Personalize Your Link Building

The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection. Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

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Brands need a ‘search relations’ strategy in times of trouble

“Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked and never mended well”.

Benjamin Franklin’s words are particularly appropriate in these turbulent times, when it’s more important than ever for companies to consider every opportunity to protect and manage their hard won reputation and brand value.

But as Paul Mead writes, it is interesting to see that one of the largest media channels - online - is more often than not completely neglected from a communications point of view in times of strife.

Yet search engines and Google, in particular, have such an enormous audience (over 28m people per month in the UK) and are such a part of our everyday lives that it’s astonishing how many brands can get this channel so badly wrong in times of crisis.

Over the last few weeks, for instance, Bradford and Bingley has rarely been out of the news as speculation reached fever pitch that the UK mortgage lender would become the next Northern Rock.

During this period of intensive media and market interest, the volume of searches for ‘Bradford & Bingley’ on Google has increased dramatically as clearly shown on the Google trends graph below.

And here’s where the current marketing and communications set up of most major brands in the UK breaks down.

Search is considered by most CEOs and their cohorts as a direct response channel and is, therefore, looked after by the media agency.

Media agencies will always deny this but, with very few exceptions, paid search will be poorly understood and natural search even less so in these organisations.

This set up will also mean there will be little or no liaison or integration with the PR agency in order to develop a wider strategy for the search channel.

An interesting question would be to consider what percentage of this huge increase in brand-related searches might be consumers looking to open a new account with Bradford & Bingley?

It’s impossible to say for sure but I will take a guess at very close tozero.

And what did concerned shareholders or worried customers of the bank see when they reacted to the news flow and Googled ‘Bradford & Bingley’ to find out what was going on?

Well they did see Bradford & Bingley at the top of the paid search and natural search listings, which is one thing at least.

However, more worrying was the site’s prominent message to all the stakeholders:

"Internet Saver 6.51% p.a. gross/AER. Open today with £1."

Mmmm. Thanks but I think I’ll leave that one.

I might be able to open an account today, but before nationalisation most consumers would have been more concerned about whether the bank would be around for much longer than the 24 hours required to open an account.

A look at the Google search results page shows no attempt to understand what people are looking for and regain some brand equity by delivering the right message at the right time - or to address the concerns posed by an Adwords ad run by The Telegraph to target worried consumers.

I am picking on Bradford & Bingley here, but it was the same with Northern Rock.

And it’s the same today with Alitalia, with MFI, with JD Sports and probably with most of the businesses at the centre of credit crunch-related speculation today.

Online is the modern channel of choice for information and search engines are most people’s starting point in that journey.

The search engine results page should therefore be considered as the frontline in modern communications and brands need to think more seriously about their ‘search relations’ programme.

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The Hidden Secret to Search Engine Optimization is in the Design

While mystery surrounds what’s search engines such as Google use to rank websites there are fundamentals. If you have ever played a sport you have learned the fundamentals and hopefully used them to play your sport of choice. Search Engine Optimization has such fundamentals, not clearly stated in guidelines for webmasters that search engines include.

I want to make it clear that search engine optimization is not "magic", nor is it tricking search engines, it's the practice of following the fundamentals within a logical and "ethical" manner. Before considering the leap into search engine optimization you have to understand there is going to be allot of reading involved. Your duty as an SEO is to stay on top of the industry and looking for those hidden gems that can increase traffic and popularity in search engines.

This article is meant for the absolute beginner. If you have been optimizing websites for awhile then this is not for you, but you are more than welcome to read on if interested.

The art of SEO is more complex but there are the main aspects. I will go over each one to give you an entry level idea of what you have in store for you.

Designing a search engine friendly website is the most crucial aspect of SEO. First you have to consider the fact search engines are not people. They are computer programs designed to mimic human behavior. There are two core technologies search engines have a hard time with and why you should use them as little as possible.

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Hosting a Contest for Link Building and Buzz

Most of link building / linkbaiting techniques are used so often that they lost their effectiveness long ago. Unfortunately, hosting a contest is one such technique: that has become a common fashion to create a contest for the sake of creating a contest without much thinking behind it.

However the tactic may be still effective when done right. Your contest may be rather successful:

• if you are popular enough to get enough attention for your contest boost;
• if you are creative enough to earn the attention you deserve;
• if you have carefully planned your contest.

MGH Word of Mouth blog lists very good points to consider when planning a good contest:

• Take time to consider the users’ motivation. Why would anyone enter the contest? Would you join it? User’s motivation may vary:
  • An established / well-known brand can be a good motivation in itself. People might want to enter your contest just because they care about you and your company.
  • Valuable prizes are the strongest incentive for people to join any contest. Making sure the prizes are relevant to the society group your contest is targeting is also very important. I would probably never care to take part if the prize is “How to quit smoking” guide, no matter how popular it might be among people who smoke and want to quit.
  • Innovative idea / creative approach is the great motivation too. If you offer something completely new and exciting, people will be eager to join.

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Best practice for SEO

According to software solutions provider CoreSense, three areas are critical to the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) programme: site structure, on-page and off-page. In its white paper “A Guide to Search Engine Marketing for Retailers”, it outlines best practice for each area. Among its suggestions:

Site structure optimisation

• Use a crawlable navigation. Avoid JavaScript and form-based structures if possible, as search engine spiders can’t crawl them. If you can’t avoid using them, include hyperlink navigation on each page.

• Remove unnecessary code. CoreSense suggests using a well-regarded design and development tools such as Dreamweaver, along with style sheets.

• Include a breadcrumb trail as a navigation option.

• Opt for page URLs that consist of keywords (www.johns-store.com/plaid_mens_shirt) rather than session IDs, punctuation and other variables (www.johns-store.com/productdetail.asp?productcatalogue=470).

• Use a 301 redirect for pages that have moved or have new file names.

• Make sure that all database-generated pages have unique URLs.

• Include a user-navigated site map and an XML site page; the latter is for submission to Google, MSN and Yahoo!

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The Importance of Search Engine Optimisation to your website

It’s easy to think that search engine optimisation is an optional extra that is not necessary to getting your business online.

