Home >> Web Marketing and Search Engine News and Articles

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Industry News

On this page you will find news and information related to the field of search engine and keyword marketing as well as updates on the Keyword Marketing Superstar website.

Microsoft to Get in the Search Engine Advertising Arena With MSN Search

August 13, 2005

Microsoft and therefore MSN has been asleep at the wheel for years when it comes to search. Apparently it takes a competitor with an 80 Billion dollar market cap to get the attention of the folks at Microsoft. Needless to say Google is running away with the search crown and massive profits and now MSN hopes to give Google a run for the money. Up till now, MSN search has only offered "Featured Sites" that required an annual spend of 75k.

In the world of search, a 75k annual spend isn't that much, but the service offered by MSN to even see if they had enough inventory for you to run with them was awful, their search volume (also known as query volume or query share) was abysmally low and they wouldn't sell you the keywords that had very low search volume and were likely to convert really well. After months of blowing smoke and spending up to $300,000,000 on an advertising campaign to promote the "new" MSN algorithmic search, it looks like MSN PPC advertising might finally arrive in the next six months. It is currently being tested out in France and Singapore and some of their current big spenders will get to test it out in the states prior to the full rollout. Look for the real MSN program to launch sometime in the next six months give or take a year.

AskJeeves Launches In-House PPC Advertising Program

August 1, 2005

As might have been anticipated following the IAC acquisition of AskJeeves, AskJeeves recently announced the launch of their own PPC advertising program. The AskJeeves advertising program will be offered to current AskJeeves advertisers initially and made publicly available on August 15, 2005. It is expected that listings from this program will appear above the Google AdWords listings and will replace the various ad units that have made the organic listings on many Jeeves search results nearly impossible to find. While AskJeeves has a miniscule market share compared to Google and Yahoo, it is still a significant audience and heavily skewed toward women. Get in early and take advantage of what are likely to be low click prices and some great traffic, at least initially.

 

Yahoo! to Launch Ad Network For Smaller Publishers

August 2, 2005

In order to cash in on the market for advertising on content sites, Google has managed to corner (for the most part) through the Google AdSense network, Yahoo! is working on it's own content syndication network for publishers and advertisers. If you have a web site, you can sign up for the Yahoo! Publisher network and receive the latest news on the program and maybe even become an early participant. Early on, the Google program seemed to be plagued by worthless clicks but in recent months Google has taken more steps to weed out bad publishers and offer advertisers more options for better targeting. It's a good time to be a web publisher. With Google AdSense, the Yahoo Publisher Network and maybe even future offerings from MSN and AskJeeves, you'll have 4 networks all competing for space on your web site. Start cranking out that content now to cash in on the action!

WebmasterWorld Pulls Off Another Killer Conference in New Orleans

June 21 - 23, 2005

WebmasterWorld.com, the Internet's largest and most respected forum for search engine marketing, ecommerce issues, online advertising and marketing, web design and development, completed another outstanding conference in New Orleans.

In the follow up conference to Las Vegas in November 2004, the latest WebmasterWorld conference attracted well over 1,000 attendees, the number of exhibitors doubled, and for the first time at a conference, Google offered a meet the engineers session. The Google session gave conference attendees the opportunity to talk one on one with Google engineers from AdWords, AdSense, Froogle and algorithmic search. As usual, Google provided free food and drinks and gave away cool bar glasses to attendees.

Other conference sessions included organic search, pay per click search engine advertising and bid management, affiliate marketing, blog and RSS advertising and marketing, design and development issues. As the WebmasterWorld series has become known for, the speakers range from CEO's to in the trenches affiliate marketers and entrepreneurs. When you want to learn high level strategy and day to day tactics you can actually use to improve your business online, attend a WebmasterWorld conference. The next one will be in Vegas again - November 15-17, 2005.

IAC Corp To Buy Search Engine Ask Jeeves For 1.85 Billion

March 21, 2005

Barry Diller is slowly but surely building an Internet Empire through acquisitions. Ask Jeeves will be the latest edition to the Interactive Corp Family of web sites shortly. Ask Jeeves is one of the web's top search engines of which Teoma is a part. Ask Jeeves joins Match.com, TripAdvisor, Hotwire and other major destination and commerce sites. With Interactive Corp behind Ask Jeeves, Jeeves may finally be able to take advantage of the awesome search technology behind Teoma and begin to give Google, Yahoo & MSN a run for the money. Now if only Jeeves would get rid of all the advertising garbage at the top of their search results, and maybe even launch their own PPC search program to replace Google AdWords.

WebmasterWorld announces November 2004 PubCon Las Vegas!

After the hugely successful WebmasterWorld PubConference in Orlando earlier this year, the next PubConference has officially been announced! WebmasterWorld replaces Comdex in Vegas November 16,17,18, 2004. Stay tuned to the official PucConference web site. for more details!

Get Ready For the Google IPO!

April 29, 2004

Google, arguably the most well known and widely used search engine on the Internet announced plans to offer a public stock offering. While the date of the offering is not yet set, the hype and anticipation is building.

In an interesting twist to the traditional IPO, where most stock is sucked up by large institutional investors right out of the gate, Google plans an auction that may make it possible for the average Joe to get in on the action.

Due to the existence of 2 different classes of Google shares, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will retain a tremendous amount of control over the company. Due to the traditional pressures applied to public companies to meet short term earnings estimates and the expense of longer term health and employee well-being, this may turn out to be a tremendous advantage and keep the company out of the ethics gutter that many public companies fall into.

Most important of all, they will have the ability to maintain editorial integrity over shier search results, maintaining a separation between paid advertising and editorial content, unlike Yahoo! which sells out its search results and charges advertisers to be included in its editorial listings if they want to guarantee inclusion in the search results. To the credit of Yahoo!, they claim that payment does not influence placement within the results. However, considering Yahoo! only gets paid when people click on the listings, do you really think payment does not influence the search results?

More Search Engine Marketing News Archives:

Search engine marketing news through April, 2004

 

Back to top of page


Search Engine and Web Marketing News Links
Business Resources
Reader Testimonials