The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Last year Yahoo! killed its Site Explorer product, which was a link building tool that every SEO and Internet marketer used to measure their inbound links. Now, the only such products available are paid tools. But a new service offered by Yahoo! may very well put the company back in the small business marketing services game.

Yahoo! has always tried to come up with ways to appeal to small businesses. In the early days of its life they gave small businesses a directory listing. Then paid services became available as well as display advertising.

Once PPC came into the fore, many businesses dropped their display advertising campaigns. It took a while, but pay-pay-click advertising won that war. That is one of the reasons Yahoo! fell to second place behind Google.

Among the features offered is a reputation management tracker. You can also see which search engines have your business listed. And you can track sales and report revenues as well.

It remains to be seen how useful the service is. Right now, it’s free, though premium upgrade plans are available for a fee.

Whether or not Yahoo! turns its Small Business Marketing Dashboard into a competitive product depends on how well they can deliver on the features and the benefits they promise. This may be Yahoo!’s last ditch effort to stay alive. If Small Business Marketing Dashboard doesn’t win hearts and minds, we may continue to see a steady decline in the influence of Yahoo!

If you had any lingering doubts that search engine optimization was still a valid form of marketing, you can put them to rest right now. According to WebProNews, search is up by 68% since 2008.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone really. While the hype these days is around social media, search is still getting a lot of air play.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft, or Bing, has gained the most ground in that time. Google has already increased the number of searches it gets. In fact, it’s share of the search market is almost 70%. Bing’s is just under 20%. And Yahoo!’s is falling.

For the first time in search history, Bing is actually No. 2 in terms of total market share. Yahoo! has fallen to No. 3.

And here’s another surprise: A few people are still using AOL.

What all this boils down to is that more people are searching for information online through search engines than ever before. That means that search engine optimization is no less important than it ever was. In fact, I’d say it’s more important now than it ever has been. And that will likely increase even more going into the future.

So let’s answer the all-important question: Why? Why is search growing?

I think it really boils down to one thing. More and more people are using the Internet. As the younger generation gets older that means more people enter into the information market. And older people are going online more and more each day as well. All that spells a huge increase in search driving up demand for professional search engine optimization.

Where people are searching there is a need for more information. That means you should be putting your marketing money into search. Even now.

One of the Web’s best tools for search marketers has seen its final days. Yahoo! Site Explorer is officially dead.

Yahoo! Site Explorer was the only free place on the Web that offered webmasters an opportunity to see what sites were linking to them and which websites were linking to their competitors. Just about every webmaster on the planet has used it and most used it on a regular basis. Even search marketers who cheered when Yahoo! got out of the search engine business have at one time sang the praises of Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Now that Yahoo! Site Explorer has died, webmasters have only one way to get link popularity information that is actionable intelligence.

You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools – and you should – but you won’t get the same level of information on links from either one of those sources. Neither Google nor Bing shares information on what links they are counting as good links any more. So the link popularity metric is all but dead unless you can get it from a paid source.

All webmasters should thank Yahoo! Site Explorer for being of service while it was alive.

Yahoo!, more than any other company, built the online display advertising market. While it was still considered a directory, Yahoo! started offering online display advertising and did quite well with it because, after all, it was the most trafficked website online for the longest time. Then, PPC advertising took off – primarily because Google was the first company to build a scalable model that addressed the needs of advertisers.

For the longest time, these two companies grew their respective advertising channels. Yahoo! focused on large corporations with big budgets who were used to advertising on television. Google focused on the small business and the entrepreneur who wanted to pay based on results.

Once PPC advertising caught on, smaller companies who were advertising with display ads online made the switch. PPC grew, online display advertising declined. Now, display ads are making a comeback.

And guess who’s leading the charge? That’s right, Google.

In fact, Google is now the leading online display advertising provider. Yahoo! is No. 2. And in a very close third is Facebook.

