SEO versus paid search engine marketing. Round one
Welcome to the great debate: "Do I pay every time someone clicks on one of my little adverts on Google, ranging from 5p to £25 per click, or do I hire an expert to dominate the natural listings (the free ones on the left hand side)?" Guy Levine. chief executive of Web Marketing Advisor, gives us the lowdown.
Pay per click, Google adwords, search engine marketing and sponsored listings are all names for pay per click. You choose a word or phrase you want, you bid a price, then an advert is displayed when someone types the word or phrase into Google. When someone clicks, you pay.
Search engine optimisation – or SEO to the cool young internet types – is the process of inducing "Google love". Basically, tweaking the pages of a website to make the search engines love them. I know there are other search engines, but at the moment Big G rules!
On the other hand, pay per click allows hungry entrepreneurs to have their websites ranking on the front page of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) within as little as three hours. Yes, you have to pay but you get visibility. Another great benefit is that you can run multiple adverts, all 128 characters of them, to test the best hooks. Google will even tell you which one people love the most.
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Tealeaf adds to customer analytics offerings
Online customer experience management (CEM) company Tealeaf has released Tealeaf CxResults and updated its core Datastore and CxConnect tools. It has also formed a best practices partner network called ViaTealeaf.
“One thing we've seen over the past eight months is that customer experience has been on the agenda,” especially because e-commerce is popular for many businesses, said Geoff Galat, VP of marketing and product strategy for Tealeaf. “Maintaining customers, managing them better and making sure that acquisition programs actually work at the rate they need to be successful is important.”
Tealeaf CxResults aids companies in customer behavior analysis by showing patterns of behavior across multiple Web site visits. The product also provides analytics and search capabilities.
“For us to help our customers analyze these sites, we can't look at just discrete individual visits; we also have to look at the overall experience and see if that was successful,” said John Dawes, VP of product management for Tealeaf. “It's very much about the sequence of steps, trying to do things multiple times, so we [not only] enhanced the product to search for individual things but to look for patterns of behavior as well.”
Among other updates, CxConnect now includes modules for packaged integrations with Web analytics, voice of the customer and data analysis. Tealeaf CX has added support for multilingual sites and central management – pieces that, Dawes pointed out, are important for the growing number of international businesses in the marketplace.
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Greenlight Applies Wall Street Tool to Online Ads
“Quant” Enables Marketers to Forecast Pay Per Click Campaigns
“For all its stunning growth, the pay per click market has only reached the multi-billion dollar stage, a fraction of the size Wall Street has to manage on a daily basis,” said Hannah Kimuyu, PPC Director at Greenlight. “We’ve applied the tools that Wall Street uses to manage trillion dollar markets to make pay per click campaigns predictable – and much more profitable.”
By definition, the vast majority of PPC campaigns are rules-based, tightly constricting their ability to adapt to changing conditions. At a rate of 100,000 calculations per second, Quant mines a paid search campaign’s historical and ongoing performance data and reconfigures it hourly with the best combination of keywords and bid prices. Its predictive model algorithms also identify obscure or minute profit margin patterns that can be quickly exploited to deliver even greater traffic and orders. Quant’s artificial intelligence engine enables it to learn, improving its predicative capabilities over time.
“Marketers may be happy with the profits search engine marketing has delivered, but it’s my privilege to point out that they’ve just scratched the surface,” said Warren Cowan, chief executive officer, Greenlight. “Knowing how keywords will perform means campaigns that consistently beat the competition’s and deliver every possible return on an investment.”
The launch of Quant follows a series of innovative products, services
and strategies that Greenlight has introduced to the online advertising
industry. A recent entrant to the U.S. market, the company has been
tapped by top brands operating in Europe for its consulting, search
engine optimization, pay per click advertising and training offerings.
In the last year, clients such as American Express, Audible.com,
Radisson Hotels & Resorts, and Monarch Airlines have credited Greenlight
with boosting sales by as much as 344 percent. Greenlight itself reports
476 percent revenue growth over the last three years.
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The Real Threat to Google
Google's biggest challenge today is mobile advertising. Although the
company will continue to make money on standard online advertising,
mobile advertising is expected to be more effective and possibly more
lucrative. Google needs to prepare now for this shift, suggests Ben
Kunz, director of strategic planning for the media planning firm
Mediassociates.
Google's biggest threat may not be Microsoft or Yahoo
No, one of the most formidable challenges facing Google is likely sitting in your pocket or purse. It's your cell phone and it will put added pressure on Google and other Internet companies to revamp the way they handle online marketing.
As more people use cell phones and their tiny glass screens to gain access to the Internet, Google and its fellow online advertisers will have less space, or what's called "ad inventory," to place marketing messages for customers. Google makes money selling ad inventory. Its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone.
Google can now fit about 10 ads on a standard computer screen. (If you
look at Google search results on a PC monitor, paid ads are the
listings at the very top and along the right.) However, on your cell
phone, if you type in a search query at Google.com you get only one or
two paid ads in response. Imagine the horror that would befall your business if a large slice of what you sell suddenly disappeared. A similar fate could befall companies that depend on online advertising, as small screens become the gateway to the Internet. Of course, no one's suggesting that consumers will abandon standard
computer screens overnight. Early research shows that mobile advertising may be more effective than standard online advertising,
suggesting that it will be more lucrative for the companies that rely
on it. Still, the shift is coming fast enough that Google must get
prepared.
iPhone as Tipping Point
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Google Primes for Mobile Search Surge
Google's mobile image ads come at an opportune time in the development of the mobile search market.
Anyone wanting evidence that the mobile search market is heating up need
look no further than Google's recent mobile brand-image search ads and
integration with DoubleClick. These ads, unveiled April 23, are tailor-made for the
smaller screens of mobile devices, such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Treos.
