December 2006 - Posts
Consumer and market reasearch group NPD Group reports that sales of smartphones (Blackberries, Treos and Motorola's Q, to name a few) jumped 230 percent in October 2006, up from 216,000 units in January to nearly 715,000 units. Faster networks, lower prices, more choices and better capabilities - such as handling audio and video applications - all account for the spike in sales.
While the online mobile market is still experiencing growing pains and has not seen widespread adoption by users, there is little doubt that it's coming. That alone is a good reason to start optimizing your site or creating alternate pages for mobile visitors.
The smartphone customer presents another good reason - they have a good amount of disposable income. According to NPD, smartphone users spent an average of $6.31 per month for wireless data in the third quarter, compared to $0.89 for all types of mobile users. Those wireless data packages aren't cheap. Add in that smartphone users are tech-savvy, Web-savvy and comfortable with online transactions and shopping, and you have a pretty good reason to start optimizing for the mobile audience.
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |
Newsweek's Brian Braiker recently wrote a piece claiming 2007 as the "Year of the Widget." Riding the coattails of social media sites such as MySpace and personalized home pages popular with Google and Yahoo users, widgets are beginning to change the way users surf the Internet. Users can visit one page and have a variety of information presented to them that, in the past, would require visits to several different pages. While this seemingly diminshes the importance of page view rankings, advertisers have jumped on the opportunity to brand themselves on user home pages and websites.
But one of the key components of widgets is in making your website a destination and a resource. For instance, if you run a travel site, it would be a good idea to include a widget on your page offering weather information or traffic updates. If executed properly, a user will find your page as a one-stop shop for their travel needs. Of course, the more page visits you can glean and the longer a user is on your site, the odds are better that your site flourishes.
Yahoo and Google offer a wide variety of widgets to explore and information about widgets and their capabilities. Two others to check out are Widgipedia and Snipperoo.
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |
All of the major ranking sites - including Alexa, comScore and HitWise - hold considerable influence and weight for both website owners and advertisers. However, Web 2.0 sites use certain technologies that can make ranking them difficult, sometimes shortchanging the sites and their influence or earning potential.
ComScore has announced a new set of metrics that will take 2.0 sites into account. In particular, AJAX and similar technologies have the ability to add new information to a page without refreshing, hence not accounting for a new page view. On the other side of the coin, a site like MySpace is designed to load page after page whenever navigating the site - accounting for many page views and what some say are inflated rankings. While MySpace is built to generate page views, newer sites are built to minimize page views for a better consumer experience. With old ranking systems, this puts certain sites at a great disadvantage - even though those sites may present a much better user experience.
It's a little odd that it has taken this long for Web 2.0 sites to be viewed differently by ranking systems than their older, more established bretheren, but it's certainly good news for community-enabled sites.
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |
Now that the holiday shopping frenzy is over, you may be looking at a host of returns or requests for refunds. While this may be disappointing, it's a good opportunity to show those customers how much you value their business. If they have already purchased from your site, chances are good they will do it again - as long as the post-purchase is handled correctly. Here are a few tips:
- Handle customer returns and queries quickly and generously
- If possible, do not require the customer to pay shipping to return an item
- Offer an option so that the customer does not have to make a trip to the post office
- Offer an alternative product to the one being returned
Finally, take the opportunity to get some feedback as to why the product is being returned. This can help determine which products need improvement or need to be removed entirely. Getting as much information as you can will reduce future returns, as well as demonstrate to the customer that you are striving to provide the best products or services possible.
Taking a serious stand with those abusing its system, Digg (digg.com) has
permanently banned several URLs - some of which you've probably heard of or visit
with some regularity. While URL bans are nothing new, it does signal the
seriousness which Digg takes (or is taking) spam and abuse.
