Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring — Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?

What’s Going On with the Yahoo! Search Engine?

As almost anybody with access to a news source knows by now, Microsoft put in an unsolicited offer to purchase the Yahoo! search engine in early March 2008. Yahoo! rejected this offer at first, saying that it undervalued its company as one of the top engines (and a provider of other services, including email and chat as well). Microsoft did not increase the offer at this point; it instead decided to enter a proxy battle.

A proxy battle would involve Microsoft putting up its own board of directors to let shareholders decide if its purchase of the Yahoo! search engine would be acceptable or not. In essence, Microsoft has decided that it will attempt to convince shareholders that their interests are better served by people who will approve this acquisition between two of the top Internet search engines. And Yahoo! shareholders have been beaten down for some time, so it is widely expected that the majority will in fact favor this acquisition.

Meanwhile, Yahoo!, on spurning this offer, began talking with other companies in order to build strategic partnerships and keep itself as one of the top engines, as it had been for so long. It was rumored that MySpace’s parent company, News Corporation, was in talks to work with the Yahoo! search engine, as was Google. However, these talks seem to have fizzled, and Yahoo!’s board of directors has begun speaking directly with Microsoft’s board. Yahoo! bought a bit of time by delaying the election of its board, but it is believed that this is all the shareholders will stand for at this point.

So I’m assuming that if the acquisition goes down, the Microsoft search engine and the Yahoo! search engine will likely be using the same algorithm, even if they remain separate sites. It just makes sense not to spend the money to have two separate research departments, especially when the Yahoo! search engine is widely regarded to be superior to Microsoft’s.

Will Ask.com Continue to Be One of the Top Internet Search Engines?

For a time, Ask.com seemed to be trying to go head to head with Google and to position itself as one of the top Internet search engines — period. You may remember the “algorithm” ads that it ran for a time on television. However, recently Ask.com announced that it will instead be tailoring itself to the niche market share of which it already has control. In other words, they’re no longer trying to be all things to all people in the way that other top search engines like, well, Yahoo! and Google are.

What we know about Ask.com’s demographic is that it is largely female, although Ask.com refutes the notion that it is focusing on “older women.” According to an article in Forbes, an Ask.com spokesperson said that:

…reports of the site becoming oriented towards older women are false and were fueled by an erroneous Associated Press article that has since been changed. Ask acknowledged that married women do compose a lot of its core users and these matronly queries are often dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia type queries — as well as categories like health and entertainment (1)…

Seeing as Ask.com also laid off 8% of its staff at the same time that it refocused, it seems clear that the company is no longer aiming to be considered one of the top Internet search engines.

And this means that we are down to two search engine technologies dominating the entire landscape: Google and a MSN/Yahoo! search engine hybrid (Micro-hoo? Yah-soft?).

How Will This Affect Consumers?

If there truly are only two major top Internet search engines, the industry will be like Coke vs. Pepsi. Sure there are other, smaller players like RC Cola that some people will be brand loyal about, but for the most part it’s either Big Guy One or Big Guy Two.

And this means that businesses that had good rankings and that were getting good traffic from, say, Ask.com and MSN but not the Yahoo! search engine, will be in a bind. With only two top Internet search engines, there will be less real estate to compete for and the same number of businesses vying for this real estate.

How Will This Affect SEO Companies?

In one sense, having only two serious engines makes the job easier for search engine optimization companies — there’s just less algorithms to absorb and master. However, it makes the opportunity for volatility much more likely. Before, if the Google or Yahoo! search engine changed its algorithm, you had three or four other engines to fall back on while you worked to update your practices. But with only two major players, a tweak to either the Google or MSN/Yahoo! search engine algorithm could have much further reaching implications to individual companies in the search space.

Who Will Compete Next?

