Alexa recently released news that they have “better rankings,” and “improved methodology” and have moved past using their Alexa Toolbar as one of the main sources for its rankings. I have always called Alexa the CEO’s site meter tool as the toolbar itself wasn’t even available for MACs. I think every CEO or marketing manager has installed the toolbar at one point in time to check their ranking and it has been used widely by marketing professionals as a research tool for competitive intelligence.
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.
Share This
Google recently announced a major update to their display URL policy in AdSense ads in an effort to further incorporate landing page quality to their bid and CTR algorithm which determines what position your ad appears and how relevant the keyword that you are buying is to your landing page.
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.
Share This
I got an email from one of my buddies in the industy asking how to calculate how much they can afford to pay on a CPM for ads outside PPC using the performance data from advertising on PPC content. Here are some fictious numbers he sent over for the example:
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.
Share This
There was a great deal of buzz around getting your site listed on relevant news sites via press releases. Is there any merit to this? Hells yeah. Once you send your press release out o the wire there is a good chance that Yahoo news, Google news, Reuters and other aggregators will pick it up if it is press worthy material. If this happens then the blogosphere usually repurposes the release and takes out excerpts or references. Hopefully some of those references will be your website URL. The most common mistake that I see is companies forgetting to use an anchored link to their own website in their releases. Duh?? Many writers, especially bloggers are too lazy to strip this out of the releases and if they copy and paste the news then you get another inbound link hopefully from a blogger that has relevant content to your business or vertical. If you happen to have something press worthy enough to get to the home page of Digg or other social news media sites then it becomes a home run for your link strategy. Here are a few good press release distribution services and some of these guys even have SEO upgrades for releases. Money!
PRWeb
PR News Wire
PR Log
Share This
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
Share This
Google has recently made a change to its display URL policy on it’s paid search ads. Google claims this has always been its policy however it has seldom been enforced. The new rules will require a ad’s display URL to match the destination URL. So for example: a display url of www.somewebsite.com must land the user who clicks on the ads to the somewebsite.com website.
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.
Share This
Google is constantly experimenting with new features aimed at improving your search experience. They have recently created the Google Experimental Search page which allows you to try out some of the new features. You can experience search results in exciting new ways. Here are a few of the features they recently added:
• Alternate views for search results (See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types.)
• Keyword Suggestions
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Left-hand Search Navigation
• Right-hand Contextual Search Navigation
Join any of the listed experiments and you’ll be able to see that feature whenever you do a Google search. I have been wondering why they haven’t just included some of the Google suggests features that the Google toolbar has on the main Google search. I like when it completes the searches with keywords that I am most likely to use and pulls from my search history as well.
Share This
Why would Google be wasting their time trying to block the Microsoft / Yahoo deal? We as consumers need another search solution and another good PPC search option other then Google. Google has been buying up companies left and right and there hasn’t be any issues with that. I was really excited about this news since I have been a little dissappointed with both providers lately. Microsoft needs more search volume and Yahoo needs more eyeballs for their portal.
It has been interesting seeing both portals grow over the past 5 or so years with two different strategies. Yahoo has opted to buy companies like Flickr, Blue Lithium, del.icio.us, Overture, Musicmatch and other websites that offer complimentary services that Yahoo decided not to build. MSN instead decided to partner with sites to offer products and services like CitySearch for City Guides, Match.com for Dating & Personals and Career Builder for their Jobs channel. MSN recently purchased aQuantive, Inc. for $6 billion to extend their ad network with Atlas, DrivePM and the Avenue A / Razorfish ad agency. They were already pretty aligned with aQuantive using them to serve up ads on their performance network. I hope that the Microsoft / Yahoo deal goes through as it will streamline a ton of inefficiencies that both Yahoo and Microsoft have had in Advertising. Yahoo has been a weak publisher to deal with on the display media side of things and MSN has been weak in the search side of the biz.
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN AND MIGUEL HELFT THE NEW YORK TIMES
Standing between a marriage of Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo may be the technology giant that has continually outsmarted them: Google.
· What would stay, what would go if Yahoo takes Microsoft’s offer?
In an unusually aggressive effort to prevent Microsoft from moving forward with its $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo, Google emerged over the weekend with plans to play the role of spoiler.
Publicly, Google came out against the deal, contending in a statement that the pairing, proposed by Microsoft on Friday in the form of a hostile offer, would pose potential threats to competition that need to be examined by policymakers around the world.
