Search Engine Marketing Guide

Looking for a Groupon clone script?

2011-04-21T13:32:00.003+03:00

The last 3 years Groupon style websites have become really popular around the world and many software companies have launched their own. I was looking to find a Groupon clone script for my website and I noticed that there are a lot of available on the market even for free. Of course there others based on commercial licenses with more features or technical support services.

I have tested few of them but my favorite is Couponic which even though you have to buy it, it comes up with a very reasonable price. But it is not only this. Even though all these scripts are built on the same idea, the features that this company offers can really make the difference. It is simple, easy to use, stable and customizable to your company’s needs.

For more info visit their website here http://www.uniprogy.com

SEO Checklist: 60 essential checks before launching a website

2011-03-22T12:21:00.008+02:00

Launching a brand new website or publishing a new site version is typically a straight forward process given that it is well planned and well organized. Failing to take into account all the known ranking factors or failing to build an SEO-friendly website can lead to low rankings in Search Results. As a result before publishing a website, the Webmasters and the SEO professionals should validate that they are aligned with the best current practices and that they have not made important mistakes in their SEO campaigns. In this article we provide a detailed SEO checklist in which we have the most essential checks that one should make before publishing a website online.

Keyword Optimization

Having well written/optimized texts and using the right keywords right is extremely important in SEO. Make sure that before launching your website, you can give a positive answer to all the questions below:

1. Did I conductive an extensive keyword research? Did I find all the popular terms that are relevant to my industry/niche/website?

2. Did I choose the targeted keywords wisely? Have I made sure that I can compete for the selected terms?

3. Did I write unique, high quality texts that will be considered useful both by the Users and by the Search Engines? Have I performed a spelling check to all of my texts?

4. Do I have unique titles and descriptions in all the pages of the website?

5. Did I add all the important keywords in the page Titles, the Meta-Descriptions and the HTML Headings (H1-H6)? Have I optimized my texts for those keywords?

6. Are the Titles and Meta-Descriptions compelling for the users? Will they click on my page if it appears on Search Engine Results?

7. Did I use keyword combinations that are likely to be searched by users? Have I optimized my pages for those keyword combinations? Did I incorporate in the text synonyms that are likely to be used in the queries?

8. Do I have a descriptive alt text in all the images of my website?

9. Have I ensured that the content is not over-optimized, that there is no hidden text in the pages and that no Keyword Stuffing techniques are used?

10. Did I keep my pages targeted by focusing on a small number of keywords per page?

11. Have I kept the content of my pages relevant to my website’s theme? Am I sure that I have not optimized my pages for irrelevant terms?

12. Are the most important keywords of my page in the beginning of the document?

13. Did I make sure that my pages will not compete each other on SERPs and that I do not have lots of different pages optimized for exactly the same keywords?

Note that by using SEO Tools you can speed up your checks. Analyze your pages by using the Keyword Analyzerin order to ensure that your pages are targeted and optimized for your selected keywords. Additionally theSERP Analysis tool can help you analyze and evaluate the competition and see if it is possible to compete for the selected terms.

Website Development

The techniques that are used in order to develop a website are extremely important and they affect the SEO. So ask yourself the following questions and make sure you have done everything properly.

14. Is my website well coded? Is it cross-browser? Have I made sure that my pages contain no broken HTML that is likely to affect the analysis of the site?

15. Have I developed my website by using Search Engine friendly technologies? Is someone able to access my website without requiring him to use Flash, Silverlight, JavaScript/AJAX, Java applets, frames etc?

16. Is my menu visible from all the pages and is it developed in HTML so that the search engines can find the rest of the pages?

17. Is my site easy to be crawled? Do I provide text links for all the pages of my website?

18. Do I use properly the meta-robots tags?

19. Did I take steps to eliminate duplicate content by focusing on the Link Architecture, by doing 301 redirects when required and by using proper canonical tags?

20. Did I make sure that I don’t use unnecessary or incorrect HTTP redirections?

21. Do I redirect the non-www version of my website to the www version or vise versa?

22. What is the loading time of my website? Have I done everything I can to reduce it?

23. Am I certain that I do not do Cloaking and that I have no Doorway pages?

Note that you can check several of the above (HTML Validation, Meta-Robots usage, Spider View, Page Analysis etc) by using the Web SEO Analysis tool. Additionally you can check the similarity percentage between two pages by using the Duplicate Content Tool.

More info at Official Source

Google Creates “Source” Meta Tags To Help ID Original News Sources

2010-11-26T13:56:00.002+02:00

With the amount of content published online seeming to expand dramatically every year, Google says it’s experimenting with two new meta tags that it hopes will help it identify the original sources of online content. They’re called syndication-source and original-source and here’s a look at what they do and how publishers can use them.

What Is Syndication-Source?

Web sites that syndicate their content to others can use the syndication-source meta tag to give Google a signal that theirs is the one that should be included in Google News. In a perfect world, the tag will be used by both the site that syndicates its content, as well as the site that receives and publishes the syndicated content from another source. The tag looks like this:

meta name=”syndication-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What Is Original-Source?

