Website Tips

How's Your Site Today?

2011-07-25T09:26:00.005-07:00

Site Redesign for SKDesigns

There's a fresh new look to SKDesigns! Content has also been streamlined, and the behind-the-scenes markup takes better advantage of current technology with XHTML and CSS (style sheets). Feel free to check out the redesign!

For more details about why and how, I wrote an article about the redesign process at my daily column, aka weblog, Brainstorms & Raves, When is it Time for a Redesign?

WebsiteTips News

Books and Software Recommendations!
All during the fall and into the winter here in California, we've been busily adding book and software recommendations to corresponding sections at WebsiteTips

Here's one that I wholeheartedly recommend to my clients, designers or developers:
Don't Make Me Think!
A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
And for Web designers, I especially recommend
The Art and Science of Web Design
by Jeffrey Veen
You'll find many more recommendations throughout WebsiteTips now, and a WebsiteTips store is slated for later this year, too.

Help Google Crawl Your Site More Effectively, But Use Caution

2011-07-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

Google has introduced some changes to Webmaster Tools – in particular, handling of URLs with parameters.
“URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” explains Kamila Primke, Software Engineer with the Google Webmaster Tools Team. “This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot’s crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you’re sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.”

Google is now letting users describe the behavior of parameters. For example, you can let Google know if a parameter changes the actual content of the page.
“If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value,” says Primke. “Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter.”
Those would be: let Googlebot decide, every URL, only crawl URLS with value or no URLs.
Users can tell Google if a parameter sorts, paginates, determines content, or other things that it might do. For each parameter, Google will also “try” to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that it has already crawled that contain a given parameter.
To bring up the use of caution again, Primke warns about the responsibilities that come with using the No URLs option. “This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the ‘No URLs’ option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to ‘Every URL.’ You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is ‘Only URLs with value=x.’”

SEO Links is Fuel

2011-07-24T21:08:00.000-07:00

Links is the fuel of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As soon as the sound of one of the newest banner of TLA. As a fuel, the link is believed to make the SEO remain alive, without any link likelihood will not be able to walk SEO aka strike! What is that correct?

From the discussion in his blog Ustadzah Auliyar about "with SEO Increase PageRank, Really ?!?", we agree that the inbound links, or links that go to our blog, will affect PageRank. The more websites that mengelink to our blog, will the higher its PageRank. It is also influenced by the quality of incoming links are. For example, link quality is better obtained from a web PR 8 of the 50 web PR 1. Which is often the question is, what homework properly will affect the SEO, or more precisely the SERP (Search Engine Result Page)?
Some doubt the opinion of a high PR will provide a better ranking in search engines. It is based on the number of websites with PR1 occupy a better position in search engines compared to a website that has a higher PR.

Then what is the point of having a high PR ?

Of course moneytized blog! Mainly selling paid links and reviews. The higher the PR, the price that we offer can also be increased. There are at least two reasons why advertisers want to buy links from blogs with high PR:

1. Media Promotion. The concept is simple, the higher PR mean more and more websites are mengelink to the blog. It is considered directly proportional to the flow (traffic) passing by making it more likely for them to be seen bigger.

2. Increase PageRank. There are still many who embrace the theory that PR positive influence on the SERP. Therefore they want to improve their web PR with buying links from websites of high PR, the hope would be a better SERP.

Some Basic HTML Tags and How To Use Them

2011-07-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

The HTML 4.01 markup chart and examples below represent some of the typical markup that I review with clients who wish to change and update text themselves on their Web sites. Learning a few basic markup tags makes this a very simple process.

These tips are intended to cover some of the highlights to easily change text on your Web site. This is not intended to be comprehensive.

It's also just as important to use the appropriate HTML for its purpose, such as using the paragraph element for paragraphs, heading elements for headings, list items for lists. See my tutorial on their appropriate use at Semantics, HTML, XHTML, and Structure.

Likester Launches New Social Platform for Analyzing Facebook Likes

2011-07-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, the Internet was blowing up about the hit show American Idol. This hype increased as global popularity engine Likester made predictions for the show through its Likester Idol technology. Likester was able to forecast who would be going home each week based on the number of Facebook Likes the contestants received both before and after their weekly performances.

The service proved to be accurate and turned into almost a spoiler service for the show. Because it became quite popular, Likester founder and president Kevin McCarthy began thinking about what else he could do with the technology. In the end, he came up with a social media platform called Likester Lists that allows users to track Facebook Likes based on a particular topic on a daily basis for free.

