Yesterday Danny Sullivan posted an interesting walkthrough on a new technology that Yahoo is currently testing called Yahoo Search Assist. Throughout the following I will give a quick rundown and explain why Search Assist may help sites found in the bottom 5 of the top 10 search results.

What Do I Mean by Search Assist? First Some Background
You may have noticed over the past couple years that whenever you search for an item in Google or Yahoo you were provided with word completion suggestions. For example, if you typed in ‘boat’ then the suggestions that appeared in a drop-down (which you can select from to complete your search) might be ‘boating’, ‘boat sales’, ‘boat magazine’, ‘boating tips’… or something like that. These suggestions came from the search engine’s analysis of the most common searches related to what you are typing in. This functionality is useful but Yahoo Search Assist promises a more intelligent search experience. Read more…

So you have decided to venture out into the world of SEO. The first thing you will need to do is determine the direction of your campaign in relation to the key phrases you are choosing to target. This article will focus on how to find keywords for your organic campaign, as the process is slightly different for PPC.

Many site owners know immediately what phrases they want. If you feel like you know what you want, before you start take a brief step back and assess if this really is the best phrase for your site. Yes, it just may very well be the perfect phrase, but if it isn’t, you could wind up spending a lot of time and money pursuing a ranking that either will never happen, or will provide very little value to your site. Read more…

The Mobile Web is undoubtedly going to grow and grow until a mega industry takes shape; after all, there are simply too many people getting more and more addicted to instant information gratification. This fact is not lost on any country with a mobile network and Canada is no exception. Unfortunately for Canadians we are being suffocated by mobile data rates that are exceedingly more expensive than even a third world country like Rwanda. Unless our data rates come down you can bet that Canada will be left in the dust while the world of mobile commerce skyrockets. Read more…

Today Microsoft earned a win that made me look twice by convincing Digg to sign a 3 year deal where Microsoft Ads will be the “exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg” (see press release). Having previously used Google Adsense to serve ads (according to Barry Schwartz’s breaking article) it is a huge win for Microsoft to peg this contract. This immensity of this win became especially clear when I compared a few of the top social media voting sites side by side at Compete.com. As you can see below Digg pulverizes the competition with a reach of approximately 22.5 million visitors per month in comparison to Reddit (976,882), and StumbleUpon (731,424).

Charts or no charts, however you look at this agreement advertising with Microsoft Ads has just become a lot more tantalizing.

The latest figures from comScore are in and Microsoft is picking up speed.

While long standing search leader Google continues to dominate by a large margin, comScore reports Google losing some ground in June, while MSN saw a noticeable increase.

Latest figures for Google show a drop to 49.5%, down 1.2% from May. Yahoo also saw a decline of a little over a percentage point down 1.3 to 25.1%. Meanwhile Microsoft had a significant gain, up from its low 10.3 to a higher low of 13.2%. Ask remains unchanged at 5%.

In June Americans performed 8.0 billion online searches, which are up 6 percent from May, and up 26 percent from June 2006.

Interestingly enough, while both Google and Yahoo both saw a decrease in their percentage share for the month of June both search engines actually saw an increase in the actual number of searches conducted. With Microsoft’s nearly 3% jump, along with an increase in American searches, Microsoft experienced a spike in search volume up 36% over May, a substantial increase by any means.

Microsoft’s increase is partially credited to the introduction of the Live Search Club launched in late May, a program created to reward users of Live Search. Using their Windows Live ID and logging in to play games, and completing puzzles that involve searches users earn tickets which can then be redeemed for rewards.

According to InfoWorld, Yahoo announced Wednesday that it has purchased a 35 percent stake in Tyroo Media, an India based PPC internet advertising company which places ads on a network of around 1200 websites.

“Yahoo India has bought more than 35 but less than 50 percent stake in Tyroo for a significant amount and the tie up would help us cater to our international clients who want to advertise in India,” Yahoo India Managing Director George Zacharias told reporters.”

India offers a huge marketplace and its online presence is growing rapidly. It only makes sense for Yahoo to further tap into this market.

“Yahoo started its search-based advertising business in India about eight months ago and so far has a few thousand small advertisers, Zacharias said. There are millions of potential advertisers in India, which all the search companies and advertising networks are chasing, he added.”

While remaining independent, Tyroo and Yahoo will open up their back end systems so that advertisers will have access both networks.

An article was published today on Search Engine Land called “SEO Tips & Tactics From a Wikipedia Insider” and it has to be one of the most interesting and best written articles I have seen in a while. The article was written by a lady by the name of Durova who is “a Wikipedia administrator who confronts some of the site’s most disruptive editors. She uses a pen name to avoid harassment in real life.” (this is a snippet from the bio at the bottom of the article) Read more…

This morning I came across a great article by Sujan Patel at Search Engine Journal called “5 Quick Ways to Optimize for Local Search“. I highly recommend reading this article! Read more…

Today at the Search Engine Marketing New England conference Google employee Dan Crow confirmed his crawl systems team is working on a new tag that will allow webmasters to remove a page from Google’s search results at a predetermined time.

The tag will appear as Unavailable_after and is a perfect addition for those who wish to expire web pages that may have time-limited sales or pages that have content that is free for a limited time.

Thanks to Jill Whalen for posting this valuable SEO news from the event.

We will let you all know when this new tag becomes available for use.

Last week Google made its move against eBay owned Skype, an online person-to-person internet telephony company, with the purchase of startup company, GrandCentral Communications.

On Monday, Google product manager Wesley Chan posted confirmation of the deal in the official Google Blog:

“We’re pleased to announce that we have acquired GrandCentral Communications, a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. We think GrandCentral’s technology fits well into Google’s efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.”

Read more…