The original-source meta tag can be used by publishers wanting to claim their article as the original version. In a sense, it’s somewhat like the rel=”canonical” tag, which can be used to indicate the canonical version of similar web pages (more about the canonical tag below).

Search Engine Land, for example, could use the original-source meta tag on this article (and others) to indicate that ours — not the various sites that scrape our content or reference it in other ways — is the original version.

Similarly, Google says this meta tag can also be used in the same way publishers link to other sites. For example, since this article is also referencing an announcement on the Google News blog, we could use the original-source tag similarly to how we cite them via a link.

In fact, Google says you can cite several different sources with multiple versions of this tag if you want to credit each one that led to the article you’ve published. The tag looks like this:

meta name=”original-source” content=”http://www.somedomain.com/article1.html”

What About The Canonical Tag?

As mentioned, there’s another tag (technically, an attribute), that Google introduced that seems similar to what today’s new “source” tags do. That’s the canonical tag. See our past coverage about the tag for more background:

Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite On “Canonical Tag” To Reduce Duplicate Content Clutter

Google Supports Cross-Domain ‘Canonical Tag’

Why use these new tags if you’re already using the canonical tag? Simple answer — because you’re a news publisher. These tags only work for within Google News, and they are designed to help Googel News experiment more with source identification and attributions. Google told us:

We felt the options currently in existence [the canonical tag] addressed different use cases and were insufficient to achieve our goals. The more accurate metadata that’s out there on the web, the better the web will be.

What About Spam?

Meta tags are, in some circles, an invitation to spam. And there’s nothing to stop Joe’s Search Blog from scraping and re-publishing this article, while also using one or both of these tags to claim that his is the original version. Worse, there’s also nothing to stop a high-trust, authoritative site from using — or misusing, to be more accurate — these tags.

Google’s blog post talks about this being an experiment and needing to see how people use these tags “in the wild.” Clearly, they’ll be looking for misuses, too. Google says they may reduce the importance assigned to the metatags on an individual site if they’re being misused, and they also reserve the right to remove sites from Google News altogether if need be.

Google also has a help page about the tags here.

Official Source

Google News SEO Tips & Ranking Factors

2010-10-13T16:21:00.001+03:00

1. Submit Your News Articles As Soon As Possible

You can submit your articles as soon as you upload them on your site. The earlier you submit, the sooner Google can crawl and extract them. The result is that you’ll boost your publishing power, and Google will process your most recent articles more quickly, since they recrawl all News sitemaps frequently.

2. Submit Your News Site Map to Google

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Verify your site. If your site is currently included in Google News, the presence of the News Crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. If your site isn’t included in Google News, you can request inclusion.

3. Include Only Most Recently Added URLs In News Sitemap (Less than 72 hours)

Google wants only the most recently added URLs in your News Sitemap, as it directs Googlebot to your breaking information. If you include older URLs, no worries (there’s no penalty unless you’re perceived as maliciously spamming — this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won’t include those URLs in our next News crawl.

4. Include Your Company Web Site When Applying to the YouTube Partner Program

To get started, apply to the YouTube Partner Program. Don’t forget to include the website of your news organization in the “Company Web Site” field on your application form — this is critical to having your application approved. If you don’t already have a YouTube account, make sure to use an email address with the same domain as your website (e.g. johndoe@newswebsite.com) when registering.

5. Keep The Article Body Clean

For various reasons, when crawling an article, Google News checks to make sure it can find the article body. If your article body is broken up by tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result. In addition, if you place the beginning of your article’s body near the title in the HTML, we’ll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.

6. Make Sure Article URLs Are Permanent And Unique

If you reuse article URLs, Google’s system may have difficulty crawling and categorizing your stories. In addition, make sure your article URLs have at least three digits that don’t resemble a year (for example, 5232 is ok, but 2008 is not.) You can get around this requirement by submitting your articles in News Sitemaps. Also, please note that session IDs can confuse Google’s crawler, and Google may not realize that two distinct URLs actually point to the same page. You can learn more about some of these requirements here.

7. Take Advantage Of Stock Tickers In Sitemaps

Google News Sitemaps allow publishers to specify stock ticker symbols for companies mentioned in individual articles. Using these symbols helps Google better identify the subjects of your articles. You can read more about the format Google uses for this data here.
8. Check Your Encoding
Google occasionally sees articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1). Don’t do this. It hurts Google.

9. Make Your Article Publication Dates Explicit
In order to help Google’s crawler determine the correct date, please make the actual publication date of your articles explicit. You can do this by placing the article date and time in the HTML, between the title and the body. Also, you can remove other dates from the HTML of the article page, and add the required tag to articles in your News Sitemap. Dates on article pages can be in most common formats, but for sitemaps, Google asks that you use the W3C format; e.g. 2008-12-29T06:30:00Z.
Note that the article times and dates displayed on Google News reflect the time at which Google originally crawled the articles, and may not be the same as the publication date.

