Jim Hedger is the Executive Editor of the new daily webmasters information site, SiteProNews.com. He is also a consultant to Metamend Search Engine Marketing and Enquisite Search Metrics. He spends most of his time in Victoria BC, recovering from traveling to the Internet marketing events and conventions where he spends the rest of his time.
PPC Assurance gathers data telling you when and how visitors arrive at a landing page or website from any given ad in a PPC campaign. Offering a granular examination of all paid-click referral traffic, PPC Assurance finds and reports irregularities in your click stream or any deviance from the parameters set at the start or during the paid advertising campaign....
According to Google, actual click fraud only accounts for 0.02% of all click activity found when Google's team is asked to audit an advertiser's account. If correct, Google's 0.02% assertion places the perceived dollar value of actual click fraud in their system somewhere in the range of $2,100,000....
The Internet is having a direct, highly beneficial impact on the environment. It is, in turn having an impact on the resource driven economy of British Columbia....
ad:Tech NYC 2006 is over for another year and if the rapid fire deal making, button-holing and strategic huddles were any indication, this was an enormously successful conference....
The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to put products or services in front of as many interested eyeballs as possible. Where the public leads, marketers, by necessity, must follow and if those eyeballs begin to congregate over there as well as over here, many marketers feel the need to move. Online marketers looking for another winning venue are therefore turning to social media spaces as social marketing tools....
The term, "sandbox" describes a process of Google's ranking formulas that appear to slow the debut of new sites in the Top10 listings. Whether or not the sandbox exists tends to depend on the side of the black hat / white hat debate one comes from. SEOs dedicated to "pure", non-spammy SEO tend to downplay the effects of the sandbox while those who use dark-art tactics know from personal experience that the effects are very real....
This is the first piece in an ongoing series on Click Fraud. Many in the search marketing and search advertising industries would prefer the issue be avoided altogether. Paid search advertising has grown to become a rapidly expanding multi-billion dollar industry, much of it based on the success of PPC....
Search marketing conferences are serious fun, especially when the conference is held in the Silicon Valley. This is the largest annual search related gathering anywhere. An estimated 7500 participants sat through over 70 in-depth sessions covering virtually every aspect of search engine marketing from the basic tips to the most advanced campaign strategies....
This is Jill Whalen's fifth or sixth interview of the day, a fact I am critically conscious of before sitting down to speak with her at 2pm on the second day of last week's SES conference....
Online competition has increased dramatically year after year. Today there are more websites doing business in every commercial sector than there were yesterday. Though the search engines are better able to sort information and rank relevant sites against keyword queries, achieving search engine placements for smaller sites has gotten more difficult as the environment evolves....
The differences between how each engine works appears to be causing a bit of confusion among webmasters and search marketers, especially regarding how to optimize well for all four at the same time....
About ten days ago, the light at the end of the intellectual tunnel became eminently visible and SEO discussion forums are abuzz with productive and proactive conversations regarding how to deal with a post-Bigdaddy Google environment....
For most Internet users, links have always been pathways between points of interest. Link-paths might be intricate and informative but they are not necessarily seen as complex....
Search is part of the mainstream marketing consciousness but as the online environment evolves so quickly, what works in the mainstream world often needs to morph through several experimental stages before finding a way to adapt....
The sudden appearance of Google's online video ad distribution service is going to have multiple repercussions for the $38 Billion US television advertising market. It is also going to present multiple opportunities for search marketers and their clients....
Microsoft and Yahoo had been in discussions for some time as part of a general exploration of plans to cope with Google’s dominance of the search business....
Mona Elesseil has recently authored the Yahoo Search Marketing Handbook, a 102-page manual that starts with the basics, outlines potential pitfalls and gradually guides the reader towards establishing and maintaining winning YSM PPC campaigns....
From a business and consumer's point of view, the lack of professional oversight or certification in the search engine optimization field can present problems when deciding with whom to risk advertising dollars....
Explaining the finer points of website optimization and search engine marketing to a person who has never designed a website themselves is tricky, under any circumstances. It is all too easy to get carried away when discussing one’s ability to put a website on the first page of Google results....
For Microsoft, the month of May has come in like a triumphant lion. When you are used to being the king of the pride, nothing says success like taking big chunks of business from the competition and over the past few days, Microsoft has scored big gains in its fight against Google....
