Take a look at the comScore is reporting:

June 2011 - Explicit search(doesn’t include image/contextual/Google Instant)

Google: 65.5% (essentially unchanged from May)
Yahoo: 15.9% (essentially unchanged)
Bing: 14.4% (up from 14.1% in May)
Bing’s 14.4% is an all-time high share of explicit search. Combined, Bing/Yahoo is now at 30.2% market share, up from 30% in both April and May.

June 2011 - Core search

Google: 64.5% (up from 63.3% in May)
Yahoo: 17.5% (down from 19.6% in May)
Bing: 14.1% (up from 13.1% in May)

Bing’s 14.1% is an all-time high in core search share.

For search engine optimization, this means that it is imperitive to continue to pay attention to Bing and their search alliance with Yahoo.  The alliance market share is over 30% and growing. You can make an argument that targeting Bing may be the primary goal for some industries due to the demographics of the typical Bing searcher.

Spending time in courtrooms is generally not our thing. We prefer to compete and innovate, serving our customers by offering the best way to pay and be paid. That’s how you really win. But sometimes the behaviors of people and competitors make legal action the only meaningful way for a company to protect one of its most valuable assets – its trade secrets.

We spend a lot of time and energy creating the things that make PayPal unique and a preferred way to pay for almost 100 million people around the world. We treat PayPal’s “secrets” seriously, and take it personally when someone else doesn’t. So we made a decision today. We filed a lawsuit against Google and two former colleagues who now work there, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius.We at SEO Inc. are not legal experts, however, this news greatly interests us. We are excited about the implications for Google Wallet. It will be interesting to see how this case develops. Many people speculate that PayPalis working on system similar to Google Wallet and this is the main reason the lawsuit has been filed. If this is the case, the two employees who left PayPal and participated in developing this system at Google could be charged with stealing company secrets.

In picture: John E Lincoln, Dir SEO Consulting and Social, Brad Lipschultz, COO and the lucky winner of the surfboard drawing! Congrats on winning the board!

Our Service Offering is Unique
Don’t worry. I am not going to turn this post into a sales pitch. But one thing that I did notice is that our SEO and social media methodology is unique. No one really does it quite like us. Our solutions are not cookie cutter, they are customized and we ensure the client gets services that will help them market their business online. I was really happy to see this, and was frankly proud of how well our services look in comparison to the other offerings out there. Each person who came to our booth was impressed by the innovative services we offer and the processes we have in place to deliver these services. I think it all comes down to the fact that many of the other companies who are offering SEO and social media marketing services are new. We have been refining our services and procedures over a period of 13 years, so we definitely have a leg up on the competition.

Video is Hot Right Now
The general consensus in the industry is that video is going to be the next big thing. (I actually wrote on this a while back. Read more on the future of online multimedia). I heard this same concept relayed by multiple people, but I think it hit me the hardest when it was commented on by Mr. Paul Botto, former head of Google Analytics Sales and Enterprise at Google. I had the pleasure of sitting and talking with Paul for quite some time on the flight from San Diego to San Francisco. While I won’t go into specifics as to who said what, the basic idea is that T.V. advertising dollars are shifting to online video advertising dollars fast. So now is the time to jump in. In addition, video tracking and overall advances in online video analytics are accelerating at a rapid rate. With this new ability to deliver qualified data on video engagement the medium gains value and more advertisers jump in

Social Media Marketing is Becoming Better and More ROI Focused
Social media marketing is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. People want it, they see the value, they want to spend money on it, etc. The big issue has always been delivering solid ROI, but now it would seem that problem is close to being solved. First, let me make a quick point. We qualify social media marketing as a service primarily because we use it to benefit SEO, build communities to market to, and run individual viral campaigns which deliver ROI. The third aspect is the one we are addressing here; essentially, we can now run more social media campaigns, of variable size, with new tools that have a greater focus on ROI. I am excited to talk to our clients about these new possibilities.

Affiliates are Getting Better but Struggling
For those of you who have been to ad:tech you know that it has a large affiliate and SEM demographic. Let’s focus on the affiliates first. The general consensus seems to be that affiliate marketing is becoming more competitive, the customers, both B2B and B2C, being marketed to are getting smarter and overall it’s just getting a little harder to make a buck. There are some new services out there pushing hard, and people are still launching new affiliate campaigns everyday on the company side, but many of the affiliate marketers in general seemed to be a bit unsure of the future. Especially with the new updates being made continually by Google.

