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We’re under siege - The mountains of Colorado are experiencing record snowfall and the Blizzard home office has received so much snow there’s nowhere else to shovel it! We’re in desperate need of some sunny weather and maybe a little sand between our toes.

If you have any sunny beach pictures or snow photos that make ours look tropical - send them to editor@blizzardinternet.com and we’ll feature them in the newsletter - with a LINK!

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Blizzard Ranked Among World’s Best SEO Companies in February 2008!

The new year is starting out great! Blizzard Internet Marketing has been included on TopSEOs.com top SEO companies for February 2008.

Blizzard has been included on this prestigious list for several months, and during February is ranked in 20th position.  This is further evidence that Blizzard is committed to delivering top-shelf results to our clients.  Staying on top of the changing internet marketing trends is time consuming and tricky.

Our in-house Research and Development team watches and tests trends and new media to ensure we’re giving our clients the best of the best.

Our clients are our partners, and our success is in no small part due to your understanding and cooperation with our Project Managers and Marketing Professionals.  Knowing how to rank a site is only half the battle, being able to implement suggestions and trust our expertise is what delivers the best forms of success to our clients.  Without you doing what you do – we couldn’t do what we do!

Since 2002, TopSEOs.com has evaluated the leading internet marketing companies and is a trusted resource in the SEO industry.

TopSEOs.com ranks internet marketing firms based on a wide range of factors; Blizzard was included on the list because of industry presence, customer service, overall performance, and innovation in search engine marketing.

There has been a ton of coverage on Microsoft’s recent bid to buy out Yahoo! for a reported $45 Billion in cash and stock.  For the travel industry I speculate a few ripples coming down the pipe - although there may be more and I’ll report on those as they become evident. 

Paid Advertising:

 Microsoft actually has a pretty nice Paid Ad platform w/ AdCenter.  The problem lies in where they show your ads and how easy/not easy it is to opt out.  Because of the huge number of people who use MSN as their default browser, showing ads on irrelevant Microsoft properties and for strange queries isnt condusive to a large return on investment right now.  That being said, MSN AdCenter has potential. 

Yahoo on the other hand has a very un-intuitive platform with Panama.  I will admit it’s better than the old Overture platform, but I personally think it’s still clunky, hard to navigate and a royal pain to maintain and hold high CTR and ROI. 

Neither Yahoo or MSN show the return on investment for the travel sector the Google Platform enjoys.  Speculation is that the MSN AdCenter brand would suffer in the merger as Yahoo has a larger audience.  I think that’s a mistake as AdCenter’s platform is easier to use, more “Google-like” in interface, and some great targeting features for demographics, etc. 

With further developement in AdCenter, and Yahoo’s number of clients - they could combine what they have into something that works great. 

Search:

Microsoft has struggled with making their “Live Search” brand a household name.  MSN is known, Live us unknown.  Adding Yahoo! into the mix could confuse the consumer even more.  The reality is - you’re going to have to be found in any search engine, but with Google handling a huge percentage of “travel shoppers” they’ll stay secondary unless they combine and make one REALLY GOOD search engine to rival Google. 

We tell our clients we optimize for Google, because that’s where the market share is for travel.  We dont “throw away” Yahoo & MSN (or “Live”) searches, but we emphasize that hurting your Google rankings for a piece of Yahoo action is not a sound decision.  You cannot optimize a page to rank highly in Yahoo! and see them succeed in high organic positions on Google - that’s a fact of life for private (not large chains or networks) travel & tourism websites right now.

Yahoo! Travel

Google has yet to roll out a dedicated travel vertical like Yahoo! has with Yahoo! Travel.  This is a chink in Google’s armor that I’m sure Microsoft plans to capitalize on.  I belive the popularity of Yahoo’s verticals is a tempting bonus for Microsoft. 

It’s important to have good reviews in Yahoo! Travel already, as even Google Maps pulls reviews from Yahoo, but with the merger,that importance will increase.  I also believe the competition w/ GDS providers sending availability out through Yahoo! Travel could cause some issues with people booking directly with the property. 

 Overall I think there will be ripples, and if Google wants to stay on top, they’ll need to work hard to roll with the needs of the advertising and user communities.  For online travel sales I see a few changes in what we need to know and where we need to apply our knowledge, but I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to handle whatever comes up. 

