Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Advertising?

Where to place your advertising dollars online…

The following chart is showing where most of the searches are occurring. When deciding where to invest your online advertising dollars, it might look like Google is the only place to invest, however, depending on your particular business, whether technical oriented, business oriented, or consumer oriented; it is probably a wise decision to try some test advertising campaigns in Yahoo and Microsoft also.

In October, Google Sites increased its lead atop the core search ranking with 58.5 percent of U.S. searches, gaining 1.5 share points versus the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 22.9 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites (9.7 percent), Ask Network (4.7 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).

comScore Core Search Report*
October 2007
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch 2.0

Core Search Entity

Share of Searches (%)

Sep – 07

Oct -07

Point Change Oct-07 vs. Sep-07

Total Core Search

100.0%

100.0%

0.0

Google Sites

57.0%

58.5%

1.5

Yahoo! Sites

23.7%

22.9%

-0.8

Microsoft Sites

10.3%

9.7%

-0.6

Ask Network

4.7%

4.7%

0.0

Time Warner Network

4.3%

4.2%

-0.1

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

In October, Americans conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines, marking a 12-percent increase versus September. More than 6.1 billion core searches were conducted at Google Sites during the month (up 15 percent), while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.4 billion (up 8 percent). All core search engines posted solid gains in search query volume in October.

Contact Professional Web Services for help with your Internet marketing today.

Yahoo! Website Submit Leaves a Lot to be Desired

What An Internet Marketing Pain In The Behind

Submitting a website to Yahoo! is not that difficult if you already have an email and a Yahoo! ID account with them. However, if you do not want an email account with Yahoo, submitting your website to Yahoo! is quite difficult. “Note: Submitting a URL requires signing in with a Yahoo! ID.” They make you get an email address that is difficult to remember. I tried about ten times before I could create one that would be accepted. Their suggestions for email addresses were not even logical. I tried placing numbers inside of the various combinations of letters and still the sign-up process would not go through. Yahoo! seems to do something very strange with their cookies also. I haven’t been able to figure it out, but with an older version of Mozilla I was not able to start the process. Even if I turned cookies fully on, the system would not accept the information into the system.

So, I had to start the whole process over with Firefox browser that I also have installed on the computer. That seemed to function for registration and login. Once logged in I was then able to submit the websites for the search engine spider to crawl in the future.

Now, Yahoo! is not endearing many folks with such a difficult sign-up process. I forgot to tell everyone that their email has flashing ads on the right side and are very annoying to say the least. If I am trying to read an email, all I see is this flashing graphic image and can’t get rid of it at all.

Yahoo!, if you want to give me ads, please don’t annoy me. Yahoo!, have you considered how this plays out with your users and the competition? I am not one to tell you how to run your business, but how much sense does it make for the long haul, to annoy your valuable users of your services and visitors to your website?

The other two search engines (Google and Bing) make it easy to submit a website for the spiders to crawl it. I don’t have to register for an email address, nor do I have to go through the difficult sign-up process with either of the other two search giants.

Understanding The Search Spiders

If your website is a new website, it can take awhile for the spiders or robots to naturally find it on the World Wide Web through links to it from other places. There are a few things besides submitting to the search engines that a person can do to help get a website in the crawl cue. Google has an excellent set of webmaster tools that can be helpful for building a detailed sitemap that can be submitted, in which every page of a website can be uploaded for the Google spiders to crawl. That way, you are sure to have all your pages included into the search population.

Do you need help with your B2B or B2C website? Professional Web Services can help with all your Internet marketing needs. Contact us today for a free Internet marketing evaluation.

Jim

PS Don’t fall for promises of daily submission to the search engines by some of the Internet marketing companies online. This at best, is a waste of time and money, and at worst, could be considered spam by the search engines.