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For those of you unfamiliar with WebTrends, its products and services offer sophisticated Web analytics features designed to analyze web site activity, visitor traffic and paths, revenues, campaign effectiveness, and most importantly, ROI (Return On Investment) from web initiatives. In other words, WebTrends gives you a whole suite of tools designed to help your business maximize its profits. Besides their WebPosition acquisition, WebTrends also announced their biggest upgrade in years, version 7, at the NetConnect Conference in Orlando April 5th. We look forward to working with NetIQ to continue to provide you with exciting products and services. In the meantime, if you have questions about WebPosition Gold, please contact us or visit the acquisition FAQ page. On behalf of the WebTrends team, we would like to thank Brent Winters and the entire FirstPlace Software team for their efforts in making WebPosition the #1 SEO software solution. We are excited to provide our mutual customers with a broader set of tools to achieve accelerated ROI on any Web initiative. At WebTrends, we have been focused on providing marketers with complete solutions enabling easier decisions, smarter marketing and of course, better results. For some time now, our customers have been telling us that they also need to be able to analyze the results of their search engine marketing activities, both paid and organic, to drive higher conversions. The combination of WebTrends and WebPosition Gold provides a powerful solution to accelerate their return on investment in online marketing. We are committed to providing you with the great products and services you have come to expect from WebPosition Gold. In the near future, you will hear more about exciting offerings from WebTrends and WebPosition to help you grow your business. Regards, NetIQ to Acquire FirstPlace - April 5th, 2004 Press Release How to increase your sales by optimizing for local markets. According to comScore last month, local search queries now consist of up to 7 percent of all searches within the United States. In addition, in a single month, nearly 36 million Internet users conducted 200 million searches that included keywords designed to localize a query. This number is only going to increase as the search engines add more features to encourage localized searching. In recent months, a number of new and existing search engines have announced local search initiatives.
Obviously, some products and services are more likely to be localized than others by the consumer. However, with over 200 million localized searches a month just in the United States, you might be surprised at how often people prefer to shop locally. For much of the service industry, location is often essential. Therefore, it's important that you design your Web pages with local searches in mind even if you also sell globally. To find a match, the search engine will give strong preference to pages that include ALL of the words of a search phrase on the same page. Therefore, if your contact data appears on one page and your best content and keywords on another, you will not likely show up for a localized search. Want to go one step further to tapping into the local search market? Add other keywords such as regional indicators or nearby cities. Here's an example of a footer I could add to each of my Web pages if I owned a Web design company: AAA Web Designers Notice that I included the address, city, state, and phone. I also included both the state name spelled out along with the two-character abbreviation. In addition, I added keywords to take in nearby towns such as Kissimmee and St. Cloud, which local shoppers may be searching upon as well. Regional words such as "southern," "northern," and so forth are also good ideas, particularly for businesses in or near large cities. You will notice I included a link called "Directions" to give people specific directions to my store or office. If I wanted to include even more localized keywords on the page, I could have written out detailed directions referencing nearby streets, cities, and landmarks to obtain the broadest possible search exposure. Of course, I must balance my desire for greater visibility with the goal of not cluttering my Web pages. A reasonable compromise would be to at least work in my best business keywords onto my detailed "directions" page. This page could be used to pick up some of the less frequent localized searches. The great thing about localization is how easy it is to grab top 10 rankings on the major search engines. The number of competing Web pages for localized searches is often a fraction of what you will find for non-localized searches. Therefore, take an optimized page that you've fine-tuned using WebPosition Gold. Insert your local keywords onto every applicable page of your site. If you don't have a centralized header or footer file you can modify, a global search and replace via your favorite Web page editor will often make this task easy. For example, search for a common phrase or set of HTML tags on your page near where you wish to place your localized text. Search for that text and replace it with that same text PLUS the address and contact data you wish to insert. Presto! Your pages are now localized. (Caution: Be sure to back up your original pages before making any sweeping changes just in case you receive unexpected results). What's happening with AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Yahoo and others right now? A number of the major engines are going through a turbulent transition period right now. If you've traveled to AltaVista, AllTheWeb, or Yahoo recently, you may be a bit confused. Merging of the three engines is well underway. Therefore, the search results of each engine are much more similar than they were in the past, but they are not always identical. The submission options for these engines have changed as described in last month's newsletter. In case you were wondering, support for this new submission method is being added to WebPosition Gold. As regular readers of