Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing’ Category

Are SEO and SEM Out-Dated For Effective Internet Marketing in 2009?

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Back in the late 1990s, many internet marketing companies focussed only on the search engines. There is no denying that the search engines do bring results and hence traffic to a website, but there is life beyond the search engines too!

The exceptional, and hence very busy, companies realised that there was far more to marketing than the search engines, and delivered broad and effective campaigns to their clients, using a variety of different strategies and plenty of metrics to assess results. It has taken almost a decade for the industry to catch up that search engines are not the be all and end all of internet marketing, and that the terms “SEO” and “SEM” are just part of the mix.

However, most website owners are still stuck in the ‘old school’ way of thinking, believing that, having built a website, all that is required is to be number one on the search engines and that is the end of the game plan. This level of thinking has far too frequently been backed up by SEO companies who could see a fast buck in optimising a website and ranking it, often for completely obscure terms, to satisfy the customer without educating either the customer or themselves in the finer points of internet marketing.

Invariably, once ranked on the search engines, the customer discovers that little has changed in the way of traffic, enquiries, sales, brand recognition, and so on, and seeks further assistance to increase the results from all aspects of the website marketing, and generate a return on investment. This can become something of a bottomless pit into which to thrown money, particularly if the company being employed to achieve the aims required is only really expert in SEO.

SEO and SEM are just one strategy to deploy in a marketing campaign, and many of the great IM companies take a holistic view to promoting a website, company or product set. Not only do they seek to generate valuable and unique content for the client (or advise on how to do this), but they employ a range of strategies and processes in order to deliver consistent, high quality traffic to a website, and increase the number of conversions from each action to maximise the potential results.

When seeking out a website promotion company, you should look for companies which offer that breadth of thinking. The services they will offer should include:
Email Marketing Forum and blog marketing Pay Per Click campaigns Landing Pages Conversion tracking and metrics Ebooks and article marketing services Press release distribution Optimised content creation Social networking and bookmarking Video and audio content and promotion As well as the good old on and offpage optimisation required to get the search engine rankings.

For every company looking to promote online, there will be a different mix of strategies which will yield the best results, depending on product, brand, target audience and more. It is only by understanding your company and the needs of your potential customers that a suitable internet marketing campaign can be designed, tested and deployed.

Just optimising a few pages for some keywords and phrases has never been sufficient to bring appropriate results, but many in the search engine industry have managed to get away with doing just that, and little more, for over a decade. Now, with the rise of social networks, and the move away from static to dynamic content, virals, and the rise in popularity of video and audio have meant that any company with too narrow a focus when considering marketing tactics can only achieve so much.

Whether you employ an internet marketing company, or train in-house staff to deliver your website promotion, be wary of any specific focus on the terms SEO and SEM. The implication that these are the only methods which will yield results, or the fact that whoever is using them may be unaware of all that is required to deliver an effective online promotion campaign should be fair warning that the person or company using them is still adopting an outmoded way of thinking.

What is Meant by Search Engine Marketing and What Are Methods to Do SEM?

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

Search engine marketing also known as SEM is one of the components of internet marketing. The process surrounds the building and marketing of a web site with an aim to improve its position in search engine results. Search engine marketing is vital for the internet marketing and for any form of information that is to be spread through the means of internet or in other words, high visibility and top placement of a website is the key for any online organization and business regardless of its size and the market.

There are number of methods for doing search engine marketing that increase the visibility of a website in result pages of search engines. The three main methods are as follows:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): One of the methods of Search engine marketing is SEO. Eighty five percent of the web traffic generates through searches through keywords where sixty two percent of the searchers just click on the results shown by the first page and rest generally do not go beyond the fifth page of the results. So, it is vital for online business to look as soon as possible for SEM and be visible in all major keyword search results and rank high. Each search engine has its distinctive way of ranking and caching web pages. When the website’s content and overall structure is easily understood by the various search engines’ programs, it is said to be effectively optimized site. The true SEO work entails hundred of diverse variables that are examined and applied in the tactical process. By optimizing the website, it is possible to maximize the site’s ranking for relevant key phases in organic and natural search results.