Google has been coasting for many years as being seen as the underdog in the industry — the cool, hip engine to use that’s not owned by the big guys. However, search engine optimization practitioners have started to see some cracks in that veneer. The truth of the matter is that Microsoft is seen as a huge corporate conglomerate, with Google starting to be seen similarly. And now Google has to answer to shareholders, rather than just going along trying “not to be evil.” Google has its own set of privacy issues and conflicts of interest, such as its recent purchase of DoubleClick, which came along with a SEO company. [See my recent article on this topic for more information.]

So when there are just two top Internet search engines, the door is opened for competition. If another company can come along technologically that is on par with the Google and Yahoo! search engine algorithms and that does not have huge corporate considerations, it could very well start gaining some market share in this space. I’ll let you know if I see any contenders.

Sources

1. http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/2008/03/05/iac-ask-update-markets-equity-cx_md_0305markets33.html

(C) Medium Blue 2008

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the founder of Medium Blue, a search engine optimization company. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including MarketingProfs, ZDNet, SiteProNews, WebProNews, DarwinMag, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue has local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world in 2006 and 2007 by PromotionWorld. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

Programming Groovy will help you learn the necessary fundamentals of programming in Groovy. You’ll see how to use Groovy to do advanced programming techniques including metaprogramming, Bbilders, unit testing with mock objects, processing XML, working with databases, and creating your own domain-specific languages (DSLs).

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There you are, project manager of a brand new project, you have done your project planning and have started implementation. Now you are thinking about what you can tell your PMI colleagues at the next chapter meeting, creating a wondrous spreadsheet to avoid project failure and revolutionize project control, and learning how to use a new whiz-bang software package you have just bought, when BAM — you are in trouble. A project wreck and you never saw it coming!

OK — so your project is in trouble and likely to become a statistic for project failure unless some immediate action is taken. No amount of wishful thinking, praying to the great god PMI, or bashing your head against the nearest brick wall can turn the clock back — so now you have to begin the project recovery process.

Common Recovery Theme

Remember the TV series M*A*S*H? Whenever they had an influx of injuries, the first thing they did was “triage,” which by definition from Encarta states that it is “the process of prioritizing sick or injured people for treatment according to the seriousness of the condition or injury.” In effect, they didn’t rush in and try to heal the first injury they saw — they did an overall assessment of how serious each casualty was then worked on the most serious problem first, working down the priority list until everything had been treated.

In project implementation terms, there may be all sorts of things going wrong, such as being behind schedule, over budget, under resourced, or having poor quality deliverables leading to non-acceptance. So how do you recover from this imminent project failure?

Preventing Project Failure

The first thing in project recovery is to evaluate the overall project — an audit or project review using a series of standard questions should identify the key problems and the severity of each one. This will allow you to prioritize project recovery planning and activity so that you tackle the most serious problems first, then work down the list. During the review, you might find some areas where you can stop the bleeding — for instance, if scope is unstable and forever changing, the introduction of a strict change control process should at least help to firm up and stabilize the scope.

The degree of project planning for project recovery will vary from project to project — some projects may need a full anesthetic (stop all work) to allow an operation to be performed (redefining scope or even another round of project planning). Some may need a plaster cast to immobilize a broken part (to prevent any more changes to scope until the project is stabilized), some areas may need a bandage (some corrective measures that may restrict progress but not stop the project), some only need a sticking plaster (minor corrective measures that have minimal impact on overall progress), and some just need some TLC (smooth out minor issues).

Recognize When Project Failure is Unrecoverable

After evaluation of the troubled project you may determine that there is no good business case for project recovery so we may need to cut our losses and move on rather than waste time and money on project recovery planning. In this case, of project failure, we need to plan euthanasia — let the project die as painlessly and with as much dignity as possible.

A failing project needs the help of a well-trained project planning professional, also called a recovery Project Manager to minimize recovery time, cost, and residual damage if the project can be saved, or to recognize when euthanasia is the recommended option.

