This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

Back when I was a kid, the internet wasn’t around.  I mean, it had been developed and all that, but it wasn’t accessible to us “regular” folks yet.  So, aside from a newscast here or there about his whereabouts, I just had to believe that he would make it to my house that night.  I couldn’t obsessively see where he had already visited and track his path.

Kids today are so lucky!  Now, just by doing a simple search, they can find tons of Santa Trackers at their disposal!  When I typed “Santa Claus” into Bing and Google, it actually suggested “Santa Claus tracker”.  Check out some of these cool sites and enjoy!

Santa Update

NORAD Tracks Santa

Santa Radar

I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  Thank you so much for tuning in this month to our Internet Marketing Advent Calendar.

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 23 – Is Blogging and Social Media New or Retro?
• Dec. 22 – This is NOT My Predictions Post
• Dec. 21 – Santa’s Helper Keyword Quick Tip # 2: Google’s Wonder Wheel
• Dec 20 – The Top 10 Searches of 2009
• Dec. 19 – It is OK to be a Person, Especially When Blogging
• Dec. 18 – New Toy from Google
• Dec. 17 – 2010 SEO Predictions
• Dec. 16 – Bing Shows Love to iPhone Users With Free App
• Dec. 15 – Your Charlie Brown Social Media Strategy
• Dec. 14 – A gift to you from Seth Godin
• Dec. 13 – Is Google Real Time Search Naughty or Nice?
• Dec. 12 – Santa’s Little Helper Quick Tip: Finding Long Tail Keywords
• Dec. 11 – LinkedIn, the Velveteen Rabbit of Social Media Websites
  
• Dec. 10 – Protecting Your Content
• Dec. 9 – Don’t Forget the Milk & Cookies (Good Content)
• Dec. 8 – Google Makes it (Even More) Personal
• Dec. 7 – Customer Service and Marketing
• Dec. 6 – Social Media Didn’t Invent Criticism
• Dec. 5 – Email is the frosting to your gingerbread house
• Dec. 4 – Is Google Caffeine on Your Holiday Wish List?
• Dec. 3 – Don’t Forget to Make Your Title Tags and Check ‘Em Twice
• Dec. 2 – Your Mobile Website
• Dec. 1 – Your Holiday Card List (Your Network)

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• Dec. 23 – Is Blogging and Social Media New or Retro?
• Dec. 22 – This is NOT My Predictions Post
• Dec. 21 – Santa’s Helper Keyword Quick Tip # 2: Google’s Wonder Wheel
• Dec 20 – The Top 10 Searches of 2009
• Dec. 19 – It is OK to be a Person, Especially When Blogging
• Dec. 18 – New Toy from Google
• Dec. 17 – 2010 SEO Predictions
• Dec. 16 – Bing Shows Love to iPhone Users With Free App
• Dec. 15 – Your Charlie Brown Social Media Strategy
• Dec. 14 – A gift to you from Seth Godin
• Dec. 13 – Is Google Real Time Search Naughty or Nice?
• Dec. 12 – Santa’s Little Helper Quick Tip: Finding Long Tail Keywords
• Dec. 11 – LinkedIn, the Velveteen Rabbit of Social Media Websites
  
• Dec. 10 – Protecting Your Content
• Dec. 9 – Don’t Forget the Milk & Cookies (Good Content)
• Dec. 8 – Google Makes it (Even More) Personal
• Dec. 7 – Customer Service and Marketing
• Dec. 6 – Social Media Didn’t Invent Criticism
• Dec. 5 – Email is the frosting to your gingerbread house
• Dec. 4 – Is Google Caffeine on Your Holiday Wish List?
• Dec. 3 – Don’t Forget to Make Your Title Tags and Check ‘Em Twice
• Dec. 2 – Your Mobile Website
• Dec. 1 – Your Holiday Card List (Your Network)

This is an entry in our daily Internet Marketing Advent Calendar series. Each day your favorite marketing elves Kasi and Amanda will focus on a new topic to get your internet marketing in order before the start of the new year.

As we’re looking ahead to the new year, it’s also tradition to recap the year that is coming to a close.  What’s the best way to remember what was on the collective minds of the US in 2009?  With the top 10 searches in Google, Yahoo, and Bing, of course!

What Does this Mean?

Basically, the long and the short of it is that Yahoo! will use Bing’s search engine to supply organic search results. Pay-Per-Click ads that appear on Yahoo’s search engine results pages are going to be powered by Microsoft’s paid search platform, AdCenter. In return, Yahoo! will use their data and technology in other areas of the search business, including enhancing its display advertising technology. Both companies will maintain their own separate advertising and sales teams.

Let’s Look at the Numbers

Google scored 65% of the total US searches in June. Yahoo! came in just under 20% and Bing’s slice of the search pie was 8.4%. Together, the two underdogs don’t account for even half of Google’s share, but it’s still a step closer in rivaling the giant. “They should be worried,” Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, said of Google. “It’s going to give Microsoft in one fell swoop a much bigger share of the search market.”

Will There Be Much of a Change?

At this point so early in the game, it’s unclear whether or not Yahoo! and Microsoft will be able to greatly increase their current combined market share. There still needs to be some sort of driving force to steer people away from using Google. In my opinion, I’m not sure it can be done. I used Google to find more information about their search deal, which speaks volumes about the fact that people’s habits are hard to break. Will my preferred search engine change? Not very likely.