• PPC: PPC is an acronym for “Pay Per Click” and is very effective method for search engine marketing that takes services and products to target audience. In this technique, when the search is made with a phrase or words that match or are close to the website’s key words, an advertisement is displayed by the site along with the search result. These ads are exhibited either adjacent to or above the organic search results or anywhere a web developer chooses on the content site. These are known as the sponsored ads or sponsored links. The popularity of the keyword influences the cost of ad and advertisers pay their host only when someone clicks on their ad. There are mainly the two models that determine the cost per click: one is flat rate PPC and another is bid based PPC.

• Contextual advertising: It is a method where marketers place ads on other sites that contain information relevant to the product. These ads are in form of text ads or banner ads that generally appears as the pop-up ads. SEM through contextual marketing was first started by Google and now numbers of other search engines have joined the battle.

There are many other methods too for the Search engine marketing that are offered by various search engines such as pay for inclusion (PFI), lead generation, etc.

Search Engine Marketing – The Full Package

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

After conducting extensive research I have come to the conclusion that there is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the subject of Search Engine Marketing. The greatest misunderstanding is in confusing the terms Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

One would think that those individuals claiming to be SEO experts should be knowledgeable about the subject and recognize the clear distinction. Apparently this is not the case; the internet is full of misguided information, from so called experts. Proving, I suppose that the industry is liberally spattered with cowboys.

To start, let us first define the term “Search Engine Optimisation” (henceforth referred to as SEO).

SEO

SEO is the process of manipulating the structure and content of a website in such a way that it will perform better in the search engine’s organic listings. The techniques involved can be sub-structured into several areas of activity, as detailed below.

1) Page readiness – Search engines expect to crawl clean HTML code. Every page of a website should be validated to eliminate errors and sloppy coding.

2) Site readiness – Search engine web bots follow the links on your web pages and thereby find new pages to index. If a web bot meets a broken link it cannot continue spidering your site. Make sure you have no broken links. Also, provide a site map. A tool for creating site maps is available at my website, www.pro-seo.co.uk/ror-sitemap-generator.shtml.

3) Keyword selection – It is vitally important to select the right keywords for which a particular page is to be optimized. The most obvious keywords are not always the best choice, and are often mega-competitive. Choose wisely.

4) Site structure – Your website should be structured in such a way that each page can be optimized for a maximum of two keywords. Do not try to optimize for a lot of keywords on one page. Remember, you have to write for your users. Writing copy is a balancing act that keeps both users and search engines happy, and is better achieved on a well structured site.

5) Copy writing – the visible text on your web pages should be structured to include the two most important keywords for that page’s content. Get the keywords into headers. Work the keywords into paragraph text, having your keywords appear near the beginning, near the middle, and near the end. Make some keywords bold, some italic and some underlined.

6) HTML tags – The most important of these is the Title tag. Get both keywords for that page into the Title tag, without repetition. For example, if your main key phrase is “diet plans”, and your second phrase is “diet supplements”, the Title tag should read “diet plans and supplements”. Do not repeat the word diet, to search engines it may look like spamming. If your main concern is to improve your Google ranking, you may have overlooked the Meta keywords and Meta description tags, don’t, there are more search engines than Google and they can all bring traffic. Also, get the keywords into H1 tags, H2 tags, alt attributes, and very important, your link text.

And after doing all that for every page in your website you may be asking: so where does SEM come in?

SEM

SEM includes SEO plus all the other things you can do to boost your visibility in the search engines and increase targeted visitors to your website. A condensed list may be as follows:

1) SEO (see above).

2) A link building strategy.

3) Pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

4) Banner exchanges.

5) Press releases.

6) And any other activity that will get your website noticed.

SEM then, is the full package. Whereas SEO techniques are a vital, but not the only, component of that package.

Learning Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing as a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

I could go into the technicalities of SEM, algorithms, robots, etc. However, if you’re reading this article, you probably aren’t interested in me stuffing a bunch of technical terms down your throat. You would rather learn about search engine marketing and how it can bring you more business.

I chose this topic today based on a couple of conversations I recently had with new clients.

One of our clients had embarked on a small ad campaign with Yahoo before coming to us. He mentioned that when he was spending the money on Yahoo, the traffic to his site was much higher. When I asked how many sales he garnered from the advertising, he replied that he didn’t know. Website traffic and conversions to sales are two completely different things, with the latter obviously being more important. It’s crucial to keep track of your ROI (Return on Investment), if you are going to invest in online advertising. Make sure that you have the tools within your company-whether it’s your own database for tracking sales, or another form of tracking system-before you spend your first marketing dollar.

