Search Engine Optimization

10 most Commonly Used Passwords

2008-05-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

Taking an aggregate sample of passwords (primarily from the UK), we take a look at the most commonly occurring. If you spot your own password listed - it might just be time for a change!

10. 'thomas' (0.99‰)

9. 'arsenal' (1.11‰)

8. 'monkey' (1.33‰)

7. 'charlie' (1.39‰)

6. 'qwerty' (1.41‰)

5. '123456' (1.63‰)

4. 'letmein' (1.76‰)

A modern-day version of 'open sesame' - and 1 person in 560 will type 'letmein' as their password. Quite why is beyond me.

3. 'liverpool' (1.82‰)

2. 'password' (3.780‰)

1. '123' (3.784‰)

With nearly 4 people in 1,000 opting for a simple numerical sequence as their password (it should be noted that there was no lower length limit specified), '123' must be the first thing a lot of people think of when asked to specify a password. One dreads to think what their PIN number might be!

Have People Stopped Clicking on Google Ads?

2008-04-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

Have People Stopped Clicking on Google Ads?

OR DID A WEB-TRAFFIC FIRM GET THE NUMBERS WRONG? - By Chris Wilson
On the morning of Feb. 26, the investment firm Bear Stearns sent out an alert (PDF) about some unwelcome news for Google. According to comScore, a leading Web-analytics company, the company's domestic paid clicks—that is, the number of times people in the United States clicked on a Google ad—were down 0.3 percent compared to last year and down 12 percent since October. By 7:16 a.m., former tech-securities analyst (and Slate contributor) Henry Blodget reported the news on Silicon Alley Insider under the headline "Google Disaster." As news of the comScore report circulated, Google got killed on Wall Street: The stock opened the day down $25 a share and continued to fall, sinking to an 11-month low of $464.19 before staging a modest comeback.

Wall Street's anti-Google stampede came despite some good news. The company's advertising numbers from the previous quarter were strong, particularly outside the U.S., and Bear Sterns also reported that Google has "healthy growth prospects that should lead to market share gains [and] a strong balance sheet." Nevertheless, investors were spooked by the idea that Web surfers had stopped clicking on text ads—perhaps a sign that even mighty Google wasn't immune from an economic slowdown. Wall Street, however, shouldn't have made such a leap. ComScore's click numbers, like so many stats about user behavior on the Web, are unreliable and opaque. Instead of using comScore reports to predict a tech company's future performance, an investor would be better off ignoring them.

ComScore is one of several firms in the United States that peddles statistics on Web traffic. It seems like it should be easy to get an exact count of how many people visit a Web site, click on an ad, and so forth. But as Slate's Paul Boutin has pointed out, these stats are a moving target. Analytics firms like Nielsen and comScore don't count every time a Web page gets accessed; rather, they extrapolate the numbers based on data from panelists who install the companies' tracking software. ComScore claims its panel includes more than 2 million people who are recruited either directly or through third-party software packages that offer services like virus protection and performance optimization. (The company terms this "researchware." Less charitable types call it "spyware.") The company takes the data it gets from these users and weights it according to demographics to draw a statistical portrait of traffic to individual sites. ComScore is, essentially, making an educated guess. Nobody except Google is keeping a tally of each individual click on the company's text ads.

Even though comScore's numbers are an estimate, they've been repeated as gospel with little discussion of margins of error—this despite the large psychological difference between a 0.3 percent decline and a small gain (or a bigger loss). Why did Wall Street respond so emphatically to comScore's numbers, ignoring the big-picture reassurances in Bear Sterns' report? One can certainly blame a jittery market on the watch for bad news as economic indicators everywhere are looking ugly. It's also probably fair to guess that crafty investors—guessing that less savvy investors will panic—would sell early in an attempt to make money off this skittishness. But it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that Wall Street types put way too much stock in the reliability of Web traffic stats, numbers that should not be used for day-to-day management of a portfolio.

After the public hubbub over its Google numbers, comScore released an analysis of the data on the site's blog. The post lists many caveats, including the possibility that the recent decline in clicks might have been the result of Google getting better at reducing "bad clicks"—accidental clicks by people who have no interest in the product being advertised. Many in the tech-blog community saw this response as comScore getting spooked by the fallout from its report or bending to pressure from Google. (A comScore spokesman told me there was no contact between Google and comScore executives between the time of the initial report and comScore's elaborations.) More likely, comScore was simply being realistic about the reliability—or maybe the unreliability—of its own data.

ComScore's numbers are particularly prone to error when making long-term comparisons, like the year-over-year comparison of Google's paid clicks. For one thing, the group of panelists that provided comScore's data in January 2007 isn't the same as the group from January 2008. We don't know how different the groups were because comScore doesn't release that data.

Like most companies that deal in Web statistics, comScore gives few specifics about its methodology. In order for investors and tech buffs to get a better sense of the accuracy of this data, firms like Nielsen and comScore have to become more transparent—something the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an umbrella organization for 300 companies involved in online advertising, has called on them to do. (For a great side-by-side comparison of how different Web analytics companies work—so far as we know—see this primer from the Web marketing firm Antezeta.)

Until Nielsen, comScore, and other analytics companies become committed to sharing their data and methodologies, personal fortunes and the fates of tech companies will depend on data that might not be anywhere close to accurate. Wall Street, at least, shouldn't be so willing to act on this kind of report.

Before public demand for better methodology is likely to mount, however, those whose personal fortunes rest on this data will have to understand that it is a methodology in the first place, not some universal registry of Web use data with a margin of error of zero. Next time you see a press release that says clicks are going up or down, take it for what it is: a guess—as far as we know.

Questions to ask before starting a Social Media Campaign

2008-04-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

Questions to ask before starting a Social Media Campaign

1: Why do you want to use social media? While, I think that many companies should exploit the numerous benefits that social media marketing (dubbed relations) affords them, there are equally as many companies who should stay clear from the medium. Determine what the underlying goal is and why social media should be used to achieve same before you continue.

2. Which department will social media become a vertical to? Often it’s the technical department that gets the thumbs up. But think carefully. The Marketing and PR departments are generally the creative, content-driven folk who hold the key to any company’s target market. This is at the soul of any social media strategy! Also, well executed social media is a result of an integrated approach.

3: Is the company ready for social media engagement? Often, so much blue tape exists within corporate society that we forget that it’s not conducive to the pace-of-lightning speed that social media is. Determine beforehand what processes need to be in place for your engagement to be real and timely.

4: Similar to point 3, is your company ready for the brutally honest feedback that exists on the Internet about your company or brand and if so, is the business ready to make positive changes to the business? This includes having access to senior management - even Exco level - so that they’re aware of what’s happening in the space.

5: What part of the bottom line are you hoping to improve on with social media? This is a biggie. You see, I’m all for brand positioning. It’s important. But it generally costs a lot of money and on its own does very little to a business’ profit margins. Social media, like any other online marketing channel, needs to be used for the purpose of generating leads. Sure, the approach may be different but there needs to be a financial target. It’s that simple. Anything less is fluff.

6: Have you got access to target social media communities that you can rely on to launch a blogger or social networker seed campaign? Being able to reach out to influential online networkers with a large following is important to accelerating the campaign and its message into the social media community.

7: Speaking of bloggers, are you aware that social media goes beyond bloggers and blogging? Often a company will jump on the blog bandwagon not realising that other social media channels do exist that could offer far more value to both your business and customers. Do the research. Call someone in. Make informed decisions.

8. Have you experimented and ideally succeeded with a SEO campaign? Because Search is the lifeblood of online traffic, it is important to understand the fundamentals of Search and Optimisation to reap the benefits across online marketing disciplines. Similarly, it’s important to be able to make sense of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

There’s probably many more things that I can add to this list. What do you think is missing?

See you in May. It’s going to be a very exciting month on so many levels...

Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability

2008-04-27T15:34:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has an in-depth review of that platform.

Search Monkey is just the first of many steps that Yahoo! discussed today. CTO Ari Balogh said that the entire company was rewiring, across all its properties, in the spirit of the social graph and data portability. Flickr's influence was tangible. Here's a high-level overview of some of the biggest changes.

Installable Apps

It's all about the platforms and conference organizer Brady Forrest was kind enough to referenceour post yesterday on what comes next after APIs and platforms are ubiquitous in his introduction of the Yahoo! CTO. Sure enough, Yahoo! has its own vision for what comes next and it's a pretty good looking plan.

Yahoo! will soon allow developers to write apps that work easily across every property in the company. Hosting will be offered or the apps can live off-site. When a user ads an application, they'll be asked which of the Yahoo! sites they want that app to be installed on. This will include the front page of Yahoo! - which will soon host 3rd party apps. Look out Facebook.

Those apps will include an event stream (ala FriendFeed/Facebook Newsfeed/MySpace friend activity feed) that's prioritized by topic area and social graph. The activities of your sports friends will appear on the Yahoo Sports page, your closest email buds will be surfaced on Yahoo! Mail.

You might not feel like you have a well developed social graph across Yahoo! but think about Flickr, Upcoming.org and Del.icio.us. Let's see Yahoo! acquire Twitter or FriendFeed and then we'll really be talking.

The Social

Social graph data, or prioritized friends lists, will serve as the relevance filter for the apps that operate across Yahoo. Back in November we discussed this strategy in a post about the Inbox 2.0 strategy titled Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook.

While Facebook stagnates, struggles with app spam and looks more like MySpace every day though - FriendFeed has taken center stage in experimenting with friend activity data, friend of a friend conversations, friend recommendation and prevention of information overload.

Yahoo will do that type of work, but will also leverage its work with in the Identity and Data Portability communities. Users will be given extensive control over where they share their data, something Facebook for example says it is focusing on before it can make Data Portability real.

Yahoo! users will have a single unified identity across all Yahoo! properties. I was sitting next to Kaliya Hamlin, known as Identity Woman, when this was announced and asked her how that sounded. She said that if a unified identity was a requirement, that would be bad, if they were an option that would be ideal, and if they were "toggleable" (like multiple personas) that would be ideal. I agree.

There's a whole lot of potential here and Yahoo! has really been engaged in the Identity world in particular. If they can make a few radical steps and perhaps a few key acquisitions - then social graph + 3rd party apps + semantified search indexing could make the user experience at Yahoo! very, very compelling. Coincidentally, or not, these moves were very close to what our own super-prescient Josh Catone called on Yahoo! to do almost a year ago.

It is a really tall order to fill, but with the infusion of so many smart people into Yahoo! after years of acquisitions like Flickr - a company wide rewiring seems relatively plausible.

28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar

2008-04-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar

StumbleUpon or SU, can be a great asset for your online marketing

strategy. Here are 28 tips to take you to SU heaven.

