Getting There With Search

Six steps you can take to help search engines find and index your content

You’re trying to get your website noticed and search engines are an excellent channel for visibility. In this article, we’ll look at some basic things you can do to make sure your content is being indexed by search engines. The more of the items you can implement below, the more noticeable your site will be to the search engines. 

1. Check your “Robots.TXT” file
One little line of code in a simple txt file can be very costly if it’s blocking your site from search engines. A robots.txt file allows you to tell search engines to crawl or not crawl certain directories or files in your site.

For example, this simple line of code disallows all crawlers (a.k.a. robots):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
To find your robots.txt file simply type in your domain followed by /robots.txt. For example, here is the robots.txt file for the W3C: www.w3.org/robots.txt. For more details on what can be in this file and how search engines treat it visit robotstxt.org. (more…)

Get the Best Results from Yahoo’s Partner Network

Efficient Frontier offers insights

Recently, we introduced some new features and functionalities that make it easier and more efficient for you to manage your account and better target your campaigns. These were pretty much a hit with the search marketing cogniscenti.

So how are these updates performing? Pretty well, according to Efficeint Frontier’s Shay O’Reilly. He offers several tips on how to make them perform even better.

— The Team

Questions about the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance

Advertisers and agencies have questions; we have answers

A few weeks ago, we announced U.S. and E.U clearance for the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. This was, naturally, big news in the search marketing world. That post garnered some 60 comments from our engaged advertising and agency customers. Most of these comments were positive.

Understandably, some of you had questions and concerns about your accounts. But the most important fact for you to know regarding the search alliance is that, as noted in our FAQ’s:

We will begin with the algorithmic search transition, with a goal of completing transition of at least the U.S. market by the end of 2010. We also hope to make significant progress transitioning U.S. advertisers and publishers in 2010 prior to the crucial holiday season, but may wait until 2011 if we determine that the transition will be more effective after the holiday season. All global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

What do I do now?
This naturally invokes the question, “So what do I, as an advertiser, need to do in the meantime?” The short answer is “nothing.” Keep on doing what you’re doing. During this time, we’ll continue innovating and we’ll ping you when routine updates and enhancements are made available—just as we do now. When the time comes to transition your account to Microsoft adCenter, you’ll be informed about what you’ll need to do, with instructions on how to do it.

What about all of Yahoo’s bells and whistles?
Several of you asked, in short, if all the bells and whistles that you have come to expect from Yahoo! will be ported over to your future Microsoft adCenter account—things like negative keywords, character length of ads, and so forth. Our answer:

As you might expect, Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search platform and Microsoft’s adCenter platform are not identical, but they offer many similar features, tools and reports. Before any advertiser transitions begin, Yahoo! and Microsoft will work together so that our advertisers have a high-quality product that is as familiar as possible and easy to use.

(more…)

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Yahoo’s March Madness hoop dreams; recession brand lessons; data’s not everything; 2010 looking up, and more

Calling all bracketologists
March brings with it green beer, spring flowers and, of course, three weeks of hoops hysteria in the form of the NCAA college basketball tournament. This year’s Yahoo! Sports March Madness line-up is stronger than ever, beginning with our seasoned veteran, Tourney Pick ‘Em. The contest pits Yahoo! users against each other and the “experts,” with cash prizes of up to a million dollars on the line. Something new and cool for this year’s tournament is “Predictalot,” an experimental app from the brainiacs at Yahoo! Labs: Predictalot enables fans to make all types of prestidigitations, then assigns odds and lets users buy and sell them like stocks. Yahoo! has also created a dedicated mobile site just for your tournament picks, as well as a new web show, “Bracket Madness Live.” Picking begins this Sunday after the match-ups are announced, and the usual bracket-busting begins Thursday, March 18.

JWT’s top ten lessons recession brand lessons
Those JWT guys sure are into their “top tens.” The global agency spent a year surveying brand and consumer response to the recession, and came up with ten key brand lessons for surviving a downturn. And then they put them all in a book, which you can download for bupkis—well, in exchange for the usual name/rank/serial number data, anyway.

