Up until recently, Google has recommended that webmasters build links to their sites, and to use directories.  They had these two bullets in the guidelines:

• Make sure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

These used to be part of the webmast guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

With Google removing these, does that mean they do not want webmasters to build links, or that you should not use web directories to build links?  Does this mean that Yahoo directory, DMOZ and other authoritative directories are no longer trusted?

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What is comparative advertising? Comparative advertising is where companies like to pit their product features next to other well known competitors in an effort to differentiate their product. You have probably seen this in a table format with product features listed along the right with check marks showing which product holds which features. This is usually occurs when either the company sees particular features they hold to be a competitive advantage, or simply because their name is not as strong as the other leading competitors.

So this brings up a few questions to consider.

1. Should I do comparative advertising? What are the pros and cons?
2. Are there any legal ramifications for using competitor names and what are the legal considerations for the claims you make about your competitor’s product?

Let’s briefly tackle them here.
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Setting up SEM Campaigns
One of the most overlooked aspect of running a SEM campaign is how important the structure of the account is for both management purposes and for performance. There are numerous factors to consider when deciding how to structure your account.

How can I make my structure tight?
What type of keywords am I targeting?
How should I best group my keywords?
Is targeting by product type more important? Geo-type?
How does creatives factor into all this?
Do I need to split out keywords with good history vs ones with bad history?
How does keyword combinations affect content campaigns?
Should I structure search campaigns differently from content campaigns?
How do I factor in budget constraints and budget management issues?
What landingpages do I have for use?
The list is endless…

Tip of the Week
Today we’ll throw out one tip to consider when organizing your accounts after you have collected some data. After you have collected a good sample size you probably are starting to get a better idea on what keywords are performing. If you have cast a good enough umbrella of keywords you would easily find some surprising performers as well as surprising duds. So how can you sort through all this data for management purposes?
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One of the most common SEO recommendations these days is to use an XML site map file.  But how important is a site map file for SEO?

An XML site map is a file you place on your website that lists some or all of the pages in your site.  The idea is that search engine spiders can read the site map file(s), and locate all of your pages so they can be indexed.  You can also give some useful information such as the relative priority of pages for crawling.  XML site map files are used by all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.  For details on implementing sitemap files, see http://www.sitemaps.org/

So back to the question:  How important are XML site map files?

The short answer is, like in so much of SEO:  It depends.

The real answer goes back to the purpose of sitemap files:  To help search engines find and crawl the pages on your website, and to do so efficiently.  XML site map files do not have any direct impact on rankings.  They only help search engines find pages.

For some search engines, such as Google, sitemap files are used for one other purpose:  to help establish the “canonical” URL for content that is served under multiple URLS, and for deterining what URL to index when duplicate content is found.  This can be very important if your site uses session IDs or other parameters in URLs, or serves the same content under different sections of the site. 

Thus, the only time sitemap files will change your rankings is in how they help find pages sooner, or to find pages that can’t otherwise be found on your site by crawling links.  It may also speed resolution of which URL to index in cases of duplicate content.  It won’t actually increase rankings — it may just get them to rank sooner.

If your website does not change too often and is well structured, with HTML links that search engines can easily follow to find all of your pages, then using an XML site map file will probably make no real difference at all in rankings. 

So when should you use XML site maps?  Here are some examples:

1. If your site is very large, you might use XML site map files to guide search engines to those pages that are new or change frequently so they are indexed sooner.  This is useful even if your site is well structured for spidering.
2. If your site has pages that are behind a search function, login, or other barrier to crawling by search engine spiders, then a sitemap file can get all of your content indexed.  This is a primary purpose of site map files:  to help find content that can’t be found by crawling.  Keep in mind, however, that a major disadvantage here is that these pages will generally have little or no page rank, since there is no internal page rank “flow” to the pages.
3. If your site has lots of issues with session IDs, dynamic URLs and duplicate content, then an XML site map file can help search engines to quickly determine the canonical URL for the content.  This can speed indexing and ensure the canonical URL is shown in search results.  Of course, if your site has these types of issues, you should work on them, but an XML site map file can help in the interrim.
4. If your website has frequent new or changed content, you can use site map files to guide search engines to crawling those new pages first.  Simply use the priority field in the sitemap records.  Note that in this case you would only need to list new/changed pages.  Removing a page from a sitemap file will have no impact once the page is found and initially indexed.