MarketPosition know, Overture acquired AltaVista and AlltheWeb early last year. Not long after that, Yahoo acquired Overture, giving it control of all three engines. Yahoo then dropped support for Google last month and brought its new engine online based largely on Inktomi technology. The engine may have also been influenced by technology from AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Lycos and MSN are still serving Inktomi results. Lycos still claims to be influenced by AlltheWeb, but since AllTheWeb's engine no longer exists at AllTheWeb.com, I doubt such claims will persist much longer. At least at the time of this article, MSN and Lycos appear to be returning results similar to the original Inktomi engine rather than Yahoo's newer version of that database. You'll also notice that the three Yahoo based engines: AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and Yahoo.com are returning similar, although not always identical results. Some variation is common when engines share the same database, but where some partners are using older versions of that database, or are applying a slightly different ranking formula than the others. Don't be surprised if Yahoo decides to use its AltaVista and AlltheWeb brands at least in the short-term to test new ranking technologies. Eventually, I'd expect AltaVista and AllTheWeb to cease independent operations and simply redirect to Yahoo.com to cut operating costs and to consolidate Yahoo's long-term branding strategy. Keep in mind MSN, while currently an Inktomi partner, continues to trudge forward in the creation of its own search engine. Ultimately, I predict we'll be left with three major "organic" (i.e., crawler or spider-based) search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These engines will supply results to their various partner sites. Those results will be passed to the visitor either unchanged or with the partner site's own twist to the source engine's standard ranking algorithm. Not unlike today, each major engine will also cater to various regions or countries such as France, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, China, Spain, and so forth. We will also see separate niche engines, or additional search features on existing engines to make localized search down to the city, state, and province level easier. Ultimately, consumers will expect, for example, to be able to search Google or their favorite engine and find all furniture stores within a five-mile radius. On a parallel track to the organic search engines are the major paid or sponsored search sites. These include players like Overture, now owned by Yahoo, Adwords operated by Google, and various independent players such as LookSmart, FindWhat, and others. It would not surprise me if Microsoft acquires its own paid search technology in order to remain competitive with Google and Yahoo. The long-term fate of dozens of auxiliary industry players is yet to be seen such as AskJeeves, which commands about an 8% market share by some accounts. Certainly, AskJeeves and others like them will be in for an uphill battle considering the size and growing popularity of Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Another influential "auxiliary" player is the Open Directory Project operated by a vast network of volunteers. Open Directory still supplies directory-based results to many major portals including AOL, Google, Lycos, HotBot, and hundreds of others. These are the category links you see next to many of the search results at various engines. These catalogs of similar sites can be handy, for example, in quickly seeing an accurate and reasonably comprehensive list of "Web designer" sites. The granddaddy of all directory-based catalogs, Yahoo Directory, remains Open Directory's chief rival. While Yahoo takes a strongly commercial approach to cataloging the Web, Open Directory on the other hand goes in the opposite direction. It offers its catalog 100% for free, taking its lead from the Web's popular Open Source movement. For many companies, free is hard to pass up, so Open Directory may persist, assuming they don't run out of money or allow quality to languish. If all these changes and engine names tend to make your head spin, don't worry. We will do our best with each subsequent newsletter to keep you up to date regarding the ever-changing search engine landscape. Furthermore, WebPosition's Page Critic and its continually updated knowledge base will boil these changes and many others not mentioned here, into specific, actionable items your business needs to take to remain visible and competitive on today's search engines. Last month we talked about several important topics including: USA Today: Business Nets Millions with Top Google Ranking Yahoo Finally Makes the Big Change and Drops Google New Paid Inclusion Pricing at Yahoo Google Adds 1 Billion Pages If you missed these or other key discussions, you can find the back issues at: If you're interested in advertising in MarketPosition™, the most popular search engine marketing newsletter in the world e-mail jim@firstplacesoftware.com for current competitive rates and information or see: http://www.marketposition.com/advertising.htm Webmasters, marketers, and business owners around the globe read this high quality newsletter and depend on its advice for promoting their businesses online. Whereas many low quality newsletters tend to get deleted as soon as they arrive in a person's inbox, MarketPosition subscribers look forward to reading the in-depth and invaluable content offered each month. WebTrends produces several products, including WebPosition (previously by FirstPlace Software), the first software program to report your search positions on the major search engines and to help you improve those positions. Download a FREE trial of WebPosition Gold 4.0 You may call us at 1-800-962-4855 if you have questions not addressed on our site. You will also find an array of additional tips and techniques for improving your search positions in both the WebPosition Help File and the Reports it generates.
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