Assessing The Real Value Of An Expired Domain

Article By John Khu

Newbie expired domain traders often find it very difficult to assess the real value of their domains. In fact, judging the real quality of an expired domain that you are thinking of buying
could be a hard game. However, when you understand the basics and fundamentals of expired domain industry, how it operates and works, how you can sell a good domain to a prospective buyer and how you can extract maximum benefits from an domain expired, then it becomes possible to create a blueprint for generating a substantial amount of online income.

Knowing more about the expired domain that you wish to purchase will help you in the long run. There are several tools that come handy, while you search for a very good expired domain. Here are some of them:

Using Wayback Archive: This is an excellent utility that can help you know more about the quality of expired domain that you are planning to buy. With this tool, you can inspect how a domain looked in the past, what was the main activity, what were the products sold or what type of information provided there. Knowing about the antecedent of an expired domain will help you in designing a solid future strategy for your business.

Using Linkpop feature: This is a tool that finds out the total sum of links to other productive web sites. This is a utility that also helps you detect the number of links and incoming traffic to a domain.

Overture with and without extensions: Overture Keyword Selector Tool is an excellent tool that displays how many times a search was made in one of the major search engines for a specific period, say one month. Google Pagerank or PR: This is yet another tool that helps you find out a particular expired domain's commercial importance, by the total number of votes it received by links and sources from other web portals.

Alexa Ratings: This web site ranks a particular web domain by the total number of visitors to a particular web site. The user must use Alexa.com web site tool bar to conduct the search.

These wonderful tools come very useful and handy, when you want to assess and evaluate the quality of a particular expired domain. However, the most important factors that you must consider before buying an expired domain are:

a) Accuracy of Linkpop estimates

b) Most probable incoming traffic and links

c) Overture Keyword tool evaluation to test what advertisers are paying for targeted traffic.

d) Checking to see, if the expired domain in question provides a click through rates of about 5%. This is often the most difficult part of the exercise.

In the end, the choosiest domain is the one that provides you an excellent opportunity to extract and squeeze the best possible income. A good expired domain is also the one that provides you an excellent click through rate when you expose it to a lucrative domain parking or PPC campaign.

About the Author:

John Khu is an author and also a seasoned professional with vast experience in expired domain name business. He is also the owner of the path breaking web sites called http://www.expireddomainsecret.com and http://www.expireddomaingains.com which provides complete and up-to-date information on expired domains and their eternal secrets.

Exactly What Is Keyword Density?

By The Davinator

There are usually a lot of questions that arise when people hear about the term "keyword density." Many people are not sure of what the term is pertaining to, or are not sure of acceptable percentages of density. This little explanation of what the term keyword density refers to should clear up some of the confusion that arises.

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn't be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places. At one time, before the search engine algorithms were set up to detect such spamming, people were tricking the search engines to get a higher placement by performing what was coined "keyword stuffing".

People were completely abusing the search engines, and over time, they smartened up and got wise to it.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your web page (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

- Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

- Go to the 'Edit' menu and click 'Select All'. Now go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Word Count'. Write down the total number of words in the page.

- Now select the 'Find' function on the 'Edit' menu. Go to the 'Replace' tab and type in the keyword you want to find. 'Replace' that word with the same word, so you don't change the text.

- When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

- Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

The above way of checking your keyword density is a bit of an old fashioned way, but it still does work for the purposes of figuring out what you density actually is. These days, there are many different types of softwares on the market which makes this
job a whole lot easier.

About The Author:

Davin Ogden owns and operates several web sites on the internet. He mainly specializes in SEO and viral marketing. For more information on keyword density, SEO, and many other aspects of SEO please visit his site at http://www.davinatorbiz.com

Having The Proper Keyword Research Tools

By The Davinator

There are many different types of keyword research tools out on the market these days. Some are free, and of course, some are not.

When we are talking about keyword research tools or software, you really need to take this part of your marketing seriously. For if it wasn't for good keyword research, most people wouldn't have much success at all. This is the reason that it is so vitally important to have good tools to work with.

