day period. NetSol defended the practice as protection against frontrunning, which is the practice of registering a domain someone is searching for and then jacking up the price.

Whenever someone says they are doing something for your own good, look out! You’re about to have your pocketbook stolen clean out of your pocket.

Network Solutions seems to be doing just that. By engaging in domain front running in order to prevent domain front running, the domain registrar is effectively circumventing good business ethics in the name of good business ethics. In order words, the ethics don’t apply to them.

But a lot of people disagree.

Domain tasting has been a problem for quite some time and ICANN has done nothing about it. It appears they’ll do just as much to curb the practice of front running. It looks like domain tasters, kiters, and front runners all get a free pass.

But the problem for Network Solutions is that is has an upper hand, even against other front runners, tasters, and kiters. Being in control of the domain querying process on its website, they are privy to information about what domain names people are querying before anyone else. That gives them a huge edge and could be the equivalent of inside trading, which is a serious crime, as homemaker celebrity Martha Stewart can attest to.

Domain front running, tasting, and kiting take good domain names away from people who will put them to good use and could be - and should be - considered anti-competitive business practices. Until ICANN and other industry authority figures see it that way they will likely not be able to put a stop to it.

Darren Rowse at Problogger wrote about an offer he received from someone wanting to buy text links on his website. The conversation is very interesting. Even after being told “No” umpteen gazillion times, the link buyer was persistent and kept upping his offer, going from an initial offer of $150 to $400 per paragraph.

Keep in mind that this offer was for a permanent placement, not a monthly recurring fee, and that each paragraph would consist of 4 or 5 text links. At $400 one-time payment, that would come to $100 total per link for a PR 5 website to help with the link building part of Search Engine Optimization. What a rip off. Darren breaks down his decision to refuse the offer this way:

• For starters it’s too risky. The examples that he gave of what he’d done show ‘paragraphs’ that to me obviously didn’t ‘fit’ on the pages. They stuck out like a sore thumb to anyone looking at them.
• Secondly it’s too cheap. $400 for a paragraph with 4-5 links in it makes it $80-$100 a link. This isn’t a monthly payment - it’s a one off for an indefinite period. Text links on pages with page ranks as high as the ones he’s targeting go for a lot more than this kind of rate when you consider that they often pay per month. Over time his $80-$100 a link is nothing at all.
• Thirdly it compromises the quality of my content. Even with the offer to write the paragraphs myself I’m not willing to link to sites that could have a dubious quality. This kind of thing can impact you on numerous fronts - Search Engine Optimization for one and reader experience for another. The sites you link to impact not only your bank balance but potentially your reputation.

I’ll have to agree with Darren on all three points. If you get offers like this to sell links on your website, your best bet is just to walk away. These aren’t real offers.

Imagine someone walking up to you on the street in your hometown and offering to buy your automobile - let’s say it’s a five-year-old family sedan with a luxury interior and only 20,000 miles on the engine - for $500 total. Would you accept it? That’s about what these offers are - ridiculous for any Search Engine Optimization efforts.

First, they undervalue your links. Secondly, they provide you crappy content that doesn’t match the content on your website. And, thirdly, if you accept the offer then you will likely see declines in your PageRank. Why do that to yourself?

If you are a relatively new webmaster, it might seem as if you are just spinning your wheels because you aren’t making any money, but you should think about your monetization plans before you build your site. Know how you are going to make your money before you build it. And stick to your plan. Don’t accept crappy offers from link sellers out to distract you. Here are a few tips for those of you who do want to sell text links on your website:

• Only sell on a recurring payment basis - never permanent placement.
• Learn the value of your links before you accept any offers and don’t sell any links for less than they are worth.
• Sell links for traffic value, not PR; then be sure to include a nofollow attribute in every link.
• Offer to write the content yourself so that you can maintain consistence of voice on your website content - if link buyers tell you that you can’t change their wording then walk away.
• Make sure the content matches the content on you website; if it doesn’t then refuse the offer.
• Examine the page to which you are linking; is it spammy? Does it link to other sites that are spammy? Are there other issues like potential warez downloads or malware issues? (Remember, you are sending your site visitors to that site and they trust you to make a good recommendation - if they get a virus because of your recommendation then they will likely never visit your site again).

