Advertisers and digital agencies have to be effective in how they approach search engine optimization. With so many tools for organic search, paid search, and landing page optimization, it is hard to know what to use.

As Matt Malden explains to WebProNews, Yield Software has taken a holistic approach to these areas. The company understands that advertisers cannot only focus on one area and neglect the others. As a result, Yield Software offers a cloud-based solution that includes organic search optimization, PPC optimization, and landing page optimization.

Malden also points out that Yield helps its users understand the importance of utilizing both paid and organic search. Often times, users do one and not the other. Malden said when users choose one area over another, it actually drives up their costs-per-acquisition.

In addition, sometimes users are so focused on getting the traffic to their site that they overlook conversions. However, they need to realize that all the areas are equally important in producing the best results.

Since the technology is cloud-based, it can be updated anytime. Malden told WPN that the company is constantly updating the software to ensure that it is effective. Also on the plus side, there is no software to install due to the cloud.

For more information on this solution, visit Yield Software.

Google has been the dominant player in search advertising for a long time, but is Yahoo and Microsoft about to shake things up with their joint effort? Only time will tell, but one thing that is certain is that the online marketplace will definitely see many changes in the coming months as Yahoo and Microsoft implement their search agreement.

The advertisers that use Yahoo’s ad platform will soon be migrating to Microsoft’s adCenter. The full transfer is anticipated to take place over the next 24 months and will begin in the U.S.

According to David Pann, Yahoo’s Vice President of Search Advertising, the company hopes to have the U.S. migration completed in time for the holiday season this year. However, if meeting that timeline means sacrificing quality, Pann told WebProNews that Yahoo would simply move the timeline to ensure the highest quality transition.

After the deal is implemented, Microsoft will be in charge of the core advertising platform for both companies, which specifically includes matching, ranking, pricing algorithms, and more. Yahoo, on the other hand, will maintain its responsibility for the consumer experience.

Speaking about the benefits of the deal, Pann said it was a “win” for advertisers, consumers, and publishers.

“It’s really a win for advertisers with a single buy getting access to more inventory, it’s a win for consumers for a greater relevance, and it’s a win for consumers and publishers since they have greater access to a new set of participation and inventory.”

In spite of all the changes the deal will bring for advertising, Pann was quick to say that Yahoo is still innovating and would continue to do so.

Keep watching WebProNews for more on Yahoo’s current innovations as well as information on company’s mobile and real-time efforts.

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft have been granted regulatory approval for their search deal, what happens now? That is a question that many people in the search industry want answered.

Just for a recap, Microsoft will power Yahoo Search and Yahoo will become the exclusive search advertising provider for Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. Recently, WebProNews had the opportunity to sit down with Shashi Seth, the Senior Vice President of Yahoo Search Products, to learn more about how the alliance between the two companies would be integrated.

First of all, Seth points out that the full integration will take between 18-24 months. As it takes place, he is quick to say that users will continue to receive a compelling search experience from Yahoo that goes beyond the traditional search page.

In spite of the partnership, each engine will maintain its individual areas of focus. For Yahoo specifically, Seth says, “…What our users will continue to find is that not only can they find that great content that resides on [the] Yahoo network on Yahoo Search, but also that we can take people from Yahoo Search to the appropriate properties etc., in the right context…”

According to Seth, users will likely see slight modifications to Yahoo Search over the next several months as the Microsoft integration is completed. However, the companies have not yet decided if they will do a major launch with new features and functionalities.

There are still many questions regarding Yahoo such as the company’s level of commitment to search, implications on advertisers, future innovations, and more.  Keep watching WebProNews for more information on these very issues directly from Yahoo.

According to Lawrence Coburn, the President of RateItAll, this is an exciting time for search marketers due to new opportunities in search queries. Historically, people would go to a search engine and enter a query. Now however, with a mere tap of a button on a phone, people can send out their location and it acts as a query.

Coburn comes from a user-generated content background and knows that it is not easy to get people to post content. But with check-in applications such as Foursquare and Gowalla, a single tap on a phone creates the content.

These applications tell your friends where you are while also letting Foursquare and Gowalla what places are popular. In addition, this data provides valuable opportunities for advertisers to get involved with location.

What does all this mean for search marketers? Location is important to them because they can build upon the APIs that Foursquare, Gowalla, and other similar applications have. Coburn’s company is even developing a product called DoubleDutch that will allow users to build their own Foursquare and Gowalla if they have a community tied to a specific location.

Because this idea of location as a query is relatively new, there are and will be challenges for search marketers. To help avoid them, Coburn advises marketers to create content around latitude and longitude. If they do this, then when people reveal their location, the marketers will know what to deliver.

How do you feel about using location as a query?

A guest post by Josh Hanagarne.