Another conversation I had with a client involved a Google Adwords campaign. He was bidding using every keyword under the sun. He had a huge CTR (Click Through Rate), but again, nobody was buying. At the end of the day, his budget was gone and he didn’t have anything to show for it besides lots of traffic and an empty bank account. Until I explained to him that he was paying for people to come to his site and quickly leave, he didn’t “get it”. Having the right keywords in your campaign and your ad copy, that are relevant to your product or service, will get you qualified click through to your site. You don’t want people to click on your ad, only to find that your site doesn’t offer the information they were looking for, and leave immediately. That will cost you wasted dollars each and every time they do that.

My advice to our clients is to, first and foremost, invest time on SEO. As long as you are engaging in honest practices, and not trying to fool the “Big 3″, the benefits will far outweigh the time you spend. If you can afford to hire a reputable firm, all the better! Please be aware that there are self-professed “SEO Experts”, who claim they can get you to the top of the SERPs, guaranteed. Any company representative who spews this line at you is most likely just out to take your money. Check them out thoroughly. Conduct an online search on their company, and don’t just stop at the first few pages of the results-dig deep to discover if they are reputable or not. Check with the Better Business Bureau or other consumer watchdog organization. Reputable firms won’t guarantee top placement, but they will give you realistic projections of how they can help you improve your placement results.

Until you really have all the pieces in place, it’s best not to engage in a pay per click campaign. Remember that it takes testing, monitoring and tweaking, as well as a significant amount of your time, before you will see any benefits.

I’ll start with my own experience:

A few years ago, the company I worked for ventured into a rather large PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign. We hired an expert, had all the tracking tools in place and launched a campaign to knock out our competition and drive traffic to our site; paying close attention to our sales funnel and expecting to convert our “browsers” into “buyers”. In addition to our PPC campaigns, we also hired a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firm to help us with the natural results. Natural results are the result of traffic coming to your site outside of paid links directing it in. It should be noted that we had all the puzzle pieces in place and spent time on the following:

1. Analyzing the results from the analytics

2. A/B testing of different landing pages

3. Closely monitoring the PPC campaigns

4. Adjusting our ad copy and landing pages based on our conversion rate

We hired top firms for both the “paid” and “natural” campaigns, as well as an expert to oversee both of the campaigns. Without getting into the numbers here, (and believe me they were big), the end result was as follows:

1. We spent a large amount of money getting traffic to our website via the pay campaigns. The increased traffic did result in increased sales, however – the results made each sale a VERY expensive one, and not really worth the money that was spent on the marketing campaign. In short, our ROI (Return On Investment) was in bad shape.

2. We spent 80% less on the SEO campaign, which took longer, but garnered results that are still driving traffic to the website to this day.

In the end, we spent a ton of money getting traffic to our website which did not result in sales, and we learned several valuable lessons. In addition, we did suspect throughout our campaigns several instances of fraudulent PPC activity. Unethical companies will engage in this practice by hiring offshore companies at ridiculously low rates to click on their competitors’ ads. These companies use various IP addresses to avoid detection. The idea is to exhaust a competitor’s budget before legitimate click through and potential sales can occur. When we reported suspected PPC fraud, some clicks were refunded via ad credits (Yahoo!) and some could not be proven and were not refunded (Google). The best advice I have for companies on a small budget is to work on your natural search results via search engine optimization, and use various other forms of advertising, such as placing a print ad, and perhaps a nice banner ad (where you pay per month, not per click) on a relevant site. Later, when your marketing budget has grown, you can branch out into other forms of media, such as local radio or television.

Why You Need to Opt For a SEM Campaign?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

With the number of web pages online exceeding the human population you can be sure that the fight for online visibility is going to get fierce. Search engine marketing (SEM) is probably one of the best alternatives for businesses looking to beat the competition.

You might see that a lot of people opt for link building or SEO separately, but one thing that can benefit you more than anything else is a SEM campaign. In a SEM campaign the online marketer not only looks at the rise in the rankings on the search engine, but also at creating the right kind of impression on the visitors to the site. This means that the conversion rates become better which ultimately helps your business with a better cost per acquisition.

A professional company will not only take care of the kind of content you present but also the way your site looks. The campaign is more like branding your site, a strategy that comes in handy during the current scenario of increasing competition.