In general, it is a good idea to have an XML site map file.  It helps search engines find all your good content, and you can use the priority field to help them discover and index new/changed content more quickly.  However, don’t expect a big change in rankings just because you use a site map file.  Think of it as a “best practice” that is part of your overall SEO strategy.

It is easy for everyone to think that Google owns the search market. If I want to be on search, I need to be on Google simple as that. Well it isn’t so simple when it comes to international markets. Though Google has a strong grip on the US market, this isn’t always the case in other countries especially when compared to the local search engines.

Who are the players?
Some of these engines are familiar. Yahoo Japan owns more than half the market of Japan. They also have a strong grip on many other international countries. However you will also find country specific engines such as Baidu in China which owns about 60% of its market. Naver in Korea also owns over 60% of it’s market. Yandex in Russia owns little less than half it’s market. Seznam controls nearly 65% of the Czech market.

How is it that these search engines are able to compete with the likes of Google?
They know their market. They have the competitive advantage of targeting a local market and studying on their behaviors, their use of language as well as their preferences. They have worked on their technology and algorithms specifically catering to their local audience. Google unfortunately due to their sheer size and international presence have a more difficult time focusing on their individual markets. For example did you know in Korea, the more busy and complex the page is, the more authority the site is given by it’s users? This goes completely opposite of what one should do in the US where simplicity and targeted pages are key to a good conversion.

Foreign Laws
Another aspect is foreign laws. Local engines like Baidu are well aware with the regulations and as a local pioneer has a lot of say and influence. Large engines like Google have a hard time dealing with all the various laws especially as many countries favor local companies as opposed to foreign competitors. Many of these search engines were started before Google and has firmly established themselves as the market leader.

Google however has put a lot of investment in trying to target these local markets and it is Google’s hope that continued investment and effort will eventually entrench them deeper into these markets.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

First, I’d like to thank the CAPPS (California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools) team for allowing me to speak at thier annual conference.  We have done a number of tests in the edu veritcal and find a lot of areas of opportunities.  This vertical is highly competitive and the big players have a lot of advantages - we believe by working with us, you can level the playing field.  I have been asked for my presentation by a number of folks, so I have uploaded it here.  Thanks,

 Andrew

When your website is down for maintenance or other outages, what should you return to search engine spiders that try to crawl your site?  Returning a “maintenance page” could cause problems if they take your maintenance page content and put that in the index.  You may suddenly lose all your rankings you worked hard to achieve.  Of course, when the search engines come back, they will find your actual content again, but your SEO rankings and traffic will suffer in the mean time.

There are lots of “wrong” ways to handle maintenance mode.  These include:

1. Return a maintenance message using an HTTP 200 response code (gives the search engines new content for the page, which they may try to index, messing up your search rankings).
2. Returning a 404 Not Found error (tells the search engine your page is gone — good by indexing!).
3. Don’t respond at all (indicates your site is down — bad for users, but also tells search engines your site is unreliable and deserves less trust).  Of course, if your server or network are hard down, this is what will happen anyway, but if you can try to avoid this.
4. Return a redirect to other content, whether 301, 302, JavaScript or meta refresh (confuses the search engine as to what the real content is, just like a maintenance page using a 200 response code).

So, what is the best response to return when your site is in maintenance mode?

You should use an HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response for all pages that cannot be served in their normal mode.   This tells the search engines to ignore this response, keep the current cache and indexing they have for that page, and come back later for a fresh copy.

Note that it is important to serve this response for all pages that are unavailable.

A PHP example of an HTTP 503 response is as follows:

<?php
header (’HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable’);
?>
<html><head>
<title>Our website is temporarily unavailable</title>
</head><body>
Our apologies, our website is temporarily unavailable.  Please return in a few minutes.
<p>
Thank you!
</body></html>

By using the HTTP 503 “Service Unavailable” response code, you can avoid all sorts of issues with search engines reacting the wrong way, and preserve your SEO rankings over site outages.

