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.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are the major search engines right now and each of them have lots of rules and algorithms to try and ensure the best results are returned in searches. The purpose of search engine optimization is to have your site rank high in relevant categories. But, there are some tactics to avoid as the major engines see them as unscrupulous and will punish you if they think you are deceiving searchers. Here are a few big ones to avoid.

1.    “Cloaking” redirects, which display different content to search engines and to your visitors.
2.    Having broken links or 404 redirects.
3.    Having duplicate content on your site.
4.    Having non-relevant or artificial links to your site, such as with link farms.
5.    Cross linking to falsely increase a site’s popularity. This is when the owner of multiple sites links all of his or her sites together, even if they aren’t relevant to one another.

Doing any of these along with a number of other “black hat” search engine optimization activities can lead to your site being banned or dropped from search engine rankings. If that were to happen then not only will you lose traffic immediately, you may never get linked to again because other sites will not want to be associated with yours.

Recently Yahoo published a patent application that explains how the company analyzes web pages for related keyword phrases. Yahoo identifies several likely phrases from the content of the web pages and matches those phrases with a content dictionary. The patent application suggests that it is beneficial to use these related keywords close together on a web page so that search engines can find the relation between them more easily.

Currently, search results can include looking at different algorithms or ranking criteria that include the number of times the queried term appears on a web page, how close the terms are together on the page and the location on the page of the terms. The problem with this method is that it doesn’t factor in the context of the search terms in relation to other words on the page.

Yahoo’s patent application attempts to find out the context of the terms as a concept or phrase as it is associated with other related phrases on the page. This helps determine the most appropriate pages to return in a search query.

One of the ways Yahoo is trying to do this is by establishing meaningful phrases or concepts. A page’s text and tags let a search engine know what those pages are about. Yahoo sends the text and tags to a program that uses an aboutness extractor to break down the text, match it with keyword phrases in a concept dictionary and see if they are listed as concepts. A context dictionary keeps information that identifies related concepts, which are one or more keywords associated with a given concept. This understanding of concepts can help search engines better understand what a searcher is looking for.

The patent application covers quite a bit more on how Yahoo plans to discover better results in searches. If you are interested in learning more you can see the patent here.

The major search engine and portal Yahoo.com is in the process of conducting tests aimed at the integration of Delicious (Del.icio.us) social bookmarking data into their search results. This lets searchers know how many Delicious users have bookmarked a particular web page. At present, it only occasionally becomes visible in Yahoo search results. These tests appear to be part of a trend in which Yahoo purchases other popular web sites and takes steps to integrate their content with Yahoo.com functions.

According to searchengineland.com, Yahoo recently began these integration tests; when visible, a line below each search result shows how many Delicious users have “bookmarked” the corresponding pages, along with a short list of “tags” (or keywords) they have been classified with. A small Delicious logo also appears alongside this line of data. Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo about two years ago. Yahoo has already completed the integration of itself with another major web site it acquired nine months earlier, by integrating photographs from Flickr.com with their Image Search feature.

The integration with Delicious enables people searching on Yahoo to know the number of people who have recommended a particular web site or page, theoretically helping them to choose the better result. For example, someone could search for a news story on a particular event which happened in the past, then read the article with the highest number of Delicious bookmarks, based upon the assumption that more users would recommend the better article. It could also give searchers a somewhat better idea of how established and/or trustworthy different online retailers are, although it wouldn’t be best to use it as the only source of information for this purpose.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to expanding integration with Delicious beyond tests. Factors unrelated to the quality of web content can impact how often it is recommended, such as how old it is, what percentage of people agree with an opinion it expresses, or how many people have an interest in promoting it. Also, Yahoo is more well-known and has existed longer than social internet bookmarking, so many of its users may be unfamiliar with this concept. It remains to be seen whether searchers will find this useful or cluttered, which will be the most important of tests in determining if integration of Delicious remains a permanent component of Yahoo web search.

“Pipes” is a feature on the Yahoo web site, which is currently in the “beta” development stage. It enables Yahoo members to put together multiple online feeds into a single “pipe”, and lets others (membership not required) specify how they want the combined information to be additionally filtered.

Some examples of Pipes which have been created by Yahoo members include “Australian Music Podcasts”, which lists related podcasts from various sources, “eBay Price Watch”, that allows users to find eBay items by price and keyword, and “GeoAnnotated Reuters News” which lets people click on numbers scattered across a world map and see headlines associated with those locations. Another pipe, “New York Times thru Flickr”, takes phrases from the N.Y. Times home page, adds photos from Flickr.com to them, and associates them with locations on a map.

If you are a Yahoo! member and logged in, you can view the sources and built-in filters which apply to each pipe by clicking the “View Source” link. There is usually a short waiting period while it opens each of the pipes, during which the message “running pipe” appears. Some of the pipes which show up in Yahoo Pipes search results do not function properly or are poorly designed; as with web pages, you may have to try a few before you find one that is useful. The system also features a message board and a substantial amount of documentation on developing and using them.

