Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

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!

Google.com – Fastest Rising

1. twitter
2. michael jackson
3. facebook
4. hulu
5. hi5
6. glee
7. paranormal activity
8. natasha richardson
9. farrah fawcett
10. lady gaga

Yahoo.com

1. Michael Jackson
2. “Twilight”
3. WWE
4. Megan Fox
5. Britney Spears — bumped from No. 1 after four straight years, according to Yahoo
6. Naruto
7. “American Idol”
8. Kim Kardashian
9. NASCAR
10. Runescape

Bing.com

1. Michael Jackson
2. Twitter
3. Swine Flu
4. Stock Market
5. Farrah Fawcett
6. Patrick Swayze
7. Cash for Clunkers
8. Jon and Kate Gosselin
9. Billy Mays
10. Jaycee Dugard

I figured that Michael Jackson would have dominated all three, but Twitter actually came out on top in Google. It’s always fun to see the differences between the search engines. I was surprised that Lady Gaga wasn’t in the top 10 for at least 2 out of 3, with her dramatic rise in the music scene (not to mention her, um, odd choices in costumes). Still, I’m sure some conclusions can be drawn about the different demographics that use the different engines. What do you think it means?

Read the rest of the Internet Marketing Advent Calendar

• 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)

A deal between the 2nd and 3rd place search engines has finally been confirmed and is reported to close in early 2010. Microsoft and Yahoo!, who have been in talks since early 2009 after Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo! last year, are teaming up to try and chip away at Google’s market share.

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…

When you’re managing 30+ Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts, you tend to get a lot of administrative and marketing mail from them. Though I do my best to keep apprised of the latest changes in their service, there’s just too much information to care about all of the time. For example, they’ve been running a webinar series for making the most out of your campaigns, which, as PPC Hero cares to point out in good detail, can be a mixed bag of advice.

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.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all announced this morning that they’re supporting an addition to the Sitemaps protocol that makes it easier for site owners with multiple subdomains to manage sitemap files.

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!