Professionalism

There are different definitions of a marketing professional, but for this purpose we are talking about search engine optimization professionals. There are many who call themselves professionals, but who will not go after competitive keywords and phrases. They are ones who will tell you it is better to be happy with less traffic, and thus, less sales. They do not practice search engine optimization, because they do not know how, or are not willing to do that much work. The true SEO will make sure that you get absolute most that you possibly can for your money spent.

There are some well published so called professional SEO's out there that are excellent at promoting themselves. They can make you think their way is God's way with an almost religious zeal and grand speeches about what is 'ethical'. One SEO in particular has so riled people that there is even a web site devoted to showing people that they are not what they purport to be, using only facts from their own site and email, and an open challenge to them to dispute anything said there. To date that challenge has not been accepted according to site and it's also well published author. Is this who you want doing your marketing?

In summary, watch out for self hype, do not think you have to pay someone $7,500.00 or more to get less than best rankings, and do some research on marketer you choose to use. Google searches are often an excellent way of seeing real story behind marketers.

For this keyphrase, I found results between Google and Yahoo to be quite similar. The only differences were sites by actual realtors and sites that were simply property listings. Both types of results are useful, with Google having an edge in realtors. Google had some lower quality sites, but information was just as good even though they did seem less professional. On other hand, Yahoo did have one site that was nothing more than a links page from another realtor's site. Big boo boo.

This one goes to Google.

Mosquito Nets

It seems to me that someone searching for "mosquito nets" wants either A) to buy them, or B) to learn about them, so I was expecting to find either stores or information about mosquito nets. Yahoo showed me 6 stores and 2 informational pages. The other results were a search result page (not a good result) and an inner page from a previous result (also not a good result).

Google gave me 7 stores and 3 charitable organizations (one of which was a store as well). The other 2 charitable organizations were a news article outlining what they had done regarding mosquito nets and information about mosquito nets.

So even though I didn't necessarily want latest news about what a charity did regarding mosquito nets, I think getting same site twice from Yahoo (not to mention search result page) is bigger no-no. Google wins this round.

Liposuction

I expected to find information about liposuction, liposuction organizations and either doctors or centers where you can have liposuction done. What I got was a lot of "how to find a doctor" sites, with a lot of good information.

Yahoo results included 3 sites doubled. This is a problem that killed AltaVista in late 90's. Hopefully they will have it fixed soon. Other than 3 doubled sites, results included 4 informational sites, 2 sites for finding doctors and one poorly written article about history of liposuction.

Google gave me 4 good informational sites, 2 good "find a doctor" sites, one recent article about liposuction for people in industry, one site with very poor information one written by a single doctor and one site that was nothing more than a directory.

Google gets this round as well. Overall, it looks like Yahoo needs to fix its doubling of sites and Google needs to clean out some spam (poor sites).

And The Winner Is...

You! Having two good search engines to choose from makes searching that much better for everyone. It also makes getting listings better. It also makes marketing better. It also makes traffic to your site steadier. The only way this could have been worse is if Yahoo's results sucked, and they don't. They seem just as good, if not better, than Google's.

So rejoice, and enjoy a more dynamic world of online searching!