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We hear this term all the time – search engine ranking – and rightly so.  It is one of the important things that we should pay attention to when engaging in SEO.  That is why it is called “Search Engine” Optimization after all.  So what should we do in order to climb the ranks of [...]

Happy Thanksgiving, from All of Us at Search Engine Watch

999 money biz ops: 820-829

links for 2008-11-29

Why You Should Be Faxing Over the Internet

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Okay, I understand that we’re all trying to “give a jolt” to the economy. But I was still surprised today when Lycos provided a list of Christmas gift ideas two days before Thanksgiving Day. Aren’t we all supposed to wait until Black Friday?

Nevertheless, for shoppers who like planning ahead — or for online retailers and etailers looking for what will be hot this holiday season — Lycos just announced its ninth annual list of the most popular toys and video games, based on web search activity.

(For a complete list and commentary of the Lycos Top Toys and Video Games of 2008, go to the Lycos 50. You can also voice your opinion on this year’s list, and weigh in on weekly Internet trends and pop culture on the Lycos 50 Blog or follow the Lycos 50 on Twitter.)

It shouldn’t come as a shock that Apple’s iPod holds the top spot as the #1 most-searched for toy this holiday season. But this year, the Apple frenzy includes hot-searched items like the iTouch and iPod Nano.

Harry Potter, at #11, makes a fifth consecutive appearance in 2008, with Harry Potter games, books and DVDs dominating Harry Potter-themed searches.

New in 2008 is KOTA, the Triceratops Dinosaur (#15), generating more search interest than Fisher Price’s New Elmo Live (#19). Meanwhile, not so hot in 2008 are Hannah Montana-related toy items, which made a big splash in 2007, but fail to make this year’s list.

Spongebob Squarepants (#14) takes over as the top licensed character-themed toy of 2008. Spongebob was last seen on the Lycos Top Toy list in 2005. And when it comes to dolls, Barbie (#6) continues to reign, extending her run on the annual Lycos list of Top Toys and Video Games to nine consecutive years of appearing in the Top 10. But there’s not enough data on Caribou Barbie to see if that will be a big hit this year — let alone in 2012.

Gaming consoles see a big resurgence in search popularity in 2008, with the Nintendo Wii (#10) capturing the most search interest, generating 25% more search activity than the Xbox 360 (#12) and Playstation 3 (#13). Also seeing a resurgence in 2008 are old school classics like Monopoly (#17), despite the current housing market.

Five of the top 25 toys in 2008 originate from the popular world of anime including Naruto (#3), Pokemon (#4), Dragonball (#5), Inuyasha (#7) and Gundam (#16). Meanwhile, one new toy making the 2008 list may be unfamiliar to most adults, but if search activity is any indication, expect the Bakugan Battle Brawlers (#24) to be flying off the shelves this holiday season.

On the video game front, the massive multi-player game RuneScape (#1) scores big with web users for the fourth consecutive year as the most-searched video game of 2008, while Final Fantasy makes its first appearance on the list since 2005, with Final Fantasy XIII (#3). Also racking up points online, making first-ever appearances on the top video games list, are war-themed games including Call of Duty: World at War (#9) and Gears of War 2 (#14), while Guitar Hero World Tour (#8) and Wii Fit (#15) are the most popular Wii-themed games based on web searches in 2008.

Also new in 2008 are Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games Fable 2 (#17), Fallout 3 (#18), Street Fighter IV (#10), Dead Space (#19), Far Cry 2 (#22) and BioShock (#25). This also marks the fourth consecutive year the Madden football-themed games fail to make Lycos’s Top Toys and Video Games list.

As for me, I don’t do any Christmas shopping until the very last minute. That way, I don’t have to figure where to hide presents where my three kids (or wife) can find them before December 24th. Yep, when I say “last minute Christmas shopping” I mean last minute shopping. You’d be surprised how simple decisions are on Christmas eve.

Whether you plan to hire a designer or figure it out for yourself, there are definitely some best practices you should follow when designing your Web site. In today’s small business search engine marketing column, “25 Design Best Practices for Your Small Business Web Site,” Carrie Hill offers a list to get a good start on finding the best Web site platform and design elements for your businesses audience.

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Why You Should Get a Business Credit Card

links for 2008-11-20

MapQuest Incorporates Personalization Feature

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Google AdWords is beta testing a new AdWords interface. The beta test includes a small group of U.S. advertisers. If your account is included in the test, you should see a notification upon signing up to the account.

You can also request to be included in the beta test by signing up here.

Note that this beta test is for the interface and doesn’t change how AdWords campaigns work (i.e. bidding, Quality Score, etc.). They’re looking to improve the way users navigate their campaigns and edit campaigns across multiple ad groups.

Have you been included in the beta test? Let us know your first impressions by leaving a comment.

Related Reading:
Google AdWords Launches Search-Based Keyword Tool
Google AdWords Quality Score — That’s Old-School for SEO
An Update on Last Week’s AdWords Updates

I spoke at PubCon last week — about How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns To Grow Traffic and Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO.

But, enough about me. Let’s talk about the top trends spotted at last week’s search engine and Internet marketing conference and expo in Vegas, baby!

For the record, I not only spoke at PubCon, I also looked at the 88 articles about it in Google News, the 77 articles in Yahoo! News, the 406 posts in Google Blog Search from the past month, and the 799 posts that IceRocket has found from the past month.