Stay tuned for more updates as the details unfold…

So why did my eyebrow raise to see that Yahoo will now offer me $20 as a thank-you gift for attending the webinar and then filling out the survey? A gift which I can get up to three times?

The reason I’m not attending these webinars is not because I need $20, but because my perception of time/value is just not there… and $20 sure isn’t changing anything. I even think their webinars are GREAT… for the right market.

For example, look at the titles of these:

How to Create Successful Campaigns
How to Create Successful Keywords and Ads
How to Improve your Ad Quality

All nice topics, covering some pretty hearty stuff like geo-targeting, automatic keyword insertion, landing page quality, and other factors that effect the success of a campaign. The problem is, I already know all this, which means that as many pieces as Yahoo sends my way, I’m still not going to be interested.

Missing the Boat

My frustration with Yahoo’s service, especially compared with Google’s, is their failure to provide powerful tools for account managers like myself. The topic of these webinars and the frequency of their appearing in my inbox is just more evidence of that.

Where’s my offline editor for managing multiple ad campaigns across several accounts?
Where’s my master account so I can easily review the status of multiple clients?
When can I pull reports for multiple accounts automatically, based on specified parameters?

While I appreciate Yahoo’s effort to keep customers apprised of how to make their campaign work for them, my feeling is that they’re doing so as the expense of professionals who need more than what you’ll get out of an hour-long slideshow.

In the past, you were forced to maintain an XML sitemap in the same domain as the domain which it referred to. i.e. www.hallme.com would have a sitemap for this domain, and blog.hallme.com would also need its own sitemap hosted on its own domain. There was no way to specify that we wanted blog.hallme.com to have a sitemap hosted on www.hallme.com, nor could we for www.hallblog.com.

For most site owners, this isn’t much of an issue, but if your business consists of multiple web properties, or many subdomains, the management of the sitemaps protocol could be quite a chore! (Imagine a scalable CMS such as wordpress.com).

The update makes life a lot easier for webmasters in these situations. Now, you can host all of your sitemaps for multiple domains at a single domain, and then use your robots.txt file to point search engines to the location of the correct sitemap.

So let’s say we want www.masterdomain.com to have the sitemap for subdomain.masterdomain.com. All you need to do is add the following line to the robots.txt file on subdomain.masterdomain.com:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/subdomain.masterdomain.xml

On the same token, www.masterdomainblog.com could have this line added to the robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://www.masterdomain.com/sitemaps/masterdomainblog.xml

For the average small business, this is an interesting, if useless feature, but for businesses spanning multiple web properties, with subdomains, or for businesses like ourselves who manage sitemaps for hundreds of clients, the new update is welcome news indeed!

While in general monopolies have never proven to be great for the little guys, a combined Yahoo-Microsoft effort would either produce a viable competitor to the Goog or continue a tailspin of diminishing relevance, leaving Google the #1 search engine by default, not choice. With Google already enforcing strict policies about paid links and essentially defining how thousands of webmasters develop their sites, the latter situation would create a hazardous environment for business owners who have desires for their sites that at odds with Google’s policies.

Now to Google’s credit, their standards for websites are generally pretty good ones — build sites for users, avoid using duplicate content, have a reliable site, etc. However, what checks and balances will there be if the organic search world is a one-company show? Especially as Google stretches its fingers into acquiring information and media properties, the neutrality of this web behemoth is going to become ever more a subject of scrutiny… and legitimate concern.

On the other hand, even a more influential Google will have to contend with the emerging power of social networks, which is exactly where a Microsoft-Yahoo would be strong. The savvy website owner — that is, you — will be wise to keep working on a site which drives in diverse sources of traffic, and answers all of the questions your customers typically have. Though it’s also not a bad idea to make an appearance in social media circles!

Well all know that technology changes will abruptly alter how we approach web marketing, and though the tactics will differ depending on how organic search companies butt heads, the bottom line will always be reaching your customers. Keep speaking the message your customers want to hear — no matter the medium — and success will follow you.

[audio:http://www.hallme.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/seo-audio-05.mp3]
SEO Audio Episode 5

The system uses a fingerprinting technology, where media creators would upload content to Google’s servers. Google’s software, in turn, creates a fingerprint which is checked against any files that a user attempts to upload. If the file too closely matches the fingerprint, the upload is blocked.

The opinions of media representatives about the technology range from the lukewarm to the dubious, and for good reason. While from a copyright-owner perspective it’s nice to see Google taking a serious move towards blocking free uploads of copyrighted video clips, their position has long been that their position as a sharing-service is protected by the 1998 DMCA. Google is happy to remove copyrighted clips when alerted to their presence, but the lack of a cohesive, thorough means of blocking these uploads has frustrated media companies and lead to accusations of Google’s profiting off this copyrighted material (by having a service that is more popular because of the unauthorized content).

While the record-companies continue to wage war against file-sharing even as the future of DRM grows more and more dubious, it’s clear that the copyright battle is just beginning for video media. And Google, as much as they can within legal limits, is standing on the side of more open sharing and proliferation than the media companies that risk losing a lot more with this emerging technology.