The initiative provides 25 charities or not-for-profit organizations per year the opportunity to learn search marketing skills at no cost, to help them make the most of their limited marketing budgets.

Well the idea launched with more of a whimper than a bang, so today we’ve distributed an official Press Release to try and drum up more publicity.

If you know of a charity or not-for-profit that might benefit from free online marketing training, please direct them to our release, encourage them to get in touch, and/or spread the word by linking to this post.

Thanks!

Yes, it’s  our second issue even though it’s nearly June. Shut up. The delay has nothing at all to do with my procrastination skills. It’s all Google’s fault and you’ll find out why when you read it.

This month’s newsletter includes an article about Social Search – the biggest thing to hit the SERPs this year since, well, Personalized Search a week before. It also contains some of the more interesting FAQs answered in this blog and a recap of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference in Sydney.

If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber catch it here and then quickly go and subscribe before you change from a geek into a nerd.

I’ll be live blogging as many sessions as I can and writing up the others later. Today we kick off with the keynote from Chris Sherman, Executive Editor from Search Engine Land.

Chris starts his presentation with a YouTube video by Raymond Crowe using shadow puppets to mime “What a Wonderful World”. Like shadow puppets, search marketing looks impossible to do but we’re just out there doing it.

Chris says that the last few weeks have brought incredible change. Seismic change in the industry! We’ve come out of the global economic crisis. Online ad spend is picking up. WE’ll see $54B in global ad spend. Search is 47% of that spend, which is promising for our industry. B2B lead generation spend is still lower than before the economicdownturn, but that may be a lagging indicator.

Chris then showed a series of videos to describe online search marketing.

1) The Renaissance Site:

Video from 1969, taking a look at the *future* of electronic technology. Chris says that what they’re describing in that video is really the Google of today. Although they started laser-focused on search, now they offer “something of everything to everybody”.

Google Fast Flip

New product – combines Google News with a easy view layout.

Google News Timeline

Takes news and shows how stories are developing over a specific timeline.

Google Dashboard

Allows you to see what info Google is tracking about you. How you are represented as an entity on Google. Showed his own dashboard. The amount of data is extraordinary. The dashboard now gives you control over how much of this information is public and available. Demonstrates Google’s commitment to privacy.

Google Australia new products:

- Google Insights for Search – compare one search with another etc.

- Google map icons – allows you to claim a local business using Google Places on Google Maps.

- Google Sponsored Listings – within maps now.  An alternative to Google AdWords.

- YouTube promoted videos – You can now sponsor videos via YouTube so your videos come up the top – not officiallyavailable in Australia yet, except via AdWords AU.

- Google AdWords Webinars – new to GG Australia

- Google Speaks ‘Strayan! New feature to hep Aussies find local info, in local jargon. Cute!

This week, GG has hired a team of photographers to use cameras within the Streetview cars to focus in on more interesting visual data they come across (similar to what Bing are doing with virtual reality?).

Google Woes

- legal woes

- privacy issues

- China and censorship

Google: The new evil empire?

Chris has heard rumors of GG replacing Microsoft as the new evil empire.

- Photographers have sued over book deal.

- EU looking at antitrust

- Execs convicted of privacy violations in Italy

- Xerox and Quintura sue over patents

- Streetview lawsuits in multiple countries

- Launch of Google Buzz

- and the beating goes on…

Chris doesn’t think they will get into major legal difficulties. In terms of privacy though, they might have trouble. When they launched Buzz, they did it without permission and that was a major concern – especially if you use public shared computers.

In response, Matt Cutts went into great detail on the European Public Policy Blog about privacy and transparency. Mind you, he link dropped in a nuclear fashion in that post which amused Chris greatly.

Keep in mind, Facebook’s privacy is MUCH more relaxed and dangerous, in his opinion.

