Google Moves into the Newspaper Business

After colonising cyberspace Google is now moving headlong into the newspaper business. The leading search engine is currently in discussions with several newspaper publishers to sell space in their pages to its online clients.

Google Print Ads is an extension of Google AdWords, the auction system that lets companies bid for a slot that appears alongside specific online word searches. Instead of an auction, advertisers pick a newspaper online through Google and enter a bid for available advertising space on a given page and day.

Rather than offering to pay the list price, customers say what they are prepared to pay. Publishers can chosse to accept or decline the offer. Google takes a slice of the advertising revenue from every completed deal. Google even offers to design the ad if the advertiser does not have the capability to do it alone.

Google’s UK advertising revenue rose roughly 40% to about £1.25 billion this current year (2007), comfortably overtaking the publisher Trinity Mirror’s income. Google has already overtaken Channel 4 and beaten ITV1 in the third quarter. Google commands around 75% of the market for search advertising in the UK. 

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Following the roll out of Web 2.0 and multi media functionality, there has been an explosion in social media which is more widely known as social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube.

SMM goals will vary for every business or organisation, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.

The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing
Any and all forms of Social Media Marketing tactics fall under at least one of these five forms of action. Often the same channel will incorporate two or more of these:

• Declaration of Identity
• Identity through Association
• User-initiated Conversation
• Provider-initiated Conversation
• In-Person Interaction

Still the best way to improve your search engine rankings is to get as many high quality natural links as possible. Releasing interesting content and promoting it using social news websites can lead to a steady increase of on-topic links.

Building a Blog
Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimisation. Most blog software (such as WordPress or Blogger) offer uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

Website Usability – Pointing You in the Right Direction!

Website usability is an often used term to describe a website’s user-friendliness and the extent to which users can use the information on the website to meet a specific objective. It is an important element of User Experience.

The usability of a website can be defined as the ease with which visitors are able to achieve specified goals. The usability of business/commercial websites is becoming a key differentiator for website owners in an increasingly competitive market.

The first port of call for those interested in learning more about this subject is the Jakob Nielsen website on Usability and Web Design. The website Usability.gov also lays down a very useful step-by-step usability guide:

• Plan – Develop, Processes, Project Team
• Analyse – Users, Task Analysis, Developing Personas
• Design – Website Requirements, Writing for The Web, Parallel Design
• Test & Refine – Usability Testing, Analysing Results, Test Reports

Whilst search engine marketing and promotion is important in order to drive visitors to your company website – it is what you do with those visitors which will ultimately determine your online success.

Once a potential customer arrives onto your website, they have to be able to actually navigate around/through the site and understand the content. Otherwise, your site is rapidly going to lose potetnital buyers, who will simply click-off and probably take their custom to your nearest competitor!

Growing Fears over Internet Privacy

Daniel Brandt has been running his own search engine called Scroogle for just over three years. Scroogle.org is the anti-Google.

Scroogle carries no advertising and relies on small donations from users. Brandts search engine traffic has doubled every year and now attracts over 100,00 visitors a day. According to Brandt this growth has bee attributed to one factor: Privacy.  

Scroogle keeps no record of who is using its site or what they are looking for. Within an hour of using the site, the search terms are gone for good.

All the big search groups have been tightening up their privacy policies. Last week the search engine Ask.com went further than others by offering a new service, Ask Eraser, that will wipe out a searcher’s queries within hours. 

Google the industry leader stores personal information for 18 months, as does Microsoft’s search engine. Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL retain search requests for 13 months.

Whilst few people would complain about internet searches being used to catch criminals, increasingly divorce lawyers subpoena search-engine firms looking for dirt on warring spouses. Highly personal information can be used in a variety of ways that were never sanctioned by the person who entered the search terms.

What happens over the next few months and years could well depend on investigations under way into Google’s privacy policies. In the US and Europe the search giant is under pressure from politicians over it’s purchase of online ad firm Double Click, the largest digital-ad server with a huge database of consumer searches.

RSS / Tailored News Feeds

What are News Feeds?
News feeds allow you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as its published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from.

Feeds are also known as RSS. RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like websites. There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but most people plump for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.  

RSS feeds can be viewed through a special program called an aggregator or news reader. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want. RSS feeds can also be used within an existing website using a XSLT stylesheet.

