Microsoft Beats Google Search Growth with Live Search Club

New figures released by Compete, an online traffic tracking and information company, suggest Microsoft has finally beaten Google in search "growth" according to its June figures. Microsoft search grew 67.3% from May 07 to June 07, but closer inspection reveals the secret to the phenomenal growth.


According to the Compete announcement post, the majority of Microsoft's growth has come from its Live Search Club. Live Search Club offers games where players can win points that are redeemable on Microsoft products. The clever part is that the games require users to use Live Search to play - hence driving up Microsoft's search usage.

"We didn't see any traffic to club.live.com at all in April. About a third of a million unique visitors went to the club in May, and in June, this shot up to over 3 million unique visitors." said Steve Willis in his post.

Source - Compete July 2007

While search growth of 67.3% sounds impressive, it's important to remember it's based on Microsoft's relatively small share of only 8.4% in May 07 and if they can't turn Live Search Club searchers into loyal searchers - then the growth really doesn't mean much.

I doubt Google will be feeling any pressure at this early stage, but should Microsoft continue to increase its share (even if only measured by Compete's version of traffic tracking), then the search giant might start to pay more attention.

The New Online Advertising Solution for Small Business

As a part of our on-going enhancements at ineedhits we've just released a new and improved Easy Search Advertising service. The revamped service now offers a tiered pricing structure, enhanced reporting and free Yahoo! Clicks for some customers.

The improvements were based on extensive customer feedback, with the goal of providing better campaign flexibility and performance and delivering better returns on investment. The key improvements are explained below:

New Advertising Packages to Suit Your Needs
The new Easy Search Advertising program features a range of packages designed to suit your budget and traffic needs. The tiered pricing structure now makes the program more affordable for a wider range of businesses.



Improved Package Breakdown
As a part of the new advertising packages, we have also added more keywords and campaigns to the program to give wider advertising reach for your business. The packages are as follows:



Enhanced Campaign Reporting
Customers wanted more detailed information on campaign performance and we listened! Campaign reporting now includes the following additional data:

• New campaign goals
• Position of Ads
• Budget Use
• Screenshot of your Google / Yahoo Ad
• List of keywords
• Contact details for your account manager

$75 FREE Yahoo! Clicks
To kick start your advertising campaign we're giving US customers $75 FREE Yahoo! Clicks! If your clicks cost around 50c a click - that's potentially 150 qualified visitors to your website for free! *This offer is only available for Easy Search Advertising Packages that include Yahoo!

Business large and small can now enjoy the benefits of advertising on major search engines Google and Yahoo! with the improved Easy Search Advertising service. If you're keen to get started, head over to the Easy Search Advertising page and choose the traffic package to match your business!

Inside Google's Newest Algorithm Update

Buzz about another Google algorithm update started about 10 days ago when reports of serious changes to rankings surfaced. The dust should finally be settling on the update - so I've taken the opportunity to review the theories on the update.

Dave Davies was one of the first to post an analysis on the update, with his view shared by many across the internet. According to his review, three key areas were addressed in the update; namely Domain Age, Backlinks and PageRank.

Domain Age:
It appears that the Google Algorithm update has increased the importance placed on the age of a site's domain. While using domain age as a ranking factor helps to prevent spammy new websites from stealing top rankings, it tends to disadvantage legitimate sites that are just starting out. The importance of domain age should be a set-up on a sliding scale - with age becoming less important after a specified period, and other factors taking precedence.

Backlinks:
The new update seems to have unusually increased the importance on link volumes again which is ironic considering Google's public denouncement of paid links and unscrupulous linking strategies. So why then would Google reward sites with high volumes of irrelevant links? Many suspect this will be a temporary consequence, and I would expect to see a readjustment sooner rather than later.

PageRank:
It seems the little green bar and enigmatic Google PageRank score is playing a less significant role in weighting the value of links to a website. Many webmasters have become obsessed with getting high PageRank links, ignoring the importance of relevance. While the change is a good thing, it needs to be substituted with a better way of valuing links, which still isn't evident as yet. Perhaps the TrustRank measure which involves manual evaluation of core links will take its place.

All told, the latest Google update seems to have taken a step backwards as far improving the relevance of its SERPs. I'm fairly confident that any irrelevance generated from the update will be rectified by an algo tweak in the near future.

Tell us how the update has impacted your rankings and whether you think the key changes are for better or worse...

The Small Business SEO Checklist

Small businesses are started everyday and many are becoming increasingly aware of the important role search engines play in the growth and success of their business. With the competition for search terms ever increasing, businesses now need to ensure they start on the right foot and make their websites search engine friendly from the beginning.

Here is my 5 point SEO checklist for developing a new website:

1. Do keyword research
Keyword research is an absolute must before you start developing a website. You need to decide which keywords to target and base the rest of the website around them. Use these keywords throughout your content in a natural way to give yourself a great head start. If you're having trouble selecting the right keywords, why not try a professional service.

2. Have analytics in place from the beginning
There's no use performing SEO if you don't know how it's going! Analytics are important to refine your optimization and determine which changes provide the best results. Make sure to install a quality analytics program such as Hitslink or Google Analytics.