10. Keep Original Content Separate From Press Releases
If your site produces original content and distributes press releases that you’d like Google to crawl, make sure to separate your original news content from your press releases by creating two different sections on your site. As you may know, Google News labels press releases distinctly in order to alert our users that the article they’re about to read is a press release. If your original news sections have links to press releases, adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all links that point to your press release articles will ensure that they’re labeled correctly. You can learn more about this attribute here.

Official Source & More Info

Το αγγελιόσημο σε νέες περιπέτειες

2010-07-02T11:23:00.000+03:00

Η απόφαση της κυβέρνησης να εισάγει το αγγελιόσημο και στο χώρο του Διαδικτύου προβλέποντας την υποχρέωση της καταβολής του σχετικού πόρου υπέρ τρίτων στα ενημερωτικά διαδικτυακά site, αποτελεί μια πολύ σημαντική εξέλιξη, έστω και αν η εφαρμογή της απόφασης αυτής περιορίζεται για την ώρα αυστηρά στους ιστοτόπους με πρωτογενή ειδησεογραφικό χαρακτήρα.

Η σχετική διάταξη προβλέπει ότι «διαφημίσεις ή με πληρωμή δημοσιεύματα που προβάλλονται ή καταχωρούνται στην ηλεκτρονική σελίδα ή πύλη του Διαδικτύου... υπόκεινται στην επιβάρυνση αγγελιοσήμου, στο ίδιο ποσοστό που προβλέπεται κάθε φορά για τους τηλεοπτικούς σταθμούς».

Επίσης το σχετικό άρθρο προβλέπει ότι το προσωπικό που απολαμβάνει τα προνόμια του αγγελιοσήμου, περιορίζεται σε συγκεκριμένες ειδικότητες και δεν αφορά στο σύνολο των εργαζομένων στα σχετικά ειδησεογραφικά site.

Με τον τρόπο αυτό η κυβέρνηση ενώ εμφανίζεται στη γενικότερη ασφαλιστική μεταρρύθμιση να επιδιώκει σε κάποιο βαθμό την αποκατάσταση της κοινωνικής δικαιοσύνης σε ένα φαύλο, άδικο, ηθικά χρεοκοπημένο και διεφθαρμένο σύστημα - με δεκάδες χιλιάδες συνταξιούχους ψευτο-ανάπηρους ή συνταξιούχους ζόμπι, ζωντανούς δηλαδή που εισπράττουν συντάξεις νεκρών- ταυτόχρονα επεκτείνει ένα από τα πιο φαύλα επί μέρους καθεστώτα του υφιστάμενου συστήματος και σε άλλους τομείς.

Ας υπενθυμίσουμε όμως γιατί το σχετικό καθεστώς του αγγελιοσήμου αποτελεί φαυλότητα. Η βασική αρχή του νέου ασφαλιστικού συστήματος, που εισάγεται με πρωτοβουλία της τρόικας, στηρίζεται στην ανταποδοτικότητα και στον περιορισμό της συνεισφοράς του κράτους (των πρόσθετων επιδοτήσεων δηλαδή που απολαμβάνει ο ασφαλισμένος όταν συνταξιοδοτηθεί πλην όσων θα δικαιολογούντο από τις δικές του ασφαλιστικές εισφορές), στη χρηματοδότηση της εθνικής σύνταξης.

Τι κάνει το αγγελιόσημο; Ενώ υποτίθεται ότι χρηματοδοτεί τις ασφαλιστικές εισφορές κάποιων κατηγοριών εργαζομένων, τις αποσυνδέει τελείως από το μισθό που λαμβάνουν οι συγκεκριμένοι εργαζόμενοι. Έτσι για παράδειγμα σε δύο site που υπάγονται στο αγγελιόσημο και έχουν τον ίδιο διαφημιστικό τζίρο μπορεί να δουλεύουν στο ένα δύο εργαζόμενοι που θα επωφεληθούν από το αγγελιόσημο και στο άλλο έξι. Στην πράξη λοιπόν, επειδή θα καταβληθεί από τις δύο επιχειρήσεις το ίδιο ποσοστό επί του τζίρου (21,5%), τελικά η μία επιχείρηση θα πληρώσει τριπλάσιες ασφαλιστικές εισφορές για τους εργαζομένους της, σε σχέση με την άλλη. Ποιος επωφελείται από τις επιπλέον αυτές εισφορές; Λόγω του τεράστιου ύψους του αγγελιοσήμου και του μικρού αριθμού των εργαζομένων που απολαμβάνουν το αγγελιόσημο, σε σχέση με τον συνολικό αριθμό των εργαζομένων που εργάζονται σε όλες τις σχετικές επιχειρήσεις (πλην του τύπου και της ΕΡΤ), επωφελούνται οι εργαζόμενοι στον τύπο και στην κρατική ραδιοτηλεόραση, οι οποίοι επιδοτούνται στην ουσία από το κοινωνικό σύνολο με τεράστια ποσά, πολύ πέραν των 360 ευρώ της εθνικής σύνταξης.