Attending a Search Engine Strategies Conference has been likened to having an encyclopedia downloaded into your mind in two or three intense days of concentrated information sessions. For long term SEOs and SEMs, a SES conference is a chance to catch up with colleagues and exchange gossip, information and collegiate humour....
The philosophy at the Forth dictates we demystify our industry as much as humanly possible in order to, move SEO towards greater acceptance as a mainstream marketing channel, and to ensure our clients fully understand what we are doing and where we are coming from....
A growing number of others in the SEO community are sensing, testing and talking about issues central to how Google perceives user behaviours and how that perception affects search engine placements....
Earlier this week, the board of directors of a well trafficked grassroots online news-source decided to pull Google AdWords from their site. The decision was based on the outrage its members felt over what they perceive to be Google’s collaboration with Chinese Government (PRC) officials to censor or otherwise limit content available through Google China....
Having been the engine of choice for nearly five years, Google is synonymous with search. Because Google is the first thing most folks think of when they think about search, it is the most important search marketing venue, at least for the vast majority of SEOs....
The problem of click-fraud is an ever-present danger in pay per click advertising, one that troubles Google as well. The problem is not going to go away. In fact, it is likely to get worse....
Over the past few years Microsoft has gotten slower. Key product releases have been delayed, upper-management has been reshuffled several times in two years, defining initiatives such as the .net strategy have been virtually abandoned and worst of all, Microsoft has lived in reaction mode for the better part of the 2Ks....
Today the trend leans towards hiring in-house. A quick glance at employment websites such as Monster.com or Workopolis.ca shows a growing list of positions for SEOs who have two or more years of experience. The demand for experienced search marketers far outstrips the supply of really good practitioners...
Some sites are built using “cutting edge advanced design techniques” that draw from several sources. Some have poorly structured databases. Some look as if they were slapped together seven years ago and have since existed as an afterthought. The one thing they all have in common is that they offer search engine spiders far too little information to grab onto....
Two key topics that tend to dominate the R&D portion of our formal staff meetings and many informal discussions amongst staff members are usability and consultation. Not surprisingly, they also tend to be discussed frequently on various SEO or SEM related forums....
Now that Google stock circulates on the open market, US law requires them to file reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a result of these reports, Google is no longer able to hold a wealth of information about it or its business as secrets....
There are now three general types or groupings of SEO practitioner. The first group is in decline; the second in transition, and the third is just starting to find its stride....
The acquisition of Upstartle, combined with other current and pending Google services poses a serious challenge to Microsoft’s desktop oriented products. Google is clearly building a suite of branded, browser-based applications that contains several daily use products designed to capture users from Microsoft Office....
Success in search marketing is a very subjective thing. To put it in a simple sentence, success equates to meeting one’s goals. What those goals are, and how they help you or your business achieve a greater objective is another matter....
It is relatively easy to find relevant information in the first ten results at MSN, Yahoo, Ask or Google but there are often thousands of advertisers competing for the same keyword targets, each of which expect tangible guarantees their dollars will produce positive results. The rules of survival are changing quickly....
There have been several changes made to Google’s algorithms since November 2003, many of which have forced SEOs to make subtle changes to their tactics and techniques. The biggest accomplishment of Florida, from an SEO standpoint, was that it stands as the first major step Google took to distance its rankings from SEO spam....
Social Networking...This trend has been gaining momentum for a while but in the past year, a bulk of new users has accelerated adoption of the medium to the point where the most popular network, MySpace sees more traffic in a day than Google does....
There is a perpetual knowledge gap among corporate executives when it comes to IT, their corporate websites and search marketing. Without a doubt, they understand the “big picture” perfectly well. It is the little things, the numerous fine details of how the machine actually works that they often face problems with....
Last week, word of a restructuring phase at Lycos spread around the web based on a post on John Battelle’s blog and an article written by me. As it turns out, the information was correct but our assumptions were wrong. Lycos is not getting out of search, exactly, it is simply changing the way it approaches the search engine marketplace as consumer use of search engines evolves....
Having already made a bad reputation for itself by hiring a legion of phone solicitors to cold-call small businesses, Traffic Power had accumulated a fairly large client list. This weekend, the story took another twist when Matt Cutts, Google's chief search engineer, posted definite confirmation of the penalty on his blog....
