Efficient Frontier recently released new numbers for search advertising spend that show Google continues to be the market leader with 77.4% of the U.S.’s search advertising spend in the second quarter of 2008. The data tracked by Efficient Frontier includes 23 billion ad impressions and 390 million clicks.

Over the past 12 months Google has been pulling away from Yahoo as they continue to gain shares in ad spending. This is an unfortunate turn of events for Yahoo who had counted on Panama, the ad system launched last year, to help increase the amount of advertising spending within the company. Another aspect of the decline can be attributed to the loss of overall search share, which leads to fewer impressions.

Even with a decline in their share of the search spending pie Yahoo could still earn money as long as the overall spend in search advertising grows. Unfortunately, according to Efficient Frontier, the growth that is occurring isn’t benefiting Yahoo, or Microsoft for that matter. In all actuality Google receives more of the new money as well.

This may sound great for the search engine giant Google, but in actuality it’s likely going to hurt their chances at winning government support for a plan to have some of its search ads carried by Yahoo. Microsoft is sure to fight against a Google-Yahoo deal as a potential monopoly.

While Google continues to dominate the U.S. market it is of worth to note they have a 50/50 split with Yahoo in Japan, which shows some weakness in the giant search engine. Additionally, Google is behind the competition in China, South Korea and Russia.

After creating an XML sitemap for your web site, you can submit it to major search engines so that they will index the pages sooner and update the search listings for them more frequently. However, the procedure for submitting sitemaps varies significantly from one search engine to the next. Here are some details on how to submit your sitemap to four of the major search engines…

To submit your new sitemap to Microsoft’s Live Search, which provides results for both Live.com and MSN.com, first go to webmaster.live.com. Then click on the “Sign in to use the tools” button, and sign in (after registering, if necessary) with your Windows Live ID. A form titled “Add a website” will appear, where you can enter the addresses of your sitemap and homepage.

Submitting a sitemap to Yahoo is somewhat different. The easiest way to get to the correct page (which has already changed its URL at least once) is to go to Yahoo.com, then search for “submit sitemap”. Click the first result (”Yahoo! Site Explorer”) and scroll down to “Submit Site Feed.” The list below it shows that sitemaps are one type of “feed” which can be submitted using that form. You will have to log in, or register for a Yahoo account if you haven’t already.

Sitemaps can also be submitted to Google, if you register for an account there and log into Google Webmaster Tools. After logging in and reaching the “dashboard”, click the “sitemaps” tab on the menu at the left-hand side of the screen. Then click one of the two “Add Sitemap” links and select the appropriate map type from the next menu. The webmaster tools area can be accessed at google.com/webmasters/tools/.

You can submit your sitemap to Ask.com as well. According to their FAQ for webmasters, a “ping URL” may be used for this purpose. This URL is “http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=”, with the URL of your XML sitemap added to the end of it. An alternative option they suggest is to put the “auto-discovery directive” for sitemaps in your web site’s robots.txt file.

Other search engines, such as GigaBlast and ScrubTheWeb, don’t appear to offer any method to specifically submit a sitemap. However, you can still submit your web site’s home page to them. Still others (like Altavista and Lycos) get their results from other major search engines, so it isn’t necessary to submit anything to them separately.

Even if you aren’t intending to be an SEO guru there are a few simple SEO concepts you should be aware of. First you should know who the major search engines are and how much of the market they command. The reason this is important is that if you have a limited amount of time, which most of us do, you should know where to focus your attention. Google is the behemoth, followed by Yahoo and MSN. It is important to remember to submit yourself to the other search engines such as DMOZ, but it does sometimes take weeks of even months for the search bots to index your site.

Next, you need to create a sitemap for Google and Yahoo if you don’t already have one. A sitemap is a simple xml or txt file that lists all the available pages on your website. It helps the bot going around to your site index it properly.

Also you want to make sure that you are bidding for reasonable keywords. Using keywords tools such as Overture can help you find valuable keywords for your niche. Once you’ve determined the best keywords for your goals make sure these words are entered in your meta data such as the title tags.

Then create relevant content for your site. Write articles, start a blog or even use articles from article directories. If visitors find value in the content on your site and think it’s interesting they will return and they will spread the word to others.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in building a site for the engines rather than the users, which is a mistake. While ranking high is important, if you have a site that isn’t clear and easy to understand visitors will leave immediately. And if you have many visitors that link to your site the search engines will take notice and your rankings will improve anyway.

Finally, the most important part of SEO currently is link building. Both Google and Yahoo base a lot of their ranking on how many links a site has. Obviously relevant links are better than non-relevant, but there are some non-relevant links that are okay, too. Directories like DMOZ.org or Yahoo! Directory are a great place to have links from because they have high pagerank. The text that is in these links are important as well so try to use keywords appropriate to your market.

While this is just the surface of SEO, it is a good place to start if you are a beginner or if you are trying to explain the process to another beginner. Once you grasp the basics then you can move further into the techniques of SEO.

Deciding which keywords (and key phrases) you want to use is an important first step in writing the text and metadata for your web site pages. These keywords play an important role in gaining traffic results through search engine results for your site. The main question is, “what keywords are the right ones?” Here are some tips to help answer that question.

The first step is to use your own knowledge. Create a list with the most common words and phrases in your industry. Be careful that your customers use these words, though and not just marketers or salesman. People aren’t going to search for whatever catchy nickname you’re using, they’ll use whatever is common amongst themselves or the media. Once you’ve create this list you can check it’s efficiency by using a tool such as Overture to see how often a particular keyword is searched for.

You can also turn to the search engines themselves for suggestions once you have a basic list. The 3 major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN, all offer tools that provide keyword suggestions. Google and MSN require registration, which may include a small, one-time fee while Yahoo does not. These tools offer varieties on the words you already have, which helps cover anything you may have forgotten.

There are also subscription services that represent another avenue for finding keywords. The most popular among these is Wordtracker, which compiles information from searches performed on several lower level search engines. Keyword Discovery is another option in a similar vein, which takes recorded search queries from Internet Service Providers to form their information. Both options should definitely be looked into as many SEO gurus favor them.

Finally, take a look at your own server logs and internal search logs if you can. These show you how people came to your site and what they were searching for once they arrived – very helpful information for a marketer trying to decide how to get people to their site.

All in all, these are just a few tips to point you in the right direction. As you develop your keyword list you’ll find more and more words to add, while some earlier versions may be pared off. As long as the right people are finding your site you can rest assured you’re on the right track.

Google continued to build on its lead in U.S. search market share, claiming nearly half of all searches conducted in April, according to research released by comScore Networks. Hitwise placed the volume at 65 percent of U.S.-based searches in April.

According to comScore, Google gained 1.4 share points from March to reach 49.7 percent of the U.S. search market in April. Yahoo’s search share dipped less than one point to 26.8 percent, and Microsoft held at 10.3 percent of the U.S. search market with less than a one-point drop as well.

In April, 7.3 billion searches were conducted by U.S. Internet users. Search volumes were up 11 percent from April 2006. Google accounted for 3.6 billion search queries; Yahoo served two billion; and Microsoft users queried 757 million searches.