Η κυβέρνηση λοιπόν αντί να αλλάξει το καθεστώς αυτό, που παραβιάζει τις βασικές αρχές του ασφαλιστικού συστήματος, ανταποδοτικότητα δηλαδή και διαφανείς επιδοτήσεις που να πηγαίνουν στους κοινωνικά περισσότερο αδύνατους ή τουλάχιστον να διανέμονται ισότιμα, το επεκτείνει και στο Διαδίκτυο.

Ο λόγος είναι απλός. Προσπαθεί να εξυπηρετήσει (ρουσφετολογήσει είναι η ορθότερη λέξη), τους νεόκοπους ιδιοκτήτες των ηλεκτρονικών site, εισάγοντάς τους στον προνομιακό κόσμο του αγγελιοσήμου, κλείνοντας ταυτόχρονα το μάτι στους παραδοσιακούς εκδότες με το υπονοούμενο ότι θα προχωρήσει στη συνέχεια η συμπερίληψη και των υπολοίπων εμπορικών site, που δεν έχουν ειδησεογραφικό χαρακτήρα. Με την ίδια «λογική» με την οποία πληρώνεται αγγελιόσημο και για τις διαφημίσεις που τοποθετούνται π.χ. σε ταινίες που προβάλλονται στους τηλεοπτικούς σταθμούς, στην παραγωγή των οποίων δεν συνεισέφεραν κατά κανένα τρόπο οι εργαζόμενοι που απολαμβάνουν το αγγελιόσημο. Η φαυλότητα του αγγελιοσήμου λοιπόν, σε νέες περιπέτειες.

Official Source

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice for everyone#links

2010-06-23T13:29:00.000+03:00

Google Voice Blog: Google Voice for everyone#links

Facebook Privacy Now Has an Official Fan Page

2010-06-04T14:45:00.001+03:00

Do you like privacy? Well, now you can “Like” it officially — with Facebook’s newly launched Facebook and Privacy Page. Today, the social networking site announced on its blog() that it has created a page all about everyone’s favorite topic: Facebook privacy.

A few weeks ago, tensions came to a head with regard to Facebook — people were sick and tired of changing privacy settings, confused by the Open Graph and shocked by allegedly leaked IMs from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s college days, in which he scoffed at users for trusting him with their info. A (failed) movement calling for folks to quit the site grew, alternative versions of Facebook began popping up, and Time magazine even put privacy on its cover. Finally, Facebook launched new, simplified privacy settings in an attempt to make good.

Now, users have an official venue in which to get info on changes such as these, as well as to ask questions and (most likely) vent frustrations. Currently, there are a few video tutorials explaining the new privacy settings up on the page, as well as a series of articles on privacy from various publications.

Official Source

The Number One Rule of SEO

2009-12-14T19:02:00.001+02:00

That might sound like a silly question – what should be the number one rule when it comes to search engine optimization? However, everyone has their own ideas. For some it relates to keywords, for others, on-site optimization or off-site optimization (or link building). It may sound like I am repeating the same philosophy all the time – here is a different twist.

When it comes to SEO, every site, every business is unique in every respect. They are have their own set of unique requirements and their own unique blend of options that can help lift them to the front page of the search results. While there may be a range of basic white hat optimization strategies that every site can implement, once you get past the basics it is a different story.

Some businesses can succeed with pure organic search results others may need the help of pay per click advertising. Another business may find that social media marketing through the use of videos delivers more and better targeted visitors than organic search on its own.

To be successful online now you need a blended strategy that uses every available channel promote your business. You also need a website that fulfills all the requirements needed to be successful – that includes design, content and usability. A mistake can be to try and copy what another business has done – it often doesn’t migrate to your business because you haven’t taken the same direction with other strategies.

So the number one rule (for lack of a better phrase) is that each business is different and each business requires a different set of strategies to succeed online.

Official Source

6 Steps to write a well-structured Press Release

2009-11-26T14:03:00.001+02:00

Here are some steps to create a correct structure for your press release:

1. Attractive Headline

Write an attractive headline which communicates the core message of your press release. Use action verbs in the present tense and relevant keywords.

2. Text Summary

Under the headline, write a summary text with one or two key sentences.

3. Key Elements

Create the body of the press release and ensure that your key elements are written in the beginning of the text so as to attract the readers’ attention. Don’t forget that journalists are usually very busy and in a rush when they receive it.

4. Contact Information

Write the name and the contact information of your company at the end of your press release, so that media can easily find that information if needed.

5. Use standard fonts

Use fonts universally accepted and avoid the use of bold, italic or colored fonts. In this way your press release remains readable from various computer platforms.

6. Post it online

When your press release is completed, don’t forget to post it on your website(s) so that search engines can easily pick it up.