Your Avatar, the little picture which represents your account. You need to have one, it seems obvious but I regularly come across "anonymous" accounts with ghost avatars. Your avatar is usually the first thing which people know about you, in the seconds or even micro seconds where your avatar is digested it's important not to make simple, initial mistakes. You want to get to the situation where when people see your avatar they get excited
Make your Avatar stand out, it's only a small space so use high contrast colours.
Only use a photo which has been designed to be an avatar. Do not use a passport photo or the "Best Employee of the Month", type photo you find in fast food joints.
If your logo works well as an avatar, use it. But most don't, you may be in love with your logo but think about how it will be perceived on SU. People using SU to improve their business are not welcomed with open arms so it's best to adopt a regular user status.
Be bold, be striking, but don't offend unnecessarily. Your avatar should not cause offence and the use of religious or political symbols should be avoided.
Pay a graphic designer to put together an avatar based on your website or company logo, if you don't have the budget create it yourself but show it to lots of friends to get feedback before you publish.
Concentrating on quality is the most effective way to stand out from the crowd. In a competitive environment it is quality which is the most important element when it comes to attracting friends and influencing people
Having more friends and fans means your stumbles will be seen by more people. Stumbleupon allows you to friend only 200 people, so make sure each one you friend, friends you back. Make sure they are active stumblers too, if someone hasn't logged on to their account they are not likely to be of any use to you. Drop them and friend someone more useful.
If your focus for using SU is business then you are not on StumbleUpon to make friends to meet hot partners of the opposite sex or even the same sex if that's your bag. As Marlon Brando in the Godfather says, "It's only business." I keep this in mind as I use SU. Forget making friends or meeting the love of your life, that may happen, but it's not why you are there.
Keeping focused on business means: Not friending every hottie in a bathing suit (they are probably fake accounts designed to sucker you in anyway). Keep in mind that networking can sometimes be better described as notworking.
Don't get personally offended when someone does not friend you back, simply remove them and try someone else.
It is not a popularity contest but a way to market your brand. It's not the amount of people in your network, it's what the people in your network can do for you.
Learn to say no. Learn to reject, learn to say get lost to your best pal who is sending you low quality spam to stumble. People know what you stumble and you will be judged on that.
Focus on those why certain people are successful. Some stumblers are more powerful than others, make sure you understand why they are power users. A lot of people spend a huge amount of time Stumbling, you cannot do this, you have a business to run. But closely analyze those who get stumbles in your sector and ask yourself, how can you get them to not only friend you but to submit your stuff.
There is a specific culture that exists on SU and it will help if you can understand it. It's not one that can easily be taken advantage of by someone running a business. Those who make the mistake of going against this culture, rightly or wrongly can attract a vicious element on SU. Tread carefully and do not annoy the natives.
There is a psychological technique called modeling, where someone wishing to emulate the success of someone puts themselves in the mindset of that person. SU is no different. If you have the time, spend a whole day looking at the those people who stumble the hot stuff in your sector and beyond. Then either create similar content or expand on the themes raised.
Think of SU as people stumbling ideas rather than websites The power users on SU are bright, erudite, literate, curious and deep thinking people. Think less about content as something you look at, but at the ideas it inspires. Model your own content with the same concept. People swarm around ideas on SU and it's important to deconstruct the content down to its original idea; you can then take that idea and create your own content.
Your politics, or personal view are irrelevant, for example if you think Global warming is bogus, then raise the issue. But not in a dogmatic or "out to make people look stupid" way, but in a way which attracts people into the conversation and into stumbling you. For example you could highlight the hypocrisy of so called " green" celebs who drive a Toyota Prius and yet have a private jet which they fly their personal chef in to cook them breakfast.
Don't only stumble your own stuff, but make it a healthy ratio. Stumble other peoples stuff at least 5 times more than your own.
Learn to find cool stuff to stumble. A website called popurls.com can do a lot of the work for you by scanning what is popular on other websites. The logic being that if it's hot on digg it could be hot on SU also. However, competition is stiff amongst professional submitters to submit the best stuff, so be aware that a considerable time investment may need to be made.
Choose your topics carefully. SU allows you to decide what kind of areas you stumble, some other members of SU will use this list to judge whether or not you are worthy to add. Rule of thumb is to be honest and pick the things you are passionate about, just don't go crazy and keep it focussed.
Be polite. Yes you may have had the third cringe worthy, low life, spammer request to ask you to friend them, but good manners costs nothing and yet being rude has the danger of creating enemies with no real bonus except being a smart ass.
It probably does not need to be said but best not assume anything. Do not spam, do not send out random requests for people to friend you and do not submit low quality, spammy content. SU works without a real algorithm, if you submit good stuff it will rise to the top and your account will rise in value. Submit rubbish and you will get nowhere.
Accept criticism. When someone gives you the thumbs down, learn from it. It's not personally (unless it's the spammer you just told to get lost) it's probably just about the content. Look at the content again and ask yourself what you could have done not to have got that thumbs down. Thumbs down are rare, so when it happens take note.
Do not submit front pages of e-commerce sites. People are just not interested. If you have an e-commerce site, think about a blog, think about creating some interesting content specifically crafted for the SU audience.
You need one of two things to really take advantage of SU, time or money. If you have the time you can see down and build an effective SU strategy. If you have the money you can pay someone to do it for you.
Don't think that SU is the answer to your online marketing problems. It may not fit your ROI, don't get sucked into spending resources on it till you are sure it's for you. My Dad has an engineering business where SU would be of little use. The ROI would be worthless. Perform tests before you commit time and money.
The definition of a valuable Stumble account is one in which people visit regularly because of the useful and interesting posts. See it as a mini blog, a way to demonstrate your knowledge of your sector. As you go on, your reputation and brand will build enabling you to use your SU account to further your business.

The above article was written in collaboration with Lyndon Antcliff, a social media marketing expert.

You can find me (Junaid Alee) on StumbleUpon here:

http://junaidalee.stumbleupon.com

Feel Free to Add me as your friends and share your pages with me and my Friend's Network.

10 ways to WOW your Clients

2008-04-27T15:15:00.001-07:00

A happy client is a pleasure to have, but an ecstatic one is even better. When you go above-and-beyond to wow your clients, they can become a wellspring of repeat business. They’ll refer new customers to you, and publicly reinforce your reputation to others over and over again.

But how do you turn an ordinary client into a raving fan? All it takes is a little understanding of their wants and needs – and some creative strategies for exceeding their expectations. Here are 10 ways to create raving fan customers who give the word-of-mouth marketing that your business needs to succeed.

#1 – Customize Your Approach To Their Problems

Learn as much as you can about what has been preventing your clients from getting the results they want in the past, and customize your marketing approach to highlight how you are the perfect solution. Instead of a typical “here are our services” pitch, present yourself in a way that will make them take notice and say “This is exactly what we’ve been looking for!”

#2 - Create A Guide That Positions You As An Authority

Being seen as an authority is a powerful way to deliver the “wow-factor” to your clients that increases their desire to stay loyal to you (as well as the amount of business they bring your way). Creating a companion guide to your products or services is an excellent way to showcase your experience and to establish your position as a company who is on the leading edge. Add an extra layer of exclusivity by offering it only to current clients – just one more perk of doing business with you.

#3 - Master The Art Of Accessibility

One of the easiest ways to consistently impress your clients is to keep turnaround time on emails an phone calls to a minimum. In today’s world of poor customer service, having a swift response rate to client inquiries is a powerful way to keep them impressed and away from the competition. A quick tip on email – even if you can’t address a client’s needs immediately, reply to them and let them know you’ll get back to them soon. Reinforcing their feeling of being valued gives them another reason to be a customer for life.

#4 - Anticipate Their Future Needs

Your clients have a specific idea of where they want their business to go, but they may not be seeing all the options they have available to them. Talk with them and get a feel for how they plan to grow their business, and offer them advice or services that will make it easier for them to grow. Then connect them with the people who can help make those things happen. Open their eyes to ways they can make their business or their offerings stronger down the road, and they won’t forget how valuable it is to keep doing business with you.

#5 - Offer A Workshop That Gives Your Clients An Edge

Home improvement stores offer free do-it-yourself workshops to give customers a reason to shop at their store. Financial planners offer free investment seminars to educate clients on additional service options. Your business could do the same. Look at what it is that you sell, and consider the knowledge gaps your clients might have when it comes to choosing options or getting the most out of what they buy. Then offer a free workshop that closes the knowledge gap, and see just how much more your clients appreciate you.

#6 - Ask For Feedback After The Sale

They typical business follows up only when they have something to sell, but you can wow your clients by following up with a request to make their last transaction more satisfying. A simple phone call or email that follows up with the question “Is there anything we missed, or anything more we could do to make your experience better?” tells your clients that you are 110% committed to making sure they are treated fairly and respectfully – and that you’re not going to settle for letting them get anything less than the best from you.

#7 - Present Everything In Terms Of Value, Not Cost

If pre-sales marketing is all about presenting benefits, current-client marketing is all about presenting value. Each time you communicate with your clients, let them know what they are getting and how it benefits them. A client who receives “new logo samples,” for instance, is not going to be as impressed as a client who receives a package of “3 logo concepts shown in multiple layouts with original source files for editing.” Make sure your client understands just how much they are getting with each deliverable, and they will feel their money is well spent.

#8 - Reward Client Loyalty With Increasing Bonuses

Keeping clients long-term saves you the time and money of hunting down new ones, so why not pass some of that savings on to them? Offering clients some sort of bonus or discount periodically, just for sticking with you, is a sure way to impress – especially if the value of that reward keeps increasing. Whether you choose to give a discount that grows each year, or you throw in a free product or service here and there, these unsolicited gifts will make your clients hard-pressed to go elsewhere.

#9 - Give Your Clients Free Publicity

It’s not uncommon to feature your clients’ success on your own website to enhance your reputation, but have you considered boosting their reputation elsewhere? Consider working them to issue an online press release that showcases their company or have an article written up and submitted to a relevant publication or website. This “out of the blue” shot of publicity won’t cost you much, but will make the client remember you for life – and in many of their referral-generating conversations as well.

#10 – Under-Promise and Over-Deliver – Every Time

The surest way to lock a permanent “wow” into your customer’s mind is simply to exceed their expectations, every time. Don’t over-promise – be realistic and focused when telling them what you’ll deliver and when they should expect it. Then go the extra mile to make your deliverable impressive and on time (or better yet, early). This is simply the easiest way to secure your reputation – the very currency of marketing itself – and virtually guarantee a stream of revenue from your current clients, and the clients they refer to you in the future.

Every great brand carries with it a number of features that give it a marketable “wow factor” – that impression of excellence, commitment and quality that invites clients to pull up a chair and stay forever. To make your brand great, incorporate these strategies into your everyday marketing plans and share your additional tips in the comments below. You’ve got what it takes to “wow” your clients every day – it’s time to get to it!

Role of Page Strength in Search Engines Rankings

2008-04-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

I have couple of experience from last two weeks which leave me in deep thinking about page strength and search engine rankings. I had an article on of the hotel in Mauritius on my website from last six to seven month and i thought i should share this hotel information with different social media website for no intension for ranking, to be honest to just keep my self active in social media.

A week ago i was analyzing my website state and i was wonder to see that i got quite fair amount of hits. i went in yahoo search and type that keywords and surprise to see my digg articles on first page, even though that was not full article, then i though this must be due to same website factor. I start searching for different unknown things about SEO rankings. Then i come across some article on SEOMOZ about page strength.
To ME this is only due to high page strength that digg is on top with just 1/4 part of my articles and my own website is not top even with full articles. What is page strength i am not full sure exactly but one thing i know it consist of so many factor of on-page and off-page optimization, which factor has more value i do not know? but to me it is very much clear now that page strength is very important factor in natural search engines rankings. Hope this will help you
you can check your page strength at Page strength Tool
Live Your Life Today

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

2008-04-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking

Posted by Lisa Barone

Hello, hello. It's day 2. I have orange juice instead of coffee this morning. Lisa's still sick from yesterday. As usual, I blame Susan. I'm going to do my best to make it through today's batch of sessions.

Kicking things off this morning we have Barbara Boser (3 Dog Media), Cindy Krum (Blue Moon Works), Randy Woods (non-linear creations), and Michael Gray (Atlas Web Service). Danny Sullivan is once again moderating. This man is earning his paycheck this week.

Up first is Barbara Boser. Just as a fun fact, if you've never met Barbara, she's probably the nicest woman in the whole world. I'm just saying.

Marketing your Business with Facebook

Pages: You can build a page in Facebook for your business. She looks at DunkinDonuts page because its Greg's favorite. Aw. You can add events and people will get notifications. You can upload photos, start a discussion board, create a poll, etc. Polls are a good way to get answers about products your customers like. You're also able to let people write on your wall and upload their own media. When someone becomes a fan of your company, all of their friends will see that and can join too.

Facebook Social Ads: It's not yet that advanced. You can filter through by age, keywords, place, etc, and narrow down your audience. Good way to target. The ads show up in the users' news feed or on the left sidebar.

Groups: You can search for groups related to your business and then participate in the conversations going on about your company.

Events: Create event pages. People can RSVP and write on the wall.

Sharing: You can share blog posts. Every time you update, all of your Facebook Fans will be informed of that.

Beacon: A little controversial last year because of privacy issues. You put some code on your site and when a FB user completes an action on your site, it gets listed in their news feed.

Lexicon: You can put in a keyword and it tracks how many times Starbucks is mentioned on the Facebook wall across all profiles. Pretty cool.