Selling text links is risky business in a number of ways. Think long and hard before you accept any offers - even if the price looks attractive. Instead of making money you could loose with your long term Search Engine Optimization efforts.

WebProNews thinks Yahoo is doing a fine take on Google turf. Well, except for where pirates are concerned.

Actually, Yahoo! Assist is pretty useful. You have to turn it on manually but it’s easy enough to do and when you type in a search query the tool will bring up automatic suggestions to help you out. The suggestions are based on popular queries so if you’re searching for the same thing that many other users have searched for then it will be easy to just scroll down on the suggested search query and you’ll get friendly results. If your query isn’t listed then you search like normal. Pretty nifty, huh?

A study by a third-party recently announced on the Yahoo! Blog indicates that perhaps the Assist tool is working pretty well. Yahoo! is bragging about having gained some inroads on Google’s excellence rating and that’s fine, but that hasn’t exactly translated into a corporate turn around, has it? The company is still laying off employees and there is still talk of a Microsoft takeover - at least in some quarters. It may be too soon to see the turnaround since Yahoo! Assist was just rolled out in October 2007. But if user satisfaction keeps going up then we could see Yahoo! taking some market share, which hasn’t happened yet.

I like Kalena Jordan. I like Jill Whalen. But a recent article in SiteProNews written by the former about the latter has me a little confused.

You have to read carefully what people say in these articles. Jordan is explaining some advice that Whalen gave in a conference tutorial and starts off with some common “Search Engine Optimization Myths.” To be sure, most of them are myths. But you have to pay attention to some of the wording on these myths:

• you must have a keyword-rich domain
• you must have keyword-rich page URLs
• heading tags are necessary (H1, H2 etc.)

First off, I don’t know anyone who says a keyword-rich domain is necessary. Obviously, it isn’t necessary. How many websites with whacked out domain names are still popular? Flickr, Bebo, MySpace … No, they’re not necessary. But they are helpful. That’s helpful. Notice the difference in spelling?

Saying keywords in your URL aren’t necessary is like saying it isn’t necessary to have a website. Sure, you can run a business without a website, but if you build a website and market it correctly then you’ll get more business. Oh, silly me!

I believe some Search Engine Optimization experts throw up a ruse to confuse people. Some of them will tell you a certain practice is necessary when it isn’t. Then someone else will come along and tell you it isn’t necessary but fail to tell you that it is helpful. Let’s be honest: Using the tools at your disposal is helpful.

So how is it helpful? Well, if you put your website up against your competition and you are equal in all other respects, I believe the website with the primary keyword in the URL will rank better. Why? Because it’s a ranking factor. It’s not the most important ranking factor. It isn’t even a very heavily weighted one. But it is a ranking factor and you should consider it. Why ignore something that can give you an edge just because it isn’t necessary?

Most of Kalena’s and Jill’s advice, however, is pretty rock solid. I wouldn’t ignore it. But take anything any Search Engine Optimization expert says with a grain of salt. Jill (ahem, Kalena) points this out clearly in her “Search Engine Optimization Company Myths” segment:

• that a #1 ranking will always lead to more traffic or sales. The good rankings need to be for keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for.
• that the company can place pages in certain positions. Not possible, unless they’re using Pay Per Click or sponsored spots.
• that your rankings will tank if you stop paying the company. Rubbish!
• that they have a “proprietary method” of Search Engine Optimization. They’re lying!
• that they have a “special relationship” with Google. Again, they’re lying. Google has no relationships with organic Search Engine Optimization companies that Jill is aware of.
• that they can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work. Run away!

These claims are all just patently ridiculous and I agree - if your Search Engine Optimization company is telling you any of these things, run away!

It’s official! It is our one year anniversary! Here at Search Engine Optimization Journal, we pride ourselves on delivering the best search engine optimization information, tips and news to our readers on a daily basis. Since our inception, we have witnessed many changes within the industry and have been impressed at the wide varieties of topics and news we have been able to cover. Throughout our year here, we have seen the major search engines morph, look to merge and the algorithms of each change immensely. Recently we have become more aware of the importance of blog marketing and social media and its rapid growth and value within the industry.

Who would have imagined that two of the top three search engines would possibly have a chance of coming together to compete with the other? The internet marketing industry changes every single day and if you miss a beat, you just may lose a lot of business. By posting these blogs, not only are we educating our readers but we are also educating ourselves as we research these new trends and learn the news that is happening each day within search marketing.