“Likester Lists is a platform that allows you to track the daily Likes that anything in the Facebook universe is receiving,” he said.

In a nutshell, the platform is an ongoing poll that calculates new data daily. There are other services that provide a similar service, but many of these charge for their data. Anyone can create a List, and once you do, Likester creates a dashboard that organizes all your Lists with images, links, and more.

For example, one List that already exists is “Who’s Winning the Shoe Wars?” Although some people might speculate that Nike receives the most Likes, it does not. It does bring in a few thousand Likes each day, but Converse brings in 20,000 Likes on average daily.

“What’s popular on a Net basis in the Facebook universe is not necessarily what’s popular on an ongoing basis,” said McCarthy.

Because Facebook’s Like data has grown to be tremendously valuable, McCarthy believes that Likester Lists will be beneficial to both general “for fun” users as well as professional users. He also sees the platform being extremely useful in the upcoming election season.

“In 6 months, I would bet that the political world is going to realize what Likester is onto here,” he said.

Likester has plans to create animated heatmaps that show the likes for each candidate in blue and red. This service is likely to really influence the election season because, as McCarthy pointed out, polls have a lot of flaws in them, but a Like analysis is purely data driven.

8 Tips for Maximizing Contextual Advertising Revenues

2011-07-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

In the late 90s, web publishers were riding high with banner ads. Payouts were great, and many web owners actually saw their dream of sitting on a beach sipping tequila nearly realized.

Alas, the glory did not last.

The bubble eventually burst. Cost per thousand impressions (CPM), the price barometer of banner advertising, dramatically fell. Whereas some web owners were enjoying CPM rates of as much as $150/CPM, the rates soon fell to as low as $0.50/CPM. For that given rate, sites generating 500,000 monthly impressions first saw their banner advertising revenues reach to about $75,000/month only to find it fall to a mere $250/month. That is one major ouch! To date, rates for banner advertising has been slowly increasing, but has not (and may never return) to the late 90s level.

Now, there’s a new thing in town that has the web community, particularly the small business web site operators, buzzing with excitement. It’s called contextual advertising, and programs include Google Adsense, Quigo’s Adsonar, Overture’s ContentMatch, IndustryBrain, among others (for a discussion of the programs, read “Earning Revenues from Contextual Advertising”).

Contextual ads are delivered based on the content of the web page using an automated system. Contextual advertising serves up ads that are targeted on the contents of a particular page, e.g. an article on how to get a bank loan will serve up bank loans or personal loan ads. These ads are often text based but some programs like Google Adsense offers image-based ads; and many programs are cost-per-click based but preferred publishers (often those generating tremendous amount of impressions) are paid on a CPM-basis.

The promise of contextual ads is that its improved targeting capabilities are deemed more effective than other types of online advertisements (e.g. banner) and hence more likely to be clicked by a user. As a result, publishers are given the chance to earn more from their web real estate.

However, contextual advertising is not just a simple matter of applying and putting up the codes on your website and wait for the checks. There are a number of ways to maximize your earnings from contextual advertising, whether you are running Adsense or Adsonar or anything in between. Here are a few of them:

1. Determine overall fit with your site.

The first rule of thumb of contextual advertising is that it is not for everyone. Some sites do extremely well with it, earning 5-figures or more a month, while others earn mere pennies a month. Others running Google Adsense, for example, enjoy being in the “UPS Club” (Google sends by UPS the checks to publishers who earned $10,000 or more whereas the rest gets their check through regular mail). Many say that they find it hard to even reach the monthly check cut-off amount of $100.

The beauty about contextual advertising is that it is not about traffic, as there are some sites getting only 5,000 ad impressions that earn more than those getting 50,000 impressions monthly. It is about the types of visitors you have. So what types of site do well with contextual advertising?

Sites where users are in a buying mood

Sites where users are looking for information on specific products or services that interest them – product, business opportunity, looking to buy tickets, etc.

