MyYahoo vs iGoogle:

As most of us are aware, Google offers you your own personalized iGoogle homepage once you are logged into your Google account. Just the same, Yahoo offers MyYahoo! personalized homepage once logged into your Yahoo account. Over the past few weeks, Yahoo has made big changes to their MyYahoo page to strongly resemble iGoogle’s features and tools. Seems almost apples to apples at first glance. However, Yahoo seems to have made their layout a little more functional, user friendly, and are working on adding even more social networking capabilities such as message boards.

Even more so, Yahoo allows you to customize both the color of your page (or theme if you wish), column layout of your page, and a feature to add further pages. As I am aware Google has all but one of these features, Yahoo seems to push the envelope with their design and easy to find “share this page” buttons. Yahoo earns 1 up on the fun factor here.

iGoogle focuses on a clean layout, few theme selections, and allows you to get down to business with what you want on your page. The tools are mostly provided by outside sources. You can integrate your Google calendar, news, and other various categories. Just looking at the popular categories to select from, we can tell the tools are for a more mature audience. Google earns 1 up on the Business factor.

Yahoo Features vs Google Features

Yahoo focuses more and more on the kids and teens (elementary/junior high)

- Yahoo 360
- Yahoo Games
- Yahoo Music
- Yahoo Kids (Yahooligans)

Google pulls in the older crowd (high school/college) with features such as:

- Scholar search
- Book Search
- News Search

Yahoo ask’s the audience, while Google gathers the facts from reliable resources. As much as reliability outweighs ‘he said she said’ answers, Yahoo answers has grown amazingly large and comes to the top for searches dealing with the question being asked.

So what have we learned today? Yahoo is fun and Google gets the job done.

How can we use this information to help out SEO/SEM?

SEO should be focused towards the target audience, and as we understand, each  search engine targets a specific audience. Have a client that is selling children’s toys? Get them set up with a PPC campaign through Yahoo. Have a client wanting to obtaining leads for car sells? Google is the way to go.

There are an abundant amount of online marketers that push clicks and traffic as being a buying factor into their services. The line I use all too often is that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Horses are one thing, but when you start leading animals down to the watering hole that don’t naturally drink from them, conversions are 99 times harder to come by. This is why target marketing is so important in todays online industry.

Not only will target marketing be the soul driving factor of the search engines in the near future (I suspect within the next 3 years), it is also the easiest way to grab your audience and sell them on your purpose.

Social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are making it easier than ever before to create our own little sections and leach off it’s pre-defined juice (or users rather).

Recently I created a Mypsace profile for BestPartyEver.com to bring in targeted traffic. With BPE being it’s own social network for party goers, vendors, and event planners; what better audience to target than those already apart of a social network?

With this in mind, I also thought about the possibilities that Myspace already offers. Myspace has groups for users interested in different areas. Groups are probably one of the easiest places to scrounge around and dig up potential traffic. Since BPE is for parties, we can focus on the groups planning weddings, baby showers, army wifes, food vendors, and party/event planners.

Taking it a step beyond adding friends to our newly created Myspace, I added a list of services that we offered. This is to funnel the Myspace visitors to our BestPartyEver.com page.

Of course after users are so kindly to add us to their Myspace page, I have to thank them. What a better way than to create “comment stickers” or banners to lay out the basics of what BPE can provide to them as an individual. All comment stickers should focus on our groups for a more personal touch. Those planning a wedding will get “Plan your wedding with BPE,” and those holding a baby shower will get “Celebrate the birth of your baby using BPE” and the like.

Putting in the extra care to market a target audience per the individual’s wants and needs is a surefire way to not only increase your traffic, but your conversions as well.

We are now approaching the end of 2007, and boy are times changing. There are enough online social networks, blogs, and user feedback sites to make your head spin. You can no longer just be “on” the internet; you have to be “in” the internet. Many markets are falling behind, as the ones that jumped on board when the internet first started or soon there after, and kept abreast of the changing online market, are striving to the top.

Within the last 6-7 months alone, SEO services took a leap up the ladder. No longer can an SEO specialist manage 50 accounts, we are cut down to10 max to give each client the understanding and dedication they deserve for their services. SEO/SEM packaged contracts dwindled down and we now must customize them per clients need. Prices have gone up as more time is needed to receive well rounded desired results, and hourly pricing is necessary to keep businesses afloat. Now we must focus on details details details. There is always more to come, so sit tight and keep focused on your target market, your niche, what they use, and who you are. That is the key, has been the key, and will always be the key, to online success.

