Retargeting: The New Behavioral Ads Presentations from SMX East, October 2010 Traditional search advertising matches keywords with specific searcher queries. This works fine if a searcher clicks your ad, sees your landing page and buys, subscribes or does whatever else you want them to do. But the real world is messier, with searchers often needing […]
Google Instant & Paid Search: A Game Changer? Presentations from SMX East, October 2010 With Google Instant, bidding, quality score calculations and other factors remain the same for AdWords – but advertisers should pay close attention to other subtleties that might impact ad display, analytics and possibly costs. In this session, search advertisers share hard […]
Local search powerhouse Yelp is planning to go public at some point in the future. That’s something that Yelp COO Geoff Donaker confirmed during his keynote conversation today at our SMX East conference in New York City. “We don’t see any reason not to be an independent company for years to come. Will we go […]
Good morning! It’s almost time for day two of SMX East to begin and the plan is to live blog this morning’s keynote conversation between Yelp COO Geoff Donaker and Search Engine Land Executive Editor, Chris Sherman. But first, I’m the master of ceremonies and so I need to run up to the stage and […]
We’re delighted to announce that Yelp Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker will be in the spotlight for SMX East’s second day keynote on Tuesday, October 5th. Combining local search with customer reviews, special offers and a healthy dose of social interaction, Yelp is an indispensable resource for local businesses and those who enjoy “getting out […]
Some time ago, a gentleman by the name of Mark Cramer emailed me wanting to talk about the future of search. It was probably precipitated by the Search:2010 whitepaper we produced in 2007, where I talked to several search and UX notables, including Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Marissa Mayer, Jakob Nielsen and others. Alas, Mark […]
What You Don’t Know About You Tube Presentations from SMX Advanced Seattle, June 2010 What’s one of the biggest search engines on the web? YouTube. What feeds much video content directly into the top results of the web’s largest search engine, Google? YouTube. Already feel you’re rocking along just fine with YouTube? Our panel seeks […]
Pump Up Those Conversions! Presentations from SMX Advanced Seattle, June 2010 You’ve got them to your site — that’s half the battle. Win the war. Convert, convert, convert! Convert them on the landing pages! Guide them past landing page as necessary, converting them deeper in the site. But convert! This session looks at tools, testing […]
Well, the first half of this one-year search advertising course is in the books! This column was an idea that I hatched, and thankfully, SearchEngineLand.com’s executive editor, Chris Sherman had also been thinking about something similar, so the timing at the end of last year couldn’t have been better. So far, it’s been a wonderful […]
SMX West Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies Testing alternative landing page content can dramatically increase conversion rates. But how do you know what to test? A number of powerful, inexpensive and easy-to-use new tools now make the process much easier. Learn the secrets of the pros by seeing a rapid-fire […]
It’s day three of SMX West 2010, and we’re going to kick off with a group keynote conversation called “The State Of The Search Union.” The description hints that we’ll be talking about where the industry is today, and where it’s going in the future. No doubt the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be a big discussion […]
Speaking today at SMX West in Santa Clara, Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, said that PageRank is overhyped and probably needs a new name. His comments came during the morning keynote session in a conversation with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman. After being asked about search technologies that he thinks are […]
It’s day two of SMX West 2010 in a rainy Santa Clara, California, and we’ll be liveblogging today’s keynote session. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman will be chatting on the big stage with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research. We’re expecting some sneak peeks at future Google products and technology, so come […]
Is your international search marketing suffering from content avoidance syndrome? Are domains and hosting top of the list with a little dabbling in managing duplication? It's not too late - if you've recognized the problem you're halfway to solving it and focusing more on content investment!
In less than two months, Search Engine Land’s SMX West search marketing conference will happen from March 2-4 in California. Anyone who is even remotely connected to gaining visitors, customers and driving sales should be attending. Experienced search marketer? Newbie? Web developer? Designer? Involved in public relations? Traditional marketer? There’s good stuff for all these […]
What amazes me is that in more than a decade no “brand” has really emerged in shopping search. What do I mean by “brand”? I mean a site that’s top-of-mind for consumers, trusted and that they navigate to directly for products and product information. One could say that the exceptions to this are Amazon, eBay […]
Keyword Research Artistry Good SEO begins with good keyword research. But all to often, this is an overlooked area. This session dives in with some of the latest tools and tips to really understand how people are searching for your content, sharing real-life examples and delving issues such as how to target both “head” and […]
Search Marketing Now, our educational webcast series for search marketers, presents two webcasts this coming week: Tuesday, July 21, Chris Sherman is the featured speaker on How Large Offline Marketers Drive Superior Search Marketing Results; Wednesday, Brad Geddes will deliver a webcast titled Trademarks, Brand Terms and PPC Advertising: Updates You Must Know. Both webcasts […]
News.com reports that Wikia Search is giving up and closing up shop. Search Wikia launched an alpha release in January 2008, where Chris Sherman gave it a poor review. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia, told News.com “It was going to take at least an another year to two before it’s usable by the public, and […]
Click fraud is worse today than ever according to an announcement from tracking company Click Forensics. Click Forensics estimates the overall average click fraud rate for Q4 2008 at 17.1%, the highest level since they began tracking it in 2006. That rate is up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported […]
Click Forensics has released their estimated 3rd quarter click fraud numbers that they track. The numbers remain pretty much the same, at least as it pertains to the overall estimated industry average click fraud rate. The rate is now 16.0%, down from last quarter’s 16.2%. The main change was that botnets were said to be […]
The Search Engine Land team is growing. We’ve gained two new editors this month, Matt McGee and Elisabeth Osmeloski, plus Melissa Cormier came on as our editorial assistant in August. Below, an update on the entire team, and what we each do.
