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SearchWrite SearchNews
Caching Better Results in Search Marketing
Vol V, Issue 045 12.22.05
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CACHING THE LATEST RESULTS IN SEARCH MARKETING....

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Google & AOL Celebrate the Holidays as Gift-ed Partners
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Google's deal to acquire a 5 percent stake in AOL for $1 billion is certainly headline news. In this case, the headlines will be spilling over to more than just online media. As part of the new "partnership," both companies plan to explore the sales of so-called offline media as well including TV and print, Time Warner Chairman-CEO Richard Parsons told his company's staff in an employee memo circulated Wednesday. "With this agreement, AOL's sales force will now be able to sell all types of online advertising - including paid search - and we'll explore expanding the partnership into selling television and print advertising," Parsons wrote in the staff memo.

The disclosure comes just one day after Google executives disclosed plans to MediaDailyNews that it was entering "phase two" of its test of an offline media buying and reselling test that so far has been limited to extending Google's advertising reach via magazine ad space, but that the powerful online search engine also is weighing moves into the buying and re-selling of other media. In recent weeks, Google has begun posting help wanted ads to recruit experienced traditional agency media buyers.

All of those moves have sent ripples up and down Madison Avenue, and senior agency executives have been expressing increasing angst that Google may be encroaching on their world. Google Head of Agencies Chris LaSala said the moves, including the hiring of traditional media buyers, are actually part of Google's outreach to Madison Avenue, and are intended to come up with ways of servicing agencies better in hopes of getting more of their business. 

A big new Google advertiser, coincidentally, may be AOL. As part of the deal, Google is giving AOL an estimated $300 million in "marketing credits" to promote its content on Google, which at least one knowledgeable observer believes may be used for more than just paid search placements on Google's sites. Google could be looking to test image ads on certain of Google's properties.


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Nature of Search:  Habit  Forming and Repeating
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Search behavior analysis is highly intriguing stuff (at least to geeks like us) and the quantification and interpretations run deep. So let's cut to the summary: A new Atlas study has observed that people who click on paid search ads often click more than once before purchasing. There is usually a long delay between the first and last click before purchase, and they are very likely to conduct the same search over and over. So says Nico Brooks, director of research & development, Search at Atlas.

While there are quantitative implications in these results for search ad performance, perhaps the greatest implication is in the nature of search behavior itself. The fact that visitors are conducting the same search multiple times to get to the same place implies that their behavior shifts from being inquisitive in nature to being navigational in nature as the search sequence progresses. While this knowledge appears to have minor implications for how keyword ads are valued, it has major implications for the state of mind of the searcher and therefore has major implications for how the advertiser can best serve the visitor when he or she arrives.

The study also suggests the useful correlation between organic and paid search components. That's just second nature!


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Yahoo Search Ads Getting Shorter
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Yahoo's text ad length will be getting shorter in January. Text ads will be limited to 70 characters--which also is the maximum size of Google AdWords ads. Previously, Yahoo! allowed marketers to include up to 190 characters in their ads. Make sure you find time to adjust your carefully-crafted Yahoo ads as those "calls to action" could be truncated by the new shorter length.

Speculation as to the motivation includes the thought that Yahoo Search Marketing wants to make it easier for existing Google advertisers to simply patch their campaigns over to Yahoo.  That's certainly a part of it.  Another rationale behind the move could also be to free up advertising space on the Yahoo! Publishing Network--Yahoo!'s answer to Google's AdSense. The move should make the service more appealing to publishers, and allow Yahoo! to compete directly with AdSense for publisher real estate.


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Ask Offers Page Translation
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Ask Jeeves has begun to offer page translation for some languages. According to the Ask Jeeves blog entry:

  Page Translation is now available on Ask.com. Why haven't we had it in the past? Because we didn't have many foreign-language pages in our index. As we approach site launches in Europe next year, the index has taken on a more international flavor. Voila! We need a codebreaker for those who do not speak seven languages (like most of the folks on our international team). Look for the "Translate this page" link.

Users can also select "Save translated page to My Jeeves." Nice addition.

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Yahoo Launches Open Shortcuts, Allows Creation Of Custom Search Commands
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The new Yahoo Open Shortcuts service lets anyone create their own custom search commands for use on Yahoo. Want to navigate to a particular site quickly or have Yahoo remember a particular search string? The new service lets you do this.

For example, let's say you want to reach the SearchWrite website quickly. Using the shortcuts creation page, you give the shortcut a name that you'll enter (let's say "sw") and the URL (http://www.searchwrite.com). Once you've set this up, you can then do this into the Yahoo search box:

    !seopg

You can make any number of commands to navigate wherever you like, and you can recall the entire list you've created through this command:

    !list

Yahoo's created a number of shortcuts <http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help#readyshortcuts> that anyone can use to reach or search popular sites, such as Amazon, My Yahoo and Flickr. Unfortunately, the shortcuts you create can't be shared with others.


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SEO Tip of the Week:  SEMLogic Explained
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Fortune Interactive has debuted a new product called SEMLogic™ which is designed to find the terms and phrases most semantically connected to the terms and phrases you want to target in your pages. 

One of the most important elements of optimization is properly supporting your keyphrase(s) with relevant supporting terms. SEMLogic™ allows us to ascertain what the most important supporting terms are for any keyphrase. 

The goal is to have an ordered list of the best terms to use on your page, in searching for linking partners and when creating anchor text.  The software grabs documents off the web from major competitors on the subject, high ranking sites and other places they feel are particularly relevant for your category and target terms.

Once they've created their training set, they build a term vector space around the collection and proceed to measure the semantic connectivity of each term to the target term and each other.  3D scatter graphs illustrate clusters of words and phrases that are grouped into certain areas. The idea is that the mathematical calculations of the software will produce the ordered list, showing most relevant terms and phrases to least.

From here, you can take the terms, use them on your page in relative frequencies (that match the levels from the tool's results) and also apply them to link building campaigns for anchor text and targeting the right link partners.  The science of search at work!

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