World’s Strongest Librarian was about four months old when I got interested in sponsors. I’d read the articles about how to do it, and none of them sounded that plausible for me and my situation.

For one, my traffic wasn’t impressive, certainly not to the point where sponsors were approaching me. And, while my blog has become slightly more focused in its first ten months, it wasn’t targeted at any group of readers in particular, so I wasn’t sure how confident niche advertisers would be. It’s a little more focused now, but I can’t really think of a better term for my readers than “The Loyal Weird.”

So I tried a little sponsorship experiment. My expectations were virtually non-existent. I did it more out of curiosity than anything, hoping that it would engage readers and foster some good will.

Here’s what happened.

Auditions and criteria

I decided to hold “tryouts” for anyone who was interested in a sponsorship slot on World’s Strongest Librarian. If you like, you can read my initial post here. If you’re terrified of leaving this page because there’s so much wisdom in the air, here’s the summary of what I asked interested readers to do:

Dear potential sponsor, please give me:

• One paragraph on something you did in the last year that you are proud of
• Your URL
• A description of your blog/business
• Why you’re interested in running an ad on World’s Strongest Librarian
• Your pitch: Why you? Just how cool are you?

And I made it very clear that I did not care about the size or look of the blog. As long as a blogger wasn’t peddling anything heinous, illegal, or spammy, they had as good a chance as anyone.

I would run auditions for the rest of August and then make my decisions.

The plan at that point

I figured that I’d get a small response and run ads for the four people who responded out of pity. Then I’d run their ads for the month of September. When September was winding down, I would thank each blogger, ask them if they wanted to pay for another month or more to stick around, or part ways while remaining friends.

I figured I’d repeat this cycle for a few months until all of the ads were paid for. Then I’d end the auditions.

What I didn’t expect

I got a lot of responses. In fact, I got close to 100 auditions. Some were lengthy and hilarious. Others were half-hearted and poorly written. Some came very close to flat-out begging, and others were so standoffish that I couldn’t tell if they were actually interested or not.

The good things about this

Any reader response and engagement can feel like a huge win for the new blogger. So of course it was gratifying to see that there were people paying attention.

I also learned just how eclectic my reader base was. I got emails from bloggers covering every topic and angle imaginable. I got emails from foundations. I got emails from businesses. Word spread, and suddenly I had a bunch of new readers, and some readers I’d never engaged with came forth out of hiding.

The bad things about this

There’s really only one: because I had underestimated the response, I hadn’t really thought through my judging criteria. And suddenly I had a mountain of auditions to sift through. It was really, really hard to decide. And in a couple of cases, I wound up choosing in a more arbitrary manner than I was happy with, but I couldn’t figure out a better way at that point.

Here is my post announcing the winners.

This caused some hurt feelings, a lot of negative emails from disappointed applicants, demands for explanations of how I chose…and so on.

“Okay,” I thought. “Next round, I’ve got to do this better.”

There wasn’t going to be a next round.

The best things about this

A couple of the winners left after one month with no hard feelings between us. But several of them stayed…and paid. When I was able to show them their click-through rates and they told me how “sticky” the traffic from my blog had been, I didn’t need to convince them at all. And suddenly I had a very, very modest income from sponsors—but I had sponsors!

I was also spared the difficulty of going through another round of auditions and making people mad.

It also got a lot of people blogging about the experiment, and of course, the traffic was its own reward.

Suggestions for anyone interested in trying this

• Overestimate the response you’ll get, this way you (hopefully) won’t get overwhelmed
• Explain your judging criteria. You may still have some sore losers, but having a prior explanation to fall back on may be helpful
• Give it your own spin
• Decide which system you’re going to use to display ads with, and figure it out earlier than the night before you’re supposed to run the ads. I can be a real dunce. This was one prime example of my duncery.

Your own variant of this experiment could be a way to grab some sponsors and figure out how some things work before your numbers are commanding sponsors on their own.

Above all: enjoy it, have fun, and use this experiment opportunity to make connections, spark some creativity, and do your own thing.

Don’t try too hard to be like anyone else. You are not anyone else. This is a good thing, whether you believe it or not.

About the Author: Josh Hanagarne is the twitchy giant behind World’s Strongest Librarian, a blog about living with Tourette’s Syndrome, kettlebells, book recommendations, buying pants when you’re 6’8”, old-time strongman training, and much more. Please subscribe to Josh’s RSS Updates to stay in touch.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How I Got Some Paying Sponsors Without Really Meaning To

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It is the start of the year and many bloggers and blog owners are planning for 2010 and beyond.

As a result the ProBlogger Job Boards have been a busier place than usual of late.

