In a recent study, Oneupweb found that the down economy actually prolonged the 2008 holiday shopping season. So how does this apply in February? Important holidays are creeping up, including Mother's Day, graduations and birthdays. The time is now to begin optimizing with appropriate keywords. And don't forget to use current purchases to cross-sell for the future with messages like "Remember us for Mother's Day."

Oneupweb's 2008 U.S. Online Shopping Report received a lot of news media attention, with Multichannel Merchant and iMedia both covering the news. Our website redesign also made headlines in Online Media Daily. Check out these and other stories at OneUpWeb.com.

ClickForensics is reporting that click fraud rates hit 17.1 percent in 4Q08, which is the highest they've been for two years. If you suspect your website has been a victim of click fraud, have a professional with their own detection regimen, like Oneupweb, monitor your PPC ads daily—hourly if necessary. Elsewhere in the industry, Oneupweb's own Director of Client Services, Duncan White, will be a featured speaker at the 2009 Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition. Registration for the event, which will be held at the Boston Convention Center, is now open.

Members of the West Senior High School Z-Club attended the Traverse City Chamber Dinner with Oneupweb this past month. The students enjoyed listening to featured speaker David Stillman on generational issues in the workplace. One student said, "It was unique looking at what the other generations have to offer, and how my generation will be able to integrate our ideas and knowledge into the workplace".

The 2008 holiday shopping season revealed several surprising trends about consumer behavior in a down economy. Discover why Halloween was the biggest week for online holiday sales and uncover other important lessons learned that will help businesses succeed online in 2009. Download The 2008 U.S. Online Shopping Report.

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• In just the first two months of the natural search campaign, top-ten positions for targeted search terms increased 253 percent while top-thirty positions increased 212 percent.
• In December 2008, unique visitors from the natural search campaign were up 134 percent, while conversions increased 225 percent.
• From December 2007 to December 2008, unique visits from the paid search campaign increased 85 percent.
• Contact form conversions are at an all-time high.

The hottest thing to cross my desk this week has been our complete rebrand and website redesign. As the CEO, owner and founder of a marketing company, I understand how important it is to portray my unique brand to the world. And as a website designer myself, this wasn't something I took lightly. But it was something I thought had to be done. Because search has changed. Marketing has changed. And Oneupweb has changed with it.

Search is no longer about optimizing content, creating meta tags or launching a paid search campaign. It's all of that, and a lot more. Today, all of the major search engines are indexing news sites, podcasts, blogs, videos, social networking sites, user reviews and more. The truth is this: social media is here, people are using it, and marketers who don' t embrace it will quickly find themselves behind the times. You' ll notice on our new website, we don' t even have a section for social media. It' s automatically factored in with our search marketing services, a unique service offering in an industry where the two are still offered separately. In fact, many brands have hired two different companies to handle search and social separately, which is a huge mistake. To quote ol' blue eyes, you really can' t successfully have one without the other.

You' ll notice a few other changes at OneUpWeb.com as well. I hope you' ll spend some time on our new site, getting reacquainted with my staff and I, our services and our way of doing business. And you can read about our entire rebrand process in our Let's Get Dirty blog series. If you think we might be a good match, shoot me an email at info@oneupweb.com, or give me a call at 877.568.7477. And don' t forget to follow me on Twitter @LisaWehr. I look forward to talking with you.

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