Dealing with the Great Firewall

- Google moved Google.cn servers to Hong Kong last month

- But China is blocking access to the site from mainland computers

- Excellent analysis at http://bit.ly/93pmnY

- Not just China: Google is censoring in other countries as well

- You can use proxies from within China to get past the censorship

- Chris has never personally experienced censorship when running SEM conferences in China

New as of Yesterday

The Google Govt Requests and Removal Tool – a new tool which is a maps overlay to allow people to request information to be removed or request more data. You can even see in real time what requests have been complied with or not. When you mouse over China, it says “Chinese government considers this information a State secret so data is not available”. Article at: “Google Responds to Privacy Concerns With…”

2) Emperor’s New Clothes

Showed video of a plane experiencing a very very dodgy landing. Chris says this represents Yahoo.

- Yahoo is the proud owner of the Emperor’s New Clothes

- Microhoo competition: Salvation or sellout? Microsoft does the heavy search lifting while Yahoo sells ads.

I was discussing this with Chris last night at the Tweetup. Chris thinks this is a clever move by Yahoo, but it really gives all the power to MS/Bing.

- Yahoo has divided the labor – “we’re more interested in what happens before and after search than search itself. In other words, we’re going back to our *browse* / portal mode.

3) Assimilator as Innovator

Showed a clip from Star Trek from The Borg. This represents Microsoft / Bing.  “You will be assimilated”. In other words, Chris says, MS is very clever at making people do what they want. Acquisition after acquisition.

Now part of the collective:

medstory

tellme

aquantive

jellyfish

multimap

farecast

Fast Search & Transfer – AllThe Web

Powerset

Bada-Bing!

- Bing is arguably a better na,e than Live Search, but what does it mean? In Chinese it means “Very certain to answer”.

- Fun image licensing for their home page means rotation of photos – always different. Chris uses Bing as his home page because he loves their home page photos so much.

- Powerset does a semantic search rather than algorithmic. Different to other SE’s. Uses Freebase to gather data. If you drill down, it will give you options like Wikipedia on steroids – will go and semantic search ALL Wikipedia articles on a topic you search for – very powerful.

- Bing Maps – geolocation can be an issue (e.g. Thinks Chris is in Melbourne right now). But they do some things very well. Mapp Apps are very cool. What’s Nearby also good. Signs and Billboards etc.

- Bing has captured billions of data sources for travel sources and put them into searchable form. Based on historical data, Bing.com/travel can tell you things like when is the best time to buy a ticket to New York – when it’s cheaper etc. This is powerful stuff! Shows graphs and charts and heat maps to tell you costs of flights, accommodation etc. Unique to Bing.

Chris sees this as the way going forward. This type of travel data may get rolled out to retail, eg volume of sales etc.

Bing SearchRank – another new feature not yet available in Australia. Get an idea of what searches are popular right now, similar to Google Trends.

4) The Shiny New Disruptor

Wofram Alpha. It’s a new computational knowledge engine. Wolfram’s founder believes the complex world can be reduced to simple rules and those rules are computable.

- WA contains 10+ trillion pieces of data, 50K types of algorithms and models and linguistic data for 1000 languages.

- In WA, put in a mathematical problem and Google will shoot out an answer. But in WA, it will give you the ellipse, a visual definition of the calculation. Put in a chord search and it will come up with the scale visually, plus allow you to play it.

- Ask questions and WA will give you all the data you could ever wish for. People can type in things like “When will I die?” Scary answers. *10 peanut M&Ms* WA will respond with the dietary calories. *Who’s the fairest of them all”?* Snow White. They are obviously paying attention, as answer has changed since Chris first started asking it some months ago. *Am I drunk?* Will give you the alcohol percentages of common drinks.

Social Media

- love it or hate it, SM is huge.

- How big?

- Globally, 1 billion+ users wasting spending 2 billion minutes/month

- Share of global online time:

Facebook 16%

YouTube 9%

Google 5%

This is HUGE. If you’re SEOing for Google, you might want to rethink your priorities and start advertising on Facebook and YouTube.

Email’s not going away anytime soon, but stats show that Social Media is more popular with people. Email has flatlined in terms of time spent, while SM has gone to vertical curve.

Twitter

- 75% of Twitter’s traffic comes from APIs

- Twitter has become a *real* search engine

- Twitter has just announced monetization – “promoted Tweets”. Chris finds this disengenous, although he concedes it will probably be successful.

