On June 18th, 2007, Microsoft announced they had launched the new version of MSN Mobile. The new MSN Mobile is a redesigned and restructured portal created to offer an efficient user-friendly experience when visiting the internet and web services from a mobile phone. The goal of MSN Mobile is to offer a ‘one-stop’ portal for phone internet users to access email, sports, news, entertainment, maps, and more.

According to Local Mobile Search (LMS), roughly 180 million mobile subscribers in the US have web-enabled phones. With such a large number of devices already having the internet readily available - it is imperative that search engine companies stay in front of the curve and offer phone internet users an easy to navigate platform.  

MSN Mobile will offer the following benefits to internet phone users:

1. Simple Navigation and Accessibility
The new MSN Mobile has been redesigned with quick and easy access to Windows Live services as well as other web content. Mobile Internet users can access the new MSN Mobile at: http://mobile.msn.com.

2. Rendering Optimization
When visiting websites on a mobile device a common problem is how a specific website may appear on that device. MSN Mobile has made a significant investment into technology that will take into account which phone a internet user is using and deliver a page that has been optimized for that phone each time a user visits a web page.

3. MSN Look and Feel
For the past decade MSN.com has provided a clean, easy-to-use website for internet users to visit and become familiar with. The new release of MSN Mobile takes into account web users comfort with the MSN.com interface and tries to accomplish an identical experience for phone internet users.

4. Availability for Multiple Browsers
One of the most common problems and complaints by phone internet users is that many websites either don’t work with a specific phone browser or they don’t render properly. The new MSN Mobile is engineered to work on all common phone internet browsers.

Since 2001, Terry Semel has assumed the title and role of CEO and President of Yahoo.  In the recent weeks, Semel had spoken at an annual shareholder’s meeting discussing how he planned to drive Yahoo back to the premier market position it once held. Everything changed on Monday for Semel, whose annual compensation package was worth $71.7 Million in 2006 - currently reported to be the highest of any CEO for a publicly held company.
 
The resigning of Semel from the helm of the $37 Billion dollar giant Yahoo, re-opens the doors for co-founder Jerry Yang to step in as CEO. Yahoo has also promoted former executive vice-president and head of advertiser and publisher group, Susan Decker to role of President and she will work with Yang and other board members to help Yahoo realize the potential their competitor Google has already achieved (Google is currently worth $160 Billion dollars). 
 
What’s this mean for Search Marketers?
 
As Google continues to sprint to the finish line of the search engine battle, this change in executive management might mean giant leaps for Yahoo or it could be the end of the once leader in the search industry.
 
Yahoo will continue to count on its new online advertising system and a handful of recent key partnerships to drive them to the market position they covet. Jerry Yang was quoted saying, “I am totally excited and energized about assuming the leadership of this great company.”
 
Many speculators feel that this could be another move for Yahoo that could eventually have share holders leaning towards a buyout. Currently there are few companies that would be fit for such a purchase, but one comes to mind right away - Does Bill Gates really need to buy the second biggest search engine - why not? We’ll have to follow Yahoo’s direction and market share closely over the next few months to see where they fit in the big picture of the search world.

Every search engine marketer knows it is important to acquire incoming links to prominent pages on websites to help build the authority of the website in the search engines perspective. There are many websites online that I personally wouldn’t want to give a link too; whether it be I think their website is no good and I don’t want to expose my web audience to the webpage or there may be little value in the connection between the two sites and therefore I’d decline the linking opportunity.  As the search engine algorithms adjust and stabilize it is evident that good incoming links are going to play a vital role in ranking website’s authoritativeness for quite some time.

So, how do I get reputable trustworthy sites to link to me?

In the search engine marketing industry we have a name for the art of making it appear attractive to link to a particular website; we call it link baiting.

“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Attempts to create link bait are frequently employed in the overall task of search engine optimization. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “… interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” Typically, users on bulletin boards, newsgroups, social networking websites, or blogs place a link to a website in some copy that further encourages another member or visitor to click. It can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature. ” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_bait

Traditionally link baiting has been a part of a PR campaign and rarely do people use the permanent content on their site to try to attract incoming links. It is important to remember that the ultimate goal of an incoming link is to get the web visitor and search engine to your website for a successful and positive experience. Good content is the key to becoming as relevant as possible for a specific search keyword so it makes sense that good content would also be key for the other websites to link to your website.

