Reminders
As the new year approaches and the “dead time” comes upon us (the week between Christmas and the New Year), we wanted to send you some reminders to help pass the time away. This is the perfect week to do the maintenance on your site that your staff has been putting off for months. We put things off too. :-)
- Have a Detailed and up-to-date Site Map
- Your internal linking structure is vital. Absolute links will improve your Google standing while using relative links will not.
- References to your site by the top directories in your industry is often an overlooked marketing method of increasing your reputation online.
- Purchasing links from reputable sites is a viable way to increase your exposure and increase your PageRank.
- Do not underestimate the power of great content.
- The Internet has an estimated 500 billion documents online, Google has less than 1% of those documents indexed.
- 550 million searches are done on the web each and every day. Search engine marketing is a vital part of your advertising campaign.
- Online advertising is growing at a rate of 35% per year and worth $2 billion right now.
Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book”
Back in October, Amazon debuted their new service called “Search Inside the Book”. They have scanned the pages of over 120,000 books and it is online in a searchable database. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is setting up a new search company A9 in Palo Alto, California. It seems that Amazon is set to have a more powerful product search than they currently employ. This technology could splinter off to a product search across the web. Bezos is looking for new revenue streams, and he knows that a market that is growing at a rate of 35% per year is worth getting into.
Google Still King
Google will earn nearly 30% profit from an estimated $1 billion in revenue this year. While in the 90’s, search engines were never revenue enhancing segments of corporations, searching has now become truly profitable. It shows how technology people can be successful in the media of the Internet. Disney could not as they took Infoseek with a strong market share of 32% to a dead engine in less than two years.
Microsoft Looks To Step Up
Microsoft, known to get into competitive markets late, dominate, and leave market share kings in their wake (Netscape, Apple and IBM) is rumored to be stepping things up a notch in the search engine arena. While their search bot first appeared on the web in April of this year, Microsoft has publicly stated that building their own search engine was a bigger challenge than they realized. Then there were the rumors surrounding Google and Yahoo! buyouts, but nothing materialized.
Microsoft is coming out with a next-generation operating system in two years, code-named Longhorn. It makes sense that Microsoft will integrate together their new web search, and their ISP with Longhorn. With “everything out of one box” Microsoft will have a distinct advantage. The consumer will have a computer, their operating system, their ISP, their business applications and an integrated search – all out of the same box.
Here is food for thought: you are typing a research paper in Word and want additional information on European art. You highlight the keyword, right-click, and choose “search”. You are returned the top results from MSN search in a pop-up window that hovers above your application (MSWord). You browse the information, highlight the content you want, and click and drag it into your document. It is formatted properly and even provides a reference automatically from where you obtained the content. That is power, and it will be available. This may be death to other search engines.
Microsoft may be in the game late, but they have the control over the right pieces in the market.
rocky says
Therefore, the bottom-line is that, if you wish to attract and retain potential clients, you need to have an attractive, easily navigable and highly organized website. It does not matter if you are promoting a product/service through your website or you are just giving information. If your Website looks aimless, full of unnecessary information and unattractive, people will not take a second look at it. Remember, there are thousand other high quality sites, waiting to lure them in.