Rethink Your Website – Part III

As we continue into Part III and the final chapter in our website analysis for the new year, we ask you to look at the following questions:

Can visitors easily navigate their way through your site?
Is your call to action clear and are you getting visitors to act?
Are you clearly communicating to your target audience?
Are you doing everything you can to market your website?

Can visitors easily navigate their way through your site?
You’ve been to your site over and over and you know it better than you know what’s currently in your refrigerator.  You’ve created your navigation just the way you wanted, and it might suit your purposes just fine.  But for someone who has rarely or never been to your site, are you able to communicate what you are saying and funneling them where they need to go in order to maximize your conversions?

You want to be sure that if you have different segments of customers you funnel them through from the beginning or help them define which segment they are first.  For instance, if you sell vacations along the Grand Strand, then you may want to first segment your beaches – North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach, and Surfside Garden City vacations.  Have information about each segment available, as well, incase your buyer doesn’t know yet.  Always have it easy to learn about the other beaches or view the properties available in each section. 

Have information like great family beach to target families, or best beach for couples, so that each need that the customer has is easily identified and ready to book.  For instance, if you are segmenting down to couples, you don’t want to suggest massive 8 bedroom oceanfront houses, but maybe a small romantic suite with options to upgrade to Jacuzzi or add on additions like champagne and strawberries.

Always have it be easy to go back to the start and let the visitor choose other options.   With better website programming available everyday, website owners are customizing their websites more and more.  This is important as the consumer wants to know their options, see the benefits and values, and choose which suits them best.  Help them find what their looking for and what will satisfy their needs without getting frustrated and leaving.

To check to see how your website is doing, go back to your analytics and look at bounce rates, time on site and exit pages.  Also, make sure you are tracking conversions and always strive to improve on them.   If there’s something that doesn’t add up, evaluate that page, funnel, or call the experts at ICND to help you identify these trends.

Is your call to action clear and are you getting visitors to act?
Do you feel like your calling but nobody’s home?  Make sure that each page has a clear call to action and it’s easy for your visitors to get started browsing your inventory or filling out contact information.  If you have a phone number, make sure it’s in a clear spot on every page.  Yes, the whole point of a website is usually to buy online, but sometimes it’s just not that easy. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to a site, saw what I liked, but couldn’t figure how to get it!  But if you go to big brand e-commerce or vacation sites, you’ll almost always see a clear call to action and point of sale.

Are you clearly communicating offers to your target audience?
So many times I run into conflicting communication with marketing to an audience.  There has to be consistency in your messages.  If you are targeting your audience through any sort of marketing, whether it be direct mail, email, pay per click, make sure your offer is clear, concise, and consistent across each medium.

If you send out an expensive direct mail piece with an “Exclusive Summer Savings” offer and you call it “Super Summer Savings” on your site, you are going to confuse the heck out of your visitor.  Even if it’s the same percentage off and the details read about the same, it’s going to be confusing.  Buyers need to feel confident in your offer, not confused or hesitant.  This may lead them to check else where and leave your site.

Are you doing everything you can to market your website?
Of course this may be limited by budget, but are you doing the most for your money?  There are simple things you can to look at your website and make sure it’s in good working order.  In fact, an expert at ICND can take  a quick 20 minute look at your site and see if you have basic things correct for SEO, where you rank, where your competitors rank and a plethora of more information to let you know how you are doing amongst your competition.   We’ll put together suggestions and integrate these into your current marketing goals and objectives.  Let us work with you and make the most out of your website and marketing budget.
 

How do you Improve your PPC Campaign – Top Ways to Improve your Quality Score

The days of setting your bid, making some ads, and selecting your keywords and calling it a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign are long gone.  You can thank those that bid on keywords and their landing pages really had nothing to do with them.  Google now has a whole formula that takes the keywords in your ad group and analyzes them against the landing page you are directing them to.

What’s the Quality Score do?  Well, for one the higher the Quality Score the better you rank, for less.  So it’s something you want to pay attention to and work on.  Whether it means tweaking your ads, segmenting your keyword list better, or creating new landing pages.  If you need help with this, call ICND now for a free consultation.