As AdAge points out, online display advertising revenues grew 23% in the first quarter of 2011, which means it grew faster than search. I think, very soon, we’re going to see a two horse race in the online display advertising channel with Facebook and Google competing head to head for the same customers. Yahoo! will fall to third and hold onto its share of the corporate advertiser – those companies who seem to be late in adopting the most innovative advertising models.

Who do you think will win this race? Will it be Facebook, the most trafficked online property today, or Google, with its lead in diverse channels and a proven scalable system?

When it comes to link building, measuring which links are taking hold and which ones are not is very important. Yahoo!s Site Explorer has been a tool that webmasters have used for many years and it has been considered the best free online link checker available. But it’s changing.

Exactly how Site Explorer is going to change is anybody’s guess, but Yahoo! has announced that its integration with Bing will lead to an inevitable change in Site Explorer some time in 2012. Here’s a snippet from the announcement:

When Microsoft fully powers the Yahoo! Search back-end globally, expected in 2012, it will be important for webmasters to use Bing Webmaster Center as well. The Bing tool will manage site, webpage and feed submissions. Yahoo! Site Explorer will shift to focus on new features for webmasters that provide richer analysis of the organic search traffic you get from the Yahoo! network and our partner sites.

The bold text is mine.

Just what are these new features? No one knows. But if they improve Site Explorer, then they are welcome. For now, however, webmasters can go on using Yahoo!s Site Explorer as they always have – analyzing their inbound links and looking for new link building opportunities. My hope is that these features will not go away.

I mean the one where Yahoo! – the former largest Web company on the planet, which has now fallen behind Google, Facebook, Amazon, and who knows who’s next? – sold Delicious to the former owners of YouTube?

It’s no joke. Delicious is now owned by a company called AVOS, which is owned by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of YouTube.

Yahoo! sent out an e-mail yesterday inviting Delicious users to transfer their bookmarks to the new company. Users have until July 2011 to make the transfer or they may not get to use Delicious any more even in its new form. They’ll lose all their bookmarks.

If you’ve been a religious or semi-religious user of Delicious, then you’ll want to transfer your social bookmarks. You wouldn’t want to lose any link juice your websites or web pages may have gained from the site.

Of course, there are other reasons to preserve your links as well. You wouldn’t want to have to apply for a new account and start over.

Our hope is that Delicious will be at least as good a social bookmarking service under its new ownership as it ever was. Yahoo! bought the site but never improved it. So it’s pretty much the way it was pre-Yahoo! If AVOS improves it even a little, Delicious could come back and be a social media force to be reckoned with.

Here’s a question for you to consider. If you were in an industry that was closely related to real estate, where would you concentrate your internet marketing campaigns? Which search engine would you focus on? It’s not a trick question, but it is a question that relates to how closely you watch the changes in search engine activity.

A little while ago Google announced that it was dropping out of real estate search. Their excuse was that the Google API was being dropped from use so real estate agents would no longer be able to list properties. Back in July, Zillow and Yahoo! announced a special partnership that would see Zillow real estate listings automatically available through Yahoo!s real estate search. This now makes Yahoo! the biggest single real estate listing site online.

If you are in an industry closely related to real estate – for example, mortgages, insurance, title searches, home inspections, appraisals, and so on – then it would make sense to concentrate some of your paid search efforts on Yahoo!. Time will tell if Yahoo! Real Estate becomes the most used real estate search portal online, but with so many listings, there is a good chance it will.

That’s real estate. The point I make here is that current information, especially news related to search engines and social media sites, is vital if you are to be effective online. You do need to filter your information admittedly. I mean, if you are in no way connected with real estate, then you would say ‘so what’ to much of what I have written. However, tomorrow, it may just be your niche that’s affected – are you going to be on top of the story and ready to take advantage?  Your internet marketing efforts are only as good as the information you base them on.

The cost associated with building an online store can be anything from next to nothing to thousands of dollars, depending of course on how complex it needs to be.  There are alternatives that many businesses are having success with. Google and Yahoo! both offer stores and GoDaddy has a similar setup. You could opt for eBay, Amazon, or perhaps even Buy.com. The latest player that is having a huge influence is Facebook.

