I am suspicious of the datasource, but I read an interesting article today about how MSN is taking a lot of market share from Yahoo (in particular). Is MSN up to their standard trickery — rolling traffic from Hotmail and "ClubLive" through their primary URL to inflate the numbers? Or is MSN finally regaining market share above 9%?
Compete Blog » June Search Market Share Update: MSN still up without ClubLive
Happy July 4th. Quick post: I read Yahoo is rolling out some advanced PPC targeting features… ones that will target ads by the individual’s demographics. I’ve been talking to colleagues for a while about this: how we haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to paid and natural search result targeting. Read more about the Yahoo PPC changes on, of all places, MSN.com:
In a bid to keep up with its competition, Yahoo yesterday launched a system to let marketers tailor advertising content to individual users, theoretically making the ads more effective and, therefore, more lucrative for Yahoo.
We’ll see how easy the targeting system is to manage… and what the bid prices will look like for this level of high-ROI ad.
I ran across an article on microsoft.com (of all places) on How to Write Web Content for a Busy Audience the other day and it prompted me to organize my thoughts on how to write/modify legal content for online distribution. Of course, the primary goal will be to get rankings for those keyphrases that people are actually searching for rather that what you may think people are searching for. A perfect example: I sometimes encounter lawyers who focus on Matrimonial Law, to the exclusion of all other keywords. Family law, divorce, settlements, etc. are far better choices. Similarly, attorneys occasionally obsess over being ranked for Somewhere County injury attorney. Other than a very select few US counties, this personal preference to think about a firm’s practice within a county-based keyword set ignores the fact that better targets like CityName StateName injury attorney, CityName StateName attorney and CityName injury are more appropriate. So how does an copywriter or web developer decide these things in the online legal market place? Download the PDF on Targeting Legal Content for the Web to find out more…
Technorati Tags: web content, copywriting
The other day, I ran into a law firm with a website coded using the IFRAME element. While there is nothing programmatically wrong with IFRAMEs, they present some significant challenges for search engine optimization.
Here is a definition for “IFRAME” from Wikipedia:
“IFRAME (from inline frame) is an HTML element which makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document… IFrames are more commonly used to insert content (for instance an advertisement) from another website into the current page.”
A few examples of sites using an IFRAME are:
http://www.samisite.com/iframephotos/index.htm,
http://calcium.brownbearsw.com/demos/miniframe.html &
http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/96/37/stuff/iframe_ex.html
From a search engine optimization point of view, the use of the IFRAME is problematic for several reasons. First, whenever a search engine spiders the content that’s within an IFRAME, the search engine will normally link to the IFRAMED page itself instead of the “master” page it is housed within. Often, this means searchers are delivered to a page without site navigation. This is not optimal for keeping the attention of search engine spiders or visitors. A good example of a page like this within Google’s index:
http://www.paxilbirthdefect.com/source/about/prenatal_exposure.html.
Next, if you’re using an IFRAME to display another website’s content within your overall navigation structure, you’re now subject to showing whatever that site may change their content to say. Today’s IFRAMED page about birth control may be tomorrow’s IFRAMED page about a less savory topic. Of course, search engines will recognize you’re serving another site’s content so it will have no positive impact on your site’s rankings.
Additionally, some users turn off the IFRAME element in their browser’s advanced settings because of a the security hole it presents (trusted websites can unwittingly serve malicious content via IFRAMES).
Finally, and this is the most important point, I’ve spotted some sites that have multiple IFRAME “shells” on different URLs that all serve the same framed-in content. In the eyes of the search engines, this is duplicate content and is likely to be reason for de-listing.
If you can’t tell, I don’t recommend using IFRAME in your site’s code. Just like framesets, there was a time for them, but that was years ago. Duplicate content, end-user experience and security concerns are factors I consider to be argument enough.
Technorati Tags: IFRAME, inline frames
You may have heard the buzzword “Web 2.0â€. You may also be familiar with “bookmarks†in your Internet browser and even “viral†web marketing. I want to focus on one particular element of Web 2.0 that lawyers can use to promote their websites: social bookmarking.
First of all, what’s “Web 2.0â€? Simply put, web 2.0 references online systems that support contribution of multiple users. The Wikipedia is a good example of “Web 2.0â€; it has an open structure where many users can contribute and edit content. The “Web 2.0â€â€ expression of a search engine is “social bookmarkingâ€. Imagine this: instead of a search engine deciding who should be #1 by itself, wouldn’t it be great if they could get the input of thousands of users like me and you? Sites like Del.icio.us, Shadows.com and Furl.net are (free) social bookmarking sites where end users can bookmark their favorite sites for others to see. Those bookmarks are also associated with tags (like keywords) that describe the site’s content. (So, when bookmarking a legal site, tags used would be lawyer, attorney, law firm, litigation and other area-of-practice specific terms.) When many, many people set bookmarks for a site or article, they rise in the rankings of the search system’s results according to their tags.
So who notices? Yes, you’ll get some traffic from the sites themselves… but traditional search engines like Google also notice – and that’s what’s important. Social bookmarking your own site (and encouraging your colleagues to do the same) effectively “reminds†Google that your site is worth reviewing. My suggestion: go to the three social bookmarking sites listed above, sign up and bookmark your site(s)… bookmark sites you find useful… and bookmark any new page or article you have published. Create one account at home and one at work, if you’d like. As part of a larger online marketing campaign of on-page optimization, link building and PR, social bookmarking can be a useful tool.
Technorati Tags: social bookmarking, bookmarks
A quick heads up: over the weekend, Matt Cutts posted an article to his blog that outlines how people can report websites that they suspect of having purchased text links. Google doesn’t like companies that buy and sell links because it is “gaming” their PageRank “authority” structure. In the rash of responses Cutts received, the valid question “What links can you buy?” arose. The (unclear) answer - not many. You can buy links solely meant for traffic and that’s it. Moreover, he indicates the traffic link’s URL should NOT point directly to your site but, rather, Google would like to see DoubleClick-obfuscated tracking URLs in use. Cutts goes on to outline the only “good” sources of links are non-paid: like Yahoo Answers.
Wow, we’ll see what this does to the world of SEO. I have no idea how they’re going to differentiate between paid links for traffic and paid links for “link juice”. Take www.stpt.com for example - is buying a link there now spamming?
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » How to report paid links
Update: Adam Lasnik, Google SEO Strategist, was recently interviewed about the topic. See his comments on Google paid links for the full text but, basically, it seems like they’re looking for link brokers and/or linking schemes and the like.