Google will rank your Quality Score based on a number of factors.  Here’s a few we’ve we’ve put together for you:

•    Your Click Thru Rate – The days where it was easy enough to just have a great, relevant ad that people liked to click on are long gone, but it still matters, a lot.  Make sure your ad pertains to your keywords and gives people a reason to want to click on it.  This will help higher your quality score.

•    Your Entire Account – Your entire accounts click thru rate is a factor in the way Google calculates your Quality Score.  If you’ve added a lot of keywords that haven’t had clicks in months, go in and delete those keywords.  You can always add more, but deleting these keywords with low click thru rates will increase your overall click thru rate, thus improving your Quality Score.

•    Your Display URL – Google keeps record of your display URL along with your click thru rate for the entire length of time of your account.  If you are new to adwords and want to practice, experts advise using a practice URL as to not to put low CTR on your main URL.

•    Your Focus and Relevancy to Keywords – It’s better to be very granular with your adgroups than to bundle a bunch of different keywords into one adgroup with a generic ad.  Say you’re trying to get Myrtle Beach keyword terms, separate each bundle of terms pertaining like north myrtle beach generic term, south myrtle beach generic terms, then Myrtle hotel keywords, North Myrtle Beach keywords and so forth.

What you’ll end up with is a bunch of adgroups with 10-25 keyword phrases per adgroup.  It may seem like a bunch of work to manage, but making it any larger will hurt your relevancy to the display ad.

•    Your Relevancy to the Search Query – In real time, Google with caluculat yoru Quality score based on how well your ad and keywords fit what people are searching for.  It won’t affect how much you pay, but how well your rank.

•    Your Geographical Performance – Google will also calculate your Quality Score based on how well you perform in certain geographical areas.  If you perform better in Charlotte, NC than you do in Roanoke, VA you’ll rank better for Charlotte.
Your landing’s page content and relevancy – This is where you will affect how much you pay, but not where you rank.  Your page should be built out for SEO, with authoritative domain name, inbound links, relevant content, original content, quick loading, and include credibility indicators such as a link to about us, contact us, etc.  A page that already ranks well in the search engines will also help.

•    Don’t use excessive opt-in or registration tactics without offering a lot of relevant, useful information. But, you do need to make it easy and quick for customers to purchase whatever it is was featured on the ad or you are trying to sell.

Remember, the best way to improve your quality score by increasing relevancy throughout your keywords, adgroup, text ad, and landing page.  Make sure they all connect and pertain to each other.  ICND is here to help.  Give us a call today for a free consultation.
 

Brandon Sauls met with the Brunswick County Chamber of Commerce in mid December.  At the meeting, Sauls was asked by the board to chair the Marketing Development Committee for the chamber. 

Working under the President, Cathy Altman, Sauls hopes to be able to increase the traffic to the chamber website and therefore increase awareness for the area which in turn will boost over all leads.  Brandon will be working not only on the online marketing and branding but the overall marketing and branding for the Brunswick County Chamber of Commerce.

What We've Been Working On - Month of December

It's been a busy end to the year and the momentum is rocking into the New Year.  We'd like to take the time and send out a big Thank You to all of current customers that made 2009 such a success and look forward to working with you in 2010.

Here's some things we've worked on in December, 2009:

AeroFlow Health Care - New Website Launched:

AeroFlow Healthcare is the a provider of home respiratory and mobility equipment.  They came to ICND to help them update their website's look and feel and promote their products online.  ICND created a newly designed website that broke down their target audiences and allowed them to view information pertaining to their needs.

In addition, ICND is developing an online Sleep Apnea survey and starting a search engine optimization campaign Spring of 2010.

New Website Launched:  Baxley & Smithwick

Baxley & Smithwick Attorney's at Law selected ICND to design them a website to allow them to have an online presence.  They wanted a nice traditional look and information about all the different services they offer and their backgrounds and specialties.

The Palace Theatre - Selects ICND for website Design

Last but certainly not least, The Palace Theatre of Myrtle Beach has selected ICND to redesign their website.  The Palace Theater is looking for a fresh, new, clean look to highlight their shows and venue.  We're looking forward to a launch sometime mid January.

In December, 100,000 brick and mortar businesses in 5,000 cities who had claimed their Local Business Listings got snail mail from Google in the form of Favorite Place stickers, with instructions to put them in their windows and use them to promote their business.