A close examination of the costs involved would help you understand that most professional companies charge a very limited amount for SEM (may be $25-50 more than what they charge for SEO). This is not a bad deal as it is proven that with professional SEM your site will be able to get nearly 30% more conversions, which means that if you are getting 100 clients per month from your SEO campaign where you might be paying $500-600/month, for an extra few bucks you get 33 or more customers, that’s amazing.

It is the right time you switched over to a profession SEM company so that you can move ahead of the competition and remain there for the betterment of your business.

SEM Tips – 4 Ways to Make Your Ads More Persuasive

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

The main difference between a moderately successful and a highly successful search engine marketing campaign usually lies in the ads. The more persuasive your ads, the better your chances of success. Here are 4 ways to make your ads much more persuasive.

Conversation

You must speak to your target audience in the exact manner in which they are comfortable with. Always write in a conversational style so that your ads will be a lot easier to read and understand. Also, your writing style must match the conversation they already have in their minds.

Solutions

Nobody really wants to buy products and services. Who cares about products and services anyway? This is because what people really want is a solution which can bring them a highly desirable end result. Always write about your solution, rather than just mentioning your products and services.

Benefits

Unfortunately, many people in business, sales and marketing are not able to tell the difference between features and benefits. Features is what the thing is, benefits is what the thing does for people. If you need to show people your features, also show specific benefits that your features can provide for them.

Call To Action

Do you have a call to action? Tell people exactly what to do, such as click here, enter your email, enter your zip code, enter your credit card number and much more. You are not allowed to tell people to click here on your paid search marketing ad, however, you can tell people to order now or access now.

Search Engine Marketing in Modern Times

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

In present online market scenario, search engine marketing is used for creating online marketing plan having main strategies as techniques. Main aim is to divert high quality of web traffic from major search engines. Here the target customers of SEM are people who have interest in products or services you deal in, and inquire it about via search engines.

SEO is used extensively in SEM, thus website is created with the aim of making it relevant source of information. Webmasters create the strategy likewise, so their client’s site appears at a specific position in search engine area which is considered as most preferable spot for finding reliable piece of information.

Common format of SEO is supported by sponsored search campaign known as pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click marketing. These tactics help the website owners to target more number of keywords than they are currently thinking about. In case of sponsored search, you get the opportunity to use their own flexible marketing strategy and choose the right keywords, or select the specific geographic area of their preference.

We can say that search engine marketing strategy is the combination of sponsored search and SEO. Main benefit of SEM is it creates positive impression in the website visitors that, as your site appears in top search engine results it is reliable and trusted source of information.  

Moreover website positioning plays significant role in determining the quality of site traffic you would get. For instance- if your website comes in the first page of search engine that the visitors would be usually serious ones and genuinely looking out for purchasing or seeking any important information. On the other hand, if your site is placed at second or third search engine results page, people doing some research of information would be forming major chunk of site visitors.

Every site owner wishes that visitors take the information provided by them in a serious manner. As they have already located you from any major search engine, they took you as one of the relevant sites for getting required piece of information. Further in order to establish stronger bond with the visitors, keep the content on the site of high quality and in relevance. SEM has the potential to convert the visitor into specific sales or lead. At the stage where you are developing online marketing strategy, lay stress on the summary message your visitor would get when intended results are shown.  

Copyright©2009

SEM – 5 Tips to Create Landing Pages That Convert

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

When it comes to search engine marketing, landing pages play a very important role because it converts visitors into leads or sales. Without landing pages,it is hard to make a search marketing campaign profitable. Here are 5 tips to create landing pages that convert well.

Quality Score

Quality score matters! When you are using Google AdWords, you need to get a high quality score so that your cost per click will be a lot lower. You can get a higher quality score simply by adding a privacy policy link and a contact page. If you add business seals such hacker safe logo, it will help too.

On-Page Optimization

On-page SEO (search engine optimization) matters. This also helps you get higher quality score. Just make sure that your targeted keywords are included in your title tags, description tags, meta tags, meta description, H1 tags and naturally sprinkled all over your landing page.

Compelling Headline

You must have a headline, it must be compelling enough to stop your reader and make him or her read the rest of the page. If you fail to do this, the rest of your landing page will not matter at all. Remember, the main purpose of your headline is to grab the attention of the reader.

Clear Call To Action

Now that you got the attention of the reader, you can show them some benefits followed by a clear call to action. You must tell them exactly what to do, enter their credit card number to make a purchase, enter their email or zip code or something like that.