Then, I used a new tool called Twist, which lets you see trends in Twitter, to chart the hundreds of Tweets about PubCon over the past 30 days.

But, I could have just as easily looked at the session agenda grid for PubCon. Why? Because Brett Tabke, PubCon’s organizer, had set most of the agenda for 2009 when he selected the keynote speakers and creating the conference tracks. That’s why.

So, it was dead easy to spot the top trends at the six-track educational conference hosted by SearchEngineWorld and WebmasterWorld. Heck, even the most sleep-deprived attendee would know they were video, blogs and Twitter.

Video is hot — and YouTube video is red hot. This was reflected in the choice of George Wright, the VP Marketing & Sales at Blendtec, as one of the keynote speakers.

Described as the “The best viral marketing campaign ever,” George’s viral marketing campaign, “Will it Blend?,” has changed the face and the future of online marketing. Seen by more than 100 million people on the Internet and reported on by traditional media outlets like the Today Show, the Tonight Show, and the History Channel, Will it Blend? continues to deliver unprecedented corporate awareness through social media channels. This new form of marketing has delivered a 700% increase in sales for Blendtec, a small Utah based blender manufacturer, with an initial investment of $50.

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice that video is hot, Brett added a Video and Multimedia track with five sessions to drive the point home.

Blogs were big, too. This was reflected in three tracks at PubCon: one on Social Media Marketing, another on Social, Brand, and Reputation Management, and a third on Linking as Social Media Networking.

Now, blogs certainly aren’t considered the “newbies” of the social media scene – “granddaddies” is probably a more appropriate name. But that gives them an advantage from a marketing perspective – the medium has matured and moved from early adopter phase to the mainstream. That means more consumers are not only reading blogs; they are being influenced by blog content when it comes to what they decide to buy and who they decide to buy it from.

If you want a second opinion, sign up for tomorrow’s free webinar: “Consumers and the Influence of Blogs: What it Means for Your Marketing Mix.” It starts at 2:00 P.M. EST/11:00 A.M. PST and will be moderated by Kevin Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair and CEO of Motivity Marketing. It will feature Barry Parr, Analyst, JupiterResearch, and Rob Crumpler, President and CEO, BuzzLogic. They will be discussion a new BuzzLogic-sponsored research study conducted by JupiterResearch, entitled, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs.”

But, you could also see the power of blogs at virtually ever session at PubCon.

In fact, there were tables in the sessions so the dozens of bloggers who were live blogging the event could blog more comfortably. (I think this is a first: I’m not sure that I’ve ever put bloggers, blogging and blog in the same sentence before.)

And what about Twitter? No, none of the keynote speakers was from free social networking and micro-blogging service. And, no, there were no Twitter tracks. And I can’t even find Twitter mentioned in the title of any of the 85 sessions.

But, trust me, you couldn’t miss the Twitter trend if you’d hit every one of the special events — from the exhibitor cocktail reception sponsored by Bruce Clay and Apogee Search, to the SEOmoz WereWolf Event, to the WebmasterRadio Search Bash, sponsored by Microsoft Live Search.

For example, I was sitting in the session entitled, Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What’s The Worst That Can Happen? It was moderated by Ken Jurina, and the speakers included:
• Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC,
• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing,
• Michael McDonald, Managing Editor, iEntry Inc.,
• Barry Schwartz, President, RustyBrick, Inc.,
• Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz.

When it came time for Q&A, one of the first questions came from a woman in the audience, who said, “I asked my circle of friends on Twitter what I should ask you, and I got eight questions. If I eliminate the seven that are inappropriate, here’s one that the panel can answer….”

That brought down the house.

Oh, PubCon also had lots of tracks and sessions on SEO, SEM and interactive site reviews. But they’ve had those for years. The new news is video, blogs and Twitter. These are the top trends that I spotted at this year’s PubCon.

I hope that I have gotten your attention with regard to page title tags. As I mentioned before, not everyone really pays attention to these. If you just want to blog or create a web site without really focusing on SEO, then that should be just fine. However, if you have the [...]

Last week, Google introduced Sponsored Videos to YouTube and also recently started testing ads on Image Search. Today, text ads come to Google Finance and soon, Google News will be getting some ad testing.

The ad testing on Google News will be a bit different. The ads will appear on the results for “search refinements.” Google gave the example of conducting a search on the “regular” Google for an iPod. Clicking on the news search link from the results would be a refinement. That’s where you would see the ads, should you be graced with the testing.

What do you think of the expansion of ads to other Google Properties? Let us know in the comments.

Google is updating its iPhone search application with a new voice search feature, according to the New York Times. The update is expected to be available in the iTunes app store sometime today.

Users will be able to speak their questions into the phone. The speech is recorded and sent to Google servers which will try to understand the recording and find the answer via Google’s search engine.

One of the cool parts of the app is that it will use the iPhone accelerometer to know when a user has raised the phone to their ear. For the iPhone-less, the accelerometer senses motion. There’s a bunch of games that use this feature for their apps. So if you ever see an iPhone user making weird motions, that’s why.

The update wasn’t yet available in my iTunes, but I’m looking forward to checking it out when it is.

Oh, I should mention that Google isn’t the first to bring voice search to mobile. Microsoft and Yahoo already have brought voice search to some devices. But a search in the iTunes store didn’t reveal anything else that was a solid voice search app (not that Apple’s iTunes search is the best).

Related Reading:
Google Updates Search Results for iPhone
Google’s My Location Now with WiFi
Google Prepares iPhone Ad Options