When you get your website live online the publishing process is not enough to get your site generating visitors and sales for your business. To enable your business to be noticed online, Search Engine Optimisation is needed to make sure that your site appears well in the rankings of Google and the other search engines for terms that your potential visitors are searching for. Remember, your website is part of your marketing department and getting visitors to find your site and its message is core to getting you more sales, just like getting your offline marketing noticed.

As Search Engine Optimisation is not a commodity for your business, choosing the right SEO company is essential to getting good results.

A good SEO company will offer a fully transparent service, discussing their work with you and getting you to agree changes to the site. As part of their transparent service your SEO company will explain the work they are doing for you, in a language you understand and answer any of your questions, helping you to understand the process of SEO.

When choosing an SEO company make sure that you avoid people who promise to submit your site to thousands of Search Engines, and who guarantee you number one rankings. Number one rankings can easily be achieved on your site but these might not be for keywords that will generate traffic for your site. A good SEO company will optimise your site around keywords that will drive traffic to your site, and some of these might be competitive, so they will never guarantee you a number one position. Google, MSN and Yahoo are the three search engines that drive the most search traffic and so, although the smaller search engines are important and should not be overlooked, focussing solely on getting rankings in every possible engine won’t help your website.

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Google Trends Allows Internet Marketers to Play "Keywords Stock Market"

ig-ticket marketing firms are using Internet Marketing hired-guns to leverage Google's sophisticated web-data tools and gain insight into consumer habits, Internet marketing potentials, search engine positioning opportunities, and super-converting high-volume web-traffic.

New York, NY (PRWEB) September 23, 2008 -- Marketing firms are hiring super-techies to leverage the well-funded, but very technical, Google information database and its data tools to gather information on consumer trends and potential free marketing windfalls via free Google traffic.

Marketing organizations are always trying to find the next edge in their industry. This is true of any major brand and this practice is definitely an art to expert marketing professionals that are guns-for-hire.

What's a typical example? Let's use the website Scentsy. Scentsy® candles is a company that was recently 'targeted' for 'SEO dominance' by one of the people we interviewed. Scentsy® is a US-based, emerging manufacturer of scented candle products but it might as well be a widget factory and another-day-at-the-home-office for the Internet marketers.

"Scentsy has tremendous upside potential while extremely low competition, both from a market-share perspective as well as organic SEO," said Garry Egan, an Internet Marketer who works from his satellite uplink and laptop computer. Egan is currently backpacking Europe and phoned in this interview. "I can work from anywhere," he said. "We were impressed."

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Top 10 ways to beat the credit crunch using internet marketing

As the media continue to drive the self-fulfilling prophecy of a recession, it’s time to start considering how best to use your marketing budgets in 2009 and beyond. Here are Programmes Manager, Jack Wallington's Top 10 methods of beating the credit crunch by maximising your online marketing strategies.

Monday, 22 September 2008

1. Search your way to the top

We’re all searching for the right answer and search marketing is definitely top of the answer barrel. Any marketer worth their salt knows that search is a safe bet for return on investment. You pay for clicks so you know exactly what you get, at least from the search engine, and combined with your own website’s analytics it is 100% measurable. This means that if you have a strong web presence with a great customer journey you will know how many sales or enquiries you can actually get. Visit our Search Help Centre for more.

2. Display power!

Search is all well and good, but it’s a passive tool that often relies on the consumer having an idea, thought or a need that makes them search. You need a tool that gets your brand, product or service noticed above the competition in the first place. Display is that tool and is to online marketing what TV, billboards and press is to offline. People may visit a search engine, but it’s the gateway to the billions of web pages that they spend the majority of their time on. Display lets you reach people on those pages with new video and interactive formats, powerful targeting and mass reach through networks. This makes it one of the most engaging, effective and powerful tools on the planet. With pricing for the number of impressions based on the quality of content, there are some real bargains to be had alongside the higher cost of premium content. Read our Display Advertising guide for more.

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Google Page Rank Explained

If you've been on the web long you've probably heard the words "page rank" or "PR" at least in passing. Perhaps you had better things to do than worry about mathematical equations, and I certainly don't blame you for that. For that same reason, I'll leave the Google page rank explained statistically process up to people like Ian Rogers on WebWorkshop.

Instead, I'd like to look at the outright benefits of having a good page rank.

*** Relevance ****

Let's say someone read one of your articles, liked it enough to visit your website, liked your website enough to sign up for your newsletter and then discovered that you had a PR0. They know enough about Google PR to know that PR10 is next to divine while PR0 is certainly not. No matter what they thought of your website, they have discovered a good reason not to believe what they thought was true which in turn knocks the relevancy of your website down a notch or two or maybe more.

Now let's say that same scenario took place but they found your website was perhaps a PR5 or higher. Perhaps even a PR8. Do you think this will affect their desire to be a part of your website? Of course it will, especially if your website is focused on any particular niche of Internet Marketing.

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Don't bet it all on Google Chrome

Think that Google's much-ballyhooed new Web browser, Chrome, is aimed at helping people surf the Web? Think again.

The browser instead takes dead aim at Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange. If Google has its way, your enterprise will use Chrome as a platform for Web-based applications from Google. You'll abandon Office, Outlook, and others, and you'll bid Microsoft good-bye.

Any surfing you do with it, from Google's point of view, is pure gravy.

Even though the world has greeted Chrome as a consumer-level browser, Google didn't conceive of it that way. In a blog post on the company's Web site, Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director, made no bones about what Google wanted to do when it designed Chrome:

"We realized that the Web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for Web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

To that end, Chrome is the first browser built from the ground up for a world in which the browser is an enterprise front end for Web-based applications and services such as Google Docs and Gmail.

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SEO Reporting: Going Beyond Rankings

Enterprise-level SEO provides consistently outstanding ROI over the life of the project. One of the best ways to substantiate this is through ongoing reporting.

In the past, many SEOs relied simply on providing visibility reports that detailed the rankings for particular keyword phrases within the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live Search. Although this type of data can still be an excellent illustrative example of the success of a project, there are many possible ways that reporting of this nature can be misleading or irrelevant from a conversion/revenue perspective.