A number of questions spring to mind, the first being whether you need to include an online store on your site. With so many options available, wouldn’t it be better to use them instead? This is really a yes/no question since it depends on your product and who your target market is (and where they are).

Facebook is an interesting option. Being the most trafficked site on the Internet, there are potentially millions of customers just waiting for the right products – and they are shopping though Facebook. The potential for viral sales is huge – if you have the right product at the right price.

All that aside, having your own custom designed online site store hosted on your own website certainly adds more credibility to your business. The most successful online businesses are those that utilize a number of outlets, including their own, in such a way that they don’t diminish their own brand. Facebook is definitely worth investigating as are the Yahoo! and Google stores.

The best approach for your business is one that you can manage easily, helps to increase sales, and at the same time helps to promote your business.

Now I know most will argue that Yahoo! is now out of search, and in the traditional sense, they are. However, the time is ripe now to step out of your safe ‘traditional search’ shoes and to start thinking laterally. Yahoo! has made several major announcements, all related to local search, and much of it designed with the mobile user in mind.

Yahoo! have announced several apps that will make it easier for people to access information on the web.  For example, they can find restaurants close to where they are then book a table by way of OpenTable, the restaurant booking service. What should interest business owners is the launch of Local Offers. As the name suggests, users can click through to see what offers are currently available in their area. Some of the Yahoo! partnerships for this service inlcude:

• Groupon,
• LivingSocial,
• Gilt City,
• BloomSpot,
• BuyWithMe,
• DealOn,
• Zozi,
• CrowdSavings,
• Lifebooker,
• FreshGuide,
• Scoop St,
• Goldstar,
• HomeRun,
• Tippr,
• Coupons.com, and
• Valpak.

Users now can access their Yahoo! page where they can read the latest news, read what’s available at local business restaurants along with free offers from local businesses, all without having to enter a search term.  Google have been working away at making local search (now Google Places) as user friendly and relevant as possible. In fact, they have made one or two interesting changes to local search themselves this week.

Will this change local search in any way? It’s a hard call, and it will depend on how well Yahoo! can sell the feature, and how well it draws he crowds.

Competitive intelligence is one of the most important aspects of doing business online. Keeping tabs of your competition and what they are up to will allow you to respond more quickly to market developments. The following 4 tools are free and will enhance your competitive intelligence efforts and make your overall marketing much more effective.

1. Google Alerts – This is a mainstay in every online marketer’s arsenal. It’s been offered by Google for a very long time. You can enter as many search terms as you want to and any mention of those terms will be e-mailed to you almost as soon as they are indexed.
2. Twitter – You’ve no doubt heard a lot about Twitter, but you don’t often hear about it in terms of competitive intelligence. In actuality, it’s a great way to keep tabs of your competitors. Follow them and you know immediately what they are talking about. It’s a direct line to their communications team.
3. Yahoo! Site Explorer – There has been talk that Yahoo! might do away with this tool, but until they do it’s a great way to check the back links of any page on the Internet. Enter your competition’s web pages and see who is linking to them.
4. SocialMention – Type in an important key phrase for you and see who is talking about it, what they are saying and whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral. A great way to keep tabs on your competition’s social media campaigns.

These 4 spying tools are a necessity in today’s online competitive marketing culture. They’re all free and in just a few minutes each day you can know what your competition is up to.

Yahoo! is still full of surprises. On its Yodel Anecdotal Blog, the veteran Web portal has announced a deal with Twitter. But this deal is a bit different than the previous deals struck between Twitter and search engines Bing and Google. This deal actually offers Twitterers a way to update their Twitter status from Yahoo!

But will users actually use it that way? That remains to be seen, but I’m betting that some users will.

Still, that’s not even the best part of the deal. The real meat of the deal, and the part that offers the best social media optimization benefit, is this:

Whenever you produce social actions on any website (like comments on articles, ratings, buzzes on Yahoo! Buzz) that you’ve allowed to appear on Yahoo! Updates, those actions can also be shared automatically with your friends on Twitter.