Apps: If you're on Facebook you probably have a whole list of people wanting you to download an application. Once you join, people will see a link to your company. You want to create something that's viral and that people will want to share with their friends.

How Much Traffic Can I Get?

She talks about Neil Patel's Flixster Facebook application where it compares what movies you like to what movies your friends like. He got 16+ million visits from Facebook. Barbara says that number has already doubled. Wow.

Next up is Cindy Krum to talk about MySpace. Ew, MySpace.

She still believes MySpace has a lot of value if you're trying to reach certain demographics. It still has 80 million users worldwide.

MySpace Whoas (aka the good things):

Flying Dog Brewery: Local Denver brewery with a MySpace page. The have used their page to establish a company voice and personality. They're reaching out to a specific demographic. They're talking to people and creating a community around the brand. They also use it to notify users about events and products.

They're taking paper flyers and putting them on their MySpace page so all of their friends can see they're having a zombie dance party. Wow. A zombie dance party, eh? Snazzy. That flyer is also their new profile picture, which helps to draw attention to their profile.

They also use MySpace Events to promote all of their events. People can type in their zip codes to look for events and the cool things happening in their city.

They use MySpace bulletins. It's similar to the wall in Facebook. You can announce contests, release newsletters, offer discounts to MySpace users etc.

Companies can also put YouTube videos on their page or post the videos on their friends' pages as comments. Because that's not annoying. They've also used their photos as a catalog for their merchandise. They can't buy from the MySpace page, but they can direct them to their real site.

This has search engine optimization value. These pages rank well in the engines.

True: Web-based dating community. Creating brand awareness.

Link to quizzes, badges and fun games from their MySpace profile to engage visitors.

They have a Create a Date game where you can skew pictures of people and then send it to a friend. It's viral. They have a Date-O-Rama game to help you find and plan a date. They've also put an entry way to their site in the corner of MySpace. It gets people where they need to go.

MySpace Woes (the bad things)

Westwood College: There were a lot of people who had self-identified as Westwood Students. They wanted to create a community online. The profile would encourage communication between students and disperse information about classes, events, holidays, news, school closures, etc.

Your MySpace profile has to be a good representation of your brand. You can't just slap something up there. A cool branded profile takes a lot of time and skill - use CSS or MySpace's profile layout tool. Cool profiles have to be updated frequently.

You can't accept everyone who wants to be your friend. You have to manage them and make sure they're appropriate. Get rid of those with questionable photos. Make sure they represent your brand well. She talks about how sometimes friends' profiles change. They had a nice guy in a polo T-shirt join. He was really active and participatory. And then he changed his profile pic of a photo of him in S&M gear. They had to remove all his comments because he suddenly didn't represent them well. (Hmm, not sure how I feel about that, but okay.)

Communication needs to be managed. Will you respond to emails? Will all comments be approved? Will you participate in groups? What kind of blog communication is appropriate for your brand?

Travel Site: They wanted to create a travel widget that would be useful for travelers and travel bloggers. They needed something cool that hadn't been done before. They wanted a widget that would work in all social networks.

Not all Developers are widget developers. MySpace messes with your code. Widgets that work on other social networks may not work in MySpace. And Widgets that work in MySpace/IE7 may not work in Firefox.

Tips for Developing Widgets:

MySpace converts HTML into its preferred object format before saving
Links: All links are encoded. Links in Flash won't work at all.
MySpace bans some widget companies
Use Flash Version 9 & Action Script 3.0

You can also use Open Social.

Randy Woods is up to talk about LinkedIn.

He starts off with some disclaimers. He's Canadian. Everyone laughs. Most of his clients are in the US. He's also old. His company started in 1995. He's also a generalist. He talks about conference brain. Conference brain means you're hung over. Wow.

He says marketing is being defined in its narrowest sense - promotion. Social media is also important for the other elements of marketing - product and positioning.

LinkedIn - Why Bother

About 20 million professionals
Average income: 140,000
Vampire free
About 2 million of these at executive level
500 of Fortune 500 represented at executive level

Harvard Business School did a study on LinkedIn and found out that 90 percent of people on LinkedIn are relationship managers. Five percent are networks and five percent are contractors. All of the Fortune 500 people you're interested in are in the relationship manager piece. They're only talking to people they know already. They don't want to meet strangers.

But they do want their problems solved. They want to know before they engage with you that you can solve their problems. That's where the Question & Answer service fits in.

You can use LinkedIn Answers to reach influencers. The challenge is that the people you want responding to these questions are your most valuable employees. They're the people who don't have time to be cruising social networks. But if you use Yahoo Pipes, you can combine everything and put it into one dashboard. Or something. Yahoo Pipes is about 10 leagues over my head.

LinkedIn Answers means dollars in your pocket.

Case Study: 11 percent conversion rate for free traffic.

Four Things I Don't Believe:

Conversions Don't Matter
All Visitors Are Created Equal: I don't care about 20 million people at Digg. I care about the people who are targeted to our business.
Don't Write A Thesis: If what you're selling is expertise, you better make sure what you write can sell that.
Never Force Registration

Recap: Marketing is more than promotion. No one important wants to hear from you. You have to get their attention. LinkedIn Answers equals dollars. LinkedIn Converts.

Michael Gray will finish things off by discussing Twitter.

Twitter is a microblogging platform. You write short messages and share them with the world. Twitter is what happens between blog posts. Or conference sessions.

Why Marketers Should Care About Twitter

Using twitters as a permission marketing tool to reach bleeding edge customers. It works like RSS. It's pull technology. It allows you to protect/block your updates from people.

Twitter = Traffic

Use Twitter to drive traffic to your Web site or blog when you post a new update.
Use Twitter to share news, information, and links with your followers
Use Twitter to help with your other social media efforts
Use Twitter to drive conversions and sales
Depending on your sector and quality of followers, Twitter can have really high CTR.

Understanding How Twitter Works:

Next to everyone's name is a star so that you can save it if you want. There's also an arrow to make it easy to reply to someone. If people reach out to you, make sure to respond back to them. The Archive section allows you to see everything you've ever Twittered.

Tools To Get More Out Of Twitter:

Web Browser Based - Twitter, twitbin, twitterfox
Desktop Clients - Twhirl, alert thingy
Blog Tools - Twitter tools, Loud Twitter, Twit This
Email - Twittermail
Smartphone - twitterberry, itweet
API - Roll it into your own application

Who's Using Twitter?

CarnivalCruise - Sends you to different articles
JetBlue - They're really interacting with people and their community. They're a great example.
AmazonDeals
Woot
TechMeme
Sphinn
Zappos
HillaryMomJeans
Maratriangle

More Tips for Getting More Out of Twitter

Set up a profile with an avatar
Have updates
Don't follow people with a blank profile
Always reply to your @ messages
Twitterbots will follow everyone who follows them
People will follow and unfollow depending on if you match their expectations.

Twitter Tracking and Twitter Search Tools

You can type a word into Twitter and it will tell you everyone who has mentioned those words. If you're a company dealing with the public you should be tracking your company name.

TweetScan

Quotably: Makes @ messages into a threaded conversation. Helps give you context to a conversation

He also points out the Twitter leaderboard.

Twitter Ranks

Jason Calacanis' Twitter feed ranks 4th for his name.
Barack Obama's Twitter profile has a top ten ranking for his name.

Question and Answer

Are there any legal issues to create a Facebook brand profile?

Cindy: You have to be careful of what you say, especially if you're not the brand spokesperson. As far as legal stuff, she's not sure. Treat it like you would treat any other marketing venue.

Age demographics of Twitter?

Michael's not sure.

Seems heavy handed to only let certain people by your MySpace friend. Do you think you're alienating people?

For her example, they were trying to create a community for a private college. They wanted to create a perception of what the brand was. They wanted to control the image. They didn't want people to think that people who went to this school were heavy drinkers or pot smokers. I have so many problems with that answer.

Barbara: On Facebook you can just be a fan and not necessarily have a friend relationship, so it's a bit different. Even if you're not going to use the social profile, you should claim the one for your company before someone else does.

Randy: In a broader sense, there just may be some brands for whom the social networking sites aren't appropriate. I'm not sure if that's a long term strategy.

Source: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/04/effectively_lev.html

Google's Engineering Philosophy

2008-03-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

A slide from a presentation at last year's Google Engineering Open House listed 12 principles that guide programming at Google:

1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location

Adsense Optimization: How to apply Top Paying Keywords?

2008-03-03T10:57:00.000-08:00

Applying top paying keywords in your website is quite similar to Search Engine Optimization. However, there are many differences as well. I have done in-depth research on the subject. On the basis of that research, I have marked the points you need to keep in mind while optimizing your website for maximum payouts through highest paying Adsense keywords. We will discuss how to apply top paying keywords as well as traffic pulling keywords to a webpage for maximum payouts and traffic. First of all, we must understand that Google Adsense bot (formally known as Google Mediabot) is a subset of Google's main crawler. The crawler detects the theme of the pages and makes an entry in the Google's index (a private index - not shown publicly) that records the theme of all the pages hosting Adsense script. In other words, Google Mediabot has the characteristics somewhat similar to Google's main crawler. There are two types of optimizations that you need to follow to make a web page search engine optimized. Same is the case with Adsense Optimization.
Internal Optimization : Internal Optimization includes Meta tags, Title Text, Optimization of content, and internal linking of your website. Here we will learn how to increase relevancy of ads and how to inject keywords that will help you get high paying ads. Internal Optimization has a high impact on the relevancy of ads and CTR. External Optimization : This includes the web pages that are giving links to you (external profile of your website), anchor text being used to link your website, and many more variables that search engines use to evaluate the authoritative importance of a web page. External Optimization helps bring relevant traffic to your website and enables you to earn more by getting more CTR (Click Thru Ratio).

How long does your webpage take to show high paying ads?

This is an important question that needs to be answered. As soon as you apply Adsense script in a webpage, it is visited by the Google Mediabot (within 2 hours to 48 hours, if the bot is free - immediately). Google Mediabot's responsibility is to evaluate the theme of the web page, and enable ads almost immediately so that your website traffic does not see FREE SERVICE ADS. The relevancy of ads increases as Google's main crawler visits your website and updates its index. Furthermore, you may observe an increase in the earnings as the PR of your website/web page increases. This means that in case of Google Adsense, the internal factors that affect the ads of a particular page are evaluated by Google Mediabot (but Google's main crawler can overwrite them). And on the other hand, the external factors are inspected by the Google Crawler over a period of time. Having said that, there are simply many many factors (including those which you cannot control) that affect your ads. We are going to discuss the factors that you can control. Lets take control!

Remember:

1. Relevancy of ads may increase as your page is indexed by Google.
2. EPC (Earnings Per Click) may increase as your PR increases.
3. It entirely depends upon you how well you promote your website and get maximum earnings from your website/web pages.
4. In case of Google, many variables are involved.

Digg Secrets Exposed - Tips to increase your story visibility on Digg

2008-03-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

Digg.com is one of the most popular social tools which can increase your traffic significantly. A story which makes to digg frontpage recieves anywhere between 5000 - 10000 unique visitors very quickly. Many times its found that digg traffic led to bandwidth overflow and server shutdowns due to more memory use and concurrent MySQL connections. But getting to digg homepage is not at all a easy feat. There are many factors which leads to a story becoming popular on digg. Some people i notice try to ask friends to digg because they think that getting some diggs would get the ball rolling. Its true upto some extent. But a experiment will clear all the doubts. Goto Digg Homepage and see the top 10 stories, you will find that most of them have been submitted 10 - 20 mins ago, some of them make to 500 diggs in just 10 mins. Do those guys ask people to digg?, no never. It is actually a separate set of factors which controls the popularity of stories. Some of the most important digg related points are given below-

1. Importance of the Title and the Topic:- The title of the story must be eyecatching and tempting people to read it out. Perhaps the title is the single most important factor which leads to a person clicking the article and visiting the site. The second thing is the topic. If you write a 1000 words article on the topic “How is Diabetes Treated ?”, OR a 200 words on “Why is my company so great ?” it will probably never attract the interest of people. First thing is no one is going to read 1000 words on diabetes (a small fraction of digg users are suffering diabetes actually ) and probably no one will be interested to know why is your company so great. You need to write topics which immediately create a buzz in the eyes of the people and they are tempted to read it and after reading the first 50 words, they become so interested that they digg the story and read the other parts. Once few people dugg your story, it catches momentum, more people start digging it and within minutes it goes viral and turned into popular.

