a useful little list of top factors for consideration in SEO.

Top Factors Affecting Positive Search Engine Rankings

The jury of search engine experts over at SEOMoz has weighed in, and here are the top factors affecting search engine placement, according to them, with my comments.

1. Keyword Use in Title TagI have said for many years that if I had a gun to my head, and could do only one thing to a web page to optimize it, my choice would be the title tag. Put your keyphrases in your title tag, and remember to optimize each page individually (i.e. don’t overstuff your title tag, and have different title tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page - otherwise, you may suffer from a duplicative content exclusion and find yourself in the supplemental results).

2. Keyword Use in Body TextDuh. If your keyword or keyphrase isn’t mentioned at least once in the body text of the web page, then it does not seem your page is very relevant to that keyphrase, now does it? But don’t get all caught up in the keyphrase density myth - there is no magic number of times it should appear. Make sense to readers, and it will make sense to the search engines.

3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)Google is smarter than you give them credit for, and just stuffing a keyphrase into a completely unrelated page won’t do you much, if any good. Your page should be on a topic which is semantically related to the keyphrase which you are targeting in your title tag.

4. Keyword Use in H1 TagOh, for years the naysayers have been telling me that H1 tag keyphrase use meant nothing and that I was an idiot for thinking otherwise. Well the verdict is in and this is the fourth most important factor according to the SEOMoz article. At this point, therefore, we have learned to put your keyphrase in your title tag, include it in your body text, which body text is topically or semantically related to the keyphrase, and head up the body text with an H1 containing the keyphrase.

5. Keyword Use in Domain NameThis is one that I disagree with. I have seen absolutely no evidence of this at all. Do a simple search on the internet for most any search term, and chances are the top results do not have the search query in the domain name. I believe this may have minor importance, but don’t go and change your domain because of it. Seriously, you have much more to lose (such as age of domain, inbound linkage, site reputation, etc.) I regularly see clients at the top of Google with domain names containing nothing near the relevant search terms.

6. Keyword Use in Page URLThis is what I have called “descriptive file naming” for a number of years. I believe it is of some importance, again, however, is more of a factor when setting up a new domain than would be for an existing domain with high pagerank and inbound linkage. Changing your internal url’s for the sole purpose of meeting this criterion again is very risky, for the same reasons mentioned above.

7. Keyword Use in H2, H3, H… TagsWell if it works for H1, why not for H2 et al.?

8. Keyword Use in ALT Attributes and Image TitlesSEOMoz incorrectly calls them an ALT tag, but it is not a tag, the ALT is an attribute of the IMG tag. Semantics aside, I believe this to be highly important, I would have ranked this above the URL and domain name items. Experience has shown me that image optimization (image file name, alt attribute, and title) is a wonderful way to make a page more relevant to a desired search query.

9. Keyword Use in Bold/Strong TagsI always use this method, as well as keyword use within the EM (italics) tag. I believe this to be a moderately important factor as it helps emphasize to Google what your page is about, and what you consider important. Definitely on my short list of things to do for “on page” search engine optimization.

10. Keyword Use in Meta Description TagAgain, one of my “big 4″ for on page optimization. The “big 4″ being: title tag, meta description, h1, and image ALT attributes. (I don’t include body text in my big 4 as I believe that is self evident). Definitely important, and again, each page should have custom title and meta description tags.

the fragmentation continues. hopefully the UK will follow suit and AOL will eventually decide to break away completely. the more the smaller providers continue to do this the less of a monopoly Google has and the better it is for people trying to survive in the market.

AOL Launches Private-Label AOL-Only Search Product
by Laurie Petersen, Monday, Apr 9, 2007