For those stating that the URLs may have been
banned unjustly, it's important to note that there are probably many reasons that we simply are not aware of or simply choose to ignore. Case in
point, Text-Link-Ads saw many of its affiliates submitting stories with their
affiliate IDs - that can't be good. The Digg algorithm is sophisticated and those
attempting to game the system will definitely be caught - high profile and low
profile bloggers alike. I don't doubt that there are
vindictive users of Digg that may bury stories just to bury stories, but you have to
give some credit to their existing system, which for the most part in my opinion
is actually pretty stable in identifying submissions which really should not be
there.
It is important to understand that social networks are fickle in the sense that it doesn't take much to be
ostracized from a group or community. Talk too much (too many posts), talk about
nothing in particular (submitting duplicate stories), talk about yourself (lame)
and you'll be labeled as spam or even worse have your story buried by users. The
result is the same - bupkus.
The lesson in all this might just be to use Digg as it was meant to be used.
Social networks, just like the communities we participate in, require
dedication, openness and honesty. It's simply not enough to submit all your own stories and not notice
or participate in the conversations of others. While I greatly respect some of
those URLs that got banned, I would encourage them to come forward and tell the
whole story - if there is a story to be told. That in itself might give users
and abusers of the system something to really think about and insights into how
to maximize their participation in digg.com.
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Technorati Tags:
digg, digg bans, digg url bans, digg url banning
This is not a sponsored post. I repeat - this is not a sponsored post. Stumbling through StumbleUpon today I came across
i6networks.com, which according to the home page is offering fully featured hosting with a whopping price tag of $0 (zero). 5000MB of disk space, 1TB of bandwidth, and free features such as PHP and MySQL, CGI and Perl, Subdomains, cPanel and both POP Email and Webmail. If you have a domain name that is more than two months old (that's the only qualifier - although one I haven't heard of before) then it may be worth a shot. And you better hurry because they are only giving away 3000 accounts! Just enter "
8000FREE" in the coupon code during registration.
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Technorati Tags:
hosting, web hosting, free hosting, i6networks
You are sure to encounter Adsense during your daily Web travels. And, I'm betting that more than once you've seen images placed suspiciously close to Adsense
(it probably caught your attention quicker though, right?). Well, you will not
be seeing that practice much longer. Google clarified on its
Inside Adsense Blog yesterday that:
"We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers."
Immensely interesting to say the least. Website Magazine has reported on this in the past and indicated that the click through rate on Adsense ads that had images placed next to them was significantly higher that those with standard
implementations (no images). Google has taken this stance to protect its advertisers from the type of misleading click traffic which for many is resulting in poor conversions.
In the end, advertisers are supporting the publishers. And if traffic from such an image/ad placement is not converting, publishers will have to get more creative. A generous amount of applause is due to Google for its recognition of the problem and its relatively swift action.
Sample Adsense Image Abuse
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Technorati Tags:
google, adsense, image adsense, inside adsense, adsense abuse
PixsyPower, launched Tuesday by Pixsy Corp. (a company that provides a Web-based visual search services) is a new media search tool and widget suite that allows bloggers, social networking sites, and other Web publishers to capitalize on media searches (mainly video, photos). Publishers can sign up for free and deploy the search engines and widgets, which allow visitors to search the Web's media content and obtain results without leaving the publishers' sites.
Sounds great in theory, but there is quite a bit of competition in the space already.
BlinkX (offering only video search) is Pixsy's main competition but should Google and Yahoo (both offering image and video search) allow the syndication of their content, Pixsy and others will have even more of an uphill battle - especially if they don't end up sharing the revenue.
“Pixsy’s business model of using media search tools to create search traffic on websites is a unique and effective way of generating new targeted advertising inventory across the web,” said Jack Klues, Chairman, Publicis Groupe Media. “We believe that Pixsy is well positioned to significantly exploit this growing market.”
NOTE: I tried to sign up for Pixsy but encountered a pretty sizable server application error.
UPDATE: The problem seemed to stem from a "badly-configured" database script. I registered and it seems to work fine.