This week, I'll discuss the elements of the standard SEO reports that we provide to clients. This isn't the only way to do it, but our reports are valuable in providing actionable insight into SEO campaigns. Please note that based on the client, we also provide modified/customized reporting formats and dashboards as directed by the project manager and, as possible, based on available resources allocated by the project's ongoing budget.

Executive Summary

This provides an overview of the campaign performance and the activities performed during the last time period (typically one month). Additionally, this section can provide a number of other metrics, based on the particular client and their analytics tool(s) (such as Omniture, CoreMetrics, etc.). Executive summaries are typically crafted by the account's senior strategist, and then edited by the project manager for style and consistency with other client communications.

Visibility Reporting

At the onset of an SEO campaign, iterative keyword research dictates the keyword phrases that are targeted for rankings. Ideally, once the keywords are chosen, a baseline or benchmark ranking report for positioning within Google, Yahoo, and MSN is established. This sample of keywords typically ranges from 200 to 2,000 (and more) phrases, and is measured against on an ongoing basis.

Our visibility report provides the baseline ranking, the prior month's ranking, and the current month's ranking. It's important to note that these rankings should be considered as a snapshot in time, as they may not actually match the ranking of the keyword when the report is actually completed and delivered.

A word for the wary: the visibility report can be made intentionally misleading by an unethical SEO providing it. One can "stack the deck" with easy-to-rank-for keywords, if the proper questions aren't asked when keyword choices are finalized. This can also happen unintentionally, if the SEO is not knowledgeable enough to know which words are important to track.

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Tactical Link Building: Finding Link Targets

Last time, we discussed how good, old-fashioned directories could, and should, remain a key feature of your link-building repertoire. Today, we'll discuss how to find other link targets to help you construct a sustainable long-term link-building strategy.

If you're just starting to create your site's link-building strategy, now is a great time to plan on spending some quality time culling your keyword research, analyzing your site's Web metrics, and growing your understanding of rival sites' search results. In your quest to discover link-building targets, it's important to remember two things: start small and aim big, and don't break what's working.

To get started finding link targets, hit your site's Web metrics. Look at search engine referrals and which keywords or keyword phrases drive the most traffic to your site. Usually, a pretty small list of high-volume keywords and phrases drive between 50 and 70 percent of your search referral traffic.

If you rank well for your branded terms, so-called head terms, as you should, toss those phrases out of the list and focus on unbranded, or "torso," terms for which your site content ranks well. Just make sure you aren't reviewing internal site search data, because visitors use different search tactics and phrases once they find and engage with your site.

Know which keywords and phrases your site converts well for today, but expand that list to account for seasonality if your online business ebbs and flows through distinct sales shifts. Refresh your keyword list and data for these terms. Then try to focus only on two or three keyword themes at a time when seeking link targets. Trying to get a variety of text links in place for 50 different terms and phrases may quickly become unmanageable.

Remember, this process is first about link building for targeted terms that you already rank for. You can then expand that list based on content opportunities.

Spend some time analyzing your site log files; you'll start to see traffic patterns develop and evolve over time. If log files make you see double, spend time analyzing your site through any or all of your site's Webmaster tools. Either way, seek out opportunities to grow more referrals from those sites that already send traffic your way and add new link targets to the mix.

It takes a link to send a referral from one site to another, and each link contributes to your site's visibility for specific keywords and phrases. Visit those sites that link to your site, then hit the SERPs (define) to review the links of top-ranking competitive sites for your targeted terms. Once you have a list of targeted terms your site ranks well for, add those terms and phrases that you want to rank well for to the list. Initially target your content that already ranks on page two or three of the SERPs. A handful of well-targeted inbound links could help move this content to page one.

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Wading through the Web

So many search results, so little time. This is a common frustration for many who search for information on the World Wide Web, and especially for those whose searches are specific to an industry or a topic.

Take, for example, a search for the word ‘title’ on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. The majority of the search results include sites for boxing equipment and associations, HTML document structure, vehicle registration and title information, online book titles, a few businesses with ‘Title’ in their names, and the Wikipedia definition for ‘title’ as the prefix or suffix of a person’s name.

What’s missing is a context for the search, such as real estate property title. Adding these three words resulted in—after some additional scrolling — a link to home infomax.com, an online repository of real property records in the United States.

Vertical search engines — also known as specialty search engines — narrow the scope of a search to information specific to a particular business, industry, or topic. A growing trend that helps Web users make the most of their time online, vertical search engines have already narrowed the search to a specific industry or topic — the context — where as traditional ‘horizontal’ search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or even Ask.com produce results from a multitude of Web pages that may or may not be related to the context of the search.

Vertical search engines limit the results to a specific set of content directly related to the topic or industry of query, and most include results aggregated from multiple sites on the Internet.

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Google Reigns as Most Powerful 10-Year-Old

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.

It sounded preposterous 10 years ago, but look now: Google draws upon a gargantuan computer network, nearly 20,000 employees and a $150 billion market value to redefine media, marketing and technology.

Perhaps Google's biggest test in the next decade will be finding a way to pursue its seemingly boundless ambitions without triggering a backlash that derails the company.

"You can't do some of the things that they are trying to do without eventually facing some challenges from the government and your rivals," said Danny Sullivan, who has followed Google since its inception and is now editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Google's expanding control over the flow of Internet traffic and advertising already is raising monopoly concerns.

The intensifying regulatory and political scrutiny on Google's expansion could present more roadblocks in the future. Even now, there's a chance U.S. antitrust regulators will challenge Google's plans to sell ads for Yahoo Inc., a fading Internet star whose recent struggles have been magnified by Google's success.

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Why Chrome Won't Crash Windows

Some are calling Google's (GOOG) new browser Chrome an "Internet Explorer killer." Others venture further and call it a "Windows killer." Whether Google's newly launched browser has Microsoft (MSFT) quaking is unclear, but there's no doubt that Google is serious about "organizing the world's information"—and is prepared to shake up the status quo in the process.

