Dear {FIRST_NAME|Valued Customer}
Happy Holidays from the NetSearch Direct team! During the holidays we reflect on the successes and challenges of the past year, as well as the trends bought on by search engine marketing. While we reflect, we also look forward to the New Year and new possibilities that we can use to better the strategies we’ve developed for our clients. As you review the last newsletter from the NetSearch team for the year 2008, we hope you will take the time to reflect on the positives that the year has bought you as well, and that you’ll join us as we continue growing next year. Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Show Me the Money! : Make Content Ads Work for You.

Content ads are ads which appear on the high-quality partner sites of search engines such as a blog or news article. Like standard search network ads, content ads have customizable bids, in-depth statistics and data, and can be split tested among audiences to optimize conversions. Unlike standard search network ads, content ads can be a simple text ad, a display ad featuring your product or special sale, and even a video. If that’s not enough, consider Google’s content network – they boast reach to over 76% of unique internet searchers in the United States which gives advertisers the potential to reach three out of four unique internet users. Imagine having your new product or special sale showing up on a page where a user is already researching it. How better to outperform your competition when you can create a short video displaying why your product is the best. When you’re ready to branch into some serious audience targeting consider how content ads can help you.

Link Building: Friends in High Places

Among the best SEO practices lies a smart link building strategy painstakingly put into place by an experienced search engine optimizer. Too dramatic? Not even. With link building, the quality score assigned to your site by the search engine truly does depend on who links back to your site. Non-relevant or brand new, non-established sites boasting a link to your site do much more harm to you than good in terms of search engine placement ranking and quality score. How is this possible, because search engines will evaluate the links to your site and score your site accordingly. Like your mom always said, who you associate with says a lot about you. Is your site hanging out with the wrong crowd?

National Statistics
Below is the Share of online searches performed in July and August of this year. Also, we have included some stats from Cyber Monday.

October 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings
Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in October with 63.1 percent of the searches conducted, up 0.2 percentage points from September, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.5 percent), Ask Network (4.2 percent), and AOL LLC (3.7 percent).

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 12.6 billion searches at the core search engines, a 7-percent gain versus September. Google Sites handled 8 billion core searches (up 7 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion (up 9 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion (up 8 percent).

Cyber Monday 2008 snapshot

• U.S visits to Online-only Web sites (100 total) were up 5% on on Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday visits to top retailers
Percentages based on U.S. visits to the top 500 Retail Web sites.

1. Amazon.com - 10.77%

2. Walmart.com - 8.55%

3. Target.com - 4.56%

4. BestBuy.com - 3.81%

5. Sears.com - 2.74%

Amazon.com’s traffic increased 21% on Cyber Monday 2008 vs. 2007. Walmart.com’s traffic increased 6%.

Local Businesses: Big Fish to Fry

For the local business owner, search engine marketing can seem like swimming in the ocean amongst huge fish, and even a few sharks. It seems like the marketplace is completely dominated by the big boys, you know, all the national retailers who rake in big digit profits each year while elbowing out their local competition. With the right tools, however, that’s not the case. Local business owners can tap into the power of branding, or creating an association between your company and a particular service or product that you sell. It’s all a part of an effective search engine marketing strategy combining paid search and search engine optimization tactics. With a few cost efficient, quick fixes your local business will be navigating the Internet with ease.