David Ku, Yahoo!'s former senior vice-president and an expert in online PR, has joined Microsoft as a corporate vice-president of the company's Online Services Division.
The move will see Mr Ku working on "a range of initiatives" across the department, which includes the Bing search engine, a Microsoft spokesperson told technology publication TechCrunch.
Mr Ku, who on his Linked In page describes his specialties as including "search technology, response prediction and online advertising", starts work in his new role immediately, just a month after leaving his position at Yahoo!.
He is one of a number of high-ranking executives to have left the firm in recent times since the company had its own search engine taken over by Microsoft's Bing.
The appointment comes as Microsoft announces its third quarter figures for 2010, which chief financial officer Peter Klein described as "exceptional".
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
Companies may wish to ensure their search engine optimisation is up to scratch following the launch of Google's new location information software.
Place Search is the new tool that organises facts so users can effortlessly make website comparisons and gain a "comprehensive view of a place".
Product manager Jackie Bavaro said: "We automatically identify when sites are talking about physical places and cluster links even when they don't provide addresses and use different names."
Hundreds of millions of portals will be linked to more than 50 million real-world locations and a new layout will allow individuals to see more relevant links on a single results page.
It is estimated this will save users two seconds on local information searches.
As a result, it may be wise for organisations to consider hiring a search engine optimisation company to help ensure their website appears high in the rankings.
Elsewhere, the company recently announced Virgin America has switched to Google and will be moving its corporate email to Gmail in the next few weeks.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Those conducting an internet marketing strategy may be interested to hear one commentator's views on how Microsoft adCentre compares to Google AdWords.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Jonathan Allen drew attention to comments made by Efficient Frontier's director of business analytics Dr Sid Shah and Matt Lawson from Marin Software.
Both experts believe Microsoft will have to be innovative if it expects its product to challenge Google and demand attention from marketers.
According to Mr Allen, this may be possible, as the company's strength lies in social search, maps and images.
He added that "Microsoft adCenter could look to their partnership with Yahoo in the meantime and explore how to leverage Bing's search intent data to transform display advertising".
On October 20th, Google held an hour-long online course for those interested in learning more about remarketing, as the company's Gordon Zhu said this is the "simplest" way to connect with website users.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
Rob Stoubos, SEO Manager at ClickThrough, shares some important tips on writing good copy for the web.
Rob Stoubos, SEO Manager at ClickThrough, shares some important tips on writing good copy, with SEO and link building potential, for the web.
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When writing good SEO copy it is important to find a balance between incorporating your keyphrases and readability for your readership. Visitors are more likely to stay on your website, redistribute or link to copy which is useful or informative.
With this in mind, I’ve put together some key do’s and don’t's to consider when creating content for distribution on the web:
If you are writing content yourself, follow these tips to get the best results. If you work with an SEO agency or PR agency, make sure that they are considering these factors when advising on content for your website, or for online distribution.
InterActiveCorp (IAC) has seen an increase in revenue of 25 per cent for the third quarter of this year compared to 2009, with internet marketing services making up much of the figures.
The parent company of Ask.com released statistics that showed search accounted for nearly half of the organisation's $421.7 million (£267.1 million) revenue, at $205.1 million.
Search services grew by 20 per cent in comparison to a year ago, with much of that being put down to an increase in queries to toolbars.
IAC's statement says "profits were favourably impacted by higher revenue, partially offset by higher traffic acquisition costs".
The business has seen several changes to the service it offers in 2010, including the introduction of its Q&A community which it says "enables searchers to obtain previously unpublished answers from other members".
According to the latest figures from monitoring agency comScore, Ask.com is currently the fourth largest search engine, controlling a 3.7 per cent share of the US market in September.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing.
Retail companies looking to maximise their search engine marketing techniques this Christmas should be optimising their content for holiday shoppers, according to one SEO expert.
Alex Cohen, writing for Search Engine Watch, has highlighted a few key variations in the market at this time of year that could affect a company's performance in pay per click results.
Because gift buyers may well be looking for specific products, branded keywords rather than generic ones are especially important, he says.
Mr Cohen points out that as they are unique, "they get high click-through rates, usually have a lower cost per click and generate a higher return on investment".
Utilising Google's ad parameters effectively is also a key strategy as it will allow an ad to appear more relevant to a user's enquiry, he continues.
According to a report by the Interactive Media Retail Group, UK consumers spent over £5 billion online in November 2009 and this year Mr Cohen expects competition in the market to be tough as advertisers become "increasingly aggressive".