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Technorati Tags:
pixsy, pixsy power, video, video syndication
PayPerPost today announced the second phase of its full disclosure model. Participating Consumer Content Creators are required to disclose their sponsored status site wide with a prominent disclosure policy or on a per post basis. PayPerPost expects this will bring greater transparency to the growing consumer generated advertising industry - the company currently provides bloggers with tools to develop appropriate disclosure standards (DisclosurePolicy.org). Consistent with WOM industry guidelines however, PayPerPost will prohibit marketers who use the marketplace from requesting no disclosure. To cover the increased blogger and marketplace costs of the company’s new policy, PayPerPost is raising the minimum price per post by one dollar to five dollars per post.
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Technorati Tags:
payperpost, pay per post, disclosure, disclosure policy
Online retail sales from Nov. 1 through Friday were up 25% over 2005, says Internet market research firm ComScore Networks. ComScore says last Wednesday was likely the biggest online shopping day of the year and, with nearly $670 million in sales, topped last year's No. 1 day by over $100 million. In fact, sales on 12 days this year have surpassed $600 million. Last year's single biggest day for Web sales was Dec. 11, when consumers spent $556 million online.
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Technorati Tags:
comscore, internet market research, ecommerce
Digg will release several new features today which for many will signal a departure from their "news-only" focused approach which has seen the WEb phenomenon through its first two years. Users can now Digg their favorite podcasts (feeds and individual episodes) and access “Top 10 Stories,” an area of the site where users can see the hottest stories at any given time, including those that have fallen off the home page but are still seeing lots of votes and discussion.
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Technorati Tags:
digg, digg features, podcasts
This week's comScore Media Metrix report stated that estimates of page views for social networking site MySpace at 38.7 million for the month of November topped those for Yahoo by 600,000. What the report didn't mention (or should have mentioned) was that Yahoo has recently moved to an AJAX-driven page model. The effect of this is a significant reduction in complete page refreshes per user. The problem with Ajax (as many are finding out) is that it does not scale particuarly well - at least for marketing and advertising departments who base media buys solely on the number of page views, something which can be misleading using AJAX. More of an appropriate measure in the future will be impressions.
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Technorati Tags:
yahoo, myspace, ajax, page views, impressions
Photoshop users running Intel-based Macs can receive an early Holiday present today as Adobe is releasing a beta of Photoshop CS3. The free beta can be downloaded at
Adobe’s Web site by any user with a valid Creative Suite 2 serial number.
Via MacWorld:
“This is a enormous watershed event at Adobe — we have never taken a flagship product and made it available this way,” John Nack, senior product manager for Adobe Photoshop, told Macworld. “It’s a way to do our best for the
Macintosh customers.”Most interesting about the release is that it's being released as Universal Binary, which means it will run on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.
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Technorati Tags:
adobe, photoshop, cs3, photoshop cs3
Google Inc. on Friday will join the crowded field of services registering Web site addresses in a partnership with GoDaddy.com and eNom. Google's service will charge a $10 annual fee and only handle addresses ending in four suffixes — ".com," ".net," ".biz" and ".info.". Web sites that register their domains through Google will be automatically set up to work with several other company products, including e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging.
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Technorati Tags:
google, domains, enom, godaddy
According to an
AP article, Gartner says the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. "The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on." What this means for serious bloggers is that there will most likely be less noise in the blogosphere to compete against. That is of course assuming that splogs don't continue their own meteroic rise and further obfuscating genuine messages and memes.
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Technorati Tags:
blogs, blogging, bloggers, gartner, blogs peaking
The wildly opular auto website discovery service StumbleUpon announced yesterday
that it is offering a way to create personalized channels for viewing online
video. Stumble Video provides a
way to watch a stream of videos thanks to the API's from popular video sites
YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. Videos are automatically matched to
individual interests much like how the StumbleUpon service works.
According to a
Reuters article, "What we realized is there is no great way to discover
personally relevant videos," David Feller, Stumble's vice president of
marketing, said in an interview. Stumble comprehends what types of videos users
like (or dislike) and delivers videos matched to personal preferences.