I dont think the changes will be painful, and with the potential to have a bigger competition going on between MicroHoo and Google, our bottom line may increase as costs MIGHT decrease.  That’s speculation of course, but wouldn’t it be nice to see ad pricing drop a bit?

Read more about the potential Merger here:

SearchEngineWatch.com

SearchEngineLand.com

Yahoo announced last week on their Yahoo!Search Blog that they are updating their crawling, indexing and ranking algos. SEM’s are reporting slight ranking shifts, and less dominance by the usual big sites, like Wikipedia. Others report changes in the Yahoo Directory, which we all know is very powerful, not only in Yahoo, but in the other Search Engines, as well.

If you haven’t checked your rankings in Yahoo! lately, now’a a good time to check up on it.

Blizzard’s very own Carrie Hill has been established as moderator for the “Marketing Small Business Online” forum over at the SearchEngineWatch.com Forums.

SearchEngineWatch forums have been around for a long time, helping folks wade through the changes and updates that are constant occurrences in the Search Engine Marketing industry. If you’re strugging or stuck with an issue or you just want to know more about a myriad of online marketing topics, head over to the forums and ask a question - there are a large number of experts that are willing and able to provide helpful suggestions or answers to your problems.

Carrie is really excited about being available to anyone who needs help with their small business, so if you fit that category and need some help, post your question today!

I’m a geek and I admit it. For Christmas I asked for (and actually got) a Kindle from Amazon. Its billed as an e-book reader on steroids. The basic idea is that you can get your books on this electronically and have them in one handy and portable device. In the past, I have avoided e-book readers because they were hard to use, had horrible glare off the screen, weighed about as much as a laptop, and quite frankly, they distracted from the enjoyment of reading. Amazon seems to have gotten it right with the Kindle, though, plus they added a number of great features.

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For those of you familiar with the many “pools” Google dips their toes into - you may have heard of GOOG-411.  Those of you who dont know, might like to try it out.  Bascially it’s a free telephone information service that will give you a phone number, an address or even send a map to a location to your cell phone.  I’ve used it once or twice and it’s pretty handy.

The most interesting aspect of Goog-411 is what Google is actually USING it to accomplish.  I hadn’t thought about there being an alterior motive to a platform that didnt seem to have any money making potential for Google, until now.

I read today over at Garret Roger’s blog “Googling Google” what the real “motive” is behind Goog-411 - they’re using to to train a voice to text software.  Now - in and of itself that’s not earth shattering news.  But if you know anything about online VIDEO - then you’ll know the search engines arent able to index the CONTENT within a video - and they dont even attempt to index video on an individual’s website.  Right now the only way to get your video included in Google’s index is to have it submitted to a search engine that FEEDS video to the big “G.”  So - with spoken word to text technology - any video can be turned into a text transcript and therefore indexed.  This would be a huge breakthrough for Google and they are probably a lot closer to having to work than anyone else.

 I went over to Bill Slawski’s SEO By The Sea blog to see if I could find any Google Patent Filing information on this technology.  For those of you unfamiliar with this blog but interested in how Google develops their technology - you must give it a read.  Bill has a great way of breaking down patent filings and giving us practical and real-life answers to questions we have about what the search engines are up to.  I didn’t seem to get very far looking for video indexing patent information.  That doesn’t mean it’s not there but I couldnt find it in 5 minutes or less - which means I’ll keep looking and let you know what I find.  I imagine if there ISN’T a patent filing already, we will see one very soon.

Rogers quotes an interview with Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, over at InfoWorld wherein she reveals the real “meat” of what Google hopes to accomplish with GOOG-411:

“Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.”

She then goes on to elaborate on the process of building a robust video search engine:

“The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. … So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.”

So what does this mean NOW?  Well for you and I it means that SOMEDAY Google (and eventually the other search engines) will be able to index the spoken word in our videos.  Today the best way to get a video indexed is to have it added to one of the Video search engines - YouTube, Yahoo! Video, MetaCrawler and the like.  As far as ranking your site for what is IN the video - embed the video on your site and add a FULL TEXT transcript wrapped around it.  Use good metadata in your video is key to having it ranked in the video engines.  Learn more about how to build an optimized video in our whitepaper on Optimization for Images and Video

Image citation
why? from e-magic’s photostream.