How about also taking into consideration plain text URL’s that lack the link? There are billions of those lying around the internet giving back no creditability what so ever. These plain text links would be easy to detect with adding a small algorithm to their “spiders”. How hard can it possibly be to pick up on http:// and www and recognize that it is being a reference, or has importance, to the article?

As website owners, we don’t have much say so in how our website is being referenced. Great back links are being left out of the mix because online newspapers and journals are not here to feed your websites food to the search engines. Sometimes if you ask kind enough, high authority sites will allow you to pick your anchor text. Other than that, you are losing out on some great juice you naturally earned.

All I’m saying is give all links, even the little ones, a chance to make an impression for website rankings. There’s a lot of lost juice out there!

3 letter domain names go for hundreds and thousands of dollars. A domain name! If I jumped on this when domain names first started, I would be swimming in cash. The good ones are being eaten up faster than I can type this. Domain names are huge when it comes to marketing and branding a company. Are domain names important? They sure the hell are. It’s the final stamp on your branding endeavor.

So yesterday I began to ponder something. Myspace is huge right? More and more companies are joining this online social network to build a reputation and clientele. You sometimes see commercials with a URL at the bottom of the screen telling you to visit their Myspace URL (i.e. myspace.com/companyname). We have also heard DJs on the radio spout off to listeners asking to friend them on their Myspace. Small companies keep their client base going, while also expanding it, by using Myspace to run contest and give away prizes (http://myspace.com/tshirthell). Bands, mainstream and underground, both use Myspace to expand and connect. Large companies advertise movies on Myspace as well (http://myspace.com/spiderman, http://myspace.com/simpsonsmovie)

Alright that’s enough explaining to get down to my final point:

Are Myspace URL’s going to be worth something in the future? Think about it. You can make your Myspace URL whatever you’d like. There’s really no limit.

Here are the top taken Myspace URL’s that I discovered while brainstorming:

http://myspace.com/cocacola
http://myspace.com/sprite
http://myspace.com/ford
http://myspace.com/toyota
http://myspace.com/ipod
http://myspace.com/apple
http://myspace.com/iphone
http://myspace.com/realestate
http://myspace.com/superbowl
http://myspace.com/doritos
http://myspace.com/pepsi

Smart guys who got in early:

http://myspace.com/microsoft
http://myspace.com/spiderman
http://myspace.com/simpsonsmovie
http://myspace.com/mattcutts

Let me know if you find anyone else on the smart guy list. I could be here all day searching for top names. So what I’m wondering is if these goobers we are seeing on these Myspace pages are our future domain name selling “thousand-airs.”

I don’t know about you, but I think I could be on to something.

Most internet users don’t enjoy signing up for services to receive the information/data they are seeking. Placing personal information out there, no matter whether it is a simple email address or your name, is no fun for anyone. Paying for information is no fun either.

I was doing a quick search the other day, looking for salary information and company surveys for Bear Stearns & Co. when I came across Vault.com. Because Vault.com gives you raw facts from submitted surveys and reviews, I was quite curious to see what they were surveys referenced in regards to working for Bear Stearns & Co. Vault will give you a little snap shot into the submitted survey and then leave you hanging if you want to “read more.”

If you want to read more you must subscribe. Not just subscribe as a standard member, but you must be a GOLD member to read the surveys. Yeah. Pay up buddy.

All I could think to myself was “that sucks” and I almost by-passed the juicy office drama (or surveys as you’d like to call them), when I realized that there might be a back way into these pages by using search. I mean, they may be indexed right?

So as easy as it was, I went on Ask.com to use their search. “bear stearns vault.com” and I was already off to a good start with my results.

In the Ask.com search results, it allowed me to “view more results from vault.com” which I found quite nifty; so I took a peek. To my astonishment, I was viewing the results of the lovely surveys I was after with a direct link into their back end.

No signing up, no information required. I was in the vault!

That just shows you how knowing how to search can save you time and money. I broke into the Vault using Ask.com. I simulated these same results using Google, but it took a little more search criteria to get there.

