Some of you may or may not know, but their is a search engine war going on which has been hotting up the past 6 months.

Google, although dominating the search market is also aggressively acquiring the online ad display market.

Stats released today from ComScore shows that Google is still growing in search share which increased by 0.7% in February 2008. Yahoo’s search share actually declined by 0.6% in the same period. Microsoft also lost 0.2% and Ask.com gained 0.1%.

Below are the stats released by ComScore today:

Interestingly, Yahoo! recently launched a number of radio ads in the San Francisco area in an attempt to convince internet (Google) users to use them as their primary online search engine. This is quite a unique and aggressive approach by Yahoo! in an attempt to increase search market share, considering they have been in the search industry so long (even before Google).

Yahoo!, which by the way have improved their search interface a lot since last year, are attempting to remind internet users that there is an alternative to Google — “Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo search,” one of the ads says before noting that Yahoo offers drop-down menus with related suggestions as the searcher types.

Yahoo not only wants to show off all their new interactive features, like search assist, short cuts, and multimedia results, but I think this action is also a warm up to the release of the new Open Search system which they are bragging a lot about on the official blog lately.

Despite the obvious problems facing the US economy, market research firms are predicting that, US online advertising will continue to grow through 2008. Online ad spending will rise by 23% in 2008!

Search will account for the largest portion of online ad spending in 2008, at 40%. (great news for SEO companies!)

Rich media and video advertising is set to grow from 10.2% in 2008 to 18.5% in 2012.

These are very promising statistics for online marketing firms!

This came to my attention today and I wanted to share. You can geo target your website via the Google Webmaster Tool (upon site verification) so that your site will rank higher in a particular country or region! This will only work for generic international extensions like .com, .net and .org. It will also only take effect if a user chooses to narrow their search within that region. But it is a very easy way to increase your chances in ranking a .com domain for example in the UK or in Australia or even in New York as a preferred region with the US.

Here is a question answered yesterday on the Official Google Webmaster blog that came up at SES New York this week:

Q: How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?

A: The instructions in our Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.

If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don’t support setting a geographical target for patterns that can’t be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.

This can be highly significant for businesses needing that edge to geo target their business website to a specific region or country.

The latest Google launch (an boy have they been busy lately!!) is the “Category Exclusion tool” for Google Adwords advertisers. Basically, what this tool allows you to do is block your ads from appearing on poor quality sites that are not converting for you.

It is a great move from Google to fight against the ever increase click fraud that is rampaging their contextual network and increasing at an alarming rate. (now I remeber I wanted to make a post on this which I will do soon). Click fraud in the Google contextual network was reported to have increase to 28.5% in the 4th quarter of 2007 from around 18-19% in the first quarter of 2007 if I remember correctly.

I know for a fact that many Google Ad campaigns now only display on the Google search pages as these ads convert at a much higher rate. This tool will allow advertisers to delve back into the Google contextual network and experiment on websites and block out the sites which are converting poorly. This means of course more ad spending for Google! :)

I will not go into all the details of the tool as it has been explained already very elaborately here.

Edit:

There is a rumor going around that Google will soon limit the site exclusion limit to 5,000 websites. If you currently excluding over 5,000 sites within the Google content network, you are safe and Google won’t drop them from your list. So before this rule goes in, it maybe worth excluding as many sites as possible which are not performing well for you.

Interesting developments of late within online advertising platform acquisitions. With Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick and the release of their free ad manager platform, Microsoft is also moving forward with a recent announcement that they have acquired Rapt. Rapt, basically has developed an advanced PPC (Pay Per Click) management platform which helps publishers manage their ad creatively, click through rates (CTR), price and other data to help publishers understand where they are and where they should go from there.

With this acquisition, Microsoft will now have better control over quote: “integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management, and ad delivery and operations” through the Atlas Publisher Suite.

Microsoft will most likely integrate Rapt’s tools into their current publishing platform, which may help to give them an edge in appealing to advertisers.

Possibly more on this later…

ComScore recently released some nice data showing the international traffic trends for Facebook and MySpace. As you can see from the graph below, Facebook is growing at a very rapid rate and recently passed MySpace in total daily unique worldwide visitors. The graph below shows absolute worldwide visitors per day and Facebook passed MySpace already back in November 2007.

Chart source

Facebook is gaining new users visitors at a fast rate and also working hard to make the social network more usefull to the members it currently has says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, who also commented on Facebook’s international growth plans:

“We are targeting England and beyond. The social network has just launched sites in Spain and Germany, and France is coming next: It’s just starting to become an international product.”

Have a limited online marketing budget? Here are a number of ways to promote your website for free!

Free Online Marketing Tips and techniques:

• Start a blog. Use a free service like WordPress or Blogger. This is an excellent way to attract targeted visitors to your domain. It is a long term project, so be patient. Traffic payoff can often be very significant.