It should come as little surprise that Google is entering the Web browser market. The search heavyweight already has a substantial stake in our online activities. Search, check! E-mail, check! Office documents, check! The list of Web applications offered by Google is both long and varied. With its goal of providing all of our online needs, it makes perfect sense that Google would step up and provide a Web browser built to accommodate its applications. With Chrome, Google is betting that more of us will move more of our computing from desktops to online, relying on the vast data centers known as "the cloud." But can Google's Web browser singlehandedly entice us to dump a favorite Web browser and our computer's operating system?

Let's start with the operating system. What's your favorite flavor? Windows, OS X, Linux? Whichever your allegiance, for at least the next several years, you'll need an operating system to boot your computer and store the applications that are still too large and unwieldy to run from inside the cloud. Take iTunes, Photoshop, or PowerPoint. While online equivalents exist, they just can't match the processing power and functionality that come from the applications you run from your computer's operating system.

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10 common marketing mistakes to avoid

Avoiding marketing mistakes isn’t easy in today’s business marketplace; which is at times a terrifying jungle where your competitors are hungry predators and your customers are the food source that’s a challenge to catch. To survive you can’t afford to make many marketing mistakes. So here are some common marketing mistakes you should look out for.

1. Poor positioning
Firstly your food source or your customer—how well do you really know them? Most businesses today believe that their target market is anyone and everyone, which is fine if you have the marketing budget of Coca-Cola. Most soft drink companies define their core demographic (a little jargon meaning your ‘most probable customers’) as 14-to-18 year olds, which is why their advertising campaigns target teenagers with a theme of fun and first love. So mistake number one is not defining your core customer. Research your customers and see who is more likely to buy from you, then define them by sex, age and even status, eg. working mother, business owner etc.

2. A bland brand
Your brand is the backbone of your business and your logo is the pivot point that all your marketing will hang from. Mistake number two is having a poor, unmemorable brand.
You’ve heard the saying ‘a picture says a thousand words’ so what is your logo saying to your customers about your business? A logo should be colourful yet simple so it is easily recognised and able to be replicated across different mediums. It should say what you do and it should create the right first impression for your business. For example, if your business is a young, funky hair salon then the logo should be bright, modern and incorporate creative shapes with sharp angles instead of subtle pastel colours with an illustration of a head or pair of scissors.

3. A website instead of an online business
The latest statistics show a total of 1,407,724,920 people across the globe using the internet with just over 19 million (or 57 percent of the population) of those in Australia/Oceania (www.internetworldstats.com). Now realistically not all of these people are going to be searching for your business or looking at your website, but it does demonstrate the depth and potential of the internet. Mistake number three is not having an effective online presence to promote your business and attract customers. Instead of a website that is little more than an online brochure, you should build an online business portal – just like opening another shop or office but with the street address replaced by a website address (URL). Companies like DesignShop can help you create a self-managed online business with all the functionality you need, like e-newsletters, product information, e-catalogue or e-commerce, forums and so on.

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How Video Fits Into a PR Strategy

By definition, the practice of public relations involves maintaining communication with an entity's publics. This typically includes primary audiences like investors, consumers, and employees. As companies explore additional communication forums, public relation teams have added the likes of bloggers, video aggregator visitors, and social networking users to the list of people to talk to. Video content, in particular, affords PR professionals the ability to make a lasting impression on their publics. Online video is also easily syndicated and repackaged so messages will have a broad reach and present a united front.

Segmenting and Viral Content

Incorporating public relations into an online video strategy will help clients formulate how to target messages to their various audiences. Taking into account that investors care about different information than consumers, and employees require an entirely separate communications strategy, PR efforts can help guide overall marketing plans to ensure the right messages reach the right audiences.

Video -- more than most formats -- has the potential to evolve into a viral campaign. Knowing that users can pass along your video should hold marketers to a higher standard. Campaigns need to be well thought out and ultimately reflect favorably back on your brand. Extra steps can include linking out to appropriate pages to drive traffic and increase brand awareness. It can also translate into taking care during the production phase to ensure that messaging is appropriate so it resonates with different audience segments.

Monitoring

Tracking is important in any campaign. In public relations, it can be the difference between a setback and a crisis. By monitoring how users react to a video while it's being circulated, public relations professionals can try to head off negative reactions. Nothing seems to travel faster than people spreading bad publicity. Look beyond the analytics dashboard to keep an on the success or failure of a video campaign, and that includes visiting the sites where videos are posted to get a better sense of how they are being received. PR teams will then be in a better place to deal with any backlash.

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Keywords hold the secret to hitting online targets

ONE side of the internet equation is the capacity to reach unprecedented numbers of potential customers, whether across the street or across the world. The other side is the huge number of potential competitors, with everyone searching for those who want to buy.

"The answer to winning attention in such a crowded marketplace lies in integration of advertising media, with a focus on the keywords which will lead customers to your website," says Charles Ryder of White Chalk Road, a Perth-based firm specialising in net-based marketing and search engine technology.

"With search engines becoming the main driver of the internet, the focus is moving towards an approach blending organic and paid searches under specialist management."

Paid search is mainly pay-per-click advertising -- that is, the sponsored ads that appear down the right side or top of the page when a Google search is performed -- which is driven by keywords applicable to the company, usually the result of specialised research.

"But you still have to get people interested in doing a search in the first place," Ryder says.

"The best method is to tie online marketing to advertising in other media, such as print and television. Traditional ads should cite the website address, but they should also feature the search keywords. Potential customers are far more likely to remember a few words about a place or product than a website address.

"If you are about to start running ads in a newspaper, or if you know there is going to be a mention of your company on a television program, then it might be a good time to increase your spend on ad-words.

"Research in the US shows that exposure through more than one channel relates very strongly to increased sales."

Google is by far the most popular search engine in Australia, attracting about 90 per cent of searches.

Ryder notes that in the US, Google offers a service for the online management of radio advertising, underlining the way in which one media can leverage another.

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How Google Suggest will affect search

Earlier this week we reported on Google Suggest, the latest search feature from the leading search engine. How will it affect what people search for and what sites they find?

Google Suggest provides a user with suggestions while they type into the search box. This sort of functionality has been available on other search engines for some time and has been available to some extent on Google as well. From this week however, it will be switched on as the default on all Google searches and will affect both the way people search and what keywords they use. This will have big implications for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns.