What I think this means is that Yahoo! users will soon have more ways to expand their social networks. I see a day when marketers will spend most of their day and their marketing efforts updating their statuses on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo! and their other important social networks. Or, they could just head right to Yahoo! and update all of their social networks at one time. In the near future, you’ll at least be able to update your Twitter status and take care of a few other social actions from Yahoo!

How’s that for a heightened sense of social media optimization?

Yahoo! was one of the companies that pioneered search engine marketing. Back then it could be called directory marketing. It was one of the first companies to use paid inclusion and the company still relies on paid inclusion to some degree. But not as much as it did in the late 1990s.

Since purchasing Inktomi, Yahoo!s search technology, and Overture, which used to be WordTracker’s main competition, Yahoo! hasn’t really done anything innovative. They dropped Google as their primary search technology provider in 2004 and that kind of sealed the deal on their own fate. It might have been the biggest mistake Yahoo!s ever made. Since then they’ve done nothing but trail and slip.

Recently, however, Yahoo! announced that they’ve incorporated Twitter into their search results, providing Yahoo! searchers with real-time results. There’s nothing innovative about that. Both Bing and Google beat them to the punch. But Yahoo! did do it a little better.

Yahoo!s incorporation of Twitter into its search results includes an algorithmic formula for obtaining relevance to the search query. You’d have thought that Google would be the first to do that. No, it was Yahoo!

Now the question is, where will search engine marketing go from here? If searchers can rely honestly on relevant real-time search results, will that spawn a whole new industry of spam, or will it lead to greater search satisfaction? Will Yahoo!s reputation climb as a result of this new industry development?

My guess is that Bing and Google will respond with a relevance algorithm attached to their real-time search results as well. Search engine marketing, in the future, will likely be real-time based to some extent. But by how much?

It should come as no surprise that Yahoo! has announced that it will start using Facebook Connect on its properties. After all, Bing owns stock in the social media leader. And in the wake of the Yahoo!-Bing partnership looming on the horizon, it was probably a part of the deal.

Still, Bing in the picture or not, the partnership makes sense. Here’s what the Yahoo! press release says:

Yahoo!’s Facebook Connect integration will give consumers richer experiences on Yahoo!, including in Yahoo! Mail and on properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!.

Well, that’s what social media marketing is all about, isn’t it? Sharing with friends what is important to you. And if Yahoo!s visitors are doing that on Facebook it will drive more traffic back to Yahoo!, which may lead to more searches using the Yahoo! search engine – at least, that’s what Bing and Yahoo! are hoping. More people using the search feature on Yahoo! will mean more opportunities for Yahoo! to raise more revenue and give Bing (RE: Microsoft) an opportunity to study what people are searching for in order to improve its own search technology.

A marriage made in heaven, yes?

For many years the name of the search engine optimization game has been to target Google. The more articles you read the more often you will come across references to Google, Matt Cutts or Webmaster Tools. Every now and then, Yahoo! or Bing creeps into the conversation.

The theory has been that Google gets the majority of traffic so that is the place to rank. It has been a reasonable theory too and most sites find that if they get it right for Google, they are close to getting it right for the others.

Yahoo! recently announced a new search design and at the same time made a little noise about targeting people search.  A search for a person will produce results which include profiles Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed.  Their aim, to be number one for people search.

It was not so long ago that reports indicated that Bing was doing well in the travel, retail and finance sectors when it came to searches.

If the search engines are going to target certain niches, perhaps the time has come to reassess our search engine optimization strategies. If your site is based on travel, retail or finance, it may be time to focus your search engine optimization strategies on areas that will help you rank well on Bing.

Many will argue that you can optimize for all three search engines, and you can. However, we still bring the focus back to Google – perhaps it is time to change that.

While Microsoft’s BING search engine isn’t exactly news, I thought I’d share my initial thoughts concerning it’s appearance on the scene.

