“Taking our search alliance revenue share into consideration, we were only down 6% for the quarter and 2% for the year,” said Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, on a conference call. “Whenever you make big changes, it takes some time for the market to adjust, but we are confident that this will turn around this year.”

Yahoo’s display advertising saw more encouraging numbers with an increase of 16%, or $567 million, over the previous year.  However, total fourth quarter revenue was also down 4% to $1.2 billion compared with the previous year.  Yahoo’s net income was nearly $318 million for the quarter and $1.2 billion for the year.

The 4Q results reflect search operating cost reimbursements totaling $66 million from Microsoft under the joint search agreement.  Yahoo projects that search operating cost reimbursements will continue to decline in 2011 as it continues it transition to the Microsoft search platform and underlying transition expenses are no longer required.

Yahoo has announced that its goals for 2011 include a focus on optimizing price-per-click and increasing growth in affiliate traffic.  Yahoo also pointed to its strong performance in display advertising as an indicator of positive growth for the company.
]]> http://qiigo.com/news/yahoo-sees-18-decline-in-search-revenue-in-q4/feed/ 0 http://qiigo.com/google/local-search-profile-optimization/ http://qiigo.com/google/local-search-profile-optimization/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:31:06 +0000 ginny http://www.qiigo.com/wordpress/?p=727 The advent of Google Instant and the insatiable need for real time information has led to an increase in the appearance of locally focused websites appearing at the top of website ranking results.  Focusing internet marketing strategies on maximizing website ranking results is an essential first step in winning the local optimization battle. So where do you begin?

Initial steps toward local search optimization should include:

• Claiming your company’s listing on online sites. Essential sites to claim your listing on include: Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local.  Here are few to help:
  • Google Places
  • Yahoo Local
  • Bing Local
  • Best of the Web Local
  • Superpages
  • Citysearch
  • InsiderPages
  • Yelp
  • Local.com
  • Yellowpages
  • Hotfrog
• Embrace social media to promote your brand, interact and engage with your customers and promote your website.  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the obvious social media choices.
• Explore the use of location based marketing sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

All of these techniques work together to enhance the local search optimization of your site.  However of these three techniques, claiming your local listings on search engine sites can most quickly and significantly impact your ranking results.  When claiming and validating your local listing, you are taking control of the data that is seen online.  By taking control of your listing, you also prevent others from claiming your listing.

When claiming your listing, pay special attention to:

• Business Name. Be specific when identifying your business name.  Include the full name of your business.  However, if your company is just named “Qiigo”, consider adding a descriptor that includes keywords.  For example, enter “Qiigo Search Engine Marketing”.  Don’t be tempted to stuff your business name listing with keywords, but do add them when your business name is too vague to deliver adequate search results.
• Location/Address. The search engines place significant impact on your business address when ranking results.  Be as detailed as possible, including latitude and longitude information.  Don’t know your address’ latitude and longitude coordinates?  Find them here.
• Category. Choose the category that best describes your business.  If one category doesn’t exactly fit, test several over a period of time to determine which category garners the best results.
• Reviews & Ratings. It never hurts to ask!  So ask! Ask your current customers to go online and review your business.  Provide them with the link for easy access.  Good reviews and ratings not only help your ranking, but also drive new business.
• Citations. These are mentions on other sites about your business.  In Google Places, they can be found on the “What People Are Saying About” page.  This is another case of the more the merrier, so work on securing citations from many sources.

With these areas completed, you will be well on your way to improving your local search rankings.  The more complete you can get your profile the better.  It is also recommended that you claim your website and submit it to primary local providers listed above.  The time and effort you put into these tasks is bound to pay off in improved ranking results.

Certainly the investments from the Microsoft partnership have helped.  They accounted for $43 million of that revenue in a one-time “net transition cost reimbursement,” with an additional $35 million coming from search operating costs. 

