In yet another round of search engine rankings, ComScore has released the ‘U.S. Search Engine Rankings for June 2008′. The latest results show that Google is still steaming ahead of the competition, but there has been slight improvements in the figures of Microsoft and Yahoo! as well. However, the figure for the raw searches for Google, have sky rocketed according to the latest figures, with record a record high of 11.5 billion searches.

For the month of June 2008, all across America, an astounding 11.5 billion searches were conducted in just 30 days and yet again Google was on top of the table with a major chunk of the search ration, a whopping 61.5%. Yahoo! recorded 20.9% searches, a slight jump from the figure of 20.6% in May 2008. Microsoft posted a gain amounting to almost 1% with a figure of 9.2%, where its figure for May was 8.5%.

Noel of Search Engine Herald has put up a post about a topic, that is sort of a taboo in the world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This topic is called ‘Keyword Mining’. Now, every website has it very own web statistics, that enable the Webmasters to understand operational critical factors about their websites such as, the number of visitors, visiting frequency and other details as well.

All Webmasters have an option of keeping their web statistics private and thus inaccessible to the public in general. However, most of the Webmasters do not bother to use the privacy option and in many cases, some of the Webmasters have been absolutely ignorant about the existence of such an option in their analytical tools. At present, Google is the King of Search and practically indexes every page on the Internet. Many a times, with the pages that are being indexed, these website statistics also get indexed by Google and are displayed in the search results for the whole world to see.

In an interview with Eric Enge at the Search Marketing Expo Advanced, Matt Cutts, the Head of Google Webspam Team, spoke about link building and gave his views on the same. Matt Cutts stressed on the fact that the best links are those that are original research and provide value to readers for example, in the form of a Firefox extension. Moreover, he also expressed his concern over too many reciprocal links. Here are some excerpts from the interview with Eric Enge:

To enhance user trust and experience, Google Analytics has recently enabled sharing of Google Analytical Data. The improvement is primarily directed towards providing transparency, choice and improved product experience. This feature will not affect a user’s account in any ways, without the approval of the user for individual product and services.

Google Analytics Data Sharing Program

According Webmaster world, Google is allowing other Webmasters (who could also be your competitors) to damage your site and destroy its online credibility. It is a harsh reality that these days many Webmasters deploy dirty trade tricks to defame a competitive website. This is also known as ‘Google Bowling’. Some of the most common deceitful tactics employed these days are:

1. Spam: A competing Webmaster can use scam script that will leave your site’s URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This would make the Google spiders believe that you are spamming those sites. This will greatly affect your ranking and credibility as well.

According to a recent announcement, Yahoo! Inc has stepped up its efforts towards the sales of graphical and premium advertisements by revealing the details of its new Advertising Management Platform or AMP. The project that is still in the developmental stages will enable Yahoo’s publishing partners to place advertisements on their own sites, as well as on Yahoo!. Advertisers will also have the opportunity to advertise on the websites that are rapidly associating themselves with Yahoo’s growing network. They will be able to focus their advertisements by demographic and geographic targeting and user’s online behavior.

A natural search optimized website will be more trustworthy to a user than a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisement, thus increasing the ROI (return-on-investment) on the website. Although, optimizing the web pages to a natural SEO takes significant amount of time, still, the ROI and the rewards reaped through this process are extremely satisfactory. It is like paid advertising vs. public relations. The best part is about 70% of the traffic from the search results is free, Google gives these valuable clicks away at no charge. 

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