Selling the Recovery Plan and Motivating the Stakeholders

Once the project planning professional has performed triage and avoided project failure, he has to be able to create and “sell” a prioritized recovery plan to all stakeholders. Communication is critical on any project, but it is particularly vital during project recovery where there may be a demoralized team, furious customer, nervous management, and unhappy bean counters to satisfy.

When the plan is accepted and project recovery is under way, the project planning professional must be able to motivate the team to reach for success, pacify customers and give them confidence in eventual success, and provide the bean counters with a realistic plan that can be regularly measured and reported on. Progress must be carefully monitored, controlled, and reported throughout the recovery and responses to unplanned events (risks) should be decisive, quick, and effective or we could be facing further project failure.

Finally, during the recovery period, it is important to keep your team positive — build in milestones to allow you to publicize and praise even small achievements. Build a momentum based on success, so that the team and other stakeholders perceive it as “normal” to meet milestones, and in contrast, missing a milestone is unusual and stands out amongst all the other successes.

Conclusion

Project failure is preventable with good project planning based on a well-constructed deliverables-based Work Breakdown Structure and proper controls. However, once a project starts to fail, there are techniques to recognize it, minimize the extent of the project failure and make the project recovery as successful as possible. There may be some casualties along the way, such as some reduction in scope, additional time, and/or additional cost, but with good project planning and timely intervention where required, these can be minimized. A project manager needs to be trained in these techniques not only to recover a failing project, but more importantly, reduce the chances of creating one themselves in the future!

About the Author

Bruce Beer, PMP is a certified Project Manager with over 35 years in the IT industry and over 25 years of project management experience in Europe and North America. He is the founder and president of Apollo Project Management Consulting and specializes in Project Management training, project recovery, and Project Management support. He is a Project Management instructor with Westlake Training and Development as well as the course developer for its Project Triage course. He works mainly in North America, but has worked in other countries, especially in Europe.

It’s a common question that companies who are considering hiring a search engine optimization company often face — is this something that we can do in-house? More importantly, can we do this in-house and get the same results that an expert search engine optimization company would provide?

As this article will demonstrate, clearly the answer is “yes” to both questions. However, as this article will also demonstrate, getting the types of results that an expert at search engine optimization can provide will cost you — often more than outsourcing.

For the purpose of this article, I’m ignoring the multitudes of companies that decide to dump the job on somebody already in their organization (usually an IT person who already has too much to do) rather than hiring a search engine optimization company. It has been my experience that while some of these people eventually provide decent results, they are the exception. More often than not, the project never leaves the ground, or the effort is halfhearted at best. In a worst case scenario, your internal person may embrace tactics that no expert search engine optimization company would ever use because they can put your site at risk of penalization or outright removal from the engine indexes.

My company often works with firms after they have used non-expert internal talent to optimize their Web site, and most of the time we are actually doing more work because much of what has been done is ineffective or dangerous. We have to take everything apart and put it all back together, often while making requests to the search engines to have penalties lifted.

The real goal of this article, however, is to assume that a business has decided to embark on a search engine optimization campaign, and that it is also committed to using a proven expert in search engine optimization. The choice then is simple — does the business hire an experienced resource to work in-house or should it instead go with an outsourced search engine optimization company?

A recent study by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, published in the January 2008 edition of DM News (”Healthy SEM Salaries Rule: SEMPO Survey”), points out that experience in search engine marketing carries a high price tag. For instance, if you were looking to hire someone with more than five years of experience in search engine marketing, you could expect to pay between $100,000 and $200,000 per year. For somebody with experience but not five or more years, you can expect to pay anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 per year.

If nothing else, these real world figures should convince discerning companies that expert search engine optimization and marketing is not something that you should dump off on an existing employee without any experience in the field. The free market has determined that expert search engine optimization and marketing is worth at least $60,000 per year for a full time position, and up to $200,000 per year.

