Search Players Agree on Industry Challenges. Search companies' hot topics include privacy, paid inclusion, relevance and geo-targeting. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

Try Before You Sell. Want to see what ads AdSense thinks are relevant to your page? Just enter its URL:  [Google Weblog]

SEM Cuts Into Yellow Page Advertising.

Will Search Marketing Cut into Yellow Page Ad Spend?

The old standby, Yellow Pages, is beginning to take a beating from search engines as more and more marketers realize the benefits of search engine marketing and shift more dollars into it.

A recent seurvey of small and medium sized businesses by the Kelsey Group and OneStat show 43% use web site marketing and 17% use search engine marketing. Most (77%) small businesses still use the Yellow Pages but indicate that more marketing dollars are likely to shift to the web. [MarketingFix]

Here's Microsoft's about page for MSNBot. [Scripting News]

Searching For The Truth in Search Engine Marketing [Online Spin - MediaPost]

Search Engine Marketing works. Search continues to be one of the primary elements for any marketer, brand development or direct response, as it drives both awareness and acquisition.

If you are starting to utilize Search, you must first understand the fundamental (Primary) elements that go into an effective campaign. These elements are: <more>

Interview With Search Engine Guru Danny Sullivan.

searchengineblog: Interview with Danny Sullivan :: Search engine blog:

Here's a good interview with the man who makes it his business to know everything there is to know about search engines. Here's a tidbit on how he sees search engine marketing:

Question: While online marketing trends come and go, search engine marketing appears to have been a constant. Where do you see SEO heading in the future? Does it have a future?

Answer: Absolutely, search engine marketing has a future. At a conference earlier this year, I likened search engines to being a "reverse broadcast network." People pay tons to be on television because you can get your message out in front of millions of people: broadcasting. With search engines, millions of people are telling you *their* messages: what they want to buy, purchase or get information about. You don't broadcast to them; instead, it's the reverse, they broadcast to you.

[MarketingFix]

Business Blogging, Free Seminar, NYC, June 12, 6:30pm

eCommerceSIG: Intro to Business Blogs

If you're in the area, come on by and hear yours truly, along with Anil Dash (of Moveable Type), John Lawlor (of Blogs4Business), Elizabeth Spiers (of Gawker) and Aaron Bailey (of National Review Online) wax philosophical about how great blogs are as a publishing and business tool.

This comes right on the heels of ClickZ's Weblog Business Strategies conference, where John Lawlor and I will also be speaking.

Yahoo! Taking on Google with New Features.

Reuters: Yahoo! goes for Google with revamp

Yahoo!'s goal for the new products remains the same as always -- to boost users and revenue from Internet queries -- and Weiner was quick to deny the changes are a direct assault on Google's market share.

The new setup, however, includes a number of Google-like features, including a more tightly integrated image search and small boxed text ads on the right side of the page.

[MarketingFix]

A New Pricing Structure for SEO Companies. One professional SEO, Barry Lloyd, has experimented with pricing structures for several years, and he’s arrived at a plan that works extremely well for him. Paid performance. [Search Engine Guide]

FindWhat.com Launches ROI Tool. AdAnalyzer helps marketers calculate post-click sales from paid-search programs. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

Some Marketers Report Discrepancy in Paid Click Reporting.

MarketingExperiments.com Reviews 25+ Web Metrics Solutions

How could three separate web metrics programs be given access to the exact same numbers (526 orders), and yet deliver a set of metrics that are 276 percent apart? (2) How can Google's Adword Select program report 7,706 more clicks than our actual log files report? (3) More importantly, how can a marketing team make effective decisions if they don't have accurate numbers?

Over the last six months, researchers at MarketingExperiments.Com have tracked more than 36,000 orders, studied 800 pages of advice, analyzed more than 10 GB of data, and reviewed 22 web metrics products.

MarketingExperiments asserts that "If someone (1) clicks on your link in Google Adwords, (2) visits your site, (3) returns to Google, and then (4) hits the back button, Google counts this as another billable click." Sounds fishy to me.

[MarketingFix]

Blogging is an alternative to pay-per-click and it is free!