Included on each sticker is a bar code that some smart phone users can scan to pull up Local Business Listing information, including coupons, on their phones. Outwardly, this appears to be just another bribe that Maps is offering to get businesses to claim their listings. In reality, Google could be testing any number of things relating to smart phone use, mobile search and local businesses. It's worth noting here that Google encouraged Local Listing Ad advertisers to link their ads to their Place Pages instead of to their websites because the Place Pages render well on small screens and contain all of the information a mobile searcher is likely to be interested in.

Google is continually testing and tweaking, so changes are no surprise to those who watch it. But in 2009, the number, frequency, acceleration and anticipated impact of the changes both in paid advertising and organic results regarding Local Search at Google have been remarkable. In my opinion, these increasingly louder rumblings indicate that once Google finds the optimum combination of the right user interface and profitable local advertising to display, it will unleash a formidable storm in the world of Local Search. Are you ready?

For full article and more information, check out Search Engine News: http://www.searchenginenews.com/se-news/content/search-engine-strategy-and-optimization-updates-for-january-2010#2

To help get set up in Google's Local Business contact ICND today.

A Social Media Strategy Checklist

   1. Spend more traditional ad budget on customer service

      So many problems could be proactively averted if companies would simply treat customers as they should. In today’s social realm, word of mouth travels far and above the vintage physical conversation, and can truly influence users across the globe. By supplementing your products with excellent support and a pleasant experience, you will create brand advocates that will help, rather than hurt you. Imagine if United had cut back on a few TV commercials and actually helped their customers out. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is amazing to see the sheer number of companies that continue to treat their customers poorly, then try to fix by spending more dollars on advertising. In a McKinsey report, 67% of consumer sales are directly influenced by WOM (PDF), and the best form of reputation management is not needing to manage your reputation at all. Treat your customers properly, and you will see the results in social media and your bottom line.

  
2. Create sound company social media strategies & social media policies

      The problem with most companies is that there is a lack of social media strategy and they are engaging because they think they have to. Sit down and put together a list of goals then work to find a strategy that will work to accomplish them. Don’t just Tweet because you saw it on CNN, don’t make a Facebook page because your competitor did.  Come up with a list of goals and a strategy to achieve them. Tactics and strategies are crucial in social media, as Sun Tzu eloquently stated: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

  
3. Train & educate workers

      Recently, there have been some social media meltdowns based on the lack of knowledge of some individuals acting on behalf of a company.  Policies should be set forth to ensure that workers are not breaking terms of use, acting inappropriately, providing inaccurate information or a handful of other impending dilemmas. In addition, anyone who is allowed to speak on behalf of the company should have extreme comprehension of the networks, how they work and the overall company strategy. When executed poorly, social media has the power to severely harm a brand, and education is the fundamental factor that can prevent these problems.

  
4. Make a better effort to track mentions

      One of the toughest aspects of Social Media Marketing is tracking the conversations that are occurring ‘in-the-wild.” Research and find a solution that will help you and your company achieve your social media goals. There are a number of good tracking systems on the market, the trick is to test drive them and see what will work for you.  In addition to tracking mentions, tracking broad keywords and engaging customer who are looking for help can be a very profitable portion of your social media marketing campaign. When looking for tools, those that allow the archiving and exportation of data is something that can be a big help as you make your internal cause for social media.

 
  5. Be proactive, protect your brand names

      If you have a trademarked term, you can almost always stop name squatters from hijacking your brand name, but why wait for that to happen? Services like KnowEm allow you to reserve usernames across hundreds of sites and prevent those from stealing your brand. Taking a few minutes and a few dollars now can save you a lot of time and money to get it back later, so get out there and protect your brand.

  
6. Take the time to look your best

      Use your social media profiles as extensions of your brand and of your website. Take the time to make custom backgrounds for Twitter or create rich Facebook tabs that support your current marketing initiatives. Just because your profile isn’t on your site, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t spend money trying to make it look good.

  
7. Really promote your social profiles off-site

      Many times, simply slapping a social media badge in your footer is simply not enough. Analyze options on how you can leverage real estate on your site to accomplish your social goals. Whether it be a Digg Widget in your sidebar to help promote some upcoming stories on your site to Facebook Fan Boxes along with calls to action on a post-conversion Thank You Page there are plenty of tactics that could make sense for your company.