Paid Search is Getting Smarter
Between advances in Google DoubleClick, increased options in retargeting, development of secret and exclusive ad networks and just overall improvements in tracking, paid search is getting smarter. Advertisers now have the ability to better track time to conversion, multisite conversion paths and device patterns. Overall, it is really exciting to see this innovation which is absolutely necessary to combat the market saturation we have experienced in basic PPC.

Overall ad:tech 2011 in San Francisco was great. We were happy to hand out a surfboard to a lucky raffle winner, we saw a few cool new services, and met some amazing online business owners which we are excited to provide services for. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to say hello to the SEO Inc. team.

1. Great Speakers
2. Good Food
3. Met Lots of People in the Industry
4. People Love the SEO Inc. Booth Girl
5. A Massive Prize was Given Away

I’d like to focus on the last two items on this list if that is OK…

So the gorgeous booth girl, or the very nice women dressed in a boxing type Halloween costume, was there to promote our special giveaway (and our search engine optimization, social media marketing and reputation management services of course). What was the giveaway you ask? How about hotel accommodations, and tickets to a boxing match in good old Las Vegas! For those of you who are boxing fans, the tickets are to the Juan Manuel Lopez vs. Rafael Marquez fight. The fight was actually recently postponed. You can read about that here.

During the event we collected cards. Then, at 2:00pm sharp on Tuesday, August 17th, we announced the winner. The buzz around the giveaway was really something special. You could tell that everyone in the crowd was really hoping to win. We pulled the first card and the winner wasn’t there to claim the prize. We then pulled the second. No one there to win, again! But the third time was the charm!

SEO Inc. would like to say congratulations to our winner, Philip Cory! You are going to Las Vegas to watch the Juan Manuel Lopez vs Rafael Marquez fight!

A little news about the winner: Philip Cory is owner of Treatment USA, a company that assists addicts in getting the help they need to excel in their lives. As a nationwide company, Treatment USA helps people find sober living, deal with eating disorders and fight other forms of addiction.

SEO Inc. would like to thank everyone who stopped by the booth to talk to us. I for one know that I talked to a lot of very smart, innovative people in the industry. For the many of you who request proposals, we are working diligently to analyze your site right now.

If you didn’t make it to this event, we look forward to seeing you at the next. SEO Inc. will be announcing the next industry event we will be attending soon.

Thank you again!

- SEO Inc.

PS. Here is a pic of the SEO Inc. team from the show. From left to right: John E Lincoln (me), David Hall (one of our killer SEO Consultants), Klaudia (Our model friend), Meera Gupta (Director of Marketing at SEO Inc.) and last but not least, Jay Dunigan (an expert and knowledgeable SEO Consultant).

We are now seeing that links which are present in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts are being recognized in Webmaster tools as external links to the domain which the Webmaster tools account is tracking. This is a new development. So what does this mean for search engine optimization and social media?

We already know that Google is a huge proponent of social media. In fact, Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google, has stated on multiple occasions that one great way to succeed in SEO is to create a blog and push those blog posts out through social media profiles (learn more about this here). So we know that Google wants social media to succeed. We also know that this tactic works excellent in the search space already, in fact, we have helped many clients establish this relationship. But what does this all mean from an external linking perpective? This is the missing piece.

Well, in my opinion it means simply this: Google is recognizing theses links as they would any other inbound link. But here are some things to keep in mind. These links are no follow links and they do not have anchor text. So they are not a huge help for search engine optimization. But there is more to consider.

While these links are not the ideal link, it can be assumed that they act as an inbound link would from any other website. If that is the case, these links would still benefit search results to some degree. It has long been speculated that even if a link is a no follow that it does still pass some ranking power (link juice) on to the website it is pointing to, especially if the site has high page rank and fends well for the term you are trying to optimize for.

So there it is! We are now seeing that links from social media posts are registering in webmaster tools. In my opinion, this only strengthens the argument to join the social media movement. What is your opinion? Also, if you have a question please feel free to ask!

By John E. Lincoln

Since Google announced the upgrade of their AdWords Certification program on April 26th, the SEO Inc. PPC marketing team has been busy taking and passing the newly required exams.  SEO Inc has a long a successful history as a full service search engine marketing agency and was already part of the Google Advertising Professionals program and had achieved AdWords Qualified Company status.  When the announcement came all AdWords Qualified companies had 6 months to pass the updated exams, but we wanted to showcase our abilities by becoming certified immediately.

