Search Engine Marketing Up 44% in 2005

Advertisers in the U.S. and Canada spent $5.75 billion on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in 2005, a 44 percent increase over 2004 spending, according to a report released today by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). The report is based on an industry-wide survey of 553 respondents conducted in November 2005 by Radar Research, LLC and Intellisurvey. The survey found the bulk of the SEM spending was spent in 2005 on paid placement, accounting for 83 percent or $4.7 billion. While four out of five advertisers report they engage in organic search engine optimization (SEO), organic SEO accounted for approximately 11 percent of overall spending; paid inclusion accounted for just 4 percent of overall spending; and SEM technologies, including leasing, agency solutions and in-house development, accounted for less than 2 percent of overall spending.

Google hits 40% in the US

According to a recent IDG News Service report Google nabbed almost 40 percent of all searches in the U.S., a commanding lead of more than 10 percentage points over Yahoo, which took second place, comScore said on Friday.

Google increased its share of searches by 5.2 percent compared with November 2004, while Yahoo saw its share shrink by 2.5 percent, the market researcher said.

Your Next Job Depends on Google

Take a look at this recent article in the Ecommerce Times. What is the most important factor that will influence executive pay and hiring in the technology industry this coming year? Is it globalization? Data management? Business process improvement? No. None of the above. It's Google - failure of a company to factor in how Google will influence its own bottom line could well lead to its premature demise, according to a new survey just released by New York City-based headhunting firm Christian & Timbers. If your company does not have an eye on Google or globalization, your company won't make it to 2010," Umesh Ramakrishnan, vice chairman of performance-based executive search firm Christian & Timbers, told the E-Commerce Times, "and the executives who understand these dynamic market forces are in high demand."

Domian Name Expiry and SEO

I thank the people at www.spectulise.com for the following bit of advice - Google has a patent on checking the expiry of domain names – the theory being that a domain name which has been around for longer or is paid upfront for the next 5/10 years shows that the company has a serious long-term plan and isn’t on the web for the short-term or just to create short-term spam/directory websites. Therefore, when registering your domains, to do so for at least 5 years at a time. This will potentially show your site to be of a higher calibre and professionalism to those which just renew from year to year. This probably makes little difference at present but it may become a feature of the Google algorithm and would then become important.

Latent Semantic Indexing - What Is It

Take a look at this blog from Andy Hagans who seems to know what he's talking about when it comes to link building. As I tell my clients link popularity is increasingly important part of search engine optimisation. Gone are the days when we could rely on a reciprocal linking strategy - it is widely assumed that Google discounts these types of links or in extreme cases penalises sites with large numbers of reciprocal links - particularly if the number of links have increased rapidly. Google in particular is looking for links between similarly relevant WebPages. This makes sense as a webpage with loads of information about laptops with many links to and from other WebPages also with loads of info about laptops is probably going to be very relevant to the subject of laptops.

However, if you then artificially create lots of backlinks with anchor text all containing exactly the same keyword phrase then the major search engines are increasingly going to smell a rat. Naturally occurring backlinks will be from a variety of sources all using slightly different terms and anchor text. Latent Semantic Indexing LSI uses complex statistical algorithms to look for patterns. On the upside this means that links from WebPages containing semantically similar terms to the word laptop such as notebook will be judged to be relevant.

So if you’re building your link popularity don't get too tied up on using those keywords all the time try looking for sites with relevancy for terms with similar meanings.