While video continues to be a resource not
yet fully exploited by the vast majority of marketers, with an established
network of 1.65 million registered StumbleUpon could change
all that.
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Technorati Tags:
stumbleupon, video, youtube, myspace, google video
As of Tuesday, Yahoo! has opened its new search-advertising platform to all U.S. businesses. Panama, the name of the search marketing platform, has been available up to this point only to the portal's existing advertisers but now any company willing to open a search-advertising account with Yahoo can use the new service.
From the Release: "We've received an overwhelmingly positive response to our new search marketing platform to date, so we are thrilled to open it up to all businesses that want to take advantage of our more intuitive and powerful system," said Steve Mitgang, senior vice president, Yahoo! advertising products and platforms. "By giving companies the right tools, visibility and environment to create highly effective search marketing campaigns, Yahoo! is connecting businesses to consumers more effectively than ever before."Advertisers can sign up online for a new Yahoo! account or learn more about the new search marketing platform at
http://signup.marketingsolutions.yahoo.com.
Now if Yahoo! were to release their
Publisher Network (YPN) to the general Web population, those hordes of new advertisers might just get some traffic! And who knows, Yahoo! just might see a reverse in that 30% decrease in stock price from this year.
Technorati Tags:
yahoo, advertising, panama, yahoo advertising
Del.icio.us Tags:
yahoo, advertising, panama, yahoo advertising
This series has been immensely popular so we'll continue. Today's links include wireframe prototyping software Frametastic, Undisposable.org's email credibility check solution and a way to protect your images with a simple .htaccess modification.
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In-Browser Wireframe Prototyping with Frametastic: An ultra-lightweight, simple tool for producing wireframes right inside the browser. "No flash, no java, darn it - no server even - just a pure HTML / CSS / Javascript solution."
Collaborative Protection Against Disposable Email: Web service that provides an API to check email credibility against disposable hosts and fake accounts. Protect your biggest asset (userbase and emails) from contamination - it's as important (if not more important) than an email validty check.
HotLink Image Protection: Bandwidth theft is a serious issue. If you have files on your site that you think are being used on other sites without your permission, it's time to consider protecting that property of yours with an .htaccess modification. The link above is a simple generator to get you started.
Previous Posts In This Series:Practical Design & Development Solutions: Volume 2Practical Design & Development Solutions - Volume 1
Technorati Tags:
wireframe, frametastic, web service, api, hotlink, image protection, design, development
Pulse 360, Inc. today announced the ability for advertisers to target viewers of online videos by appending ad listings to the beginning or end of a video. Ads can be targeted based on context, location, behavior or demographic to ensure every opportunity is taken to serve the most relevant advertisement.
“The consumer audience is watching videos online,” said Lance Podell, chief executive officer of Seevast, Pulse 360’s operating company. “Advertisers can now reach their audience in this highly desirable space, and publishers can add another way to monetize their content in a way that’s non-invasive to viewers.” What this all means is that publishers have another strategy to monetize their multimedia/video content in a way that's non-invasive to viewers.
Technorati Tags:
video, video advertising, sponsored links, pulse 360, seevast
Just a quick note, Yahoo! Search is currently undergoing an update. If this update is similar to previous ones, according to one WebmasterWorld poster "sites that have good inbound links will suffer initially but slowly come back as sites are reindexed." Many are expecting this to be a quick update as the global SEO community would let out a collective moan if changes were too significant this deep in the holiday season. Keep that in mind that these changes are in progress so wait until they are finished before criticism, panic, or celebration.