With automated tagging, Web links can surprise from the Associate Press reports that the Yahoo Shortcuts feature aided in placing inappropriate content on AP’s content. Yahoo Shortcuts is a feature that allows publishers to enhance their content by adding Yahoo content around the words in the articles or blog posts. In this case, there was […]
Philipp Lenssen’s The World According to Cuil blog post inspired me to take snapshots of how Cuil, the new search engine, matches up the names of our industry to pictures. Here’s Danny Sullivan’s Wikipedia article, but showing a picture of Danny Sullivan the race car driver:
Click Forensics has released the second quarter results for 2008, showing a slight drop in the estimated click fraud. Last quarter, Click Forensics reported a 16.3 percent rate, and they are now reporting a 16.2 percent rate for Q2 of 2008. However, the rate is up from a year ago, which was a 15.8 percent […]
As I watch search marketers often continue to obsess about things like PageRank, I wanted to do a personal post / wake-up call related to our SMX Local & Mobile Search Marketing show happening next month in San Francisco, July 24-25. Because for all the buzz that goes on around link building, link baiting, PageRank […]
Microsoft Live Search’s xRank feature got some attention when it launched as a way to track celebrities. But you might not realize the service also now tracks buzz about musicians, politicians, and — yes — bloggers.
One of the biggest search challenges has long been that the major search engines like Google cannot crawl material that can only be retrieved through the use of forms. Now Google is filling out those form to obtain the information previously hidden, the company has announced.
Search Engine Journal has announced the winner of the Best Search Industry News Blog of 2007, and we are so delighted to inform you that we have secured first place! Thank you all so much for voting for us. It has been a wild year, and as you can see by Danny’s Search Engine Land […]
Wikia Search has launched their Alpha version at https://alpha.search.wikia.com/, and boy is it an Alpha launch. Chris Sherman is writing up our long review of Wikia Search and it should be live shortly. Even Wikia said the “quality of the search results is low.” There is not much I can add to that than simply […]
Happy Birthday to us! Today, Search Engine Land officially turns one year old. Below, I wanted to share some thanks to all those who’ve helped make it such a successful year, and I’m going to save the in-depth "what have we achieved" statistics for sharing for January, when the entire 2007 calendar year has passed. […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
SMX London is has ended. Search Engine Land’s Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan hosted the event. Missed the fun? Don’t you worry. We have lots of live coverage. Here’s a rundown:
The two day SMX Travel @ PhoCusWright show in Orlando is now complete. Chris Sherman hosted the travel focused agenda and we were lucky enough to have Marty at the aimClearBlog provide full coverage of the event. Below are links to his coverage.
Want to understand more about all that’s happening in the local and mobile search space? That’s what our SMX Local & Mobile conference on Oct. 1 & 2 in Denver is all about! To give you a preview of what will be covered, Search Engine Land executive editor Chris Sherman and staff writer Greg Sterling […]
Nearly a decade ago, I believed in the power and promise of locally focused Web sites and applications. Back then, I was COO of About.com and in hindsight can say that I was a bit ahead of market adoption, to say the least! We ended up pretty successfully focusing on interest-based sites that became all […]
Several weeks ago (seemingly years) Just Behave featured Part One of the summarized interviews with my personal dream team of search usability: Jakob Nielsen, the Web’s best-known usability guru Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of user experience and interface design Michael Ferguson, one of the architects of Ask’s unique user experience Larry Cornett, the VP of […]
It’s Search Engine Strategies San Jose next week. For Chris Sherman and I, it’s our swan song. This is the last SES event that either of us will program, with our search marketing conference efforts going forward focused on our own Search Marketing Expo (SMX) events. But we’ve put our all into making the last […]
I chuckled a bit over the buzz Yahoo got when they launched Yahoo Search Suggest earlier this month because I knew something even better was coming: Yahoo Search Assist. Finally, it’s going live and in the wild for lucky people who are selected at random for testing. If all goes well, eventually everyone will get […]
Jason Calacanis has announced Mahalo Greenhouse, a way for users to get paid for writing their own search results for the Mahalo people-powered search engine. The Greenhouse FAQ gives more details on the program, where if accepted, you can earn $10 to $15 per submission.