In the past year, social networks have become increasingly popular and have assisted in developing the presence of several companies and people online. Just when we believe that we have reached the end of ideas for online promotion, another idea blows the previous one out of the water.

A Year in Review

Listed below are some of the posts we have written that we believe may the most helpful:

Preventing Search Engines From Crawling Your Web Pages

Where and How to Add Keywords to Your Site…

What To Do If Your Search Rankings Fall

Should You Start A Web Business?

We here at Search Engine Optimization Journal have tried to keep up with the Jones’ by providing daily content (twice a day even!) that is relevant to the industry as a whole. Have we done a good job of it? Feel free to let us know by commenting!

I’ve got to hand it to Andy Beard. Here’s a creative way of getting around Google’s paid link policy. The search engine has effectively told webmasters that they will be penalized for selling links. Many webmasters have gone to instituting nofollow attributes on their paid links so that they aren’t penalized. That penalizes the webmasters buying the links as they don’t get any PR transference from those nofollow links. So will Beard’s Robots.txt solution solve his problem?

It’s possible, but not likely. Robots.txt will allow webmasters the ability to tell Google not to crawl their pages. If you have a page on which you link to other sites that have paid for you to do so then you can prevent Google from crawling that web page altogether. The page will still be indexed, but it won’t be crawled. And the natural follow up question is, “Well, if it isn’t crawled then how will be indexed?”

If there is even one inbound link to that page from anywhere else on the web then it will be indexed. Google may not crawl it, and therefore will not crawl the links on that page so it will potentially never discover that those links are paid links. But what Andy Beard is banking on is that his content being syndicated either by aggregators or scrapers - the first being a legitimate and ethical way of syndication and the second one being unethical. Either way, he wins, as does his link buyers.

Any content that is syndicated will provide inbound links from other sources. Google is unlikely to count syndicated paid links as paid links. The search engine won’t know that they are paid links on the syndicated pages. How would they know? They can figure it out on the original content page, but since it isn’t crawling that page it becomes a non issue. This is what Beard is banking on.

He says he hasn’t implemented the Robots.txt strategy yet. My bet is, if he does, then other webmasters will follow and will get away with selling links for some time. They will even figure out how to syndicate each other’s content effortlessly for a period of time. Eventually, Google will institute another policy. But short term, it looks like it might work.

Tracking conversions is one of the most important aspects of running a business online. If you don’t know how your sales pages are operating and how successful or unsuccessful they are then you have no idea on how to improve them. That’s why tracking conversions is so important.

It’s really simple to track your conversions. The difficult part is analyzing your results. Seemingly good results can sometimes be improved upon just by tweaking your sales or landing page a little. One change to your landing page can increase your conversions by a considerable amount, but to do that you have to know what to improve and that’s where conversion tracking comes in.

There are different analytics programs you can use for tracking your conversions. I like Google Analytics because it’s free and because it’s also tied to your Google AdWords account. If you are driving traffic to your landing page with pay per click ads from Google AdWords then you can track your conversions with a simple piece of code that you add to your landing page.

Don’t confuse your conversion tracking code with your Google Analytics code, however. They are two pieces of code. You’ll need to add your Google Analytics code in order to track how much traffic your PPC ads are delivering to your pages. But you need your conversion tracking code in order to track your sales. The analytics code goes on your landing page. The conversion tracking code goes on the “Thank you” page that your visitors see when they purchase your product. That’s so that the conversion tracking code can register the sale that has just been made.

To get the code, log into your Google AdWords account and click on “Conversion Tracking” in the green bar at the top of the page. On the left side of the page, near the bottom, you’ll see a box. In that box is a link using the words “Get conversion page code.” Click on that link. You’ll have to choose the type of conversion that you want to track. Just follow the instructions in that part of the Google AdWords system. It’s pretty simple.

Want to get an edge over your competition? Everyone knows about Search Engine Optimization - search this, search that, search yackit-yak-yak. It’s all been said and done before. Or has it?

Well, there is one technique that you can use in your search campaign that you competition likely is not using. And if you are a local business marketing yourself to your local neighbors then you can gain an even bigger edge that will catapult you way over the head of your competition.

