Arch rivals, Google and Overture have announced 18-month, non-exclusive agreements to provide listings for Yahoo! Japan. Currently, the Yahoo! subsidiary is the most visited site in Japan. This deal will allow paid listings to appear under Yahoo! Japan's results on a rotating basis between Overture's system and Google's AdWords. It seems that each rival is boasting some version of a victory over the other: Overture is happy that it is now inching in on Google's relationship with Yahoo! in Japan (Google had a smaller agreement already in effect with Yahoo! Japan) and Google is proud to be taking away a piece of the paid listings pie from Overture. These two rivals should provide significantly more entertainment in the coming months. stay tuned for the next round.

Well it seems that AltaVista missed a few other important elements in their new design. To sum up the posting that we found ("New Design Forgot the Users"), it seems that AltaVista forgot to make the site accessible to special needs users. This can be done by adding 'alt' tags and link text when designing. There is also something that is actually quite obvious when you look for it; links are not underlined, which makes navigation rather frustrating. Now it could be said that kinks in the design should be expected at first, but do you remember Google making mistakes like that? If AltaVista wants to measure up they had better cover all of their bases, and very quickly before interest in the new design gets old.

Continuing its new and radically different focus, Yahoo! released its new "Mail Plus" email service on Thursday, November 14th. The service starts at $29.99 per year and includes many little extras. Some of the extras include a proprietary spam blocker and an option to save messages to a user's computer for later viewing in an Outlook program.

Vanity Surfing.
Want to Know More About Your Neighbors?
Try visiting Google and typing in your postal code in quotations. did you find anything interesting? Possibly not, but occasionally the results are rather shocking and sometimes quite interesting. This BBC article goes into more detail regarding vanity surfing and the kind of information that can be found about you or your neighbors.

Selling a home is always challenging. Get the most out of your next home sale by visiting Barb Schwarz and the StagedHomes.Com team of Accredited Home Staging Professionals. “BUYERS ONLY KNOW WHAT THEY SEE, NOT THE WAY IT’S GOING TO BE”, says StagedHomes founder Barb Schwarz. Staging is the art of preparing a home for sale by rearranging its contents so potential buyers can see the actual home through the clutter. Staged Homes tend to sell faster, and for more money than non-staged homes. “You’re going to be packing to move anyway, why not get a head start by making your rooms look larger and packing up excess items and or furniture?”, asks Barb, “This allows the buyer to mentally move their furniture into your home.”

For more information visit www.stagedhomes.com or contact Barb Schwarz by email.
P.S. Keep your eyes open! Barb has a television pilot that may be coming your way!

Focus: About two years ago a mentor of mine stressed the importance of focusing on a single service - be the best at what you do and don't get distracted by offering services that only dillute branding. Well this piece of advice extends even more evidently into the world of search engines.

Don't Dillute: Do some research and find the keyword/phrase that best describes your offering and has the most traffic and interest revolving around it. Then tackle that target head-on, this will be your primary goal. Any alternate keywords and phrases can be included but they should only be secondary goals until your initial goal is successfully realized. If you concentrate on one phrase/keyword then you will have a significantly better chance of succeeding in the online marketplace. Now occasionally this strategy does not fit some business models (multiple, unrelated products for example) but the base concept will hold true for the majority of service specific businesses.

If you are unsure of your online marketing strategy just give us a call.
Toll-free 1-877-385-5526, Local (250) 385-1190

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see into the past and watch the evolution of your competition or vett a potential vendor that says they were around 4 years ago? Well we have one tool that might help you do this and more. The WayBack Machine is a freely accessible archive of the Internet which has information dated as far back as 1996.

To see how your competition started out (as marketers we are most interested in this) just go to the WayBack Machine and type in the address of the site that you want to research. Then (providing the domain is not new) you will find cached copies of the website since the day it was first automatically added to the WayBack system. Keep in mind that companies change their name occasionally so it may require some research before you find the domain that they actually started with. For example, StepForth.com was initially BraveArt.com (Don't laugh! It was a first draft!) before we incorporated and changed our name to StepForth Placement Inc.