2. Keep the Content Short and Interesting :- No one would like to read a 1000 words article. People look for short informative, humorous and interesting pieces of content.

3. Numbered Lists are great :- It has been noticed that numbered lists work wonders on sites like digg.com. Interesting lists could be “10 Reasons you should eat a lot of choclates”, “17 Reasons why laptops are better than wives” , “15 Tricks to drive massive traffic to your website”, “101 Tips for successful blogging” etc. are found to hit the homepage instantly.

4. Your Digg Profile :- The single and the most important factor which carries 90% weight and is more important than all the above factors. Its is how strong your digg profile is. Okay take a bit time to read this piece from Rand Fishkin which says that Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s HomePage Content. Guess what ? it is true. If your digg profile is very strong, then you submit a story and and it instantly gets noticed by all famous digg users and undergoes a spontaneous reaction. So the next question is what does a strong profile mean and how to make your profile strong. Okay Christopher Finke has a list of top 100 digg users. Do have a quick look at the list and you will find what makes your profile strong. Its 5 things -

1. Number of stories submitted
2. Number of stories which became popular
3. Popularity Ratio which is the percentage of your submitted stories which became popular. Kevin Rose is the only person who has 100% popularity ratio. Means all the stories which he submitting went popular. Well for those who don’t know Kevin Rose is the founder - CEO if Digg :D
4. The number of stories you dugg
5. The number of distinct people who viewed your profile.

Out of these 5, point number 3 is the most important and point number 5 is least important. You can find all these numbers on your digg profile page right sidebar bottom.

Okay now the question arises is that, how do you build your profile very strong. The answer is simple, its social networking website so focus on the word social. Digg other’s popular stories, add good members to your friends list. Read and comment on other’s stories. Submit good stories to the site (Not necessarily from your own website). If you find a good story on on a big site like CNN, then submit it too. There are more chances that it will quickly make to front page. If it makes to the front page, people view your profile and you ass a friend increasing your credibility. If you follow these then after a few months, you will be able to make it to the top 50 digg users and then any story you submit will again undergo a spontaneous reaction providing you extreme high traffic on your fingertips.

Digg's new algorithm is destroying the digg 'middle class'

2008-03-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

How many great stories are being missed because this flawed algorithm? It's hurting people for having loyal friends - digg decided "friend variety" is a good way to judge the quality of a story. And guess who has lots of random friends? Top users.

I'm the opposite: I submit news from *actual newspapers* but have a small ammount of loyal friends, so I'm punished.

It took 180 diggs for my Mccain story to frontpage. Yet Mrbabyman frontpaged with just 40 diggs recently. Kevin Rose admited it at the Digg Town Hall. (However yesterday Mrbabyman went 0 for 6.)

Of course digg should stop top users from spamming the frontpage, but "user variety" just isn't a good way to promote or punish digg stories.

Why Mozilla Firefox is So Popular?

2008-03-02T07:56:00.000-08:00

If we want to understand the reasons behind Firefox success we have to find the origins of the browser. During, September 2002 the first version of the browser was released to the public called Phoenix. The browser was based on Gecko engine from Mozilla Suite. After, a number of releases the name was changed to Firebird but due to a legal dispute it was changed again to Firefox. This browser has received a great deal of publicity as an alternative browser to Internet Explorer.

There are many factors behind Firefox’s success but I think the added features and the marketing strategy make a whole lot difference in users’ adopting the software. Another thing, I want to add is that Internet Explorer after winning the battle with Netscape’s browser was left with no significant changes. Of course, this has changed with the upcoming new version of windows called Vista and a new version of Internet Explorer. I suppose Microsoft is trying to correct some omissions and bugs in various levels of the browser.

We are now going to explore the main features Firefox has at the moment. One of the main goal of the developers working in Firefox is enhanced usability and accessibility for the end user. Tabbed browsing, where you load many pages on the same window, is a valuable feature in Firefox as it can make your browsing a lot faster. Also, pop-up blocking eliminates those irritating ads and the user can easily find information on a particular page using the ‘find as you type’ feature. The built in search bar includes all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc. and you can add more search engines if you want. People working on the accessibility of the browser have manged to make Firefox work with several screen readers, screen magnifiers and on-screen keyboards. These accessibility features can help people with impairments browse the Internet easier than before.

Another feature Firefox users like very much is that they can customize easily many aspects of the browser. Extensions such as the popular web developer or the Venkman debugger can be added to the browser and enhance the functionality of Firefox. Users, often like to have an appearance according to their preferences so they use different themes in Firefox. Therefore, themes are used to change the visual appearance of the browser.

Security is really important for end users and corporations. Both, want a secure browser that they can trust without the security holes of Internet Explorer and its ActiveX technology. Mozilla Firefox fulfills this requirement mainly by giving the opportunity to other developers to check the code for security bugs and using various successful security techniques and models such as the sandbox security model. In addition, the browser can be used in many different platforms and the source code is freely available for anyone to compile it and contribute to the project.

We have seen numerous features that Firefox has but I would like to talk a little bit about the marketing strategy that is used. The development of the browser is supported by search engines Google and Yahoo through partnerships and mostly by the open source community. Mozilla Foundation which is responsible for the development of the browser believes that community based marketing can be successful. They have proven their point by using a community based marketing web site called spreadfirefox.com. They were able to place an ad on New York Times through donations made by the community of developers and devotees during the release of Firefox 1.0.

The secret behind Firefox’s success is the valuable features available for the user and the enthusiastic community which helps financially through donations and spreads the word.

Google Rejected Logos

2008-02-29T21:10:00.000-08:00

Supposed to be celebrating: Children’s Day 2003.
Reason for rejection: Too childish.

Supposed to be celebrating: 150 Years of Cigarettes.
Reason for rejection: Too politically incorrect.

Supposed to be celebrating: 50th Anniversary of Product Placement.
Reason for rejection: Starbucks didn’t pay enough.

Supposed to be celebrating: 5 Years of Google motto “Don’t be evil.”
Reason for rejection: Too self-obsessed.

Supposed to be celebrating: 130th Birthday of Mondrian.
Reason for rejection: Too abstract.

Supposed to be celebrating: 90th Anniversary of the Copyright Act.
Reason for rejection: Potential trademark infringement for using the © symbol.

Supposed to be celebrating: 20th Anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Reason for rejection: Severe complaints by the Pet Duck Association.

Supposed to be celebrating: The 65th Birthday of Googol, a 1 with 100 zeroes.
Reason for rejection: Too geeky.

Supposed to be celebrating: This was one of two drafts to honor M.C. Escher.
Reason for rejection: Too creepy

Supposed to be celebrating: Two decades of the JPEG image compression algorithm.
Reason for rejection: Compression too lossy.

3 ways Social Bookmarking is Broken and 3 ways to Fix it

2008-02-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

The social bookmarking system (Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc.) is broken, and it has become so top heavy that "gaming" the system and unfair advantages given to "power users" have become the only real way to achieve success, a.k.a. a lot of traffic to your website.

For my regular Today is that Day readers, this post is not going to be about personal development or self improvement. However, it IS going to be about achieving success via your website, so if that is of interest to you, then please keep reading.

A quick Primer on Social Bookmarking

For anyone who doesn't understand why people are spelling "Digg" like that, or anyone who doesn't understand why Stumbling is a good thing, this section is for you. :)

In short, social bookmarking is a system where you find a blog post or a webpage that you like, and you cast a "vote" on sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, etc., which lets other people know that you think they should also check it out.

If someone else likes that content, then they also vote on it, someone else joins in and does the same, yet another person casts a vote, and the process continues like that over and over again. The more "votes" that page gets, the more traffic that it gets as a result.

Traffic is the key to success on the internet. There are other factors, to be sure, but even if you have the best website in the world, if no one ever finds it, you are just spinning your wheels.

So, the general idea is that by voting for content, you help the creator of that content to get more traffic to their website. In return, often the creator of that content will vote for your content as well, and a nice reciprocal stream of traffic is created. That stream of traffic grows larger and larger the more times that people vote for your content.

Sounds great, right? So what's the problem?

1) There is too much voting going on

People have a tendency to think that if something is good, then MORE of it must be better. Sometimes that is the case, but often it is not. When it comes to social bookmarking, more is NOT better, and in fact, the entire process can backfire on you.

Social bookmarking sites are looking for extraordinary content, not just run of the mill stuff. It doesn't matter how great of a writer you are, every single thing that ends up on your blog or your web page is not "vote-worthy". Social bookmarking has become so competitive that people are asking for votes for every single thing that they put up on the Internet, which entirely defeats the purpose of the entire social bookmarking industry.

How you can fix it:

Only vote for content that is TRULY outstanding or useful, and only ASK FOR votes on content that is truly outstanding or useful. Just because you have a fleet of "voting buddies" doesn't mean that every single thing that any of you write is worth sharing with the world at large.

Yes, put up all of the content that you want on your blog or your website, but don't clog up the social bookmarking system by voting for everything that comes your way, or asking for votes on every single thing that you write.

p.s. - Practice what you preach in this regard. Don't sweep other people's content under the rug while only being partial to your own.

2) There are too many social bookmarking sites

Digg is the most heavily-trafficked social bookmarking site (at the moment), followed closely by Stumbeupon. Both of those sites have a lot to offer, yet both also have short-comings. I won't get into the details of that since that is a discussion all by itself.

The same "more is better" mentality that I mentioned above has permeated the social bookmarking website creation sector. Although there are several large(ish) sites such as Reddit, Del.icio.us., and Propeller (to name a few), there are dozens of smaller sites that have popped up as well.

Since most people with websites or blogs want as much traffic as possible, everyone is scattering to get votes at as many of these sites as possible. Again, that seems logical, but it's really not.

Each of these sites has their own unique communities and ways of doing business, and it is simply not possible to be an active member in twelve different social bookmarking communities - not if you have a job and/or a life, that is.

People who are trying to become popular on all of these different websites are just compounding the problem by once again "clogging up" the social bookmarking system, not to mention annoying their social bookmarking friends by asking for votes on so many different websites all the time.

How you can fix it:

Stick to a small number of websites where you are building up your community involvement, and ONLY interact on those websites (for the record, check out the Digg, Stumbleupon, and Mixx buttons below to see me practicing what I preach).

Become an active member in those communities by providing OUTSTANDING content for those communities to vote on, and also vote on other OUTSTANDING stories that you find there. Keep your chosen communities "clean" by not muddying the waters by voting for a bunch of crap content that no one really cares about, and certainly don't provide that type of content yourself.

If you really want to try out more than just 3 or 4 social bookmarking sites, then simply build up your presence in one community, and then move on to other communities later.

3) The contact systems for these websites are broken

Most Digg users have hundreds (if not thousands) of "friends" on Digg, yet the Digg system will only let you send "shouts" out to 15 people at a time letting them know about the content that you want them to check out.

Stumbleupon will only let you send a message to ONE person at a time.

Some of the other sites don't have a messaging system at all.

The entire idea behind social bookmarking is to share outstanding content, yet these websites make it very difficult for you to do that. The reasoning behind that is probably so that hundreds (or thousands) of people don't start spamming each other every day.

The solution to sharing content with people who may be interested enough in your content to vote for it is to make sure that they are interested to begin with!

Adding friends on social bookmarking sites is nothing more than a "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" arrangement, and often that leads to seriously one-sided efforts. One person votes for their "friend's" content all the time, while those alleged friends rarely return the favor.

How you can fix it:

Get involved in social bookmarking groups where all members agree to give due diligence to each other's vote requests, and then manage the entire process via email. Using email requires each person to actually make an effort (what a concept!), rather than just blindly using some broken contact system that includes zero accountability on either end of the equation.

Yes, I can hear you now: I already get too much email!

I am involved with several of these email-only groups right now, and with the exception of Digg (where until today I was using their broken "shout" system) I spend approximately 1 hour per day reading and voting on my friend's requests. When I send emails to those same people asking them to check out my stories, it results in an absolute flood of traffic, because my email partners reciprocate my efforts by voting for my content that is worth voting for.

