Category: Microsoft (MSFT)

Microsoft (MSFT)

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Search Engine Strategies New York City, San Francisco & Chicago 2010 Session Pitch : Home Page Title Tag – Hot or Not?

The following session was submitted to Search Engine Strategies in January, 2010.  Hope you enjoy it.

Home Page Title Tag – Hot or Not?

Moderators: David Dalka and either Mike Grehan, Greg Jarboe or Stewart Quealy

The first thing one learns about search engine optimization is about the importance of title tags, especially the home page title tag. Yet when an experienced SEO surfs the web they often must stop and scratch their head at certain home page title tags! It certainly indicates a lack of understanding by senior management teams out there.

In this session everyone is the expert! We will share 30 title tags and URLs in 30 minutes. Everyone gets to tweet their impressions of the title tag for with the Twitter hashtag #sestitle!!! Then we’ll do Q&A and figure out what it all means. The benefits of this session are certain to include venting of pent up frustration, bonding with your fellow search marketers, extreme laughter and far reaching communication of the session to people far and wide not even at the Search Engine Strategies conference! Spread the gospel. Change the world. See you there.

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Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008: Universal & Blended Search Engine Conversation

Moderator:
Kevin Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair & CEO, Motivity Marketing

Speakers:
Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search
Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
Chris Blakely, Director, Client Services, comScore, Inc.
Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corporation
Jack Menzel, Senior Product Manager, Google

This is a live session blog from Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2008, please excuse any typos and/or fragments. Thank you!

Mike Grehan:

You need to think differently.

Vertical creep is pushing organic results down the page.

Eye Tracking shows that people are not scrolling the way that they used to.

This creates a problem, you need to be at the top of the listings.

Local business center creates opportunities for local businesses.

New paid search results like paid results.

Chris Blakely – comScore:

Leverage comScore search data shows traction of universal search efforts.

Feature sets of search expanding. 48% of searchers are seeing different types of blended search results from their queries.

Lower clicks on sponsored links with the exception of ecommerce and travel.

Organic search strategies need to evolve from that standpoint.

Jack Menzel – Google Product Manager Universal Search:

Universal search has the following elements:
Comprehensiveness – Images, Maps, News, Products, Video, Books and more
Relevance – Run every query against every index, decide what to show only after we collect all of the data
Presentation – Summarize the content in the most efficient way possible.

Recently, there have been made into search results pages.

Better Ranking – Universal search is just a subset of ranking.

What’s next?
Keep improving relevance
Help users explore
Improved results summary

What does this mean for web masters?
– Publish the best and high quality content that you have.
– Take advantage of prominent new verticals

Todd Schwartz – Group Product Manager – Microsoft Live Search:

Evolution of Search:
Search – Directories, Keyword Trends, Rich Semantics, User Experience
Market – Immature, Closed Trends, Open Item????
Consumer – Search, Keyword Trends, Actions

Deliver, Simplify, Implement

Showed Samsung lcd tv model – showed elements of a shopping review, rating and engine – an interesting change

Showed weather and Barack Obama examples

More engagement
Better reach
Higher ROI
Update Product and Business Info
webmaster.live.com

Larry Cornett – Yahoo! Search:

Transformed from a static experience to a complete information in one search

Showed several Blended examples using Yahoo! Search:
Kyle Orton – Chicago Bears fantasy sports
Movies – including times and local listings
Beyonce – music videos on the search page
Sushi in San Jose
Barack Obama
Puppy

Richer, more relevant links…

Searchmonkey – publishers collaborate, meaning behind the link, richer experience, relevant and personal, etc.

Yelp is a Searchmonkey partner. (How does this affect Yahoo! Local?)

The infobar – Steve Jobs example

Share structured data: Publishers > Searchmonkey > Tell your users

Why is blended search important?
Unmatched opportunities and control for publishers
Key step for building a smarter search engine with structured data
gallery.search.yahoo.com

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Have We Entered The Era of The Functional Web?

The New York Times has an article on how the potential sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft could be bad for minnows, i.e. small Silicon Valley companies looking to be acquired. I think this is a short sighted viewpoint.

In the late 1990’s dot.com era, the web was slanted too much towards wall street involvement that led IPO’s that were questionable and in retrospect not advisable.

