Interesting enough, recently, I was reading an article (for details visit here) that supports Mr. Gladwell’s idea in the web environment. The study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as a blink of an eye, in about 50 milliseconds. This shows that we, as marketers, do not have much time to impress our visitors. So, it is very important that the site design be appealing enough to grab the attention of the visitors right away. The headlines, features and call to actions on the site should also be prominent and relevant enough to help visitors find what they are looking for and know what steps to take next in a blink.

As a response to Blink, Michael LeGault, wrote a book entitled “Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t be Made in a Blink of an Eye.” He also has a point here! If we want to put his ideas in work in the web environment, we can conclude that in case of products and services that need higher level of commitment from visitors, it is important to provide them with enough information to help them decide the product/service fits their needs.

So, from the website usability point of view, it is important that visitors understand the web page’s objectives and are given clear trails to follow. Trails that lead visitors to their needs and the business to its objectives.

Utilizing bid management tools, SEMs advertising on Overture, in contrast with Google AdWords, are able to set their ads’ positions in the SERPs. A feature that can potentially be very desirable and straight forward. However, as the competitors also see your bid amount, they could simply change their bid to move their ads to their favorite position or even worse use the bid jamming tactic.

Bid jamming occurs when a competitor raises his/her bid amount to just a penny or so below your bid for a given phrase. This is possible if you have set your maximum bid as such that it has a huge gap with the next closest bidder underneath you. Your competitors, using this tactic, will force you to pay that max bid amount per click, whereas they only pay one penny more than the bidder underneath them.

Here, the competitors’ objectives are to increase your cost and make you burn your budget soon pushing you out of the auction. However, if they are not careful enough, you can reduce your bid one penny bellow theirs and jam them instead.

So, it is very important to pay close attention to your bids to make sure you are not jammed by your competitors and burn your valuable marketing budget. That is why I personally prefer a human touch on bidding as most of the current bid management tools available in the market might easily fall in the trap of bid jamming practitioners.

Small-business Marketers now have access to a decent application to monitor and measure the success of their Internet marketing initiatives. This free web analytics (or better to say Google Analytics) tool could positively contribute to the bottom line of small businesses.

Enterprise level marketers who have highly invested in a web analytics application might now feel disappointed at how much they have spent on the solution and infrastructure in place. Though they could reassure themselves that they have made the right decision by being early adopters and having access to higher quality tool.

Web Analytics Companies probably have a poker face. Now they have to think their marketing strategies and messaging over and come up with innovative solutions to compete with Google’s marketing might. Google Analytics is definitely imposes the most danger to the very existence of low end analytics solutions.

With Google being the early to market with its analytics tool, they could lure away Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter market share. GA offers added value to AdWords marketers by helping them improve their conversion rate and ROI.

The timing of Google Analytics is also important as AdWords was facing pressure from Yahoo Content Network and GEO targeting capabilities of MSN AdCenter. Now they could convince marketers to spend their advertising budget on Google as they could get a full, end-to-end package that helps them maximize their return on investment.

Above all, Google will get access to a sea of aggregated information where they could see the trends and improve their services accordingly. However, the danger is they would know which keywords are converting and what the cost per conversion for them. This will allow them to increase the minimum bid price for those keywords!

Google Analytics definitely changes the name and rules of the game. We have to see how things unfold and how Google’s competitors, Web Analytics Association, and public react to the recent developments.

The real question here is why an increasing number of people are deleting their cookies. I personally started deleting my cookies the very first year I started using the Internet in 1999. It was mainly due to the fact that I was not sure what cookies do and what sort of information they gather about me. Then the anti-spy-ware software programs fed my cookie-deleting obsession with indirectly suggesting cookies are not privacy friendly.

After few years of working in the industry, now I have a different view of cookies. Now, I don’t have a fear of unknown and I see the value proposition of cookies and know them to carry no code or viruses. Cookies offer Internet surfers with better experience through customized and easy to use websites and relevant ads. Even though cookies may carry information on where users have gone on the web, most of it is anonymously tracked and that is why I think cookies are treated unfairly.

In my opinion, one of the reasons why people started deleting cookies was the abuse of technology by some marketers as they bombarded Internet surfers with pop ups. To get rid of the pop ups, people started downloading anti-spy-ware software programs. This intensified the competition over market share among anti-spy-ware companies. To offer more to customers they started offering tracking and removing cookies in addition to spy-wares which in turns fed to the misconception that all cookies are harmful among average Internet users.

In addition majority of people could not distinguish between first-party, third-party, tracking cookies and with lack of education, and sometimes misinformation, see all cookies as harmful and start deleting them. While they do not mind providing more personal information to get discount cards or cable companies monitoring which channels they watch, their fear of unknown makes them wary of cookies even though they collect less personal information.

Of course there is always the danger of getting exposed to “Cookie Poisoning Attack”. I see this as a risk of using a new technology to thrive in such a fast paced life we have.

In my opinion, there is a need for collaboration between all web site owners, web analytic experts, Internet marketers and spy-ware companies to educate users. This could be in the form of coming up with a good list of sites with trusty reputation as initiated by Safecount.org or as simple as offering a brief introduction to cookies and how they are used on our websites.

By tracking the tsv file, you could keep track of which pages are included in Yahoo search engine. Nevertheless, the most interesting feature, IMHO, is that if you enter a URL of yours which is not indexed, it might give you the reason why it is not cached in the index. It also provides a direct link to the URL submission to the engine.

What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to pull in news and information from across the Web. By adding a RSS feed to your RSS aggregator, you may get the latest news/articles directly on your desktop or on your My Yahoo page. With RSS feeds coming to you, you don’t have to visit each site individually.

What is RSS Reader?
You may read RSS (or Atom) files in a program called an aggregator, which collects news and articles from various sources. Bellow is a list of some of the most famous RSS aggregators:
FeedReader
NewsGator
SharpReader

How to get the RSS feed?
Click on Site Feed, grab the URL and paste it in your aggregator. Or Alternatively click on My Yahoo or My MSN buttons, log in to your My Yahoo or My MSN and click the Add Content link and insert the URL in the form and submit it.

What is Blogroll Me?
If you write a blog and would like to add a link to my site on your blog, just click the Blogroll Me link, log in to the service and add my blog to the list of your favorite sites.

The AOL and MSN merger makes sense in so many ways, however, we have to see if the long lasting relationship between Google and AOL (since 2002) and the current bid could prevent such a merger. We’ll see..

This could help AOL & MSN to compete fiercely with big guys: Google and Yahoo. This could be especially a great threat to Google as currently Google provides search results for AOL and the business AOL brings in accounts for 10-15% of Google AdWords revenue.

This deal if goes through would help MSN expand its search engine rich and generate more revenue through its MSN AdCenter when it is widely available to the North American audience.

The search engine battlefield is getting more and more interesting. We have to watch how the story unfolds.

This could help AOL & MSN to compete fiercely with big guys: Google and Yahoo. This could be especially a great threat to Google as currently Google provides search results for AOL and the business AOL brings in accounts for 10-15% of Google AdWords revenue.

This deal if goes through would help MSN expand its search engine rich and generate more revenue through its MSN AdCenter when it is widely available to the North American audience.

The search engine battlefield is getting more and more interesting. We have to watch how the story unfolds.