If you’re unsure as to what Search Engine Marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising and Sponsored Search) entails, there are two excellent breakdowns in brief here, or in detail here.

SEO is a blanket term that’s used to describe the process of enhancing your website, its content and its meta-data (that is, the information contained in each webpage that humans don’t usually see, but which machines – which includes Google’s search – interpret).

Undertaking SEO can be a project that varies greatly both in time & cost, and in overall effect to your business’s bottom line – the latter of which is determined by several factors. Generally, when you deal with a quality SEO agent you’ll enjoy the benefits of sitting closer to the top of results page for a handful of searches related to your business.

With any SEO service your website is modified (and sometimes re-engineered) to target a handful of specific keywords. Over time, your SEO agent will alter your website to feature the keywords (or clauses) that you’ve chosen to be ‘ranked’ for (that is, to increase the rank of one’s website in search engine results pages so that it appears closer to the revered #1 spot on Google).

SEO is a process that takes time, and one which relies on Google revisiting your website to glean new information from it – which can happen as often as every day (for very popular sites) to every few weeks (for the rest of us). Every time your website is modified to better target your keywords, along with it comes an inevitable wait for Google to revisit your website. As website rankings are constantly changing, maintaining your ranking for a specific keyword is an ongoing task that requires a fair amount of maintenance.

So for example, if you’re a plumber in Chatswood, it would make sense to choose SEO keywords such as chatswood plumber, or north shore plumbing (Chatswood being a suburb in Sydney’s north shore). These would be an example of some common keywords a customer might use to find a local plumber on Google.

Whilst being near the top of organic results for “chatswood plumbing” or “north shore plumbing” would be great for a plumber servicing Chatswood, relying on these two (and a few more) keywords alone will inevitably lead to a loss of many potential customers.

The trouble is that many more customers will search for terms such as emergency plumbing artarmon or 24 hour plumbing lindfield [where Artarmon and Lindfield are both surrounding suburbs of Chatswood]. And that’s where Search Engine Optimisation begins to fall short. With Pay-Per-Click, not only can you have your ad shown above your competitors’ organic listings, but you can also customise each message according to your audience. Examples below:

plumbing chatswood	emergency plumbing artarmon	24 hour plumbing lindfield
For our Chatswood customers (a bustling commercial and business area with many high-rise apartments) we can emphasise your speed of service.	For Artarmon customers (a mix of commercial, industrial and suburban), we can tailor your advertising to reflect cost-effectiveness.	For Lindfield customers (consisting of mostly privately-owned homes) we can emphasise personal service and guarantee for homeowners looking for a quality plumber.

 Seeing as the cost and scale of an SEO project goes up with each keyword targeted it can begin to look a little daunting for first time businesses looking to introduce SEO to their website. Just don’t expect this same sort of reach or the immediacy of pay-per-click!

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are great for their inherent versatility. Google pay-per-click ads can be modified quickly to adapt to any changes in the market, and they can apply to more than a few keywords at once, each with individualised messages to suit your target audience.

With respect to SEO, we believe that a holistic approach to marketing your business online involves both components of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. After all, our aim is to get your customers onto your website and dialling your phone – and both technologies offer a different way of doing that. Search Engine Marketing happens to have the advantage of being more agile, more accountable, and with a faster, more pronounced return on your investment.

In their Christmas marketing promotion (known as Chrome For Christmas), Google are letting you give the gift of…Chrome! The web browser that is gradually picking up market share is now pushing for more with this new idea. Instead of giving the gift of new socks, Google have made it easy to give their browser as a gift for Christmas.

It’s simple

1. Go to the Give Chrome For Christmas website.
2. Select some paper which is themed.
3. Add the recipient’s name and email address!
   You can then add ‘a personal photo or video’ and personalized message to the gift.
4. Once the recipient receives the gift they can then unwrap it and are asked to download Google Chrome.

