Internet Marketing:
...is the practice of using all facets of internet advertising to generate a response from your audience. It ties together both the creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development, advertising and marketing. Internet Marketing methods include search engine marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, affiliate marketing, and interactive advertising.
Great news! According to ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, Google has just introduced a way for webmasters to inform them what country their site should be associated with.
This is an important new feature and can influence the way Google ranks your site, as Vanessa states:
“Country association is used both in overall ranking (for instance, searchers in Canada will see a greater number of Canadian sites than searchers in the United States will) and in country-restricted searches (for instance, searchers on google.co.uk can choose to see only “pages from the UK”).”
To use this tool, simply follow these instructions:
1) Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account
2) Click on the Tools tab and then choose “set geographic target”
3) Choose your country/region from the drop-down list
Please note: you can only change your domain location association if you aren’t using a country specific TLD. For example, if your site is mysite.com.au, the country Google automatically associates it with is Australia and you cannot change that.
Although you can’t specify multiple countries for a site, you can specify a different country for each sub-domain or folder.
To do this, simply add each sub-domain or sub-folder to your Webmaster Tools account and specify the location for each one.
This is a great addition to Webmaster Tools and should solve a LOT of the webmaster questions I’ve seen about how to tell Google about a site’s geographic market. It should also have a big impact on the way webmasters structure their sites from now on.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
I’ve had a couple of discussions with clients this week about what makes a good blog post on their business blogs. No matter your subject matter, your blog posts should be of good quality and not written hastily. You want to post once a day if possible, or perhaps only every business day. Posting more often is ok if you have time, but sometimes with frequent posting, the quality is difficult to maintain.
Each blog post I make on my sites takes me between 30 and 90 minutes as I craft it pretty carefully. There is nothing wrong with adding a post about something that is on your mind or an article that you found, but you should try to write so that each post:
–> is of real interest to your site visitors
–> has no spelling/grammar errors
–> follows SEO principles e.g. contains lots of (relevant) keywords and uses anchor text links
–> is well-written and easy to read
–> cross-links to a relevant product or info page on your site
–> uses one or more relevant labels
One client suggested to me that SEO should be the main focus of their blog, but I disagreed. Yes, blogging can provide a huge boost to your SEO efforts, BUT first and foremost, you should be providing your site visitors and potential customers with good content and a useful service. You want to build up your subscriber base and you can’t do that if your posts are written primarily for the search engines.
Always post content that is timely, relevant and helpful to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, post articles about exotic destinations. If you provide an online car auction site, post links to consumer surveys comparing the safety features of various vehicle makes and models. To get more ideas for blog posts, consider your customer phone and email inquiries. What topics do they need more information about before purchasing? Look at your site stats too. What pages are people visiting the most or viewing the longest? That should tell you what content people are finding most useful on your site. Consider asking your visitors and staff for blog post suggestions. I bet your customer service staff could give you loads of ideas for new content.
Make good use of post labelling too. Blog labels are primarily to enable blog readers to navigate your blog more easily and find specific content they are looking for. Your blog should have a label for each of the main topics you write about. Each label creates a new page on your site that is about a specific topic and collates all your blog posts about this topic in one place. Not only is this good for usability, but the search engines consider your site a more relevant match for the topic because generally the URL and page content are very keyword-focused.
Happy blogging!
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
About a week ago, I posted some figures from the click fraud reporting service, Click Fraud Index [run by Click Forensics] which showed that click fraud rate was on the rise. Below are some additional disconcerting numbers from the same report:
Click Fraud By the Numbers:
70% - the amount of parked domains in the Yahoo and Google publisher networks
25.6% - the amount of click fraud on the search and content networks
15.8% - the amount of click fraud on all PPC search
10% - the amount of clicks Google says it discounts
3% - the amount of clicks Click Forensics finds that Google discounts
12.8% - the amount of click fraud CF believes advertisers are billed for
.02% - the percent of Google’s revenues Google gives for refunds categorized
as click fraud
unknown - the percent of Google’s revenues Google gives for click fraud refunds
that it categorizes as something else
100% - the number of industry experts who believe that it is an impossible dream
for a click fraud system to achieve .02% error rate as claimed by Google
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
Today’s question is from Maitiu, who writes:
Good morning Kalena!
I found you from a SitePro News article under your name. I wonder if you can help with this problem. I use Skype quite extensively (and world-wide) in my coaching business.