The new program raises the bar for certification in the following ways:

• New, comprehensive curriculum designed to improve strategic and tactical knowledge
• Introduction of annually refreshed advanced level exams illustrating competency in search, display, reporting and analysis
• To match the updated training materials, we’ve increased the exam requirements for individual qualification to two – Advertising Fundamentals and one advanced exam

As the test has become more difficult it is our belief that being AdWords Certified Partner will mean more as many agencies will not be able to keep up with the level of ongoing training and knowledge required.

Today Google formally announced on its blog that it has completed its launch of he new indexing system dubbed “caffeine”. Google originally announced the caffeine indexing infrastructure in August of 2009 and then launched a version of it on a single data-center later in the year. Today’s announcement makes it official that caffeine is live on all Google data-centers.

Highlights of the Caffeine Announcement

1. The size of the Google index is larger than ever
2. Google claims that all search results are 50% fresher meaning that new content being added to the web will appear in search results faster. This does not change the frequency of Google’s indexing of websites, it simply means that new information is pushed live to the index faster than before.
3. Storage Capacity Increased Greatly- Google’s caffeine currently requires 100 million gigabytes of storage. (that’s 625,000 of the largest ipods to you and me).
4. The primary reasons for the update are to deliver fresher content at a close to real time rate and to create a foundation for the future as the internet grows.

Impact on Search Engine Optimization
For right now existing search engine optimization best practices will not be impacted or impacted only slightly. Google has been adamant that the caffeine update does not impact search results. However, they are also very clear about the fact that the new indexing architecture allows it more flexibility in the way that Google stores data and associates data together. In an interview with Vanessa Fox, Matt Cutts stated ““It’s important to realize that caffeine is only a change in our indexing architecture. What’s exciting about Caffeine though is that it allows easier annotation of the information stored with documents, and subsequently can unlock the potential of better ranking in the future with those additional signals”.

These types of statements and subsequent statement out of the Googleplex clearly indicate that they have increased the potential to make rapid algorithmic changes based on changes that occur with the internet. As we have mentioned in previous posts, Google cares more about page speedso it is still recommended to work hard increasing the efficiency of your website. In addition, Google’s capacity to consider “additional signals” in the future means that they will have the capacity to consider many additional factors in their ranking algorithm including on-site and off site factors.

1. Very few developers actually understand flash well enough to implement search engine optimization best practices.

2. Very few flash developers understand SEO strategy

3. While you can get search engines to read html embedded in flash and therefor read content, there are limitations to the optimization of site architecture specifically

Bottom line…Apple has only added more reasons to the flash is not good argument. Thank You Steve Jobs!

Upon arriving at SEO Inc. this morning it was quickly realized that things were out of sorts, in particular, Jay Dunigan’s office suffered a serious blow. Let the picture explain.

White sheets of unpleasantness lined Jay’s walls, hung from his ceiling, blanketed his windows and occupied a significant amount of carpet space. Jay’s office had been, you guessed it, TP’ed!

Search Engine Optimization Inc. will be using their Internet marketing skills to find the culprit. Each of us is furiously Googling away. More on the story as it develops.

Until we find the person responsible, feel free to read some recent posts

How to Optimize Twitter Lists

Google Announces AdWords Certification

Search Engine Optimization vs. Website Usability

Changes in the PPC World Could Benefit You

Not sure if your in-house pay per click department is giving you the ROI that you need as part of your search engine optimization? Well good news! Today I read that Google is replacing their Advertising Professionals exam with a new Adwords certification exam. This new program will “provides agencies with comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts.”

The new program introduces preferred Adwords API (Application Programming Interface) pricing so an advertiser can chose an agency that fits his or her business model. These changes will allow agencies to compete with companies who have in-house pay per click departments. Changes are also being made in the spend criteria to become qualified.

Although these changes allow small and medium size advertisers to compete with larger ones, the new advanced exam will also allow larger companies like SEO Inc., who work with larger budgets to prove competency in “search, display, reporting and analysis”. This will help advertisers find companies who are capable of handling their accounts.

The bottom line is that advertisers will be more willing to turn to companies like SEO Inc., who use API tools, to manage accounts due to the lower costs. The exams will be evaluated and changed on an annual basis to ensure that advertisers can stay competitive by being up to date with strategies and best practices. We here at SEO Inc. will be taking the fundamental and advanced exams in the following weeks.

What do you think about the new AdWords Certification?