Suggesting keywords will probably result in fewer search terms being used. This will likely adversely affect longer terms (long tail keywords) and shorter, 1-2 word terms, focusing instead on a smaller number of "suggested" terms. This will mean the number of competitive terms, where large amounts of traffic can be sourced, will drop.

This decrease in the number of high volume keywords may affect both brand terms and non-brand terms. As previously mentioned, long tail terms (4 or more words) will likely produce less traffic than before - and for some sites, this could make piggybacking on other company's brand terms a more attractive proposition.

Naturally, this focus on certain keywords will have an effect on Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. As PPC campaign managers start to bid on suggested keywords, volumes will increase and push the cost of these keywords up. However, Google didn't get where it is today by trying to keep prices down. By having customers competing on a smaller number of keywords, the prices for those keywords will inevitably increase. This will most likely affect advertisers with smaller budgets or profit margins.

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Search Engine Tool Faceoff

Yahoo! has unveiled the new and improved version of Yahoo! Site Explorer. Site Explorer is an invaluable tool, "providing site owners with better visibility into how we -Yahoo!- index their websites and what data we use in our search service". As Priyank Garg from Yahoo! Search explains in the release post:

Search Engine Tool Faceoff

"We launched a new look and feel for Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new) that provides a more dynamic interface to accommodate future feature roll-outs. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, we're also increasing the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10".

Google has a similar service for webmasters, known as Google Webmaster Tools. We've encouraged all our readers to embrace the Google Webmaster tools for as long as they've been available, as they provide great insights for people concerned with their Google organic listing.

Which set of webmaster tools provides the greatest value to site owners? In reality, both services are valuable additions to your SEO efforts. Here's a quick run-down on the information each set of webmaster tools offers:

With Yahoo! Site Explorer you can:

• Find out which of your site's web pages are indexed by Yahoo!.
• Discover and track what websites link to your site.
• Know what subdomains from your site are known to Yahoo!.
• Monitor and manage the feeds you have submitted for that site.
• See when the data was last refreshed by our crawlers.
• Resubmit the feed to let us know that it has been updated.

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Google Analytics

If you're wary of Google knowing everything about your business and your web site, then Google Analytics is not for you. But for most, it's a useful ally in a challenging business climate.

Formerly known as Urchin from Google, Google Analytics is now a leading, and free, tool to help businesses and individuals use performance data to improve their online marketing campaigns and web sites. As well as delivering critical information such as unique visitors, page views, visitor location and time spent on site, Google Analytics allows marketers to determine what keywords attract the most visitors to their site and which email campaigns create more customers.

Google Analytics gives online marketers and publishers access to powerful web analytics to help them better understand what their customers or readers want. Although its features are pretty standard (you can pretty much get the same results using OneStat or SiteTracker), Google Analytics is astraightforward to use and is totally free. The only downside is that — as with all Google software — Google Analytics doesn't have the prettiest of interfaces.

Google Analytics provides a useful (and free) toolset for analysing traffic to your web site, but it's interface is typically workmanlike.

To get the software working on your web site you simply need to place unique tracking code immediately before the tag of each page you're planning to track. Life is a lot simpler if your site uses a main template, as you can simply insert the code once to cover your whole site. If your site is database-driven, you'll have to insert the tracking code on your index.php page or equivalent (default.php, index.cfm, for example).

You should also note that a web page containing frames will generate multiple page views — one for the framing page (containing either a FRAMESET or IFRAME tag within its HTML code) and one for each page shown in a frame. As a result, page views may be somewhat inflated. Even if a page on your site only appears as a frame for another page, you should still tag it with the entire tracking code. If a visitor reaches the page through a search engine or a direct link from another site and the page does not contain the tracking code, the referral, keyword and/or campaign information from the source will be lost.

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Link Building Basics

Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages. Learn also how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.

Moderator:
· Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
· Michael Gray, President, Atlas Web Service
· Jeff Quipp, President & CEO, Search Engine People
· PJ Fusco, Natural Search Director, Netconcepts
· Jody Farmer, VP, Strategic Marketing, CreditCards.com


Kevin Ryan: I see some new faces here and also some very old faces. This is a session that many years ago a guy names Mike Gray decided that links were going to be the next generation. Many of the people on this panel are experts on the topic. So I would like to thank Mike Gray for this and let him take it from there.

Mike: Thank you. What we used to do back in the Alta Vista days was keyword stuffing. And it got to the point that when you have thousands of keywords on a page, how do you know which is going to be the most authoritative? So back in 1998 a computer scientist John Kleinberg did a search for Alta Vista and was stunned that it didn't come up in the results! He realized after doing research that it's not what is in your page but rather what it is that other people say about you. And then the guys over at Google took that, and developed Page Rank, and that's when link building became very important.

And with that, let me introduce PJ Fusco.

PJ: I'm with Net Concepts with offices in Madison Wisconsin and New Zealand. I used to be the in-house SEO for Jupiter Media. And now I have the gig for writing for ClickZ. Today we are going to talk about the strategies of link building.

Quick tour of link popularity – true popularity comes from acts of kindness, which can correlate to "you attract more flies with honey".

What is link building? It's an activity – an ongoing activity (not set and forget) of increasing high-quality inbound links to a document. Not web page, but a document. And obviously it's all about relevancy.

There are 3 things you should have in mind when starting a campaign:

Set some goals – increased search-referred traffic always assumes that more is better than less – and with links, it's more about quality than quantity.
Improve your search engine visibility for targeted terms – assumes your stuff should rank better than other people's stuff.
Improve relevancy signals to the search engines – presumes your stuff is relevant for specific search queries.
Getting started – this looks like a monumental task – so we will walk through some free webmaster tools and understand that PR is not the only thing that matters. We will also look at free and not-free link analysis tools. The caveat of course is that tools are tools, you have to be smarter than the tools, know where the data comes from. Webmaster toolsets have come a long way in the past few years and months. Yahoo Site Explorer is still one of the best free ways for scoping out backlinks to your site and to competitors sites. Google, with its webmaster tool, has recently expanded on what they are showing. MSN, relatively new – we used to be able to count on them until advanced queries were blocked. Now they have a filter option, and the results are limited, but we can expect to see some expansion on this soon.