As the sector gears up for its busiest time of year, Mr Cohen reminded businesses that the ability to answer specific queries will be the key to success.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – experts in SEO, Pay Per Click Services, Multilingual Search Marketing and Website Conversion Enhancement services.
Businesses using Google's range of internet marketing services should be interested to learn the search giant has increased its traffic share to 6.4 per cent of all internet use.
The record figures, complied by online security firm Arbor Networks, include data for the company's search engine, as well as statistics for its other areas such as YouTube.
Craig Labovitz, who conducted the research for Arbor, said even with overall internet usage growing by 40 to 45 per cent a year, Google's share was still impressive.
"While its not news that Google is big, what is amazing is how much bigger [it] continues to get," he said.
The numbers may be further good news for the search engine's advertisers and investors, coming shortly after the organisation announced increased profits for the third quarter of the year.
Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Google, said the brand had an "excellent quarter" and "continued to show significant momentum".
News brought to you by ClickThrough – specialists in Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing.
We’re really excited to announce that ClickThrough have welcomed on board Lauren Myatt to oversee copywriting and content creation for our clients.
Lauren has ten years of copywriting experience; including working as a print journalist, within a PR agency, creating and running her own music magazine, as a journalism lecturer, and as a broadcast producer on the TV show “Trisha”.
Understandably, ClickThrough are really proud to have secured someone of this calibre to head up our copywriting department.
Lauren is managing a team of ten copywriters who are already creating articles, press releases, onsite copy, content for social media distribution (including blogs) and more for our clients.
If you have a need for high quality web content to support an existing campaign, or want to learn how we can make your brand famous (and drive search rankings and conversions!) then drop us a line on 0800 088 7486.
This month, Dr Dave Chaffey highlights the top six features of Google Webmaster Tools that will help you quantify current performance, fix errors and give Google what it needs to be able to index your site.
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SEO specialists will be aware of the features in Google Webmaster Tools and use them regularly, but site owners and non-specialists may not, so I thought I should flag them up to you in case your not making the most of them.
Here’s a quick review of the 6 main features that marketers need to be aware of in my view. Discuss these with your specialists and make sure you have access. You will have to verify yourself as owner of the site if your access is not setup.
1. Current keyphrase ranking – Shows natural search click-through rate your average position for top keyterms.
2. HTML Suggestions – Shows you missing or duplicate title & description tags forming duplicate content in Google’s eyes. If Google is unable to differentiate between different pages, your pages may be seen as similar and their ranking reduced.
3. Crawl errors – As sites develop and grow you tend to find broken links, pages that display errors. By identifying the links here you can correct broken links on your site (which you should be looking for in your analytics anyway since they are a poor user experience).
You can also see broken links from other sites pointing to pages that no longer exist. By correcting these links you can improve their anchor text, point them to an appropriate page and potentially boost your ranking.
Step 4. Sitemaps – Sitemaps are simple lists of web pages you submit to the engines to inform them about your pages. For a well-constructed site they are unecessary since Googlebot will crawl these pages anyway, but through submitting sitemaps you can inform Google of particular content types such as news, mobile or video pages and gain insight on which text pages Google isn’t indexing.
Step 5. Site performance - Google will notify you about the overall download speed of your site and particular problem pages. If your site is within the slowest 2% of sites you may even suffer a ranking penalty – so check out how you compare to other sites.
Step 6. Link Analysis - This section shows Google’s information on your internal and external links, so you can review who links to you and assess relevant anchor text.
There’s a lot more tools within Google Webmaster Tools, but these are the main ones that site owners need to be aware of in my opinion to improve SEO. Google is always updating these tools and I have summarised the most recent changes – although our team of search experts will be able to guide you through what matters.
Using geographically specific content is vital to good search engine marketing, according to an expert in link-building.
Writing for Search Engine Watch, Jennifer van Iderstyne highlighted the importance that search engines such as Google now give to personalised results, which includes delivering content that is locally specific to users.
While it may seem that developing pages for a specific area could create a more limited market, Ms Van Iderstyne explained that it "can be useful in obtaining links from websites dedicated to a specific region".
This in turn will allow a domain to place much higher in search results for users looking for services in a specific area than would otherwise be the case.
She goes on to say: "Whether it's a single page or an entire site devoted to a particular locale, if it's your locale, it's a good place for a link."
Last week Google announced an update to its Autocomplete feature, which it said makes its search results "more locally relevant than ever".
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.