If you aren't willing to take the time to open an email, click a link, and then cast a vote once you get to the site, then you aren't going to have time to do the same thing using any of the site-specific content sharing functionalities, either.

By doing the entire process via email, you can ensure that your social bookmarking partners are reciprocating your efforts, because it is easy to keep track of who is active and who is not. Even if you have an extremely active email network of social bookmarking partners, it is not difficult to keep track of who is voting for your content.

A Highflier Loses Altitude as Google’s Clicks Go Flat

2008-02-28T05:08:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO — Are Internet users clicking on fewer Google ads and putting the company’s growth prospects at risk?

Those questions are weighing on investors, who have cut the value of Google shares by 38 percent since they peaked at $747.24 in early November.

The slide continued Tuesday when Google shares dropped 4.6 percent to close at $464.19, as investors were spooked by a report by the research firm comScore that said clicks on Google ads the United States were flat in January when compared with a year earlier.

In all, Google’s shares have fallen $283 from their peak, wiping out $83 billion in market value, and bringing a aura of vulnerability, at least on Wall Street, to a company that just four months ago seemed unstoppable.

Investors have focused with new intensity on Google’s so-called paid clicks, which grew at 30 percent in the fourth quarter, because the search and advertising giant earns the vast majority of its revenue from text ads, for which it is paid only when users click on them.

Many analysts saw the comScore report as the clearest sign that Google, which does not give forecasts about its future performance, is not impervious to the slowdown that is buffeting the United States economy.

“There are pretty strong signals now that the economic slowdown is having impact on consumers’ behavior online and therefore having a negative impact on Google,” said Clayton Moran, an analyst with the Stanford Group.

Wall Street analysts say that in addition to concerns about the economy, the company is facing a growing number of questions that are weighing on its shares. Has Google gotten so big that its ability to gain further market share is limited? Is its spending out of control? Will it face stronger competition if its two chief rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, end up merging?

For now, however Google remains a highly profitable company that is outpacing all of its major competitors. Its share of the fast-growing online advertising market in the United States increased to 28 percent last year, from 19 percent in 2005, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

And even some of Google’s biggest critics are reluctant to bet against the company in the long term.

“Everything wrong with Google’s stock is self-inflicted,” said Scott Cleland, an analyst at the Precursor Group, who testified before Congress against Google’s proposed merger with DoubleClick.

Mr. Cleland said the most recent quarter, when Google’s revenue grew at 51 percent while profit rose only 17 percent, was the latest sign that the company was overspending. “If they cut their spending a little, so that they could start gaining earnings momentum again, their stock valuation would return,” he said.

Others point out that the unexpected weakness in “paid clicks” that comScore reported may be the result of deliberate actions taken by Google that may benefit it in the long term.

“I think at least half of it is self-inflicted,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. Mr. Rohan noted that Google has reduced the clickable area in text ads to avoid accidental clicks, which earn it revenue but are of little value to advertisers.

In recent months, Google has taken other measures to improve the usefulness of its ads. For instance, it ended contracts with Web sites whose sole purpose is to carry ads — the kind that Web users are directed to when they mistype a Web address — as those ads tend to deliver poor results for marketers.

Many sophisticated marketers base their search advertising budgets not on the number of clicks they receive, but on the value those clicks create in terms of purchases or sales leads, said Marianne Wolk, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group. If Google weeds out poor quality clicks, advertisers may be willing to pay more for every click, Ms. Wolk said.

Google may be cleaning out poor performing sites from its advertising network so it can market the network more effectively to brand advertisers after its acquisition of DoubleClick, which is being reviewed by regulators in Europe, Ms. Wolk said.

“Google has had this history of making major changes to the platform that have had terrific impact on monetization,” Ms. Wolk said. “Given the track record, we will give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Others went as far as to question the accuracy of comScore’s one-month report. During a Jan. 31 conference call to discuss fourth-quarter earnings, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, repeatedly told investors that the company had not been affected by the economic slowdown.

“I am happy to say that we have not yet seen any negative impact from the rumors of future recessions,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Derek Brown, an analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald, said investors appear to be overreacting to data that Mr. Schmidt’s own statements seem to contradict. Mr. Brown noted that while Google’s share decline is significant, other technology stocks that climbed sharply in 2007, like Apple and Research in Motion, are also down sharply, in part, because of concerns about the economy.

Google’s rate of growth has slowed markedly in recent years, from 92 percent in 2005, to 73 percent in 2006 and 56 percent last year. Growth in the fourth quarter was 51 percent, slightly shy of analysts expectations. While many believe that the slowing trend is inevitable given Google’s growing size, others worry it is happening faster than anticipated.

“The fourth quarter didn’t show the company’s growth falling off a cliff, but it did show a slowdown,” said Mr. Moran, of the Stanford Group. “This is a high flying stock that trades a lot on momentum, and the momentum has turned decidedly negative.”

How Video Ads Will Change Google's AdWords Forever

2008-02-27T17:41:00.000-08:00

By Danny Sullivan Published: February 25, 2008

Last May, I predicted Google's new Universal Search results would open the door for video ads. They're he-ere! Google is running a private test program that allows selected AdWords advertisers to associate video clips with their ads. Below the ads there's a small plus symbol with an invitation to watch a video. Click the symbol, and the video appears and begins to play. Didn't Google have video ads already? Not on its search-results pages. Google video ads appear within YouTube clips and on pages across the web that carry Google AdSense units. But video ads in the sacred Google search results? This is a revolutionary change.

For one, AdWords advertisers have had to shoehorn their messages into a 70-character limit. Well, if a picture's worth a 1,000 words, moving-picture ads will let advertisers blow through the haiku-like restriction. Video ads also open the door for the payment structure to change. Anyone remember that Google ads used to be CPM-based? Cost-per-click pricing was introduced when the AdWords Select program began in 2002 -- and the old cost-per-thousand program was eventually retired. CPM, of course, is nice for building brands. Impressions can matter more than clicks, and video might allow CPM-based ads to return to search pages. That will be especially useful in Google's quest to woo budgets from big accounts looking to build brands. Of course, video could kill the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs. Search ads make money because people find them relevant to what they're searching for and click on them. Dump brand-building video all over the search pages, and the relevancy of the results might be hurt. Maybe. But it doesn't have to be that way. Searching for "blender"? Text ads that come up will be relevant if targeted to that word -- and if they have accompanying video about a particular blender, it likely will be perceived as relevant too. In contrast, thousands of searchers each day look for general topics such as "weather" or "lottery results." A carmaker with a video ad shilling a new model is likely to encounter the hurdles Google will toss up. Are people clicking to play the video? Do they click from the video to a site? Do editors reviewing the ad feel it is relevant? Google's going to protect that search goose. But video is almost certainly going to stick and evolve. Whatever comes, AdWords is about to undergo as radical a change as when silent pictures became talkies.

How Google gains from MS-Yahoo war

2008-02-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

SEATTLE: Neither Microsoft Corp nor Yahoo Inc wants to blink first in the software giant's proposed $41.7 billion takeover of the Web pioneer but as the gamesmanship drags on, arch rival Google Inc, the merger's raison d'etre, is the biggest beneficiary.

Not much has progressed since Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo on February 1, a proposal that was rebuffed by Yahoo's board as under-valuing the company. Microsoft has countered by saying its offer was fair and urged the board to take a second look.

The union of its two biggest Web rivals could eventually loosen Google's grip on online search and advertising, but a messy takeover battle followed by a complicated integration could give Google ample time to build on its advantage.

"Google benefits if Yahoo is in a state of limbo," said RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan. "The longer the uncertainty persists, the greater lead Google has in online advertising."

The impasse between Microsoft and Yahoo has lasted almost a full month and while analysts think that the two companies will eventually strike a deal, the stand-off shows no signs of a quick resolution.

Microsoft has not ruled out a proxy fight to win Yahoo and Yahoo continues to probe for other options. A proxy fight could stretch until July, the latest it could hold its annual meeting this year, followed by a strict regulatory review process in the United States and Europe.

After clearing those hurdles, Microsoft and Yahoo will have to merge two different advertising systems and consolidate completely separate back-end computer systems. Already, Microsoft is seeking to absorb its $6 billion purchase of advertising services company aQuantive from mid-2007.

All the while, Microsoft has to figure out how to head off a feared mass exodus of Yahoo employees while paring back redundant brands.

Microsoft expects the Yahoo transaction to close in the second-half of 2008, but analyst Marianne Wolk at Susquehanna Financial Group said a deal may not be finalized until early 2009, meaning Google may not face a stronger number two in Web search and advertising until 2010.

Google dominance
Google has proven what it can do when given an opportunity to build on a lead. Over the last year, Google's US Web search market share has jumped 11 percentage points, while Yahoo and Microsoft have both posted steady declines, according to research firm comScore. Factor in Web searches done overseas and Google's lead is daunting -- with three-quarters of the world market.

Its profitable search engine allows Google to devote more money toward research and development for growth areas like Web video advertising and search on mobile phones.

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, due for completion later this year, should also shore up its position in display advertising, banner ads placed on Web sites, where it has only begun to make inroads against Yahoo.

Without a clear number two to challenge Google, advertisers and Web site publishers may opt to stick with the status quo. "In the short term, Google is likely to continue to see renewals and traffic wins as various players realize that because of the merger and the time that could take that neither Microsoft or Yahoo could catch up for some time," said Susquehanna's
Wolk.

Microsoft and Yahoo, however, will become a "substantial force" in the online market over time, according to Wolk. At the same time, Google faces its own challenges. Two Wall Street analysts, UBS and BMO Capital, cut stock price targets on Google on Tuesday, citing a comScore report that showed a decline in advertisements delivered by the site in January, even though searches increased in the same period.

Google has raised concerns about a Yahoo-Microsoft deal, saying that coupling the two most often-visited Web portals with Microsoft's desktop software monopoly could undermine competition.

Mountain View, California-based Google could also see its R&D advantage shrink with a combined Yahoo-Microsoft. According to Wolk, Google spends about the same amount of money on Web R&D as Microsoft and Yahoo combined, but as separate entities, there is a lot of overlap in that investment.

"There is a lot of redundant development going on..., and at the end of the day, you don't need both," Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie said at the Goldman Sachs Tech Investment Symposium.

Little Known 'Boring' Websites That Make Incredible Money With AdSense

2008-02-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES — Jerry Alonzy figured he'd be working into his 70s at least.

As an independent handyman at the mercy of weather patterns near Hartford, Conn., he'd always made a decent income that rarely grew.

Then he found Google and his life changed. Alonzy, 57, now makes $120,000 a year from the ads Google places on his Natural Handyman website, and he couldn't be more thrilled.

"I put in two, maybe three hours a day on the site, and the checks pour in," he says. "What's not to like?"

In return for placing its ads on websites and blogs, Google pays Web publishers every time one of its ads are clicked. Those clicks help keep Alonzy and his wife living comfortably and talking about moving to Hawaii. "All I need is a laptop and a high-speed Internet connection, and I can live anywhere."

The Internet may be a young person's medium, but the retired and those nearing retirement such as Alonzy have found that they can work the Web just as well. Sometimes, such "Gray Googlers" can live a richer, more financially rewarding life than when they were supposedly working.

"Google isn't just for kids anymore," says Google executive Kim Scott, who runs the company's AdSense program, the ad platform that provides the income for Web publishers such as Alonzy and others.

Take Jerrold Foutz. The former Boeing engineer, 75, started a website a few years ago devoted to one of his passions — switching mode power supplies, which help drive, for instance, the inside of video cameras.

He put Google ads on his smpstech.com site four years ago. After just one month, the first Google check was for $800. The second check totaled $2,000.

"I thought, 'Wow,' " he said. "This was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. Something I thought would make $50 a year now equals my Boeing retirement check."

That comes out to around $25,000 yearly.

Foutz's experience is not an anomaly.

After Hope Pryor's four kids left home, she grew intrigued with the Internet and learned how to design a Web page. She didn't want it to focus on just her, so she posted some of her favorite recipes on the site.