Other basic free tools - and there are many:

- Robots.txt
- SEO for Firefox – goes way beyond back link analysis, had a lot of other features
- Marketleap popularity checker – good for determining which competitor links you want to raid

Net Concepts is a player because we developed a plugin for Wordpress so we are getting links just from that.

If you are a more visual person use the more visual tools. Quintura and Kartoo are good visual search engines, and of course Google Visual Search.

Hubfinder is a good free link analysis tool.

There are a series of subscription-based tools: Advanced Link Manager is great for anchor text insight and backlink diversity data. iBusiness Promoter is another one.

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Increase Your Bottom Line With More Web Traffic

If you have dealt with these frustrations, you've come to the right place. Pay Per Click is one method of driving traffic which is practically guaranteed. For a brief introduction to Pay Per Click, simply set up an account with Google, write your ad, select your search terms, bid on your click price, and go. Then your ad will appear on the right-hand side of the search engine results page whenever someone searches for the terms you've selected. When somebody clicks on your ad and goes through to your site, then you will be charged for that click based on your bid price. One of the best features of Pay Per Click is that you are all but guaranteed to get traffic in to your website. Because it does cost money, though, it is important to create a website that will draw your visitor to come back again and again.

You can also get your website ranked in the search engines in order to get visitors to your site. The process of achieving this is commonly called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is often tough for new site owners because it can be rather complicated, and competitive. If you think you are up for the challenge of optimizing your site, amp; upholstery cleaning inc quick online search for SEO, and you will find piles of information to help you get started. If you succeed in getting top search engine ranking, you will very quickly begin receiving completely free targeted traffic from peoples' web searches.

Another method of getting traffic is reciprocal links. This can be a little controversial these days, because of changes in the way search engines view reciprocal links. It used to be that Google and friends counted any links in to your website as backlinks,which enhance your site's ranking. They've now caught on to the fact that many website owners are trading links with each other to try and improve their search engine ranking. Reciprocal links may not help your site's ranking any more, but they still can be a valuable way to drive targeted traffic to your site. Imagine this: you're cleaning upholstery at the net looking for information on how to fix your vehicle.

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Blogs a growing target for site hackers

Barry Welford considers himself lucky. The weekend he decided one of his blogs, Staygolinks.com, needed a cleanup was the same time a hacker chose to splatter the site with a host of unwanted pages.

"I was doing something I don't normally do: changing the theme of the blog. But it turned out that it was just after the hacker had got in," says Welford.

As he went through the software that drives his Wordpress-based blog, he found a block of code he didn't recognise. Its job was to subvert the engine that drives Wordpress and generate page after page of links to sites that purport to sell prescription drugs.

"It really was clever programming," he says. "He or she was creating a web-page factory within my website that probably, within about 24 hours, created a few thousand pages. Every time a search engine came in, it would build a new link."

Bad medicine

As an internet marketing consultant, Welford is one of a growing number who finds that blogging makes a site more visible to the search engines. But that in turn attracts criminals who want to hijack the traffic that comes with having a high page rank with Google and other search sites.

"It was amazing. I had the site fixed within 48 hours. But, even a week or two after that, if you did a search for some of these things, my website came up as number one, two, three."

Hackers do not just redirect surfers to Viagra vendors. They will inject code into blog pages that then try to dump password sniffers and other malware on to visitors' computers. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, says: "We are seeing more and more websites becoming infected. We count 16,000 new malicious web pages every day. It's one every five seconds. And 90% of them are on legitimate sites that have been hacked."

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How else can Google ascertain relevancy?

Google was a pioneer in the search world for ranking websites based on incoming links as well as content. But which other measures could the search giant use to evaluate relevance?

Apart from the top level 'links' and 'content', which we know affect placement, online marketers use experience and testing to work out the other things Google looks at when ascertaining the relevancy of web pages for search terms.

What other top level techniques could Google potentially use (if it isn't already) to determine web page relevancy?

1. Video Content – Listening for brand mentions in video.

With Google owning YouTube, it is in a prime position to build technology which can analyse words used within user generated videos.

The technology could recognise the use of brand and product names, and rank the websites of regularly mentioned brands higher.

On another level, the technology could be intelligent enough to recognise brand logos in videos. One might argue it's a step too far, and gives an unfair advantage to established brands, but then again, aren't established brands the most likely to be talked about anyway?

2. Gmail – Rating websites by their mentions in email.

If any of these techniques happen already it's got to be this one.

We all trust our family, friends, colleagues and associates (the people who email us), so if we assume they would only send us relevant and resourceful links, wouldn't this be an invaluable measure of a web page's quality?

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Is Google a Media Company?

SAN FRANCISCO — Type “buttermilk pancakes” into Google, and among the top three or four search results you will find a link to a detailed recipe complete with a photo of a scrumptious stack from a site called Knol, which is owned by Google.

Google envisions Knol as a place where experts can share their knowledge on a variety of topics. It hopes to create a sort of online encyclopedia built from the contributions of scores of individuals. But while Wikipedia is collectively edited and ad-free, Knol contributors sign their articles and retain editing control over the content. They can choose to place ads, sold by Google, on their pages.

While Knol is only three weeks old and still relatively obscure, it has already rekindled fears among some media companies that Google is increasingly becoming a competitor. They foresee Google’s becoming a powerful rival that not only owns a growing number of content properties, including YouTube, the top online video site, and Blogger, a leading blogging service, but also holds the keys to directing users around the Web.

“If in fact a Google property is taking money away from Google’s partners, that is a real problem,” said Wenda Harris Millard, the co-chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Money, of course, is very much at issue. The lower a site ranks in search results, the less traffic it receives from search engines. With a smaller audience, the site earns less money from advertising.

Although Martha Stewart’s buttermilk pancake recipe appears lower than the Knol recipe in Google’s rankings, Ms. Millard does not believe that Google unfairly favors pages from Knol. But she said that Google’s dual role as search engine and content site raises an issue of perception. “The question in people’s minds is how unbiased can Google be as it grows and grows and grows,” Ms. Millard said.

