Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Service

The new search engine from Microsoft Bing.com is now officially live. You can search whatever, just like Google. Microsoft has allocated around $80 million in advertising to promote the search engine to the public.

The first impression of Bing is very good. The results are very relevant and it stands up very well to Google. I personally think now Google has a more serious competitor. Add to that $60 billion in reserves and we’re in for a very though battle.

Ex-Googler Yoelle Maarek Becomes a Purple Person

In 2006, Yoelle Maarek founded the Google Haifa Engineering Center. While there, her team contributed such features as Google Suggest, Searching Ads, and Interactive Annotations on YouTube.

Maarek left Google and will now lead the Yahoo! Lab in Haifa with Ronny Lempel. The lab was opened in March 2008.

Prior to her Google gig, Maarek worked for IBM Research both in New York and Haifa. Maarek received her undergrad and grad degrees in Paris and later her PhD from Technion in Haifa. During her PhD studies, she also was a visiting student at Columbia University in New York. - search engine watch

Here’s how search engine market share looks according to Nielsen:

Google leads with 60.9%, Yahoo is at 16.8% and Microsoft is at 9.8%. Google is still the undisputed leader.

2009 New Year Fireworks

Search Engine Rap Battle

LOL This is fun as hell. You can find the videos here.

MSN vs GOOGLE - Search Engine Rap Battle

MSN vs YAHOO - Search Engine Rap Battle

GOOGLE vs YAHOO - Search Engine Rap Battle

Hope this makes you smile.

Source

1.) While everyone else searches for wedding photographers, senior portrait photographers, and the like, you’ve spent weeks looking for a “social media avatar photographer.”

2.) The thought that SoloSEO is actually a team of two gives you a slight headache.

3.) You travel to so many conferences that your spouse struggles to keep track of your whereabouts. And one day, while trying to update her calendar with your schedule, your wife says to you, “Okay, SES in March. SMX and SEG in April. And what’s the one in May? SEX?” (This actually happened.)

4.) Instead of showing the number of RSS feeds you’re subscribed to, your feed reader just says “TILT.”

5.) There’s an indentation in your mousepad that exactly mirrors the path from the “What’s New” tab on Sphinn to the “Report As Spam” button below the most recent submission.

6.) You know how to “match client sites to the 70+ part algorithm formula that is used by Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and every major search engine worldwide.”

7.) You know where that quote came from.

8.) It doesn’t strike you as strange that you sometimes communicate with your spouse via your blogs.

9.) When Danny Sullivan moved his family from England to California, you tracked their travel on FlightAware.com.

10.) Your spouse says your family is “going green.” Your first thought: “Did our PageRank increase on the family blog?”

11.) While telling your son about your favorite childhood books, you wax poetic about the “Wikipedia Brown” series. You never correct yourself. He doesn’t, either.

12.) You get in line at the public library, and while your son checks out a book, you whisper to the librarian, “Eric Ward says you have the best links around. Can I get one?”

13.) One day your wife tells you, with no prompting, “I really like the name ‘Mihmorandum’. I wish we had a cool last name that we could do something with.” (A true story.)

14.) You spend the next four days trying to come up with clever puns for “McGee.” (Also true.)

15.) You think Lively, Google’s virtual world, offers a lot of marketing potential.

16.) When Matt Cutts posts his personal travel schedule, you sync it to your own calendar.

17.) When your alma mater emails you about its new Alumni Directory, your first thought is, “Ooooh. A clean link from a .edu? Gotta check that out.” (True story.)

18.) You vow to never make a donation when you learn your alumni listing is blocked to search engine spiders. (Also true.)

19.) You’ve never been on TV, and never will be, but you still create a TIVO “wish list” search for your name. You convince yourself it’s all in the name of reputation management.

20.) You use social updating services like Ping.fm and HelloTxt, but those aren’t enough for you. No, you need a master service that updates your updating services. You’re that connected.

21.) You laughed at anything on this list!

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (commonly referred to SEO) is an active practice of achieving website visibility on major search engines corresponding to consumer determined keywords. To put it into more practical words – the objective of SEO is to make sure that prospects find your website when they are ready to buy.

How can SEO help my business?

Search engines are “brand-blind” and do not consider marketing influence outside of the internet.  This creates a level playing field between large and small companies because websites that rank at the top of search engines convey the image of industry leadership.  Most importantly, ranking at the top ensures that visitors who are looking for your type of product find and contact you first.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines gather their information about a website by periodically sending out ‘robots’ to scan websites.  SEO works on the basic principle of making sure that a website contains all of the key ingredients needed by the robots to properly and efficiently gather certain types of information about the website.  This information is stored in search engine databases in order to classify and rank the website within subject matter category.

What are the key ingredients or ‘components’ to SEO?

There are 4 key components to successful SEO strategy.

• Keyword research and placement
• Search engine friendly coding
• Search engine copywriting.
• URL propagation and link building.

A search engine robot will only stay on a website for less than second, and then leaves. Therefore, another important part of SEO is to map the key components efficiently so that the robot finds and process the information quickly and completely.