If you’re looking to hire a blogger – the job boards are subscribed to by thousands of bloggers seeking work – each new job is also tweeted to the ProBlogger Twitter account (with 85,000+ followers) and seen by thousands more (and they’re often retweeted). The feedback I get from many advertisers is that the quality of applicants is high. At just $50 for a 30 day advertisement the investment is very low and the potential reward is high! If you need some help in putting together an effective ad check out this advice and then Post your Job here.

If you’re looking to land a blogging job - in the last week we’ve had 10 new jobs and I expect the next couple of weeks to see more added as many companies and individual bloggers are looking to hire at this time of year. Subscribe to the RSS feed and keep an eye on my Twitter account and when you see a job – act fast (although not at the expense of the quality of your application). Keep in mind that there’s a lot you can do to increase your chances of getting a blogging job.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Find Bloggers to Hire and Find Blog Jobs at the ProBlogger Job Boards

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Todays post in the Best of ProBlogger 2009 series looks at the topic of making money from blogs. By no means is it a comprehensive or complete guide to the topic but below are 12 of the more popular posts we’ve had on the topic this year.

1. The Importance of Having Your Own Product to Sell
2. How to Make $30,000 a Year Blogging
3. The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business
4. 5 Ways to Make Money Blogging Once You Have Traffic
5. $72,000 in E-books in a Week: 8 Lessons I Learned
6. How to Find Direct Advertisers for Your Blog
7. How I use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money
8. What is Affiliate Marketing?
9. How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote
10. 11 Lessons I Learned EArning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program
11. 10 More Amazon Associate Program Lessons I Learned on My Way to Six Figure Earnings
12. Should I Add a Donation Button to My Blog?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make More Money From Your Blog in the New Year : Best of ProBlogger

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When WebProNews spoke with Nick Fox back in August, he indicated that the future of paid search could be without keywords. At the recent SES Chicago, WPN sat down with Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media who shared with us how this development would impact advertisers.

Up to this point, Google has used keywords as a proxy for relevance. In the future, however, the search engine hopes to allow advertisers to state their desired outcome and then, use its machine-based learning to produce that desired result. In other words, Google would essentially take the necessary information and put the ad in front of the most relevant audience.

Why is all this important? According to Elesseily, it’s important because query length is increasing, new and unique search terms are increasing, and searcher sophistication is increasing. All these elements make it hard for advertisers to keep their keyword lists fresh.

Incidentally, not all of the advertising community supports this new development. Elesseily said that some advertisers believe it’s too broad of an approach and don’t like the idea of putting that much trust in Google.

Although Elesseily doesn’t believe keywords will go away, she does believe the future of paid search is changing.

What are your thoughts regarding paid search without keywords?

Yahoo is, of course, a search company, and Efficient Frontier deals in online marketing. A person who’s worked for both organizations would appear to be in a somewhat unique position to talk about the future of the search and advertising industry, then, and at SES Chicago, Justin Merickel did exactly that.

Merickel used to hold the title of “Managing Director, Vertical Markets” at Yahoo. These days, his Efficient Frontier business cards read “Vice President of Marketing and New Product Development.” Meaning he’s been part of a lot of important conversations.

As for what Merickel had to pass along at SES Chicago, he talked to Abby Johnson about “the importance of lower-level data getting from advertisers and marketers out to the search engine results page,” and of some pretty big changes in what results pages look like. A significantly greater depth of information should become available.

Merickel didn’t necessarily view that as a great thing, citing an instance in which a search engine decided to show him eight highly similar pictures of bottled water. Search engines, in their efforts to outdo each other, will have to be careful that results pages don’t get too busy.

Still, as search and display come together, there should be lots of benefits for searchers, advertisers, and the search companies themselves.

Although the FTC’s new advertising guidelines are scheduled to go into effect tomorrow, there are still many gray areas that have yet to be clarified. WebProNews caught up with Wendy Piersall, Founder of the Woo! Jr. Network, and spoke with her about many of the “It depends,” scenarios regarding the new rules.

The Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising hope to regulate how advertisers utilize endorsements by consumers, experts, organizations, celebrities, and bloggers. The FTC is calling for these parties to openly disclose their relationships with the company or brand they are endorsing, which is causing quite a rise from the blogosphere.

Piersall raised many points on both sides of the debate. On one side, many people feel like they have to “justify” what they are talking about. For example, someone may provide a complimentary statement toward a brand without realizing that it could be perceived as an endorsement. Piersall said she has become very conscious of how she injects brands into her work.

On the flip side, if someone is willing to associate his personal brand with another brand, then he must also be willing to face the consequences that could be affiliated with it. According to Piersall, while brands should not expect bloggers to spread their message for free, bloggers should also be open and disclose their relationship.

Although the gray areas remain, Piersall hopes that people take both the ethics and consequences into consideration moving forward. To read the complete text of the guidelines, the official documentation can be found here.

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