Technorati Tags:
yahoo, seo, yahoo search, yahoo index update
The blogosphere let out a universal hooray last week when SEOmoz reported that the major search engines were saying OK to pay-per-post type services. Representatives from Yahoo, Google, Ask and MSN agreed in part that advertisers could buy links and product reviews and that (I am only inferring this) there would not be a penalty. Then, squashing the hopes and dreams of millions of bloggers and their psuedo-sponsors, Matt Cutts jumps in by commenting at SEOmoz stating:
Just to chime in and expand on Adam's comment: Google wants to do a good job of detecting paid links. Paid links that affect search engines (whether paid text links or a paid review) can cause a site to lose trust in Google.
You can read the
full post and comments here and try to figure it all out while I'm schlepping away blogging only for trust in the eyes of Google.
Technorati Tags:
paid posting, pay per post, google, ask, msn, yahoo
Google advertisers using the Adwords Starter Edition in the U.S. can use a Google hosted business page to tell people more about their business when they click on their advertisement. While the offering only allows for a simple landing page (No HTML knowledge required), it's seems like a good alternative to those that businesses that are unable (or unwilling) to invest in a full fledged website.
You can learn more about hosted business pages in the
AdWords Help Center.
Technorati Tags:
google, hosting, free hosting, adwords, advertisers
You're not alone if you're feeling a little fed up with the low click rate and
corresponding poor payouts of the Adsense ads on your blog. There are some
alternatives that you might just want to consider however. While Adsense has
certainly been the most popular way to monetize your Web writing endeavors, one
network in particular in BlogKits is enabling bloggers to partner up (show
ads on a CPA basis) of large brands such as eBay, GoDaddy.com & Travelocity.
BlogKits is an affiliate marketing network that is intending to bridge the gap
between large-named advertisers and bloggers which is powered by the OfferForge
network, a global provider of performance marketing solutions.
Technorati Tags:
blogs, blogging, affiliate marketing, google adsense, performance marketing, blogkits
During the course of my morning reading I come across important news stories and
tips of the Web trade that I share with the readers of this blog that can make a
direct and positive impact on your 'Net endeavors. Well, today's no different.
This morning I've come across no less than five holiday specific campaign sites
leading me to think that now is most certainly the time to launch and/or release
your own special holiday campaigns. Whether it's an email to current customers,
a special on-site-only discount promotion or a fun game to engage your users in
the holiday season - the benefit of additional branding and more sales is
certainly worth the investment. Here's an entertaining
Holiday Party Excuse Generator from
Enlighten.
According to the results of a survey of more than 1,000 online holiday shoppers
released by web application experience management provider Gomez, Inc., more
than nine out of 10 shoppers will simply abandon an online store after three or
fewer unsuccessful experiences to complete a purchase. To compound the problem,
three out of four shoppers complained that web sites generally load too slowly,
and more than half said they would switch to a competitor’s site when that
happens.
“If one store can’t deliver a positive online shopping experience, then a
competitor’s site is just a click away,” said William Agush, VP of marketing at
Gomez, Inc. “Online shoppers have exceedingly high expectations this holiday
season, and they are an unforgiving crowd. It appears that ensuring a quality
online experience trumps brand loyalty, and even savings.”
The full survey report, as well as the real-time performance rankings of the top
50 online retailers during the 2006 holiday shopping season, can be found at
www.gomez.com/holiday_shopping.
Technorati Tags:
gomez, user experience, development, survey, holiday shopping
Google will be helping those in the ecommerce area have a slightly more happy holiday season with free payment processing. The program started November 8, but will now continue through December 31, 2007. Google will process Checkout transactions for free, even if you're not an AdWords advertiser. Learn more at
Google Checkout.
The Bulk Submit 2.0 session at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this week could have easily been called "You, Me and Sitemaps" - and probably should have been. The process of submitting sites to search engines has been an interesting evolutionary process, one which has ranged from bulk submission of URLs thanks to services such as Inktomi to the paid inclusion of sites. A recent agreement of the big three search engine networks (Google, Yahoo and MSN) that agreed to use the same standard for the use of sitemaps (find out more at sitemaps.org) - a welcome development for website marketers.
