Press Release Lobby

More Pages

OK, we’ll deal with the most obvious method first. Add more pages. It’s simple and it might be considered old school to many, but it still has a place. The more pages of content you have, the more information you can provide and the more keywords you can target. The math is simple and the technique is devastatingly simple.

Try to add new pages for new topics and, if a particular topic looks like being too verbose, split the page down into several parts. Hostíng plans usually allow for a lot of disk space so you should have no problems with space limitations in this respect. Content Management Systems are often included as part of a hostíng control panel, again making it much easier to add more pages to your website.

Add An Article Directory

This is a similar approach to adding more pages in many respects except that it allows for a slightly different structure. An article directory is an excellent way to provide visitors more information on the topic of your site. Articles can be categorized, and include deep links to the appropriate pages of your site.

Articles are very marketable, in the sense that if they are well written, other websites may be inclined to link to the article or even republish it in full with all links to your site left in place. If you simply want to add more content, and use the resulting pages as online real estate, then you could consider accepting article submissions from other authors and Webmasters. You receive free content while the authors receive exposure.
News Section

News items related to your industry or even your business can be a good excuse to regularly add content. As a general rule they will contain what will turn out to be reasonable long tail search results and you can optimize the pages. Good news or press releases may be picked up by other industry news sites providing you with more exposure as well as genuinely useful content for your site.

Let’s not overlook that it’s always good to brag. Modesty will not win you customers, so if your business or website achieves something big then brag about it. Inform your customers how they too can benefit and the advantages that your news gives to them.

Forums

Some believe that the forum is becoming outdated by more modern web 2.0 applications and portals. While this may be true, the forum can still be used to your advantage although only in the appropriate circumstances. Forums provide a means for people to communicate with one another, and if you can create a vibrant and lively forum, you will instantly attract regular visitors.

The forum can also be used to direct your website visitors. If there’s a particularly hot topic, then link to it from one of your pages. If somebody (even you) posts a particularly beneficial post, then link to it from one or more of your pages. Conversely, you can also point forum readers to the main pages of your site. It is possible, with certain forum applications, to replace all instances of a word with a link to one of your pages – a quick way to flow traffíc into your main site.

Blogs

Who hasn’t heard of blogs, right? They caused a huge debate when first introduced. Early bloggers claimed they would be the future of the Internet while more skeptical marketers and Webmasters decided their popularity would dwindle eventually. The former certainly came true and it seems there are blogs everywhere, within every industry, and on every conceivable topic.

Blogs have been turned into books, books into blogs. Blogs have even been turned into TV series and, again, vice versa. If you’re not blogging then you’re not communicating because a blog really does provide a superb way of communicating with your visitors and your customers. And, you guessed it, it allows you to add a lot of good content to your site and will usually draw good search engine traffíc for your efforts.

Frequently Asked Questíons

An old favorite of the Internet marketer. The FAQ page serves a number of purposes, but primarily it is used to prevent an excessive number of telephone calls and emails with simple questíons. An FAQ page can also be used to highlight some of the main benefits of your service or product. For example, if you sell trainers, and deliver them the next day, one of your questíons could be:

“Q – How long before my Nike trainers are delivered?”

“A – We provide next day delivery on all orders placed before 2pm”

That’s a very simplistic view, but it can help to sell your product. Also ensure that you include some of your more important keywords through the questíons and answers.

Knowledgebase

A knowledgebase is essentially the next step up from an FAQ page. Instead of having a single page with all of your questíons and answers you would create an article or short article that concentrates on one question or one tutorial. Once you have built up a good number of these you have an excellent point of resource, a good way to attract visitors, and a method of keeping unnecessary customer communications to a minimum.

Feeds

RSS and XML feeds are not new, but they are good for adding content to your site. Look for other sites within your industry that provide feeds and embed them into a page or several of the pages of your site. This can help with SEO because the better feeds update regularly and the search engine spiders believe your site content updates regularly.

These are just some of the more basic but effective methods of adding more and more content to your website. Anything that enables you to add more words has the ability to help improve traffíc and conversions, and provide your customers with an invaluable resource that they will hopefully return to time and time again.

If you don’t already have a blog, then get one. At least one. You can combine a blog with other methods of adding content. For instance, you can add other people’s articles, or your own articles to the pages of your blog. Alternatively, you can use a blog as the news section of your website. They are easy to design and typically very easy to establish and integrate into your website.
About The Author
WebWiseWords crafts various forms of web content. If you are looking for anything from article writing to blog writing, then visit the WebWiseWords site today.

Paid Search Revenues Continue to Rise

While the major search providers have always insisted the clíck fraud rate is a gross overestimation, a 2005 Outsell survey found that clíck fraud was a $1.3 billion problem for publishers. At the time, many advertiser respondents (27 percent) said they planned to cut back and/or eliminate paid search campaigns in 2006.

Outsell respondents may have intended to cut down on paid search, but they certainly didn’t follow through. SEMPO’s year-end search marketing report showed that North American advertisers spent $8 billion on paid placement programs in 2006, amounting to 86 percent of 2006′s total search spend ($9.4 billion). Seventy-one percent of SEMPO respondents said they used paid search campaigns, illustrating that there were not many defectors.

Despite advertisers’ insistent claims that the search engines don’t do enough to eliminate clíck fraud, paid search revenues continue to fill the coffers of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many second and third tier search engines. Additionally, there is a huge gap in the professed prevalence of clíck fraud between the search providers and the advertisers and clíck fraud advocates.