Along with revenue increases in 2010, Yahoo is expecting to see search engine share increases this year.  Positive results are already coming in from the new Yahoo/Bing partnership with ComScore reporting Yahoo’s search engine share in March rising from 16.8% to 16.9%.

With the new alliance, Microsoft will focus their energy and expertise on self-service advertisers.  On the other hand, Yahoo! will focus on high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, resellers and their clients.  By working together, Yahoo! and Microsoft hope to bring value, innovation and choice to consumers, advertisers and publishers.

This new partnership has been approved by both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.  The two companies will begin working together immediately to implement the deal, although this process is expected to last through the balance of 2010.

The real impact of Bing’s year-over-year growth is seen when comparing their numbers to that of Yahoo.  The December 2009 report showed that Yahoo had a slight decline in month-over-month share.  However, it showed a significant 2.83% decrease in Yahoo’s year-over-year share of all search traffic.  Yahoo’s decrease, combined with the increase for Bing in year-over-year search traffic, seems to indicate that Bing will surge past Yahoo into the number 2 spot for all search traffic by the end of the first quarter 2010.

While this change in the number 2 position is certainly notable, it is also important to acknowledge that Google continues to see increases in its total share of the search market.  Google’s November to December share rose 0.78%, while their year-over-year share grew 3.01%.  Google’s continued success in capturing and maintaining the search market could push them past the 80% share of market level by the end of first quarter 2010.

• The K.I.S.S. principle holds true…Keep It Simple Stupid.  Keeping your headline short, sweet and to the point is essential.  Don’t overwhelm the reader with unnecessary words.  A shorter title will also help the search engine determine the topic of your article.  While puns and humor can be attention grabbers remember that a search engine doesn’t understand them.  A simple straight forward title will almost always result in a higher ranking.
• Start with a bang.  Your most important words should be your lead.  The payoff here is that search engines and readers can easily tell what your article is about.  If possible your keywords should come first, but remember that keyword usage needs to make sense.  Don’t throw in keywords just for the sake of using them.
• Don’t forget the topic.   This may sound silly, but be sure that your headline adequately conveys the topic of the article.  For example, this article could have been entitled “Why Headlines Matter”.  It would have given readers some idea as to what it is about.  However, by adding “tips” and “clickable” to the headline, we helped to define the true scope of the article.  Make it easy for the search engines and your readers to know what you are writing about.
• Make it compelling.  Don’t let the search engines be your only focus.  You are writing for real people after all.  Give the reader a reason to want to click on your headline and read your article.

Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment with different styles.  Track your results and see if a pattern emerges for your most successful headlines.  Use your best headlines as a template to create future headlines.  Build on your success!

Highlights include:

• 11% increase in online retail sales in Q1 2009.
• Nearly 60% of companies surveyed reported increases over the same quarter last year.
• Increases of 10% or more were reported by 44% of e-tailers.
•  14% of e-tailers reported increases of up to 10%.
• 13% of E-tailers reported flat sales.
• Online sales increases were reported by approximately 70% of consumer brand manufacturers and multi-channel retailers.
• The only dark spot was that 60% of web-only merchants reported sales declines.

Overall, US retail e-commerce sales are expected to grow to $141 billion in 2009, a 4.4% increase.  2010 is projected to see a 16.5% increase, according to Citi Investments Research.

Get an active Twitter account.

Yes it sounds basic, and you may already have one, but don’t just breeze past this section.  We have some interesting tips to help you maximize your usage.

For those of you just getting started, open your account at http://twitter.com/signup. Once you have the registration form complete, connect with as many people as you can. They make it easy by allowing you to search your email lists (see below for more information).  Customize your profile to show your main website and your, or your company’s, bio information. Don’t forget to set your location, update preferences and how you want to be notified of friends who have joined the Twitter revolution.

Draw attention with a customized background.

Get creative here. Simply click on “Settings” and then “Design” to choose a premade background or upload your own image.  If you have a flair for design and a little Photoshop experience you can create a background that speaks volumes about you and your company.  Check out some great custom layouts like:

http://twitter.com/JetBlue

http://twitter.com/BBCClick

http://twitter.com/MarthaStewart

Gather friends and follow interesting people and organizations

Finding friends on Twitter is easy. Three options are available.

1.   Search Twitter.  Use the “Find People” function to search for anyone from your next door neighbor to celebrities to companies.

2.  Search other networks.  Connect to anyone in your email contact list. Twitter can search through your hotmail.com, Gmail, Yahoo mail or AOL mail contact lists and if your friends use Twitter they can be added to your list.

3.  Manual invites.  Have friends, co-workers or clients who are not on Twitter? Manually input their email addresses and invite them to be your friend.

Connect your blog to Twitter

One of the best tools to connect Twitter and your blog was created by Alex King.  This plug-in will automatically create micro blogs from your WordPress blog posts. Just follow this link for all the information

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

to download this plug-in click here

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/share-this.2.3.zip

If you blog regularly, be sure to review the instructions and support information.

Monitor your Twitter Rank

Twitter offers the Twitter Grader (http://twitter.grader.com) to show you where you rank against other Twitter members.  Once you enter your user name, you will see where you rank among a possible 100 points. 

Twitter Grading is based on overall rank, number of followers, your following and updates.  The more active you are the higher you will rank.

Link your Twitter account to social bookmarking sites.

If you are in the Twitter game, be in it to win it.  Build up your social networking account by bookmarking your Twitter account to sites such as Digg.com, Propeller.com, Dropjack.com and others.

Take advantage of advanced search features on Twitter

To really maximize your connection with people in your target market, go to http://search.twitter.com/advanced to use the Advanced Search features Twitter offers.  In Advanced Search you can search by keywords or phrases, location, names and more.

Resist the urge to connect with everyone you see.  Be choosy and select only the best people who actually have good information to share and are likely to accept your friend request.

As you take these steps to maximize your Twitter impact, you will see your social status rise.  As with any adventure, the more you keep at it the better the results will be.

With the decline in the economy, customer acquisition is becoming more and more vital.  As the focus on customer acquisition increases, SEO becomes a more vital part of the overall marketing strategy.  Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

“Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics” reports that SEO growth will grow from 17.7% to 20.3% while paid search will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013.  When searching for information, consumers find more value in organic search results than pay per click (PPC) advertising.  The value placed by consumers on organic search results garners more clicks on these results thus making SEO a valued part of the marketing plan.

Combining SEO and PPC marketing efforts may result in higher search engine result rankings.  Paid search engine advertising offers more immediate results, but in order to see results in the search engine arena advertising must be consistent.  SEO marketing results occur over a longer time frame, but result in organic search results more valued by consumers.

In order to gain the most information and knowledge of your results, Web analytics is necessary.  Having solid feedback regarding your SEO and PPC marketing efforts will allow you to gage how successful your campaign is.  More traffic is only positive if the cost of the search ad relative to the conversion doesn’t reduce your bottom line.

SEO is a bit like a good public relations strategy; it helps to bring top of mind awareness to your site.  SEO gets them in the door, so you can complete the deal.

When a blogger mentions your business consider it an open invitation to respond. If a blogger criticizes a promotion you are running or pans your business based on their experience, it is your opportunity to craft a well thought out response.

You have every right to explain yourself. Address the specific issue raised in the blog; explain what your business is all about or the structure of your promotion in question. Be sure to take the high road and always be professional. Personal attacks are never appropriate; even if you were attacked first.

Opening a dialog with a blogger gives you the opportunity to provide an explanation, to correct misinformation and address misunderstandings. With a well thought out and timely response, showing your thought process and professionalism is likely to enhance your image.

Don’t forget that the blogger’s posting and your response is going to be viewed by all of the blog’s readers. Accuracy is a must. On a side note, a quick “Thank you for the kind words” post to a positive blog comment is always appreciated.