Yahoo have lost 15%, MSN have lost 21% and Ask has also lost 21% over last year.

Searchers are also now using longer search queries when searching for what they want on the web. What does this mean? This means that the average searcher now knows (better) how to use a search engine to find the results that he/she is searching for.

Longer search queries are becoming more popular as year over year increases (and decreases) show just that.

• 1 word search queries have dropped by 3%
• 2 word search queries have dropped by 5%
• 3 word search queries have remained stable
• 4 word search queries have increased by 2%
• 5 word search queries have increased by 6%
• 6 word search queries have increased by 8%
• 7 word search queries have increased by 12%
• 8 word search queries have increased by 22%

This means that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) management have become a lot more difficult as search queries become longer and therefore more varied.

Paid advertising using keyword targeting will become more difficult as accounts become larger due to increased keyword numbers. As keyword phrases become more targeted, so too must paid advertising campaigns such as Google AdWords, in order to maximise quality score, reduce Cost Per Click (CPC), and thereby increase Return On Investment (ROI).

Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns discusses the easy part of selling PPC, the hard part of selling SEO and finally, selling your SEO product.

Although this article is not so much for clients reading about whether SEO is a better investment over PPC or vice versa, it does offer some interesting information for the client on why PPC is easy to sell, and why SEO is more difficult in comparison.

Sam Niccolls discusses the ways to increase your conversions and thus your Return On Investment (ROI) by optimizing the pages on which your visitors, and thus potential clients land.

Perhaps in days past your most important page was your home page, however that is no longer the case as search engines bring traffic to those pages which are most relevant to your visitors.

Read more about these valuable 5 tips to improve your landing pages and keep in mind that these are not only for SEO, they can increase the performance and value of your website:

1. Reassuring Policies: Highlighting security features, guarantees, or refund policies can earn trust in your new visitors.
2. Testimonials: Knowing that other customers have enjoyed a pleasant experience with your company instills trust in new visitors.
3. No Credit Card Forms: Lure your visitors in before slapping them in the face with a credit card form.
4. Email Collection: Make email sign-ups easy so that you can keep in touch with visitors who are most likely to convert to customers.
5. Look At Bounce Rate By URL: Look at changes to your site which will have the most impact and therefore require the least amount of effort on your behalf.

It shows that tracking visitors to your website might be unreliable through several Twitter programs such as Tweetie. Some of these programs open links sent on Twitter through their own browsers, where Javascript is usually not enabled.

Since analytic software such as the very popular Google Analytics uses Javascript to track visitors to your website, visitors from programs such as Tweetie may give Google Analytics as well as other analytics programs the slip. At best these visitors will show up as direct visitors rather than being referred from a specific source and therefore it will be difficult to measure statistics such as Return On Investment (ROI) and conversion tracking.

This is something that needs to be kept in mind when analyzing data, and may explain discrpancies between various analytical software used to monitor the same domain.