Offering Value to Your Website Visitors
One of the ways in which you can firstly attract and then retain visitors to your website is by offering something of value. Value can come in many forms but one of the most common is news content.

1. News feeds allow you to stay up to date with the latest news, as and when it is published.
2. Increase the number of new visitors to your site and encourage repeat visits by supplying newsworthy content
3. Customers know they can find the latest industry developments by visiting your website, thus raising your brand profile.
4. The feed can be linked to your most profitable website pages to encourage users to remain on site for longer to explore your products.

Google Checkout

Google Checkout is an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases.

For buyers, Google Checkout is a fast, secure, and convenient way to shop online. Google Checkout claims to make online shopping easy by providing a single login for purchases across the web.

For merchants, Google Checkout is a new way to process sales. It works with Google AdWords to make it easy for shoppers to find you and buy from you.

Tackling fraud
Google Checkout fraud prevention tools help stop invalid orders from reaching you. You’ll also enjoy the benefit of:

Chargeback Protection
As part of Google’s Chargeback Resolution Policy, Google will evaluate all chargebacks you receive and, whenever possible, fight them on your behalf. If the chargeback is successfully disputed, Google will reimburse you.

In addition to their Chargeback Resolution Policy, Google also offers the Payment Guarantee Policy, which extends even more chargeback protection to you for transactions.

Google Checkout is free for merchants until December 31, 2007. After that date Google charges merchants 2.0% plus $0.20 per transaction (1.5% + £0.15 for UK merchants). Also after this date, merchants who have an AdWords account will not be charged fees on monthly transactions totaling less than ten times their monthly AdWords expenditure.

Search Term Analysis – Explanation Please!

Search Term Analysis (STA) is a term often used by search marketing professionals and webmasters. STA is integral to any successful search marketing campaign and allows you to select key terms for each website page. Betwixt clients will often enquire as to the meaning of the term and what exactly are the benefits are of conducting a thorough STA.

Before building your website and creating content for web pages you need to know which Search Term(s) (keywords and phrases) people are entering into Search Engines? Also it is imperative to know how many people are searching for a particular Keyword or Phrase?

Once you know what it is they are typing in to the search engines you can write the correct copy on your site to match what it is they are looking for on their terms. This strategy creates a constant flow of highly targeted visitors.

Depending on the objective of the campaign, search terms can be selected according to their target market (eg UK or US) and popularity in terms of searches performed and size of market.

Black Hat SEO

If you are a webmaster or more generally tasked with overseeing the performance of your company’s website in the search engines, quite possibly you have come across the term Black Hat SEO. 

Definition(s)

1. Techniques considered unethical, or contrary to the Terms of Service of search engines.

2. This term refers to using deceptive techniques to gain high search engine rankings. Some examples are hiding text (ie – white letters on a white background) and cloaking.

Note: The lines are often blurry, with some maintaining that any form of SEO is an artificial attempt to rank highly.

Black Hat search engine optimsation techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• Breaks search engine rules and regulations
• Creates a poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques utilised on the Web site
• Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

We have listed below a brief overview of the most commonly used black hat seo tactics:

• Keyword Stuffing
• Cloaking
• Invisible Text
• Doorway Page
• Spam Page
• Interlinking
• Selling PageRank
• Buying Expired Domains

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer, or HTTP over SSL) is a Web protocol developed by Netscape and built into its browser that encrypts and decrypts user page requests as well as the pages that are returned by the Web Server.

https is used to indicate a secure HTTP connection. It is syntactically identical to the http:// scheme normally used for accessing resources using HTTP. Using an https: URL indicates that HTTP is to be used, but with a different default TCP port (443) and an additional encryption/authentication layer between the HTTP and TCP.

The Google crawler can access content over HTTP, HTTPS, and SMB protocols, as well as UNC (Universal Naming Convention) paths.

Glossary of Search Marketing Terms – Ad Views (Impressions)

Ad Views (Impressions)

An instance where a server serves a web page containing an ad is referred to as an ad view. An ad view is distinct from an ad click, where a visitor clicks a hyperlinked advert to activate a link to a different page or website.

Ad views are also referred to as impressions. An ad view is an advertising metric (standard of measure) that refers to the number of times an advertisement such as a web banner or text ad has been downloaded and presumably viewed.