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Top 10 Industry Search Terms - September, 2008 By Hitwise US The terms listed below are ranked by volume of searches that successfully drove traffic to websites in the Hitwise All Categories category for the 4 weeks ending September 27, 2008, based on US Internet usage. 1. myspace - .78% 2. craigslist - .47% 3. ebay - .34% 4. youtube - .26% 5. myspace.com - .26% 6. facebook - .20% 7. yahoo - .19% 8. mapquest - .16% 9. www.myspace.com - .10% 10. craigs list - .09% Top 10 Fast Moving Search Terms - September, 2008 by Hitwise This list features the search terms for the industry All Categories, ranked by largest relative increase for the week ending September 27, 2008, compared with the week ending September 20, 2008. 1. dancing with the stars 2. paul newman 3. david blaine 4. clay aiken 5. britney spears 6. 2009 ford mustang concept car 7. hooters 8. criss angel 9. heroes 10. presidential debate Some of the terms that are off the top ten list from August: sarah palin, hurricane gustav, how to get a tax refund, palin, democratic convention Average Search CPC Data by Category for September 2008 Reported by ClickZ based on an Efficient Frontier study A look at the average CPC (define) in search by vertical in the U.S. for September 2008, compared to the prior month. Data and research are provided by Efficient Frontier. "Total finance" includes auto finance, banking, credit, financial information, insurance, lending, and mortgage. Each vertical contains data from multiple advertisers. The percentage of change from the previous month is indicated in parenthesis. Total Finance - $2.06 (-22.6%) Mortgage - $2.89 (7.8%) Insurance - $12.65 (4.3%) Travel - $0.69 (-4.2%) Automotive - $0.54 (-5.3%) Retail - $0.50 (13.6%) Dating - $0.44 (2.3%) The biggest change came in the Finance category which dropped from $2.66 in August to $2.06 in September. Paid Search Spending Pops: Very few cuts planned, most plan to splurge From eMarketer

"Linux servers are open source and can be based on a number of different distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, or FreeBSD."

" Another consideration that many nomads face is the difficulty of finding nationwide medical insurance plans. Most plans currently available only cover medical services within a limited network in your home state. This makes these plans nearly useless other than for emergency room care if you seldom return to your home state. "

Oct 8, 2008 at 5:55pm Eastern by Matt McGee Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Yahoo has announced that they'll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo's Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers. The next "big deployment," Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo's 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009. Yahoo's analytics service is a result of the company's purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen announced the company's plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free. In its FAQ about the new analytics service, Yahoo suggests three reasons why its product is better than the competition: 1. Real-time Data: "While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection." 2. Raw Data: "While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form." 3. Ease-of-Use and Flexibility Yahoo offers a sign-up form for future updates on the Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) home page. Update: Yahoo's Dennis Mortensen explains more and shares screenshots in a new post on VisualRevenue.

Oct 7, 2008 at 8:11am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Webmaster Central Hosting "Link Week" This week at the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google has a series of blog posts all about links. The first two blog posts are live and are named: * Links information straight from the source * Importance of link architecture Google explains that they will be writing about three main topics this week. (1) Internal links, the links that you have within your site. That post is already live and is about the how you should structure your link structure for best search engine visibility. (2) Outbound links or the links you post on your pages to other sites. I assume Google will discuss the value of these links and who you should and should not link to. Clearly, think about your user here and not the search engine. (3) Inbound links or the external sites that are linking to your site. I assume Google left this for last, because this may be the most interesting topic. Google plans to bust some myths, so it will be interesting to see what they say on the topic of links hurting your site. Time will tell - but stay tuned for more information. Postscript: Here is Google's post on linking outbound, which has useful tips for beginners on who and when to link out. In addition, it tells you how to handle user generated content links. Postscript 2: I was a bit let down by Google's inbound link post.

"By analyzing the source domain name that's part of the migration, you can view urls that Googlebot is coming across that end up as 404s. And that can help you find gaps in your 301 redirection plan."

Podcast and Videocast Essential Training with Garrick Chow takes you through hardware and software requirements, planning a broadcast, recording, editing, and posting your files for download.

The funny thing about duplicate content is that you don't really have to have it for it to appear as if you do have it. But whether you have duplicate content on your site or not, to the search engines appearances are everything . The engines are pretty much just mindless bots that can't reason. They only see what is, or appears to be there and then do what the programmers have determined through the algorithm. How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development. For example, we know that when we link to site.com/page1.html in one place but then link to www.site.com/page1.html in another, that we are really linking to the same page. But to the search engines, the www. can make a difference. They'll often look at those two links as links to two separate pages. And then analyze each page as if it is a duplicate of the other. But there is something we can do with our internal linking to alleviate this kind of appearance of duplicate content. Link to the www. version only Tomorrow I'll provide information on how to set up your site so when someone types in yoursite.com they are automatically redirected to www.yoursite.com. It's a great permanent fix, but as a safety measure, I also recommend simply adjusting all your links internally to do the same. Example of not linking to www. version. In the image above you can see that the domain contains the www., but when you mouse over any of the navigation links, they point to pages without the www. Even if you have a permanent redirect in place, all the links on your site should point to the proper place. At the very least you're making the search engines and visitors NOT have to redirect. At best, should y

How can you begin using segment optimization in your campaigns? Start by making a list of possible segments within your audience. Who are the different types of people who look for you online - and why? Don't restrict yourself to the way you may have segmented people in your database or your business plan. Brainstorm what's important and relevant from the respondent's point-of-view, by considering any or all of the following issues: * the specific "problem" the respondent wants to solve * the demographic/psychographic "persona" of the respondent * the respondent's stage in the buying process * the role of the respondent in their organization * the respondent's geographic location * the respondent's industry or the size of their organization These are your initial buckets into which respondents could be segmented. Don't worry if there's overlap between buckets, as these won't necessarily be either/or choices. Next, review the keywords and ad creatives you're running in your search marketing campaigns. For each keyword/creative pair, ask yourself - is there a particular segment that its respondents would clearly belong to? If the answer is yes, add it to that bucket along with the number of clicks per month it generates. If there answer is no, leave a question mark next to it - perhaps with a handful of segments it might appeal to. For instance, in our example above, the keyword phrases "french exam" and "college french" are obvious candidates for the student segment. Phrases like "business french" and "executive french" fall into the business traveler bucket. But "learn french" can't be segmented just from the keyword. Now, look over your segment buckets and see which ones have the most number of clicks per month. These are your best targets for segment optimization. For each one, create a dedicated landing page that is focused on the needs, wants, and characteristics of that particular

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