Don’t forget to optimize your texts, review the grammar & orthography and send your press release to all available free submission directories!

Tina Fotopoulou is the Official Author of this post WebSeoAnalytics.com

The 5 Basic Rules of Seo Copywriting

2009-11-26T12:39:00.001+02:00

SEO copywriting is a writing technique used for producing readable and persuasive website content. With this technique we produce quality texts for the visitors of the website and at the same time, we target to specific search terms in order to rank highly in the search engine results. Finding the perfect balance between having the correct keyword density and an engaging text for the visitors is not an easy task.

Search Engine Optimization improves the volume of traffic that a website receives from the organic results of search engines. In order to have a successful SEO campaign, you need to make sure you are optimized for the different factors that search engines use in order to determine the relevancy of a site. One of the key factors of success is the quality content and thus the effective SEO copywriting.

Here are the 5 basic rules you need to follow while writing your texts:

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Conduct a keyword research to determine the exact keywords and keyword phrases that should be incorporated into your website content. Search for terms that your customers might search when they look for products & services like yours. Check the popularity of each keyword by comparing the number of results in Google Search and the Global Monthly Search Volume from Google Adwords.

2. Write Descriptive Texts

Usually the pages that do not contain enough text do not appear on the first results. Always try to write quality content and have more than 250 words per page.

3. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a major issue for sites like online stores, news portals etc. If two pages look very much alike, Google removes one of them from the index. This means that it deletes pages that contain very few or not unique text. Thus always try to write unique, quality and descriptive text for each page. You can check your site for duplicate content by using the tool Duplicate Content Check.

4. Mind the Keyword Usage

Use a group of terms that share a common word or phrase to optimize one page. It will allow the search engines to consider the entire page relevant to the common theme.

Add two, or at most three targeted search terms in each page and place them strategically within the text. Be careful not to insert more than two or three keywords per page that can divert the search engines’ ability to recognize the most relevant phrases.

5. Keyword Optimization – KeywordRank

Incorporate the selected keywords in each page title, HTML headings (H1-6), meta description and meta keywords. The page title is the one appearing in the top bar of the browser window. It is also the one it appears in the Search Results, so it must attract the user to click on it. The H1-6 tags are the headings of the page’s paragraphs. The meta description is a meta-data field appearing sometimes in the search results as snippets. The meta keywords have not any significant value for SEO these days, nevertheless you can use this meta-tag and include the important keywords of your site.

Keyword density should be higher for the most important terms of your page. Additionally in order to be sure that you have optimized for the correct terms you need to find the KeywordRank (KR) of each keyword of your page. The KR is a special rank that measures how optimized a term is inside the page. You can use the Keyword Analyzer tool to perform such an analysis. Make sure you keep the KR relatively high for your important keywords and low the unimportant ones.

In addition to the above, the most important is to create a copywrite appealing to the visitors-consumers. Don’t forget that they are your website’s end users and they need to discover your products or services uniqueness, through a comprehensive and attractive website.

Official Source

Nelios.com advanced Internet Marketing & E-commerce Greece

2009-11-19T13:53:00.001+02:00

Nelios.com internet marketing Greece welcomes you to a new world of endless marketing and advertising opportunities over the internet. Our specialists in advanced internet marketing in Greece and e-commerce industry, provide you with the opportunity to apply the power of the internet to your own e-business in order to enhance your sales and your brand identity.

We provide you professional internet marketing services in Greece like internet advertising, search engines marketing, search engines optimisation, high quality web design and web development, content management systems and CRM tools, all essential to achieve your goals, secure your investment and retain your clientele.

Nelios specialises in advance e-commerce services: E-commerce, E-stores building, Internet advertising, Pay per click advertising, Web Marketing, Banners Advertising, E-Brochures, Live chat services, E-mail marketing, Web media plan, Search engines optimisation, SEO Consultants, Content writing, Directory Submition Services, Articles Writing, Link building, Linux hosting, Windows hosting, Dedicated Servers, Email hosting, SSL Certificates, Data Center, Support, CMS developments, Custom programming, Web design, Web usability, Corporate branding, Web templates.

Learn More About Nelios at the Official Site

Custom Sections Directory for Google News

2009-11-05T10:57:00.001+02:00

Google News added a directory for custom sections and an easy way to create your own custom sections. Until now, the only way to add a section to Google News was to perform a search and click on "create custom section" at the bottom of the search results page.

Now you can click on "Add a section", find your favorite sections or create new ones.

Official Source

Google Now Indexes Pages via RSS / Atom Feeds on your Site

2009-10-30T15:54:00.001+02:00

Google uses numerous sources to find new webpages, from links we find on the web to submitted URLs. We aim to discover new pages quickly so that users can find new content in Google search results soon after they go live. We recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for the discovery of new webpages.

RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items.

