Now, I am probably a little late to the game compared to other web industry early-adopters, but in case the rest of the world has not gotten into this, I have to extol the virtues of tagging, both as a user and a marketer.

As social networking, blogging, and other participatory web environments continue to grow, tagging has evolved as an additional, convenient way to control and organize web content.

What is tagging? Basically, tagging is a means to categorize content, whether it is a web page, a picture or a video, with categories that allow you to organize the collected content under that tag category at any time.

Here are a couple of examples of cool tagging I have come across recently:

1. Photos - I started sharing my photos yesterday on Flickr, an online photo sharing site. As you upload the photos and supply descriptions, you are also asked to add tags. As you add more and more albums over time in your Flickr account, you can view photos across these albums that have the same tag. So if you have pics of your pet Fido in many different albums over a year, and you tagged all those photos with “fido,” then you can view all photos you have of your best friend at any time by viewing that tag.

2. Online Bookmarking - I set up a del.icio.us account the other day, and I see where it is awesome. del/icio.us is an online bookmark aggregator, and it is very handy to me, since I have over 1,000 sites in my browser bookmark - not very useful. del.icio.us allows you to tag your bookmarks by category, so it is easy to dynamically access websites by theme. Also, you can access your bookm arks from any computer. Cool.

Why is tagging important? These are two relatively mundane examples as a user, but when you put on your marketing hat for a minute, it is useful to consider the impact of tagging on your online message.

For example, as tagging continues to grow as a means to organize information online, how can you present content that is easy to tag? This may influence how you write your online content. You may want to offer suggestions to tag content. You may want to incorporate tagging into your website and web properties. And you may want to make it easy for people to tag using the multitude of services similar to del.icio.us. Check on the top right of my blog or at the end pf this post — feel free to bookmark this anywhere you please!

Do you use tagging? As a user? As a marketer? Please share your thoughts on how tagging will influence how people interact with web content!

kristen :: Oct.20.2007 :: Web 2.0 :: No Comments »

Search Engine Land posted a comparison of search engine ratings late last week, and it is interesting on a couple of levels:

1) It is an easy view to see how different ratings companies have different methodologies.

2) It gives a sense of who is gaining and who is losing audience.

It is no surprise that Google leads the pack and in some cases continues to grow its share. The various ratings companies attribute anywhere from 47 percent to 64 percent share to Google.

Yahoo share ranges for the most part from 21 percent to 28 percent of market, but a number of ratings services show a drop in February.

MSN Live, Microsoft’s search engine, has posted month after month of audience loss across most ratings services, but some mixed data in January and February indicate that this decline may have ceased.

Why does this matter to you? Well, it may be interesting to see if your pay-per-click campaigns across these various engines are in line with these share breakouts. Checking out your organic search engine referrals would be interesting as well. If the share breakout of your PPC or SEO referrals are drastically out of line with these share numbers, it may represent an opportunity to improve your efforts.

Plus, it is interesting to see just how long Google can continue to dominate versus such aggressive competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft.

Do you have some other ideas on how these search engine market share numbers can help all of us plugging away at our organization’s online marketing programs? Comment here!

kristen :: Mar.26.2007 :: Pay-per-click, Search Engine Optimization :: No Comments »

Search Engine Roundtable is reporting that Yahoo issued another index update this past Friday, and that they are updating the index more frequently to enhance search results more rapidly.

Many businesses have been frustrated and stumped by the Yahoo index, which seems to defy many rational optimization techniques. Furthermore, erratic updates have also made it difficult to estimate how long it takes for optimization changes to go into effect, thou SEO Roundtable reports very little posting activity about this index recently.

What has been your experience? Are you ranking well or poorly with Yahoo? Have you been frustrated by efforts to improve your Yahoo traffic? Share your thoughts!

kristen :: Apr.24.2006 :: Search Engine Optimization :: No Comments »

I ran across a post today about a Google program in beta - Google Grants. Google states this program "supports organizations sharing our philosophy of community
service, and with a strong mission to help the world in areas such as science
and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy,
and the arts."

If you are a 501(c)(3), you may be eligible to gain three months of Google AdWords advertising. Check out all the details at the Google grants page.

kristen :: Mar.09.2006 :: Pay-per-click :: No Comments »

Had a message on my AdWords account today advertising targeting of AdSense campaigns by age and gender.