- Based on KW bids, ads will be displayed at top of search results

- Resonance reuqired (think Quality Score), based on retweets, replies, hashtags, clicked links etc. Searchers need to engage with the ads for them to maintain position – this is a Google approach. Makes sense given key staff are ex FeedBurner / Google staff.

- Third party distribution

- Twitter palns to expand program to it’s partners and then it will become massive.

- other options – Tweetup – contextual sponsored tweets displayed on  publisher sites, using a CPM model now with cost-per-click and cost-per-new-follower.

- TweetUp – is a new tool -the brainchild of GoTo.com’s founder. It’s a network of the world’s best tweeters. Response has been sceptical, but hey, the response to GoTo’s idea of PPC caused the same reaction in people.

Facebook

Chris says Facebook is here to stay. So many ways to reach people and the size of the audience is astonishing, he says. You can’t ignore Facebook. There are definitely ways to measure the impact of a Social Media campaign.

- If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

- lots of fertile options for marketers

- pages, apps, ads, polls,

- And analytics via Facebook Insights

If you’re looking for ways to leverage Facebook, try:

InsideFacebook.com
AllFacebook.com

One third of the people ON Facebook are interested in marketing on Facebook – encouraging. Chris says, if you’ve avoided SM until now? STOP and reconsider.

Real Time Search & SEO

- As real time search becomes more commonplace, it is displacing *traditional* search results

- Fundamental SEO is still important, but there are new opportunities to gain exposure thanks to real-time algos

- At it’s heart, Caffeine is an attempt to capture real time crawl. Larry Page is very impatient about this concept.

- Real time search impacts SEO in a huge, huge way. The algorithm has basically been re-written. Can’t do much right now except continue to use best-practice.

Personalization

- This will amplify things

- Personalization affects search results

- For text results, can’t do much

- However, opportunities to gain real estate via universal search are still good

- Think *digital asset optimization*

Chris says, don’t despair, these changes offer oppportunities for you to use them to your advantage. Because most people won’t be – now’s your chance.

Mobile Search

Chris says “Are we there yet?” YES we are. Tipping point has hit this year – mobile advertising has become popular with the advent of smart phones.

-mobile advertising is the new Point of Sale

- 5.8 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2013; 30% will be smartphone users (Portio Research)

- Mobile ad spend 2015

New Data from Morgan Stanley:

- Sometime between 2013 and 2014, there will be more mobile Internet uers than desktop PC users

- Growth of the iPhone happened at 11x the growth of Desktop Internet!

- These stats will impact Facebook users too obviously

- If you’re not already doing so – GO MOBILE NOW

- Little competition right now

- Go multi-mobile – see Cindy Krum’s article on Search Engine Land

- Consider optimizing your site for mobile search

- Use GPS based mobile apps to leverage your business e.g. 4Square, Gowalla, Placecast (GPS based advertising)

Video Marketing

- YouTube is second largest search engine right now

- Syndicate your videos widely

- Use video because your competitors probably aren’t

- Embed meta data, relevant titles & filenames

- Use appropriate on-page SEO

- Descriptive text

- Include your URLs in the video to encourage viral linking and viewing

A Huge Trend: Targeting

- Types of targeting include device / geographic / demographic / behavioral

Device Targeting

- GG, MS Yahoo

- Device platofrm tgt allows you to target your ads to PCs and iphones and others

Goegraphic Targeting

- GG, MS, Yahoo

- Language targeting occurs at country level or radius

- Also beningn, used to reach specific groups and exclude others

Demographic Targeting

- MS (full), YH (partial), Google (exploring options)

- Targeting ads based on age, gender, income etc.

- similar to direct mail, but uses data from volunteered information

- Can be problematic, especially on shared computers

Behavioural Targeting

- MS, YH, Google content only. Not search or Gmail

- Ads targeted based on online behavior (visits, pruchases, queries etc).

- Benefit = ads match interest closely

- Concern = privacy? What privacy?