Smooth Marketing Flow

Your marketing process must flow smoothly. Starting from your keywords to your ads to your landing pages to your offer, they must all make sense and they must all link to each other. When you get this right, marketing is really simple.

Sizzling SEM Business Blueprint Reviewed – 21 Days, 2 Clients – A Path to 6 Figures

Monday, October 26th, 2009

There are heaps of blueprints out there on the market that claim similar figures THAT DON’T DELIVER so I thought I would take the time to let you know how I am getting on with the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Business Blueprint by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey, 3 weeks since purchase.

The SEM Business Blueprint provides you with the information you require to service the organic and paid search needs of small business owners.  The SEM Business Blueprint material is detailed and comprehensive. They give you a lot of material to get started with including:

2 fully functional websites that you can edit.

These websites are great and easy to edit. Here is one of the complete websites they provide for you to edit worthoverdoing.com and here is my website once I completed the editing profitableresults.co.uk.

A presentation deck used for client presentations.

Again this is very comprehensive and clear and only requires a couple of pages of edits to introduce yourself. A spreadsheet you use to sell clients in on the value of PPC advertising for their business. When you use this simple spreadsheet with clients you can see the light bulbs going on and they get sold on the spot.

A contact strategy to approach clients.

Steve and Tim provide a great plan and ideas to go out and find your clients that definitely work! They walk you through a series of video tutorials that you can go move through at your own pace that explain the business clearly and are jam packed with all the information to get started.

One of the questions I get asked is do you need previous SEM experience and my response is that you really don’t. Steve Clayton walks you through all the steps you need to make the business a success. If SEM is completely new to you, and you are serious about making a business out of it you will of course benefit by doing some extra reading around the subject and familiarizing yourself with some of the tools being used including Google AdWords and AdWords Editor. The great thing is Google provides all those instructions in video format anyway so it is straightforward.

Customer support is excellent. If you have any questions or you are not sure how to do something or approach a task Steve and Tim are always quick to help via email. This definitely isn’t some get rich quick scheme and like any proper business requires a committed approach but if you are serious with it I can already see it delivering on their promise – a 6-figure income after just 10 sales.

At the moment after just 3 weeks I already have my first 2 clients just following their plan. If you are serious about getting out of your day job and looking for a viable business alternative then I can strongly recommend you check this out. Take a look at their video on that explains further what you get inside SEM Business Blueprint. There are also some useful resources there to help you get started.

Search Engine Forecast 2009

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

2007 has been a very interesting year in the SEO/SEM industry. We’ve seen Google gain even more of the search engine market share and the rise and fall of some of the major SEO players. SEO itself has become more of an institution and it seems every company wants in on it whether or not they are qualified. SEO/SEM has become increasingly more visible as hosting and design companies are pushing ’search engine exposure’ as an add-on. There have been feature articles in many popular marketing and business magazines as well. The question has shifted from ‘what is SEO?’ to ‘how much benefit can I get from SEO?’.

With the transition of the industry into the mainstream marketing arena, more and more companies are springing up and more ideas are being tested. 2008 will be a great year for SEO with the influx of new talent and ideas. Search engines themselves have grown into some of the biggest companies in the country and there will of course be big announcements from them. The following are TreeHouse’s major predictions for 2008.

1.) Death of DMOZ

DMOZ may not be so well-known outside Web and tech savvy circles, but DMOZ still has a lot of influence on Google, Netscape, and AOL search. DMOZ is a non-profit open directory that is maintained by editors. Web masters submit their site to the directory and editors approve or deny the listing. This is of course in opposition to Google’s automated indexing. Google and the other engines do spider and use the DMOZ index as a ranking factor for their own results. DMOZ has always worked fairl closely with Google due to Google’s ties with the Mozilla foundation (creators of Netscape and FireFox). In the past 5 years or so, the accusations of corruption and willful manipulation of directory listings by editors has grown more and more apparent.

The incredible difficulty of getting listed in the directory mixed with rampant corruption charges has pushed most Webmasters and SEOs to give up on DMOZ all together. I believe that sometime this coming year, Google will distance itself from DMOZ and signal the death of the directory. DMOZ is indexing pages far too slow to be a real effective tool for Google. It was more helpful when Google had a smaller index and had to determine the relative longevity of sites. Now, with a massive index and years of data, Google no longer needs the DMOZ directory for anything other than bad publicity. Google ending its official relationship will cause DMOZ to slowly die.