In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it's important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

Official Source

Measure Your Display Ad’s Impact with AdWords Campaign Insights

2009-10-20T12:19:00.001+03:00

Following the view-through reporting campaign it rolled out recently, Google AdWords is launching a new ad campaign impact measurement tool called Campaign Insights. Campaign Insights will let you measure how well your display ad campaign is working beyond just clicks.

According to the Inside AdWords blog, Campaign Insights is a unique measurement tool that gives you reliable data about how a particular ad campaign was able to raised brand awareness or active user interest on a particular product or service that you are promoting. It measures the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits brought by display ad campaign, beyond the usual click and conversion indicators.

Campaign Insights analyzes large quantities of data and compare two data sets – large group of users who saw and ad against a large group that did not see the the same ad to see whether there is a big difference in searches and visits to an advertiser’s websites. It will then determine whether the incremental change directly attributable to the display ad campaign is enough to establish how well a display ad campaign is effectively working beyong clicks.

Campaign Insights is currently available for display ad campaign in the US and UK. It will be a useful tool for you if you’re running display ad campaigns over the Google Content Network.

Official Source

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

2009-10-07T18:16:00.001+03:00

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn't use) the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Google Now Highlights Forum Posts in Search Results

2009-10-01T11:01:00.000+03:00

For some types of queries, the best results come often come from online forums. What’s the best place to eat in San Francisco? What type of RAM should I buy? Where do I find a flux capacitor? Recognizing this, Google has added a new feature to its search results, highlighting several relevant forum posts on sites that have a large number of posts on a specific topic.

In the image above, my query was “best Intel motherboard” Google has recognized that tomshardware.com contains a forum with several relevant topics, showing it below the main result, together with the dates when those topics were created.

In certain situations, this could save us plenty of time, as you can jump directly to a forum post without searching for it on the actual site. Being able to see the date of topic creation is handy too, as you can quickly filter out old info. I’d like to see a setting that enables you to see more forum results, though; four forum topics often isn’t enough.

Official Source

FeedBurner Goes 301 All The Way

2009-09-30T17:45:00.000+03:00

The Google AdSense for Feeds (aka FeedBurner) blog announced that all of their links will be 301 redirected, as opposed to some that are 301 redirected. In summary, when you use FeedBurner to create and host your RSS feed, FeedBurner creates special links that are used to send the reader to your web site. Some users selected to use a 302 redirected link, as opposed to a 301 redirected link, to obtain better tracking.

Google has made the decision to remove the 302 redirect option and make them all 301s. Why? The main reason is Google wants these URLs to become “more compatible with search engines that crawl feeds.” A 301 redirect is the best solution for a search engine to determine where a URL lives. 302 redirects historically have confused search engines, as well as webmasters. So to be “consistent with the way that content is distributed today,” Google has made this change.

If you run FeedBurrner for your web site feeds, you don’t have to make any changes. Google has already made the 301 change for you.

Official Source

Google Wave Headed to 100K Beta Users

2009-09-30T14:21:00.000+03:00

Google is set to offer 100,000 more testers access to Wave platform

We already know a lot about the collaboration service coming from Google called Wave. The new Wave platform has so far been seen only by developers and press at events designed to showcase the platform's capability.

Since Wave was first introduced, Google has been signing people up as beta testers for Wave in exchange for the users reporting bugs in the platform. Google is now set to roll Wave out to 100,000 of those beta testers as the next step in taking the Wave platform to the big time.

Starting on September 30, the 100,000 beta users will be able to start using Wave. The Wave service is a collaborative environment that allows users to share all sorts of content like video and documents as well as voice and video chat services.

Wave first broke cover back in late May and in July, it was offered to thousands of devs for testing. However, the new test pool is much larger than the original tester pool. The release to a much larger beta tester pool is a lead up to the official public offering of Wave.

Forrester research analyst Ted Schadler said, "Because Google Wave requires people to think about working differently, it's not clear yet what the sweet spot will be. However, you can bet that vendors and CTOs will be watching this with interest to see what develops."

Wave also has functionality similar to a Wiki in that users can write documents to share with others on their wave and that content can be edited by any other user on the wave. Third-party companies are also looking at wave as a platform to launch other types of software offerings. British Telecom plans to launch VoIP gadgets for the Wave platform as an example.

Schadler continued saying, "It's a time of experimentation. We see many companies and plenty of vendors, including all the big collaboration and productivity vendors, looking at new forms of document-based collaboration."

Official Source

Google Toolbar Adds Sidewiki

2009-09-25T11:21:00.000+03:00

As you browse the web, it's easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you're researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.

What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?

Now you can. Today, we're launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

The Link Between Search and Social

2009-09-24T12:48:00.001+03:00

Social media isn't just using Digg and StumbleUpon, as many SEOs would have you believe. Then what is the link between SEO and social media?

There's a huge link, but it isn't a "link" in the form of connecting one site to another -- it's something more basic than even the common hyperlink. It's as simple as this: being found.

Even on social sites, you want to be found. People may not know your name, but if they're searching for a great bistro and you aren't listed in Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Yahoo Travel, you might never be found.

