Interworks One is a Pay Per Click Management and Search Engine Optimization Firm. It is a search engine marketing firm that can help you get better exposure online. As a los angeles internet marketing and los angeles online marketing firm, it low cost, high quality Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, and Internet Advertising programs for companies targeting regional and local audiences.   It can implement pay per click job for your site to make sure you spend your money effectively on search engine and it helps on local search engine optimization to make sure your site is ranked for the keywords you want to targets. It will eventually generate more leads, traffic and sales for your website.

For small businesses with tight budgeting, it is especially important to figure out where to most effectively spend your money. The four basic search options are paid search, contextual advertising, paid inclusion and SEO. Here is an estimate made by eMarketer

We can see that SEO is catching up with other forms of search advertising. Paid search gives marketers a immediate effect but the problem is that you have to spend it consistently and carefully manage your bidding so that you don’t waste your money. SEO do takes time, effort and money. Once you established your credit and trustness with Gooogle and get your site ranked well in the organic search results, you can sit at your office and watch your traffic and leads to grow.

Email software systems run the gamut. Some lack standard reporting, list segmenting and A/B testing capabilities or make you build email with HTML coding. Other systems are the polar opposite, offering an array of features and an easy-to-use interface.

Be careful what you wish for. When you transition from a barebones email system to a premium provider, the metrics suddenly at your fingertips can be overwhelming. You might not know where to start.

Erick Barney, VP Marketing, Motorcycle Superstore, sends email offering accessories and specialized content. About three years ago, he switched from software that couldn’t even tell him his open rates to a system that gave him all the metrics he could ask for … and more.

“Right away, we had access to more numbers and reports than we knew what to do with, really,” he says. “Our challenge was to define what to focus on.”

Barney and his team started by defining some key performance indicators and scrubbing the list. They followed this with some basic A/B testing and gradually increased the complexity of their metrics work. They stayed focused on taking small, incremental steps.

The result? Deliverability, open, clickthrough and conversion rates are all up dramatically, and their email revenue has increased 377%.

“Optimization is not something that you can actually achieve, it’s something that you continue to work toward. There’s always something that can be done to improve your strategy,” Barney says.

Here’s the process they followed along with key insights they discovered when suddenly handling a flood of metrics.

Determine What Numbers Matter
First, Barney and his team set out to figure out which metrics were the most important to track.

They chose to monitor:
o Delivery rate
o Open rate
o Click activity
o Unsubscribes
o Conversion rate
o Revenue

“We had little knowledge of what were considered acceptable [key progress indicator] levels, and we began paying closer attention to industry standards,” he says. “We were quickly able to define acceptable KPI levels for our particular business strategy.”

The full case study can be accessed here

What i am wondering now is that will merchants like Dell, tigerdirect and other big companies follow ebay? I surely hope they do. However, CJ is still necessary for small merchants that is incapable of creating their own affiliate platform.

http://sites.google.com

Google always impresses us (or sometimes frustrates us) with the new tools they created. Google sites is a part of Google App which enables you to create a team sharing site as easy as editing a document. I have yet tried this tool, but to me, it would work pretty much like a handy CMS. Some features of Google sites include:

Single-click page creation Creating a new page for your Google Site just takes the click of a button.

No HTML required Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there’s no markup language for you to learn — just get started.

Make it your own Our customization options let you give your Google Site your own look and feel

Get started with templates We offer a growing list of page types — web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list — to help you get started with your Google Sites pages.

Upload files and attachments Use the file cabinet to upload files up to 10MB in size. Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites. Google Apps Premier and Education editions get an additional 500MB for each user account.

To me, the only thing that sets Google sites apart from others is the ability to put Google Doc, Google Calendar and Gmail together and hopefully that would make your team and organization work more efficiently together.

What Google is Attempting to Measure

Google wants to measure or is attempting to actively measure each of the following:

• Domain information
  • Registration date
  • Length of renewal (10 years, 5 years, 1 year, etc)
  • Addresses and Names of admin & technical contacts
  • DNS Records
  • Address of Name Servers
  • Hosting Location & Company
  • Stability of this data
• Information on User Behavior Online
  • CTR (Click-Through Rate) of individual results in the SERPs
  • Length of time spent on a given site/page
• Data contained on your computer
  • Favorites/Bookmarks List
  • Cache & Temp Files
  • Frequency of visits to particular sites/pages (history)

My thoughts:

Don’t get suprised. Even the expiration date of your domain and how often you renew your domain could impact your website’s ranking. This is all about credibility. If you only regersiter your domain for 1 year, what does this indicate to Google. Google interpret this as you will shut down your online business after 1 year. If this assumption is true, Why Google would bother to rank you? This all makes sense because Google wants to provide reliable source for searchers and Google trust websites has been online for 5-10 years.

