Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, August 31, 2007 Leave a comment
The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog earlier today announced that it has made some changes to the Yahoo! Panama PPC model. I think some of these changes are quite interesting.
For instance, you can look at all of your pay-per-click ads, up to 20 ads, with one click. And you can also look at competitors’ ads so you can borrow their ideas. But the feature that I found most promising is the quality score update. Every 30 days, Yahoo! will review pay-per-click quality scores and if your quality score goes down they’ll send you an e-mail to let you know. Of course, you can check your Account Summary, but if you are near the end of the 30-day period and haven’t checked yet then they’ll notify you by e-mail. I think that’s a cool feature.
Finally, one new feature of the PPC model at Yahoo! is the ability to save and view up to 45 different reports. I like creating custom reports. 45 of them? Wow, that’s a feature I could go crazy for.
It looks like Yahoo! is making a serious effort to compete with Google.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, August 31, 2007 Leave a comment
When I scour the web looking for blogs to read I run across to big mistakes that bloggers make. There are probably more than just two mistakes, but I see two extremes with regard to blog SEO, or blog optimization, that bloggers tend to make when writing their posts.
The first mistake is the “too much” mistake and the second mistake is the “too little” mistake. In other words, the blog posts either look spammy or are written in such a way that you can’t tell that the blog post is SEOd at all.
Blogs are meant to be conversational. That is, it is really a sales tool, not in the sense that I want to deliver a hard sales message and try to close the sale right now. The purpose of the blog is to get people interested in my topic enough that they stick around longer to see what else I have to say. You can call it “pre-selling.” I’m not trying to sell you anything right now. I’m just trying to open the door of conversation.
Since that is true, my primary purpose in blogging should be to start a relationship with you. Not sell, not harp, not hustle. Just relate. But I’m also relating to the search engines and the way humans relate to search engines is through keywords and links. That’s where blog optimization comes in.
Most bloggers, when they try to SEO their blog posts, forget about the conversation part and start adding links and keywords in where they don’t naturally fall. This looks spammy and could count against you at the search engines as well as with your human readers. If your readers notice you trying to SEO your blog posts then they’ll likely lose interest. On the other hand, if you don’t optimize your blog posts at all then you may not have your blog posts indexed in the search engines for the keywords you want to be found for.
Blog optimization is all about managing your two audiences: Search engines and humans. But, really, the more important of the two are your human readers. Talk to them, not at them.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, August 30, 2007 Comments (1)
When it comes to viral video marketing, everyone knows about YouTube and Google Video. But those are not your only options. I wanted to take this time to share with you some other places you can upload your videos as well. Here’s the list of video directories I recommend:
- YouTube – Needs no introduction.
- Google Video - I think you know who they are.
- Yahoo! Video – Did you know the largest search portal on the Internet has a place where you can upload your videos? I highly recommend using Yahoo! Video in addition to YouTube and Google.
- MetaCafe – MetaCafe encourages users to vote on their favorite videos.
- Break.com – Break is unique in that they offer monetary prizes for the best videos in certain categories, including Girl of the Day, and they have ways for videos to make money being the most popular.
- DailyMotion – DailyMotion is very popular and it’s easy to see why. You can upload your videos, join groups, and share your videos with your group. This adds a new twist to social networking.
When it comes to marketing yourself through viral video, don’t just settle for YouTube and Google Video. They may be the most popular video sites on the web, but they are not the only video sites. Get your video out there in as many places as you can because some of the most devoted video marketing freaks aren’t YouTube junkies. Some of the best viral video marketers are actually hanging out in some of these other places too. Oh, and one more for the road: Try Blinkx. It rocks.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, August 30, 2007 Leave a comment
If you plan on using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to your website then you need to understand that each ad you write must be optimized for specific keywords. Not concepts. Keywords.
Google evaluates every ad and gives it a quality score. That quality score helps determine the rank that ad falls into when displayed on SERPs and in the content network. The quality score is determined, in part, by how well you have optimized your ad according to certain keywords. Perhaps the most important thing to understand is the keyword mix you have on your target page – the page you are driving traffic to.
PPC Ad Positioning Based On Keywords
It isn’t so much that the keywords that are on that page will be penalized if they don’t appear in the ad. Your ad might still run, but it won’t be displayed as high up on the page. You might have to increase your bid amount for those keywords if you want them to appear on the page. You might be better off discontinuing the ad from appearing on pages optimized for those keywords altogether.
For example, let’s say you sell fruit: apples, oranges, bananas, pears, kumquats. OK, we’ll throw in the figs for a nickel. Well, you can’t ship fruit through the U.S. mail, but it’s just an example, right? So you optimize your ad around the keyword fruit. You don’t have enough space in your ad to list every kind of fruit you offer so you leave those out. You could write a separate ad for each type of fruit. But let’s suppose your first ad uses the keyword “fruit.” Your ad will still run when a searcher queries “apple,” but your ad won’t appear as high on the page – unless you increase your bid for that keyword.