Google Clíck Fraud Estimate

The rate of clíck fraud changes depending on whose numbers you believe. Clíck fraud detection agencies put the clíck fraud rate hovering around 14 percent, while others believe at least 20 percent of all clicks are fraudulent.

Late last month, Google issued a statement on the Inside AdWords blog that insisted invalid clicks consistently remain under 10, typically in the single-digits, and that virtually all malicious activity is found by Google’s filter. Ghosemajumder claimed the percentage of clicks found by advertiser-initiated investigations account for just .02 percent of clicks. All other accounts, he said, are grossly overestimated.

Alchemist Media President Jessie Stricchiola takes issue with Google’s assertion that it refunds advertisers promptly for fraudulent clicks, stating that “Google has been the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers”.

Google Clíck Fraud Filters

In February, Google outlined the three-layer filtration process it uses to combat and eliminate clíck fraud. They described the system which uses both proactive and reactive filters as follows:

1. Proactive Filters: Automated algorithms analyze and filter out invalid clicks in real-time without billing advertisers for these false clicks. This accounts for the vast majority of invalid clíck detection.2. Proactive Offline Analysis: Post billing, Google uses automated and manual analysis to identify fraudulent clicks that somehow made it through the first layer of filtration. Special attention is paid to clicks occurring on the AdSense network. This is done pro-actively and without any involvement from advertisers. When false clicks are found, advertisers’ accounts are immediately credited via Clíck Quality Adjustments.

3. Reactive Investigations: Investigations take place when an advertiser approaches Google concerned about suspicious activity on their account. Each complaint is investigated, though Google says refunds are relatively rare. Google claims that the vast majority of fraudulent clicks, more than 99 percent, are found and thrown out within the first two stages of filtration. The third stage only includes the .02 percent of clicks where advertisers are affected by undetected cases of clíck fraud.

Clíck Fraud Detection Agency Estimates

In April 2006, The Clíck Fraud Index reported an industry-wide average clíck fraud rate of 13.7 percent. The clíck fraud rate was broken down as follows:

• Tier 1 search providers — 12.1 percent
• Tier 2 search providers — 21.3 percent
• Tier 3 search providers — 29.8 percent

Some of the newer clíck fraud prevention firms like Clíck Assurance and ClickLab offër algorithm-based programs to limit bad clicks. These programs estimate the statistical likelihood of a clíck being fraudulent based on behavioral variables and IP address.

Gap in Prevalence of Clíck Fraud

As noted above, Google admits to a < 10 percent clíck fraud rate, while advertisers and clíck fraud detection agencies believe it is more like 14 to 20 percent. Ghosemajumder explained this gap saying that many advertisers and clíck fraud detection agencies are looking at the wrong signals, mistakenly classifying valid clicks as fraudulent. Additionally, he believes many advertisers request refunds for clicks already thrown out during the first two layers of the filtration system.

For example, misclassification might occur when counting reloads of an advertiser’s landing page. Say the customer clicks through to the landing page, views a product page, and then hits the back button, returning to the same landing page. Without proper tagging, that one clíck and five page re-loads could be misclassified as 6 clicks from the same visitor. Google argues that there are hundreds of different signals that must be monitored to detect clíck fraud, signals that are a closely guarded company secrët and known only to the Google clíck quality team.

A Solution for Clíck Fraud

Like other experts, we believe the only solution to clíck fraud is for independent auditors to evaluate the system using accurate data provided by the search engines and advertisers themselves. It is the only way to get a neutral calculation — the current clíck fraud detection agencies may not be entirely neutral, and certainly the search providers are not neutral. We need an independent agency that has no incentive to íncrease or decrease the clíck fraud rate. One solution could be to use a technology firm like Fair Isaac, which is currently conducting clíck fraud research for SEMPO.

One thing is certain, until advertisers are willing to provide campaign info, and the search engines are willing to share clíck fraud data, we’ll nevër know the actual prevalence of clíck fraud or how much advertisers are losing as a result.

About The Author
Nick Guastella, SEM Analyst and PPC expert at Bruce Clay, Inc., has been active in search engine marketing for the past six years. Nick has worked both sides of the PPC fence. He has insider knowledge gained from a stint starting in 2000 at GoTo/Overture, the original Pay Per Clíck advertising pioneer. He then crossed over as Account manager for ValueClick.com.

Just when you believed you had all your SEO tactics figured out, the web goes and changes on you. Not just the rules of the game but it takes the whole web platform right out from under your feet and changes it. What’s a poor webmaster to do?

What Is Web 2.0?

Just what exactly is Web 2.0? What does it mean? Is there a precise definition that all webmasters can get their heads around and understand? Not really, many believe Web 2.0 is just another one of those contrived buzzwords, signifying mostly marketing hype!

However, perhaps the simple definition can be found in the word “you”! Time magazine probably summed it up best by making reference to the “you” in user generated content. Web 2.0 is basically all the platforms that give us this brave new user-powered interactive Internet, generally referred to as ‘social media’.

Web 2.0 can be seen or manifested in such sites as YouTube, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Digg, Squidoo… Web 2.0 uses scripting languages such as Python, Perl PHP, RSS… to construct interactive platforms that websites can use to create all this user-generated content.