Why hire an SEO company? (why not do it yourself or use your web-developer)

There are two classifications of SEO.  One is defined as basic-SEO skills, and the other is defined as advanced-SEO.   Anyone who takes a reasonable level of interest can attain basic SEO skills, and today’s professional web-developers should no longer be making the basic-SEO mistakes of the past (some of these mistakes can result in serious penalty situations with the search engines).  As things move forward, one can assume that all active business websites will have addressed basic-SEO requirements and all should more or less be sitting at an equal footing.  However being ‘equal’ is not good enough or useful because you need your website to be ahead of the pack; this is where advanced-SEO comes in.

Advanced-SEO requires a specific type of knowledge and a unique set of skill set.  Search engine companies such as Google spend millions of dollars every month developing and improving the algorithms used by their robots.   A good SEO company focuses specifically on what search engines are doing and where the overall search engine marketing industry is going.  A top SEO company continuously refreshes and advances its understanding of what is required to propel a website ahead of the pack and to keep it there.

What is the Return on Investment – ROI (how long does it take)?

There are 4 key factors that influence overall ROI:

• the keywords being targeted
• the level of competition for those keyword
• the current state of the website
• the aggressiveness of the SEO plan

It is important to target keyword strings that are being used by your market (note: there are tools that allow you to see statistics on what people are actually typing in search engine queries).  Targeting word strings that nobody uses will likely get you the #1 spot on Google for that string (because there is no compefor these words), however, this will not provide you with any benefits or returns.

Keywords that are used in highly competitive markets are likely being aggressively targeted by the competition.  For example, displacing a competing website that targets the broad based hotel industry would generally take longer than it would take to displace a site that targets a regional bed & breakfast industry.

Finally, every website has its own set of existing strengths and weakness from an SEO perspective.  Creating and executing an SEO plan around these strengths and weaknesses is key to an accelerated ROI.  On average, results can start to kick in less than one month and up to three months after SEO is completed

How much does SEO cost?

Just like ROI (see above), the costs associated with SEO can vary from site to site and are directly influenced by the same key factors:

• the targeted keywords
• the degree of competition that also target those keywords
• the present strength and weakness of the website
• the overall objectives of the SEO plan in terms of scope and timing

In general, websites that are targeted at highly competitive markets will typically require a more aggressive and extensive SEO plan which of course will impact costs.  Typically costs will range from $3000 to $10,000.

How do you choose the right SEO company?

Every SEO company claims that they are the best. Some will even make very tempting promises or guarantees that seem too good to be true.   Therefore choosing the right SEO company would seem to be a difficult task, but actually, it’s not.  It’s very straight forward as long as you avoid basing your decision on the sales hype,  and instead, focus on logical objective information.

The first and most important thing to look for is ‘where is the SEO company able to rank its own website on the search engine for all of the main keywords used in the SEO industry’ (these keyword are: SEO,  Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, SEO Company, SEO Services, SEO Expert, etc).   It nearly goes without saying that being on top of the search engines for the SEO industry is by far the most difficult category because all SEO companies target and compete against each other for these top spots.

Secondly: can the SEO company provide a strong and diverse list of customer references who have top ranking positioning for the main keyword in their respective industries?

Third, how accessible is the SEO company?   Are they hiding inside the virtual world of the internet or can you call them or visit their offices, can you meet the owner and put a face to a name.  Its always important to know whom you are giving your money to.

Comscore: Over 5 billion video views occurred on YouTube in July 2008, according to new data supplied by comScore. That gave Google Sites a whopping 44% of the video market in the U.S. In a distant second is Fox Interactive’s MySpace with 3.9% of the market and 446 million videos watched.

142 million, or 75%, of internet users watched online videos in July. The average number of videos watched per viewer is 80.

92 million of those viewers hung out at YouTube, consuming an average of 54.7 videos. 54 million absorbed video content at MySpace, at an average of 8.1 videos.

Here are the charts for the complete picture of the top 10 sites:

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

More than 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 80 videos per viewer in July. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (92.1 million), who watched an average of 55 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (54.9 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (37.6 million) and Microsoft Sites (32.6 million).

Other notable findings from July 2008 include:

• 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• Americans spent a total of 558 million hours watching online video during the month.
• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.
• 91 million viewers watched 5 billion videos on YouTube.com (54.8 videos per viewer).
• 51.4 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (7.8 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.9 minutes.

Comments

Google dominates video views online. It was the right move to acquire You Tube. Though it still has hard time making money, video market share cap alone is well worth it.

Pretty Girls Get More Sphinn

I’m not much into social media like twitter, facebook and digg… but dying for some ideas to blog about I headed out to shpinn.