Sites where users are researching ways to spend money

Sites with a high percentage of fresh unique visitors (regular visitors tend to ignore ads)

Sites where users show an interest to ads, and not just the site’s offerings

If contextual advertising is not working for you as you expect, be sure to check out other forms to monetize your web real estate such as affiliate programs and CPM-based advertising.
2. Develop solid content for your users.
The key to a successful foray into contextual advertising is content. Content is what brings visitors to your site, and content is what makes them interested in the ad. Content is also what the technology will read to serve well-targeted ads. The more quality content you have, the greater your propensity to earn from contextual advertising.
Looking at it from the advertisers’ perspective (the group of people who are actually paying the publishers), many prefer their ads to be shown on sites with good content. One of the common reasons why advertisers turn off the content network option for their ads (in addition to showing their ads in the search engine results, such as in Google) is that they do not want their ads to be shown in spammy or no-content sites. Why? Because they feel that poor quality sites may give them clicks, but not useful leads. A user may have clicked on their ads – not because of any interest in their advertised products or services – but because they want to exit the site as soon as possible and the only way out are the ads. Advertisers do not just want clicks: they are paying to get visitors interested in what they have to offer. They want visitors that they can convert, whether conversion is defined as a sale, signup to a newsletter, or an inquiry.
3. Read and follow the Terms of Service carefully.
The Terms of Service spells out the do’s and don’ts that will guide you in your program participation. It will tell you how you can place the ad codes, where you can place them, among others. More importantly, it gives you the reasons why you can be terminated from the program – from generating fraudulent clicks to showing competing adverts. Yet many publishers do not even bother to read what these terms are – and then complain that they were kicked out from the program because of a violation.
It is imperative to carefully read and understand a program’s Terms of Service (not just contextual advertising, in fact). You don’t want to lose a revenue source that may be giving you as much as $5,000 a month just because you did not read the Terms that you have supposedly agreed! Some programs such as Google Adsense are strict with regards to terms compliance, and often sends either a warning email to rectify your mistake, or an outright termination notice giving you a few hours to remove the code from your site.
4. Use and analyze available data.
As a participant in a contextual advertising program, you will be provided with reports that tell you how effective the program is working on your site. The basic metrics will include page/ad impressions, number of clicks, click-through rate (CTR) and earnings. Some provide effective CPM, or the cost per thousand impressions. These metrics can help you analyze what is working well in your site, and whether you can improve your revenues.
For example, if your CTR is only 0.2 percent and you stumbled across a posting of a competitor in your niche bragging that their CTR is 4.5 percent, then you know that your content can handle such a high CTR rate. Then you develop strategies to improve your CTR.
You can also use your effective CPM data to compare across your various revenue sources. The effective CPM is calculated by dividing total earnings by the number of impressions in thousands (e.g. if a publisher earned $200 from 50,000 impressions, the CPM would equal $200/50, or $4.00). Your effective CPM can show you how much your site is worth in terms of advertising, and it can be your benchmark when you sell your own banner ads. You can also choose to select and actively promote in your site affiliate programs that have effective CPMs that either equal or exceed the rate you are getting from contextual advertising networks.
Many also look at their earnings per click (EPC), derived by dividing revenues over the number of clicks (if revenue is $200 from 600 clicks, then EPC is $0.33). Since the value of actual clicks from specific keywords are not known, this average number is an indication of the “value” of the keywords covered by the website.
Google Adsense has a particularly useful data that can help you analyze the performance of key segments of your site – the channels. While reporting is delayed by a couple of days, you can set up different content, topics or ad format as different channels. Google allows as much as 50 channels. If you have 5 sites running Adsense, for example, you can set-up each site as a different channel so you can get information as to which site actually brings in the revenues. Or you can set up your channels based on different topics on your site to see which topics offer the highest effective CPMs and those that generate the best click-throughs. Another way to use the channels is to set it up to determine the effectiveness of your ad formats — whether the leaderboard ads at the top-of-the-fold gets better click-throughs and revenues compared to rectangles at the bottom of the page.
5. Experiment, experiment and experiment.
There are three things that you can work on to increase your revenues: the number of ad impressions, number of clicks, and your click-through rate. Even if your traffic is not growing as fast as you hope for, you can grow your revenues if you improve your click-through rate. And you can improve the performance of the contextual ads in your site by experimenting on layout, colors, ad format, and number of ads.
There are no hard-and-fast rules as to the most effective layout and ad formats: it will depend on how your site is set-up and the contents of your site. A large rectangle, for example, may increase the CTR of a site that commonly uses long articles. Another site may find that a leaderboard or a skyscraper may augur well for them. In terms of colors, some sites report that their CTR doubled or tripled when they blended the ads with the color of their site, while others believe that using contrasting colors in the ad block increases the click-through rates.
You need to experiment and see what works best for your site. Track how changing a regular banner to a skyscraper affected your revenues. If the revenue increases, then stick with it. If not, try something else. Remember, though, that what works for one web site may not necessarily work for the other web site.
6. Increase visibility of your site.
Increasing your traffic and continuously building your website is always a good way to improve revenues, not just contextual advertising. Contextual advertising is a “set and forget” solution that works especially well for small online publishers, because it allows the publisher to focus on building content instead of trying to sell ads.
7. Diversify keywords.
The number of advertisers who are bidding on the keywords, and the amount they are bidding affects earnings from contextual advertising. When there is a bidding frenzy for your keywords, you may find your earnings to increase. However, if the biggest advertiser pulls out from the content network or stops their ads for whatever reason, you may find your earnings go down the drain. One of the realities of contextual advertising is the seesaw motion of earnings: today you may be earning well only to find your earnings go down the following week.
To protect your revenues from wild fluctuations, the best approach would be to diversify your keywords by developing content based on different topics. The price of a click for one keyword may decrease, but you still have other competitive keywords where advertisers are placing big bids.
8. Enjoy while it lasts.
For those who have found gold in contextual advertising (or at least sizeable revenues), their fervent wish is for these types of programs to proliferate and continue – and their incomes continue to increase. Alas, nothing lasts forever and the Internet has shown that things can go downhill pretty quickly. There are a number of things that can affect and reduce publishers’ earnings:
Reduction of payout. Google and other providers reduce their payout to the publishers, as what happened to banner ad networks (when things got tough, publishers getting 70-30 share before were reduced to 40-60 in some instances). A reduction in payout can immediately shrink the publisher’s income.
Text ad blindness. Just as users have learned to ignore banner ads, they can also be conditioned to ignore text ads, no matter how targeted.
Discounted clicks. To lure more advertisers into the content network programs, providers often provide enticement such as discounted price per clicks. Google for example has introduced in April 2004 “smart pricing” whereby the price of the clicks are adjusted based on potential conversion. Publishers whose sites generate numerous clicks for an ad may be paid on a decreasing scale, thus also cutting the potential income of publishers.
The programs can be terminated. The provider may decide to get out of the contextual advertising game and focus on other business models. Or they may restructure their program in its entirety that may not be advantageous to the publishers.
The key is the old adage: “Do not put all your eggs in one basket.” You must always have a diversified source of revenues, and not rely on one income source. Combine contextual advertising with affiliate programs, other types of advertising (as long as they don’t conflict with the terms of the other programs), or other business models. This way, you will not be left empty-handed when contextual advertising dries up.
Nach Maravilla is the President/CEO of PowerHomeBiz.com. For information on starting a small or home-based business, visit PowerHomeBiz.com at http://www.powerhomebiz.com

