SES Toronto 2008

Search Engines Strategies Toronto is back for its 5th year here in Toronto. This year's event will take place June 16 -18th.

For the fourth year in a row, I'll be speaking at this year's event (June 18th at 12:45). My topic for this year's conference address is "Keyword Research". This is the same topic as last year's address, but I promise to update my slides and give out some new information.

Joining me again on this year's panel is Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance. I've gotten to know Christine not only at SES, but at other search conferences throughout North America. She not only brings a big smile and sunny disposition to each presentation, but a wealth of knowledge and insight developed through years of hands on experiences.

SES Toronto, to my great delight is also increasing its focus on web analytics. Anyone who has ever attended one of my talks knows that I firmly believe that you can't do and SEO or SEM without sound analytics in place. That's why I'm thrilled to see June Li (Clickinsight) (June and I have teamed up before in Toronto to speak on the topic of Web Analytics) and Bryan Eisenberg (Future Now Inc.) two of the leading authorities on web analytics speaking at this year's conference.

So if you're only going to attend one search engine conference in Canada this year, make SES Toronto. As reminder to people in the US north east, Toronto isn't that far to travel and it is a very cosmopolitan place (the most multicultural city on the planet) with lots of fun activities and despite the recent increase in value of the Canadian dollar, it still is a relatively affordable place to travel to.

Google's Market Share US

Overall the number of searches in the US in October increased 12 percent from September to 10.5 billion. Google's market share continued to increase to 58.5% or 6.1 billion searches during this period according to comScore.

Just remember that all searches are not created equal and these numbers include searches on such web properties as YouTube and other search engine web properties. What does this all mean? If the experts are right, then the US search market is destined to resemble the Canadian market where Google has well over 80% of all searches. In essence, Google is becoming a monopoly when it comes to search.

Here are the other major search engines' market shares for the US in October:

• Yahoo - 22.9%
  
• MSN - 9.7%
  
• Ask - 4.7%
  
• Time Warner (AOL) - 4.2%
  

To more information please see the Yahoo News article

Search Engines Tighten Privacy

Here's an interesting article from the Washington Post about Search engines and their privacy policies. In a nutshell, the major search engines are starting to reduce the the life of their cookie and the tracking of what terms you've been searching on.

This article is well worth the read for anyone concerned about Internet Privacy and search engines.

Read the article

SES Presentation - Follow-up

Just a quick note to all those who attended my presentation at the Search Engine Strategies conference here in Toronto on June 12.

I was thrilled with all the positive feedback you gave me after the presentation as I wandered the vendor area and hallways of the Toronto Convention Centre.

Many of you asked me for the name of the software that dynamically sets different phone numbers on your web site. The company is voicestar.com.

As I mentioned during the Q&A of the session, I've only seen the demo of this software and am not currently using it. From the demo it looks great. So if you give it a try let me know how it works out.

Keyword Spy - A new Tool in my SEM Toolbox

A friend just forwarded a great new search engine marketing tool to my attention. After just a few minutes of evaluating it in the free mode, I've added to my arsenal of search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO tools. The tool is Internet Spy (http://www.keywordspy.com).

This tool allows you to easily see how different keyword terms you've purchased are performing plus look up the keyword terms your competition is bidding on a well.

So far I've only tried the free version of Internet Spy and perhaps I'll dig into the old wallet to give the paid version a try. My first thoughts on looking at the costs are that it is a bit steep. At $19 USD for a single day, they may be pricing themselves a bit too high and when you look at an annual subscription price of $99 per month ($1,188 per year) they are a lot more expensive then paid SEM and SEO tools that I'm currently using.

So I'll stick with the free version for now, but I'll keep in mind the competitor's information that you can't anywhere else. So let me know if you decided to give the paid version a try. I'd love hear from you.

Google Loses Belgium Court Case

Several months back I posted an article on how a group of Belgium newspapers were suing Google over listing headlines and snippets of stories in Google News. Well the court has ruled and Google has lost.

It turns out that the bigger issue besides the headlines and content snippets (which in itself contradicts the Belgium copyright laws) was the storing of copies of articles in Google's cache. Like most newspapers they offer recent stories for free, but then place them in an archive and charge for access to the archive. By allowing searchers to access the articles through a cached copy, Google was taking away potential revenue from the newspapers.

As with all big law suits, it is never over until someone gives up. On that note, Google is planning on appealing.

Read the full story.

A Cranky Way to Search

A new search engine launched this week called "cRANKy" (www.cranky.com). This new search engine is targeted at web users who are 50+ years old.

Beyond adjusting the search result to list pages that cRANKy thinks are more appropriate to this demographic, it also limits the total results significantly and places content search based ads (provided InterActiveCorp's Ask.com aka Google Adwords) at the bottom of the page as well creating a search experience that is less confusing.

The user interface uses a larger typeface then on most search engine. The use of the larger typeface is sure to please all of us who are 40+ years old.

So if you're over 50 or even if your not give a try. Who knows "Try it. You'll like it"