  
8. Advertise your social profiles

      One of the hardest things to justify in Internet marketing is spending money without sending visitors to your website. Much like investing in design and development for social profiles, you should be securing budget for advertising on social media sites as well. For example, advertising Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to let targeted users know that you are participating in the conversation. While you may be able to leverage your site to gain some loyal fans/followers (see above), spending money for exposure to targeted audiences could be much more profitable in the long run.

   9. Give people a reason to join in

      “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work in social media, or online in general. You should give users a reason to follow you and become a fan. Whether it is sweepstakes, breaking news, giveaways, sales or company updates, you should offer users something beneficial in exchange for their loyalty.

 
10. Reward loyal fans with exclusives

      By offering fans items that are exclusive to the social audience, you can “demonstrate value” and make them feel good about following you. Not only would they get an exclusive deal/song/download/game, they also get the feeling that they are getting a special connection that not everyone has.

 
11. Explore more outlets

      While Twitter and Facebook are making the biggest splash on the news scene, there are hundreds more social sites out there – many of which can help you achieve company goals. Look into other social media outlets that you may not be currently engaged in. From social news sites like Digg to social bookmarking sites like the new StumbleUpon to smaller niche social media sites, there are many outlets that could work for you,  so give ‘em a try!

 
12. Don’t neglect your site

      While all of the above points speak mainly of tactics that work off of your site, one of the biggest things to remember is that you can be social on your site. Things like blogs and forums were the original social media, so make sure to maintain and cultivate them and create good content that will perform well in social media. At the end of the day, your site is your ultimate sales tool, so take care of it!  Where applicable try to bring social media in with things like Facebook Connect or Digg or Twitter’s API to harness the benefits of these sites on your own.

And that’s it! Try to work on these resolutions in 2010 and watch your social presence flourish. Have any other resolutions you’d like to add? Drop a comment below. Happy Holidays!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Greg Finn is the Director of Internet Marketing for 10e20, a publicity company that specializes in social media and search marketing services. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for over 5 years and specializes in Social Media Marketing.  He writes in-depth about social media and internet marketing on the 10e20 blog

To talk with a Social Media Expert and get your strategy right, contact ICND today.

It's like the Swiffer commercial, where an old sponge-mop is outside a window, peeking in at a housewife who has moved on to better mops, while "Love Stinks" plays in the background. The old mop is trying to win her back, even going so far as to hire a Mariachi band to court its perfidious ex-partner.

In this case, you're the sponge-mop.

We're talking about site-abandonment, and especially early abandonment -- the kind that leaves you feeling like a toddler dropped off at a nunnery, and you never know why, though you spend your life trying to find out.

Digital marketers, especially those who rely on campaigns to drive ecommerce, suffer greatly from abandonment rates, which can run as high as 80 percent for a typical landing page. All marketers are affected by it, even if their KPIs don't involve selling something online. In fact, any failure to complete a scenario -- any loss of traffic anywhere in the funnel -- is a symptom of abandonment: The target audience just didn't want to proceed. And isn't that the entire reason we perform web analytics at all? To find out why we can't get every single site visitor to do what we want them to do?

Perhaps a thousand types of measures have been devised about visitor behavior. The sheer number of report choices can nearly suffocate any search for the truth. There are so many interconnected measures that, at a certain point, it becomes like a house of mirrors -- no one can tell what's the real number or which measure can be relied upon for some type of objectivity.

In your search for objectivity, have you ever wondered if people's behavior is affected by how long they have to wait for your page to load? Have you ever abandoned because of load time?

Here are three ways, based on understanding load time, to help put abandonment in perspective -- and perhaps even decrease your abandonment rates:

Step 1: Admit you have a problem
The latest data shows that abandonment increases dramatically after a wait time of four seconds. In net time, four seconds is like four hours of driving: "Are we there yet?" becomes "Let's just pull over." And all of your marketing efforts suddenly become road-kill.

Slow load time can be caused by a number of problems, some of them obvious, some of them hidden, and all of them addressable.

The first thing you'll want to look at is content richness.

Ouch.

You may be thinking content richness is what everybody is looking for. How can you survive without Flash, without embedded video, without whirling, dancing eye-candy for a user base that seems to think a chance browser encounter should be as glittery as a stroll down the Las Vegas Strip?