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Google attacked over Knol's spam potential

Google's new Knol system has come under fire for making itself open to spammers seeking to push their products up the search engine's rankings - in effect with the blessing of the company, which has previously sought to exclude them from its listings.

Knol, which was announced in December but only opened for wider use last month, is already being targeted by people who have realised that its characteristics are a godsend to spammers.

Knol is meant to be a competitor of sorts to Wikipedia, the "encyclopaedia anyone can edit". The difference is that rather than having a single page with multiple (sometimes competing) authors for each topic, Knol in effect encourages people to compete to write articles on the same topics to see which one gets the most authority, and so comes highest in search results. Anyone can write a Knol page - which does not need to be checked.

"There are a large number of issues with the [Knol] service ranging from accountability, authenticity to credibility and general SEO concerns. What they all stem from is that Google has in essence created a toolset that's ripe for abuse, and given those with no scruples financial incentive to abuse it," noted the Mashable blog, which added that its design is "so optimistic as to the potential depravity of human behavior that it borders on ignorance.

"On the Internet, you must imagine all the negative possible uses for your product when you design it for mass consumption."

Writers of a Knol can earn money from clickthroughs of Google Adsense ads on their pages. That has attracted those seeking to encourage readers and clickthrough.

Jonathan Bailey, editor of the Plagiarism Today blog, notes that a YouTube video already explains to other spammers how to use Knol to push their results up Google's rankings. Google has already come under fire for the sheer amount of spam hosted on its free Blogspot blogs - and now that may be repeated on Knol.

Google has taken some precautions: outgoing links from Knol pages have "nofollow" links, meaning they will not count towards its ranking; and people can leave comments and reviews on pages.

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With automated tagging, Web links can surprise

It wasn't what anyone expected to see while perusing a news article.

But there, in the final paragraph of an online story about the call girl involved in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, Yahoo's automated system was inviting readers to browse through photos of underage girls.

Yahoo Shortcuts, which more frequently offers to help readers search for news and Web sites on topics like "California" or "President Bush," had in this case highlighted the words "underage girls." Readers who passed their mouse over the phrase in The Associated Press story were shown a pop-up window filled with images from Flickr, Yahoo's photo-sharing Web site.

Some of the pictures showed nothing untoward, while several captions claimed that attached photos showed underage drinking. Clicking on the pop-up window yielded more-disturbing results: hundreds of images, including some of a girl or woman in pigtails, knee socks and lingerie. One photo showed a faceless female body, naked.

The misstep, which happened in early July, was noted on a technology blog. Editors at the AP contacted Yahoo Inc., where a spokeswoman said the company quickly removed the link. Several of the more provocative photos were apparently taken off of Flickr.

The phrase "underage girls," now added to a list of thousands of previously blocked terms, will never again generate a Yahoo Shortcut, the company said. But the incident highlights how difficult it can be for publishers to keep a tight rein on their sites in this age of user-generated content.

Internet publishers are increasingly relying on automated systems to tag phrases of interest and, in some cases, to provide links to other sites. With legions of YouTube users, Flickr photographers and anonymous bloggers posting floods of their own, largely unsupervised material, it's impossible for publishers using automation to exercise total control.

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New search engine Cuil plans to break Google monopoly

The hunt for information on the internet has been synonymous with Google. The search engine has maintained a clear lead over Yahoo and Microsoft, the number two and three players, respectively, in web search. While earlier attempts by Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc to join forces against Google failed, a team of former Google engineers and others who worked at eBay, IBM and AltaVista have come up with an alternative called Cuil (pronounced cool).

Cuil plans to not only break the monopoly of Google, but also change the surfing culture among users. ET decided to experience the new web search engine cuil.com.

Cuil, which precisely means knowledge in Irish, is a start-up by led by husband-wife team Tom Costello (CEO of Cuil) and Anna Patterson, president, along with former colleagues Russell Power, vice-president of engineering, and Louis Monier, vice-president of products. Cuil has got venture funding of about $30 million from Tugboat Ventures, Greylock Partners and Madrone Capital Partners.

At Cuil, search index spans over 120 billion web pages, which is much larger than any existing search engine including Google (almost thrice its index span). The results are based on content and relevance. Popularity and audience traffic take a backseat.

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Google continues to dominate European search spend

Google continues to dominate the European market, with over 85% of the search marketing budgets going to Google in the UK, and over 95% in the rest of Europe, according to the ‘UK Search Engine Performance Report: Q2 2008’ from Efficient Frontier.

As well as holding its position in the UK in pure search, Google has further strengthened its position through a number of improvements to its content network, which has led to a modest increase in market share from 3.9% to 4.3%.

Also making modest gains in market share, Microsoft now captures 4% of search budgets in the UK. Both Google’s and Microsoft Live Search gains come at the expense of Yahoo.

The ROI available to advertisers on Microsoft Live Search is still higher than the other two engines.

This is due to the high quality of users of Microsoft Live Search and a less competitive marketplace. Correspondingly, Google and Yahoo both offer similar ROI, but Google outperforms Yahoo! due to the high traffic volume - 8.5 times the volume on Yahoo.

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Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results. Skip to next paragraph

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

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The (very) basic building blocks of a strong online presence

It’s Christmas in July, and what better way to celebrate the somewhat bizarre festive season than with these little gems, which will ensure that your website stands out from the crowd in the congested search engine wilderness. Without too much of an introduction then, let’s jump right in.

Keyword research
Probably the most important aspect of building a strong web presence is ensuring that your website is targeting the correct key phrases. Here, there are three things to consider. Firstly, that the key phrase is a popular and searched for term ie: it wouldn’t be sensible to focus your accommodation website around the term “luxury Wynberg villa” if there is no demand for it.

Secondly, that the key phrases are related to what your website is offering ie: “cape town accommodation” may be a highly searched for term, but it wouldn’t be applicable to your Garden Route tour operator website.

And lastly, to weigh it up against the competition ie: “Cape Town guest house” may be a great term, but there are eight million competing pages on Google.