There are some online services that have been around a while. Some of these sites and tools are still regarded for their high quality, and rightly so. Word Tracker, is among one of the first and still remains to be one of the most effective sites around. It's been proven time and again, it is simply a great tool, that provides quality results.

SEO Book has been largely popular in the past couple of years as well. I've often used SEO Book's Keyword Research tool in many cases, and did cross references between a couple of the other alternatives around. It does provide great results as well. While I don't think it may be quite as accurate as Word Tracker, it is still a good tool to be utilizing in much of your research.

Overture's keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but it will not tell you how many sites are competing for a certain keyword phrase. For example if you type 'golf clubs', the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the words 'golf clubs' was searched, say for example 340000 times at Overture.Com. Similarly 'golf balls' was searched 310987 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common highly searched term then you might not get any results. It means that hardly anybody has searched for that term in the last month.

There is a bit of a newer keyword research tool out there these days that can be obtained for free as well. The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator is such a tool, and it actually takes all of it's results from Word Tracker itself. So this is really good in terms of having a great source for it's information that it brings back. It returns all of the keyword results from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Some people regard these three search engines as The Big Three, meaning that these are the search engines to be really concerned about.

There is a drawback of The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator though, and that is, the keyword research software only returns results for the top 100 related results. It won't dig down any further than one hundred deep in finding related keywords or keyword phrases. This really only means, that in some cases you may not find that real low hanging fruit, or combinations of long tail search terms.

The Groovytastic Keyword Dominator is still a very good and useful tool though. It performs good and accurate keyword research fast, and does give you the results that in many case will be enough that all important start on building and creating your site around your chosen set of keywords and keyword related phrases.

About The Author:

Davin Ogden owns and operates several websites on the internet. He specializes in viral marketing strategies and SEO. Check out his site containing information on keyword research, SEO software and more at http://www.davinatorbiz.com.

Internet Marketing - One Giant Leap for Mankind

By Paul White

Those Oldies amongst us who can actually remember Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon never think of it as just history. We were there. It was live, and we were all part of it.

Practically everyone on earth who could, was huddled around a TV set watching the shaky black and white pictures in awe.

It was something that united the whole world like nothing before. First stop the moon,then onwards to the stars! They talked about tourist trips to the moon within 5 years. Hotels on Mars within 10 years, and a passenger cruiser to Jupiter by 1999!

But harsh economic and scientific realities meant a rapid slow down in our race to the stars, the space program was downgraded, and dreams of space travel for everyone were pushed aside, and all but forgotten. But then something else came along, even bigger than the moon landing in the history of the World - The Internet.

Now there really was no limit to what man or womankind could achieve.

With the internet, you could make your own personal journey to the stars! Untold wealth for everyone we were told, just pick up your free site, and wait for the money to roll in. Not just to the stars, but to heaven itself!

At least that's what we were all led to believe just a couple of years ago, when Amazon introduced the first affiliate sites. But sadly, just like the little boy playing with his space toys,
excitement, and expectation have given way to frustration and disappointment, and a general feeling that it just isn't possible for normal people to go to 'infinity and beyond!'

So is it time to take off your play spacesuit and give up? Is it time to shrug your shoulders and resign yourself to the fact that yet another of your dreams has been jettisoned out of orbit?

NO! In fact the space race has only just begun!

Even though your experience with the internet may be a disappointment so far, just stop and think. Can you imagine what disasters would have happened in the early Apollo missions if the astronauts had not been such highly trained professionals with the best possible equipment and resources.

Why should the internet be any different?

The journey to the stars is not just for the elite few. It is for everyone who chooses to travel. But you must have the right resources. You must have the knowledge, expertise and equipment necessary to survive. Quite simply, your business will die without it, just like an astronaut without life support.

For example, did you know:-

*You must have your own Website. It should be professionally designed with links to several affiliate/associate sites. A free affiliate/associate site is not enough on it's own.

* You also need to have your own domain name, not a free site name with a really long URL that no one will want to click on.