Merging Online and Offline Data

- Exelate & Aperture pull data from Neilsen and other co’s to combine data with search behaviror

Opting out of Targeted Ads

- Google makes it kind of fun but not clear and hard to find

- MS uses legalese and it’s boring

- YH also makes it unclear and difficult to find

- You can opt out of 200 Ad networks by going to NAI (inc big ones)

Conclusion

- Web search has consolidated to few major players

- Good news – competition among majors has also increased, good for SEM and searchers

- Counterintuitive: Advertising may DECREASE as search engines continue to refine targeting options

Search Engine College tutor Micky Stuivenberg (@contentwriteroz) alerted me to the changes via Twitter – which she had been observing on Google Australia since midday today. Micky says she is seeing the following:

1) The radio button options that used to appear under the search box at Google.com.au to Search: *the web* or *pages from Australia* have disappeared.

2) A searcher’s default location now appears under the search box on the SERPs (Micky’s says Sydney although she is located on the NSW mid North coast). See this demonstrated in image 2 below.

3) On SERPs, the main search options that used to appear at the top of the page and are now also listed in a left hand navigation column:

• Everything (default)
• News
• Images
• Videos
• Maps
• Blogs
• Shopping
• Books
• More

These options appear to be dynamic, based on your user search preferences. You can filter the navigation to only display *blogs* for example.

3) Underneath that it has the option to search only pages from your region (a long way from the search box!)

4) Then there are 3 options to search results for

• Any time (default)
• Latest
• past 2 days

5) Then the standard view (default) with Wonder wheel.

6) At the bottom of the redesigned SERPs is a button for *More search tools*.

Here’s a couple of screen grabs of the changes:

A major difference is that all the above options are now displayed permanently on the SERPs, whereas before you had to click *show options* to see all of them. The changes can only be viewed on selected data-centers right now – I’m not seeing them yet so am grateful to Micky for the scoop!

I haven’t seen any posts about it on official Google blogs, although it may be related to the local search changes they announced recently.

I’ve only seen one other blog discussing the revisions so far, so I think it’s fair to call BREAKING on this one.

* images courtesy of @contentwriteroz and Softpedia

The deal will result in tweets appearing in Yahoo Search as well as other Yahoo properties such as the Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Sports. Yahoo will also integrate Twitter clients into their various applications so that Twitter users can tweet from within the Yahoo network.

The partnership announcement was delivered to media with an embargo, but within a few hours the story broke on the blogosphere and Yahoo pretty much gave the game away with the *clues* they posted on Twitter.

With a worldwide audience of 600 million, Yahoo offers Twitter significant exposure to add to their existing partnerships with the other major search giants Bing and Google.

Now keep your hands up if you’ve verified your site with Bing Webmaster Center? Oh dear.

Seems quite a few webmasters are concentrating on Google and forgetting about the other major search engines. If you want to understand how search engines interact with your site and find potential issues before they impact your traffic, you really need to verify your site and sitemaps with the big 3 and monitor your stats regularly.

Most people are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, but today I want to give you a brief overview of Bing Webmaster Center.

To add a site to Bing Webmaster Center, simply login to your Bing account (or create a new one) and then type in a URL and a sitemap if you have one. You will be prompted to verify your site via either a meta verification tag you place in your home page header, or an XML file that you upload to your server.

Once you’ve verified your first site, you’ll see a dashboard that looks quite similar to Google Webmaster Tools, with the following tabs:

• Summary – lists the date Bing last crawled your site, the number of indexed pages, your domain score and the top 5 pages of your site.
• Profile – lists your URL, the verification process you used and the email address associated with your site.
• Crawl Issues – lists any issues Bing discovered while crawling and indexing your site, such as 404 errors, malware infections and long dynamic URLs.
• Backlinks – lists which webpages (including your own) are linking to your site.
• Outbound Links – lists the web pages your site is linking to.
• Keywords – allows you to see how your pages are performing in search results for specific keywords.
• Sitemaps – provides various ways for you to notify MSNBot of new sitemaps or when you change an existing sitemap.

