1. According to comScore, this is what market share looks like concerning the top search engines. Reports came out that Google suffered a decline for the fourth month in a row, ouch! Just when you think that Google can’t get any bigger, it seems that they may have reached their peak. After all, what comes up, must come down… but Google? They are the only company in the world with no measurable debts!
2. Tired of cluttered and slow loading sites? Mashable reports that Google is taking consideration (a small amount) into the speed of a site in search rankings. Finally, in 2010! Less than 1% is a small portion, but hopefully this will help weed out slow sites.
3. We’ve talked about “augmented reality” before but what about its use in print? DMNews reports that advertisers are embracing this trend, even for their print ad campaigns. Sounds interesting to see it incorporated in print. I wonder what the next advertising trend will be?

Happy Tuesday! I saw this video and it contains some pretty noteworthy factoids. You’ve probably come across some version of this video but this is the most updated one. Enjoy!

More Useful Factoids

What Kind of Local Strategy?
Another strong point that Gregg brought up that was many businesses don’t have a comprehensive view of their online marketing strategy. As he put it, it’s not an either/or but an and strategy. This includes efforts in paid search, organic search, internet yellow pages, social media and mobile content. Just because you’re doing well in one segment doesn’t mean that you should scale back or ignore the other ones. The most successful businesses will realize the benefit of having a wide-ranging plan of attack to stand out against their competitors.

Resources for Local Search

If you haven’t already, there are many resources that you can take advantage of in starting your local search campaign. Gregg recommends: internet yellow pages, major search engines, Angie’s list, local search sites (Citysearch/Yelp), industry related blogs (including your local chamber of commerce) and more. Here’s a handy list of tools from Duct Tape Marketing.

No More “Batch and Blast”
I saw this tip as it applies to email marketing, but you can apply it to different platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and even blogging. Have you ever wondered why you constantly get postcards and junk from your local real estate agent? They often use this batch and blast method because it’s cost efficient and effective. Just think of it, the commission they make from one sale makes their direct mailing costs very minuscule. Sure… social media marketing is free, but you really are paying a cost if you blast your followers with self-promotion. No matter how you choose to carry out your campaign, think of it as a continuous process.

Copying Competitors and Copycats
Google alerts is a great way to keep an eye out for your reputation, but have you thought about using it to watch your competitors? This article does a great job of compiling a variety of different ways you can stay in the know. Have you dealt with plagiarism in the past? You might have a piece of content that people love to steal. You can check by searching a certain phrase in parenthesis or checking CopyScape. We’ve had 3 different “companies” steal content on our video marketing page and reported them to Google as soon as we found out.

Google Webmaster Tools for Your WordPress
Did you know that you can use Webmaster Tools to get insight about your WordPress? The WordPress dashboard already allows you to see how many visitors you get and who’s linking to you. Once you verify ownership of your WordPress account with Webmaster Tools, you’ll see where your blog ranks in search engine results along with relevant keywords. You’ll also be able to see any crawl errors and other useful diagnostics. Best of all, this tool doesn’t cost anything. Feel free to add all your blogs/sites and master Webmaster Central today.

Following up with their minimalist Super Bowl ad, Google has launched their social service, Google Buzz today.
Google Buzz will incorporate social media into their Gmail platform while also connecting to other services like YouTube, Twitter, Picasa and Flickr. Of course, Yahoo! and Microsoft aren’t too pleased.

Microsoft released the following statement:

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

While Yahoo!, took a similar route in this Tweet:

Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com

Although I sortof think that Google jumped in late to this game, I don’t think it will hurt them. Following Apple’s iPad ridicule, Google could’ve at least named their service something different from Yahoo’s version.

What do you think about Google Buzz? Check what others are saying in real-time here.

Search Engine Optimization is a term that regroups various optimization methods of website, blog, or forum in the search engine. SEO is effective in improving your website and also help you save time. Its objective is to adjust the position of your website in the results of a search engine such as Google and Yahoo on specific words corresponding to the main themes of the website. In general, we take into account that the best position a website could have is mostly when it is positioned or classified between the first ten responses of a search.