There are several venues for meeting fellow search engine enthusiasts and marketers: Danny Sullivan’s SMX, Search Engine Strategies, the Webmaster World conference and the PPC Summit. Here are the upcoming events.

Webmaster World PubCon

The Webmaster World “pub conference” stated out as a simplistic meeting of people over some beers in a pub in London in 2001.

Since then the show has turned into something much bigger, with a huge annual search engine marketing conference and expo in Las Vegas.

This July 24, however, PubCon is back at the Cittie of York pub in London for an informal afternoon.

The next big event is in Las Vegas November 10 to 13.

Search Engine Strategies
on August 10 to 14.

The next Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo is in San Jose in California

Europeans may want to take part in the Berlin conference on November 24 to 25.

SMX Search Marketing Expo

SMX is all over the world this year. Just look at this itinerary:

• Singapore July 2 to 3
• SMX São Paulo 2009, Brasil, August 4
• New York City - October 5-7
• Stockholm, Sweden, 12 & 13 October, 2009
• México November 11

SMX is, like PubCon and SES, a great place for networking and keeping up to date on the latest in search engine and social media marketing.

PPC Summit

The PPC Summit focuses on pay-per-click text ads and search engine advertising.

The next two venues are in Los Angeles September 23 - 24 and Chicago November 4 - 5.

photo credit SMX: Scott Clark

photo credit SES: CircumerroStock

Ready To Get New Customers?

It’s Sunday and Pandia gives you the most important search engine news headlines of the week.

• Google Rules Mobile Search — for Now, Report Says

  Popular search engine Google not only dominates the web game but has taken to lead the mobile search domain globally as well, a report from Web browser company Opera said recently. (PCWorld June 27 2009)

• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. (Wired June 22 2009)

• More real-time search startups join the fray

  Real-time search allows users to find out what’s happening now on any topic, unlike traditional search engines, which bring up the most authoritative results over time as judged by page links. (The Industy Standard June 26 2009)

• Study Suggests People Prefer Bing’s Design To Google’s, But Still Won’t Switch

  Prior to the test, all the subjects used Google as their main search engine. Following the test, 4 out of the 12, or one third, said that overall they preferred Bing. (TechCrunch June 25 2009)

• Can Someone Please Tell Us How You Determine What’s A ‘Legal’ Search Engine From An ‘Illegal’ One?

  I’ve had a lot of trouble with courts around the globe pinning blame on search engines for what they find, using a questionable interpretation of the law for “contributory” infringement or “inducing” infringement. (techdirt June 26 2009)

• Dump Google? Bing is more user-friendly

  Bing, the search engine from Microsoft, has a better design than Google, a usability study from Catalyst Group has found. (ComputerWeekly June 26 2009)

• How to Turn Your PowerPoint Presentation into a Video for More Exposure

  You have some great video content to promote and generate additional leads! (SE Journal June 26 2009)

• Google News Now with New Author Search Feature!

  Use advanced search option on Google News. (PageTraffic June 24 2009)

• Bing Gains Major Paid Search Share in Two Weeks

  According to Efficient Frontier’s latest analysis, Bing’s share of paid clicks increased to 13% from 8% prior to its launch two weeks ago. (SE Journal June 24 2009)

• Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! - Update

  Kayak, the popular multi-airline airfare search engine, thinks Microsoft Bing’s new travel search engine looks so much like its own that it’s confusing Kayak users. (Wired June 24 2009)

• Moving up in natural search

  The Google Grants blog offers a course in search engine optimization (June 24 2009)

• China Blocks Google, YouTube This Week, Could It Become Permanent

  Given China has its own internal search engines and the government has strict control, Google has acknowledged it is censoring search results in the country. (SE Watch June 27 2009)

• Michael Jackson’s Death: An Inside Look At How Google, Yahoo, & Bing Handled An Extraordinary Day In Search

  The rush of traffic was so severe that Google initially thought it was under attack. (SE Land June 27 2009)

• You Know You Work In Search When You…

  …have more logins than you do pairs of socks. Chelsea Blacker’s Top 40 (Marketing Pilgrim June 26 2009)

• 9 SEO Tips for Attractive Search Engine Friendly Web Design

  Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design. (Marketing Pilgrim June 26 2009)

• Once Touted As A Google Killer, Cuil May Deal With Search King

  Cuil is talking to Google about a text ad deal (Yahoo Finance June 23 2009)

• Is Bing a viable competitor to Google - a 1st month review

  Since the 10.8 percent UK peak on the 3rd, traffic to Bing has declined quite considerably (SearchCowboys June 23 2009)

• Google hands Bing a pagerank 9

  The pagerank lift for Bing is remarkable. Not only is the leap from a PR2 to a PR9 pretty high, it’s also remarkable that a site which might be Googles biggest competitor in the next coming years gets such a high PR from their main rivals. (SearchCowboys

• Exclusive: Yahoo Working on Major Brand Overhaul (Pretty Please, No More Yodeling!)

