The first thing I did was look for a Submit URL page. I found a webmaster info page that had an email address for now on site submissions. If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, just let them know:
crawler@cuil.com

Twiceler is the name of their robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” They understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.

More info can be found at:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Let’s see if these guys can pull it out and make some noise in the search space. If I was Microsoft I would be trying to get some investment going on this project as it seems like a small dream team at work.

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Here are some best practices that I teach and use to stay in good graces with the ‘mean’ algorithm:

1. Keyword Insertion. This is a super-duper important one to use whenever possible. Here is the tag and a good secret that not everyone is aware of: {KeyWord: YourName.com}. What basically happens when you use this tag is that the keyword or phrase search will get inserted as the link title and will be capitalized only if you capitalize both the “K” and the “W” (That’s the secret). By including your domain name or trade name then that’ll appear if the keyword phrase is too long as they won’t truncate it for you. I could almost stop right there as this step is so overlooked by most SEM shops. The other great benefit is that your keywords will be “Bolded” when displayed which usually results in higher CTR and lower bid pricing.

2. Use the Keyword or Keyword phrase in the description text field. I didn’t realize until recently how important this was in making sure that your are buying relevant keywords. If you have to break out and build new smaller ad group buckets then take the time to do it on important keyword(s). Google takes this into the consideration factor when weighing out your quality score.

3. Your Display URL. I as a measure of best practice always Capitalize my URL’s and don’t put the www. in front of them. Example: Meeta.com instead of www.meeta.com. It just jumps out at you more and is easier to read and remember.

4. CAPITALIZATION. While we are on the topic this might be the second most important best practice to follow to a “T”. You will end up fighting your brand managers and anal copywriters but don’t sleep on this one at all. Hold the line. Capitalize The First Letter On The Ad Description Text So That It Jumps Off The Page.

Example of all 4 Best Practices in play:

Your ad should look like:
{KeyWord: Meeta.com}
100% Free Dating Service!
Meet Local Singles Today.
Meeta.com

Another quick tip is that you can use superlatives in your ad description. I usually try to get a good short call to action and one exclamation point in the ad.

I’ll do another article on landing page optimization soon and how to use the Google conversion counter free tool.

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Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.

-Brian

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• Bulk editing bid prices
• Bulk editing destination URLs
• Ad Group geo-targeting
• Uploading changes instantly to your Account
• Set and monitor bid and CTR alerts
• Keyword research tool and optimization (see monthly search traffic and demographic data for keywords)
• Create campaigns with wizard tool
• Ability to view and manage multipule accounts

I know you are about as excited as I was to hear this news and you are just about to leave to go search MSN Live for a link on downloading the tool. Here is the link for you:

MSN adCenter Desktop Tool Beta

You can either sign-up online for the pilot or contact your Account Executive to get you access. I know everyone including myself can’t wait for MSN to acquire Yahoo so we can put a dent in Google’s empire on paid search.

MSN also recently updated their Microsoft Advertising logo. I went searching around for the new logo that I first saw in my Account Executive’s signature file on email. It was interesting to see Microsoft’s progression of logos for Adcenter. I have included a few below that I found. Remember that Microsoft launched the MSN butterfly logo way back on Feb. 14th, 2000.

New Microsoft Advertising Logo:

Here is another great adCenter resource if you have any questions or are an API develop:
Microsoft adCenter Community

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компютри втора употреба

I haven’t used the site or toolbar in over a year and for comparative site reporting I usually frequent sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com which the industry and website owners have implemented and are using in great numbers to report on their own demographics and to share information to their vertical or category for ranking. These two services have free features and provide pretty detailed information for general comparison reporting or trending. If you have the cash to pay for yearly access to Hitwise, comScore or Nielsen’s net ratings then let me know so you can run a few reports for me too. Those subscriptions are costly and I haven’t seen much value in them unless you are in an interesting vertical and are looking for websites to advertise on that you might not have realized were in your demographic.