AOL TODAY LAUNCHES AOL SEARCH Marketplace, a private-label version of Google AdWords search allowing advertisers to place search ads only within the AOL network.
This marks the first time Google has allowed one of its partners to offer such a service. It is an expansion of a five-year strategic relationship between Google and AOL struck in December 2005 in which Google powered the contextual search ads found on the AOL service.
AOL Search Marketplace is designed to enhance the efforts of display advertisers on the AOL service, allowing it to offer deeper services and strengthen relationships with these advertisers, said Dariusz Pacsuski, vice president of search products for AOL Platforms. It has been tested with about 30 advertisers over the past five months.”
“We have found that there is a significant impact when search and display campaigns are coordinated,” said Mike Kelly, president of AOL Media Networks.
The service also gives AOL a better shot at getting some of the search advertising dollars that have gone to Google. AOL restructured to put a focus on a free ad-supported service last year, and has made online ad sales a top priority. AOL ad sales rose to nearly $2 billion in fourth-quarter 2006, up 49% over the previous year for the period.
“This brings what you can classify as a really strong second-tier player to the table,” said Stephen Chiles, COO of search marketing agency Reprise Media. “Anytime you can get diversity beyond the big three, that’s certainly a positive.”
“You can certainly hope that there will potentially be less spam since it’s a syndicated Google,” added Chiles, a former AOL executive.
Still, the service can only be viewed as a supplemental play because of the AOL volume, he said. According to comScore Media Metrix, AOL has 111 million monthly unique visitors, and search drew 311 million queries in February. Its latest public filing pegged the number of paying AOL domestic subscribers at 13.18 million.
AOL also announced two other search enhancements launching today. AOL Local Search is now in beta incorporating technology from MapQuest. It combines information from AOL’s CityGuide with geotargeted advertising to make it easy to find a location and get reviews of local businesses, restaurants and more.
A new AOL Shopping and Commerce Search is resulting from a partnership with PriceGrabber.com to provide a comparison shopping search experience.

A useful little list of video search providers.

Search Innovation Spotlight: Video Search
by Bob Heyman, Friday, April 6, 2007

THIS MONTH’S spotlight falls on video search.
While Google and Yahoo offer this service, smaller companies are also making a stir.

Blinkx is a category leader in dedicated video search. The Blinkx technology combines voice recognition with image and contextual analysis. The company has a partnership with Microsoft to power the video search on MSN and Live.com. Blinkx claims the deal made it the “single biggest video search engine on the Web.” Blinkx already powers video search on AOL, Lycos, Times Online and other major sites. It also indexes video clips from around the Web and allow users to search them on Blinkx.com and partner sites.
Here are several other competitors:

Flurl is a Belgium-based video search firm in which Brad Greenspan, the founder of MySpace, has acquired a majority stake. Flurl claims to be the “leading independent video search engine.” In addition to video, Flurl also indexes images, audio and flash content.

SearchVideo is a video search engine and directory created by AOL that lets you search for videos by categories and relevance. Users can also search within specific video channels like MySpace and YouTube. SearchVideo classifies videos according to 10 general categories. It has a feature that allows users to filter videos by cost, length, quality and format.

PureVideo is a video search engine that enables users to search within the most popular video directories and video sharing sites. It also provides a celebrity video directory. Every search result has its own RSS feed, and you can track its status through any feed readers.
Singingfish is a video and audio search engine that enables searches within hundreds of online video channels and video-sharing sites. It allows users to search videos by format and length, and also save search results and email them to friends. There’s also a safe search filter available to block adult content.

ClipRoller allows you to search across the most popular video sites — and as you continue to log in and search for videos, ClipRoller learns your preferences to deliver content that you would like. It also allows you to easily syndicate a video to any other Web site. There is also a ClipRoller ticker to search for your favorite videos from the desktop.

Users of Pixsy can search across dozens of video sites and can save searches and single videos to watch again. Pixsy displays a description of the content of each video, when available, and enables emailing search results.

this subject interests me greatly. with the knowledge the big computer games suppliers are gethering about users through the online gamng networks ads have the potential to be highly targetted to the user. they also have a much higher visibility than other forms of advertising and a higher engagement time. with the right platform this is a massive industry and one which will take off even more in the next 12 months.

Let the Games Begin Advertising! APRIL 6, 2007

Video games are getting down to business.
The practice of using video games as an advertising vehicle is as old as the games industry itself. Early Sega racing games for the Atari 2600 console featured Marlboro display ads on the raceway, and high-profile early-’90s titles such as Zool and the FIFA International series contained ads for Chupa Chups and Adidas, respectively.
But the games are changing.

“In-game advertising will evolve in scope and sophistication, offering new platforms for marketers, new business opportunities for technology providers and vital revenue for game developers, who have struggled with the escalating production costs of increasingly complex games,” says eMarketer Senior Analyst Paul Verna. “eMarketer estimates that over the next five years video game advertising will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%, reaching nearly $2 billion by 2011.”

Looking at the US market alone, eMarketer predicts that in-game advertising will reach $969 million in the same time period.

Of this total, a significant percentage will come from “advergames,” video games created as marketing tools, usually with brand awareness as the central objective. In 2006, US advergaming spending is estimated at $164 million, and this figure is expected to rise to $344 million by 2011.

The factors driving the growth of video game advertising include:
Growth of the video game industry overall
Increasing realization among advertisers that games are a viable way to reach their targets
Broadening of the gaming demographic to include older gamers and women
More games that favor online advertising, such as casual games, online games, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and third-generation console games with an online connectivity
Proven success of the advergaming model
“As the in-game advertising industry evolves,” says Mr. Verna, “game developers, console manufacturers, advertisers and technology providers are experimenting with new approaches that leverage the shifting demographics of the gaming population.”