(more…)

Video: What’s Next for Yahoo! Search?

David Pann talks about customer migration and continuing search innovation

How will the search agreement with Microsoft affect Yahoo! advertisers and products? David Pann, VP and general manager of search advertising, told WebProNews Video that the deal is “a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.” For more from David, watch the video below.

More WebProNews Videos

—The Team

Right on Target

Case Study: Affiliate marketer profits by fully leveraging the targeting tools of Sponsored Search

Self-proclaimed “retired computer geek” Don Tuttle is a man who’s always tried to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to making money online. His current line of work, commonly known as affiliate marketing, involves using search advertising to send traffic to third-party companies, and when a sale is made, Tuttle gets a commission.

To do this, Tuttle uses all of the popular paid search providers, but he identifies Yahoo! Search Marketing as his favorite, primarily due to its powerful and more extensive targeting capabilities, and to the high quality of customer support. In a business where having access to key information about users—and then using it to reach the right prospects with the right message—is essential to making a profit, Tuttle shows that being bigger is not always better.

Using pay-per-click
In 2005, after a less-than-successful foray into selling items on eBay, Tuttle recognized a growing opportunity in the field of affiliate marketing, and decided to dive in. “I don’t own the products or the companies I promote; I’m more like a commissioned salesman,” he says. Tuttle keeps a close eye on his advertising expenses, to ensure that they don’t exceed the commissions he receives from the traffic that the ads generate. “I’m very bottom-line oriented,” he explains. “Cost-per-conversion is the metric I primarily use. And like a lot of people, I didn’t succeed at first, but once I got the hang of it, I’ve been very happy with pay-per-click advertising, and with Yahoo!.”

(more…)

4A’s Conference Round-Up

Trends and tips from the smartest minds in advertising

This week, your indefatigable Yahoo! Advertising correspondents went on a field trip to the 4A’s “Transformation 2010” conference in San Francisco. (Those 4A’s stand for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.) While there, we did old the meet and greet, tweeted, and posted to Facebook our take-aways from some the smartest minds in the advertising world. We even did a little live blogging and took some video, too. (Lookin’ good, Carol!)

For a round-up of some the most interesting sessions, switch over to the Yahoo! Advertising blog.

Five Ways Advertisers Can Save Time

Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop simplifies multiple campaign management

If you’re an advertiser running more than one campaign, you will probably welcome the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, a free offline tool that lets you spend less time on the tactical details of campaign management, and more on increasing your return-on-investment.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing Desktop, it now takes just a few clicks to modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads at the same time. And if you get carried away, you can even undo selected changes with no harm done.

(more…)

Ad News and Views from Around the Web

Segmenting segmentation; bad tech predictions; activity streams are the new black; consumers using online search for offline research, and more

What segmentation is right for you?
“There are three main types of segmentation,” says ClickZ’s Neil Mason. “Demographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, and attitudinal segmentation. But which one is best? It really depends on what problem you’re trying to solve.”

The Internet’s doomed—and other bad tech predictions
Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo takes on the 1995 prediction that the Internet was doomed to fail, and discusses how you can avoid making bad predictions about technology in the future.

“Activity streams?”
It’s an idea for a new, free, more open Internet model, and it may just be the next big thing. And Yahoo! is right there, innovating. ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick explains what activitystreams are and what they may mean for the future.

Even if you’re brick and mortar, you still gotta be online
This comes by way of Greg Sterling over at Screenwerk. According to a recent poll, 94 percent of consumers did some research online prior to making a purchase. While e-commerce only makes up four percent of U.S. retail sales, people overwhelmingly (61 percent) use Internet search to research a purchase.

(more…)

Video: Carol Bartz on Science, Art and Scale

“No one can do this as well as we can.”

In an informal conversation at the 4A’s conference, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz says that only Yahoo! can offer everything advertisers need for successful digital advertising: science, art and scale.

Previous Posts »