35 posts tagged “affordable proffesional web design”
Google opens AdSense to third party tracking
Google is now allowing its US advertisers to track their ads on its content network using third-party advertising tags.
The new feature is available within Google's AdSense content network and is only for advertisers based in North America, according to a company blog post by senior business product manager Rajas Moonka.
The blog did not state when the service will roll out to other countries.
Until now, the only way advertisers could track their ads was through Google's AdWords reports, because Google didn't have a process for reviewing ads to make sure they complied with its format standards and policies.
The new scheme lets advertisers work with approved third parties to serve and track display ads, including rich-media ads, across the Google content network through AdWords.
Google is also introducing a new certification scheme so that ad servers, rich-media ad agencies and research firms can ensure their ads comply with Google's standards.
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Keeping SEO Staff Motivated and Driven
Links represent the largest factor of the ranking system for the most popular search engines. Yet link building can be tedious, and mind-numbing. How do you motivate your link marketers?
With the proper incentives, you can keep your link marketers productive and driven while reducing staff turnover. Talented link developers are hard to find -- you want to retain them as long as possible.
Contest
Create a weekly, bimonthly, or monthly contest as a motivator. Make sure the prizes are worth it. Link building is hard work. Don't insult your workers with trivial prizes -- offer something of value, such as paid days off.
Design a contest that's easy to measure and that doesn't dilute the quality of the link campaign. If the contest is simply judged on the "number" of links people obtain, then employees will focus on numbers, and the quality will suffer. Instead, place the focus on rewarding quality links.
Some possible contest measurement:
- 1 point for links obtained from a domain that is at least three years old.
- 3 points for links obtained from a domain that is at least five years old.
- 10 points for links obtained from a domain that has 20 or more government backlinks.
- 20 points for getting an editorial mention on a site at least five years old.
Get the idea? Focus the contest on obtaining quality links. That way the contest is a vehicle to teach and guide link builders to pursue high-quality links.
Pride in Accomplishments -- High Rankings
In our disconnected modern society, people often never see the final results of their hard work. Want to motivate your link marketers? Give them something to take pride in by showing them the high rankings and revenues generated off their hard work. Don't just keep them in an isolated cubicle. Review with them ranking comparisons (i.e. weekly, monthly, yearly). Treat them like the sales team they are and show them the revenue that high rankings can generate.
Group Meetings
These meetings can be fun, motivational, and a learning experience for everyone. The key is to get everyone involved, sharing and thinking creatively.
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Dollars flow online as marketers panic
The online search powerhouse Google confirmed yesterday it was witnessing a "significant inflow" of advertising revenues from large companies as they nervously shifted their budgets out of mainstream media, generating more immediate returns on investment.
But results from a tracking study of consumer spending intentions released this week by the forecaster Foreseechange says industry has become too gloomy and has overreacted to economic uncertainty, predicting retail sales growth will finish at 5-6 per cent for 2008, well above the last big retail slump in 2005. Retail sales is a key indicator for advertising demand.
The director of Foreseechange, Charlie Nelson, said that despite eroding business confidence and deteriorating home financing levels, retail sales would hold up for the rest of the year unless there were further rises in interest rates and fuel prices or a slump in house prices. Mr Nelson said household goods and furniture retailers would struggle but most other retail categories, including motor vehicles, would escape a demand crunch.
"Business has turned very negative but it's an overreaction," Mr Nelson said. "Things are not as bad as they seem."
The executive chairman of the diversified marketing services business Photon Group, Tim Hughes, concurred. He said there was no evidence among Photon's big clients that they were slashing marketing and media budgets. "It's not the disaster everyone thought might happen," he said. "Everyone stopped spending in February but April picked up and things are looking good for the June quarter."
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Shoot up Google list
Two internet experts from Woodley are going up against the might of search engine Google to help local businesses maximise their online presence.
Gregor Spowart and Andrew Bunce claim they can dramatically increase the flow of traffic to a company’s website by boosting its Google ranking.
The pair have set up their own internet marketing company Mass Media Design to help catapult ineffective websites up the search results list and swell visitor numbers.
Spowart told Business Post: “Many companies have great websites but they’re totally underperforming due to the lack of exposure.
“The main way people find websites is through Google, but Google will only list your site if it thinks it’s popular.
“Once Google believes that you’re popular, it’ll list your website much more highly in the search results and you’ll start to see lots more customers coming to your website.”
And with more than 30 years IT experience between them, Spowart, 30, and Bunce, 32, have developed a number of techniques called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (SEO) to do precisely that.
“SEO is a relatively new concept and has grown from the massive amount of traffic that websites such as Google can drive to your website,” Spowart said.
“Originally we were just doing website design, but no matter how good the site we built was, if it wasn’t easy to find then it was useless.
“So we looked into SEO and tried out a few ways of getting clients up the Google list.
“We now offer a range of services from initial website scoping, through the design and development process and then provide a marketing service to ensure that your website gets the visibility and attention it deserves.”
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Google Friend Connect to bring social networks to your site
The barriers around social networking sites are finally crumbling as
all the major players bring out their demolition crews. Both MySpace
and Facebook have announced new data portability initiatives
that will let users exchange data, make friends, and interact with
third-party social networks. Now, Google has donned its own hard hat in
the form of Google Friend Connect, promising to bring social networks
and their features to the rest of the Internet.
Previewed by Google in a press release, Google Friend Connect will provide secure authorization APIs for any website owner to embed applications and features of any social networking site that hops on board. The advantage, however, is that these features will be provided as snippets of code that website owners simply place where they want on their sites. This removes the expensive overhead of programming these features and brings social networking integration to the "long tail" of the rest of the web.
Google illustrates the potential of this new platform with the website of independent musician Ingrid Michaelson, who used Google Friend Connect to embed music features from iLike into her site. Once Google Friend Connect goes live tonight (for a hand-picked group of whitelisted sites), Michaelson's visitors will be able to see comments from their social networking friends, who's going to one of Michaelson's concerts, add her music to their profiles, and more without having to visit iLike's site.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. Indeed, the next evolution of social networking has been marked as the liberation of data onto the rest of the web. Facebook Connect, for example, will allow users to see which of their Facebook friends are on digg and what they're digging, and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative will let users plug their profile data into Twitter with links to their MySpace page and even favorite blogs.
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Google joins effort to make more Web sites more sociable
The effort to make it easier for Web surfers to connect with their friends is attracting a crowd.
Following similar moves by the two biggest online hangouts, Internet search leader Google Inc. is introducing tools that are supposed to make any Web site more sociable.
The service, expected to be available on a limited basis Monday evening, provides a framework that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks like Facebook and Plaxo even when they aren't visiting those sites.
Google's initiative, called "Friend Connect," follows pledges by MySpace and Facebook last week to allow their users to transport their personal profiles and applications to other Web sites.
News Corp.'s MySpace and privately held Facebook — the Internet's two largest social hubs — announced their plans for wider accessibility late last week.
"Social is in the air," said David Glazer, a director of engineering for Google.
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Blogging 'creates high rankings fast'
Blogging can help firms achieve high organic search results within a short period of time, it has been suggested.
Industry commentator Ambar Shrivastava, writing for MediaPost's Search Insider publication, noted that regular corporate blogging can lead to high search results as the portals are looking for pages which are often updated.
Furthermore, it can be a cheaper way of trialing the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO) without committing to changing the website or providing a budget for pay-per-click advertising, she noted.
"Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less-competitive topics, so your site has the ability to rank for those terms," Ms Shrivastava advised.
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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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