Now, her Cooks Recipes site is bringing in nearly $90,000 yearly, mostly from Google ads. The holidays are the biggest-producing months of the year.

"Last December alone, I netted $30,000 from Google," she says. "There's not too many people I know who can walk into a car dealership and buy two vehicles at one time. I did just that recently."

While the upside of working with AdSense sounds exhilarating, it's not that way for everybody.

Scott says she posted an unsold novel on Google and earns about $5 a month from the AdSense ads on the site. Al Needham, 74, who runs a site about the care of bees (bees-online.com) from his home near Boston, reaps about $250 a month.

"Forget about getting rich overnight," says Alonzy. "It takes time to learn."

Jennifer Slegg, a consultant whose JenSense blog is devoted to tips for using so-called contextual advertising, says the easy part is getting AdSense up and running. Google provides computer code that must be copied and pasted onto a website. Figuring out how to do that "is very easy for new publishers."

Foutz says even if you've never cut and pasted code before (hint: On Windows PCs, highlight the text, press Control C to copy, then Control V to paste it), "Just follow what Google says. They have very easy-to-understand instructions."

Hard work, big reward

Introduced in 2003, AdSense was an outgrowth of Google's AdWords program, which put sponsored ads at the top of search results at Google's own site. Google created AdSense as a way to expand beyond search listings and onto hundreds of thousands of websites and blogs.

Google rivals Yahoo and MSN have similar programs, but they have found limited acceptance on the Web, where Google dominates both search, with more than 50% market share, and search advertising, with 90%.

Now everyone from big sites such as the New York Times and CNN.com to mom and pop operations such as Cooks Recipes and Natural Handyman have the familiar "Ads by Google" text-box somewhere on their site.

"With AdSense, we fund creativity on any topic," says Google's Scott. "If you have a subject you know something about, write about it, find a like-minded audience on the Internet and we'll take care of monetizing the content."

Or, as Joel Comm, author of the AdSense guidebook The AdSense Code, puts it: "People are amazed. They say, 'Really, all I have to do is write, Google will put ads on my site and pay me?' Yes, it's that simple."

There is a little more to it. The folks who reap the biggest rewards put in long hours setting up their site and feeding it lots of content.

"Write about what you know, write like mad and often," says Alonzy. "The more you write, the more opportunities you have to make money. If you post 500 pages on a topic, you'll have 500 pages with ads, and many more potential clicks."

Google's computers scan the content on Web pages to match it with appropriate advertisers. Articles on Alonzy's website about how to keep mice away might result in ads for pest control services, while a recipe for turkey casserole at Cooks Recipes might generate ads for diet tips and beauty makeovers.

"The beauty of our system is that we have so many advertisers," says Scott. "The content may not change, but our ads change every day. So you'll always see something different there."

Slegg says the biggest mistake new AdSense publishers make is clicking on AdSense ads — their own or others. That's a big no-no in Googleland, and can get you dumped from the program.

The computer won't break

Alonzy and other Gray Googlers say they haven't experienced any problems working in a young person's world.

"Many people my age are scared of computers; they think they're going to break them," says Needham. "The computers aren't going to break. But you won't find out unless you get in there and try."

At $250 a month, Needham's site generates revenue in line with its niche audience of folks who want to learn about bees.

"I bring in enough to fund a free vacation to Key West every year for the family," says Needham, a retired Department of Defense employee.

One stumbling block for many people is translating a great idea into a nice-looking Web page.

In the past, creating a Web page required knowledge of complicated HTML computer code, or learning off-the-shelf Web design software such as Microsoft's FrontPage or Adobe's Dreamweaver.

Now, Google and Yahoo have free tools to create Web pages or blogs. And many Internet website-hosting companies (such as GoDaddy and Brinkster) have online site creators that come as part of their monthly fees. Apple's iWeb is another such tool. With these, AdSense can be automatically added to your pages with the click of a mouse.

"When you retire, you have to have some interests," says Needham. "This is my indoor activity. I did a search online for how to create a website and found lots of good help out there for nothing."

The Internet, he says, opened up a new world for him.

"I started searching for other sites about bees and met some people from Australia with similar interests. We've since become friends, and I went to Australia last year to visit."

The same thing happened with Gail Bjork, 63, who runs the Digicamhelp site from her home base near Tampa. She designed her site but made a friend online in Ireland who has since redesigned it for a more professional sheen.

"My background was art," says Bjork. "I was an art teacher. I didn't know about code. My friend does. So now she handles the design, and I operate the site."

Bjork is a former local school board member who ran a print shop with her husband. A camera buff, she started the site because her friends were always asking for photo tips.

"This started as something to help my friends, and I've gone from a 14-page site to one with over 700 pages," she says. "I'm legally retired now — but not mentally."

Her site brings in around $1,500 a month. Bjork's advice to others: "For anyone, no matter what age they are, if they find something they truly love, write about it. You have nothing to lose but time. And it could really pay off."

Google sued over defamatory postings found on web search

2008-02-20T19:38:00.000-08:00

Google, the world's biggest search engine, is being sued by a London businessman in a landmark legal action that could hold the US-based company liable for the publication of inaccurate, malicious or damaging material on the internet.

The case, the first of its kind in this country that seeks to make search engines responsible for the content of the internet - could trigger severe restrictions on the free flow of information on the web.

Last night, internet experts warned that if the action was successful it would mean Google could be held liable for the content of 11.5 billion web pages.

The case is being brought by a 48-year-old man from Wembley who has instructed a City law firm to begin defamation proceedings after the search engine directed users to web pages that the businessman claims contained "deeply offensive and commercially damaging" material about his enterprises.

In one anonymous posting on an internet discussion forum, Brian Retkin, managing director of the internet company dotworlds, is wrongly accused of cashing in on the 11 September attacks on America by offering the free registration of domain names to the US in a way that took advantage of the fervent patriotism at the time. In other anonymous postings, he is wrongly and groundlessly accused of conducting fraudulent business.

The allegations are believed to have originated in America, where it is much more difficult to succeed in a libel claim.

US judges have ruled that search engines and other third party internet service and product providers are immune from defamation lawsuits. But in Britain, similar legal protection is conditional on the company not having notice of the complaint. And in Britain that area of the law is yet to be fully tested.

Mr Retkin, whose internet company is a domain name registrar (a company that allows customers to register domain names on the internet), says he has spent three years trying to persuade Google to permanently remove the libellous allegations from its search results.

In a letter sent to Google, Franklin Price, a litigation partner at the law firm Jeffery Green Russell, has given formal notice of the defamation action under the court's pro-action protocol.

"There comes a point," said Mr Retkin, "when someone must take responsibility for this material. These allegations were posted anonymously so there is no way of suing the author. Where it has appeared on internet discussion forums we have asked them to remove it but it keeps popping up again at other internet addresses. The only solution is for Google to remove it and give an undertaking they will remove it permanently."

In legal correspondence between Mr Retkin and Google, a California-based company with sales and marketing offices in London, claims it has "blacklisted" the offending links and removed the material complained of by Mr Retkin. It also rejects the idea that it should be responsible for the contents of links produced in an internet search.

In an email written by Google's legal counsel Harjinder Obhi, the company argues: "Google is not responsible for the content of any result of a query which may be presented to a user of Google's web search service. Google has absolutely no connection, control or ability to direct or influence the content of web pages which may be shown as links within any given set of search results."

Defamation on the internet

Internet publishers rightly fear the libel laws in this country, which are much stricter than those of other jurisdictions. They know the onus is on them to prove the truth of any statement found on their websites. Recent UK case law has established that a company based outside the jurisdiction may not be immune from litigation in this country if the material can be read by internet users in this country.

A successful defamation ruling against a search engine such as Google would have dramatic consequences for thousands of similar organisations or internet product providers which refine, channel and forward information. The reason that has not already happened is that the Defamation Act 1996 offers a defence to an internet product or service provider where it can claim it is unaware of defamatory or potentially defamatory material it is hosting or material arising from a search result. This protection is supported by the Electronic Commerce (EC) Directive, 2002. But the Defamation Act stipulates that once the company has been put on notice about a complaint it must take action to remove the material or block access.

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Friday, 29 June 2007

What is Search Engine Optimization?

2008-02-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

The term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. In the past, has also been used as a term for any type of search engine marketing activity, though now the term search engine marketing is more commonly used as an umbrella term. A number of factors are important when optimizing a website, including the content, Meta tags & anchor tags for designing and development of any successful online ranking. And structure of the website's copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process. Well optimized & Top SEO can help a site reach targeted goals much sooner than possibly imagined, simply by adhering to simple rules and guidelines and implementing these experts' methods in such a way that is friendly to all online search engines. SEO campaigns can range from targeting a particular product or service on a website, to the majority of its content and its specialist's subject matter. Generally a client wishes to freely advertise their website on the internet with the most popular search engines in the most efficient and successful possible ways.

Contact Neonsolutions.net for more information

Reason Why Your Rankings Suddenly Drop

2008-02-20T15:30:00.000-08:00

First of all let me state that there are several reason why a site rankings drop so fast. The most common reason is because your website has very few backlinks. Some twenty backlinks on your linkspage are a surefire sign you have too many little backlinks.

If your competitors are getting more backlinks then you are, they outrank you and your rankings drop.

Rankings won't drop because you have some incorrect information on your website or some false keyword density.

First you need to start getting backlinks, everyday get around 15-30. You can get more than that but the important thing is you get same number of links everyday. A 100 everyday will be difficult while 15-30 is realistic.

The concept behind it.

Getting backlinks regularly like that means something important to the search engines. It means your website is very good, since everyday people are linking to it. That is what search engines think when they see new backlinks everyday.

So it's easy. 15-30 is not that big and with certain automated software you can get 50, 100 or more daily.

If you are going to get backlinks create a link directory on your website. A one page links page is not a well created directory. It must contain categories and subcategories and link from the homepage.

You can invest in some scripts that that creates such directories, there are many of them.

OutBound Links means links pointing to another website from your own. In simple terms linking to another website is like giving them some of your pagerank, they get rewarded and you do not want to reward your competitors or any other website.

You link to other websites on your links page and if they do not link back you can and should remove their link from your website. That also makes a difference in your rankings.

When doing SEO it is a good idea to focus on one few keywords. Find some 3 or 4 and focus on getting backlinks, changing the anchor text in the backlinks using all keywords. So it's like optimizing your homepage for 3 or 4 keywords only. A great start to get some traffic and money. Then you can optimize some other pages for some other keywords, or the same page for new keywords. You also become good at SEO and you get some experience.

When creating meta tags make sure your other site pages have different meta tags, not identical.

So the very important things are the number and quality of backlinks you have. Give the search engines what they need in order to reward you with high rankings.

Protecting your Search Engine Ranking...

2008-02-20T15:20:00.000-08:00

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search
engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of mis perception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you
must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods." You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a "Pagerank" which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar. Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection. There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.

These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to
index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing." It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you
can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called "Keyphrase Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance," be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking." To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as

"pagejacking." This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of "off page" elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.

Internet Marketing: What You Need To Know

2008-02-20T15:16:00.000-08:00

Marketing tactics for the internet include such things as search engine and email marketing, reciprocal linking, publicity, shopping carts, and other tactics such as partnership building. Many of the successful gurus of internet marketing have achieved this status through aggressive branding and advertising of themselves. While advertising can be quite effective, it can also backfire on you, putting you out of business just as quickly as it can help you.

By offering a large variety of products, services and marketing schemes, you can protect yourself from unpredictable shifts in the marketplace. If you carefully manage this situation, the majority of your business will remain secure as any single particular sector or product becomes less attractive to your customers.

Customers are prospects too. Stay in contact with them. Find or develop other products or services you can offer them. It's easier to make a sale to a previous customer than to someone who never bought from you. Avoid making any claim that sounds exaggerated, even if it is true. A bold claim creates doubt in your prospect's mind and jeopardizes the sale. Reduce any bold claims to a more believable level.

To create an absolutely irresistible offer, combine a special discount price and a set of valuable bonuses in the same offer. Develop a series of 4 or 5 different special offers. Use them one at a time with an expiration deadline. When one offer expires, replace it with the next offer and a new deadline. Continuously recycle through the same series of offers. This enables you to keep using special offers to generate sales without taking time to develop new ones.