Browsing there are the same old posts

• 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level
• The 6 Viral Seeding Must-Haves
• 25 Outdated SEO Terms & Tactics vs Their Modern Alternatives

Lists and tips, all good stuff, but time is limited and I don’t need to know that right now… but wait a sec… there’s something interesting… something different… something that’s worth my time… Is it a post? A tip? … a killer relevation? no…

It’s some face of a pretty girl…

and my thoughts go:

Girls do that? Is she OK? She looks good. Nice smile. hmm… i like her… Let’s click and look for some more. …. looking for a bigger picture… damn shpinn, they should make a photo album. Let’s see what she wrote.

As a result I ended up reading her article.

Weird?

We humans, like animals have preprogrammed, unconscious wiring, which is sex. In men, the magic chemistry that leads to sex called attraction, is switched on with pretty body looks. In women attraction is triggered by confidence, humor, dominance.

In mind mind, unconsciously, without me realizing it, in a matter of MICRO seconds the following happened:

• I spot the picture
• It’s not a male, so it’s not competition.
• It’s a female, a potential partner
• Analysis: physical traits pass filters, she’s a go.

Us guys have this happen without ever realizing it consciously. In fact our conscious brains control little of what we do. Think of the habits you do on autopilot which are hard as hell to break. Genetic wiring is 1000 times stronger than habits. In women this wiring manifests through testing. Women test men’s character unconsciously, to see if he is who he claims he is.

So what can girls get outta this? Take a sexy pic, plug it on shpinn and get horny male traffic.

This is a continuation of the funny week posts.

Source

Customer: “I think I’ve broken my computer! There’s a message across the screen that says: ‘It is now safe to turn off your PC.’ WHAT SHOULD I DO?!?!”

I’ve done my time in tech support and have managed to live through some very weird calls, but this one was the best. An older lady bought a brand new desktop system with all the extras and had been using it for about a month when she got an error about an “illegal function.” She took apart the whole system down to the hard drive and hid it in different parts of her house, called us, and wanted to know how much longer she had until the police were going to come get her. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time on the phone putting the system back together.

I work for a nationwide ISP, doing overnight technical support. A man who had immigrated from Croatia called to ask us, in his thick eastern European accent, mind you, why we were kicking him offline.

• Customer: “Why do you guys keep kicking me offline?”
• Tech Support: “Can you hold on a moment while I look at your account logs?”
• Customer: “Sure, but please hurry.”
• Tech Support: “Ok.” … “Hi, thanks for holding. It looks like our servers are reporting that either your modem is hanging up like a normal disconnect, or the connection is just being lost. This is usually attributed to line noise. I’d advise you get in touch with–”
• Customer: “No, that is not what it is!”
• Tech Support: “Well, that would normally be the first place I’d look. The modems are just losing touch with each–”
• Customer: “All right. Apparently they do not tell you everything there. What I’m trying to look at are some Croatian newspapers to keep up with what’s going on in my old country. The government did not like me when I was there and they do not like me being in touch with my family and events there today.”
• Tech Support: “Sir, the government there cannot disconnect you from the Internet here. You are in the United St–”
• Customer: “My government was very powerful. They can do lots of things you would never imagine.”
• Tech Support: “I’m sure in Croatia, the government would have the power to disconnect you from the Internet. The service providers are under their jurisdiction there. However, in America, there is nothing they could do to force our computers to knock you off line. You’re safe. I’m telling you, the first and foremost place I’d look is the telephone company to have them do what’s called a ‘data grade check’–”
• Customer: “No, no, no. That is alright. I just wanted to know if you were doing it intentionally, or if it was them. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good night.”

Customer: “Excuse me, there is an empty-folder virus on my disk.”

• Customer: “Hi, I’d like to buy a virus.”
• Me: “You really don’t want a virus on your computer. What you need is anti-virus software.”
• Customer: “No, my son told me I need a virus, and that’s what I’d like.”
• Me: “No worries. You don’t need to buy a virus — you can just connect to the internet and download one.”

• Customer: “Hi, um, my printer smells funny, and it’s smoking.”
• Me: “Did you turn it off?”
• Customer: “Well, no, I was told never to turn it off without running it through shutdown, and it won’t go through shutdown.”

• Me: “How much RAM do you have?”
• Friend: “Not that much; I own an old computer. I guess about 4 gigabytes.”
• Me: “Uhuh, and what kind of CPU?”
• Friend: “32 megabytes.”

• Customer: “How much will 16K of conventional memory cost?”

• Customer: “I can’t get online.”
• Tech Support: “Can you be more specific?”
• Customer: “It says, ‘Bad username/password’.”
• Tech Support: “What is your username?”
• Customer: “Are you sure that the Internet isn’t closed for the night?”

• Customer: “The Internet is running too slow. Could you reboot it please?”

• Tech Support: “Well, just go to [URL].”
• Customer: “How do I do that?”
• Tech Support: “Type it in in your web browser.”
• Customer: “Huh?”
• Tech Support: “Ok…sir…do you have Internet access?”
• Customer: “Huh? No. No Internet. I don’t even have a computer.”
• Tech Support: “Ok, sir, you need a computer and an Internet account to access web sites.”
• Customer: “Oh. Well, it didn’t say that when I mailed in the membership card. I want my money back.