I wish sites like 100Hot.com still existed and MediaMetrix still published their top 100 website report online for free. I think I’ll give Alexa another try and see if they are delivering something worthwhile now.

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What do I need to know about the updated display URL policy?

Based on feedback from both our advertisers and users, and consistent with our efforts to present relevant results, we’ll no longer allow certain exceptions to our display URL policy. These include, but aren’t limited to, redirects and vanity URLs. In line with our existing policy, we’ll continue to require that your ad’s display URL matches its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). This policy will be strictly enforced for new ads, regardless of previous exceptions. For more details about the current display URL policy, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47173

.

Here are some other important aspects of the policy you may want to keep in mind:

Tracking URLs - Your ads will be approved if the URL of your landing page domain matches that of your display URL domain.

For example, the following would be acceptable:
• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.google.com

However, this example would be unacceptable:
• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

Sub-Domains

The use of sub-domains and additional text within the display will continue to be acceptable, provided the top-level domain matches the URL of your landing page.
For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:
• sub.google.com
• google.com/extratext
• www.google.com/extratext

Quality Score

Note that changing your display URL may affect your ad’s Quality Score and ad position.

Keyword URLs

Keyword URLs are considered your destination URL (the URL of your landing page); your ad’s display URL must match its destination URL.

Next Steps

While no immediate action will be taken on existing ads, we encourage you to make the necessary changes to all ads within your account. This will ensure that your ads run without being disrupted by future disapprovals related to this policy enforcement. Visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6272 for step-by-step instructions for editing your display URL.

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PPC Content Stats:
488,000 Impressions
350 Clicks
18 Conversions
$95.00 Ad Cost
5.6% Click Thru Rate

Ad Cost / Impressions = 1.946
1.946 * 1000 = 0.19 CPM

Does this mean we pay roughly $0.19 CPM?

The only missing piece to this equation is the CPA that they are willing to pay for each conversion. Using these numbers they are currently getting a $5.20 CPA on content ads. If they were able to pay $20 CPA then they should effectively be able to buy CPM traffic on a network like AdBrite for around 0.80 - $1.00 depending on the quality of the placement. I would just use this as a gauge and not be afraid to test out networks like DrivePM, MSN DR, Yahoo Class 2 and Advertising.com. Sometimes you’d be surprised running wider reach categories that your ad might perform in areas that you would of never thought of like Maps, Web Mail and IM messenger placements.

If you want to effectively test display banners you should have a budget of about $10k and should A/B test several ad sizes like 728×90 leaderboards, 300×250 square box ads and 160×600 skyscraper units. I have seen different sizes perform better for different types of businesses. You’ll want to get at least 1M impressions on each banner to get good enough conversion and CTR performance results.

Oh yeah, BTW “eCPM” = effective CPM for you acronym junkies.

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PRWeb
PR News Wire
PR Log

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MSN has recently launched its own Webmaster Tools (Beta) center which is similar to the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer webmaster areas. You can register you website and sitemaps with them now at:

MSN Webmaster Tools

Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. Once you have your site authenticated with a HTML tag then you can view a site summary, your rank on MSN, top keywords, top outbound links and top backlinks.

You can submit your XML sitemap for better results. Sitemaps help the Live Search robot find all of the files to be indexed. You’ll get the best indexing results by using robots.txt autodiscovery.

On the website status page you’ll see the date from the last crawl or your site along with the total number of pages that were indexed.

If you haven’t submitted your site and it doesn’t already appear in the MSN Live index then you can submit to MSN below:

MSN Search Submit

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Advertisers are still allowed to send users to either a subdomain foo.somewebsite.com or a subdirectory somewebsite.com/foo/foo.html. Google claims this policy is in effect to minimize any surprise or confusion on the surfers behalf if they land on a website not listed in the display url.

For now all ads currently running will not be disapproved unless a complaint is filed or Google is notified about the directly. However all new advertisers or new ad placements will need to comply to these new restrictions.

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