Baidu Reaches The Japanese Market
China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has finally reached the Japanese market after about a year of beta testing. At the moment, Baidu commands the highest share of the Chinese search market and has approximately double the search volume of Google (but only within its communist borders).
The launch of Baidu’s Japanese search portal signifies its first attempt in expanding to markets beyond those of China. Growing Baidu’s reach into Japan makes sense from a language and locational standpoint, and I predict that they will enter the South Korean market soon upon the conditional success of its Japanese portal.
Tags: Baidu, net neutralityGoogle Universal Search Opt-out, Please!
For the most part, Google has always been fairly keen on new innovations and staying ahead of the pack. However, their design and layout of universal search (a.k.a. blended search) result pages leaves much to be desired.
Simply put, there is a lack of organization in the universal search results - let alone any logical or intuitive organization. The results look like a head-on collision of text, maps, images, news, videos and any other number of verticals all meshed together.
Tags: Ask, Google, universal searchExcluding Poor Sites From Content Network
As many of us have come to realize, the seeds of search engine optimization can take months before bearing fruit. Pay-per-click advertising is a much quicker means in acquiring search engine traffic, although it’s usually more expensive as well. In this post we will discuss how to make pay-per-click advertising cheaper and ultimately improve your ROI.
There exists two main platforms when it comes to search marketing - the content network and the search network. The former is infamous in its delivery of low quality traffic, and often leads frustrated search marketers to exclude it altogether. Here’s what you should try instead.
Tags: AdWords, pay-per-click, search traffic, SEM, toolsMicrosoft Live Search Gaining Market Share?
Nielsen Online’s December search share numbers have been sending small ripples through the search marketing world. According to Nielsen, Microsoft’s Live Search was the only of the “big three” search engines to increase its market share in December, from 12% to 13.8% for queries performed in the United States.
On the other hand, Yahoo and Google were both subjected to decreases. Yahoo’s share of the market fell from 17.9% in November to 17.7% in December, while Google suffered a loss from 57.7% to 56.3%.
Tags: Google, Hitwise, Live Search, Microsoft, Nielsen Online, search traffic, YahooThe Often Overlooked TITLE Attribute
In the course of researching and reviewing a variety websites online, I have come across some that follow good SEO practices, but seem to overlook the same basic SEO elements. I bring to your attention one of them.
The TITLE Attribute
Although most search engine optimizers will remember to use the ALT attribute for their images, they often forget to optimize other page elements via the TITLE attribute. This attribute is similar to ALT in that it’s used to describe the nature and purpose of an element.
Tags: code, SEO

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