• Setup a Webmaster Central Account. You will be amazed how much useful information you get about how Google sees your website! This information alone (if used correctly) will benefit your site enormously.

• Use Google Maps. If you have an online business, submit it to Google Maps!

• Use GoogleBase. Submit your products!

• Use Social Media. Submit high quality (interesting) content to social media networks. The more interesting your content is, the more effective your social networking efforts will be. Great content is worth gold!

• Press Releases. Write and submit press releases to places like PRLog.org, goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com

• Join Forums. Start intelligent discussions, use your signatures to link, make friends and potential online partners

• Use Flickr. Host and share your photos at Flickr. Don’t share photos you don’t own or have permission to use.

• Use Facebook. Build a Facebook Business Page and start a community focused on your niche.

• Use Twittering. Network with like-minded individuals.

• Blog discussions. Make comments on blogs in your industry and leave a link back to your site.

• DMOZ submission. Its free and well worth it if you are accepted.

• Contribute to Wikipedia. Add your site to where it belongs to on wikipedia.

• Keep your page title tags unique to the content on your page!

• Use Video Media. Make a slideshow of your products into a video and upload to YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion. Include optimize title and descriptions tags. Great for Viral marketing!

• Write more Keyword optimized content. Use a free keyword tool and write more keyword optimized pages for your website.

• Use Google Analytics. Install Google analytics on your website and analyze your traffic! Many clues will be revealed.

• Use CrazyEgg. This is a great heat map tracker that analyze where the user’s eye find and clicks on information on your website.

In time, I will add more to this list and also elaborate of all of the above techniques.

Do place a comment below if you need any of the above elaborated on!

Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube with the release of some new API’s that will allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. With these new API’s, developers will be able to do all of the following without having to go to Youtube (or directing their traffic to YouTube!):

• Upload / Edit videos remotely
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

In this way, webmasters can now show free interactive videos on their own sites that are hosted and maintained by Google via YouTube servers.

This is different then what we had available in the past as the YouTube videos viewed on non-YouTube websites, although hosted on YouTube, where non-interactive and sent your traffic to YouTube.

One disadvantage is that your videos will also be available on the YouTube platform, which is good for traffic, but not good if you did not want to share the video content with YouTube. YouTube will also not be revenue sharing on the ads displayed in and around the videos at this stage, although this could be something to expect in the future says.

I got some of my information from Techcrunch thanks to Andy’s email :)

Also, you can find the original news release on the youtube blog

And if you are wandering how these Youtube APIs are being used, check out the case studies here!

One interesting use of the new APIs I noticed is the wikihow project.

Jack Herrick, Founder of wikiHow says: “wikiHow’s mission is to build and share the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Adding YouTube to our site will allow members of our community to share and learn how-to information in a totally new way.”

If you like, read more on the wikihow project here.

While browsing over at seomoz today (see previous post) I came across another juicy event that happened recently. You can find the detailed story here (all credit to seomoz for this great post)

Here is the summary:

Recently, ValueClick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon, have been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (”FTC”) for alleged violations of the Can-Spam Act and failure to protect consumer’s sensitive information.

The FTC announced today that Valueclick has agreed to pay 2.9 million dollars to settle the charges.

(According to allegations by the FTC, “ValueClick subsidiary Hi-Speed Media used deceptive e-mails, banner ads, and pop-ups to drive consumers to its Web sites. The e-mails and online ads claimed that consumers were eligible for “free” gifts, including laptops, iPods, and high-value gift cards, and included come-ons such as “Free PS3 for survey,” and “CONGRATULATIONS! Select your FREE Plasma TV.”” After being promised the sky, the consumers had to participate in a confusing assortment of expensive and burdensome third-party offers – including car loans and satellite television subscriptions.)

With this news, Valueclick’s stock fell to a 52 weeks low. But a $2.9 million dollar fine will make a dent on a company with reported revenue of 545.6 million, earnings of 62.6 million and operating cashflow of 114.2 million. There has been regular speculation over the last year about whether Valueclick was going to be acquired. Perhaps Valueclick’s current dip in value and the final resolution of the FTC investigation will make it a more attractive candidate to potential purchasers.

This is possibly a good buy for online investors :)

The results of a recent Google experiment was released over at seomoz.com regarding the weight of anchor text on the same page pointing to the same destination.

What they found  can nicely be summarized in the image below:

So let’s say you have 2 links on your home page that are both pointing to your blog. The top navigation link that has the anchor text ‘blog’ will get the Google weight for your blog and the second link further down the page will get not Google link weight at all. So your blog will not get the ‘celebrity news’ relevancy factor but instead just ‘blog’.  So Google doesn’t appear to count the anchor text from multiple links to a target from a single URL.

They specifically state that this was only tested for Google and NOT for Yahoo! or MSN.

Read the full study over at seomoz.com (thanks for releasing this great study guys!)