John Erickson
www.leadqual.com

News Corp owned Fox Interactive Media (FIM), which owns social MySpace, has surpassed Yahoo! as the owner of the largest share of display advertising in the US according to comScore data.

In June, total display ad views on FIM sites was over 56.8 million views which makes up 15.9% of all display advertising in the US. Yahoo! sites served up 53.1 billion display ads in the same month for a 14.2% share. Top display advertisers on FIM include University of Phoenix & Deutsche Telekom while the top Yahoo! display advertisers are Netflix & Nextag.

Concerns at Yahoo?
This new data shows a change from May when Yahoo had 15.9% share and FIM had a 13.5% share. With Yahoo!’s stocks dipping below $20, there has been many concerns regarding whether Yahoo! will be able to maintain or grow their advertising business. Yahoo! has been under much pressure to show shareholders that their advertising business will continue to grow and remain strong after turning away a $47.5 billion offer from Microsoft.

Good News MySpace
FIM’s growth in the advertising business is good news for their social networking property MySpace which makes up nearly all of FIM’s display advertising revenue. However there continues to be a struggle for advertisers to generate revenue off of social networking sites as these ad medium has generally had a poorer conversion rate compared to other online marketing tactics.

MySpace has reported that their fiscal fourth quarter revenue grew 23% year to year to $225 million due to search and advertising gains. They also noted that their ability to “hyper target” in delivering ads to specific group of consumers has contributed to this growth.

Display Advertising
Forrester projects that $2.78 billion will be spent by retailers this year. That would make display advertising over a third of all online marketing which is projected to be $8.2 billion according to Forrester. Search Engine marketing makes up $3.63 billion and email marketing is third at $1.25 billion.

AOL, Microsoft & Google sites round out the top 5 display advertisers in terms of total market share followed by well known web properties Facebook & Ebay.

Microsoft was the top display advertiser with 5.5 billion display ad views (1.7% share) largely due to its promotional campaign for Live Search. The University of Phoenix, an online university came in second with 4.7 billion ad views (1.4%) followed by Experian Interactive, United Airlines, Verizon, and AT&T all at 3.8-3.9 billion ad views (1.2%).

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google has launched their own web browser today with the promise to better handle complex web programs and video rich content. Google had mailed a copy of a promotional comic book prematurely. The comic book can be found here. It was immediately followed by a post on Google’s blog site confirming the rumor that quickly spread across the web. The browser is called Google Chrome. It is considered “a fresh take on the browser”. Their plan is to make all of Chrome’s software code open to developers similar to Mozilla’s Firefox format.

This launch follows a recent update to Internet Explorer 8 as well as Firefox 3. It also follows a recent 3 year partnership extension between Mozilla and Google. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera being the main players, Google enters a very highly competitive space.

Google continues to produce different softwares and applications with the intention of having them fully integrated with one another. With office applications, desktop search, a new browser, email, google earth, Android among many other programs there is definitely a long term goal of providing an all-in-one fully integrated solution for their consumers. Most likely it will also be free of charge.

Call it another shot at Microsoft. Microsoft needs to figure out a strategy to counter this movement or they will continue to see their market share erode.

Thoughts? Please comment!

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM

Google has finally launched Google Suggestion, a tool which was started back in 2004, but was never released. If you go to Google.com and start typing out a search query, you will now see “suggested keywords” appear in a drop down. This seems to only work on their homepage. Once you make a search query you will no longer see the suggestions. For people who need keyword suggestions for the SEM campaigns, this can be a pretty handy tool to use.

Don’t forget that this is a great way to discover negative (google) or excluded (yahoo) keywords. Negative keywords are keywords you specify in your SEM campaign as keywords you DO NOT want your ad to show on. For example if you are selling books, but don’t sell education books, you would have the keyword books, but negative out the keyword education.

Yahoo! has had a suggestion bar for a while now. How this affects the way searchers behave remains to be seen. One affect it could have is to lower the cases of misspellings. Another is to potentially increase the use of longer search queries by users who previously only used 1-2 word queries. If there are any dramatic changes in either of these areas, it could potentially shift the way you should setup and maintain your Google SEM campaigns.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - SEM