The following additional tools are available when you’re logged into Webmaster Center:

• Robots.txt validator
• HTTP verifier
• Keyword research tool

So don’t ignore Bing Webmaster Center. Remember that Google is NOT the Internet.

The exact implementation is yet to be announced, but will involve Yahoo shifting their organic and paid search operations to Microsoft. Yahoo will then display primary search results from Bing and enhance them with Yahoo content.

From Yahoo’s official press release:

“Implementation of the deal is expected to begin in the coming days and will involve transitioning Yahoo!’s algorithmic and paid search platforms to Microsoft, with Yahoo! becoming the exclusive relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers globally. Once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers through a platform that contains a larger pool of search queries.”

Advertising for both companies will be managed by Microsoft’s adCenter platform (meaning the closure of Yahoo Search Marketing) and prices for all search ads will be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process.

According to a memo sent to all Yahoo advertisers today:

• Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers will log into one place – Microsoft’s adCenter – to manage campaigns, for greater efficiency and a better ROI.
• Yahoo is hoping to transition advertisers and partners in the U.S. prior to October 2010, but may wait until 2011 for efficiency reasons.
• Advertisers will reach users on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites as well as other premium partner sites, with a single buy on adCenter.
• Yahoo will give Search Marketing advertisers 3 months warning of any changes to take place.

The two search giants have created a web site dedicated to the partnership and Yahoo has implemented a Transition Center for advertisers.

What does it mean for the search industry? To use a silly dinosaur analogy, (because who doesn’t like those?), it means that Bing the Triceratops and Yahoo the Brontosaurus have just combined to become an aggressive Tyrannosaurus Rex that’s going on a hunt for the Google Gigantosaurus.

Should be quite a spectacle.

Believe it or not, 2010 is our 10th year of publishing The Search Light. My, how things have changed in the search engine landscape since we published our first ever issue nearly 10 years ago.

This month’s newsletter includes an article about how to choose the most effective SEO keywords, written by Search Engine College Assistant Tutor, Micky Stuivenberg. It also contains some of the more interesting FAQs answered in this blog and a blurb about the upcoming Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Conference in Sydney.

If you’re not yet a newsletter subscriber catch it here and then quickly go and subscribe before I find out.

I have come across a company that guarantees placement in the top 7 of Google local business results within 60 days or they give the money back.  Does this sound kosher to you?

They charge a one-time set up fee of $50 and $49 a month.  Is there a way that you could tell me to do that?  I know they submit to a lot of search engines.  Is this a fraud?  The company is Geo Listing Service out of Las Vegas.

Thank you for your help.

Best,
Lois
————————————–

Hi Lois

It’s just a scam. You can get a site listed in Google Local for free by making sure your business is listed in Google Maps.

More info here:

Google Local Business Center

Google Maps Local Business Help

Just to wind ‘em up, ask this Vegas mob why you should pay for a service that’s provided free by Google and watch them back-pedal. Better still, share the results with us in the comments!

Called Twitter Local Trends, the new functionality gives users the option to set their regional location and view trending topics happening in their part of the world. For example, one of the screenshots pictured shows that the topic “Trafalgar Square” is trending for users that have United Kingdom set as their region (because it relates to a well known London icon), but not for users that have set their region to Worldwide.

At this stage, only seven countries and 15 cities in the US are available for selection (see screenshot below) but more will be added soon.

According to a post on Mashable, the feature has only rolled out to around 1 percent of Twitter users, but there’s nothing official on the Twitter Blog about it yet. I noticed it in my account this afternoon so I’m not sure if I’m part of the lucky 1 percent or whether it has rolled out to a larger audience since it went live this morning.

Regardless, when it does roll out to everyone, it will make a huge difference to how we use Twitter to target a regional audience. The benefits for geo-based mobile apps like Four Square and Gowalla should be immediately apparent. Add to that the ability to pinpoint regional trends in real time search and this becomes a social media game changer.

Everybody knows a business that is still sceptical about using Twitter. But when they see they have the power to follow and influence social media conversation in their specific target markets using Local Trends, I think even the sceptics could be convinced to start using Twitter as a full time marketing channel.