A force outside the web, namely Sarbanes-Oxley in the Enron aftermath, has made the IPO considerably more challenging to achieve and costly to navigate – even for highly legitimate ideas.

In the web 2.0 era, the slant often went way too far to the left in terms of engineering. Some ideas with little actual business purpose have received unwarranted acclaim and without artificial sources of acquisition, some might not even exist.

Before I go onto explain why that development might create an alignment that I’ll tentatively call the functional web, let me state that I think there are plenty of other companies out there that could emerge to pick up the slack such as Fox, Intuit, Apple or any of a number of traditional media companies who “get it”.

This web might emerge even if the Yahoo! acquisition does not take place. If the functional web emerges a place where engineering and business purpose mix in equally important parts instead of the excesses in one direction or another, who potentially gains and who potentially has something to lose?

Potential Gainers:

– Strong Internet business skill generalists with strong system architecture, product management and the ability to network with geeks and non-geeks alike and iterate from feedback will be in higher demand.

– Companies who would like to challenge the big three who would get an opening.

– People who understand how to create revenue models that could provide for great stand alone businesses.

– People pushing for Sarbanes-Oxley reform to reopen the IPO spiggot a tad. They will push even harder.

Potential Losers:

– Funding sources who either fund ideas in a me-too fashion or just because they’ve known the people since the dot.com era and/or those who can’t define and lead a path to monetization or bring strong execution partners to the table.

– Domain name squatters and sellers.

– Passive executive recruiters who will have to actually analyze comprehensive skill sets instead of simply poaching from a direct competitor.

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Microsoft Launches Mobile Advertising on MSN Mobile

Microsoft just announced the launch of mobile advertising on MSN Mobile.

I wish they would have given more details about the release instead of pointing us back to overly dated speeches on the mobile advertising subject. I would have expected to see more examples than just movie tickets.

Microsoft has the potential to lead this market with it’s array of assets if they are integrated in the right manner – see my post on Web 2.0 was NEVER a business strategy for business strategy ideas.

Maybe they will start a larger conversation on this subject once they see this post? We’ll see.

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Microsoft Hotmail Blocking Yahoo! Mail as Spam?

This is a joke. But all too real. Microsoft meet Yahoo!. Yahoo! meet Microsoft. Now play nice.

Remote host said: 550 SC-004 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. A block has been placed against your IP address because we have received complaints concerning mail coming from that IP address. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your — Below this line is a copy of the message. Received: from [68.142.237.90] by <A href=”http://n10.bullet.re3.yahoo.com” target=_blank><SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1194272982_1>n10.bullet.re3.yahoo.com</SPAN></A> with NNFMP; 05 Nov 2007 14:25:19 -0000 Received: from [69.147.75.182] by <A href=”http://t6.bullet.re3.yahoo.com” target=_blank><SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1194272982_2>t6.bullet.re3.yahoo.com</SPAN></A> with NNFMP; 05 Nov 2007 14:25:19 -0000 Received: from [127.0.0.1] by <A href=”http://omp103.mail.re1.yahoo.com” target=_blank><SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1194272982_3>omp103.mail.re1.yahoo.com</SPAN></A> with NNFMP; 05 Nov 2007 14:25:19 -0000 X-Yahoo-Newman-Property: ymail-3 X-Yahoo-Newman-Id: <SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1194272982_4 style=”BACKGROUND: none transparent scroll repeat 0% 0%; CURSOR: hand; BORDER-BOTTOM: #0066cc 1px dashed”>3742.69458.bm@omp103.mail.re1.yahoo.com</SPAN> Received: (qmail 894 invoked by uid 60001); 5 Nov 2007 14:25:18 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com;

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Will You Attend SMX Local & Mobile Denver Next Week

I’ll be attending the first ever SMX Local & Mobile conference next week in Denver!!! Chris Sherman, who talks about why he is excited about the event in this post, and Greg Sterling have both put in a tremendous amount of work into researching and programming this highly unique and special event.

You may view the full agenda and you may still register for the event.

I arrive at Noon on Sunday (where is the Sunday pre-conference meetup – The Hyatt?) and hope to meet with as many attendees as possible before and during the event as I look forward to learning about people and seeing the demos in this soon to be revolutionary space.

See you in Denver! I’ll also have room for one or two on the way back to the airport as I’m renting a car while there.