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Occasionally we’re asked our opinion of certain marketing companies out there who seem to make fantastic claims for incredibly low prices. Claims like “guaranteed top search positions” for a low low price. Two questions that come to mind are :

Top positions for what phrases?
Generally achieving top positions for obscure terms is pretty straight-forward. Most site owners probably have a number of top positions right now for some combination of words and phrases that appear on their site right now. Of course, what matters is whether anyone else actually uses those phrases in search.

Top positions on what sites?
Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo. Those are the sites that matter. And if you do well there, you’ll do well everywhere else. So that claim (that I fortunately do hear less often these days) that we’ll submit your sites to 50, 100, or 1,000 of the top sites, just doesn’t hold any water. You don’t need to do it.

So, in honor of these shady sites I’m coining a new term : Xanadaculous. Xanadaculous means a spectacular claim that is both mythical (like Xanadu in the movie by the same name) and awful (also like the movie). Amazingly enough, google currently finds no results for the term Xanadaculous.

#1 position, coming right up.

This afternoon I decided to take a trip down memory lane. For me, that means cleaning my desk.

Tucked into the nooks and crannies I found all kinds of little reminders of past projects and people we’ve worked with. I also found that the little mouse we found in our office last year apparently had a vacation home in the back of drawer #2 (we eventually caught the little fellow with this trick).

So, should I clean my desk more often? Is that what I’ve learned in 10 years. No. It isn’t.

What prompted this post is a 3.5″ diskette I found at the very very back that contained the very top industry knowledge on the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)…from 1997.

Back then there was a group called Planet Ocean Communications that produced a guide to “winning the search engine wars”. I found an august 1997 copy (their 2nd I believe) sitting there on the disk in the back of my desk drawer. It was full of recommendations and methods/tricks that would help you climb to the top of the search engines. And, this stuff really worked. I still remember the day we reached #2 for web design on InfoSeek. INFOSEEK people!

Now, while a lot of their recommendations from back then would be real bad ideas today, their top recommendation is still one of the best SEO recommendations out there. It is:

Have a unique descriptive title tag on every page!
It is amazing how many sites still don’t do this. For ten years just about anyone who’s even dipped a toe into search optimization realizes that the title of your page is very important. If every page of your site says the same thing in the title (you’ll see the title at the top of your browser window)… then change it! Right away.

So that was their top recommendation 10 years ago–and guess what the top recommendation is amongst SEO experts today? What single thing to they most agree on? Yes! Have a title containing your keywords.

The secret is out. Update your title tags. Now, I have to get back to cleaning my desk before I catch a case of hantavirus.

A month ago I asked Yahoo! for three wishes that would make my life working with them so much easier.

One month later, a wish has been granted. I have to give them props for granting me my wish to opt-out of certain partners.

Guess what Blurit.com? Gravy train is over!

Yahoo must be getting serious, someone from their agency services team actually pro-actively called us the other day. I don’t think that has happened in a while. Said they are going to improve their service. I hope they do. I’d like to see Yahoo! start to actually compete with AdWords.

Yesterday HitWise came out with their monthly rankings of search volume by engine. According to them, Google now has 64% of the U.S. search market. The top 4 looked like this:

Google: 64.0%
Yahoo: 22.9%
MSN: 8.0%
Ask: 3.5%

That leaves just 1.6% for everyone else.

It just so happens that yesterday I came across an email I’d sent to a client with the top 20 search engines in 2001:

Search Engines
Yahoo! 30.9%
Google 26.2%
MSN 14.9%
AOL.com Search 8.7%
GoTo.com/Overture 3.2%
AltaVista 3.0%
Netscape Search 2.1%
Dogpile 1.9%
CNET Search.com 1.9%
MSN – Canada 1.2%
DirectHit 1.0%
LookSmart 1.0%
Lycos 1.0%
Excite 0.7%
Oingo 0.6%
HotBot 0.6%
Metacrawler 0.4%
Ask Jeeves 0.3%
Mamma 0.2%
All The Web 0.2%

Interesting to see how many have either disappeared or faded into obscurity in that time. A much more diverse field, with those engines outside the top 4 accounting for a full 19.3% of the market.