Do you attract numerous potential customers for your product or service, only to find out that time and time again these promising leads don't possess sufficient capital to follow through on an investment? Perhaps you should consider new markets. Focus on markets that have an encouraging need for what you provide, and the dollars to follow through. A wise idea would be to broaden the appeal of your product or service by promising unique benefits that cannot or will not be mimicked by your competitors.

Advertising copy produces the biggest response when each reader can believe the message was written specifically for him or her. As you write any sales message, visualize you're writing to one person instead of to a large group of people. This will help you write in a less formal and more personal style.

How Google Page Rank is Calculated?

2008-02-20T15:11:00.000-08:00

This is where it gets tricky. The PR of each page depends on the PR of the pages pointing to it. But we wonâ€™t know what PR those pages have until the pages pointing to them have their PR calculated and so onâ€¦ And when you consider that page links can form circles it seems impossible to do this calculation!

But actually itâ€™s not that bad. Remember this bit of the Google paper:

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web.

What that means to us is that we can just go ahead and calculate a pageâ€™s PR without knowing the final value of the PR of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation weâ€™re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much.

Lets take the simplest example network: two pages, each pointing to the other:

Each page has one outgoing link (the outgoing count is 1, i.e. C(A) = 1 and C(B) = 1). Guess 1

we donâ€™t know what their PR should be to begin with, so letâ€™s take a guess at 1.0 and do some calculations: d = 0.85 PR(A) = (1 â€" d) + d(PR(B)/1) PR(B) = (1 â€" d) + d(PR(A)/1)

i.e. PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 1 = 1 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 1 = 1

Hmm, the numbers arenâ€™t changing at all! So it looks like we started out with a lucky guess!!! Guess 2

No, thatâ€™s too easy, maybe I got it wrong (and it wouldnâ€™t be the first time). Ok, letâ€™s start the guess at 0 instead and re-calculate: PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0 = 0.15 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.15 = 0.2775 NB. weâ€™ve already calculated a â€œnext best guessâ€ at PR(A) so we use it here

And again: PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.2775 = 0.385875 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.385875 = 0.47799375

And again PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.47799375 = 0.5562946875 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 0.5562946875 = 0.622850484375

and so on. The numbers just keep going up. But will the numbers stop increasing when they get to 1.0? What if a calculation over-shoots and goes above 1.0?

Guess 3

Well letâ€™s see. Letâ€™s start the guess at 40 each and do a few cycles:

PR(A) = 40 PR(B) = 40

First calculation PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 40 = 34.15 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 34.15 = 29.1775

And again PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 29.1775 = 24.950875 PR(B) = 0.15 + 0.85 * 24.950875 = 21.35824375

Yup, those numbers are heading down alright! It sure looks the numbers will get to 1.0 and stop

Hereâ€™s the code used to calculate this example starting the guess at 0: Show the code | Run the program

* Principle: it doesnâ€™t matter where you start your guess, once the PageRank calculations have settled down, the â€œnormalized probability distributionâ€ (the average PageRank for all pages) will be 1.0

Impressing Google!

2008-02-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

While it's true that there are many different strategies that can be used to optimize a web site for search engine success, one of the most overlooked methods for improving search engine placements is building up your web site's credibility. When you provide your visitors with lots of useful, relevant information on your web site, you create professional credibility and establish your expertise in your industry. When your web site is credible, people will naturally want to link to all of your good information, and your pages will likely be loaded with the keywords and phrases that matter most to your company as well. In other words, a credible web site has many of the elements that impress Google the most!

Brownie Points From Google
One of the ways you can help build your web site's credibility is to create an online glossary for your site and link to it from the rest of your pages. Think about it - we know that Google gives you points for using your keywords in the text of your links, so why not pick up some extra points by linking your key terms to a glossary that further explains them? This is also extremely helpful to visitors who are on your site to learn about your company, products, and services as well.

Credibility Through Repetition
Let's say, for example, your business sells insurance, and that each type of insurance that you sell has its own web page. Now imagine that some of your important keywords like "auto insurance," "life insurance," and "renters insurance" are linked directly to a glossary page that contains these keywords, plus a short description of each. In this example, you've used your keywords as links, and repeated the keywords on the glossary page as well as on the product pages. All of this contributes to the credibility of your web site as Google sees it.

Thinking Like a Spider
A glossary page is inherently loaded with specific words and phrases that are relevant to your business. When a search engine "spider" visits your glossary, it sees these words and phrases and also sees that they are cross-linked and used throughout your other web pages as well. So what's a spider to think? It would probably think that your site is very important, relevant, and credible. And credible web sites can lead to more web site traffic, increased inbound links, and ultimately improve your search engine placements in Google. Now that's impressive!

About the Author

Lauren Hobson is the Editor of Biz Talk Newsletter and the Five Sparrows Marketing Blog from Five Sparrows, LLC. Read the most recent Five Sparrows articles on small business websites and marketing or subscribe at www.fivesparrows.com/biztalk. Copyright 2007

Why SEO help is required?

2008-02-20T14:59:00.000-08:00

With more and more websites getting launched everyday competition is increasing. Increasing the rank of website to see it on top of search engine is a tough task nowadays. Lots of efforts are required for making a website unique and distinct from rest of websites. Deriving good results from search engine optimization is not an easy job and seeking help of qualified web promotion expert to ensure optimization and high quality traffic is a must.

To begin search engine promotional activities one need to create search engine friendly website with use of proper navigation structures and clear coding. After this, website must follow major search engines as Google and Yahoo guidelines.

A SEO help will provide perfect keyword analysis and help in promoting website accordingly. SEO help will enable one to understand different aspects of SEO including on page optimization, building quality links, keyword analysis and off page optimization. This will improve website search engine ranking for different keywords and will make web developer understand SEO better.

With SEO help one can generate online presence of website. In order to promote one need to spread the message about the name and the services of website. One can even write press releases about products and submit it online to make it familiar to people. Also one can make post description of website in online journals and newspapers. These are some of means of quickly spreading the message of arrival in online business. This helps to attracts visitors to website and generate more enquiries and leads.

Like on page optimization, link building, keyword analysis, article distribution services, providing quality content for websites, quality articles, off page optimization including forums posting, blogs and press releases are attributes of SEO help provided by expert.

Numerous SEO companies sell SEO expert skills and expertise providing SEO help. But one must check if these companies are efficient in getting website to top search engines rankings or not. While seeking SEO help results matter and one should look for genuine factors.

MSN gains on search market share

2008-02-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

MSN is finally making gains against giant search engines as Google and Yahoo! MSN literally lost years of search market share and have now at least made minor gains against Google.

Latest ComScore results have revealed that following are major engines:

Google site dropped a total of 1.2% with 50.7% market share in May 2007 and 49.5% share in June 2007.
Yahoo1 had market share of 26.4% in May 2007 and 25.1% in June 2007 with overall drop of 1.3%.
Microsoft site had an overall gain of 2.9% with 10.3% in May and 13.2% in June.
The ask network was steady at 5.0% market share.
The Time Warner Network dropped from 4.6% to 4.2% from May to June 2007.

ComScore also disclosed some other facts and statistics as:

- In June 2007, Americans conducted 8.0 billion online searches which was 6 percent higher than may 2007 and almost 26 percent more when compared with June 2006 results.
- Google solved 4.0 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo sites with 2.0 billion and Microsoft sites with 1.1 billion search queries handled. Ask network had 403 million and Time Warner Network dealt with 341 million search queries. The search market in June declined but still Google and yahoo had increased search query volume.
- Microsoft sites experienced a momentous increase in search query volume which is about 36 percent up and search engine share with approximate 2.9 share points up in June. Microsoft launched a large part to live search club, in late may which engaged and rewarded users of live search.

ComScore is a great base to know about search market share and even lets one know about latest hit search engine which helps web developers a lot.

How to chose the right Anchor Text ?

2008-02-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

Anchor text is clickable text associated with a link. Google looks at the anchor text, freshness of anchor text and changes to anchor text over time.

If there is any gap between the anchor text and document linking it which may be possibly due to changes in domain ownership, Google can look at time this occurred and can even ignore all valuable links to document prior to event.
People linking to document should use appropriate anchor text for linking. Google analyses the unique words, bigrams (pair of letters, words or syllables) and phrases in anchor text for a document.
Google analyzes graphs or unique words, bigrams and phrases in anchor text and checks if information is correct or not. Results created artificially show spiky graphs while natural data shows organic graphs.
One should not SPAM or try to SPAM he search engine with help of unscrupulous link trading or search companies as it can lead to website being black listed, lowered ranking or even worse site can also get banned.

SEO and Blogging

2008-02-17T17:49:00.000-08:00

SEO and blogging together provide unbeatable combination to web developer not only for free advertising but also for making film.

If the website or blog has intention to provide information or to op0erate a website on a non profit making basis, then combination of search engine optimization and blogging will work to perk up traffic level to website. If making money is sole aim for website which can be either for paying bit extra to credit cards or as only means of income, one can use blog and design website properly to enhance traffic flow.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO or search engine optimization is first and quick way towards improved traffic levels of website. If website looks good to search engines then it will have higher chances of being listed. Google is the best and one needs to be listed among top in Google and rest of search engines will follow it themselves. Each web page and even home page should be designed around one keyword or key phrase. Using more than one key phrase for a page will hamper and web developer will fail to gather traffic to website.

…. tags and should even include page keyword in it. It is not necessary that only keyword should be used a line can be used to describe web page but should essentially include keyword in it. For instance, if keyword for a web page is ‘using blogs’ so title can be modified to ‘using bogs and SEO to make money.’ Also for key phrase ‘weight loss’ one can use ‘check great weight loss programs’ as title. Meta tags should be avoided or used only if one has time. They can’t be used for quick way. The page title should be put in

This way one can get an optimized size title which should not be too short or too long. Web developer can also utilize keyword in attractive and efficient manner. The first headline or heading should be put in H1 html tags but one need not worry of purity of html as Google doesn’t give a throw as long it can understand H1 tags and title.

If one has graphics such as payment graphics provided by Clickbank adding an alt relation to it : is beneficial. This graphic will also reinforce the information that theme of page is using blogs.

Keyword should be used in first 100 characters of body html for example title ‘using blogs’ can be expressed as “Using blogs in combination with good webpage SEO has been proved time and again an extremely effective technique in the science of making money. The secret is to understand the needs of bloggers and of search engine users, and how to combine the two into a single money-generating machine that one can design to work on autopilot while you work on your next money-spinning project.”

In this illustrated pattern keyword is used as heading and is included among first line of 100 characters description of page. Keyword and rest of title is used immediately in first sentence. Keyword can also be used again in last line which will attract crawlers and give a head start to competitors.

The theme of bog can be continued and one can have another section on same page with related heading as “using SEO and blogs”. It should be contained within H2 tags which expands on theme of blogs and SEO and introduce concept of using blogs and web pages together to mutual benefit.

Internal Linking Strategy

It needs to be done on each page but every page should be optimized for different keywords that have been identified as being worth while to use for website. Apart from utilizing SEO and keywords, one must also design internal linking strategy for best advantage. Strategy should be such that it allows visitors to easily navigate between pages and reach pages they want to see such as privacy policy and contact details.

It also means leading search engine spider to dance to developer’s tunes and not on Google tunes. Spider can lead to pages one want it to see when required and can even bar it from seeing those pages that it doesn’t have to see. Pages barred from spiders can be navigated by humans by simply placing a big ‘humans only’ sign above door which won’t let spiders get in.

Blogging

Blogs should be updated indicating every change in website, and should even be optimized for different keywords which are used by website. Blogs with keywords work best for web pages and also bring website into healthy competition with competitors.

Articles in blogs are different from article directories which advertise only limited websites or products. Blogs can be used to advertise number of websites and products. This is one of major benefit of blogs when used in conjunction with websites. Blogs can be used to advertise website and similarly website can be used to advertise blogs. In both way links between both sites will be benefited and over all increase in web traffic will result.