Blend in or Contrast with Your Site?

2011-07-24T11:22:00.000-07:00

In addition to optimizing your ad placements, should your ads contrast with your Web site or blend in? Both Yahoo! Publisher Network and Google AdSense report that best performance of their ad placements tend to be from ads that blend in with the content.

Another poll by Yahoo! Publisher Network via Your Ad Display Preferences asked, “Do you find it more successful to select ad colors that blend in with your site or contrast?” The chart below shows the results

Most Successful Ad Colors Blend In Vs. Contrast (Yahoo! Publishers) ^[12]
Answer	Response (%)
Blend in	85.71%
Contrast	10.46%
Other	3.82%
Total	100%

Google AdSense staff continue to write about blending your ad colors with your site's colors, such as their AdSense Help Center article, What color palettes are the most successful? and their blog posts, Color your ads beautiful and Unobtrusive ads can boost revenue. Google's AdSense Help Center makes the following recommendations based on your site's background colors:

In addition, for sites with mainly repeat visitors Google AdSense recommends rotating color palettes or occasionally switching the ad locations to help avoid banner blindness. If your site has lots of ads and busy content, Google AdSense recommends to “use more visually arresting colors” for your ads.
Marketing Experiments Journal also reports better ad conversions with blended ads in their case study article, Online Ads Tested, dated 27 March, 2007. “Advertising that blended in and looked like a 'native' site content performed significantly better than ads that stood out from the rest of the page.”

To receive higher clickthrough rates for your contextual ads, you should test making the text in your ad match the size and colors of the host site's native content. Company logos and offer elements should be small enough not to shout “advertisement” so loudly as to be blocked by the subconscious “ad filters” of content site visitors.
In order to discover what type of ad is most effective for your particular content seekers, we suggest you test multiple variations of ads that appear “native” to the page against those that stand out.

Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and Marketing Experiments Journal all stress the importance of considering your own site and visitors. Whether using your own ads or contextual ads, such as those through Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher, you may need to experiment a bit with your own site's ad locations, ad sizes, formats and ad colors to achieve the best performance from your ads.

