Yahoo! Search Marketing

In the ongoing struggle for e-mail marketers to have their messages land in consumers’ inboxes rather than in their spam filters, it’s been widely assumed that message content is the main reason ISPs filter legitimate e-mail marketing messages. But the findings from the recently released Lyris EmailAdvisor study may go a long way in changing the mind-sets of many e-mail marketers. Message content is not a major cause of deliverability challenges for most e-mail marketers, according to the Lyris EmailAdvisor ISP Deliverability Report Card for the first fiscal quarter of 2007. More than 1,705 unique e-mails were tested against the widely accepted Spam Assassin

Wouldn’t it be great if all the whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), widgets, Flash, RSS feeds, podcasts, video blogs and so forth were all search engine optimized? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, many of these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, you’d better read on or you’ll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings. The discipline of search engine optimization (SEO) is evolving to better meet the challenges presented by a

Catalogers and other search advertisers are justly concerned about click fraud. Click fraud is when a person (or computer) imitates a legitimate user clicking on a pay-per-click ad, without actual interest in the ad’s target. Like Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography — “I know it when I see it” — click fraud escapes precise definition. To know when a click is fraudulent, one needs to know the clicker’s internal motivation for clicking or be able to prove the clicker was an automated ’bot. Most experts agree that few individual clicks are “good” or “bad.” Instead, investigators assign quality scores that indicate the probability

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art as well as a science. As with any scientific discipline, it requires rigor. The results need to be reproducible, and you have to take an experimental approach — so not too many variables are changed at once. Otherwise, you won’t be able to tell which changes were responsible for the results. You can glean a lot about SEO best practices, latest trends and tactics from SEO blogs, forums and e-books. But it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, to know with any degree of certainty that a claim will hold true. That’s where

For smaller catalogers like Chinaberry, the Web can certainly be the great equalizer. Here are some tactics used by Chinaberry’s namesake children’s books and toys catalog and its spiritual gifts catalog Isabella. Search engine marketing: Both catalogs use Google AdWords for prospecting. “Google is the most compatible for us in sending us our types of prospects,” he explains. “MSN is starting to do well, and everyone is waiting for the Yahoo! paid search relaunch. We’ve had Yahoo! on hold for a few months until its ‘Project Panama’ has its full rollout.” Affiliate marketing program: Using Performics’ tracking system, Chinaberry can monitor the online relationships

For many catalogers, paid search will be the single most important channel for new customer acquisition this year. Here are what I believe to be the 12 best ways to do it. 1. Focus on Google. The reality is, Google controls more than two-thirds of the search market and is growing rapidly. Yahoo! continues to lose market share each quarter. MSN is a far distant third. Ask.com is even further back. Allocate your attention proportional to your ad spend. Don’t completely ignore Yahoo! or MSN, but invest the most love and attention in your Google campaigns. You’ll be rewarded with the largest return for your time.

What online offers are most effective today? To answer this question, I’ll revisit 14th century Japanese poetry, tap the insights of experts at the three leading search engines and talk return shipping with two leading online retailers. Today’s Advertising Haiku Haiku is a Japanese poetic form dating to the 1400s. Haiku poems consist of three lines of five, seven and five syllables. When written well, these poems can pack a powerful emotional punch. Today’s online advertising equivalent of haiku is paid search advertising. Taking Google AdWords as the archetype, a pay-per-click ad consists of a 25-character title, two 35-character lines of ad copy and a 35-character

Does your company market products through comparison shopping engines? Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) are sites such as Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Gifts.com, Pricegrabber, NexTag, MSN Shopping, Google Base and Shopzilla. CSEs aggregate SKU data from retailers for online shoppers. Some retailers avoid CSEs due the technical hassle of sending product data to the engines and retrieving corresponding advertising cost reports. But today, the National Retail Federation (NRF) announced a new data format intended to simplify communication between retailers, agencies and CSEs. The beta test of the standard took place last week when engineers at Channel Intelligence used the format to submit product data for

9 ways to get your site search-ready for the holidays. The clock is ticking. Holiday shopping season is just around the corner. More customers will turn to your Web site than ever before. That means it’s time to tune it up for maximum search engine visibility. Here are nine traffic-building tips that’ll make your site sing “Happy Holidays” long after the season is done. 1. Link Building Links are the currency of search engines. Improving the quantity and quality of your inbound links will pay dividends. Add a handful of links from high-PageRank, relevant sites and you’ll see an impact within weeks. (PageRank

An average of 19.2 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes between January 2006 and June 2006. But that’s down from 21 percent blocked during the same time last year, according to a report from e-mail solutions company Return Path. Looking at past e-mail delivery numbers, the trend appears to be reversing itself: * 20.7 percent of commercial e-mail was blocked from consumers’ inboxes in all of 2005; * 22 percent was blocked in 2004; * 18.7 percent was blocked in 2003; and * 15 percent was blocked in 2002; Other data revealed by the report: * In the first half