The infomration from Google indicates that you can select specific publishers to target your ads with based on these two demographics.

Demographic information is provided to Google by comScore Media Metrix.

More to come!

kristen :: Mar.08.2006 :: Pay-per-click :: No Comments »

Neil Mason cited some interesting stats presented by Hitwise at the Search Engine Strategies conference last month in New York City. They cover some interesting usage stats by search engine. He covers these in detail in his ClickZ article this week:

• Google is the unanimous market leader based on all research companies, both in total number of searches and in frequency of searches by individuals.
• Yahoo trends towards younger users (Hitwise)
• MSN users are slightly older (Hitwise)
• This older skew affects searches on MSN — searches for financial and business sites are more common.
• Google users are slightly more affluent (Hitwise). Google has more searches for educational sites.

As Neil mentions in his article, these stats point to a couple of ways you can look at your search marketing differently to improve performance. First, though Google is dominant, depending on your market some other search engines may be much more valuable than you think and quality of traffic may trump quality.

Also, consider targeting different landing pages to different pay-per-click engines in order to cater to their specific types of users. Landing pages have definitely been a great way to improve conversion of your PPC campaigns, and this concept takes the tactic even further.

What do you think? Have you found that some search engines perform better for you than others? Drop a comment and let me know!

kristen :: Mar.07.2006 :: Search Engine Optimization :: No Comments »

If you are interested in search marketing but could not make it to the New York Search Engine Strategies Conference, then members of the SEO Roundtable website have helped you out by writing a large number of articles covering the event.

Some articles of note include "Winning a Bid War," "Duplicate Content Issues," "Buying and Selling Links," and more.

I have not read them all myself and hope to catch up on them this weekend.

kristen :: Mar.03.2006 :: Search Engine Optimization :: No Comments »

There was some buzz yesterday afternoon about an email Yahoo has sent out announcing that it will no longer allow pay-per-click customers to bid on another company’s trademarked terms. MarketingVox also posted this announcement this morning.

I will try to confirm this in the next few days, but if true, this is a big step. Competitors bidding on another company’s name or other trademarked terms has been a sore point for many advertisers for some time.

Google and Yahoo to-date have allowed competitive bidding on these terms. MSN AdCenter, which is due to launch this Spring sometime, is not allowing these sorts of bids.

I will keep you posted. In the meantime, what do you think about this sort of bidding? Have you been a victim? Do you buy competitor terms? How do you feel about this change?

kristen :: Feb.24.2006 :: Pay-per-click :: No Comments »

Internet Retailer reports today that MSN AdCenter, its new pay-per-click service currently in beta, is outperforming both Google and Yahoo according to search industry experts testing the service.

MSN’s AdCenter has features additional to either Google or Yahoo which allow advertisers to target their advertising by additional demographics like gender, age, geography etc. Currently Google and Yahoo only offer targeting by geography.

MSN’s AdCenter is still in beta testing, though it indicated that it would launch either late first quarter or second quarter, 2006.

What this means to you: If you currently advertise using pay-per-click, you will want to watch the AdCenter launch closely. Not only will it possibly provide you with a bigger bang for the buck than other advertising, when it launches it will slash Yahoo’s current reach, because it currently provides MSN with its sponsored listing results.

If reach is one of your goals with pay-per-click, have MSN on your list to expand to when it launches.

kristen :: Feb.21.2006 :: Pay-per-click :: No Comments »

Yahoo announced this week that it will change the length of its PPC ads from 190 characters to 70 characters. This length will now become standard with Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter, which both have ads of 70 characters.

Why the change? Though there were no direct explanations from Yahoo in the MarketingVox article, marketers believe that this length is easier for busy consumers to digest and determine relevance before clicking on the ad.

Some other theories are that the ads read better on handheld devices, than shorter ads have traditionally had higher click-through rates, and because more ads can be fit on a page.

Bottom line for advertisers and marketer — this will be an improvement in administration for sure — they will only have to write one set of ad versions at one length, versus previously having to write two.

If you are an Overture advertiser, you will want to check out your ads - this change is going into place this week, so you may want to make some adjustments.

Have you seen higher click-through rates on Google versus Yahoo? What do you think of the change? Let me know!

kristen :: Jan.18.2006 :: Pay-per-click :: No Comments »