Hitwise has released search engine volume data that shows Google with just over 60% of total online searches in the U.S. Here is the breakdown, according to Hitwise:

U.S. Volume of Searched Top Search Engines Four Week Period Ending July 29, 2006:

• Google: 60.2%
• Yahoo: 22.5%
• MSN: 11.8%
• Other: 5.5%

They indicate that it is a slight increase for Google and Yahoo and a slight decrease for MSN.

I wonder how Ask.com fares in all of this. I still think they have a great search engine and I find myself more disappointed with Google and Yahoo results all the time. With Yahoo’s recent update, results seem to be even closer to Google. Is search becoming just another commodity? In “organic” search results, what does, can or will differentiate the brands? Does it even matter any more?

Here’s a fun tool to see the overlap of Yahoo and Google results:
yahoo! vs. google

Here is the Hitwise piece:

Bill Tancer – Hitwise US: Google Breaks 60% – U.S. July Search Volume Numbers

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple – choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing – DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy – SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I get a lot of questions from clients about redirects.

• How do I move my site to a new domain and keep my search engine rankings in tact?
• I’m going to take down some old pages/sites, will this affect my rankings?
• I’m redesigning my website and my directory and/or page names are changing, will the engines just point to the new pages?
• How can I tell the engines to send all my traffic to my home page?

There are answers to these questions, but first I usually say something like, “Are you sure you want to do that?” The reason I ask is that often times the pages or sites that the company wants to get rid of are older pages that have great link reputation and are well “aged” in the engines – they get crawled a lot, have a high Page Rank, etc. Plus, more content is usually better; can the pages be repurposed?

After assessing the need for getting rid of pages or moving domains or changing the page/directory structure (which are all valid and necessary in a lot of cases), using a 301 redirect is usually the answer. A 301 redirect won’t get you in trouble with the search engines as some redirects, like a meta-tag refresh, can. It tells the engine that a page has permanently moved and asks if it would please start indexing the new page in its place. It’s the safest way to change page names, domains, directories, etc. when changing these elements of your website. If you’re deleting an old mini-site or set of pages, you should consider redirecting each page you’re deleting to a similar page on your new or main site.

The next question is, naturally, “how do I do that?”

Here are some good sources that I’ve com across recently on redirects, 301s and how to implement them:

Steve Hargrove – How to redirect a web page, the smart way - added 6/20 

Wikipedia – URL redirection

TamingTheBeast.net – Giving search engine spiders direction

SEOBook – .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy

Bruce Clay, Inc. – Sorting out Redirects

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Here is an interesting discussion over on Robert Scoble’s blog. Scoble is a Microsoft employee and personal blogger.

I say, Google has no problem being AOL’s primary search service… I’ll bet that’s not easy to change! As long as you can change the option in IE7, it seems reasonable. We should all be using Firefox anyhow. (-:

Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger » IE team responds to NYT article about Google’s hackles’ being raised

Here is the NYT piece:

New Microsoft Browser Raises Google’s Hackles

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

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

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC