SEO Articles

Visit Rank for $ales

Read my bio

email me

Home

My 2 featured articles for the week ending Jun. 8, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of Jun. 4, 2007

1349 - Jun. 6, 2007 - 3.34 PM EST

Will Baidu be present in Europe?

Chinese search engine Baidu is apparently planning to take on Google in the European market, with the company expected to launch a European version of its search engine.

So far, Baidu has held off competition from Google to remain the biggest search player in China. Baidu reportedly has about a 58 percent search share, compared with Google's considerably lower 17 percent share of the market.

Baidu recently entered Japan and was expected to expand further in the Asian market, but now there are reports that it plans to announce a European launch near the last week of June 2007.

But with Google so dominant in the search area, Baidu will find it very difficult to make inroads in Europe, as its success so far is based on its expertise in the Chinese language and the size of China's rather large Internet audience. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1348 - Jun. 5, 2007 - 5.12 PM EST

Ask.com puts on new face

Today, search engine company Ask.com has revealed an overhaul that includes a new user interface and a wider variety of content, including video search.

Ask.com's revamp is the latest in a series of moves undertaken by the company as it bids to remain a player in the search segment, dominated by Google and Yahoo, and is aimed largely at making search a more visual experience for its users.

With its new interface, users can choose from a dozen different skins to liven up the background of the search home page, and the overall design of the results page favors graphics over text. Ask CEO Jim Lanzone said "the end result will be a more pleasurable search experience, with users spending less time hunting for information." For example, users can preview sites returned in the results, listening to music clips, viewing video previews and learning more about a website in the results pages.

Lanzone added "on average, it takes people about four queries to find what they are searching for online. This is because search engines have forced people to wade through endless lists of links, and refine query after query, to find the right information."

Ask-3D seeks to reduce that process by "delivering the right information, from the deepest range of content, all on one clean and simple page."

Since it acquired the search engine two years ago for $1.85 billion, IAC has set out to revamp the site. It shortened the site's name from Ask Jeeves to Ask, and later jettisoned the butler icon that had become the site's mascot and marketing face for so many years.

Earlier in 2007, it made a bid to become a local search leader, tying Ask with other IAC properties, such as its ticket-selling and city-specific information sites. However, Ask.com still is largely viewed as a second-tier search player by most standards.

According to recent data from comScore, overall, Ask.com accounts for just about 5 percent of all U.S. searches, compared to 10 percent for Microsoft, 27 percent for Yahoo and almost 50 percent for Google. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1347 - Jun. 5, 2007 - 11.39 AM EST

Google signs distribution alliance

Google and SalesForce have announced a marketing and distribution deal that will integrate Google Adwords to existing SalesForce tools that can track sales from Internet search advertising.

Overall, Google and SalesForce will begin an extended partnership encompassing marketing and distribution services for their products across forty-three countries.

The distribution alliance will start with the integration of Google Adwords and Salesforce’s lead generation tools into a new application called Group Edition.

Group edition replaces SalseForce's previous version Team edition, and offers more features to online advertisers and Internet marketers.

SalesForce's new Group Edition will allow Adwords users to track AdSense referrals to their Web site, and create a customer profile based on the various data a user enters into a site and its navigational path.

As usual, companies will handle their AdWords campaigns through Google, but Salesforce takes over from there. Read more here...

Posted on Businessblog™

1346 - Jun. 4, 2007 - 4.47 PM EST

Some email marketing myths are dispelled

A new report provides further evidence to dispel the widely-held myth among Internet marketers that email message content is the number one reason Internet Service Providers filter and then delete legitimate email marketing messages.

Overall, that's the primary finding of the Lyris Email Advisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for the first quarter of this year.

The report is a quarterly research study that monitors deliverability rates for permission-based email marketing. The Email Advisor Report Card also reveals that a majority of the largest US-based ISPs have the lowest rates of delivering email to the inbox.

According to the EmailAdvisor Report Card, message content is not the major cause of deliverability challenges for most email marketers. Overall, more than 1,705 unique emails were run through the EmailAdvisor content scoring application that includes the content scoring rules subset to the widely adopted Spam Assassin open source project.

The average content point score of these 1,705 unique emails was 1.04 - well below the filter's generally accepted spam identification level of 3.0 or higher.

Stefan Pollard, director of consulting for EmailLabs says "the main message of this quarter's EmailAdvisor Report Card for email marketers is that there are no easy fixes to senders' deliverability challenge."

Along with J.L. Halsey's Lyris and Sparklist brands, the report was integrated with the EmailAdvisor deliverability monitoring tool. Read more here...

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.