Google’s Gargantuan Footprint
by Gord Hotchkiss, Thursday, April 5, 2007

A RECENT blog post by Anil Batra, formerly from Revenue Science, speculates that Google will soon be getting into behavioral targeting. Another post by A-list blogger Robert Scoble indicates that Google may be dialing down the presentation of sponsored ads for certain queries. Combine this with a few conversations I’ve had recently with Googlers, and it seems the company is already setting its sights beyond the search results page when it comes to revenue generation. One starts to get a sense of the footprint that Google is planning to put down on the future online landscape.
Getting Personal, One User at a Time
To me, the glue that holds all this together is Google’s move towards personalization. If the company can get that piece of the puzzle right, everything else falls into place behind it. And personalization moves Google beyond search into a lot of other applicable areas: the Google homepage, G-mail, Google News, desktop gadgets, to name just a few.
One of the issues I have with Google’s move towards personalization is that it stops short of really providing additional value to the average user. If personalization works well, it significantly enhances our search experience by providing relevancy unique to us. The signals that Google is watching to power the personalization algorithm are very much the same ones it would need to watch to introduce behavioral targeting of advertising messages. It’s all about the sites that people visit, the search results that they click on and the path they take online. If Google can use all these signals to help enhance the search results, it’s not that big a leap to be able to target messaging through its AdSense network on the sites you visit.
Google Everywhere You Turn
The key to all this for Google is ubiquity online. It need to be everywhere and it’s rapidly approaching that goal. While the pick-up on things like Gmail may not have been the runaway success that everyone was expecting, Google is beginning to offer enough online touch points to provide continuous interaction opportunities for any given individual prospect. Consider the touch points Google already controls. First, three out of every five searches that are launched online, anywhere, happen on Google, according to Hitwise. That’s 60% of hundreds of millions of searches daily, and that alone gives Google a virtual vice grip on the traffic channels of the Internet.
Next is Google’s AdSense network. Although it has not publicly disclosed how many sites are in this network, it’s estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
And then there’s Google’s toolbar. In a recent survey we found that about 42% of the participants we interviewed had the Google toolbar installed. In its full implementation, it tracks every single site you visit and streams this information back to Google servers somewhere.
Add to this the various other Google properties and tools you may interact with. This could include Gmail or a Google personal homepage, Google gadgets installed on your desktop, Google Checkout, Google Blog Reader, to name just a few. And that list keeps growing.
Finally, there’s Google analytics. One of the smartest moves that Google has done is introduce Google Analytics as a backend tool, free to Webmasters. The question is, why would Google offer a fairly robust analytics package free? The answer is that it gives the company a tremendous amount of data on the backend to supplement what it’s already collecting on the front end through click stream tracking. This closes the loop, giving Google two views of a massive dataset and allowing extrapolation from those two views.
BT High on Advertisers’ Wish List
When you add all these touch points together, you have the capability of driving the largest consumer-centric behavioral network in existence. And there’s an appetite for this ability to pinpoint precisely. In the last SEMPO market survey, advertisers indicated that behavioral targeting was their preferred option, with 78% of them willing to pay a premium for it. If you could offer advertisers the ability to present progressive messaging, tied to consumers’ movement through the buying cycle, with the ability to intercept them not just at the search results page but at various information sites where they would be gathering more information, you would have an extremely effective net in which to capture prospects.
The challenge for Google is to present behaviorally targeted advertising in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience. And this is likely the only sticking point standing between the search engine and the more aggressive rollout of behavioral targeting for advertisers. My suspicion is that work is currently underway on the technologies that would allow Google to always present the right message at the right time to the right person. There is a distinct danger in trying to push that too soon. It’s one of those things you have to get at least 70% right out of the gate. But if Google can do this, it’s a distinct win both for advertisers and consumers. We don’t mind advertising when it’s relevant to our needs. We only hate the stuff that gets in our way and keeps us from doing what it is we want to do.
Why Google Can Afford to Dial Back Search Ads
And this brings us to why Google can afford to experiment with dialing back the presentation of sponsored ads on the search results page. A few conversations with different Googlers seem to indicate that its future focus is definitely on the advertising network, rather than the search results page. If it can get the right message/right place/right time/right person equation nailed down, it can monetize traffic much more efficiently and further improve the user experience.
The key for Google, at least on the search results page, is keeping that top-of-page real estate highly relevant. The fact is, over 50% of all the clicks on the page are going to happen on the first three or four listings, whether they’re sponsored or organic. Another fact is that we don’t mind a mix of highly relevant sponsored and organic links at the top of the page, but we do mind having nothing but sponsored ads in the top four Golden Triangle locations. Our tolerance for this advertising drops like a rock with the lessening of relevance in the ads presented. If personalization and behavioral targeting would allow Google to further tweak the relevance of these ads and get it right more often, the monetization naturally jumps dramatically.
In our last eye tracking study we found that Google was the most efficient at monetizing traffic to the search results page in the long term. Although Microsoft and Yahoo were more aggressive in presenting ads in the top real estate, Google managed to maintain its click-through rates on both first time and subsequent visits to the same page of results.
Given the possible paths that Google could pursue (and the huge revenue-producing opportunities that lie down those paths) perhaps its mission statement should change from organizing the world’s information to always presenting prospects with the right marketing message at the right time. This certainly aligns better with its recent moves into every marketing channel imaginable.

