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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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."

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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?

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

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.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source