A few techniques for successful link baiting with new content are:

1. Tools: Offer industry related tools to your audience and other websites will be more attracted to providing  a link back to your site. The old saying from the movie “Field of Dreams” applies here: “If you build it, they will come”

2. Articles: Creating a library of well-thought articles based around topics your audience is searching for is a sure-fire way to gain positive exposure and attract new sites to provide you an incoming link.

3. Humor: Everyone likes something humorous, especially when they can connect with the subject matter. If the opportunity arises to add some humor to your content it will go a long way. I’m not saying to go hire George Carlin to write all your content but if a nice blend of humor that is relevant can be worked into the content - other sites will be more attracted to providing your site an incoming link.

When Pay-Per-Click advertising first came about it, there wasn’t much thought that went into the creation of campaigns. It took a few years for marketers to realize the capabilities of Pay-Per-Click advertising. On the same note, it took the Google Adwords and Overtures’ (now Yahoo Search Marketing) of the world a few years to fully capitalize on the applications they had created. Over the years we have seen vast changes to these applications with three themes in common.

Every change made by Pay-Per-Click advertising companies have concentrated on the following themes:

1. Make a better user experience - always a top priority of the search engine companies. I mean brand loyalty is key for any successful business.

2. Make money - Take a look at how much one share of the Google stock goes for: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=GOOG - Do I need to say anymore?

3. Make it easier for search engine marketers to navigate and use the applications - the easier the search engine companies make it for businesses to advertise online, the more attractive of an option it looks compared to traditional forms of marketing.

When the Pay-Per-Click advertising companies recently decided to make quality score a large part of the algorithm for when to display which ads; most search engine marketers were not surprised. In the past it was easy to come up first in the search engine result pages - all you had to do was be willing to outbid your competitors for that top spot in the sponsored results. Pay-Per-Click programs used to be based on the traditional auction system. If you were willing to pay $1.00 for a click on a specific keyword search and I was willing to bid $1.25 per click on the same keyword search - my advertisement would show higher than yours on the search engine result page. It was a simple system that worked for a few years but as with any new service offering there were improvements that could be made.

In the last year we have seen both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing shift their traditional auction system model to a more strategic approach; including quality score as a key factor as to which advertisement to show at top of the sponsored search results.

What is Quality Score?

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.

We believe high quality ads attract more clicks, encourage user trust, and result in better long-term performance. To encourage relevant and successful ads within AdWords, our system defines a Quality Score to set your keyword status, minimum CPC bid, and ad rank for the ad auction.”  Source:http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21388

The effects of quality score on pay-per-click advertising have increased the responsibility of search engine marketers to make each and every ad as relevant as possible. The old school approach of bidding the maximum amount on every keyword in your market space and using one generic ad copy for all the search results is no more. Search engine marketers still have to bid on keywords and subsequently be willing to spend a pretty penny on clicks but now the user is more likely to click a sponsored result that will convert them to a customer or help them find the information they were seeking.

The addition of quality score to pay-per-click advertising is a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Users: Get the most relevant ads served for specific search queries and in return they are more likely to convert to customers.

Search engine companies: Keep brand loyalty by delivering the result the user was searching for. The addition of quality score also improves conversion rates for websites advertising online and in return business owners are willing to spend more money on online advertising.

Businesses/Websites: Conversion rates go up! This means you make more money for every dollar you spend. Isn’t the goal of any marketing initiative to obtain a high ROI? 

In recent months there has been a lot of buzz in the search engine marketing industry about the possibility that Google and other search engines might be tracking paid links to incoming sites and placing negative weight on these links in the search algorithm. Well, to all you link gurus out there, this may come as great or horrible news; but it’s true - Google has added paid link tracking to their webmaster tools package. This doesn’t mean they have not been tracking these links for quite sometime and have just now decided to share the results with website owners but it does mean they are taking the time to track these links so you should take your time in selecting where your site should be linked from - especially when you are willing to pay for the link.

Matt Cutts of Google’s anti-spam team has offered some guidelines for evaluating paid links: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070514-153234.