Many refer to these evolving formats and scripting platforms under the name AJAX and no this does not refer to the popular cleaning agent under your kitchen sink! This AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScrípt and XML) comes from Google and takes web based interactive programs such as Google Maps, something that’s usually associated with desktop applications, but is now being applied on the web. If you have used Google Earth, you will realize how powerful and revolutionary these new applications can be, not to mention, they are a whole lot of fun.

Where Did The Name Web 2.0 Come From?

Many point to Tim O’Reilly, the constant innovator of many technological changes on the web. O’Reilly has been at the forefront in discussions and conferences on the nature and substance of the ‘meme’ open source platforms dominating the new social media.

How all this new media plays out is anyone’s guess, but all webmasters should optimize their sites for this new Web 2.0 and take full advantage of all the SEO possibilities presented by this brave new Internet.

Here are a few SEO suggestions you can try:

1. RSS/Blogging: You must place a blog and RSS feed on all your sites. This is a fairly simple procedure to do with frëe server-based programs such as WordPress. Having a blog and RSS feed will place your site into the whole tagging process. Each category you create in your blog will be seen as a tag by such sites as Technorati. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and your RSS feeds will get your content distributed across the web. A simple and easy way to tap into the new Web 2.0 universe.

2. Create some Google Juice!: Join as many of these highly interactive sites as you can: MySpace, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Wikipedia … my favorite is Squidoo, where you can create Lenses on different topics that interest you. User driven content that’s utilized by all the major social media sites. Of course, link back to your sites in your posts and creations in these user-created content havens and watch your PR ratings go way up.

3. Use Interactive Scrípts: Place interactive JavaScrípts and platforms on your own sites. Have membership forums, polls, blogs, feedback forms, user-contributions… to build unique content driven sites. Become the spider!

4. Tagging (Folksonomy): Be constantly aware of the tags (keywords) you’re creating with your blogs and sites. This can have a very beneficial effect on your traffíc and rankings. Closely relate these tags to the content on your sites and build higher rankings in all the major search engines.

5. The Long Tail: Especially important for affilíate marketers, you need to cover special niches where there is less competition and content. These narrow niches make up a large portion of the whole vast web, creating content in these unique areas will get your site included in the search engines a lot quicker and keep them there a lot longer.

6. Holistic Web 2.0: Be constantly vigilant in placing your sites in the whole ‘Interactive Game’, building links and partnerships with the important YouHubs: MySpace, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Digg, Squidoo… the more connections you have, the more your own sites will prosper.

Be The Spider!

No doubt, Web 2.0 will play an ever increasing role in the development and evolution of the web. Make sure your sites are optimized and in the ‘You’ game. Create blogs, RSS feeds, interactive forums, membership areas, user-generated content and truly make your sites interactive havens in their own right. Just remember to tag everything and your sites will reap the benefits of this new Web 2.0 generated SEO gold rush.

About The Author
The author is a full time Internet Marketer with numerous sites on the web, including two niche sites on Internet Marketing. His main site is Internet Marketing Tools. For the latest and most effective marketing tools try: Marketing Tool Guide Copyright © 2007 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed with box intact.

Create Your META Description Tag

Take your líst of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Description Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing description is:

<META name=”description” content=”Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.”>

You can make your META Description Tag as long as you like, but only a certain portion of it will get indexed and displayed by search engines. According to Danny Sullivan in his (old but still relevant) article How to Use HTML Meta Tags, 200 to 250 characters of the META Description gets indexed but less than that gets displayed, depending on the search engine. So you want to make sure all your important keywords are listed towards the start of the tag.

Now take your líst of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Now you need to create a readable sentence or two describing your web site and incorporating these keywords so they make the best use of the keyword real estate available.

Because search engines often display the contents of the META Description Tag in the search results, it is very important that your sentences make grammatical sense and are enticing enough to encourage readers to clíck on your link. Let’s start with:

If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.

Ok, so that’s around 150 characters long and gets our three important keyword phrases included. But it’s a bit bland. We need to add something to entice the searcher to clíck on it. How about:

Order online for a 10 percent discount!

So now we have the following completed META Description Tag:

<META name=”description” content=”If you’re seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!”>

Our new tag is optimized for our keyword phrases, it’s around 200 characters in length, it describes our site accurately, it speaks to the reader and it (hopefully) entices them to clíck on the link and view the site.

Create Your META Keywords Tag

We’re almost there. Now it’s time to create your optimized META Keywords Tag. Let me stress here that this Tag is quite unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Not many of the search crawlers even support it any more. You can see which ones do on this page. If you have the time and you really want to create META Keywords tags for your pages, then go ahead, but if not, then leave them out of your code altogether. This tag will have very little impact on your overall SEO campaign.

Assuming you do want to create a Keywords tag, take your líst of target keywords and phrases and open another text file. Again, you can use an existing sample META Keywords Tag as your template. Let’s say our existing Keywords Tag is:

<META name=”keywords” content=”flowers, roses, weddings bouquets, florists, floral arrangements, flower deliveries, Valentines Day gifts, Christmas decorations, Mother’s Day, tributes, wreaths, clutches, sprays, in sympathy, funerals, corporate functions, parties, floral displays, Miami, Florida”>

You are just including a líst of related keywords to include in this tag. Now take your líst of keywords for the home page in order of importance. For our fictional florist these were:

- florists Miami
- florists Florida
- wedding bouquets

Because you have a lot more room in this tag, a good rule of thumb for creating a META Keywords Tag is to include the keywords and phrases you are targeting with your site content, as well as some terms that you don’t necessarily want to use in your site copy but are still relevant to the site content. For example, the site copy, TITLE and META description tags would include the most important search keywords, but the META Keywords Tag could be used for keyword variations and combinations that don’t appear in the visible site text, but that people may also search for. Examples include plurals, contractions, slang, variations, misspellings, cultural nuances and industry jargon.