Best Performing Ad Formats, Ad Sizes

2011-07-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Phoebe Ho of Google AdSense's Optimization team reports in a Google AdSense Optimization Webinar, that the best performing ad size is the large rectangle, 336x280. She also stresses the importance of using the best format for your own site, though:

"So the wider formats do best, so specifically, the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper.

As I had mentioned before, because there's a lot of variety with different sites, you want to make sure that you're using the best format for your site. Don't try to squeeze in a format that doesn't fit your site just because we said so here today. I want to make sure that you fit in the right format that would fit into your site. But just to let you know that wider formats do tend to perform better."

Google is not alone in this observation, either. For example, in Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness (PDF), based on a multitude of statistical studies that “show a strong correlation between the size of ads and their click-through performance”, the authors recommend larger ad sizes, especially the 336x280 size, format: “measuring click-through rate (CTR) and purchase intent respectively, the “large rectangle”(336x280 pixels) was particularly noteworthy in its effectiveness compared to other standard on-page display ad units.” The publication also mentions that the 728x90 leaderboard format is gaining in use, too, as being a desirable ad size.

Best Performing Ads Locations

2011-07-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

While each site is unique and needs to be considered with that in mind, certain locations do tend to be more successful. Google's AdSense ad locations heatmap shows these locations, with darker orange giving the strongest performance and fading to light yellow with the weakest performance.
As you can see in Google's AdSense ad locations heatmap:

Ads closer to the center of the page tend to perform better.
Ads above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold.
Studies show that ads placed at the end of articles tend to do well, even though they're below the fold.
Ads placed near site navigation or by images or other rich content tend to do well, too.

It's most important to consider your users, though, and their behavior at your specific site and with each specific page at your site.
Margaret Holland, a senior account manager at Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that “from a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a 'leaderboard' above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.”^[11] She finds the next most effective for click-throughs is the right-hand column or margin, especially with skyscrapers and vertical banners when placed next to the content in the main body. In addition, she finds that contextual square and rectangle banner ads within the center of the body content also do well.

Charts and Graphics of Banner Ads for you

2011-07-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

The charts below reflect the standard for banner ad sizes, followed by charts of Google AdSense ad sizes, formats, then Yahoo! Publisher ad sizes, formats.

The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Ad Sizes Working Group publishes banner ad size guidelines. “These voluntary guidelines provide a framework for advertising inventory and Web page design. The goal is to reduce and simplify the amount of work for agencies that may be faced with having to create several assets of a similar size for different publishers, e.g. 300x95, 300x100, 300x105.”

Below you'll find the current^[2] recommended banner ad sizes, and this listing includes 3 categories: Rectangles and Popups Banner Ad Sizes, Banners and Buttons Banner Ad Sizes, and Skyscrapers Banner Ad Sizes. In addition you'll also find graphics to show their respective sizes - click on the links corresponding with each category to view graphics showing the actual sizes.

Rectangles and Popups Banner Ad Sizes

Supplement to Banner Ads: The Best Performing Banner Ad Sizes, Locations, and Colors

On this page:

300 x 250 IMU, UAP: Medium Rectangle
250 x 250 IMU: Square Pop-up
240 x 400 IMU: Vertical Rectangle
336 x 280 IMU: Large Rectangle
180 x 150 IMU, UAP: Rectangle
300 x 100 IMU: 3:1 Rectangle
720 x 300 IMU: Pop-Under

IMU = Interactive Marketing Unit
UAP = Part of the Universal Ad Package

The Best Performing Banner

2011-07-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

“Internet Advertising Revenues Continue To Soar, Reach Nearly $10 Billion In First Half Of '07” reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers October 04, 2007.[1] This growth “continues to point to the mainstream acceptance of the medium and advertisers' continuing reliance on it.”

This is fantastic, positive news for both online publishers and advertisers! So how can we best maximize on this advertising revenue growth and continuing upward trend? The online ads themselves, ad placement, ad sizes and formats, and ad colors each play important roles in CTR (click-through rate) and earnings for publishers and advertisers. To maximize earnings for these ads, publishers need to optimize ads, part of which is choosing the best ad sizes and locations for their pages, along with choosing effective colors. This article provides charts of current standard ad sizes, Google AdSense ad sizes, formats and Yahoo! Publisher Network ad sizes, formats, followed by recommendations and statistics on the best performing ad locations, best performing ad sizes, formats, and blending or contrasting your ads with your site.