When you are looking at your marketing and advertising budget it is really easy to question your expenditures and the return on investment. A small business has a limited amount of resources and it is imperative that those resources be used wisely.

But determining the ROI from your Yellowpage ad or, for that matter, from any ad is very hard. That was one of the reasons the Yellowpage people started doing coupons. They desperately wanted their advertising customers to see some measurable traffic generated from this investment.

The ability to closely track responses and results is the great thing about a local online marketing and search campaign. In depth analytics can be applied to all the data generated on a website. You can tell how many people were there, how those people got there and exactly what they did once they were there.

This capability alone should put online and search marketing at the top of the marketing and advertising list for small business owners.
KV

Tom is right . . . These things are pretty popular these days.

This is an article on Yahoo . . .

Bloggers spearhead anti-Mubarak dissent

I am taking my wonderful daughter to college this weekend. I’ll be back on Monday. Hook ‘em Horns.
Ken

Local search is truly a different animal than general search. Local search is about finding things close to you, whether you are conducting a general search for an auto repair shop or a specific search for Joe’s Auto Repair.

This is one of the few areas of the search landscape that Google has not conquered. Yahoo appears to be holding its own. But, rest assured that Google is after them.

Take a look at the following and think about where your potential customers go when they are searching local.

Yahoo! Local Trumps Google in Local Search

I told you we love data, so here’s some more.

Hitwise reports on how 25 million users interact with the web. They have released a new report on search engine usage. Here’s a summary posted by Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineWatch.
Hitwise: Google Also Tops In July 2005 & Awesome Report On US Search Landscape

Here is another link to Danny’s ongoing ranking of search engines. This data also comes from Hitwise.
Hitwise Search Engines Ratings

Take a moment to review the report summary that Danny put up. It appears the Google juggernaut is continuing to gain steam. I’m not sure that this is a good thing.

We received this email:

Sir or Madam,

Quite an impressive display of sites. I am a student, studying computer science, and have a question for your designers.

What are your designers’ opinion on the trend towards tableless CSS designs, and the idea that all formatting should be removed from the content.

I noticed that the source of some of your sites use tables for the layout. I disagree with my professors, as he believes tables are, for a lack of a better word, “evil”.

I use some css for site design, but sometimes find the pressure to use all CSS can drag out completion time in order to hack my way around browser limitations.

If you would share your well-qualified opinions, I would be most appreciative.

Have a blessed day,

Matthew L.

Ah, good question.

Truth is you and your professor are both right. From a theoretical standpoint, there are some very good reasons to strive for total separation of design and content, particularly if the data will get reused in other media. However, in practice, browser rendering engines have quirks that take hours of extra development time to work around to achieve CSS only design.

Most of the sites we design, do have tables (we work to minimize the use of tables and superfluous markup). We have done some that are CSS only. The CSS sites take, on average, 3x as long to code and test across browsers. Given we live in the world of dollars and cents, most of our clients cannot cost justify the additional cost of CSS only design.

In addition we build all our sites to be accessed by visually impaired web users. One feature of accessibility is the ability for the user to resize text. This causes most CSS only designs to place text on top of each other. Tables work great to prevent overlapping of variable size text. When all major browsers universally interpret CSS the same way, we will move to full CSS.

That is the difference between the academic world and business, for clients you have to get a positive ROI. It is similar to why most of our programming is in PHP. Years ago we did Java programming (we have also done projects in ASP & ColdFusion). Java and J2EE is a very in lighted development environment. We even use to lecture about separation of data, business logic, interface logic and creative. “The way of the future”, we proclaimed.

Then the .dot com bubble burst. Despite Java being a near perfect language from a programming theory standpoint, the truth is it’s complicated and you don’t need that kind of horsepower for most applications. In practice, PHP is much faster/less costly to develop. Back in my Java days, I described weakly typed, hacker languages such as Perl and PHP as “Evil” also. Funny how a recession can make you look more practically at things.

That being said, it is good your professor is making you do it the academic way. When we hire, we look for people with strong theoretical backgrounds. School should be more about learning how to think then the practicalities of the real world.

Good luck with your studies!

Here’s some stuff from Hitwise/Clickz that is interesting.
OK…we really like data around here. So, you are going to see a lot. Get used to it.

Well, this is the first post to the LevelTen Local Search blog. The topics addressed here are really a subset of the ideas and topics discussed on the LevelTen Search Happens blog. Here it will all be Local, Local, Local.
As exciting as it is to watch the world of search evolve, it is even more exciting to watch how the powers that be in search scramble to become the powers that be in Local search.

The reason for all this scramble is obvious. One of the core functionalities of the Internet is to help you find relevant information. And if you are looking for something local…you should be able to find local relevant information.

And when you find relevant information that is local…you will generally use that information to find or purchase…this is why the Web is the greatest direct response tool we have ever seen.

So, we’re going to talk Local…and here’s something posted today on Clickz…talking about user generated reviews.

Web marketers just love user generated content and this model is creating some incredible Internet communities, MySpace, Facebook…etc.

The one interesting thing not mentioned in this article is how easy it is to subvert this model. Those with a vested interest in the success of a company or product or service can easily post glowing reviews. This has been done many times in Amazon’s book review sections. You could also provide a bad review of your competitor…just thought the dark side should be mentioned.

Stay tuned.

I guess the first post to Search Happens should explain who we are and why we have decided to become one of the 35,799 new blogs put up in the last 24 hours.

I am Ken Vernon and I have spent over 23 years in advertising and marketing. I was there at the beginning and the end of the dot com debacle of the late 90’s. I didn’t get rich and it cost me my agency.

And for some odd reason, in all my experience of online marketing and website development I never got deep into search marketing. I guess I was like a lot of marketers and website developers, I was so deep in creating the online experience that I wasn’t focused on what happened after the site launched. Find a client, build a site, find another client, build another site.

But recently I have had the good fortune to meet and start working with a guy who really, really gets search and online marketing. He is Tom McCracken, the founder and director of LevelTen in Dallas, Texas.

Tom has opened my eyes to the full realm of search and how successful search marketing really works. He and I have spent hours upon hours talking about the landscape of search engine marketing and how to provide clients with true online and search marketing results.

And guess what, it’s not all about keywords and website optimization. It is a complex formula that is different for every project and for every client.

Successful search results happen when you understand the client, the client’s products and services, the client’s customers, the client’s goals and objectives. You must also understand the online landscape for the client, their products and services and their customers. Then you put your creative problem solving hat on to devise the specific formula for that client. Once the formula is implemented, you have to monitor, analyze and adjust…and keep on doing it, and keep on doing it, and keep on doing it.

Seems a bit daunting, doesn’t it? But the results attained from good online and search marketing are stunning. True results. True conversions. True web ROI.

And that’s what this blog will be about. We may ramble a little and we may post some stuff that appears to be random…but it will all point back to making search happen.

Stay tuned.

Found a very informative blog posting about Yahoo vs. Google vs. MSN.
http://awis.blogspot.com/2005/07/yahoo-vs-msn-and-google.html

As you know Yahoo is the most visited site on the web, then MSN then Google:

Yahoo 30% reach
MSN 28% reach
Google 22% reach

It has been this way for years.

Search engine marketing novices have often used this information to state that Yahoo is most important for search. Yet we all know Google is king. The difference is that Yahoo and MSN are true portals with all kinds of additional services people use.

In reality only 9% of Yahoo users use search and 7% of MSN users. Google’s traffic is almost all search, although Google is expanding its additional services such as Gmail, and Google News.

The other item of interest is that Alexa is predicting that Google’s traffic will match Yahoo’s in one year.