This search technique is so easy to implement you can do it five minutes. You’ll have your already existing website crawled within 48 hours and re-ranked. Small print: Other considerations may cause your website to be crawled less frequently. For most of us, though, this technique will get Google back to your website in just a couple of days and re-ranked.

I’m talking about including your business phone number in your description tag. Whenever searchers see your phone number in a search result they immediately think credibility. In many cases, they won’t even visit your website. They’ll just call you right off of your SERP listing. If you are local and you want to rank for a local area then the zip area code in your phone number will help with that local ranking. This is a powerful technique for your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Try it.

Look at the latest stats and Google owns more than 60% of the search market - almost 70%, in fact. Yahoo! has a whopping 20-something percent on any given day. The top three - Google, Yahoo!,and MSN Live - together get 95% of the search business. But Google is so far ahead of the other two that it seems they will never catch up. Why?

A little history says it all. In the late 1990s there were plenty of search engines that were competing for the business and all of them were pretty close to even in terms of search market, except that Alta Vista had a little bit of a lead. Google owners Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented a robot program that they called BackRub. BackRub later became Google. It’s essence was in using a backlink counting system to determine which websites had the greatest authority because the idea was if you had 100 links pointing at your sites versus your competition’s 50 then you had more “votes” and deserved the recognition. It was a good theory.

Back then, nobody paid for links. No one thought they should. The linking that went on between websites occurred because people linked to what they liked with no expected return. Page and Brin understood that better than anyone and created a search engine based on that idea. Over the years, they have tweaked and improved upon their search ranking factors based on the natural (and sometimes unnatural) behavior of Net citizens.

It took just a couple of years really before Google started outpacing all the other search engines because their results were so good. Then pay per click advertising came on the scene and Google jumped into the fight there. Soon, it became the dominant player in PPC because of its keyword-based advertising model and click bid technology. That allowed Google to raise enough revenue from advertisers to acquire more properties and continue improving its technology.

It took the other search engines awhile to catch on to what Google was up to. Yahoo and MSN Live started to make their search engine algorithms more like Google’s, but they were much too late in doing so. Today, the three search engines have very similar ranking algorithms, but there are some differences:

• Google is much more strict on its backlink approval ratings
• MSN Live seems to favor keywords in the URL much more
• Yahoo appears to favor larger sites over smaller
• Google has a more sophisticated natural language measure

Meta tags for your search engine optimization efforts at each of the engines are somewhat important, but not very. MSN Live probably cares more about meta tags than either of the other two. But Google is still favored as the best search engine even though you’ll find a lot of the results between the three almost the same. Why?

I believe it has to do with Google’s early lead. Yahoo! and MSN Live are playing catch up. They probably always will be. The only thing that will cause Google lose market share is Google. Only a major slip up like the one Coca-Cola made when it changed its formula can make Google lose. The competition will not. If you are in a competitive industry vying for search market, keep that in mind. What can you do to pull out an early lead?

With all the talk about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, Yahoo acquiring somebody else, AOL wanting a piece of Yahoo pie, and Google sniffing the behind it can’t get, you might be wondering what to make of all this noise. I know I am.

There does appear to be some shuffling going on. Just within Yahoo itself, there is some asset maneuvering - acquisitions, resettings, layoffs, etc. Microsoft is looking to make a big move. Some say they will get Yahoo and others say they will buy more Facebook. Some say they just want something and will get whatever they want. Meanwhile, Google continues to dominate.

I think the cold, hard truth is the future is hard to predict. Next to impossible. But if I were to gather up the mojo to make a prediction, I’d say the most likely scenario for the future of search is that it will merge with social media.

I know, I know; it sounds crazy. These two worlds - search and social media - seem to be two separate worlds within the universe of cyberspace and Search Engine Optimization. You’ll find search kings who hate social media and social media queens who despise search engines. Then there’s the rest of us, trying to make the best of both tools. I think in the long run your big players in both markets will see the potential in combining the two for maximum user experience.

Microsoft already owns a small part of Facebook. Both Google and Yahoo and reaching for their pieces of the social media pie. Yahoo has del.icio.us, but is that enough? Rumors have started about Google and Yahoo wanting Bebo. Google has a deal going with MySpace. It’s just a matter of time before the two worlds merge completely. Then what?