The web is truly another world of its own. “You” on the web are different than you away from the computer screen. This is because the web sucks you in and opens you up to a whole new portal of people and personalities; which allows you to expand your own. So are you more yourself on the web, or off the web?

We can even change (and most of us do without realizing it) who we are on the web. I am quite shy in a crowd, even a bit anxiety ridden, but when I’m on the web, nothing can stop me. I’m quite fierce and outspoken in my own little online world. I tell all fairly freely.

Online social networking websites allow us to interact with each other in ways we never thought possible 5 years ago. Beyond the chat rooms, beyond simple email between friends and family, online social networks give us a way to debate with others, express our opinions, and be more open about our beliefs.

We can even find out more about ourselves by socializing with others like us on the internet. Special interest websites and social networking groups allow us to interact with others that have the same religious beliefs, diseases, health issues, job industry fields, demographic regions, interests, etc. More and more, we interact online with others and find ourselves sucked into this other dimension. We open up to those we hardly know, expressing our most secretive, deepest and darkest self beings.

Online users do this because they feel their information is somehow kept private. Keyboard and screen keep us from feeling tracked or violated in any way. Actually a sense of freedom is felt while browsing around the net.

Not everybody knows that their information is being tracked. And even if they do, they are lightly conditioned to be OK with the fact that our information is out there to be tracked by anyone who wants it. Why? Because we are already open to the thought of web personality, interaction, and search.

Google picks apart your brain.

Again: Since we are so open with each other on the net, this allows search engines to track who we are (demographics, gender, age, interests, etc.).

The search engine that tracks us the most is obviously Google. Beyond our general search (even though the General search statistics are tracked too), if we have set up any type of account with Google, our online search activity is being tracked to properly display SERPs that will pertain to our specific liking. Good ol’ Google helped us find that specialized social network we are now apart of.

Just like with a psychologist, the more they know you, and the more you tell them about yourself, the better they can help diagnose you. Proper therapy or medication (or in our case search results) can be administered.

Many search engine optimization and marketing specialists fear this change, as it will be harder to ‘game’ the search engines to provide them top rankings that result in more traffic. However, by search engines being more in-tune with each individual user, they will be able to display more accurate results, which in turn provide better conversions. These changes will actually make my job a little easier.

For the most part, we wont have to target demographically related keywords. Google will already know its users demographic location, age group, special interest, and past search conversions.

How can this necessarily be a bad thing? The future of Google excites me actually. This means going beyond marketing, beyond user function and click troughs, beyond funneling a user to purchase a service or product.

We are going to need to understand our potential users reason for possibly coming to the website to convert them. I just hope Google makes these statistics readily available in our Analytics. This way we can continue to provide clients with the most accurate analysis (demographics, gender, age, common interests, etc.) for their website.

So go ahead and take over the brains of all us Google guppies, analyze what we’re into, and give us the results we want.

I was doing a simple keyword analysis for a client of mine when I came across something I have never seen before in Google. I know they toy around with the supplemental results, I know there have been rumors of them selling organic placement, but this didn’t fall into either of those categories.

What I found was that instead of using a suggested keyword list for my searched term as normally done, they provided me with an ‘inset’ second list of SERPs distinguished with “See results for: equity apartments” as shown below.

When I scrolled over the link to discover the link’s path, it was clear that Google is carefully tracking the click through for the input suggested SERPs. At first I thought maybe Google was selling the placement for keywords relating to my original terms. But it seemed unlikely, as they were clearly marked as being keywords I was not searching for.

So I then viewed the SERPs for equity apartments, and found out that the 3 placed SERPs were ranked the top 3 in their correct order as viewed using “equity management” SERPs.

When I scrolled over these results, thinking that maybe Google got rid of the sponsored section look to make everything flow, I noticed the links without the Google tracking. So the input links were the top 3 SERPs for their designated keyword.

This still boggles me a bit. I was reading a Sphinn article by Kimber Cook how Craigslist was stealing her clients Google rankings, and now I feel that Google is stealing my Google rankings. In this case, it narrows down the 1st pages results to displaying only 7 results pertaining to the originally suggested keywords. The spots with the highest lead conversions (SERPs 3-6), are being replaced with other semi relevant suggestions.

I would love to know how readers of this article feel about this discovery. Anyone know what’s going on?

Melinda Roberts

obu Web Technologies, Phoenix Search Engine Optimization