I was recently reminded about test conclusions, posted last May by those wonderful people at Marketing Experiments, on the subject of Website headlines.

Their conclusions pretty much sum up what most copywriters will tell you about your Website--

1. Your Landing Page absolutely must have a headline.
2. The more specific your headline, the better your results.
3. Properly optimizing your headline will produce the best results.

The report is a quick read, so you've got no excuse for not reading it. Especially when you read how their findings showed that optimizing the headline on a Web page could produce an increase in the Website's conversion  rate in excess of 73%.

I'm frequently amazed at how many Website's don't even bother to have a headline on the page, much less one that is written to attract attention and keep the visitor on the site. 

Let's face it, when you're seeking prospects on the Web, don't you want to do everyting you possibly can to not only attract them to your site, but turn them into customers? Of course you do.

So, read the report, and then do one of two things--

• work on creating a compelling, optimized headline for your site, or
• give us a call here at Zunch, and put us to work on creating a prospect-grabbing headline for you.

And if you think you've got a particularly challenging headline to create, just tell them you want me to work on it for you. I love a good challenge.  

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), has released it's annual industry survey, The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006, whose findings conclude that spending paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization (SEO) and other forms of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) hit a record $9.6 Billion in 2006.

SEO remains the most popular form of SEM, although paid placement still gets the lion's share of online marketing budgets, with total spending of $8 billion.

Expect SEO spending to grow as a percentage of marketing budgets, as a growing number of advertisers continue to see the benefits of organic SEO as an important element, maybe the most important element, of their marketing.

Just a few days ago, February 7, 2007 to be exact, Yahoo! launched Pipes, a service designed to allow users to combine, or as more tech-savvy types might put it, "mashup", data from various Web sites.

What is Pipes?

Here's how it describes itself on it's Home Page: "Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."

A further explanation on the same page says:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

What's that mean?

Well, for example, using Pipes, you can combine news feeds from both Google and Yahoo News on one site.

But maybe the best way to get an idea of what this mashup produces, is to visit their site.

And it seems Pipes is part of a broader initiative at Yahoo! that's been dubbed "Brickhouse." You can learn more about Brickhouse in this BusinessWeek article.

What it boils down to is Yahoo! is hoping Brickhouse will give it a way to develop new products, rather than finding itself buying up other companies who've already beaten it to the punch on developing next generation Web features, tools and platforms. Remember, Yahoo! and others had developed photo sharing sites, but Yahoo! found itself spending millions to buy Flickr because Flickr was seen a s both an innovation leader and, perhaps more importantly, cool.

There's a desperation among large companies to appear "cool," on the Internet, and thereby attract the millions of 18-to-34 year olds who advertisers and businesses alike crave as customers.

Of course, as we've seen time and again, even if you can somehow manufacture or buy cool, it eventually fades away. In fact, not to long ago, Yahoo! was cool, only to see itself supplanted by Google (we should note, even Google's cool cache is way down these days).

Whether Yahoo!'s Brickhouse proves to be a good idea remains to be seen. The brief history of the Internet is waist deep in similar ideas and operations that failed.

It's no big secret that Google and other search engines see local search as one of the next big steps in search engine results. Toward this end, Google has been working to include local businesses at the top of specific geographic search queries.

How's this work?

Well, let's say you decide that Japanese sounds good for dinner tonight. And let's say you are in Dallas, which, as you probably know, Zunch is. So you do a search in Google for "Japanese Restaurants Dallas." This is the image that appears above (yes, ABOVE) the search results:

  The cool thing for the restaurants appearing here?

The map and the listings appear at the top left of the search engine results page (SERP), prime real estate and generally the first area of the screen that a viewers eyes land on.

The cooler thing for the restaurants appearing here?

It didn't cost them a dime to appear there!

Really.

And it won't cost you anything to list your business.

You can read Google's own blog on the subject for more info.

The blog doesn't explain how to get listed, so here's what you do:

1. Visit https://www.google.com/local/add/login and set up a Google Maps account. Not only can you add address, telephone and other information, but you can include a link to your Website.
2. You'll next have to verify your address. To prevent anyone from posting fraudulent listings, Google will verify via snail mail (yes, snail mail), by sending you a postcard.
3. You will receive a PIN on the postcard. You'll need to log back into Google Local/Maps and enter the PIN.
4. The next time Google updates the listings, you'll be included. Be aware that it may take 3-4 weeks before you appear in the Map listings.