For our fictional florist, these may include things like:

- wedding flowers
- roses
- wedding roses
- Valentine’s Day roses
- sympathy gifts
- Mother’s Day gifts
- funeral wreaths
- flower deliveries
- floral arrangements
- birthday gifts
- flowers
- flowers for wedding
- wedding decorations

So now we have the following draft META Keywords Tag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami, florists Florida, wedding bouquets, wedding flowers, roses, wedding roses, Valentine’s Day roses, sympathy gifts, Mother’s Day gifts, funeral wreaths, flower deliveries, floral arrangements, birthday gifts, flowers, flowers for wedding, wedding decorations”>

However, when creating your Keywords Tag, you should not repeat any particular keywords within your META Keywords Tag more than five times and I would recommend excluding commas so that all your keywords can be indexed in combination with each other.

So we need to fix the draft tag to remove the excess repetition of the words “flowers” and “weddings”. This is easy to do because some of the keyword phrases already incorporate these single generic keywords.

For starters, we can lose the single “flowers” as it is already covered by some of the other phrases like “wedding flowers”. Next, we can drop “roses for the same reason. Then we can combine some keyword phrases together to save space, e.g. “flowers for wedding” and “wedding decorations” can be integrated to become “flowers for wedding decorations” so we can lose the extra instance of “wedding”.

So now we have the following completed META Keywords Tag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”florists Miami florists Florida wedding bouquets wedding flowers wedding roses Valentine’s Day roses sympathy gifts Mother’s Day gifts funeral wreaths flower deliveries floral arrangements birthday gifts flowers for wedding decorations”>

Tailored TITLE and META Tags

While some webmasters remember to include a META Description and a META Keywords Tag in their home page HTML code, many forget to include them on every page of the site that they want indexed. Or worse, they duplicate the homepage TITLE and META Tags on all other pages. To give a web site the best ranking ability possible, it is highly recommended that each page of the site include a unique TITLE tag and unique META tags, individually tailored to the content of that specific page.

For example, our fictional Miami florist may have a page devoted to wedding bouquets and another devoted to funeral wreaths. The TITLE and META tags for the first page should include keywords relating to weddings and the page about wreaths should utilize keywords relating to funerals and sympathy.

The use of tailored TITLE and META Tags on each page creates multiple entry points to a web site and enables relevant content to be found in search engines no matter where it resides on a site. For example, instead of relying on visitors to arrive via the Home Page, the optimization of individual site pages makes each page more visible in the search engines, providing additional gateways to the site’s content. The more pages optimized, the wider the range of keywords and phrases that can be targeted and the more entry points are created to a site.
About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

‘online technologies and practices that people use to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites‘.

At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing.

Social media can be a great way to have your website promoted by word-of-mouth.

If you can get people to talk about and recommend your services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?

How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?

The good news is it is easy to start the process of using social media to promote your website.

1) Create a MySpace Page

MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.

Setting up your own page is simple and frëe. Go to www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.

Spend an hour every week developing your site and building your líst of friends. Invite relevant people to comment about your website.

2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages

A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lísts of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lísts and benefit from other people’s recommendations. If your website has frëe content, you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lísts. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:

• Digg – www.digg.com
• Technorati – www.technorati.com
• Del.icio.us – del.icio.us
• Reddit – www.reddit.com

However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

3) Add an RSS Feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.

Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.

Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner to encourage distribution and interest.

4) Email to a Friend

Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an ‘Email a Friend’ link to all of your content pages.

5) Add a Forum

Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.

The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don’t feel they are being censored, but you have to stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, sp@m and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don’t bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.

Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin. More technical people can use a frëe opensource solution such as PHPBB.

You can register your forum with BoardTracker to make it easier for people to find.

6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos

It has nevër been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your website is about Making Monëy on eBay, you could create a short video on “How to Take Perfect Photos for Your eBay Listings”. Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.

Post your videos on YouTube and Google Videos. Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.

7) Share Your Photos

If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr and PhotoBucket. For example, if your website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next steam train show and post the pictures on these sites. People searching for steam train images are likely to try these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your own site from the images.

Create a Blog

Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.

Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly löse their audience.

Use the blog to drive traffíc to your main website.

You can get basic blogging software for frëe. Try WordPress or Blogger. For a managed service, try Typepad.

In many ways, today’s social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created – of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers better start listening to what they are saying.

One last point before I finish. It’s really a word of warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still, call their lawyers to fight it. If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.
About The Author
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com Feed: SubHub Articles Feed

Let’s first examine the main reasons why advertisers should be abandoning PPC in droves:

1. Cost

According to the Fathom Online Keyword Price Index, the average keyword price paid by online advertisers reversed a downward trend and increased 16.5% percent to $1.48 in the third quarter of 2006, up from a $1.43 per clíck at the end of 2005.