Amanda Camp of Google was up first. Camp made it clear that what she wasn't going to be talking about were Google Base, Local Business Center, Blogger, Page Creator or the Add URL feature as methods to notify Google of existing Web pages. What she did focus on were sitemaps and how they improve the comprehensiveness and freshness of your indexed pages and how they help improve the efficiency of Google itself. There are four accepted formats for Google sitemaps (which are now the same as a Yahoo or MSN sitemaps) and they are text files, rss feeds, the official sitemap protocol and OAI-PMH (open arvhices
initiative protocol for metadata harvesting - this is not used very often).
Camp presented some simple rules for success with sitemaps including:
- include the full URL path
- remove unnecessary parameters
- should be at the highest directory
- needs to match location
- name the file anything you want
- must use UTF8 encouding
- max is 50K URLs or 10MB per sitemap
- use Gzip for compression of neccessary
It's interesting to note that Camp mentioned that, when using the XML format, only the <urlset>, <url> and <loc> are required. Optional data to incorporate into the XML file are the last modified date, the change frequency and the priority of each page. Camp suggested using the official Google Sitemap Generator (a python script) or one of the fifty plus third party generators listed on their site.
Next up was Anit Kumar of Yahoo. Kumar managed the Site Explorer team. Site Explorer is a popular tool among Web marketers for browsing pages and in-links, ensuring site authentication, enabling bulk submission through RSS and sitemaps and which will be offering up some new features very soon. Kumar emphasized that "the best was yet to come."
Eric Papczun was up next with a sitemaps case study from which he offered up some valuable tips.
- Do the due diligence, make sure you achieve clean URL submission
- Have an optimized named sitemap and links from a global footer
- Exclude redundant content (printer friendly pages, disembodied content (flash) and generally spammy stuff)
- Discussed what to expect - (the number of pages may go up or go down - which is neither a good or bad thing)
- Select URLs for more frequent crawls (news release pages, product release pages)
- Pay attention to unreachable URLs (in the Google Sitemaps system), uncrawlable URLs and URLs which were blocked by the robots.txt file.
Todd Friesen was up next and focused on comparison shopping engines which enables marketers to utilize RSS and XML to incorporate sites via paid inclusion. CSE feeds and their automation keep costs low but Friesen noted that a "human touch" brings the best performance. Friesen went into his own review of how well the big three search networks shopping services performed, highlighting that MSN Shopping converted very well at a reasonable cost per click, although he did note that there was a low volume comparatively. Google Base did convert well but offered little support which Yahoo Shopping featured a high volume of traffic which was expensive but did provide good conversions.
Video search engines are popping up and the technologies being used to index video clips are evolving. Currently, most video is indexed by simple tags and text - no different than descriptive tags for images. But voice recognition is developing, where video search engines will comb video content for recognizable words and phrases to return the most accurate results for your search.
Suranga Chandratillake, Co-Founder of video search engine Blinx was part of a panel recently at SES Chicago. While he, among the rest of the video search engines, is excited about voice recognition, the data is still somewhat raw. Chandratillake cites a 50 - 95% voice recognition rate so far. That's pretty broad, but agreed on by the other panelists and video search engine providers. If you're thinking of video as a viable means of marketing or extending your brand recognition, there are a few things to keep in mind in regards to the voice recognition issues.
- Quality: Simply, the better the quality, the better chances that your video will be indexed.
- Accents: Accents play an important role in the quality of voice recognition. Currently, British and American accents are well recognized, but beyond that there begins to be problems.
- Background Noise: Perhaps the single biggest factor. Even if your audio feed is clean, simple background noise can confuse the system. When preparing to shoot video, choose a quiet room or edit your final product carefully.
Chandratillake also mentioned the next step for video search engines - facial recognition. Think Paris Hilton or her recent cohort Britney Spears.
Jason Calacanis, fresh off his resignation with AOL, was presented as the keynote speaker for day two of SES Chicago on Tuesday.