This marketing promotion is just one of many that displays Google’s intentions to push this browser onto not only the U.S. market but international markets such as here as well.

With new plug-ins, extensions and the beta version for Apple Mac now available, Google’s tilt at having ‘the browser’ to use is gaining speed by the month.

Who needs socks anyway?

Social media sites are set to overtake traffic from search engines.

Search Engines (such as Google and Yahoo) attributing 12.8% of all sites visited, social media sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) closely follow with 11.8%. It is estimated that social media will soon overtake search engines as the most popular websites to visit – especially so over the Christmas break.

Facebook and MySpace must be licking their lips at the prospect of being the most visited sites in Australia and therefore an increased potential advertising revenue. Much like the television stations of traditional media, more people watching equals a larger audience for advertisers and therefore more advertising potential in terms of raw numbers and targeted demographic reach.

Another interesting fact to note is that Australians uses search engines more (12.8%) than the Brits (UK-12.6%), the kiwis (New Zealand 12.2%) and the yanks (U.S.-10%).

Google Dominates Search Engines-Bing the mover

• Google- 87.1% ( – )
• Bing- 4.7% ( + 0.6%)
• Yahoo- 2.3% ( – )

The amount of advertising dollars spent on launching Bing and creating brand awareness has been apparently significant enough to warrant an increase in market share. However, it is not nearly as big as what the big coffers at Microsoft would have hoping for.  It is expected that Bing will increase their market share slightly over the Christmas period and into the new year.

Users Love Brands

One of the largest changes in users’ search behaviors is the rapid increase in brand name and brand related searches. In 2006, brand related searches accounted for 8.75% and in 2009 it accounts for 14.22% of all searches. This is an important development for search marketers as it shows the benefit of using brand related keywords more so now than ever before.

Searchers More Refined Than Ever Before

Whether it has to do with demographics shifting, or users becoming better practiced in the art of searching, users are using more words to search than ever before. 1-2 word searches have decreased and 3-5 word searches have increased from their 2008 figures. When 3-5 Word Searches now account for 52.8% of all queries and it is becoming increasingly important that long tail keywords are a part of any AdWords campaign.

• 1 Word Searches- 18.6% (Decreased)
• 2 Word Searches- 28.6% (Decreased)
• 3 Word Searches- 24.2% (Increased)
• 4 Word Searches- 14.3 % (Increased)
• 5 Word Searches- 14.3% (Increased)

How do you describe something well enough with just text for customers to get a reasonable idea of what you are selling?

Well the answer need not be a tutorial on how to write effective ad copy; Google has a new “Product Listings” feature to display relevant products in line with the organic results.

U.S. users on google.com have already begun seeing more and more product listing ads appear. As you can see in the picture below, the ability to compare between different companies, brands, products and prices on the one page makes shopping online so much simpler.

As soon as a user enters a search query which is relevant to one of your items, Google will show the most relevant products (as well as the product name, price and of course its photo) which makes it easier for the consumer to find exactly what they want.

Furthermore, in enhancing the user experience, the result for businesses is likely to be more profitable as well. These Product Listings are only charged on a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) basis; only when a user views the ad, clicks on link and eventually makes a purchase from that particular store is the advertiser charged. Advertisers on Google will be able to potentially save on their advertising expenditure and receive a greater ROI as a result.

From an advertiser’s perspective this makes product listing ads perfect for reaching a more specific consumer as they are not paying per click, they are paying per sale. No matter how many people click on the listing – as long as they don’t purchase the item, the advertiser won’t be charged. This is different to when a visitor views your site through text ads, where you will be charged for a click – therefore providing a distinct advantage to businesses who want to advertise on Google.

See Google’s explaination on the new technology at the AdWords blog: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-product-listing-ads.html

The main culprit drawing Murdoch’s ire is Google, which grabs the headlines and summaries from online news websites and blogs and ranks them on the Google News service. The print mogul’s complaint stems from the traffic Google generates on the back of content generated by media outlets.