Controlling your name by having a Web site is smart. However, how many people are really searching for your company's name? Unless you're a household name like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, McDonalds' or Hershey's, people most likely won't find your products or service by your name in a search engine these days.

But It Isn't My Site

Companies fear social media sites because they have very little control over what other people say about them on these types of sites.

Get over it.

People say bad things about you offline just as much as online. At least online you have the opportunity to find out why they're saying these bad things about you.

There are more than a few advantages to participating and having a presence in social media sites.

People are increasingly turning to social sites for searches: When a search engine fails to return a relevant result for their search, users look to social sites like Yelp and Twitter (to name just two of many), to find more up-to-date and relevant results for their inquiries.

People believe their friends before they believe a search engine result: If a friend in a social media community has publicly recommended a lawyer, a massage therapist, a restaurant, or any other service provider or product the social community allows reviews of, that friend's review becomes golden. It's more believable because the friend shared their experience and you've come to trust that friend. You don't have a relationship with a search engine.

Social media isn't just a Web page: Increasingly, social media sites are offering different ways to access their communities and information beyond the typical Web page. The iPhone and iPhone Applications (Apps) are fast becoming a point of entry to many social communities. TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook, MySpace, and TweetDeck all have applications that don't require a browser.

Search engine results: A byproduct of being involved in social media is that a lot of times your profiles on those social media sites will rank in the search engines for your business, brand, product or service name that you have worked the profile with. You certainly shouldn't being doing social media just to stack the search engine results. However, it can help thwart attempts by competitors to capitalize on your name.

Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results

2009-09-22T15:16:00.000+03:00

1. Robots

As the lotto commercial says: "You can't win if you don't play". You'll never win the SEO game unless your site gets discovered by bots and indexed. How do you get discovered? You can move to L.A. and wait tables, or you can build relevant inbound links, create a crawlable, spider-friendly architecture, and work to get mentions and citations (through social media, for example).

2. Ranking

Of course, ranking is the Holy Grail of SEO – we all want to be #1 on Google. I've been tough on rankings over the past year, but it's not because they aren't important. Clearly, you have to rank if you want to generate search exposure and traffic. My concern, and the message of this post, is that rankings are just one element of the big picture.

3. Relevance

Of course, ranking is only effective if it drives relevant traffic, and I mean "relevant" in the very practical, business-minded sense of attracting visitors who are looking for your products and services. Too many clients want to rank for what they think are the most popular keywords, but that often creates two problems: (1) What they think is popular isn't always popular, and (2) What's popular may not be relevant or ultimately drive click-throughs.

4.Results

Ok, I know "results" is a bit vague, but hey, I needed another R-word. Seriously, I'm talking bottom-line results here - leads, purchases, and anything else that drives your success as a business ("conversions", in the industry vernacular). Traffic is only valuable if it drives measurable results - otherwise, it’s just costing you money.

Read Full Article At Seomoz

Link Building Notes

2009-09-22T14:43:00.000+03:00

The very first tip in the notes is Link Building Opportunities

Where to look for links:

Social news sites
Online media sites such as The New York Times, Boston.com, and About.com
University sites
Government sites
The blogosphere
Professional contacts (satisfied customers, suppliers, business groups, regulatory bodies, similar sites operating in different geographic areas)
Personal contacts
Directories

How to get links:

Link bait content
High quality exclusive content
Missing content on other authority websites
Article submissions/article exchanges
Your own blogs
Widgets
Through PR firms and offline marketing
Contests
Ask for a link (directly/indirectly)
Micro sites/buying sites for links
Restructuring your website to make it more link-sexy

Read Full Article

5 Internet Marketing Tips To Promote Your Online Brand

2009-09-22T13:23:00.001+03:00

5 Tips For Building Your Brand Online

1. Create a Listening Post

Consider using Google reader or Google alerts to monitor key websites and blogs to keep in touch with where you are being mentioned online.

2. Don’t Just Rely Solely On Your Website

Relying solely on your text only website is becoming less effective when it comes to spreading your companies message. Building your website should only be the start of your online marketing efforts and building your brand is definitely not going to happen if you just stick to your traditional website.

When trying to build your brand you should give your company every opportunity to get noticed. Using text is naturally one way, but how you deliver that text has become much more important. Having a website is only the starting point. You should be delivering your brand through:

Blogs

Video

Images

Online PR releases

Link building strategies

3. Use RSS

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is an extremely effective method for people to get notified of changes to your website and blog. If one of your customers has a large number of websites that they want to keep up to date on, instead of checking the actual websites every few days, simply let them subscribe to your website using your RSS feed. This way, they get all your important new content delivered straight to them. This is possible using a piece of software called an ‘Aggregator’ or ‘Feed Reader’ Popular aggregator’s are:

Google Reader

FeedBurner

NewsGator

4. Consider Social Media Marketing Strategies.

The social media websites below should play a key part in your online brand building strategy. As these websites are used by the larger search engines for content, you will get more visibility when you start to build a presence in these web 2.0 sites.