  The new branding of Yahoo, said several people close to the situation, might be built around the latest relaunch of its main homepage design. (BoomTown June 24 2009)

• Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site

  The inclusion of Wikipedia articles among the thousands of publications used by Google News began as an experiment that was seen by a small percentage of users (NYT June 21 2009)

• Want Your Google News To Show Up in Google Finance?

  You need to include the full ticker name, prefixed by the name of its stock exchange. (SE Roundtable June 2009)

• Book Seer suggests books to read.

  Nice resource - simple, easy and quick to use. Great to have easy to hand at the public library enquiry desk when the question is asked. (P Bradley June 23 2009)

Ready To Get New Customers?

At the end of two and a half years, the EU project CHORUS concluded its work at a conference in Brussels recently. The conference focused on status and challenges of multi media search engine technology, but also addressed the challenges, gaps, commonalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impacts and success criteria related to search initiatives.

CHORUS has been a European Coordination Action which aims at creating the conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives have also been included.

The conference was accompanied and animated by a stand exhibition of 11 research projects participating in the CHORUS cluster and two external research projects (all in the domain of multi media search engines). The complete list of projects can be found at the end of this report or on the Conference Web site.

All Powerpoint presentations from the conference are available, as well as video of of the talks.

The conference was attended by more than 120 people from a wide range of professional backgrounds, covering private and public research institutes (various universities, INRIA, IFAAR, IDIAP, CERTH, Fraunhofer), industry (Nokia, Yahoo, Exalead, Thomson), public bodies (The European Commission, German Ministry of Economy) and national initiatives such as THESEUS and QUAERO.

photo credit: david.nikonvscanon

Breakthrough SEO Tools
Download Free Now!

Pandia discusses the role of search engine rankings in online marketing and reviews a new tool that helps you keep track of your own results.

There used to be a time when a number one position in the search engines was considered the highway to online marketing heaven. More people used to click on the three top positions than all the others combined.

Mixing different types of results

Lately things have become slightly more complicated.

Google’s Universal Search mixes results from various databases, including regular web pages, news sites, image and video listings and blog posts.

Bing sorts results into several topic sections, encouraging searchers to scan the whole of the first search engine result page before clicking.

This means that more of the first page of results become valuable marketing property.

That doesn’t change the old saying, though: Being on page 1 for a popular search query will bring you a lot of traffic.

Personalization

Then there is the case of personalization: All search engines will give a different mix of search results to people in different geographical locations.

The search results at google.co.uk are not the same as the one found by an American searching google.com.

Search engines will even use your IP address to serve you search results tailored to your city, county or state.

If you have activated personalized search in Google, Google will also take your personal search history into account.

This means that two persons sitting in the same room may, in extreme cases, get different search results.

Search engine intelligence

That being said: There continues to be a large amount of overlap between the various versions of search engine results, especially for sites and services with a global appeal.

This means that it still makes sense to keep track of your general search engine popularity to get a feeling for how well your search engine optimization strategies are working.

Given that your local search results may vary from the ones of someone at the other site of the world, it actually makes sense to use data generated from one destination. In this way you get comparable data that can be used to measure the success of your search engine strategy over time.

KPMRS

KRMRS is an acronym for Keyword Positioning Monitoring Positioning Reporting Service. It is a new free search engine positioning tracking service that lets you compare your rankings for selected keyword phrases on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Unlike some web search analytics tools, they keep it very simple. Enter the query and the url of your site and click go and you get your position for the major search engines.

If you sign up for the free subscription you will be asked to list your most important queries. KPMRS then gives you a result page that lists your positions for all these keyword phrases.

You can sign up for email alerts telling you when your position has changed or one of your competitors have outranked you. You will also get a weekly report. (Go to “Settings” to select or deselect these services).

What you get

If you subscribe KPMRS will give you several options for each site:

• Keyword analysis
  (search engine rankings for your selected queries)
• Page Rank
  (the Google page rank indicator for the home page of your site)
• Alexa ranking
  (data from the users of the Alexa toolbar, although this one didn’t seem to work when we tested it)
• Track back links
  (gives the number of pages linking back to your site. We are not sure where they get this number. The figure for pandia.com was very low, even lower than the one reported by Google. Google only reports a fraction of back-links. Yahoo gives a much more correct figure.)
• Social activity
  (probably a measure of visibility in social web sites. This function is under construction).

KPMRS does to a certain extent take geographical variation into account as it lets you search one of two data sets: US or UK search engines. The US version gave the results we asked for. The UK version reported N/A for all keyword phrases and search engines.

A lot of potential

We like the simplicity of this service and we think it has a lot of potential. It may be especially useful for those that do not have the time or skills needed to sift through all the data generated by more complex web analytics tools.

We have a few suggestions for improvement, though:

• If there are missing data, as the ones for the UK and Alexa in our test, give an error message that makes sense to the user, like: “data will be available within 24 hours” or something similar.
• Tell how the back-link number is generated, or better: give us both Google and Yahoo data.
• Make the ranking results click-able: If you click on the Google rank for a particular query, KPMRS should open the relevant Google search results in a new page or frame.
• Avoid warnings like: “NOTE - Best viewed in Firefox and Internet Explorer!” It should work for all the most important browsers, including Safari and Opera.
• Add links to a FAQ page that explains to newbies what Page Rank or an Alexa ranking entail.