As part of his battle against the world’s largest search company, Murdoch is attempting to broker a deal with Microsoft that would see News Corp content supplied exclusively to the software giant’s fledgling “Bing” search engine, as reported on TechCrunch and the Financial Times – though the latter is behind a pay-wall.

The idea behind the deal is News Corp would receive compensation for its content – something it does not receive from Google – and Microsoft would theoretically be able to drive up the traffic to its search offering with exclusive content.

Murdoch has voiced his displeasure with online search engines in the past, though things started coming to a head when he told Sky News – which he owns the controlling interest in – that the flagship titles in the News Corp stable would consider blocking Google once a paid subscription model was in place.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

When the Australian-born tycoon first announced the plan to charge for access to News Corp’s titles online, the announcement was met with almost universal ridicule. Murdoch’s plan was to use the established model of the Wall Street Journal for other News Corp titles like News.com.au and its subsidiaries like The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and The Times in London and a plethora of other titles under the company’s banner.

“Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch said during News Corp’s fourth quarter earnings call.

The mobile advertising pioneer is a Silicon Valley success story that emerged in 2006, when Omar Hamoui founded the company after being frustrated by a lack of ways to generate traffic for his mobile site, claiming it was too hard to engage users.

“I’ve been working in mobile for over seven years now. Before AdMob, I founded two separate mobile startups that never got significant traction. It was so frustrating to build what I knew was an incredible service only to find myself unable to distribute or monetize the product without a carrier or handset deal. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one. Talk to any veteran in mobile and they will tell you just how hard it was to get things done only a few years ago,” wrote Hamoui in a statement.

These days AdMob is serving targeted and personalized advertisements on the mobile web through the use of its mobile advertising platform. According to the company website, the network claims to have served over 125 billion impressions.

The acquisition is the fourth biggest publically-disclosed deal in Google’s history, at least if Wikipedia’s metrics can be trusted. Upstaging the AdMob deal in price tag is the landmark $3.3 billion (US $3.1 billion) the company paid for DoubleClick, plus the $1.8 billion (US $1.65 billion) shelled out for YouTube and the cool $1.08 billion (US $1 billion) paid for a 5% stake in America Online – more commonly known as AOL – back in 2005.

Word also leaked that Google is rumoured to be acquiring Gizmo5, which was swallowed up in the hype surrounding the AdMob deal. The search giant is allegedly writing a cheque for US $30 million for the VoIP startup, though no official confirmation has come through yet.

I will not disagree, 30 million users is quite large-when you compare it to the population, of lets say, Australia, with a mere 22 million. However if you were to compare it to its competitors (which are much more substantial in comparison), it has a tiny 3.58 percent market share compared to the likes of Internet Explorer with 65pc and Mozilla Firefox claiming 24 pc percent of the market.

In my opinion either of these are better performing browsers; but it’s important to note that both are more established browsers and have had time to develop more of a following (more so with Mozilla Firefox). Chrome only launched about a year ago, so this increase in usership and market share is not one to be taken lightly – hence Google making this announcement.

The team that developed Chrome received a Google Founder’s award for the developments that have been made thus far (which has been won previously by the teams that created AdSense, Google Maps and Gmail). So what does this mean for us? It means that Google are definitely taking their browser quite seriously and want to compete with the big boys at Microsoft and Mozilla. With Google taking Chrome seriously, you can expect as a user of this browser to have more updates and increase in functionality as time progresses.

Having healthy competition between browser developers is a great thing because it helps them strive towards a better product for the end user. Users of any browser can expect to have an improved experience on the web because of browsers like Chrome and Opera pushing Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft to make a better product (as well as innovating more themselves). With Google Chrome’s usership bound to increase over time, it will be interesting to monitor whether it one day will be on par with Internet Explorer and Firefox- only time will tell.

Havent tried it yet?