Bing has brought a traffic increase to Microsoft. Exciting news for them, but don’t get excited yet! Whether you are in the business of Internet marketing or simply looking into your options for hiring an internet marketing firm, consider the following:

• Making the Switch- before everyone rushes over to BING for their marketing needs, be it Pay Per Click or not, there are a lot of facets to each engine. While Yahoo! has been at bay in the number 2 spot under Google for a long time, there are many campaigns that don’t work on Google and do work on Yahoo! Just because a site is bigger does not make it better, and while jumping on any given bandwagon may seem like a good plan, there is no rush. Should BING continue in its success, it will only further establish the engine, and thus, it will still be there later on. Still, if you’re one of the people that can’t wait to dive into a new channel and truly believes that a new engine is the way to go, there are other things to consider first.
• Duplicate Content- On a Google search, as a primary example, you will find multiple links to the same site. Between all links to the same domain, there will be home page links, interior links, and potentially file links, like .pdf files and the like. BING, however, is a different story. As of recently, the BING algorithm is designed to remove duplicate content, for the purpose of only showing the most relevant page on a given site matching the search query. This may or may not be a good thing for your site. Many sites might have many similar products or services listed on the home page or on interior pages, in which case a direct link to one product might not be optimal. For eCommerce sites, this could improve ROI since, assuming the product or service page is most relevant to the search terms, such a user would be inspired to buy the product or sign up right then and there. For some businesses, however, browsing is all part of the purchase process, so taking users directly to a product page may very well give them the impression that this is the only option they have. However, even under this circumstances, site optimization will play a role in the success of your online marketing efforts.
• Site Optimization – Another thing to consider is the layout and organization of your site. Suppose users land on interior pages but do not find what they are looking for – are they easily able to access the home page, other similar products or services, and category pages from all corners of the site? It’s often difficult to find a perfect balance between enough options and too many options – and a website can become quite cluttered with too many links and poor layout / design, so a smart plan of action is to have a professional website, designed by an experience firm that not only understands design concepts and techniques, but it familiar also with Internet marketing strategies that must be implemented on-site. Whether you BING or not, be sure you or your hired marketing firm understands how the search engine being utilized works, and optimizes the site for such engines to return the best results.
• Content- Thus far, it is rumored that BING weighs on-site content over all. This means that a site featuring picture galleries without ample description, sites lacking company’s information, and sites without rich context may be penalized for it. This doesn’t denote a negative effect on rank – just the absence of a positive one. Be sure there is rich on-site content to accompany all the beautiful pictures of your products, staff, facilities, etc. A site should read well in your language, because this is what search engines look for.
• Complaints - Despite its swift jump to #2, BING has still received many complaints about how the engine ranks sites. For example, with giving equal weight to interior and home pages on a site, it may find a lower-ranking interior page to be more relevant, and therefore return that page lower in search results, where as a search engine like Google, which displays both interior and home pages, factors in the home page rank as well when considering the position of results. Another problem that many might find with BING, although not quite an official outcry from users, is the weight it gives to interior links compared to the weight it gives to external links. In recent years, it’s always been understood that while on-site SEO is important, it should not factor into rank as much as relevance. On BING, however, it seems that proper linking structure within a site will do more for your rank and relevance than it will on Google, which is known for giving much more weight to exterior links for both rank and relevance. This might be a problem, or it might be good for those with well-optimized websites.
• Pay Per Clickon BING – As I mentioned above, BING’s algorithm is quite unique compared to Google and Yahoo, so for anyone planning to experiment with a PPC campaign on BING, approach with caution. I would not recommend ending a PPC campaign on Google or Yahoo just to replace it with one on BING. I’ve always said that exploring the options is a good way to feel things out and find what works for each business, so I would encourage delegating some budget, or even better, increasing a budget to see what BING can actually do for your company – just don’t put all of your eggs into this basket because it’s fresh and new.

All in all, I’m impressed with BING, but I can’t say I’m surprised at all. Microsoft has been around for a long time and they obviously know their way around IT. I’d say that a gradual transition is best, but even better when managed by an experienced Internet marketing firm.