Money Spent on Paid-Search is Unjustified

Few days ago, The New York Post published a sensational headline "Search & Destroy," based on the results of an audit from UK-based Internet Search Metrics. The Post article says, according to the results of an audit, which are not yet released, all the money spent on paid-search or pay per click campaigns is often unjustified. Adding to the shocking results it also states that marketers should focus more on the natural side of search engine optimization.

According to Phil Millo, an ISM director "Executives know the battleground for business success today is being fought on the search engine but they know very little about how well their companies are faring on natural search or if their paid search advertising dollars are well spent,".

Millo also said that “Google's own research shows surfers look toward natural search over paid search by a ratio of 4-to-1.”

Power of Backlink's Anchor Text

Till recently Google PageRank (PR) was the most important aspect of SEO, not any more. By far the most important aspect of modern-day SEO is anchor text found in the incoming links or backlinks to your website. Anchor text is the clickable text that is displayed for a link. For example:

<a href=”http://www.fone2talk.com”>Phone Call From PC</a>

links to www.fone2talk.com and has the anchor text “Phone Call From PC”. When you get links to your website you should always try to get your targeted keyphrase in the anchor text. This is an incredibly important factor used by search engines when generating the result pages.

But you must remember one thing that the search engines are aware of people purposefully targeting keyphrases via their link anchor text, so it is a good idea to vary the incoming link’s anchor text so that you don’t get penalized or banned for attempting to spam the search engines.

Utilize The Anchor Text on Your Own Website
Anchor text is not only important for backlinks to your website, but it’s also important for internal linking of you web pages too. You should always put the keyword of the page you are linking to in the anchor text for that link.

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Microsoft To Acquire Online Marketing Firm aQuantive

Microsoft has announced it's plans to buy digital ad firm aQuantive, which owns Atlas and Avenue A-Razorfish, for $6 billion in cash. It is apparently the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history.

From its press release, Microsoft says it sees the purchase as helping it build an advertising platform across various media:

The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to strengthen relationships with advertisers, agencies and publishers by enhancing the Company’s world-class advertising platforms and services beyond its current capabilities to serve MSN. The acquisition also provides Microsoft increased depth in building and supporting next generation advertising solutions and environments such as cross media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV. Combining aQuantive’s technologies and services with Microsoft’s portfolio will provide value for the industry’s key constituencies.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of the 2008 fiscal year for Microsoft.

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Yahoo Decides To Close Yahoo Auctions

Yahoo has announced that they will be closing Yahoo Auctions in the United States and Canada as of June 16, 2007. Yahoo Auctions will continue in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

Here is the last date of some important events:

Last day to list an item: June 3, 2007
Last day to Bid/Buy: June 16, 2007
Last day to access remaining site tools such as My Account: October 29, 2007

As Yahoo has a good working relationship with eBay and the site didn't seem to get much attraction. Given that it wasn't really doing much for Yahoo it makes sense for them to focus on other areas.

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Google is the Most Visited Site in the World

Google has become the world's most visited site surpassing Microsoft. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Google's popularity in terms of worldwide visits is now more than Microsoft's.

According to comScore, in March 2007 the difference between the number of visitors of Google and Microsoft was about a million. Google had 528 million unique visitors, while Microsoft had 527 million visitors in March. Not only is Google more popular in terms of traffic, it also passed Microsoft as the most powerful brand in the world.

BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | Spurl | Yahoo MyWeb

Google Planning to Integrate News with Web Search Results

Google is planning to change the way it blends news results and web search results, co-arranging links to news sources and web pages if your search terms are relevant to current news events. The new format will replace OneBox news links that have normally appeared at the top of a search result page, such as shown below:

Shortly, news results will no longer be inserted into web pages using a OneBox format. Instead, they will be blended into the regular search results. According to Google this will allow them to rank news according to relevance in search results rather than at top of the page.

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Autodiscovery of Sitemaps by Search Engines

Recently Google, Microsoft and Yahoo got united to support sitemaps. And now, the three joined by Ask.com are supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location of your sitemaps is listed in a robots.txt file.

In the past, if you created a sitemap, you then had to manually submit it to the search engines. With this announcement, search engines will check your robots.txt file for a link to a sitemaps file, then get the file from that location. This is a big plus because all the major search engines regularly check robots.txt files as part of their ordinary crawling.

To add the sitemap location, just put a line like this anywhere in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE

Replace the LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE with the actual location. For example, if www.oliveglobal.co.uk has a sitemap file called sitemap.xml in top level, the reference would be like this:

Sitemap: http://www.oliveglobal.co.uk/sitemap.xml

But waht to do if you have more than one sitemaps file? Ideally, you'd create a special "sitemaps index" file that links to all of them, then put a link to the sitemaps index file in your robots.txt file. If that sounds like too much work, you can have more than one sitemaps URL listed in the robots.txt file.

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