Google has been offering mobile search text ads for a while with its AdSense
for Mobile program, but these new ads are different. They are essentially mobile display ads, using images to sell the products
or services, which—as with TV compared with print—is more effective at
capturing viewers' attention. Google is providing these ads in Australia,
China, France,
Germany, India,
Ireland, Italy,
Japan, Netherlands,
Russia, Spain,
the United Kingdom
and the United States,
as part of an effort to standardize an industry fragmented by country-specific
startups.
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Making Your Website Number One
Wordsdeals.com offers one lifetime payment for Textlink advertising to help website owners increase their visibility and search engine positioning. Textlinks advertising rates start at $1.
Elaine Keller of Worldsdeals.com said, "There are many ways to make your website rank high on the search engine lists. This best and most popular way is called Search Engine Optimizer or SEO. This is were you use keywords and the keyword density to boost your websites position on the search engines so when potential customers search places such as Yahoo or MSN or Google, you website will pop up on the first page or at the top of the list of similar websites".
Keller states further, "Another way to make your website number one or at least get it to the first page of a search engine is to participate in a link exchange program with another company who sells the same product or services you are selling. A link exchange is where you agree to place a link to the other person's website on your website while in exchange, they do the same. You will both benefit from such an exchange of links because if one of you have something slightly different than the other, at least one of you will be getting a sale out of a visitor".
"The idea behind getting your website to be at the top of the search engine list is using your words traffic to generate enough interest in your site, your products and services to warrant it being placed at the top of the search engines list. Words traffic is another way to use keywords as much as possible to generate traffic to you site so that the search engines 'crawl' toward your pages and place them at the top. This can be done through article words traffic use or just plain key word density - which is using the word or key word over and over again, so that it makes sense - so the search engine 'crawlers' will pick up on it and your words traffic will make your website more likely to be on the front page or the top of the list of websites that are similar to what you are selling and this is exactly what you want", said Keller
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Google: SEO can help deter spammers
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, Matt Cutts said that SEO firms should be seen as friends rather than foes by website operators, reports CNET News.
According to the news provider, Mr Cutts said: "SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO.
"There are plenty of white-hat SEO [companies] who can help you out."
Mr Cutts, who heads of Google's Webspam team, was once known as "porn cookie guy" after he offered cookies baked by his partner to anyone who found lewd content they did not want in their search results.
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Grid computing; faster results at less cost
Grid computing, a new technology that has been on trial for the last seven years, poses a threat to the single desktop computing. Experts says as organisations grow so is the amount of data and need to transact business faster and more cost effectively.
Apart from obtaining considerable returns, the use of grid computing can improve It utilisation and help avoid budget pitfalls.
Experts says the technology can enable users to tap into surplus processing powers of computers or servers with only an additional hardware required for the basic grid implementation.
Although some organisations currently use the technology over the Local Area Network, experts see more companies switching to the technology and deploying it over the Wide Area Network to provide faster communication on larger areas.
The argument is based on the fact that the existing Internet network has evolved to a stage where it has many cables and routing equipment linked together. Most of these cables and equipment were originally designed for telephony networks and therefore lack the capacity for high speed data transmissions.
The technology will enable an individual or an organisation to rely on online applications, as the Internet speed would be fast.
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Web 2.0: Obsolete within three years?
SAN FRANCISCO--One of the biggest booths at the Web 2.0 Expo here belongs to a very un-Web 2.0-ish kind of guy.
Remember Steve Perlman? He's one of those tech wunderkinds who piled up a laundry list of achievements over the last couple of decades--to the point where their predictions about technology carry more weight than most mere mortals. In his case, the highlights include leading the Apple development team whose technology led to QuickTime and later co-founding WebTV (later sold to Microsoft for a half billion or so.)
Perlman has been working at Rearden, an incubation firm he founded in 2000 that has some cool companies in its network, including Mova and Moxi Digital. Perlman was at Web 2.0 to show the corporate flag and sign up new talent. Though neither he nor his team would say what was on deck, they were playing it up as quite a big deal.
"At least two of the technologies we have are getting ripe on the vine," he said. The big tease. (By the way, Tom Paquin, who ran engineering at Netscape, does the same at Reardon.)
Interestingly, Perlman isn't very impressed by most of what falls under the rubric of "Web 2.0." Coming from someone with his technical pedigree, I was intrigued when he added: "Most of what you see here will be obsolete in three or four years."
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Reverse Engineering Google: Is Imitation Really the Best Form of Innovation?
Unethical search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search (PPC) sales reps use the term "reverse engineering" to sell snake oil to naïve companies.
Now, two Harvard Business Review authors claim they've reverse-engineered the secret to Google's innovation process. This month, two distinguished college professors published "Reverse Engineering Google's Innovation Machine." Be forewarned: the article is a gourmet recipe for unmitigated disaster.
What's the best way to innovate? Imitate!
Who came up with such a Pythonesque idea? Bala Iyer, an associate professor of technology operations and information management, and Thomas H. Davenport, the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, have created such a wacky concept, it's sure to be a bestseller.
Will the elite audience of HBR believe they've found the secret to innovating the Google Way? Well, the authors visited the Googleplex in person and found themselves in an impromptu comedy sketch worthy of Robin Williams.
We haven't spent a lot of time in the Googleplex, and between us we've consumed only one of the company's tasty and free cafeteria meals. One of us impulsively tried to question Sergey Brin in the Googleplex courtyard, but he beat a hasty retreat and came close to calling security.
The genial professors feel that Google is "quite open" because "there are scores of official and unofficial blogs accessible through the company's website, for example."
They profess that as "non-insiders" they've been able to "unearth countless clues" as to how the company innovates "appropriately enough, through Google searches."
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