Try Google Chrome and let me know what you think or which browser you use and why you decided to use it (Microsoft Internet Explorer users need not respond .

Car manufacturers were the first to get in on the action, with Mitsubishi and Holden both shelling out coin to have their own videos promoted on generic search results. A scan for the term “4×4” or “car” in YouTube will put a sponsored link to Mitsubishi’s video channel next to the normal list of search results. If you try this at home, don’t be tempted to click on the “Is your tongue kissable?” clip that also shows up, as it’s a highly unwatchable skit for an electric toothbrush.

 YouTube’s Jay Akkad was in town to promote the launch of the service, which has been available in the US for more than a year. According to Akkad, the pricing of the service is done on a cost-per-click basis and is showing strong click-through results.

It isn’t all milk and honey with Google’s marquee clients on the project, as Simon Dunwoody, search director at Mediaedge:cia – the company that developed Mitsubishi’s YouTube campaign – told ITWire that he was in discussions with the search giant as to why the click-per-view cost had proved higher than the 5-10 cents he had been anticipating.

Despite these teething problems, Dunwoody expects Mitsubishi to continue using the service as it has boosted the subscriber numbers for the company’s YouTube channel. The Mitsubishi-themed channel has received 6,059 views since its launch on the 20^th of April this year and currently has 23 subscribers.

YouTube has also admitted that there is nothing stopping derogatory videos appearing in the organic search results next to promoted links. A spokesperson from the company told The Sydney Morning Herald that advertisers can combat this by adding negative terms to their campaign, to prevent the sponsored videos showing up next to certain results.

Well, the brilliant minds at Google have developed what the IT and media crowds are pegging as the next big thing – “Google Wave”.

A few people have described it as “turning email on its head” and Google spokespeople describe it as E-mail developed for the users of today-rather than 40 years ago (when email was first developed).

So let’s take a look at what Google Wave is all about!

A wave – in essence – is always moving, ever changing and never still; it is truly dynamic. What Google has done is to turn emails, which are considered ‘static’, into something that’s more dynamic.

For all intents and purposes Wave is a glorified IM/Chat program (such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger and AIM). The major difference being that it mixes IM & chat with emails, and has potential for rich media such as large file videos/pictures and the ability to communicate with new ‘fads’ such as downloading and updating one’s twitter status’.

Here’s an example of how the whole ‘Wave’ process works. Here’s a brief example of how it can work for you [from Mack Collier’s website “The Viral Garden”].

“I can create a Wave that’s 5 paragraphs, and send it to Beth. Beth can then go in and break up the Wave and reply to each paragraph. I can then reply to each point Beth made.

Now let’s say at this point we decide that we want to bring Amy and Jason into our Wave and get their ideas on what we’ve been talking about. First, they are going to see a Wave that’s probably confusing as hell, because it will be my original 5-paragraph Wave, which was then broken into 5 parts (where Beth replied to each paragraph), and then I replied to each of Beth’s replies. So it looks like a complete cluster to anyone that joins the Wave at this point.

But Google Wave would give Amy and Jason the ability to ‘replay’ the wave and see how it was created. They could first see the 5-paragraph wave I wrote, then see Beth break it down into replies for each paragraph, them my replies to her replies. So it’s less confusing”

Source: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-first-date-with-google-wave.html

One hundred thousand (that’s 100,000) public invites were sent out on 30^th September this year and don’t worry too much if you weren’t one of those lucky ones. You can sign up with this link below or wait for someone to contact you/wait for the wave to reach you eventually!

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Both Google’s press release information and the experience of beta users reveal a lot of excitement but in varied cases it seems to be a lot of hype about something we can potentially (and currently) do without. It is however an application that may become a standard amongst other e-mail providers such as Live hotmail and Yahoo Mail – so that’s where the value lies. However unless there are a few improvements between now and the launch date, I will stick with the old, static, snail (e)mail.