Click here to take KPMRS for a spin!

photo credit: Mariano Kamp

Here are some of the search engine news articles we found interesting this week:

• China to Google: No porn, or else

  Google has acknowledged that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography (Cnet June 19 2009)

• Google’s censorship struggles continue in China

  On June 4, 2009, Google.cn blocked all searches for “Tiananmen Square,” even ones not related to the massacre that took place on that date in 1989. (Cnet June 16 2009)

• Google Street View Imagery Leads to Arrest

  Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in the northern town of Groningen were arrested after being caught on camera by a car gathering images for Google’s online photo map service (Blogoscoped June 19 2009)

• Google Goes Rainbow For Gay-Related Searches

  Google is once again flying rainbow colors to support gay pride celebrations (SE Land June 19 2009)

• Google’s Matt Cutts on PageRank sculpting

  Probably the most popular way to envision PageRank is as a flow that happens between documents across outlinks. (June 15 2009)

• Does Lycos want to get back in the game?

  Lycos wants to re-launch their search services pretty fast (Search Cowboys June 17 2009)

• Google Fires Back At Bing, Launches “Explore Google Search”

  A new Explore Google Search page. (SE Land Jun 17 2009)

• Google News Hit By Spammers

  Articles redirect to affiliate pages (SE Roundtable June 17 2009)

• Microsoft tackles Richmond trio for ‘click fraud’

  Three Richmond residents have been sued by software giant Microsoft for “perpetrating a massive ‘click fraud’ scheme.” (Richmond Review June 17 2009)

• Google Germany to Erase Internal Unblurred Street View Data On Request

  Google Inc. is willing to concede to German demands the company erase photos for its panoramic mapping service (Google Blogoscoped June 18 2009)

• Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Advice for Bing

  Microsoft recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. (SE Land Jun 18 2009)

• Bing Maps: A revealing discussion on Ch. 9

  The Bing Maps for Enterprise, previously known as Virtual Earth, is a team of some 600, with 260 developers (Liveside.net June 18 2009)

• Google adds Flash indexing with external resource loading

  This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too (Google Webmaster Central June 18 2009)

• Google Joins Twitter in Iran Election Buzz : Adds Persian Farsi Translation

  Google has added Persian (Farsi) translation to their Google Translate tool. (SE Journal June 19 2009)

• Google Flipper Is About To Jump Out Of The Water

  The project is a visual way to read Google News, or to flip through it, as it were. (TechCrunch june 18 2009)

• It Ain’t Over ’til the Fat Lady Bings

  Bing kicked off with a bang on June 1, doubling the number of unique visitors MSN/Windows Live received on the previous day and nearly overtaking Yahoo! Search for the No. 2 spot. (Nielsen Online June 16 2009)

• Google Trilogy Now Available

  Infonortics Ltd., a publisher in the United Kingdom, has announced “The Google Trilogy”. Stephen E. Arnold’s three monographs (June 17 2009)

• Scoopler: Social media engine

  It pulls live updates from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious ‘and more’ (P Bradley June 16 2009)

• What Intel Can Teach Google About the Cloud

  Internet bandwidth grows at an annual rate of 50 percent, compared with compute capacity, which grows at 60 percent, meaning that over a 10-year time period, computer power grows 100X, but bandwidth grows at 57X. (Gigaom June 14 2009)

• Topsy Lets You Mix Real Time in Your Search

  An indexer of data from the living social Web, which includes things like blogs, twitter Digg, etc. (ResearchBuzz June 20 2009)

• Google Preps Product Ads, Shows Us “What’s Here?” on Google Maps

  Google product ads will feature product specific information directly in the ad such as price and product image (Google Watch June 20 2009)

• Google Squared - great idea, but…

  In practice, once the excited searcher deviates from the carefully chosen examples Google offers things fall to pieces very quickly. (P Bradley June 20 2009)

• Hunch - a decision search engine that works

  “. I dutifully answered the questions (didn’t take long, no more than a couple of minutes) and then Hunch told me that it knew enough about me to start being helpful.” (P Bradley June 19 2009)

• Iranian Election Scandal Forces Facebook, Google to Translate Persian

  Google and Facebook have set the blogosphere afire with breathy promises of adding the Persian language, Farsi, to their list of translation services. (Google Watch June 18 2009)

• New Features on Google Books

  Google adds embedding, thumbnail view and makes it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book (Inside Google Book Search June 18 2009)

• Secrets of a nimble giant - Brin on Google

  How does a company with 20,000 staff manage to keep innovating? (Guardian June 17 2009)

• Steve Ballmer admits Microsoft’s biggest mistake

  “I would probably say I would start sooner on search” (TG Daily June 18 2009)

photo credit: phauly

Breakthrough SEO Tools
Download Free Now!