Excellent articel highlighted the impact of personalisation of search on the SEO market place. Come interesting observations I had not before considered.

The Impact ofPersonalization on SEO
By Claudia Bruemmer

Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google’s widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers’ attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:
You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).
You could get automatic personalization from your search history.
Major Changes at SiteProNews: The SiteProNews website no longer reflects the content of the SiteProNews newsletter. The website has a completely new look, provides keyword and category search and offers more article content as well as dynamically changing webmaster blog and news feeds. New features and sections will be added in the coming weeks. Be sure to visit and bookmark the new SiteProNews website.
Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don’t wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.
To quote Danny Sullivan, “…anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History — Personalized Search — Personalized Homepage.” In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.
Widespread Personalization
We don’t know for sure how rapidly search personalization will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an íncrease in the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored results.
These findings can likely be generalized to search users because the information required for search personalization is less intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in the survey.
Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners
Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the “stickiest” content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user’s previous history.

In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to clíck through.
You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offër users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.
Implications for SEO
Increased personalization in search results has obvious implications for anyone performing search engine optimization since search results will now differ from user to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will show a change in ranking positions between personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this effect and found that results for personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data, will become extremely important again.
Rank Checking
The area most affected in the search optimization process is rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue January/February 2007 states, “Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking”. Moran also asserts, “It’s the biggest change in search marketing since paid search.”
Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank checking process because site rankings will differ based on users’ idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will force a change in search engine optimization techniques. Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to identify the leading competitors because all search results will differ.

Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors.
The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine the relative importance and influence of multiple factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for optimization.
In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners more accurate readings of how their client’s Web pages compare to their competitors’ pages, and the result will be more accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence
In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what’s working and what’s not for a site’s strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client’s site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.
New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client’s position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.
In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client’s content, the competitors’ content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.
It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.

Wow! Miva must have cut their own throats to get this deal!

Miva Beats Google, Yahoo to Land Conde Nast U.K. Account
30th March 2007

Online ad network Miva has won the pay-per-click account of Conde Nast Interactive U.K., besting Yahoo and incumbent Google, writes paidContent.
The agreement covers all 12 Conde Nast U.K. sites, including Vogue.com, GQ.com, Glamourmagazine.com, CNtraveller.co.uk, Vanityfair.co.uk and the newly launched, Stylefinder.com. The total volume of page impressions of these 12 sites exceeds 54 million per month.
Six Miva PPC ads will be displayed across every page of the 12 sites through ad units at the bottom of the page, according to Miva. The implementations will include advertisers’ logos, and the ads will be targeted using both the content of the page they appear on and the demographic of the site users. All implementations will be un-branded and designed to mirror the design style of the individual Conde Nast properties.
In addition to ads on Conde Nast’s U.K. websites, Miva’s ads will be embedded in 500,000 opt-in emails sent daily, weekly or every two weeks, depending on the newsletters’ publication schedule, to Conde Nast Interactive’s email subscribers.

Not rocket science but puts forward some interesting points. This is what I have believed and have told clients for a while. There is no sense in managing PPC and SEO as seperate entities when they are formed from the same model. Also this becomes even more prevelant as the paid search engines all revert to a qulity scoring system which accounts for landing pages in the same way as the natural search algorithms.

