It comes as no surprise that Google still dominates the search engine industry. Online marketers do not really dislike the idea of Yahoo remaining separate from Microsoft; it’s just the fact that Google still has a 70% share of the market. They are not happy with this because it severely limits their search ad campaigns. Online marketers want different sources of relevant traffic and this need will remain even as Google’s market shares increases.

Over the last decade, there has been a significant decrease in the competition between Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo with Google leading at the forefront. With the current economic downturn, marketers are now seeking ways to have good search ads campaigns less the astronomical price from Google. Marketers now concentrate on their return on investments instead of simple promotion.

It is interesting to observe that online marketing executives remain hopeful of the performance of Google’s competitors even as they try to downplay its importance. Some notable competitors that are standing out despite the dominance of Google include Ask.com and Baidu from China. But there are also other players with less than stellar performance despite significant investments in this field. For example, AOL has very slight percentage growth despite its rather viable ad ventures.

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In organic search engine ranking, content is always king. In order to attain a high ranking for a particular key phrase, you need to include it on your website content. In addition, the articles you put in should be well-written, original, and relevant. Until a few years ago, images played minimal role in search engine marketing but it has changed.

Google image search has seen a dramatic increase of 40% in visitor traffic. Meanwhile, universal search is now features in around 17% of all Google searches. This means that when you search for a particular topic, the results displayed will include images, maps, videos, weather, stocks, and web pages. So optimizing your images will certainly provide a positive result for you. The basic process of optimizing your images includes:

1. Using keywords – you need to know the exact keyword that will best describe the image. You should be specific with regards to the keyword. For example, if you are selling Nikon cameras, don’t just name the image as “Nikon digital camera”; instead; you should use something like “D80 DLSR” because searchers are typing specific models when they are searching for something to buy.

2. Filename – the keyword you used for the image can also be used as the image filename. This will help in the optimization effort as well.

3. Nearby text – put the same keyword near the image on your web page.

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If you are a blogger, I highly recommend you to try Story Sharing.

Anyone can create new account for free. After the registration you will enter your Adsense Publisher ID into your account. That’s all. You can start to blog and earn immediately.

Blogging with Story Sharing has many advantages. But the best one is that your blog posts will crawl by search engines instantly. That means you will start to get visitors instantly. You won’t need to wait for the new visitors. You won’t need to pay for promotion of your blog!

You will also have your own blog feed, your readers can leave comments and they can also contact you directly through your profile page.

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Google is using a crawler specially for their AdWords advertising system that automatically spiders and analyzes the content of advertising that is displayed on the Google Network or other websites. The name of the new crawler is AdsBot-Google. If you see such an entry in your web logs then you know, your web site has been visited by this bot.

Why does Google’s AdsBot visit my advertisement landing page?

Google uses AdsBot to measure the quality of the ad landing pages. The content of the landing page will be used for the Quality Score that Google assigns to your ads.

Google uses the quality score and the amount you are willing to pay, to determine the position of your ads. Advertisement with a high quality score can rank higher, even if you pay less than others for the ad.

If you do not want that Google spiders these landing pages you can add the following robots.txt to your server:

User-agent: adsbot-google

Disallow: /

These commands forbid Adsbot-Google to crawl or index your web pages that you display for advertisement in Google search results. The bad thing about this however is that your AdWords quality score will drop and you certainly have to pay for it too. So you better forget to deny Adsbot-Google crawler access to your pages. Google AdWords landing pages and site quality guidelines are published on the AdWords pages of Google.

» SEO Watch is specialized in online marketing and has many years of experience in the SEO world. SEO Watch has been involved in web development and marketing for 8 years in Asia and International and has helped several businesses to success.

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Popularity: 34% [?]