Your content might be too rich, and yes, it might take too long to download. It might ask for too many plug-ins. It might be unsupported by your target user's browser.

Or, your page load problem may be caused by something that has nothing to do with over-rich content. It could turn out that your server is slower than a dinosaur in a dunce-cap; then again, you might have a peerage issue somewhere between you and Timbuktu. The hunt for KPI completion does not begin and end with earning kudos from your colleagues in a closed environment where everything runs at optimum speed and every link works just the way it ought to.

You need to get out of the conference room and into the real world. That's where the real story of page load begins and ends. And, as noted above, the trouble may not even be content richness. But how do you measure that?  Contact ICND to fix this problem now!

Step 2: Measure with the right yardstick
There are a number of tools available to measure load time: Gomez, Keynote, TeaLeaf, Atomic Labs -- these are just a few of the companies with load time measurement offerings. There are also some clever ways to tag pages for load time information, but few of these options are bundled products as yet (though they may be available from your web analytics professional services vendor).

The products mentioned above tend to work in a somewhat different way than the typical analytics tools do. In other words, they don't concentrate on click-stream data and don't need tagging or log files in order to function. In fact, they are, generally speaking, separate architectures that look at all of your traffic, all of the time, and do a variety of things with that information. Sometimes they are called "sniffers" because they sit somewhere between your server and your user and pick up all the traffic (kind of the way a bloodhound sniffs an evidentiary trail).

So for instance, where an analytics tool will know whether a particular tag loaded, a "sniffer" will know much more about how long it took for the page to be requested, how long it took the server to get it out the door, and how long it took for the various packets sent by the server to show up in the remote user's browser.

I had indicated above that some of the tools have significant other uses. TeaLeaf, in particular, has a core function that allows the marketer to play back, literally, a browsing session. Some folks call it "Tivo for web analytics." It may be a bit much to deploy all of that solely for the purpose of locating a page-load problem, but if it is taking place, TeaLeaf will probably see it.

A tool like Gomez, on the other hand, sets up a network (around the world) of synthetic testing nodes, enabling them essentially to mimic requests from anywhere and measure your response time for anything and everything you want to measure. You can look at certain parts of your transactions and find out, for instance, how long that is taking in Albuquerque, Inchon, and Luxembourg all at once. The only drawback is that generally these tests are synthetic (in other words, not involving actual users).

A clever tagging solution will have its drawbacks too; for instance, it won't be able to know when the server request was made, or how long it took for the first tag to load. But then, the moon is not the sun, yet both have recognizable assets.

Linking load time directly to abandonment typically requires an additional integration step. For instance, if you are trying to find out how a sniffer-tracked load time problem is affecting your campaign ROI, you should be prepared to do some fancy dancing with your analytics tool -- but with the right kind of integration, the dancing can lead to marriage, and you'll see stars.

The important takeaway is this: While I'm not going to claim it's easy, you can certainly find out how long your pages take to load, and you can, with the application of some elbow grease, understand whether that is affecting abandonment and conversion overall. In all likelihood, load time is affecting abandonment. Now you'll know how much, and perhaps even why. 

Step 3: Come back armed with the facts
This part is probably the least fun, but most rewarding once it's done and accepted. Armed with load time data, your task now becomes a matter of breaking the news.

Your creatives, your developers, and/or your IT folks may all dislike your news intensely, but you've got bigger worries than that if people aren't completing scenarios.

I know from experience that creatives have a soft, mushy spot in their hearts for visual extravaganza. For them, a day without Flash is like a week in the pokey, and they will start to complain that they can't deliver value without it -- and some of that may even be correct.

I also know from experience that IT folks will defend their architecture to the bitter end -- or at least until management coughs up enough bucks for some faster servers. But even the best server jockeys must sometimes face the fact their horse is not in the money.

Developers will say it can't be fixed. The work that's been put into your current site cannot be taken apart and reassembled in a more efficient way "just like that." And they are right (but they were, perhaps, wrong for building it "like that" in the first place.)

In any case, while your developers may be architects of the best parts of your site, they are also architects of the worst; and when people are bailing before your pages load, that's the worst. As a marketer, you may need to force-feed them some facts, and hold them accountable for making sure you don't have to tell management that the site's most important pages aren't even being seen by the audience.