3. Make SEO friendly URLs
Using keywords in your URLs and filenames is a great way to show search engines your content is relevant to a particular topic. For example if you run an online candle store, one of your URLs could be candlestore.com/red-candles.html. Keep it to less than 3 hyphens as anymore can tend to look spammy and remember to always use hyphens in your URLs as they are treated as spaces, while underscores are not.

4. Include a sitemap
A sitemap is a great way to help search engine spiders find all the pages in your website and determine their relationship to each other. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to major search engines to provide a clear structure to your site. A simple search on Google will provide you with a range of free XML Sitemap generators.

5. Stay in for the long haul
Search engine optimization isn't about instant gratification. Results often take months to see, and tactics that worked last year may not work as well this year, so be prepared to stick with it.

Bonus Tip: Build a great website
While this tip might seem like a no-brainer, you need to make a website that really offers internet users some value. Ask yourself: "Is my website really the number 1 website for information on this topic?" If not, improve your site to the point where it is.

Use these basic SEO tips when starting a small business to help pave the way to search engine success. Next week, I'll cover some more advanced SEO techniques for existing small business owners.

Google Pay per Action - Now Open Globally!

In March this year, Google announced it was beta testing a new pay per action advertising system for US customers using the Adwords platform. Well behold, beta testing is now open to all advertisers globally.

To summarize, pay per action is a new advertising model where you only pay when somebody completes an action on your website, rather than by click or impression. This action may be an enquiry, signup to a newsletter, use of a free tool, a purchase, or even a page view.

Pay-per-action ads are available to publisher sites in the Google content network, and publishers can choose which pay-per-action ads are displayed based on relevance to their site.

As an advertiser, you can now decide how much you pay for an action. For example; if you have a free newsletter on your website, what is one signup worth to you? Is it $1, $5 or even $20?

This type of pricing lets you control your costs in a much better way. Instead of spending $200 a day on advertising and not knowing if this will produce any sales, you're now assured that $200 in advertising will produce a certain number of orders for you.

Because this is a beta test, users are still limited by certain criteria. To get started with this pay-per-action beta test, you need to meet these criteria:

• Firstly be a Google AdWords advertiser
• Have Google analytics and conversion tracking installed on your website
• Have a minimum of 500 conversions over a 30 day period

Pay per action is a smart move by Google in trying to revamp the poor image of its content network. Google's content network has received bad publicity over the years with the poor quality of clicks it generates and accordingly the poor conversion.

With pay per action now underway and with the newly unveiled content network reports (that show advertisers the individual performance of websites in Google's content network), this may just entice me to switch back on my content network advertising in the near future.

Google Maps - Drag and Drop Directions

Google have made another update to their increasingly popular Google Maps service. "Click and Drag" enables users to change their 'route' when using Google's driving directions. Google Maps provides directions between any 2 places (dependant on your location), however should you want to avoid highways and bad traffic, or simply want to take the 'scenic route' you can now change your route manually!

Say I want to travel from Boulder, Colorado to Los Angeles; Google gives me the shortest route, through Las Vegas, on Highway 15. However, I have family in Santa Fe, and would like to see them whilst I'm traveling. I drag my route through Santa Fe, and presto! Google changes my driving directions!


Coupled with this great feature is the ability to check live traffic conditions in selected cities. Don't want to get caught out in bad traffic? Avoid traffic snares by navigating your path around the worst areas!

With Street View only just released, it appears Google is doing all it can to ensure that they remain at the top of the Maps / Local game! Find out more about how you can use Google Maps to help you get from A to Z, and anywhere in between!

Put Your Business on the Map. Help customers searching for your products or services find your front door. Get a Local Search Listing and get found today!

New Yahoo! SmartAds - Unrivalled Dynamic Online Advertising System

Yahoo! has just unveiled a new SmartAds program which promises to provide unrivalled levels of relevance and targeting for online advertisers. Now creative and messaging will be dynamically merged - presenting Yahoo! users with more tailored advertising than ever before.

After the recent merger of their search and display advertising divisions, this new smart advertising program has many in the online advertising space taking notice. While SmartAds are only being used in the travel category at present with limited expansion plans for 2007 (2 other verticals by the end of the year), the behavioral targeting intelligence behind the system is the real genius.

The biggest challenge for any advertiser is to merge the right message and creative to the right audience. Yahoo! SmartAds allow advertisers to harness the wealth of behavioral information Yahoo! gathers, both through cookies and Yahoo! members who sign in, and use this information to tailor campaigns on the fly.

"Yahoo's SmartAds gives marketers what they have long wanted from online advertising: the ability to deliver more personalized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand," said Todd Teresi, Yahoo!'s senior vice president of display marketplaces.

Companies or agencies can create a range of unique creatives and by providing Yahoo! various offers or messages, SmartAds will display the best combination of each based on the behavioral data of the user.

According to Teresi, SmartAds generally generated click-through rates, two to three times higher than static, non-personalized ads during the four month beta testing phase.

At this stage, SmartAds is only being sold by Yahoo!'s sales force and is probably only suitable for bigger budget advertisers. Lets just hope the advertising platform is scalable and this long overdue behavioral targeting is made available more widely in the not to distant future.