In an excerpt published on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog, Laura Lippay said that any search engine optimisation strategy must start by zeroing in on what their prospective customers want and what needs are not being met.

This provides the foundation for building up a campaign because it gives marketers parameters for making website content and tools as relevant as possible to their target clientele.

It also means that their keyword research is likely to be more effective because it is based on what potential buyers are actually looking for, rather than their existing web content.

Aaron Wall recently told Search Engine Land that features such as Google Suggest can provide useful insights into what a target audience wants because it employs phrases that users have actually searched for.

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Source:Defining audience 'crucial in search engine marketing'

The analysis by UK Online Measurement (UKOM) showed that UK internet users were on the web for 884 million hours during the month.

Social networks and blogs, increasingly seen as an important element in search engine optimisation strategies, accounted for the lion’s share of online activity, with Britons spending 23 per cent of their internet time on these sites, up from nine per cent in 2007.

UKOM said that during April, a total of 176 million hours were taken up by social networks and blogs, up 340 per cent on the 40 million hours spent on the portals three years earlier.

The biggest online casualty of the rise of social networking has been instant messaging, it added.

In April 2007, this was the most heavily used sector, accounting for 14 per cent of time spent on the internet. Last month, it accounted for just five per cent.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 18.3 million UK households had online access in 2009.

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Source:Internet marketing services to benefit as time spent online soars

Josh McCoy wrote on Search Engine Watch that web presence can be built up using on-site search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques with localised content, images and video clips.

Meanwhile, online brand promotion can be boosted by including products on customer review sites or setting up group and fan pages on social networks like Facebook, he added.

To maximise conversions, businesses need content that sets them apart from competitors. While they may offer the same types of product as others, firms need to think about what makes them different – for example, a 100 per cent satisfaction guarantee – and highlight this in their optimised pages.

Another major boost to conversions can be achieved with locally-targeted pay per click marketing, which builds on previous "search collateral", promotes brands and uses online channels to attract nearby customers.

According to Outsell, overall spending on online marketing services such as SEO is set to hit $119.6 billion (£78.4 billion) in 2010.

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Source:The keys to local search engine marketing success

Eric Enge of Search Engine Watch said that travel is a "hellishly competitive" area for search engine marketing.

The top ten Google results for ‘travel’ are all large websites, although one smaller agency sneaks in because of Query Deserves Diversity (QDD), the idea that Serps should not contain basically the same type of pages.

However, Mr Enge noted that being picked up by QDD is "like winning the lottery" and in order to regularly compete on a term like ‘travel’, firms would have to invest in optimisation on a "massive scale".

Nevertheless, smaller firms can still boost their online profile by gearing their sites towards more niche queries, such as ‘Orlando travel agent’.

"Deciding on an SEO strategy starts with understanding the business you’re in and what it will take to succeed in that business space from an SEO perspective," he said.

According to comScore, US internet users carried out 14.5 billion web searches in February.

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Source:Competition 'should shape search engine optimisation'

Eric Enge of Search Engine Watch said that travel is a "hellishly competitive" area for search engine marketing.

The top ten Google results for ‘travel’ are all large websites, although one smaller agency sneaks in because of Query Deserves Diversity (QDD), the idea that Serps should not contain basically the same type of pages.

However, Mr Enge noted that being picked up by QDD is "like winning the lottery" and in order to regularly compete on a term like ‘travel’, firms would have to invest in optimisation on a "massive scale".

Nevertheless, smaller firms can still boost their online profile by gearing their sites towards more niche queries, such as ‘Orlando travel agent’.

"Deciding on an SEO strategy starts with understanding the business you’re in and what it will take to succeed in that business space from an SEO perspective," he said.

According to comScore, US internet users carried out 14.5 billion web searches in February.

News brought to you by ClickThrough – a best practice Internet Marketing Agency.

Source:Competition 'should shape search engine optimisation'

Laura Lippay wrote on the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog that natural linking is an important element of search engine optimisation, as it can boost the profile of a site by demonstrating that visitors value its content.

Users of Site Explorer can access a drop-down menu showing the inlinks from all pages to an exact URL of their choosing, along with the links to the URL listed below it.

They can filter results to a specific address or view links to an entire site.

Other features provide more detail on a URL, like page titles, key terms and Delicious bookmarks and tags.

While Site Explorer users can only see the detail crawled data for sites they own, they can nevertheless view backlink figures for any sites in Yahoo!’s index.

This allows them to view the number of pages indexed by competitors and their inlinks, as well as giving them insights into the type of content on offer.

According to comScore, Yahoo! accounted for 16.9 per cent of the US search market in March, handling 2.6 billion queries.

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Source:Yahoo! boosts online marketing services with link exploration

This is according to Brian Klais of Search Engine Land, who said that such "crowdsourcing" techniques can do for search engine marketing what the flux capacitor did for the DeLorean in Back to the Future – provide a dynamo for propelling it into a different era.

It is simply a question of adjusting the definition of social content and what it can do for a website.

User reviewers have already established themselves as a useful boost to search optimisation, but many brands overlook the potential benefits of adding a "top search query" list showing actual searches conducted by visitors, with links to the associated landing page.

Elsewhere, marketers could add the keywords that visitors used to find their site through organic search listings to their most important page elements to match their site to the "voice of the customer" while also increasing the relevance of their content.

Last week, Josh Dreller of Search Engine Land said marketers increasingly need to use modifiers to increase the range of keywords available to them, while also identifying niche products consumers are looking for.

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Source:Harnessing social content 'key to future of search engine optimisation'