Conclusion
You've probably long sensed there was some "other" problem out there that was keeping users from delivering for you. You could never be sure what it was. There were fingers pointing 'round the table during your last review, and nobody seemed to be at fault. Knowing about load time will help reduce the blank stares at meeting time, and set you up for better success at conversion.

Often, it's the unturned stone in the path that hides the all-important clue. My suggestion: You should at least turn over that stone.

Andrew Edwards is managing partner of Technology Leaders. 

Is your traffic quality traffic?

Put your site and your marketing efforts to the test.

So you’ve had 2,567 visitors this month and only two sales online.  What’s going on?  You’re doing SEO, PPC, and other offline marketing tactics.   Your results should be more, right?  Yes.  They should be more.  So, let’s take a look at what might be causing this slump of proportion of sales per visitor.

Back to the basics.  Whether or not your site is booming or dragging, do you know who your customers are? Are you targeting the right audience?  In the past couple of years, buyer’s behavior has really shifted.  They have more control then ever, more information thanks to the internet, and are much more cost conscience because of the recession.  So take an immediate look at your buyer from the last year and also look at their buying behavior and cycle.  What’s the sex, age, average income?  Where do they live?  When are they buying?  Here are some cool tools and analytics to find out.

Microsoft Ad Center has a great program to help you look at the demographics of your website.  Check out their demographics prediction tool: http://adlab.microsoft.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx

Click on URL next to tool input and put in your website URL.  It will bring back the results of your website based on different factors they record.

Then, put some of your top keyword phrases in the query tool and see what the results bring back.  Compare your site demographics to your keyword phrases as well as what you thought the results would be. You may be surprised on how far off you may be.

Check out some of your competitor’s sites and see where they pan out in comparison to the popular keyword phrases pertaining to your industry.

Then, pull up your Google Analytics or your analytic software and there you should be able to pull a map that shows you all of the geographical locations your traffic is coming from.  Is that your target area?

Look at your bounce rate.  If it’s high, you may need to adjust your content or your site or your marketing efforts.  Look and see where your traffic may be exiting your site.  Is there a disconnect somewhere?  Are you able to take your visitor down the right path?  Or, are they getting frustrated and leaving?

Next you look at your marketing both online and offline.  It’s not necessarily the amount of traffic you send to your site, but the quality of traffic you drive to your site.  The more targeted your marketing efforts are to your core audience, the more your inclined to have more sales. 

For more information about how to evaluate your marketing and traffic, contact us as info@icoastalnet.com with your questions or call 1-866-249-6095

Bing released an enhanced page preview feature during November with a different interface and more focus on structured previews. For example a search for Carbon Credits is shown below, when you hover your mouse pointer over the search result an arrow pointing to the right in a gray box shows up, moving your mouse pointer over the arrow itself pops open a layer with a preview of text on the page.

In some situations, like the result from Wikipedia above, a site search box is also shown. We've observed many different variations in what the Bing preview will display. They all typically show some text content, but may also feature a list of popular and/or deep links on the site, site contact information, they may even show pictures if it's a Facebook page.

Some of this information can be useful to know, for example popular links show what Bing/MSN have tracked to be popular pages users view after landing on the page. We have to assume they are getting that data from the MSN toolbar - and this does give you some insight as to what's getting clicked on for yours, or a competitor's site.

Not every site owner will like this feature, If you don't want your content available by the Document Preview feature, you can opt-out using the meta robots tag. To specifically block only Bing from using a preview feature add the following tag to your pages head area.

<meta name="msnbot", content="nopreview">

Or, if you wish to block all engines that support the nopreview tag, use this generic version;

<meta name="robots" content="nopreview">

For more information on Google updates, please see our friends at SearchEngineNews.com.

Is it Holiday Greed or a User Interface Improvement? Yahoo's November 24th update to their Search Assist drop down features new smart search links that signal an even greater push to drive traffic to their own properties than before. With this new change, when you type in a keyword like mail, Yahoo takes the opportunity to intercept the traffic and drive it to one of their pages as shown in the example below.