5. Keep Viral Marketing in Mind.

Viral marketing is an excellent strategy for spreading your message and building your brand through ‘word of mouse’. Perfecting a viral message is not an easy thing to do. A recent example of viral marketing was the Susan Boyle video of her performance on the “Britain’s Got Talent TV show”

The power of Viral Marketing lies with your audience. When they start spreading your message for you, without you having to advertise or push the message, bingo! The more effective the viral message, the more online visibility you get.

In Summary………

Building your brand online should be an ongoing exercise that continually looks for new ways to get your message out there. Increasingly online users are getting information sent to them rather than going searching for it.

Your ability to create a buzz has become increasingly more important, it only takes months now to reach 50 millions potential customers – the trick is knowing how to find them!

Official Source

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange: growing the display advertising pie for everyone

2009-09-21T10:37:00.000+03:00

Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use search advertising — short, highly relevant text ads alongside search results on Google and other search engines — to grow their businesses. Thanks to a decade of innovation, search advertising is an open platform that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.

As you browse the web today, you'll also see "display advertising," such as videos, images and interactive ads. Like search ads, these connect users with products, services and ideas that interest them. For advertisers, display ads are vital in boosting awareness and sales. For websites and online publishers, they help fund investments in online content and the web services that we all use.

But with a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns. With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don't bother, or don't invest as much as they would like.

On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty. And for the ad space that they do sell, publishers also have to deal with the complexity of managing thousands of advertisers and campaigns.

We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone.

Three principles underpin our approach to the display advertising field:

1. Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads: For example, our DoubleClick ad serving products help advertisers and publishers manage campaigns and ad formats across thousands of websites and from thousands of advertisers.

2. Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure: We're building a host of new features to help advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network (comprising hundreds of thousands of AdSense partner sites) and on YouTube. We're also developing better measurement and reporting technology so they can figure out what's working and what's not.

3. Open up the ecosystem: We want to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open, like search advertising. We recently launched the Display Ad Builder to help businesses easily set up and run display ad campaigns. 80% of advertisers who use that product have never run a display ad campaign before.

We've been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we're excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.

The 6/90 Rule: 6 Reports Contain 90% Of Actionable AdWords Insights

2009-09-17T11:45:00.000+03:00

Google offers numerous AdWords reports that allow you to view more data than most people have time to analyze. One of the tricks to working with PPC is to determine what data you need to look at every day or week, and then determine what data is useful to analyze when improving your AdWords account.

There are six reports that, when used effectively, can give you the majority of insight you need to analyze your accounts on a day-to-day basis. In part 1 of this two-part series, I’ll take you through these reports to find insight into your accounts. In part two, I’ll take an in-depth look at the keyword report to create actionable items from the data.

While these reports are easy to run they are most effective when combined with the AdWords conversion tracking script. This is a different feature than what you find in Google Analytics. The conversion tracking script sends data from your website back to AdWords so that you can see conversion information in your AdWords reports. In walking through these reports, I’ll make the assumption that you are using this script. If you are not, then you can still use these reports; however, you should marry up the data with the analytics package you are using to track conversions to get a complete picture of what’s going on.

The keyword report

The AdWords keyword report should be your starting place for analyzing keyword data. This report shows metrics by individual keywords within your account. For instance, the main data points to examine when reviewing information by keyword are:

Impressions
Clicks
CTR
Conversions
Cost per conversion
Conversion rate
Value per click

There are three main uses of this report:

Set bids based upon cost per conversion or other metrics with your established bid methodology
Find low quality score keywords with high spends so you can optimize for quality score (note: it can be useful to use a pivot table to find AdGroups with high spend and low quality scores. See Josh Dreller’s In The Trenches column about mastering pivot tables for more info).
Find keywords that are not on page one (where the first page bid is higher than your max CPC). Remember, though, that just because your keyword is not on page one does not mean you should raise your bid to be on page one. If you cannot be profitable on page one, then you need to decide if this is a word that can be on page two; if not, you need to optimize the landing page, ad text, or other factors for this keyword before you raise your bid to be on page one.
In part two of this article, I’ll take a deep dive into the keyword report to show various ways of working with the data it produces.

The search query report

The search query report will show you the query that was actually typed into a search engine that caused your ad to be displayed. For instance, if you bid on the broad match “coffee mugs,” your ad could show for “yellow coffee cups,” “blue coffee mug” or possibly even “tea cup.”

Use the search query report to find words that are not converting yet are consuming your ad-spend dollars. When you find such words add them as negative keywords.

Then use the report to find words that are converting and are not keywords in your account—consider these to be Google’s gift to you to help you improve the overall importance of your campaign. Add these words as keywords so that you can bid on these words based upon their actual returns. Remember, your broad match keywords will never convert higher than your exact match keywords.

When you conduct keyword research, you should always consult the search query report as part of your keyword expansion methodology.

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