Everything you need to know about the future of search engine marketing you learned in the 1990s.

That’s an overstatement, of course, but the basics of SEO and SEM — the very first things you probably learned  — now are more important than they’ve been in years for bringing people back to your Web site. It’s all thanks to the new browser wars among Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, all of which are generally evolving in the same direction. All three, for instance, support searching from the address bar, where you normally enter a Web site URL. Chrome encourages this the most, as it doesn’t even have a search box, but the same feature is on all the browsers. The searches all are conducted through the default search engine you select (IE8, for example, doesn’t hold you to Live Search).

More importantly, these address bars all offer suggestions as you type. Generally, these are based on which sites you’ve previously visited, how often and/or recently you’ve visited them, and potentially some other factors. Firefox sticks to your browsing history, but Google will sometimes recommend other sites it deems relevant, while Microsoft occasionally recommends a page from one of its properties. The history is what marketers and publishers have the most control over, so that’s where the focus needs to be.

(more…)

What might a Google killer look like?

Last week a lot of people were musing whether it would have search results in three columns with tabbed pages and irrelevant thumbnail images, with a black homepage background instead of a white one. That so-called killer,  in the form of Cuil, wound up not being a case of Goliath meeting its David so much as it was Goliath waking up with a minor case of halitosis. It was at most a temporary nuisance, and as is often the case with halitosis, it seemed to rile everyone else much more than it bothered the one afflicted with it.

Here’s another vision of what a Google killer looks like: it’s a downloadable program rather than a Web site, but you can use this program to access any site you want. You can use it to search, but it’s much more effective to visit Web sites you already know about and probably visited before. If you can’t remember a site you visited previously, you can type in a relevant keyword or two and it will show you the relevant sites from your history. You can customize the program to access countless other programs and tools, from weather forecasts to Twitter, all without going to any other site at all.

(more…)

Earlier this week on “The Daily Show,” Larry Wilmore reported on how Beverly Hills is coping with today’s economic hardships, where women are waiting longer to get their Botox refills and plastic surgeons are taking on reconstructive surgery cases just to pay their golf dues.

That’s hardly the case in digital media, where the plastic surgeons of the Web have their hands full. It seems like every other major site and software program is getting its digital version of Botox lately. These sites want to look better, and generally more youthful, without calling too much attention to themselves. We’ll review the latest round of e-Botox projects and see who wears their new looks well. (more…)

How can you go wrong with offering your customers new ways to customize their experience? Once again, a Web giant is learning that customization isn’t a panacea.

Earlier this week, in my last Search Insider for the time being, I reviewed the challenges Yahoo will face with its new SearchMonkey program, in which publishers create enhanced search listings that users can incorporate into their results. SearchMonkey is currently difficult to use, Yahoo users won’t see enough of a payoff, and Google hit a dead end with its related Co-op offering. How can Yahoo struggle so much with customization when it’s such an important part of consumers’ evolving media experience?

To find some answers, let’s contrast SearchMonkey with some examples of where customization works online. (more…)