Recently, (for the last three months), when I open Skype to hold a conversation, it crashes my computer, now almost every time. I’ve got to explain to clients that it will happen…. Embarrassing. Reboot, reconnect, everything then OK. Windows HELP only suggests locating the software causing the problem, and then deleting that software. Can you help?
I am a complete non-techie, so step-by-step would be appreciated if you can help. I’m at my wit’s end with this as I use Skype for paying clients. It’s VERY irritating, as you can imagine. Here’s hoping.
Warm regards from sunny Dublin, Ireland,
Maitiu
Hi Maitiu
If you run a Google search for “Skype crashes my computer”, you’ll see you’re not the only one with Skype crashing problems! I’m not sure what version of Skype you’re using, but it if it’s pre Skype 2.0.0.73 for Windows, the crashing is a known bug in the software and newer versions apparently fix it so you should download the latest version.
It might also be a Firewall issue so you should check your firewall settings to see if they allow Skype to make/allow direct connections to and from your PC. Have you checked that your PC meets the system requirements to run your version of Skype?
If none of the above work, try browsing the Skype support forums.
Good Luck!
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
It all started with a post on TechCrunch Thursday morning. Baidu Hijacking Google Traffic In China the post said. Apparently Internet searchers in China were suddently finding their Google searches being redirected to Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine.
The redirects seemed to be restricted to persons using particular ISPs with connections to the Chinese Government. The post was followed by a more frenzied one on TechCrunch stating Cyberwar: China Declares War on Western Search Sites. New reports were streaming in that the Chinese government was blocking access in China to all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Live Search) as well as YouTube and redirecting all requests to Baidu.
Conspiracies started to develop. Was it a political stunt by the Chinese government in retaliation for the US government awarding the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal? Danny Sullivan thought so. The timing suggested as much and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Google sites were banned in China. Wikipedia entries suggested that censorship in general was being ramped up because of the Chinese Communist Party Congress held last week. Or was it a sneaky business partnership between the major Chinese ISPs and Baidu.com? Unlikely and Baidu disclaimed any involvement in the redirects.
Next came claims from PC World and Network World that the redirects didn’t exist. According to their sources, Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai were able to successfully access Google on Friday. Further testing from Beijing showed things were working OK as long as searches for forbidden or politically sensitive terms weren’t used.
So the question is: did they or didn’t they censor US search engines? Chinese officials rarely comment on censorship claims, making it difficult for users to determine when a site has been blocked or is inaccessible for other reasons.
Whatever the truth, the alleged redirects have now apparently been lifted.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
Looks like Reader Rescue is a hit! Thanks to everyone who sent in questions, I’ll try to get to all of them. Today’s question is from Jim, who writes:
Here lately I have been getting some requests to exchange links with some prominent websites. In their email, they provide me a link to where they have placed a link to my website and of course they provide their link code to me for placement on my site. However, their website address is different than their link site address when carefully analyzed. The website and the links page addresses are similar at first look, but you can not get to the links page from the actual website. I believe they are trying to create one way links.
Here’s an example: I am requested to link to www.site-A.com but my link is on www.site-B.com/SiteALinks/links.html You get the picture? I believe I am right but please let me know if I am not. I guess this practice surprises me. Have you heard of such things? Or maybe I am too naive?
Jim
Hi Jim
You’re spot on. These cheeky link requesters have the nerve to ask you to link directly to their site in exchange for posting a link to your site on some unrelated site, on a non-indexed page buried in a sub-directory. They are aware of the value of one-way incoming links as opposed to reciprocal link swaps and are hoping that you won’t notice (or won’t care) that the reciprocal link is on another domain. I’ve removed the actual domains from your example so they don’t get any link juice, but for the benefit of our readers, the link request came from a web hosting firm and the link page that they offered Jim in return for his link was on an unrelated low quality “directory” with a PageRank zero. The link page they refer to isn’t even cached by Google!
Jim, bin any future requests from these people and if they’ve already linked to you from a low quality page, you should probably ask them to remove the link less it dilutes your own site’s link reputation.
Kalena
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
On October 18th, Click Forensics released pay-per-click fraud figures for the third quarter of 2007 from the search advertising industry’s leading independent click fraud reporting service – the Click Fraud Index[TM] which showed that click fraud was on the rise, increasing from 13.8% in the 3rd quarter of 2006 to 16.2% for Q3 2007.