Search Engine Optimization Basics Part 2 - Title Tags. Not only is the structure and content of the Title tag used by the search engines when calculating your webpage's relevance, but it is also displayed in most search engine results pages. It therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it influences your website's position in the SERP, but is also attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link. [Search Engine Guide]

Keywords in Hyperlinks Improve Search Engine Ranking. It's important to discuss why keywords in hyperlinks are helpful to the search engines. To do this, we have to do my favorite thing, which is to think like a search engine. [Search Engine Guide]

Search Engine Inbreeding

The search engine landscape has been changing at lightning speed this year. As I sat writing a case study on the launch of BlogAnswerMan.com, I realized that I needed to get up to date information in order to see "who’s on first," so to speak.

WebMasterWorld.com has what looks like a current (updated 2003-02-24) landscape of the search engine relationships as they impact today’s search results. <more>

It looks like the best way to get an overview of how your blogs are ranking with the least overlap is to evaluate Google (powered by Google), MSN (results from LookSmart and Inktomi) and AllTheWeb (results from Fast). 

John Lawlor - Boca Raton - 2003-03-03

keywords: search engine optimization, Google, MSN, blog consulting, business blog strategy, blog optimization, weblog, b-blog, blog answer man, blog answerman.

A Good Product Yields a Strong Brand.

Forbes: The Making Of A $2 Billion Brand

Even more remarkable is the fact that Google has become a valuable household name without spending a dime on advertising to reach consumers. The search site has never placed a TV spot, a print ad or an online banner in search of users, according to Google VP of corporate marketing Cindy McCaffrey.

OK, so Google's all over the news these days but this article talks about the power of a strong product. Build something so powerful, so needed, so superior to everything else out there and it will succeed on it's own. It's the Purple Cow thing. [MarketingFix]

The Forbes article also stated that Google logged 16.1 million search hours in October 2002 -- that's 2.1 million MORE hours than Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves combined!

Should businesses pay attention to business blogging?

Let's do the math. Google loves information that is fresh and updated frequently. Blogs exist on a diet of fresh content updated frequently. The more Google finds freshly updated content, the more often their little robots visit the blog...resulting in high Google search rankings of ALL of your blog-powered information.

Google bought a blogging pioneer, Blogger, last week and they say they don't even know how they are going to use the company! [NY Times - requires free subscription]

OK. Can you think of a reason why your business shouldn't start a business-blog (b-blog)?

Reasons why you might not want to blog:

• you have no timely information to share with your customers or prospects
• you are happy with the results and ROI from banner and email marketing
• your current search engine optimization company has guaranteed you top positions in 3-6 months
• you have heard that blogging is a fad and won't last

Before you adding to this tongue-in-cheek list, here is a list of a few business benefits of starting to blog immediately:

• high search ranking on Google with no paid-submission (Google is one of the few engines that doesn't have a paid submission program)
• Google's competitors will position you higher -- everyone watches the leader and most improve your search positions due to high Google PageRank
• high ROI - pay-per-click is a great vehicle but no-cost marketing has infinite ROI
• you are creating this visibility with information that you should be sharing with your customers and prospects anyway
• new information appears on Google in days, not weeks
• other bloggers point prospects towards you -- for free!

Got questions about business blogging? Send your questions to questions@BlogAnswerman.com.

While most search engines are becoming more and more adept at detecting 'spam' pages and penalizing or removing them, there is an unfortunate side effect to this efficiency - some companies that are innocent of intentional wrongdoing unknowingly have sites that fall into the 'spam' category. [Search Engine Guide]

Overture Acquires Alta Vista

Overture Services, Inc. (Nasdaq:OVER), the world's leading provider of Pay-For-Performance search to Web sites across the Internet, and AltaVista Company, a pioneer in Web search technology, and a majority owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), today announced that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Overture will acquire AltaVista's business for $140 million in cash and stock.

Oh, what a dance this is becoming. Any bets on when Overture will enter the blogging arena?

J:L

Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are the building block of any search engine marketing strategy. It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. [Search Engine Guide]