In the search results for pipes, an icon showing interconnected pipes appears next to each pipe listing. Generally, the more complex the icon, the longer it will take to open the individual “pipe.” However, this is not always true; it appears to be partially dependent upon how many sources the pipe uses. On a high-speed internet connection, the loading time is generally about two to thirty seconds, but it can sometimes be longer. If you are using an older web browser, it will probably be necessary to upgrade it before Yahoo Pipes will function properly.

Overall, Yahoo pipes offer a way to combine, associate, and filter data from two or more online sources. They can make it easier to find information, images, products, audio, and video on various subjects. The system currently has a few undesirable aspects, but these might be corrected when it advances beyond the “beta” stage.

Yahoo Pipes can be accessed at pipes.yahoo.com.

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.

Two recent studies from comScore, one commissioned by Yahoo and another by local search agency TMP Directional Marketing, examine the impact that online advertising, including search, have on offline sales. While none of the data is especially surprising, it does show once again that search marketers should consider the impact of offline conversions.

The Yahoo-commissioned study looked at shopping behavior of 175,000 comScore panelists from April 2006 to January 2007. It compared the purchasing behavior of those exposed to online advertising with the behavior of those who were not exposed, but who were otherwise behaviorally and demographically identical, looking at in-store purchases at five major retail stores.

The study showed that consumers exposed to online search and display advertising are more likely to ‘pre-shop’ online prior to purchase, and this behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales. These ‘pre-shoppers’ spend an average of 41 percent more in-store when compared to consumers not exposed to online advertising.

It also found that users exposed to search and/or display ads were more engaged, viewing an average of six more pages during their research. Those exposed to both search and display ads were most engaged, and spent more in-store, on average.

In the TMPDM-commissioned study, comScore surveyed 3,000 consumers to learn more about their local searching behavior. The study found that 82 percent of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase. Of these, 61 percent made purchases.

The importance of optimizing local search results is underscored by the finding that 60 percent of searchers online looking for local businesses think that the top results are most relevant, and 25 percent don’t want to scroll down on the page to see more results.

The study also found an interplay between online and offline ads. Between 60 percent and 90 percent of searches for heavily advertised categories – such as pizza, insurance, banks and financial institutions – were branded. Meanwhile, 30 percent to 50 percent of keyword searches for low-branded categories – such as auto and home services – were general in nature, showing that traditional advertising triggers branded online searches.

Surprisingly, 33 percent of all consumers still consider print yellow pages as their primary source of local business info. That may either be an indictment of the current low quality of local search, or an indication that local search providers have not conveyed their value to general searchers.

Other researchers have come up with similar findings, including an Accenture report which found that 67 percent of survey respondents prefer to make purchases in physical stores while 69 percent research product features online and 68 percent compare prices online.

In addition, recent research from The Kelsey Group indicates that with purchases over $500, where the Internet is the starting point, over 90 percent of the transactions finish offline. And comScore reported last year that 63 percent of search-related purchases happen offline; while the U.S. Census Bureau reports that e-commerce represents only 2.5 percent of U.S. retail spending.

Yahoo executives have warned previously that the Panama search advertising system would not have an immediate impact on the bottom line. It didn’t do anything to balance out a lower performance from display advertising, once a dominant force for the company.

Gross revenue rose by 8 percent to $1.70 billion, but net income ticked downward to $161 million. Disappointed shareholders have dropped the stock to $26.52 in after-hours trading, after a market close of $27.53.

The rest of 2007 won’t be very promising for Yahoo investors. The company lowered its third quarter and full year guidance to reflect the drop in display ads and the extra time needed for Panama to mature within the search advertising market.

We were contacted by a Yahoo spokesperson ahead of the bell, regarding the recent search rankings from comScore and our observation that Microsoft’s gain in US search market share equaled the collective share given up by Yahoo, Google, and AOL for June 2007.

Instead of attributing Microsoft’s gain to Yahoo’s loss, we were told the market has expanded and Microsoft simply picked up share from that growth. We’ve asked for supporting documentation to make a better determination of this, but haven’t received it as of press time.

The most important link count for your site is with Google and Yahoo as they collectively represent over 80% of online searches.  However, Google does not show all of your site links without a
using the link analysis tool in its Webmaster Central area. Google provides webmasters with information that cannot be found anywhere else. One such piece of information is the Links information within the Webmaster Tools section of Webmaster Central. It shows you, by page, how many links you have and who is linking to you. You can also download the information into a spreadsheet.

Yahoo! has a more open policy. Going to Yahoo! and typing in the query, “link:www.yourdomain.com,” will take you directly to Yahoo Site Explorer. This shows you all of the sites Yahoo! knows are linking to you and also puts them in order of importance. Yahoo! also lets you create a “Badge” that you can put on your Web site that shows you how many links Yahoo! knows is linking to you. Incidentally, Yahoo!’s open policy is great link-building research fodder. You can use it to see who is linking to your competition and then use that information to go after links for your own site.

Another place you might find useful is technorati.com. This search engine is highly focused on things such as links pointing to your Web site. Technorati refers to this as “reactions.” Try typing your domain directly into the Technorati search box and view the information it gives you.

You can check out your current link count on Google, Yahoo, and Technorati weekly using our Link Popularity Watch.