For the large search engine content networks like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher the news was even worse. The reported average click fraud rate continued to climb from 19.2% in Q4 of 2006, 21.9% in Q1 2007 and 25.6% in Q2 2007 to 28.1% in Q3 2007.
Other interesting facts revealed by the report were as follows:
- Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud
- the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside North America came from France (4.2%), China (4.1%) and Germany (3.7%).
Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, made the following comments:
“Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks. Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”
The growth of click fraud is not a surprise to industry insiders. The writing has been on the wall for some time. The real question is whether the PPC industry will devote less time to spin control and more to transparent reporting and click fraud prevention. The “trust us” approach to doing business could drag the entire industry into the junk bin of once great ideas.
Comments?
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
Last week I answered a question here for a reader and it got me thinking. Because I receive a lot of questions and SPN readers seem to like FAQ posts, I thought I’d introduce a regular feature here on my SPN Blog where I try to help a reader in distress about their web site. I’m calling the new feature Reader Rescue. Like it?
This week’s question is from Simon, who writes:
Hi Kalena,
I’m worried that google hasn’t cached my index page since August. I’ve changed the information and structure completely - now it’s html for the index, wordpress for the innards. However, the metadata and the cache from the two-month old wordpress index page still shows up in the google search results for my name. Why would this be so? Many thanks for your help.
Simon
Hi Simon
I had a look at your site today (Simon wants to keep his URL private) and it seems like Googlebot finally updated your cache this week. I’m not sure what caused the delay, possibly an indexing issue, or perhaps the page was stuck in Google’s supplemental index, but there are a few things you can do to ensure your page cache is updated more regularly in future:
1) Make sure the page is listed in your Google XML Sitemap.
2) Make sure your Google Sitemap is updated regularly with any page additions and verified in your Sitemaps account.
3) Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account regularly to check for any sitemap or page indexing issues. You can also see here when Googlebot last visited your site.
4) Make sure you update any pages you want indexed on a regular basis.
5) Make sure any pages you want indexed are linked to from within your own site AND from other sites.
Kalena
Got a web site problem? A question about search engines? Email me via kjordan[at]sitepronews.com with “Reader Rescue” in your subject line and I’ll do my best to answer it here.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
ExactSeek, the search engine with a strong webmaster following and a unique flat fee ad system, is in the midst of a major upgrade which should be completed within a few weeks. Once the techies are done tinkering under the engine hood, ExactSeek will offer:
1. An expanded database of a half billion quality site listings
2. Customized search for any site that wants it
3. A distrbuted downloadable crawler
4. A paid inclusion program
5. Crawling & indexing of submitted URLs within 24 hours
6. A comprehensive news search, with updated results every 10 minutes
7. Various webmaster tools to check keyword ranking, etc.
8. An improved member interface.
Based on techie input, the above changes are scheduled to be introduced around Nov. 1st. Making allowances for geek vs real world time, look for a major announcement and press release around mid-November.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog
In September last year, a law suit was lodged against retail chain Target by the National Federation of the Blind, who alleged that the Target.com web site was in violation of California state and federal laws protecting people with disabilities because it was not accessible to blind visitors.
On September 28 this year, the suit was certified as a Class Action, meaning it has expanded to include claims from any blind individuals in the United States “who have attempted to access the Target web site and as a result have been denied access to the enjoyment of goods and services offered in Target stores” AND any blind individuals in California “who have attempted to access the Target web site“.
Until this case, web site owners have not been obligated to comply with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), because the laws apply to physical spaces, not virtual spaces. However, by denying a motion to dismiss and then certifying the case as a Class Action, Judge Patel has set up an expectation that commercial web sites may now be required to comply with the ADA.
So what are the laws relating to web site accessibility? In the U.S., it is a legal requirement for government sites to be accessible as outlined in Section 508 of the Disabilities Act. Plus each state has its own accessibility laws applying to government sites. Unfortunately, what constitutes a legally accessible web site is not spelled out anywhere for non-government sites.
In an interview with Kevin Newcomb about the law suit, usability expert Kim Krause Berg of Usability Effect says “As a courtesy and suggested practice, but not legally binding, online retail should also comply [with Section 508], specifically if they also have a physical store.”
The implications from this case could have a ripple effect across other commercial web sites that may be forced to comply with state and federal accessibility laws or face law suits of their own. And don’t forget that site owners can be sued in the future for past behavior. Is your web site breaking the law? Now might be the time to seek advice about your site’s accessibility.
Originally Syndicated via RSS from SiteProNews Blog