Google also monitors how many people would go back to your sites to visit. Return visitors means more to Google as more return visitors implies you have a lot of useful information on your site and that is what Google would expect from an authority. The same theory applies if there are lots of people bookmark your site.

The Impact of this Patent

At last, the author encourages every webmasters read the article completely as quoted from the author “Although it is long, I urge every SEO/Webmaster to read this page completely. I have attempted to make the information legible and readable, and only pulled out parts that are important to the active practice of SEO”.

See the entire article about Google Patent at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/google-historical-data-patent

There are 5 critical points in that paper:

Google’s Concept of “Document Inception”

The date of “document inception”, which can refer to either a website as a whole or a single page is used in many different areas by Google. This data can come from the registration info, the date Google first found a link to the site/page or the site/page itself. Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.

My thoughts:
That is exactly why when you have a new page, you can get it indexed by Google in 24 hours if you can get a backlink from a high PR website. If you have a new site, you don’t need to spend big bucks to get a high quality link. You can use a free service from site like squidoo or hubpage. If you start writing some topic there and link back to your site, you site should get indexed by Google in 72 hours.

How Changing Content can Affect Rankings

Changing content over time has a huge impact in Google’s measures according to this patent. They use changes to determine “freshness” or “staleness” of websites and pages and how that data impacts the value of the links on the page as well its rankings. They’ll also measure large, “real”, content changes vs. superfluous changes and rank based on that data.

Google also says that for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn’t need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it, seasonal results may pop up or down in the rankings based on the time of month/year, etc.

My thoughts:
Yes, freshness! Google loves new content and that is why blogs can do better than other types of sites. Thus, you need to provide your visitor updated information. You ever wondered why sometimes e-commerce sites rank better than a content-driven site? New and fresh content would be the reason. E-commerce site always update their product listings and show new promotions while some content driven sites shows only static shopping guides. Another finding is that it seems the more product listings a page has, the better ranking. But I am not sure about this.

Spam Detection & Punishment

Google is employing many new systems of spam detection and prevention according to the patent. These include:

• Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
• Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their “bad list”
• Growth of off-topic links
• Speed of link gain
• Percentage of similar anchor text
• Topic/Subject shifts or additions

My thoughts:
Aggressive link building strategy probably won’t work anymore. I have worked for a company that decides to spend lots of $$ for getting a keyword ranked. We bought tons of articles, did tons of directory submission and did a lot of blog posts. Guess what, 1 month later, it worked. The company’s web page get to the 1st page of Google for a very competitive keywords. However, this only lasted for 3 months, and now get pushed back to 3rd page again.

I will talk about next 2 factors in my next post.

Look at this image below, it shows what search terms drives traffic to your site and it shows exactly how many visitors found your site with each search term. For example, 223 people found your site with the keyword “seo service” and 112 people found your site by search “seo tips”. What’s more, you can filter the results by different search engines, so you can see which search engine is your site currently optimized to.

On this page, you can see the exact referral URL sorted by time.

On this page, you can see a list of keywords that Hittail suggest you to improve. If you can work on the ranking for these certain kind of keywords, you will be able to get more qualified traffic.

First, determine the landing page of your ad placed on other sites, an example of be: http://www.yoursite.com/page1.php Then determine what your goal page is, this is the final page you want your visitors to go to, it could be http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you-for-purchasing.php. After you determined all these pages, put them into the conversion goal setting section, see the following image:

After you have completed this step, then you need to determine a couple of things and build a understandable URL. For example, i want to buy a text link ads on SiteA, if you just use the link: http://www.mysite.com, you get nothing on Google Analytics, however, if you use the URL like: http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.html?utm_source=SiteA.com&utm_medium=textlinkads&utm_campaign=specialsale, then you would able to track the results. Google has a very handy tool to build a URL like this:

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&topic=10998

On that page, it explains terms clearly such as what is the campaign source, campaign medium…etc

After you’ve done this, in Google Analytics, you can track the results by clicking traffic source and then select campaign names that you want to track. You can see how much traffic has a specific ad campaign brought to you and you can see how these traffic has contributed to your final objective (the goal you set up previously).