Internet Marketing

Beating industry watchers expectations and a full 35% higher than 2005’s spending, online marketing spending has reached a record $16.9 Billion dollars according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Here is how the money broke down:

40% - Search Ads
32% - Display Ads
18% - Classifieds
8% - Lead Gen
2% - Email Advertising

While 17 billion dollars sounds like a great deal of money its important to note that this still accounts for only an estimated 5.6% of total marketing monies spend annually. However, online ad spend continues to grow year after year while other mediums such as newspapers and broadcast television are seeing stagnation and in some cases decline.

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Google today unveiled its new revamped Analytics service. Google Analytics is a free service that allows webmasters to track and analyze their websites traffic activity. All new accounts will have the new version activated immediatly while existing accounts will be phased into the new upgrade over the next couple of weeks.

The new release appears to mark a shift away from providing users with simple numbers and charts to a new approach where the data is set in context to give the data meaning and spot trends.

Brett Crosby, senior manager of Google Analytics:
“It’s not just one lonely number sitting on the page, telling you if your traffic went up or down. We present it with other data, so you can see if the data show that things are good or bad. Maybe your visits are down, but your conversions have tripled. Once you have the reports, you still need to understand what the data is telling you.”

It appears from their online demonstration of the new analytics that they have increased flexibility in the layout of the data as well as tied the conversion tracking of AdWords more tightly into the overall reporting.

If Google integrated its Website Optimizer and developed and automated AdWords bid management system into this program you would be very close to having a pretty automated all encompassing traffic and conversion machine.

I for one hope this doesn’t happen as I enjoy having a job.

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Stop words are quite simply words that Search Engines generally do not index to save space in their database and increase the speed at which it can retreive data for search queries. These words are usually extremely common and don’t add anything substantive to the context of your content.

Common stop words are “a”, “of”, “the”, “I”, “it”, “you”, and “and” however it is believed the many search engines will actually include a much more comprehensive list.

So what does this mean to those of us involved in the SEO game. In a nutshell while stop words can’t be eliminated entirely from your title and Hx tags they should be minimized as much as possible. The name of the game in keyword density is to include only enough information thats needed to increase the weight of your targeted keywords or phrases. A stop word is simply diluting your efforts and as you can see won’t provide an ounce of help as the search engines simply ignore them anyway.

Lets take a look at a specific example - imaging the following as a title tag:

Mary had a little lamb who’s fleece was white as snow.

We can identify “had”, “a”, “who’s”, “was” and “as” as stop words in this title. “little” is a suspected stop word as well. A more effective title would be the following:

Mary’s lambs white fleece is like snow.

We have eliminated all but two stop words and as a result have increased our target key word density.

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For years we have known about using robots.txt and the rel=”no-follow” tag to guide spiders through our websites to index what we want and to ignore the rest.

Yahoo has now introduced a new twist on this concept with the introduction of support for a new class that can be used to block indexing of specific content WITHIN THE CONTENT ITSELF. Let me repeat that, you can now block indexing of content not only on whole pages or directories but within the content itself.

Let’s take a look at this tag. The syntax is simple. class=”robots-nocontent”. It can be used just like any other CSS class. For example you could use it in a standard div tag as follows:

I am content I want Yahoo to index.

That’s a pretty powerfull tool if you wanted to increase Key Word density by removing duplicate content such and UI elements and common includes such as footers and headers.

Now if only Google would adopt this we would be getting somewhere.

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