That’s one report. Another compiled by Clíck Forensics concluded that the average pay-per-clíck search-term cost was $4.51 across retail, financial services, health and fitness, technology and entertainment advertising. Whatever the average cost, it’s too high for most small to medium-sized businesses.

More stats and information on PPC trends (conflicting or otherwise) can be found at the links below:

SEM Services: Trends and Predictions

DoubleClick Performics 50 Search Trend Report Q1 2006

Advertisers Cutting Google AdWords Spending With Surge of Keyword Prices

2. Clíck Fraud

You gotta love stats. In researching this article, clíck fraud was cited as running anywhere from a low of 2.0% to a high of 35% – a range guaranteed to put a smile on the faces of government flunkies that like to boggle the public with reams of out-of-context figures. Since stats can be massaged to support just about any argument, I won’t bore you with a list of supporting links.

If you’re interested, just do a search on “Clíck Fraud percentages” or “35% Clíck Fraud” and review at your leisure.

3. No Accountability

PPC engines bill without providing any backup as to the origin of the clicks received. It’s the “trust us” philosophy of business. Hey, if you’re not savvy enough to look for, or find, fraud, then obviously there wasn’t any. Why would you think otherwise?

Not all advertisers, however, are content to accept the “trust us” approach to customer relations. Expect more suits like last year’s class action suit against Google.

Clíck Fraud Concerns Hound Google

Google Agrees To $90 Million Settlement In Class Action Lawsuit
Over Clíck Fraud

Of the three reasons noted above, the first and third are known to any PPC advertiser and the second is widely ignored. Why? Because many advertisers would prefer to believe that the big PPC players are doing their best to monitor and control the clíck fraud problem. And, of course, they believe this because companies that make billions of dollars from PPC ads have no vested interest in padding their bottom line and making their investors happy. Also, there’s the fact that the Internet is immune to scams and rip-offs. Plus, as we all know, history has shown that industries and companies that police themselves are above reproach.

Is this the world we live in? Remember Enron and WorldCom? In the real world, the equation reads as follows:

But to be fair, not all advertisers turn a blind eye to the threat of clíck fraud. The sad fact is that most are either unaware there is a problem or are ignorant of the extent of the problem. These advertisers simply do not have the technical know how to investigate clíck fraud as it applies to them or to determine how it affects them – by which I mean how much monëy they are losing.

Generally, this group is impressed with numbers. If they receive hundreds of clicks per day on a PPC ad, they are in clíck heaven. The same group is especially enamoured with all things Google. All other advertising models are measured against Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs and found wanting. The problem is that only God and Google really know where their clicks and impressions come from, but why worry since both subscribe to “Do No Evil”.

So, how bad is clíck fraud? Worse than you think and worse than has been reported and, if you’ve missed what has been reported, the links below provide an overview:

1/ The Sausage Manifesto
By Jeffry K. Rohrs, December 18, 2006

2/ New Clíck Fraud Allegations, With a Twist
By Kevin Newcomb | December 8, 2006

3/ The Silent Epidemic of Botnets
By Jim Hedger, December 6, 2006

4/ The Vanishing Clíck-Fraud Case
By Ben Elgin, December 4, 2006

5/ A True 2nd Tier PPC Clíck Fraud Story
By Carsten Cumbrowski, November 15, 2006

6/ Clíck Fraud The Dark Side of Online Advertising
Business Week Magazine October 2, 2006

7/ Google, Yahoo Clíck Fraud Audits: When Will Advertisers Demand Them?
By Donna Bogatin, August 25th, 2006 ZDNet

8/ Yahoo Used in SpyWare Clíck Fraud Scheme By Jim Hedger, Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Still not convinced? then, listen to the following interview with the CEO of AIT Inc. Clarence Briggs who was one of the lead plaintiffs in last year’s Google class action suit:

These stories should serve as a wake up call to any thinking person that a large number of clicks don’t necessarily equate to sales or monëy well spent. And, if you think clíck fraud is just part of the cost of doing business, then there are thousands of scam artists out there who are ready to be your best friend.

Can the PCC industry be saved? Not without accountability from the major players. In any other industry if you paid for something – say 100 widgets – you would expect to get 100 widgets. If you received 60 widgets, you would want to know what happened to the other 40. And, if the supplier said, “trust me, I sent a 100″, you would demand proof.

Even when there are external and independent monitoring agencies working on behalf of consumers and investors, fraud occurs, as in the case of WorldCom and Enron. When an industry polices itself – well, you figure it out.

So, if pay-per-clíck is a poor choice for your advertising dollars because of rising costs, fraud and lack of industry accountability, what are the alternatives?

1. Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The blanket term used to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven search results of a search engine, and the methodologies used to achieve such website rankings. (Source: http://www.mediumblue.com/newsletters/organic-seo.html)

Entails a learning curve to become knowlegeable in accepted SEO techniques but worth the time and effort given that it’s generally accepted that around 80%-90% of all traffíc to websites originates from search engines. If time is monëy to you, hire a reputable SEO consultant. Use the savings from the monëy you would have spent on a PPC campaign.

2. Paid Inclusion: Refers to the payment of a one-time fee for placement of a website listing within a search engine’s paid or organic search results. Not as popular an advertising model as it once was (read not as much monëy in it for search engines) but could be poised to make a comeback.

This model used to be the main revenue generator for a number of search engines with Inktomi being the best known proponent. Advertisers would pay an annual fee to appear in Inktomi’s search results as well as the results of other engines powered by Inktomi. The hook was frequent crawling (every 48 hours) which allowed webmasters to see the results of their SEO efforts quickly.