The use of eye-catching graphics is good to engage the interest of the observer however, a web document is really only as good as its content. In website marketing, all content should be viewed as a call to action. The goal of commercial websites is to convert visitors into participants of one form or another....
A study released yesterday by Madison Ave. based AdMedia Partners suggests that advertiser interest, coupled with the changes in the way consumers perceive and receive advertising makes many search marketing firms tasty targets for acquisition or likely candidates for mergers....
For the past few days, the search marketing world has been abuzz with the news BMW’s German language site was banned by Google for using a form of cloaking....
Along with its competitors, Google has been undergoing a remarkable series of changes over the past six months as it adds new features, acquires new technologies and expands its operations. It is no longer a pure search engine company though its search engine is the most popular around the world....
Google dominates today’s versions of search and both Yahoo and MSN are prepared to admit it. In short, the recent past and the persistent present belong to Google. For its formal rivals, the only place to look is the future....
Since the introduction of the Jagger Update at Google, we have been doing a number of things slightly differently and have updated expectations of our clients and ourselves....
Search engine optimization spam continues to be a problem for the SEO industry as it tries to move past the perceptions of mainstream advertisers....
For search engine marketers, 2005 was a tumultuous year full of contradictions. Search marketing became more challenging, even as the search engines became better at finding and sorting data....
ast week, commentators were speculating Google was going to announce the development of a low-cost personal computer that directly threatened more than a few of Microsoft’s near monopolies....
Last year (2005 for those who've already forgotten) was all about change and, aside from the obvious fact that everything in search is going to be or has already been affected, 2006 will be no different....
I think the recent moves by Google to chase after black-hat SEOs and improve user experiences in their PPC offerings is a signal that a significant shake-up is coming in the SEO industry....
There are a growing number of advertising channels available via the Internet and the major search engines are interested in acting as facilitators for as many of them as possible....
Successful marketing is a process of long-term planning and execution of those plans in an ordered campaign. When designing a sales-orientated website, planning for annual special events is a good way to capture interest and increase sales....
In early January last year, I went out on a Yule Tree limb to make a list of wild predictions for 2005. The first Friday in December, two weeks before the beginning of the Yuletide holiday season, is a good time to look back at those predictions to see how accurate they were....
For some SEOs, the changes to the industry this year represent a world of opportunities to expand their services and experiment with emerging techniques. For others, the changes in the search world have hit with the repetition and intensity of a series of destructive environmental disasters....
Leading visitors towards goal-orientated outcomes makes as much sense for a functioning website as it does for a functional building and, to follow through on the analogy, it all starts with a smart architect....
The distribution power of four of the five largest search engines and the business model proposed by Brightcove can be seen as an experiment in marketing and content-distribution. The TV networks have recognized they need to work with the Internet and to do so they need to work with the Web’s core information providers, the major search engines....
So, what exactly happened during the Jagger Update and what might it mean to your website? Quite a bit as it turns out....
Google has established a fund to provide development monies to emerging companies before the VC crowd comes along with larger sums and results orientated directives....
Search marketing has expanded from the humble but mysterious artful science days to be a more professional, precise and predictable service. With so much change on the horizon, it is often a good idea to scope the scenery to see how it is being affected....
Google will be receiving a wealth of consumer and marketing information from sites using the software, information that will be incorporated into Google's understanding of how users travel through sites found in its index. That kind of information is worth its weight in Google shares....
With so many avenues opening for search marketing, it is much easier to envision and facilitate several different multi-channel advertising campaigns for a single client, product or service....
The 2000 version of Dot-Com Monopoly looks like a lot of archaic fun. Instead of landing on Community Chest, one lands on Download and the phrase "E-Mail Just In" replaces the Chance space....
A vast improvement on personal empowerment from the socio-economic order of the post WW2 corporate-economies, the Internet has provided tens of millions of people the essential tools to become entrepreneurs and add value to their lives and their communities....
Every town has a storefront that never changes and that store never seems to be very prosperous. Websites need to be updated and maintained, they are sort of like a storefront that way....
While it is difficult to say exactly what one should do in any given circumstance, it is fairly simple to say what one shouldn’t do. In the spirit of the Friday before Halloween, here is a list of the Top10 worst things we’ve seen designers doing this year....