This is an unbelievably simple way to get listed at the top of the search engines for local listings. If many of your prospects are local, doing this will give you a leg up on the competiton, unless, of course, they've figured out how to do this also.

So get the jump on the competition and do it, now.

Outsell, Inc. has released its second annual report on U.S. ad spending and, based on their survey of 1,010 advertisers and media companies, spending on advertising on search engines is expected to grow 39 percent.

The press release, issued by Outsell,  indicates that overall online spending will grow 20 percent.

Interestingly, 49% of those surveyed indicated they plan to reduce their Pay Per Click (PPC) spending because of click fraud concerns.

The report demonstrates the growing confidence advertisers are gaining in marketing on the Internet, as online spendings share of ad budgets rises while more traditional media will see continuing declines in ad spending.

Also noteworthy in the report is the fact that advertisers rate online advertising as a very effective means of branding, wihch runs counter to the conventional wisdom that online is effective for generate leads, but poor for branding.

Expect to see an increased focus on search engine optimization (SEO), as these same advertisers continue to see the value of SEO in both attracting prospects and bolstering their branding efforts.

If you'd like to know more about how you can leverage SEO to both develop your brand and attract prospects, why not give us a shout today? One of our Zunch account executives will be happy to discuss what SEO can do for you. 

And if PPC is part of your online marketing efforts, don't forget that we also specialize in click fraud detection, and can help you both identify and recover ad dollars lost to fraud.

Some of you may recall receiving a promotion we ran earlier in 2006 in which we predicted a rise in click fraud for the latter part of 2006.

Seems we were right.

In an article appearing on Bizreport.com, Kristina Knight writes that the latest research indicates that click fraud reached 14.2% in the fourth quarter of 2006. In the promo we sent out, we had predicted that click fraud would rise during the busy Christmas buying season, hand-in-hand with increased Christmas purchases, and searches, online.

Not that the 14.2% figure isn't undisputed. As the article notes, Google engineers believe there are fundamental flaws in reports of increases in click fraud.

Regardless of the actual percentage of clicks that are fraudulent, click fraud at any level should be unacceptable, but it continues to be an issue that Google doesn't want to address head-on.

Unfortunately, there are no real defenses against click fraud. the only real protection is to use click fraud detection software to first-- detect it, second-- document it, and third-- file a claim with whichever search engine the fraud took place on.

And if you are looking for an excellent click fraud detection and reporting system, might I recommend Zunch's own, Click Fraud Detective? It's a proven system that can be used to detect, document and report click fraud. In addition to its reliability, it's also very affordable, especially when you consider it will help you recover ad dollars that have otherwise, gone to waste. 

Following on the heals of the earlier release of  search share numbers by Compete  and comScore, comes word, courtesy of SearchEngineWatch.com, that Hitwise and Nielsen/NetRatings rankings are out.

Nielsen’s numbers were similar to those reported by comScore, with Google remaining on top of the search pile with 50.8% of all searches in December 2006. Yahoo was second with 23.6% followed by Windows Live Search (MSN) with 8.4%.

Hitwise gives Google an even larger share, while also providing early figures for January 2006, pinning Google’s share at 63.1% and Yahoo at 21.6% for December 2006, with Google having the same figure for January, while Yahoo slipped to 21.4%.

No matter how you add it up, Google remains the dominant search engine.  And if Hitwise's numbers are correct, Google is garnering nearly two-thirds of all searches. Even with numbers hovering around the fifty percent margin, as reported by comScore and Nielsen, Google's numbers are envious.

Charles E. Wilson, former CEO of General Motors and the Secretary of Defense from 1953-1957, once was famously misquoted as saying, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." At that time GM had over 50% of the auto market.

Is the day coming when we'll say, "What's good for Google, is good for the country?"

Okay, not the best of analogies, but Google's continued dominance of the search market remains incredibly impressive, and you have to wonder how much of the economy and commerce is tied to seraches completed on Google.