aaron dalrymple dot com

We tend to think of search audiences as encompassing all walks of life that use a computer. Very rarely do I run in to anyone who adjusts marketing spend based on the demographics of the engines themselves. We tend to believe that our keyword selection self-qualifies any visitors who may click on our ad when buying pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google, Yahoo, and the others.

This may be true to a point, but if you have a narrow demographic when it comes to your target customer, you may want to pay some attention to these number put out by HitWise concerning the demographic profile of search engine users.

Here are some notable stats. According to the HitWise study:

• Google users were 53.6 percent male.
• Ask Jeeves users were 58.7 percent female
• MSN Search had the highest proportion of users older than 55
• Google had the most visitors with household incomes greater than $100,000.
• Google, Yahoo!, and MSN users tend to enter just one or two words in the search box. An average of 87 percent of searches at those three engines are two words or less.
• Ask Jeeves sends the largest proportion of searchers (8.55 percent) to business-related sites
• Google, Yahoo!, and MSN accounted for 72.8 percent of visits to search engines and directories during the survey period

I ran across the study while reading Online Media Daily. You can view their entire piece here: Hitwise: Google Searchers Male, Yahoo! Skews Young.

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing

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There seems to be a couple of different avenues for the future of search. One is personalization, and another is metasearch. Metasearch is defined by Wikipedia as:

A search engine that sends user requests to several other search engines and/or databases and returns the results from each one. They allow users to enter their search criteria only one time and access several search engines simultaneously.

This is simple, well and good from an optimization standpoint - until those metasearch engines start playing with the results. And then, while still well and good, it will present some challenges to webmasters and SEO professionals when those engines reach a large portion of the searching public.

The appeal of a well developed metasearch engine is that it may be able to sift through the millions of main stream search engine results and give you what you’re really looking for. Also, considering that nearly 85% of search results are unique to one engine, it seems there may be a place for a one-stop engine that combines the best of the results and filters out the rest…

The Boston Globe published an interesting piece yesterday on some of the engines and technology that is out there. You can read the article here:
Cutting through search-engine clutter.

I ran across the Boston Globe article while reading the SearchEngineWatch Blog, you can read that post here:
Two Roundups of New Search Technology and Services Available.

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing

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Yahoo! has quietly released an update to its URL submission form that allows you to specify the location of a text file with a list of your site URLs for it to crawl. Sound familiar? It seems to be Yahoo’s answer to Google Sitemaps.

Of course, Yahoo! offers no guarantee that your URLs will be crawled, but if your site is full of dynamic URLs or any URLs that are otherwise hard for the engine to find on its own, this may be a way to make sure Yahoo! is aware of them and increase your chances of having those pages added to its index. All without paying, as is the case with Yahoo’s Search Submit Product.

It is also worth noting that the format for the new Yahoo! file and Google’s Sitemap files are different. So you won’t be able to use the same file for both. I’ll begin testing this functionality with a couple of my clients and post here with any feedback and/or results.

I think it’s interesting that Google appears to be testing a paid inclusion product as well… The world of SEO just keeps getting more interesting (and difficult to mange).

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Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO

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It looks as if Google may be thinking about adding another product to its search lineup…

From a recent ClickZ News article:
Google is testing interspersing alternate listings that appear to be commercial in nature into its natural, or organic, search results.

A recent search for “on demand,” for example, returned an area delineated off from natural results, occupying the above-the-fold sixth through eighth positions in the organic results area of the page. Within the clearly demarcated but unlabeled space were three listings for Comcast services.

I’m guessing that this is what becomes their paid inclusion product. Which would make sense with the recent release of Google Sitemaps… In other words, they’re testing the two pieces (submissions and display) independently. At least it looks like the listings will be indicated in a special area of the page and not inter-mixed as Yahoo does.

The article goes on to say:
A Google spokesperson assured ClickZ News the results are not paid listings, saying the demarcated results are a search relevancy experiment.

You can read the entire piece here:
Google Tests “Commercial” Results In Organic Listings

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO

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Let’s face it, the more link building gains popularity, the more difficult it becomes to sift through the garbage and come up with quality incoming links. If you have a budget for your link building efforts, it can be it easier. But, don’t spend all that money on obscure directory listings, short-term text links, and sites that may not be around next year. Not that these types of links can’t help you (just make sure the sites are relevant to your own content), but there are ways to buy links once and make them last forever… or almost forever.

Look for industry, niche or lifestyle-oriented e-zines (online newsletters) that you can buy links in, many times at a low flat rate. Pay special attention to how the company archives its newsletters. Many times a one time link buy in a newsletter that is then archived on the company’s website will get you a long-term (finely aged) inbound link from a relevant source. And, who knows, it may also drive some qualified traffic to your site too!

If you would like to know more about link building, why it’s important and more tips - read This Post.

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Tagged as: Marketing, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building

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I wasn’t able to attend the SES conference in San Jose this time, but, I wanted to point you to the coverage of the conference by the folks at Search Engine Roundtable. They are covering the conference, virtually in real time, on their blog site. Very in depth coverage, probably the best being done.

Here’s the link:
Search Engine Roundtable

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Tagged as: Search Engine Strategies

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Just in case you didn’t think you really needed to optimize for more than one search engine… Search Engine Watch is reporting on a new Dogpile (meta search engine) study that shows the difference in each of the major engine’s top results continues to grow more and more unique. This means there is lots of opportunity to optimize and, for searchers, there’s a lot of results you may be missing if you’re only using one engine. Of course, that’s why Dogpile did the study.

Search Engine Results Continuing to Diverge

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEO

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I’m expecting a lot more details to come about next week during the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, but search engine guru Danny Sullivan is giving some details on the new system over at SearchEngineWatch.com.

Of note is the fact that the program won’t be rolled out until October, and then only to 500 select advertisers. After that, they will begin to trickle it out to the 5000 plus advertisers who have already requested to be a part of the program. Have you applied yet? If not, Click Here.

Also, it appears that the ad format will be the same as Google’s, meaning you won’t have to write any new ad copy if you don’t want to… meaning that paid ads for the major search engines will now all look pretty much the same… so much for product differentiation. Although, MSN has promised some better targeting tools for advertisers, so we’ll see (they’re not mentioned in the referenced post).

Official launch date (to the general public) has yet to be announced. Read the entire post here:

More Details On New MSN Keywords Program

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEM, Online Marketing, MSN

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Ask Jeeves isn’t wasting anytime between the announcement of their new PPC listing service and the launch date. It’s available now to existing Ask advertisers and will be available to everyone on August 15. Their timing is very strategic as well… MSN is supposed to announce their long awaited PPC product this month too. In fact, a representative from MSN told me in New Orleans to expect an announcement at this month’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, CA on their new product.

Generally speaking, the new services will simply be shifting money away from Google (Ask’s current partner) and Yahoo! (MSN’s current partner). MSN is promising some great technology though, including demographic profiling, that could significantly change the way we buy sponsored listings and target potential customers.

Ask Jeeves Launches Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings

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Tagged as: Search Engines, SEM, Online Marketing, Ask

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Yahoo’s tips for optimizing your pages for natural search from their July advertiser newsletter. No big surprises here… Keywords in your title tags, keyword rich headlines, simple layouts, no frames, html links and static pages.

Yahoo! Search Marketing - On Target

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Tagged as: Yahoo, SEO, Search Engine Strategies

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