Paid inclusion hasn’t died, but it has morphed with variations still being offered by Yahoo! and other engines. Probably, the most interesting variation was launched about 18 months ago by ExactSeek.com and the ISEDN (Independent Search Engine & Directory Network). In a nutshell, the ISEDN offers a hybrid advertising model which offers rotating top 10 site listing exposure across a growing network of smaller search engines as well as web, blog and article directories (currently, there are 260 ISEDN members) for flat fee rates. Pricing is based on time rather than keyword bidding. Buying a single ad listing for 3 months costs $12 and $36 for 12 months. The model is simple and affordable, offering all of the advantages of the PPC model without any of the drawbacks. More details at:

3. Cost Per Action: From an advertiser’s perspective, this could be the ideal advertising model since the advertiser would only pay for an ad when a specific action had occurred such as a sale or a registration. Back in June of 2006, there were several reports that Google was testing a version of its AdWords product using the CPA model. Not much has been heard since. The CPA model is widely used in the affilíate and lead generation industries, but don’t hold your breath waiting for wholesale adoption by the search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Percentage: Put forward by Microsoft as a solution to both clíck and impression fraud. Below is a quote from a Microsoft research paper:

“In this system, an advertiser picks a keyword, e.g. “cameras” and purchases, perhaps through bidding, a certain percentage of all impressions for that keyword. For instance, an advertiser might pay $1.00 to MSN Search. In return, the advertiser might receive 10% of all impressions for “camera” for 1 week. What does this mean? It means that for 1 week, one out of ten times that someone searches for the word “camera”, they will see the ad.”

You can read the full abstract for an in-depth explanation.

The Microsoft PPP advertising model was proposed, perhaps not coincidentally, around the same time Google was testing the CPA model. Again, not much has been heard since then.

Will any of the above alternatives dethrone PPC? Time will tell. Which brings us back full circle to the herd mentality. If and when the advertiser herd twigs to the fact that PPC is a hype driven industry with very little substance and begins to move to a new advertising model, expect PPC engines to shift advertising gears faster than you can say “Who wants to stay a billionaire”.
About The Author
Mel Strocen is CEO of the Jayde Online Network of websites and founder of the Independent Search Engine & Directory Network. The Jayde network is comprised of more than 20 websites, including ExactSeek.com, SiteProNews.com, SEO-News.com,and GoArticles.com.

Transience

Transience refers to the fact that memory degrades over time, our recollections become generic and what we are left with is a sense of expectation rather than specific features.

If you overload your website visitors with a shopping líst of features or a series of b-school banalities, you are giving up the opportuníty to make a singular impression on your audience, especially if the features you are so proud of are mere duplicates of features offered by your competitors.

You may not remember the specifics of the latest Volvo automobile advertising campaign but you most likely regard Volvos to be safe, the primary focus of their long-term marketing efforts. What Volvo has done is position itself as the manufacturer of safe cars. This is the position they hold in the minds of the car buying public. As an advertiser this should be the focus of their campaigns. If they for some reason decide to change their approach, they stand to confuse and alienate their audience.

Whether you are dealing with website content or webmedia presentations the focus should be on establishing your primary marketing message in your audience’s minds. If that singular message gets lost in a jungle of corporate platitudes and extraneous specifications then the chance of your audience retaining your message is greatly reduced.

To deal with this problem, we suggest clients think in terms of advertising campaigns rather than just an ad, and program-style linear narrative presentations rather than feature and specification-based information. In our own recent marketing campaign we were able to present eighteen different issues, each in an individual presentation, but all with a central unifying theme. People may not remember the individual issues, but they will remember the central unifying theme of the campaign; most importantly they’ll remember who we are and what we stand for.

Absent-mindedness

Absent-mindedness is the failure to pay attention when receiving information resulting in no memory, or the inability to recall information buried deep in memory because of missing contextual references.

The sheer volume of demand for attention and information that people deal with on a daily basis, what author and information architect, Saul Wurman refers to as “Information Anxiety,” makes it impossible for people to absorb everything they think they should, or even want to, retain. Our brains automatically filter-out extraneous data and retain only what is important or relevant. As a result people are more likely to develop a general familiarity with a brand rather than an in-depth recollection of details.

Recognizing that your audience is only going to retain the core message you are delivering if it is relevant and meaningful requires that you give up the immaterial and concentrate on the essence of what you need to say.

You also must find ways to break through the mental barriers people erect in order to block-out useless content. A website dominated by large amounts of text requires a huge commitment of interest in order for someone to pay attention and commit your content to memory. The use of web-audio and web-video requires less of a mental commitment from your audience and at the same time provides the sensory, emotional, and contextual references that aid in memory recall.

Blocking

Blocking is a familiar phenomenon most people have experienced. We recognize a person and can tell you almost everything about that individual except his or her name. Unlike transience where the name has faded from memory, blocking refers to a situation where the knowledge is in memory but the appropriate reference or association has not been accessed to stimulate recall.

To overcome blocking people must access mental associations that are emotional, contextual, or sensory. Emotional triggers are an adaptive imperative for our survival as a species and advertisements and presentations that reflect common emotional experiences will leave indelible impressions. By framing your presentation in some familiar context, you will provide viewers with an association that aids in memory recall. The addition of sensory mnemonics like a distinctive voice-over and an on-screen visual character, provide assistance in memory recall.