Calacanis went to work for AOL after they bought his company WeblogsInc. just over a year ago. At the same time, he has helped transform Netscape from a tired browser of yesteryear to a Digg rival - a social blog and networking site. However, the relationship with AOL became strained.
Calacanis has been accused of trying to put rival Digg out of business - an accusation he denies, and held the line on Tuesday by quipping "all ships rise and fall with the tide." This is Calacanis' official stance, that Digg's success will continue successes for Netscape. But his cooperative demeanor has been held suspect, most recently because of his offer to pay top Digg contributors $1,000 for every month they publish 150 blog posts or more - seemingly attempting to steal Digg's top writers and moderators. It was a move that incensed many, may have aided his abrupt resignation from AOL and caused bloggers and industry insiders everwhere to wonder, "what was he thinking?"
That may remain a mystery, but a quick word association shows what Calacanis was thinking on Tuesday morning - along with some choice comments about SEO ("it's bullshit"), his motto of the day, "making it suck less ... like Yahoo," "evil stuff like that," (referring to PayPerPost) and considering himself "...part of the forces of good."
Q: Digg
A: Brilliant.
Q: Google
A: Brilliant. Unstoppable. Good.
Q: AOL
A: (deep breath) Transition.
Q: SEO
A: Keep it simple.
Q: Podcasting
A: Addicting.
Q: AdSense
A: I love you.
Q: Netscape
A: The future.
*Calacanis also announced his new job today, hired by Sequoia Captial to build a yet-determined company.
Links are essential to promoting your website and ranking high with the big search engines. But, as Eric Ward pointed out at Tuesday's SES Chicago conference, it's not about how many you get, but the quality of those links. And it takes hard work to secure quality links. But what happens when you get those great links and you don't take full advantage of them?
The link itself is great, but if not properly displayed, the search spiders will not see it and your efforts are wasted.
We see many sites that reference a great link, then ask the user to click here. The problem is, "here" is the anchor text - what is picked up by the spiders, not the descriptive content of the link. Therefore, if you are referencing a link about a new study on email open rates, grab the attention of spiders by describing the link in your anchor text - "click to read this important study on email open rates." Now, the spiders will get a clear idea of the content and your hard work will pay off.
For an extnesive analysis of link building, look for Website Magazine's next issue that will include an insightful article on this very topic, written by Chris Boggs.
Podcasting may not be reaching the heigths its greatest proponents prophesied, but that has stopped millions of people from downloading audio content or creating their own radio like shows for others. This sessions looked at podcasting, audio searching and best practices when it comes to getting the best possible audio in front of the broadest possible audience.
Read our synopsis of the SES session "Podcasting and Audio Optimization"
If you are engaged in online advertising of the pay per click variety, then you have undoubtedly heard of quality score - that notoriously confusing black box which influences how you are placed, how much you pay and, yes, I'll say it - how successful you are with your advertising campaign.
Read our synopsis of the SES session "Ads In A Quality Score World"
Are you producing video content? There are video search engines that specialize in gathering up your video and maing it available to searchers seeking such content.
Read Website Magazine's coverage of the Video Search Optimization panel now.
Website Magazine is live and on the scene at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this week, reporting from sessions and interviewing some of the top companies about their products and services. Take a look at the sessions we'll be covering here and let us know if you have any questions for any of the speakers or panelists - we'd be happy to ask!
Review Website Magazine's SES Chicago Coverage.
Google's quality score system, which affects the minimum bid for an advertiser's search campaign, is including landing pages in their ranking systems. Google is taking the stance that these considerations will make for a better user experience and claims to have data that shows an increase in user satisfaction with SERP's. But the user is not the only one to benefit - advertisers should see an increase in conversion as well, as better pages and more relevant information keeps users from navigating away from the site.
In the current system, landing page quality only affects minimum bids. But those at Google feel that landing page quality will soon find its way into the ad ranking system as well.
Beyond sound business practices (delivering the proper order, honoring your promotional deals, transparent company information, etc