If blog is pinged to every website one is registered with then one can get more traffic to website than one would have got using SEO only. Blogs are free so they can be very beneficial in promoting website.

Conclusion

If web developer uses easy SEO and takes care of all elements mentioned, one will get great chances of website home page being listed high on Google and other search engines. If one uses blogs to advertise site not only to other bloggers but also to social bookmarks and numerous websites that can be joined, than one can achieve success in less time.

If blogging and website working is not utilized together for traffic flow than one may not be successful.

Google algorithm update analysis

2008-02-17T17:38:00.000-08:00

Anybody who monitors website ranking with same dynamism as SEO community notices will have observed the remarkable shifts in algorithm within two-three days. Ranking at most of search engines changes even from Thursday evening to Monday morning. Many sites rocket up into top 10 and others get dropped at same time. Many websites are on losing end of equation and some are fortunate to have sudden jumps into top positions. Adjustments in algorithm are common. After spending a weekend analyzing the results may invoke interest that can result in further twist in ranking system. Ranking update revolves around three main areas which are domain age, back links and page rank.

DOMAIN AGE
Google is currently suspiciously giving a lot of weight to the age of a domain. Age of a domain can be used as a factor in determining how strong a site or company is. Many new sites offer great information and innovative ideas. And a lot of older sites get hit in update. Google’s purpose of using domain age as a whole is a good filter which allows it to “sandbox” sites on day one which insures that they aren’t just being launched. During “wild west days” of SEO ranking of a site was a matter just of cramming keywords into content and use of questionable methods which generate links quickly. Adding in domain delay was an excellent step which insured benefits of pumping out domains. Domain age can be used to add value to site up to a point. After period of time, domain age had only very small influence on site’s ranking with countless factors overshadowing site’s data. During recent updates, domain age has been changing and presently holds disproportionate weight. A number of examples illustrate less qualified domains ranking higher than newer sites of higher quality. Google works to maximize searchers experience which changes ranking algorithm accordingly.

BACK LINKS
Back links are calculated and valued with some adjustments in latest updates as well. A couple years of back Google used to have same old game for ranking which was realized as adjustments are required. Back links are valued in a way which appears to have almost no grasp on relevancy and places importance on sheer numbers. Sites having large, unfocused reciprocal link directories are out ranking sites with less but higher relevant links. Recently non reciprocal links lost the advantages they were supposed to have over reciprocal links. In present atmosphere, a reasonable sized site with large recip link directory can also be enough to get good ranking. But this can not stand as indefinite reason behind ranking.

PAGE RANK
Page rank has lost of its importance which pertains to value of a back link. Google has taken this very strong and intelligent step with reducing importance of page ranks as they mean little in terms of site’s importance. Page rank is a less than perfect calculation subject with abuse and manipulation from pesky people in SEO community. It serves as a purpose and while it need to replace it seems that it have not been replaced with anything of significant value. It is believed that page rank is being replaced or will be replaced by trust rank but Google is still not giving green signal to trust rank. Either Google is considering both trust rank and page rank as irrelevant and have decided to scrap both. Or Google has shifted some weight from page rank to trust rank up to some extent and are currently sorting out issues with trust rank calculations. Issues with trust rank are not clear as its due weight in overall algorithm is unclear and this shift from page rank to trust rank will reduce importance of page rank and will offer relevant calculations in evidence.

CONCLUSION
One can expect an update in ranking system of Google in every few days. Google is experiencing regular updates over the past few months and a current round of new update should not surprise any one. Many of other issues are gaining importance and implying them may change ranking system. Regarding aging of domains, aging delay and sandbox is a solid filter for Google and it needs to have a maximum duration. Next updates will see changes in areas as older trust domains having slight weight. A site of 2000 will no longer be more relevant than site from 2004. Google may have changes with back links calculated in similar way unless they decide to revert back to issues of 2003. Lower page rank with high relevancy links can once again surpass high quantity and less relevant links. Google is getting better day by day and determining relevancy of each factor. Current algorithm issues being utilized by Google has more to do with weight for different factors than inability to properly calculate link relevancy. Google may shift back to page rank and give it importance till they find out what went wrong with their experience with trust rank. With the update coming up round this weekend, Google will see shift back to last week results and will work on issues and launch new algorithm shift next weekend. So those web developers who have found a sudden jump from page 6 to top 3 may not celebrate so soon as soon they can experienced some drop which will panic them. Many adjustment to Google ranking algorithm system have to be made and those who have used perfect SEO practices and have been consistent in ranking will get back to their ranks with latest update.

Effective Keyword Choice Strategy and Useful Tools

2008-02-16T08:42:00.000-08:00

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Getting Started with Search Engine Optimization
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There are several ways to describe the enigma that is keyword marketing. The use of carefully selected words to optimize a site’s content for search engines presents one explanation. Keywords will be relevant words and parts of phrases that relate to the site content. This article will give you plenty of tips for choosing those all-important keywords.

So what kinds of keywords should you use? Well, to coin a few simple examples, if you have a site that focuses on mobile phones, some keywords might be "mobile, mobile phone, phone tariffs, cellular," etc. If it is a movie information site, keywords could be "movie, movies, film, films, horror, sci-fi, action, cinema"......and so forth.

One correctly targeted keyword will produce a better overall search engine ranking than keywords just generally placed. That does mean that both targeted and general keyword types will help the site maintain a high ranking. With the mobile phone and movie site examples above, the search engines will know the site theme while "crawling" the site pages. This is where the keyword power needs to be utilized. If the user wants to find mobile phone sites that host budget phones, he or she may type the keywords mentioned above.

The presence of that keyword placed strategically across the site is a factor in determining whether or not the site is ranked high in a search on sites like Yahoo. Many users will type broader search criteria into the search engines if they are uncertain of exactly what they seek. They may be wondering what the best mobile deals are at present, but do not know which model, service provider, etc. they should favor. So the keywords above in the first paragraph would fall into this generalized category and can produce very general but also occasionally foggy results. This positioning and choice of keywords is crucial for a site towards SEO optimization.

So, what are the most useful keywords for a site?

Establish what keywords are most used in the context of the site content and theme. The SEO campaign begins at this point and does not need to be an arduous process. There is no set number of keywords that can be put forward here for driving traffic. If keyword density is to be utilized, a ball park figure can be derived by dividing the number of instances of the keyword by the total number of words in the content. Then multiply by a hundred to see the keyword density percentage. Safe figures fall between 10 - 15% and up to 25% but this is just a guideline and not a rigid rule. The point is that your keywords depend on your target audience's needs, and what keywords they will use to locate sites that will provide the information sought through a search on Yahoo or Google.

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How to choose the Best Keywords
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First, think about the theme of the site and write down the most popular words that come to mind. Ensure they are words that are likely to be used in finding the site's content. Remember what was mentioned previously about targeted and generalized keywords. Make a list of both types; go over the site content, read it carefully.

Using whatever web design software is necessary, bold the words found or underline them and work out the keyword density for each for the top four or five keywords. This assumes that the content has been written and SEO optimization is now required. If the content is yet to be written, just be conscious from the start of the placement of the keywords chosen.

When compiling the list of keywords, bear in mind what will be sought on search engines by the target audience. The focus of the site should revolve around the keywords, not the other way round. Knowing the target audience will enable some instant keyword choices. Try some searches on Yahoo using the keywords and also other key phrases. See what is found and make notes of the top keywords leading to similar sites.

Don't worry about absolute accuracy at this point. Reviews of some great SEO tools will follow to help the process of developing an effective SEO plan. The initial main factors to consider are:

* Popular keywords related to the site theme.
* Keywords should reflect the focus of the site's target audience.

Do the research first, and then move onto developing that killer SEO plan.

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The SEO Strategy
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Once the keyword research has been carried out, there should be a list of relevant and powerful words to add to the site content. The research must be done thoroughly to establish what keywords will drive web surfers to a site. Start with a list of words commonly used by web surfers. The strategy is about becoming known on the web, bringing the site to the web surfers so they become visitors and, in turn, customers.

It is worth checking what sites are found through the most popular words. Why are the keywords bringing up this list and what are the visitors buying from that site or reading? From this, a developing plan of action will emerge showing where potential customers are going. This will generate a plan to drive traffic to a site on a regular basis. Bear in mind that whether or not the site sells services or products or just information, it is the content that people will want to see and the reason why retention will occur by keeping those visitors coming back for more.

Check the results from top engines like Yahoo and Google in selected keywords. Scrutinize competitor sites. What do they possess that attracts their customers? Take a look at the " " tags in the source code of the site as they will show what keywords attracted the traffic generated.

Take a look at the SEO tools right here on SEO Chat on the left hand side. There are various tools of interest here to help with SEO optimization. The Adsense calculator is a great way to estimate potential earnings. Even better, if the page impressions and cost per click is already known, a projected earnings forecast can be calculated. This is a great tool for this task. Read about the Adsense program at http://google.adsense.com. Google pays those enrolled in the program for displaying ads on their site that are relevant to the site's content. This is a strong way to drive potential traffic.

The Google Keywords tool is a good starting point when evaluating the strength of a chosen keyword. Use the tool to provide keywords relevant to the key term entered. The popularity of that keyword will be evident and the choices can be taken forward. Additionally, the Overture Keywords tool should be used in tandem for best results. The Robots.txt generator will help the creation of a file that can be configured to block pages from search engines that you desire to hide. While using the search engines to evaluate what keywords are the most popular, try comparing the results of Yahoo to Google with the Google VS Yahoo tool.

Question the keywords. Are they words that would be used to find the site being promoted? Another little trick is to deliberately misspell words in the keyword list for the tags as there are some pretty horrendous spellers out there e.g. mobile could also be written as mobil.

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SEO & PPC Strategies
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Pay per Click campaigns are regularly used by Internet marketers and web designers to promote their sites. They can also earn you a lot of money; those bucks turn up in thousands for the most effective plans out there. It is, however, a process that requires a large amount of work. Essentially, if a surfer clicks an ad placed by the designer, that designer receives a fee from the advertiser. Where Google Adwords is concerned, bids are placed on keywords that will be used by web surfers while searching for the site's products. Keyword bids start from as little as one cent a word up to many dollars. Thus, skills employed by the marketer to carefully select the words will decide whether money is accumulated or lost.

Another strategy is link sharing. There are bound to be similar sites that may already have heavy traffic on their pages. Sharing links with such sites, and therefore traffic, benefits both parties. The best way to accomplish this is to write articles as part of a blog or for free article submission sites like articlesbase.com. Write articles on the theme of the site on submission sites. Links back to the site being promoted can be placed in these articles. Find blogs and forums that will allow the hosting of articles with links that will allow visitors to click through to the site.

Here is a short list of SEO points to keep in mind:

Keyword research on site theme.
PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords and Adsense.
Link sharing.
Articles written about the site products and services containing links.
Strong use of keywords on the home page to maximize initial SEO strength.
Placing the most effective keywords and phrases in the description tags.

There are more methods, though these will provide a strong base for any future SEO plan.

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Effective SEO with Web CEO
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Finally, I'd like to share a review of a truly magical tool for carefully formulating an SEO plan complete with keyword and PPC optimized campaigns. It is called Web CEO and can be found at http://www.webceo.com. It is a complete package and is also free.

What can be said here? Well, as an SEO tool, this is a true winner. All the tools required to take your SEO strategy plan forward are rolled into this one complete package.

Here is how Web CEO can help promote a site successfully:

Generate many keyword choice results as part of its quick keyword research ability.
Know why a site is not ranked highly in the search engines.
Check those rankings in over a hundred search engines.
Establish the site's link popularity.
Find potential link partners to initiate a link sharing campaign.
Real time analysis on a 24 hr basis of slow pages, missing pages, lost transactions, visitor tracking.
Edit web pages with Web CEO's visual editor and upload them to the server.
Receive Traffic Statistic analysis reports.
Gain a certificate as a CIM (Certified Internet Marketer) for free.

This is a wonderfully complete package and is worth checking out if an SEO marketing plan is in the making.

Remember, this article is purely a guide to the salient points of keyword strategies in SEO. It is actually a huge subject. The points covered will help in the deployment of that all-important marketing strategy and provide more exposure to any web site.

Good Luck!