There are some great keyword research tools out there, including Keyword Discovery, WordTracker as well as the Google Adword Tool. These programmes will give you an indication of historical search trends, as well as helping you come up with alternative phrases you may not have thought of, so go through these carefully and come up with as comprehensive a list as you can. The best way to do this is probably to whip out the old Excel spreadsheet and list all the phrases in consideration, with columns for the various programmes you are making use of. Once you have a long list of terms, go through your selection and carefully select your main keywords, secondary keywords etc.

Implementing these keywords
Once you have these keywords, it then comes down to implementing them within your site. Remember, each one of your website pages is a potential entry point for a user. In a perfect world, someone searching for “red widgets” on Google would arrive at the “red widget” page on your website, rather than the “blue widget” page, so these all need to be optimised accordingly.

Generally, pages should be optimised for one to two main key phrases; anything more than that and you should probably look at creating an additional page focusing on those extra terms. In terms of implementing the keywords, the title tag is probably the most important area to look at. As an example, let’s say you had a page focused on the phrases “online florist” and “cape town flower seller”, you could then have a title tag of “Online Florist Cape Town Flower Seller”. The meta description and meta keyword tags have little to no effect on proceedings. The meta description tag will be what is displayed below your link on Google however, so just ensure that it’s concise, clear and easy to understand.

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Giving Your Site a Social Life

When shopping for a one-stop-shop solution in building a social platform, small businesses should consider various elements, including original content, aggregate content and user interaction, notes Yann Motte, cofounder and CEO of Webjam.

The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, and convenience was the king.

Now both those previous core competencies have become expected norms, with social interaction, immediate consumer feedback, and a live and evolving social network and Web presence the new differentiators for cutting-edge online small business best practices.

Advantages of an active social presence include increased user interaction, higher market penetration, optimized advertising revenue, and multiplied audience visibility, to name a few opportunities. Unfortunately, for most small businesses, the options for developing online visibility are diverse and intimidating: How do we design a Web site? Do we need a blog? What is RSS (really simple syndication)? How do we keep users informed with RSS? What if we want to add widgets? How do we protect the privacy of our users?

Facebook and MySpace are the first two names that jump out, given their mass-market appeal and reputation, but they are poorly designed for business needs. There are alternative, less known companies who are developing social publishing platforms and are more specifically addressing the needs of organization and businesses looking for simple, low-maintenance and integrated solutions.

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The host with the most

Over tea and toast on my last visit to London, Edward Roussel, head of digital for the Telegraph, said he had pondered the question posed by the title of the book I'm writing - What Would Google Do? - and answered with a striking vision for newspapers: what if they handed over much of their work to Google? Roussel reasoned that Google already is the best distributor online; it's hard to imagine a newspaper creating better technology than Google. And the service is proving to be brilliant at ad sales - so why not outsource those departments to Google so a paper can concentrate on its real job - journalism?

Roussel was actually asking and answering what business a newspaper is really in. The next day at the Guardian, in one of its Future of Journalism seminars, I suggested that it, too, must make that critical decision. AOL thought it was in the content business, but it was actually in the community business before anyone else - AOL should have been Facebook. Yahoo, too, thought it was about content -instead, it was in the ad business long before Google. Yahoo should have been Google.

Newspapers are in the wrong businesses. They should no longer be in manufacturing and distribution, which have become cost-heavy yokes. And they should no longer try to be in the technology business - because they're bad at it. When I said this on my blog, Bob Wyman, a technology entrepreneur now at Google, commented that technology infrastructure "is a cost of doing business. It is not a thing of value." So I asked him whether Google should fulfil Roussel's vision as a paper's new pressroom.

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Google learns to crawl Flash?

According to Google, they have been developing “a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.”

They explain further: “We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way and that content is then available to be indexed. We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilising Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”

However, no matter what they say, I’ve yet to see Flash sites or SWF content of any kind being indexed in my many searches I do through Google on a daily basis. So, for now, I’m not getting excited about this announcement until I see it working for myself, de facto. I would be interested if anyone reading this has had SWF content indexed in any of their Google searches …

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20+ Must-Have FireFox Search Plugins for SEOs

The ability to access almost any search engine right from your browser is awesome:

• you have all engines in one place;
• you can switch from engine to engine with one mouse click;
• you save time and space: easy-to-use drop down menu to choose the engine you need;
• you can enjoy quick and easy installation (besides, most of these search plugins work for both FireFox and Internet Explorer);
• you get plenty of search options without making your browser work slower (unlike with many of extensions).

FireFox search plugins for SEOs:

1. Google and Yahoo (if you don’t have their dedicated toolbars installed);

2. Urban dictionary - to search for your keyword slang and urban synonyms and definitions.

3. The Free Dictionary - to research your keyword related terms, definitions and synonyms.

4. Whois Look-up - to quickly find a domain registrant’s details.

5. Summize - to get instant access to Twitter live conversation search.

6. Facebook search - to find people and build connections.

7. Google unpersonalized search - to turn off personalized search in Google.

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Adsense CLICK Fraud-How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?

Many web site owners are getting their Google Adsense account terminated when they have done nothing wrong to deserve the punishment. Considering the money that they are getting from Adsense, they would certainly want to get back into it, and no wonder as the money that can be made over time is huge

It is that same consideration why the Google Adsense click fraud is thought of and why many people are getting into it.

Click fraud is the act of clicking on ads for the purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is simply the same as paying out cash for false leads. Many people website owners are aware of this fraud and are sharing the same sentiment that this is the one big problem that Adsense is facing.

How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?

Majority of web hosts are offering access logs. Once this is offered to you, it is necessary that you hand it over to Google as well. This allows them to look for any suspicious activity on your site. Problems like this are very serious and giving it to them is saying that you would want to help them in any way you can in solving the problem.

It can also help if you have a click monitoring software. If you do not have one yet, you should try and get one. There is absolutely no major factor preventing you from having one because most of this software is free.

As usual, all the information you have received should be turned over to Google. This is showing Google that you too are fighting against click frauds and that you are not a part of it.

Study your server logs and watch for any activity that seems suspicious. Report anything that you may find odd, may it big or small thing.

You may want to consider disabling ads for your own IP address and local geographic area. This will certainly prevent accidents and will not make Google mistake another user as you. You can do through a hackers file. This will avoid Google mistaking as clicking on your own ads and be kicked out because of it.

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