For queries like NASDAQ stock symbols, the drop down even displays current stock prices right in the drop down. So far this feature is not in use on the Yahoo.com home page, but it is showing up at other subsections of their portal such as Yahoo News and Weather. While it might be a nice traffic builder for Yahoo Properties, it certainly is a heavily biased feature that interrupts search before the user even gets to the search engine.

Can you imagine the impact something like this would have if every time you went to the Google home page and started to type in a query, a drop down tries to lead you to a Google Property like Google Product Search? Wait - they have already started doing that with YouTube Video, Google News, Google Local, etc. you might say, but there is a key difference with this concept - fewer choices. Yahoo is interrupting the traffic stream before a search even occurs vs Google integrating theirs into the results post search. Perhaps we should call this "Pre-Search" results?

The engines are getting bolder and bolder in their desires to keep more and more traffic (and money) to themselves, and pass along an ever decreasing percentage to the rest of the Internet. While for a short term benefit, it will work in their favor, in the long run a new up and coming search engine will remember what worked for Google, Infoseek and others before and offer clear unbiased search results to their users and gain the public's favor.

For more information on Google updates, please see our friends at SearchEngineNews.com.

A few months ago Google released a video demoing their revolutionary product, Google Wave. It promises to be everything Google is as a whole, all rolled up into one easy to use interface, not to mention make email obsolete. That's a pretty big promise, and if anyone can accomplish something so huge it's Google.

If you watched the entire hour and twenty minute video or read anything about Wave, you know a little about what it's capable of, but even so, you probably weren't one of the lucky folks to make it into the beta to test the software. That's where we come in.

First logging into Wave, I'll admit, was overwhelming. We had all watched the whole demo video, and I felt I understood the interface and how it worked. The good news is that the overwhelming feeling goes away pretty quickly. If you're like most and have a Gmail account, you'll notice that the interface is set up to mimic the Gmail interface.

In the center of interface is the Wave inbox. This is just like your inbox in your email, with the subject of the wave, and the icon or avatar of some of the people in the wave. On the left side of the interface will be a link to start a new wave. This will open a window to the right of the inbox one where any current wave you are interacting with will be. From here is where the magic all happens. Also note these windows are collapsible so you can maximize your screen real estate with what you are currently reading or maybe just hide your inbox during a meeting to stay focused.

Basically Google will allow you to do just about anything you could think of inside of a wave, and this is why it has the potential to be the biggest thing to happen to the Internet since...well since email. The wave combines Gmail, Gtalk, Google documents, Google maps and probably some other Google things that I can't remember.

That means if you want to send an email, instant message, directions with a map, or create an entire collaborative presentation or document that everyone can edit in real time - you can do it all with a wave. Plus, you can drag and drop photos from your PC, or Google image search and you can even embed YouTube videos straight into the wave. Sounds like a lot of content to suddenly fall into if you get added to a wave late. Google thought of that and made it possible to use what that call a playback ability to see the progression of the wave from the beginning - edit by edit.

Of course the ability to install extensions means that Google Wave has unlimited potential. Right now there are only a few basic extensions created for the beta, like a yes/no/maybe chart for decision making with your friends, a weather extension, and a couple map and trip builders. The most basic, but probably the most convenient is the Google Search extension that comes by default. Anything you search within this small window can be inserted into the wave for others to see.

The most amazing of the extensions Google has in the works though, is the universal translator. Though it's not quite complete, Google did demo it in the video, and it did allow them to translate from one language to the next in real time, and with Wave's ability to display all sorts of characters, the language possibilities are seemingly endless. Though, there are also some addons for things like prettying your code so you can share HTML/MySQL/PHP/etc. code while developing and have it look nice and be color coded. There are so many possibilities with the bots/addons that can be created we are all very excited.

We're very impressed with the ambition and the ease of use of the program. The Google design team has thought of almost everything when it comes to things like drag-and-drop, which makes the program so much easier to use. As a challenge, we tried to figure out how many different ways we could do the same action within a wave. (I'm not sure we've named a winner yet.)

It's important to mention that some news has come out suggesting that Wave will have some security issues with bots, but seeing as how it's not officially released yet, it's unfair to assume that Google won't deal with that before release.

For more information on Google updates, please see our friends at SearchEngineNews.com.

For more information on Google updates, please see our friends at SearchEngineNews.com.

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