Privately, Google went much further. Its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, placed a call to Yahoo’s chief, Jerry Yang, offering the company’s help in fending off Microsoft, possibly in the form of a partnership between the companies, people briefed on the call said.
Yahoo declined to comment Sunday. Microsoft said, as it did Friday when it made the bid, that the merger would lead to more, not less, competition.
“The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling No. 2 competitor for Internet search and online advertising,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, said in a statement. “The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.”
Share This
I got this information from our Google Agency Services weekly update newsletter. It has some helpful tips if you use YouTube.com for viral traffic. Be sure to also watermark your videos and/or have a URL slide at the end so users can type-in your website address if they want to visit your site.
Tips to Improve Your Video’s Ranking on YouTube
YouTube video search uses a variety of signals to determine the placement of a video in our rankings, including the video file name, title, and any associated metadata. The more information provided about a video, the better it can be searched. In general, we strive to give the best possible objective video result. However, there are some best practices that clients can use that will help their rankings:
* Add a Descriptive Title to Your Video - When users search for a video on YouTube, they will find your content easier if you include an accurate and descriptive title for your video. An engaging title can also help your video stand apart from the rest of the crowd.
* Make Your Descriptive Content Clear and Specific - Try to determine what content your video contains that will help users find it and distinguish it from other videos. Providing content that is descriptive, accurate, and unique is an important factor. Using complete sentences in your description is also a good idea. For more information, you can reference What should I put in my video description?
* Provide Accurate Tags - Including tags that users may use when they search or browse videos also helps. However, avoid using techniques such as keyword stuffing which will ultimately hurt your videos rankings.
* Community Opinion - Our vast and highly engaging YouTube community is an important factor that can affect the ranking result of your videos. Signals from users who share, comment, rate, watch, subscribe to and embed your videos are also taken into consideration when ranking videos.
* YouTube Embeds and Links - YouTube also takes into account links from reputable websites that point to your video. Web sites that are “important” and point to your video may improve your videos ranking. Similarly, YouTube also takes into the consideration reputable websites that embed your video. For information on how to embed videos, please refer to How do I embed videos on my website or blog? Google has also published webmasters guidelines that apply to all sites that embed or point to video content. This document also provides important quality guidelines that webmasters should take into consideration when linking to or pointing at videos.
Using these and other factors, YouTube strives to provide the most accurate and relative video search results. YouTube also continues to modify and improve its algorithms to ensure accurate results and create a better user experience.
Share This
We all know how much the engines are loving blogs and bloggers these days. If you can’t beat them then join them…sort of.
How can you make your site that isn’t a blog more SEO-bloggish-friendly?
It is pretty simple my friend. Here are 3 tiny steps that you can implement, introduce or tweak to your existing pages to show the relevance of the content on your page or website.
#1 - Title Tags. Keep them short and to the point. Example: The title tag we use for one of our sites Hip-Hop.net is “Hip-Hop.net - Hip Hop Network”
4 keywords, not spammy and to the point including the keyword that we are trying to rank high in the SERPs for: “Hip Hop”
#2 - URL Re-Writes. I believe this is what gives the bloggers the one up on the competition because the URL usually matches the title of the blog post and the H1 header title on the page. 1+1+1 = top listing in most cases if your site is relevant to the topic being searched. Example: You knew I would have one for you to see. Do a search in Google for “implementing flash click tags“.
This page should appear as the top result (fingers crossed):
http://internetadpulse.com/design-advice/implementing-flash-click-tags/ <-- Look at the URL, it matches the keyword search string and when you click on the page the header also matches. Wordpress is like Magic huh?
#3 - H1 Tag. The old school header tag makes a comeback to the scene. Headers in old HTML mark-up are very important. Think about newspapers for a second. If they didn't have headers for the articles then you probably would just glance right over them. The Header tag lets the engines know the topic of the page content. I usually recommend using either a breadcrumb trail and having the page title at the end of the breadcrumb.
Example: Home > Design-Advice > Implementing Flash Click Tags (make this your H1 in CSS).
Check out an old client, Bag Borrow or Steal, that I did some SEO consulting for and how they do the breadcrumb trail, the title tag header on the page and the same text from the header in the URL string. Perfect execution! See this example handbag detail page: Betsy Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo handbag page then do a search in Google for the keyword phrase: Betsey Johnson ‘Guns & Rosettes’ Hobo
Doesn’t it just look to easy to be true? Remember to keep your content relevant, be picky on your link trades and include your site URL in your press. Google will love you sooner or later.
-Brian Rauschenbach
Share This