Misattribution

We often remember some information or experience but attribute it to the wrong source. This ‘unconscious transference’ occurs when a feature or benefit is too similar to a competitor’s, or when the presentation lacks any distinctive association, reference, mnemonic, or emotional impact.

Sometimes the presentation of information is highly relevant and is therefore embedded in memory but the source of that information is considered extraneous and is therefore dismissed as inconsequential. When delivering information to a website audience, it is important to create presence, and establish credibility, in order to link the message to the messenger.

By using web-video and web-audio to present information, you create the opportuníty to establish a memorable personality for your organization. Presenting information as ‘programming’ rather than just information provides context and character, both of which help build a memory inducing corporate personality.

Suggestibility

Suggestibility occurs when information learned from an outside source is attributed to personal experience. Vivid mental images, intense emotional reactions, or suggestive questíons that target emotional soft spots can trigger this type of false memory.

Research suggests that suggestibility for false memories can be enhanced if an audience is instructed to expect results that are plausible. The combination of suggestibility and misattribution can result in people having memories of things that nevër took place.

In a research paper entitled, ‘Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,’ Kathryn A. Braun of Harvard Business School, Rhiannon Ellis of the University of Pittsburgh, and Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of Washington, present evidence that certain types of suggestive advertising can create false memories.

As a basis for the research they used a Disney advertising campaign, ‘Remember the Magic,’ that featured a family enjoying themselves at Disney World and included a scene of a child shaking hands with Mickey Mouse. The researchers wanted to know if such an autobiographical ad could create a false memory of shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, when in fact it nevër happened.

In order to test the validity of their theory, they created an ad that prompted people to remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny on a childhood trip to Disneyland, an event that could nevër have occurred since Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character and would not have been seen at a Disney theme park. Despite the fact that this event could nevër have taken place, a significant number of participants in the study were able to recall the experience of shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Bias

New experiences are filtered through past experiences and pre-existing belief systems. Often when people with opposing political points-of-view watch the same political debate on television, they will come away with totally different opinions on who won the debate based on their pre-existing bias.

New experiences are filtered through our past experiences and color our interpretation of current events. Advertisers often use images and nostalgic icons of the past in order to create a positive context for interpreting new product offerings. On the other hand, political campaigns often use the same kind of technique in reverse to generate negative attitudes toward an opponent or a divisive polarizing issue.

Memories are not static imprints of the past, but rather reconstituted constructs filtered through an ever-evolving personal history of learned knowledge and emotional experiences.

Persistence

Emotionally intense experiences, especially negative ones, will leave longer-lasting impressions than emotionally neutral experiences. It is important for us to remember traumatic events so that we learn from them and don’t repeat them; it is an innate survival mechanism.

Advertisers can use this to their advantage by reminding people of negative situations that could be avoided with the use of their product. These types of advertisements can be used for health care, personal grooming, and financial services and products.

On the positive side, we can see from the previously mentioned Disney ‘Remember the Magic’ campaign that positive emotional experiences can also be used to create positive attitudes in a properly constructed campaign.

The main difference between positive and negative persistent memory is the recall of details. Persistent negative memories tend to be richer in detail whereas positive persistent memories tend to be more generic, a fact that can be used as we have discussed previously to create false memories or what is more euphemistically referred to as ‘imagination inflation.’

Conclusion

The more we know about how human beings process and recall information, the better we become at communicating our marketing messages to website audiences that are decidedly more complex, and emotionally motivated, than can be determined by mere demographic profiling or statistical Web-visitor analytics.

About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone             (905) 764-1246 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (905) 764-1246 end_of_the_skype_highlighting .

The Web will become increasingly realistic, interactive, and three dimensional. Two dimensional displays will evolve into three dimensional displays. And the Web will probably incorporate more than just the two senses of seeing and hearing. It will first be incorporated into all other electronics found in household appliances, copy machines, automobiles, and anything else with a microchip. Then it will be integrated directly into our brains.

I also envisage this new Web creating an unimaginably sophisticated data sphere that surrounds and envelops the world like a warm electronic blanket, connecting everyone and everything. And it may some day become an autonomous and sentient entity in its own right that we may even come to depend on for life itself.

When a person switches on his wireless Web chip and connects with the Net, he’ll be looking at and interacting with the Web of the future. He’ll manipulate objects, clíck on links, download information, and communicate with anyone by simply thinking it. In fact, when he navigates to a grocery store to büy food, for instance, he’ll be able to “pick them up”, “feel them” and even “smell” the food he wants to büy just by thinking the appropriate thoughts.

In the future, Web-based software agents will constantly build dynamic lists and instructions to help people in personal and professional activities. These software agents are subroutines, or small programs, which may be part of a responsive ‘Internet Operating System’ that serves humanity, or possibly even destroy it. Programs may become responsible for doing some of the basic thinking that we get stuck routinely doing today. Additionally, it may be responsible for storing a percentage of our memories as well.

The Web has already become something we rely on for memory, and that reliance will only grow. We’d rather look something up on Google two or three times instead of trying to remember it initially. And eventually, we’ll come to rely on the Web for memories and immediate information so that it will seem like we are missing a part of our own brain when not “jacked in” to the Net, to borrow a phrase from science fiction writer William Gibson. The Net will be such a part of our existence that we may even feel profound separation and isolation when not connected.

