NEWSLETTER JANUARY 2007

A new year has started!

The search market made a lot of progress last year and the outlook for 2007 is even brighter. You might think that we just need to carry on as we did last year and things will continue to grow, but be aware of falling into old ruts. Don’t just focus on copy and text links on your website, there are other ways to connect a brand with relevant search queries – press releases, customer reviews, images, blogs, videos etc are great ways to be found. Give us a ring to get an infusion of creativity into your site!

Håkan Mauritzon, CEO, Relevant Traffic Europe

News

French News Search Site Wikio Is Now Available In An English Language Version

Wikio, the French news search site, has launched a version for English language sources.The site is based on a Web 2.0 philosophy. The interface is easy to use and very similar to the RSS-reader Netvibes. Both Wikio and Netvibes are products made by the same developers. Highlights of Wikio are; indexing not only professional news media but also blogs, users may influence search engine ratings by voting on search listings, you can add comments to listings, you may add your own personalized news pages etc. Now there are also Wikio for German, Spanish and Italian sources.

comScore: Google Market Share Surges Past 47%

U.S. WEB USERS CONDUCTED 3.2 billion searches on Google last month, bringing the company's search market share to 47.3%, according to new data by comScore Networks. That figure marks a slight increase from November, when Google claimed 46.9% of searches. Yahoo remained the second most popular search engine, with 1.9 billion searches, or 28.5% of the market--up from November's 28.2%. Microsoft's MSN continued to lose ground, accounting for 713 million December searches, or 10.5%--down .5% from November. Overall, U.S. Web users conducted 6.7 billion searches last month--up 30% from December 2005 and 1% from November.

Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites

Microsoft has done a new survey on how users interact with search results. Among the findings is that search marketers may need to be more concerned about getting into the top five rather than the top ten, if they want to be seen. In addition, search engines might want to seriously experiment more with adding "official site" links at the top of their pages and possibly enlarge the size of listing descriptions or "snippets" to help searches find what they are looking for.
The study from Microsoft Research can be found here in PDF format.

Microsoft Unveils New adCenter APIs, Targeting Features

Microsoft previewed a new adCenter feature that will allow search engine marketers access to MSN data that can be used to predict demographic behaviour, traffic, and how keywords will perform. Microsoft will offer the feature, the Keyword Services Program, through a set of APIs, which are slated for release soon. Other new ad functions previewed include a tool that predicts whether a search term is commercial or informational, and another that predicts the size of the demographic of a given keyword. In addition to the search marketing tools, Microsoft also previewed video hyperlink technology, which will allow marketers to create ad links on products shown in videos. The company said it will make that technology available on MSN starting in the spring.

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