Once again, Rand Fishkin, wrote a blog post with some meat in it. The questions people ask about ranking at one search engine vs. another are worth a read. Just a little snippet:

Google rewards a few very high quality, trusted links over many lower value links and thus, you’ll frequently see pages and sites in Google’s rankings because they’ve won out through the value Google places in their sparse but more trusted link profile.

This is probably one of the least understood principles of search engine optimization. It is definitely the most misunderstood thing about link building. You don’t necessarily need a ton of links. Yahoo likes a lot of links. Google doesn’t. In fact, Google has been known to penalize websites for certain kinds of links. So you’re much better off targeting your link building efforts toward a few websites that will garner you great link juice than a lot of websites will get you modest juice or none at all.

Link building is an essential activity for search engine optimization. Do it wrong and it can cost you. Do it right and the benefits will stick around for a very long time. You should take some time to learn what each of the search engines consider a valuable link and work on optimizing your link building strategies so that you get the right benefits from each search engine.

Blogger.com may be the worst neighborhood in cyberspace, but it is owned by Google, which makes it one of the best search engine optimization tools in your arsenal.

Because Google is one of the most authoritative sites online, if you have a blog at Blogger.com then you could pass on some very important link juice to yourself. In some experiments that I’ve seen, a Blogger.com blog will improve your link building, which in turns improves your search engine positioning. It does this the same way that any other inbound links do except that, because it is owned by Google, you may get additional points due to Google’s authority.

This won’t work for everyone, however. If you are a spammer, you can count on getting your Google blog flagged and eventually taken down. But if you are not a spammer then a Blogger.com blog can help you. It’s free, which means you can set up a blog for about $10 per year less than you can by owning your own domain name. If you blog every day then the benefits should be close to the same. The downside is that you don’t own the property and therefore, theoretically at least, could lose it at any time. But I’ve seen business owners start off on Blogger.com and transfer to their own domain name after a few months with relative ease.

Whether you go with Blogger.com or your domain name (and just for the record, I support your own domain name), you’ll still benefit your business with an offsite blog.

(Source) In the midst of an absolute flood of them, we’ve got another trickle of firings to report: 40 people were let go by Yahoo India. The truly strange part, though, is that Yahoo India is still looking to add over 500 new employees.

OK, call me crazy, but isn’t it possible that Yahoo could be restructuring its assets? Yes, they’ve been laying people off across the board, but they’ve also been buying up properties, something that companies who find themselves in deep hot water typically are afraid to do.

Much ado was made about Microsoft’s buyout offer, primarily from onlookers who hoped it would happen for one reason only: Fight Google! Rah Rah Rah

Well, I’m like anyone else. I like a good fight. But the fight seems to be Yahoo vs. The World, not Google vs. Second Place.

Much of the mess that Yahoo is in right now that everyone else seems to have a solution to was the doing of former CEO Terry Semel, who left the company just recently. Yahoo executives said no to Microsoft with a statement that they were going to pursue other courses of action to pull themselves out of their mess. That could mean any number of things:

• Nudge offers from other companies (AOL has been mentioned)
• Restructure internally
• Do Nothing
• Something Else

My bet is that Yahoo executives have looked at the state of their company and have seen some things they don’t like. They’ve likely seen some fat and are starting to trim. But that doesn’t mean they can’t look to the future. If you are a company that is planning to return itself to life from the graveyard then the future is very important. Acquisitions and hirings tell me the Yahoo is in a state of transition. The question is, do they have a plan or are they just winging it?

Much has been said about online press releases. How they’re important for branding, building an online business, getting lots and lots of publicity. But you can use them for Search Engine Optimization?

Absolutely.

Links in your press releases work the same way as links anywhere else online. But it may not necessarily be just about the press release distribution website. Like article marketing, you can submit your press releases to distribution websites that are visited by newspaper, television, radio, and Internet journalists. These press releases are then used to promote your company and products on news sites and sites related to your industry.

There are two ways a press release can be used by these other companies:

1. The press release can be used just as you wrote it, links and all
2. Or the news site or industry site can contact you for an interview

That second way is the way most press releases attract attention. You’ll get a call or an e-mail from a news or industry website wanting your opinion on a topic or wanting to do a story on your company. In the story, they will usually use link to your website. That link will count as an inbound link for you website and it will garner the same link juice that any other link will, subject to relevance, authority, etc. Overall, press releases can be a great addition to your search engine optimization.