There’s often a seriousness to hype that shouldn’t be dismissed just because the messenger sounds like a huckster. When mass-marketing ideas are exchanged by a lot of mass-marketers, (even far-fetched philosophical ones), the stuff we do in marketing is subtly changed....
Splog fraud is a big problem for Google and a growing concern for the other major search advertising providers such as Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN. The way content is taken from one site and replicated to dozens of others can cause no end to technical and financial issues for honest webmasters....
Another obvious area for SEOs to find long-term referral relationships is with mainstream advertising and public relations firms. These businesses serve clients with a pressing need for organic search engine placements....
Organic search engine optimization is understood to be a best-attempt service and that “best-attempt” attitude has obviously been exploited by the unscrupulous....
From search marketing opportunities to cost cutting technologies such as VOIP to social and business networking tools, the Internet environment provides a virtually unlimited multi-leveled communications capacity at relatively reduced rates....
Until recently, search advertising was a less attractive option for a wide range of street-front businesses then other traditional types of advertising such as print, radio, local TV and the ubiquitous Yellow Pages....
Organic search engine placement continues to be perceived as a nebulous service that can take time to show results. On the other hand, paid-ad placements tend to show up minutes after they are established and bidding one’s way to top spot is relatively easy....
DontBuyJunk takes the narrowing of search results much further than general attributes, allowing me the option of telling it exactly what I need in a product....
There are a number of reasons backing speculation that Google is building its own global digital communications network. Google has formally entered the telecom business with the release of a VOIP client known as Google Talk....
his summer, Google and Microsoft have been waging multiple battles across several fields from the courting of business in China to the courtrooms of King County. This week, a new battleground may be opening, this time in the Manhattan offices of Time Warner, the owner of AOL....
Over the years, the Internet has become far more than Cert and his partner Kahn could have imagined. Just over a decade after it was opened for commercial use, the Internet is now the primary means of global communications and data transfer....
One of the most compelling reasons to cultivate a career in the search industry is that it provides a front row view of the immense economic and intellectual forces that are rapidly changing the ways the world works....
The search engine community is starting to respond to the devastation Hurricane Katrina left along the northern Gulf coast. Several blogs, forums and search tools have been redesigned, rewritten or refocused to aid in relief efforts....
As far as my brother’s kids are concerned, there is no other search tool worth using except for Google. They say their friends feel the same way....
Usability is often confused accessibility (making a site fully accessible to people with physical disabilities) however accessibility is a critical element in site usability....
Believe it or not, basic SEO is all about common sense and simplicity. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make a website as search engine friendly as possible. It's really not that difficult....
Like thousands of other SEO practitioners, I have been quietly monitoring a raging debate that has crossed several SEO/SEM related forums over the past week....
The frustration with the major search engines felt by serious search marketers is real. Our clients don't care about size and neither does their money. They care about being relevant....
The past five days provided search marketers a front-row view of international economic development, the growth of a media empire, the internal disruptive influence of corporate culture shifts, and a colligate game of "mine is bigger than yours."...
Back in the good old days, headhunters never got sued. If a lawyer went nuts on you, there was always a good shrink available. Being a headhunter meant never having to say you were sorry. Corporate law has evolved substantially since then....
SEOs and SEMs take great interest in a number of lists and statistics beyond the Top10 search rankings....
Yahoo has merged all its European search products under one common business brandname, Yahoo Europe. Yahoo will also be carrying a live feed 24/7 from the Discovery Space Shuttle mission....
While there has never been more business for good SEOs with strong reputations, the amount of work needed to be done to provide a strong campaign has never been greater....
Today there are four major general search engines and several vertical search tools, each with a unique algorithm and spidering schedule. So just how important is it to know the spidering schedule of the various search engines?...
Christmas sales have increased every year for the past five years as have searches for holiday related keywords. Will your web site be ready?...
The landscape of the search environment is going to alter its appearance before the leaves change colour in mid-autumn. These changes should serve to solidify the market for a number of new niches in the search-marketing sector....
Now that they are all grown up, Google appears to be willing to make compromises on their beloved core mission: to make money without being evil....
As it grows, Google appears to be running into the same problem other webmasters with numerous sites or services encounter, the rapid dilution of a domain’s unique topic focus....