In highly competitive markets your ad may not run at all unless you bid a certain minimum. I saw this the other day. Ads for a certain keyword were inactivated until the advertiser agreed to pay $1.00 for those keywords, a full 70 cents above what he was willing to pay. And they were excellent keywords for his ad. Just keep this one thing in mind: Keywords are extremely important in pay-per-click advertising.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 Comments (5)
Real estate agents like to buy the newest best thing. If I were a real estate agent and wanted to build a website, I would stay as far away from real estate gurus who claim to have the best method for building a real estate website. For one thing, if they’re worth their weight in salt as a real estate agent they probably don’t know squat about designing or building websites, let alone search engine optimization. It doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in; to succeed online today you need to have a firm grasp on search engine optimization and how to rank your site well at the search engines.
I visited one real estate website and noticed at the bottom that there was a copyright notice showing the owner of the content was the person who had developed the website, not the real estate agent whose site I was on. That’s a big no-no. If you pay a web designer or another professional to build you a website, make sure that you are buying the content. You don’t want to pay someone to build you a website only to find out that they own the content. You won’t be able to modify it and what good does it do to have a website that you don’t own the content to?
The Other Mistake: PLR Is Duplicate Content
That was the first mistake this real estate agent made. Upon further investigation, I found out that the owner of all of that content also licensed the rights for other real estate agents around the country to use it as well. The company actually had links to their customers’ websites. They all looked exactly the same! It was one template and all of the website contained content that was exactly the same. They were PLR articles. It looks like real estate agents who bought into that plan paid for a template with duplicate content so none of them got any SEO benefit out of their websites at all.
When you go to build your real estate website, be sure you don’t buy a package that looks just like everybody else’s. More importantly, make sure the content is not the same as anyone else’s online. If even one other web page has the same content that you have and that web page got that content first then your web page won’t rank in the search engines. It’s duplicate content. You’re only killing your business. Why would you do that?
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 Leave a comment
Do you have a website that you want to drive traffic to? You can drive traffic to your website, even to a specific web page, by uploading a video to YouTube and Google Video. We call it viral video marketing.
All you really need is Windows Move Maker and a video camera. You can use one of the small hand held point and shoot digital camcorders that are so easy to get these days. You know, the ones people use for making their home videos?
You take your video and have someone hold it while you talk, or dance, or perform … whatever it is you making a video of. Or you could just put your camcorder on the coffee table on top of a tripod, if you are doing it all by yourself. You do your editing in Windows Movie Maker, of course.
Once you’ve made your video you simply upload it to the video sharing sites. But before you do that there is one more thing you need to do. Overlay your e-mail address into the last seconds of your video so that it appears on the screen toward the end of the video. This is so that people watching the video can see what website you are promoting. People interested in what you have to offer can decided for themselves to visit your site. This is one way to get targeted traffic to your site and it works no matter what kind of site you own. It’s also totally free.
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, August 28, 2007 Comments (2)
Some interesting stories on Marketing Pilgrim this morning.
First, the Chinese and Yahoo:
“Free speech rights as we understand them in the United States are not the law in China,” Yahoo said in a statement Monday. “Every sovereign nation has a right to regulate speech within its borders.”
This no doubt has human rights activists up in arms, but does Yahoo have a point? Is this a matter of Chinese law rather than U.S. values? I believe we’re going to see more and more of this in the future. The Internet is not a U.S. entity. It is owned by no nation, but every nation wants the right to regulate what can be accessed through within the boundaries of their borders. Do nations have that right? If not, who does?
(Pilgrim) Now that more of the NYT’s archives are appearing in Google’s search results, many individuals are finding their past is catching up with them. Worse, it’s the NYT’s version of their past that contains misinformation.
In out litigious society, this could be cause for a few lawsuits. But who would those injured sue? Google or the New York Times? Maybe both?
What happens if an old news story that contains false or unverified information appears online? This is another reason you should be paying attention to online reputation management.
These stories weren’t on Marketing Pilgrim’s blog, but they’re interesting nonetheless:
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Google Inc. said Tuesday it will serve as the exclusive provider of auction-based text advertisments throughout Time Warner Inc.’s CNN.com
I think we’ll see more of this type of buddy/buddy advertising from big media in the future as well. The Internet is quickly becoming the playground of large media companies just like TV has been for the past 50 years. Anyone care to guess who will eventually rise to the top (Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, et. al.)?
(Turncoat) If AOL is serious about wanting to improve DMOZ, this would be a good place to start. For now, I’ll join the crowd of people saying Google should stop using DMOZ. Of course there are editors who do a good job, but these mob like practices make it impossible to work with and for.
You’ll have to read the whole story to get the full picture, but this DMOZ editor is the Martin Luther of online directories. Well, not quite, but this is quite telling. Do the right thing and even the has-beens will get you. It really is the wild west, isn’t it?
(Source) The new allowed sites feature now seems to be live for all AdSense publishers. Just login to your account and go to https://www.google.com/adsense/publisher-whitelist-view.
I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.
I’d be interested in your thoughts on any of this ….
Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.
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