Well, Google is at it again. In a much talked about move towards what the engine sees as the future, Google has unleashed its personalized search capabilities on the public. From a user perspective, this effort will aid the searcher by displaying the results that are most relevant based on previous search history. By staying logged into your Google account (gmail, adsense, Google analytics, etc) and using the search engine, Google is able to maintain a record of your search history. This record will contain previous web page searches, image searches, news headlines, and Froogle results Google will also be able to provide recommendations for other search results that you may find useful based on your history. Users will have the ability to remove items from their search history or gauge interesting trends regarding their search habits. Furthermore, the personalized search feature will allow users to create bookmarks that they will be able to access from any computer. So, how will this effect SEO? Should those of us working in search engine marketing start looking for new careers?

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Keep your brand consistent. It seems like a simple philosophy. Your company has a brand (whether you realize it or not), your clients most definitely have a brand (which you may be creating for them as I type this), and all of our competitors have brands. Everyone has a brand; we get it. Using that brand appropriately causes all kinds of confusion. For this posting, I’ll concentrate on one area of your brand; your logo.

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In the past, paid search marketing was an environment in which advertisers placed bids based on the positioning that they wanted to achieve. Following the model that is typically credited to GoTo (which later became Overture, and most recently became Yahoo! Search Marketing) an ad’s position was based solely on what the advertiser was bidding. Actual costs per click that advertisers paid were $0.01 above what the advertiser in the position below was bidding.

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Gregg Stewart, VP of Interactive at TMPDM was recently quoted in Advertising Age:

“Local search is going to get a heck of a lot better… We’re just connecting buyers and sellers though telephones and locality information. If you look at the print Yellow Pages, there’s a robust amount of information. As the web builds out that information, you’ll have more purchase information that is more easily categorized by search engine indexes, which makes for a better search experience.”

Grab a copy of Advertising Age to read the whole article, or head over to adage.com and read online (registration and subscription required).

Before the Internet, consumer opinions regarding personal experiences with businesses and/or specific products or services were passed from person to person or discussed in small groups via informal conversations or what is more commonly known as “Word of Mouth” marketing. However, the Internet has transformed this intimacy into more of a broadcast communication method, allowing these types of opinions and recommendations to be communicated out to the masses in a matter of seconds.

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I was having lunch with a colleague yesterday. We spoke about our respective families, changes at a previous employer where we both worked, and A/B Testing. A/B testing is the practice of (relating to website page performance) offering up varying samples against a control to evaluate user behavior. By altering language, action position, action size you can measure performance of a specific result as long as you have a significant user sample size. Let me tell you, we are a couple of “wild and crazy guys…”

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