Yes, Co-managed PPC And SEO Campaigns Work

by Rob Garner, Wednesday, March 28, 2007
IN LATE February we released our Search Synergy Report, which demonstrates that there is indeed a lift in search campaigns that have both a paid and natural search component. These findings support similar studies presented by SEO-PR and Yahoo/Nielsen ReelResearch on the exponential benefits of and lift from holistically managed search campaigns.
The study sought to answer the following question: “Does running a natural search campaign and a paid search campaign together create more value than running them in a non-integrated manner?” In the end, the evidence revealed that the answer to this question is an overwhelming yes.
Among the findings, the report shows:
A causal relationship between paid and natural was confirmed, and the results were significantly positive. These happy results came when running paid and natural search in a cohesive, integrated manner, particularly when visibility was maximized for a particular keyword in both the paid and natural sections of a search engine results page. We also confirmed other eye-tracking and holistic research studies that reveal the dynamic interplay between paid and natural results on the search engine results pages, and that search is not an either/or proposition.
One plus one equals three. Not only did the research show that positive results increased (to the effect of appearing twice) but there was also extra lift from the additional visibility.
Running natural and paid search together (versus running them alone) in an integrated manner will drive superior results for branding and lead generation. When appearing in both natural and paid search for the same keyword impression, clicks lifted 92 percent, actions lifted 45percent, orders lifted 45 percent, page views lifted 44 percent, visitors increased by 41 percent, and time on site increased by 40 percent.
Natural search optimization is one of the strongest tactics for increasing paid search performance. Imagine that your paid copy is so tweaked so that it can be tweaked no more; your call-to-action has been massaged to entice clicks that exceed industry standards; and your sophisticated ROI measurement tools show that position 2.4 is the sweet spot for the highest conversion rate. So where do you go from there? The research indicates that while natural presence creates overall click lift, it can also create overall paid search lift. If your paid terms are converting, then a tactic for increasing those high converting clicks is increasing natural search visibility.
So how do these findings impact holistic search strategies?
Look to high performance keywords in paid search, and begin optimizing for these terms in natural search. If all copy and paid rank optimization has been maxed out for conversion performance, the next logical step is to increase visibility on the natural SERP for that keyword to attain additional click share. Impressions are relatively finite, so increasing page visibility in natural search is a sensible way to maximize the potential for high-converting terms.
Look for high performance keywords in your natural results, and ensure that these terms are added to paid campaigns. If you want to get more of a good thing, maximize your visibility on the page for that term, including adding the term to paid results. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to bid aggressively to maximize visibility and conversions. Get in the paid game for high converting terms, and find your ROI comfort zone, whether it’s at no.1, no.3 or no.6.
Increase natural presence; decrease paid spend. For certain types of ROI goals, particularly those running on leaner margins, it may be very sensible to reduce PPC bids once high natural visibility is achieved. If you are bottoming out in paid search every month, and lack a significant natural presence, it would be worthwhile to add a significant natural search component, and then tweak positions in PPC accordingly to effectively increase ROI.
Consider defensive brand term strategies. Note that neglecting holistic strategies could let high-performance clicks go somewhere else. In other words, being exclusively in paid search or natural search means that there is some click attrition. The best way to reduce click attrition is to be as highly visible in the SERP as possible, and your two basic choices are paid and natural placements.
Consider addressing multiple search intentions between paid and natural listings: If you find that paid search generates more ROI at the point of conversion and is generally more commercial in presentation, this could be countered with more informational content ranking highly in natural results. Brand visibility is attained in both areas of the page, but the discerning searcher would have two content options from the same query that meets multiple intentions at varying stages of the “funnel” process.

Yahoo appear to be gearing themselves up to be at the forefront of mobile search marketing when the predicted “boom” occurs. The articel is right in its statements that this is one area Yahoo could steal a march on Google and this may be exactly what they are trying to do.


Yahoo Launches Mobile Advertising Network
Mar 27th
Yahoo is expected to announce today that it is creating a mobile advertising network geared to cell phones. The service will allow marketers to place ads both on Yahoo’s mobile services and on those of other publishers.
Yahoo’s network of publishers consists, for now, of three web services: MobiTV (a video service to be used with cell phones); Opera, a maker of web browsers; and Go2, a Yellow Pages site, the New York Times writes. But Yahoo plans to quickly expand its network over the next few months.
Yahoo’s mobile ad network will focus on publishers and advertisers, groups essential to the success of the mobile internet. By summer, Yahoo will begin delivering text, display and video advertising on third-party mobile websites, according to Steve Boom, Yahoo SVP for broadband and mobile.
Yahoo has been aggressively pursuing the mobile market and in January began promoting its new mobile search software called oneSearch, which allows users to find information such as sports scores and weather reports without having to scroll through a long list of sites.
Yahoo has fallen behind Google in internet search. But Kevin Heisler, an analyst at Jupiter Research, says “one area where Google has not outshined Yahoo is mobile search.”