The Evolution of the Web Display

Of course we’re not going to jump from flat screen LCD monitors of today to displays that exist only “in our minds”. Three dimensional displays may be the bridge. There is a device in existence today called a Heliodisplay (TM) that produces holograms which exist in three dimensions and are created with photographic projection using advanced laser technology. It’s possible that all displays will employ this technology in the future. The gaming industry ceaselessly works at making their artificial gaming experiences more realistic and is a powerful driving force in computer display technology.

The Web of our future will first be truly device independent where each piece of equipment is a different window that peers into the same global Web. From handheld devices not unlike the Star Trek Communicators, to cell phones, televisions, automobile dashboards, embedded refrigerator displays and MP3 players, all will be portals into the same World Wide Web.

And of course everything will be connected. Instead of applications running on individual personal computers and devices, applications will operate on the Net and be accessible to anyone, creating a loose Internet Operating System.

Ultimately, the Web of our future will most likely abandon standard two dimensional and even three dimensional displays and instead be projected right onto our corneas, skipping the middle man, so to speak.

FutureWeb is Closer Than We Think

Already demonstrated in the lab is the ability to cause a computer to react to thought alone. Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis works in the field of BMI (brain-machine interface). In an experiment involving a monkey, a computer and a monitor, Nicolelis and his team successfully caused the monkey to communicate with and control a robotic arm through its brain’s neural signals alone.

The monkey’s brain activity and signals were first monitored with numerous electrodes inside its scalp while it manipulated a joystick. The scientists taught the monkey to move the joystick with its arms to accomplish movement on the monitor. Nicolelis’ team then took the joystick away, but continued everything else the same way. Since the monkey’s brain was hooked up to the computer, each time it had the thought of moving its arms, the desired affect actually happened anyway on the monitor, triggered by the monkey’s thoughts alone. In fact, the monkey was even able to control an artificial arm over the Web 600 miles away in the same manner.

There are two important applications for this technology that are driving its research: medicine and war, two constants in all of human history. Doctors will someday be able to attach a prosthetic arm to a patient, wire it up to her brain, and succeed in enabling her to control the prosthetic fingers by simply thinking it.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) manages the research for the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2003, DARPA invested $23 million in BMI programs, including the one at Duke University cited above. Their goal is to allow soldiers to control weapons of all kinds by thought only. These super soldiers will be able to stealthily navigate through a battlefield willing robotic gliders above to drop their payloads of smart bombs on the enemy over the next hill, without endangering their own lives.

Ethical questíons aside, brain-machine interfacing will someday mature and become integrated into our lives. Since the Web is already such a part of our world, the marriage of the two is inevitable.

This technology can be utilized in the other direction as well. Just like a thought can produce computer behavior, the computer will someday be able to send back sensory data other than just sight and sound. If a computer is hooked directly up to the brain, then smell, taste and touch can be affected as well. The Web will literally come to life.

The Semantic Web, Web 2.0 and the Collaboration of Humanity

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, wrote an illuminating book called Weaving the Web that I recommend all Web professionals read. Among the many profound ideas expressed are two concepts relevant here. One is the Semantic Web, which is explained as “The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Metadata is the term used for data about data. Most Web pages today have embedded in the html code metadata that gives information about the Web page. Eventually, this information will become much more robust, allowing more intelligent searches to become a reality.

The Semantic Web may have the potential to help make the Internet an entity in its own right. Parallel processing, the connecting of computers to make super computers, has been in existence for some time now. In fact, that’s how the human brain operates, by conducting many operations at the same time.

The other fascinating idea Berners-Lee expressed in this landmark book is that his original idea for the Web involved much more of a two-way exchange of information. His original vision for the Web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to be able to post information to the Web as easily as it was to view information. Unfortunately, the latter has been embraced more readily by the general population.

But now we see the emergence of “Web 2.0″, a fairly new term that describes an innovative type of website that is built on the participation of its users. Blogs, wikis Podcasts and social networks all fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. Today we are finally achieving what Berners-Lee had in mind all along. With websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and Digg, non-technical users can now post information and contribute to the Web as easily as they can access it. The Web of the future will embrace this concept even more, causing its speed of growth to eclipse today’s rate.

It’s not difficult to see that the Web could be a vast parallel processing farm, that given enough artificial intelligence programming, the infusion of Semantic Web systems, and the constant additions from billions of intelligent beings (namely humans), it could have the potential of becoming something of a unified intelligence, a data sphere that surrounds the planet and is more powerful that the sum of its parts.

This concept of technology’s exponential growth turning onto something we cannot even imagine with the possibility of the Web becoming sentient is not new. Vernor Vinge, a retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, a computer scientist and a science fiction author, wrote about the Singularity in a 1993 essay.

A super-intelligence emerging out of the Web was also written about by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine in August 2005 and also published on KurzweilAI.com.

“. . . we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number-but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine [the Web of the future] is.”

An online search will yield many examples of bizarre concepts that existed only in science fiction later becoming reality. The Web is something that Earth has nevër seen before. It not only has the potential to connect everyone, but it can also extend every brain and grow exponentially. It may take a lot longer than anyone thinks, but eventually the Web of our future will be immensely different and much more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine today.
About The Author
Jason OConnor is CEO of Oak Web Works, LLC, an e-strategy firm. Reach him at
joconnor888 [at] hotmail.com.