2.) Purchase/consolidation of major SEO companies

It would be very suprising if the major SEO companies didn’t start receiving more offers for purchase from larger traditional marketing companies. Because SEO/SEM is so alien to most marketing companies, the risks and costs are far higher to start an SEO division than to buy an existing successful SEO company. It is also becoming harder and harder for larger SEO companies built around old methodologies to deal with the influx of new talent in the industry. The SEO indsutry has not yet adapted to freelancers and skilled contract SEOs. It also has had problems dealing with the protection of their intellectual property and research.

My list of most likely to sell all or part of the company to a larger marketing/Web company:

ICrossing - Big lay offs when they hired new CFO Michael Jackson. They still claim to be trying to set up an IPO, but it seems likely that they could be purchased by another publicly traded company if the IPO bid does not pan out. SEO, Inc. – One of the older SEO companies and still privately owned. It seems likely they may take the IProspect route and sell to a much larger marketing firm. SEO, Inc. has reached the level where it has to grow to a larger corporate entity, sell to a larger corporate marketing company, or stagnate as a small business. Submit Express – They are one of the few original SEO companies to maintain rankings for ’search engine optimization’ after the Google flush of last year. They should take notes from SEO, Inc. and ensure they can market and sell outside of #1 rankings. They are growing rapidly and are in a prime position to sell. Marketing companies would buy the company simply for the rankings it already has in Google.

3.) Record growth in the SEO/SEM industry

SEO is here to stay. The industry has grown year after year and the core methodologies are far more refined. The major search engines are no longer doing massive changes to their ranking algorithms and ethical SEOs have learned to work together with the engines against of against them. Google has gotten very good at weeding out spam and unethical tactics forcing many of the ‘less-than-ethical’ SEOs out of business by simply making them ineffective. More and more companies are realizing how powerful organic search really is. I predict the best year so far for SEO.

The main thing to keep an eye out for is the blending of SEO with more traditional Web marketing. SEO is finding its place in the marketing realm and beginning to coexist quite well. Instead of being a stand alone service, it will be far more commonplace to see SEO offered as a facet of an overall online marketing program.

4.) Google will continue to dominate the SE market

Despite what many market analysts and bloggers like to fantasize about, Google will not fall from grace this year. It’s predicted every year now, but the stock is stronger than ever and continuing to climb. Google is expanding into radio and television now and bringing a whole new model for advertising to the forefront. I don’t see anything but good things for them again this year.

5.) Google will start being very apparent in the television advertising market

Google has a history of expanding before waiting to see results. They expanded into radio and allowed PPC clients to run ads on the radio with the same ease as running them on the Web. I do not think Google will sit around crunching numbers to see if the PPC model applied to radio is the next evolution or not. I think they will expand into television as soon as possible. Most likely, this will happen this year and initially be announced quietly. It’ll be a new feature in Google Adwords accounts sometime in 2008.

6.) Yahoo! will unveil a reworked PPC advertising model

Yahoo! has always had trouble in the PPC market and sought to attack Google directly with a new search advertising model called Panama that was launched in February of 2007. It was a dismal launch that only saw Google take even more market share. Later in 2007, the CEO was let go. Considering that 80%+ of Yahoo!’s revenue comes from advertising, they will need to do something huge this year. Whether it be a totally reworked PPC program or intense advertising of their system, they have to do something to increase the number of PPC customers. Of course, advertisers go where the users are. If Yahoo! manages to pick up a better share of the search market, advertisers will naturally migrate there.

7.) YouTube will cause Google more headaches

The RIAA, MPAA, and television networks have grown more and more militant about their content ending up on the Web. The RIAA, especially, has escalated this into a full blown war that has them in court on a daily basis suing pirates and content providers. YouTube has been in hot water for hosting copyrighted content for over two years. It’s purchase by Google has seemingly provided it with more slack and negotiation powers, but the facts are that a huge portion of the content on YouTube is copyrighted (and not by YouTube). I seriously doubt the major media companies will allow it to continue as it does now. Expect more negotiations between Google/YouTube and the major networks, studios, and record companies. Considering Google could buy up many of the people suing them, it adds a strange new twist to the issue.

Thank you for reading TreeHouse SEM articles. If you would like to know more about any of these topics, feel free to contact us. If you would like to reprint any of the above text, please contact us first.