Advertisers are paying too much for the returns gained in traditional advertising while paying less for better returns from paid-search advertising....
At one time, a listing at the Open Directory was mandatory in order to guarantee strong listings at Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Today, while still helpful, the strength of a Open Directory listing has been diluted by the search engines themselves....
Search marketing has become more important and is thus becoming more professional. With growing acceptance of online communication tools, and a number of alterations to the faces of search engines themselves, the marketing arena has been upgraded from a three-ring circus venue to a Super Bowl sized stadium....
As things stand today, the search marketing industry is on the cusp of tremendous growth with several sub-streams of search marketing evolving and interacting with each other....
One of the best parts of being at an event like Search Engine Strategies is the presence of dozens of well known names from the SEO/SEM world....
The major search engines are adopting a new method of operation with both Google and Yahoo announcing personalized search features in the past two weeks and MSN presenting information on one they are working on....
The search engines are changing friends. There is nothing the SEO/SEM community can do about these changes except to study, experiment and learn as quickly as humans with electronic assistants can....
As anyone who has followed search engine optimization techniques knows, Google puts a lot of stock in the value of links between documents. But now, Google appears to be actively cleaning its listings by targeting sites using suspicious link-building techniques....
Google's newest patent application is lengthy. Some of the ideas and concepts covered in the document are almost certainly worked into the current algorithm running Google....
Name a business sector and you can likely find a search tool designed specifically for that sector. Vertical search is not a new idea however branding it as an essential type of search engine is....
This has been a good week for Yahoo. It has seriously upgraded its feature services and, as search engine user stats released yesterday by Search Engine Watch attest, is holding its position against Google and MSN in all fields....
The activity of the first three months of this year has started to change how most users relate to search. For search marketers, environmental changes borne by the mass adoption of new technologies can be both boon and bust....
Large companies are just now starting to recognize the wisdom behind a full spectrum approach to search engine marketing and the marching orders seem to have gone out to the marketing divisions....
Yahoo was among the first Internet properties to grow solely by word of mouth. Within six months of its conception, over one hundred thousand unique users per day were visiting Yahoo....
The core temperature of the search engine sector is continuously growing warmer as interest in search-advertising increases. Over the past three years, various concepts of search have moved in from the peripheries towards the middle on the radar screens of corporate marketers....
Boasting new blog creation software, a well thought-out contextual advertising program and talks with other technology creators in the works, Ask Jeeves is doing its best to brand itself as a credible alternative search engine....
Google is conducting a house cleaning stemming from what appears to be an algorithm update. For the past few days, Google's results have been bouncing, with placements moving up and down frequently....
Adopting a strategy which combines Organic placements with PPC advertising, large websites receive more visitors, gain increased credibility through multiple references on a SERP, and generally make more sales....
With a solid financial model in paid contextual advertising, the incredible hype Microsoft is about to provide, and the moves to integrate video content into search by both AOL and Yahoo, the world of search is about to enter a new and highly improved phase....
Despite a volume of circumstantial evidence such as the registration of the domain Gbrowser.com or its organization of open source programming events, Google has repeatedly denied speculation they are developing a web browser or an operating system....
This year many common assumptions about search engine marketing have been made obsolete or require a different way of thinking. Many erroneous assumptions continue to be proliferated in hundreds of forum posts, emails and marketing articles....
Starting this week, Google appears to be taking steps to radically improve their relationship with their clients by offering advertisers more control over their AdWords campaigns....
As long as Google, Yahoo and the web community at large can produce virtual real-estate, there will always be room to plant virtual billboards. The shear size of the market and their methods of contextualizing ads makes it an extremely complex business....
MSN has removed the beta-wrap from its proprietary search engine and is now showing self-generated results at MSN.Com. Beta results had started bleeding into MSN listings over the past three weeks but since Sunday (Jan 16), the .COM (US / Global) version of MSN has consistently mirrored those found at MSN(beta). Regional versions of MSN continue to display Inktomi (Yahoo owned) / Regional partner generated results (Jan19, 05). ...
Jim Hedger is the Executive Editor of the new daily webmasters information site, SiteProNews.com. He is also a consultant to Metamend Search Engine Marketing and Enquisite Search Metrics. He spends most of his time in Victoria BC, recovering from traveling to the Internet marketing events and conventions where he spends the rest of his time.
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