On the other hand, most reputable search agencies have many more than five years of collective experience in the search engine marketing industry. In addition, a high percentage of these agencies offer SEO services that cost considerably less than $60,000 per year, to say nothing of $200,000 per year. It should also be noted that this figure neglects to include any of the additional costs associated with hiring — benefits, training, and so on. In addition, an expert search engine optimization company will have a broad range of sites from which to draw knowledge, while your in-house expert will likely only have one, or a handful at best.

To be fair, there are certain advantages to hiring an in-house expert. First of all, experts will have their feet to the fire, so to speak. A search engine optimization company isn’t likely to go out of business if it underperforms on your site, but an in-house expert in search engine optimization is likely to lose his or her job. It’s also much easier to get the whole team together to discuss your SEO initiatives at any time you choose when you are working with someone in-house. And hey, when you’re paying someone $200,000 per year, you can be pretty certain that you’re going to get top-notch work. But can an expert search engine optimization company give you that same level of work for a lot less money? Probably.

Conclusion

There are many compelling reasons why your business should hire an expert search engine optimization company rather than bring in an SEO expert internally or simply give the SEO project to an existing team member. Financially, it makes sense. But more so, you’re more likely to get the results over the short and long term with an outsourced company for all of the reasons noted above. I’m not saying you have to hire an SEO company — at first. I’m saying eventually you’ll probably want to.

(C) Medium Blue 2008

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the founder and CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott’s articles have appeared in numerous publications, including ZDNet, WebProNews, MarketingProfs, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. He was also a contributor to The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004). Medium Blue is an Atlanta search engine optimization company with local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

I recently started serving as an evangelist for Daylife, and if you haven’t heard of them before, Daylife presents a news site and a distribution platform that pulls together news and imagery from thousands of sources and organizes and displays it all for you in a way that easily enables you to follow specific topics and see how they’re connected to other topics. By using Daylife, you’ll receive complete information on the subjects that you care about.

I mentioned the distribution platform, and this platform is offered to content publishers and developers in the form of an API that’s called the DayPI. Publishers like USA Today and CNNMoney have already built their own solutions with the API, and you can too. Check out some of what has already been created and then visit the developer site to sign up for an account and get access to the API. Daylife has already done all of the work related to pulling the news together, so now you just have to use all of that data in the way that you want.

If you’re a blogger who’s not a developer but you still want to offer the latest news and images on subjects that you and your community care about, then take a look at the collection of powerful widgets that have been developed for people just like you. Customize them, copy and paste the code, and you’re done. Unlike many of the widgets out there today, the widgets from Daylife actually serve a useful purpose, and you’ll realize that once you see them in action.

News moves fast, but now you and your audience can stay informed about what’s happening thanks to the flexible tools that Daylife provides.

Here’s a short note that might be of benefit to those of you who have your own Web site or even just like to blog regularly.

I’ve been working with NetLine’s RevResponse partner program and have been pleased with the content it provides for my audience and with the revenue I’m able to generate. I think you could benefit from its program and I encourage you to check it out! Here’s where you can sign up or get more information.

Have a look and let me know what you think!

As any good search engine optimization company knows, in search, more so than any other medium, you have a very short window of opportunity in which to engage your prospect. The only way to get a solid competitive advantage in this arena is to utilize various techniques in order to make sure that you are giving a prospect exactly what it is that he or she is looking for. Otherwise, your prospect will simply click the back button and visit one of your competitors - a process that only takes seconds.

One way to gain a competitive advantage, of course, is to work on the Web site itself. Any search engine optimization company worth its salt will also be involved in conversion testing on your Web site - in other words, making certain that the visitors who arrive on your site are likely to take a point of action that eventually leads to a sale. Split tests, modifications in content, different color schemes, and numerous other variable elements can all have a measurable impact.

There is also another way that a quality search engine optimization company will seek to maximize the value of the prospects that find your Web site through search engines. In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality.

Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Differentiators

As more and more companies turn to organic search to gain a competitive advantage while promoting their products and services, it can be increasingly difficult to achieve high rankings for the generic terms that everyone in your industry is pursuing. While any ranking is ultimately attainable, eventually a search engine optimization company has to decide whether the effort involved is worth it, especially when it recognizes that you can get overall better results from the campaign by making sure that a very high percentage of people that are typing keyphrases into search engines are looking for exactly what you offer.

This is why your search engine optimization company should be able to leverage differentiators in your keyphrases to give you the best competitive advantage available.

What Keyphrases Will Work Best for Your Business?

Suppose that you are in an industry where companies can have a wide array of prices, approaches, customer service levels, and so on. Instead of targeting, from the outset, the general keyphrase that defines the industry (for example “email marketing”), a good search engine optimization company will take the time to help you gain a competitive advantage by realizing what is different about your company in order to a.) attract very highly targeted prospects who know what they are seeking and b.) reduce the competitiveness of the keyphrases they are choosing.

Let’s take a look at a high-end provider of email marketing that has advanced Web-based functionality and focuses on the B2B market. This fictional business is seeking a competitive advantage by working with a search engine optimization company. We can safely assume that the percentage of people that type “email marketing” into a search engine who are looking for this exact type of company is anywhere from between 0 and 100%.

By looking into the popularity of other variations, however, we can see that it is nowhere near 100%. Phrases like “cheap email marketing” or “free email marketing” are very popular, demonstrating that many people seeking “email marketing” are not looking for exactly the service that the provider is offering.

Imagine that instead of targeting “email marketing,” a daunting task (that, even if achieved, assures that a high percentage of visitors that come to the site are not looking for the provider’s particular type of solution), the search engine optimization company takes advantage of the provider’s differentiators. In this case, the search engine optimization company would instead target phrases such as “business to business email marketing” and “Web-based email marketing.” Suddenly the two objectives have been achieved - the provider knows that a much higher percentage of visitors that are typing these terms are actually looking for the right kind of company and the competitiveness of the phrases has also been reduced, leading to faster and higher rankings.

Using Modifiers to Give You the Edge

There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company’s differentiators, including words such as “free,” “affordable,” “high-end,” “full service,” “proven,” “turnkey,” etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your Web site. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall Web site performance.

Conclusion

Remember, your company is better than the others out there. Ask yourself why, and then tell your search engine optimization company to take advantage of these differences in your keyphrases to give you a competitive advantage in your industry. The subtle addition of a few seemingly minor modifiers can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

(C) Medium Blue 2008

About the Author

Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld in 2006 and 2007. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Brown, 2008), Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

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Someone asked how to improve search engine rankings for a Web site. Apparently, someone she knows started a Web site and talked about it with her.

She and Paul (SO) looked at me asking how did I get my site to rank well. Honestly, I don’t think about search engines when I work on my site or create blog entries. I told them that my site has been around since the mid-’90s and that getting decent search rankings took a long time. I started blogging in 2000, about three to four years before it went mainstream. The site stays fresh as I try to update it about three to five times a week.

That’s it. No magic formula. No studying articles, studying blog entries revealing search engine secrets or anything else. Just keep trucking and updating. Of course, if I try to start a new Web site, it’ll be difficult for it to achieve half the results of this one because it will never have what this has: Longevity.

It’s frustrating to land on many sites obviously trying hard to optimize their sites for search engines by using keywords everywhere… repeating key words… putting “navigation” at the bottom with at least four rows of links and keywords. As soon as see this, I leave the site. It isn’t illegal to do this, but I don’t want to associate with someone or a business that does such tactics.

What do you think?

Gnomie William Bokunicw writes:

Hey Chris, it’s me again. I’ve been thinking about buying my own domain similarly to you (with my last name being the domain name and my primary Web site being first_name.last_name.com) and doing technology based Weblogs. However, I don’t really know PHP, ASP, and the like and am really only proficient in HTML (TacoHTML for Mac OS X is an awesome HTML editor). Since all blogs are dynamic and HTML is not, I was a bit stumped as how to embed a blo