* You need to read everything you possibly can to learn how other people have done it. I now have a collection of dozens and dozens of Free e-books which I give away on my site, which contain all of the knowledge you will need.

*You can get thousands of people to your website by offering freebies and other things. Just spend a few hours surfing all the freestuff sites for things you can give away on your own site.

* You must have a constant source of traffic going to your website. Only a tiny fraction of people visiting your site will buy anything, so you need to get thousands to visit. Once you understand and accept this, and know how to get them, then you are on your way!

*You will never make any money by only advertising on free sites, even with submission software. Let people place an ad free on your site. You will get far more response than placing your own ad on someone else's free site.

*Once you start to become successful, then you can become even more so, by writing your own articles and submitting them to some of the thousands of e-zines and getting free publicity.

* Definitely the best way of doing business is to have your own newsletter to communicate with your customers to build up a relationship with them. For this you need a listserver. This is software which enables you to communicate with thousands of people at once.

I used to be like one of those poor monkeys in the early space flights, being led blindly into oblivion by their masters. Believing all the hype about instant riches, and not being able to do anything about it. Luckily I realised before too late, that instant riches is just fantasy. But with an investment of time to learn what to do, and an investment of money to get the right tools, anyone can be in control of their own flight to the stars!

About the Author:

Paul White webmaster of:- http://www.profitmountain.com is a former teacher who now dedicates his time to helping ordinary men and women to recapture their dreams and make money online. Feel free to e-mail regarding any online questions you may have:- webmaster@... Subscribe to profit mountains money making newsletter, and get free advertising for a year, and tons of other things!

Blackhat SEO: Protect Yourself by Recognizing The Bad Guys

By Bill Platt

Over the years, webmasters have been told that they should want to avoid Blackhat SEO techniques in connection with their own websites. In general, I agree with this statement. But, by obtaining a deeper understanding of Blackhat search engine optimization, one could actually learn a bit about how to better his or her own positioning in the search engine results.

White Hat vs. Black Hat Search Optimization

Whitehat and Blackhat SEO is a comparison that is a take-off from the old cowboy westerns, where the good guys always wore white hats and the bad guys always wore black hats. So, in theory, we can assume that Whitehat practitioners are the good guys of SEO, and Blackhat practitioners are the bad guys of the industry.

But, the truth is a little bit more opaque than this. SEO is never a pure "white vs. black" issue. Just as in Mad Magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" series, sometimes the white spy whipped the black spy, and vice versa, sometimes the black spy was victorious.

In theory, Blackhat SEO is the type of search optimization that will eventually get your website banned in the search engines. And sometimes it will.

But, it is truly fascinating to me when I visit a website such as http://www.blackhatseo.com/ and discover the world-renowned SEO expert Aaron Wall owns the website. In case you were not aware of it, Aaron Wall is the owner of the SEO Blog at http://www.seobook.com/ and is recognized as one of the world's foremost leaders in SEO technique.

Blackhat SEO Is A Learning Opportunity

To me, the study of opposites offers a greater understanding to mankind.

* One cannot know "altruism", until one learns about "selfishness".

* One cannot truly appreciate "wealth", until they have experienced "poverty".

* One can never declare something "easy", until they have faced something truly "difficult".

* A "slow" driver will seldom be noticed, until which time the "fast" driver passes them by.

These are the philosophical ramblings of Bill. ;-)

I have always argued that in order to see the light, one must be able to recognize the darkness. And that is why when I am told to avoid something; I go right to it, so that I can see what it looks like, for the sake of being able to recognize it.

So, whenever I am in the mood to learn more about SEO, I search out Black Hat SEO forums and websites to learn how to recognize the dark, when I am in the light.

After all, if you cannot recognize the dark side, how do you expect that can you protect yourself from it?

There Are Always Two Sides To Every Story

Remember when your grandmother always told you that there were always two sides to every story? Well, my grandmother did, and I like to believe that everyone had a wise old grandma to help them find their way in life.

White Hatters teach us how to do things the right way. Black Hatters teach us the wrong way to do things. And as my grandmother used to be fond of saying, "the truth is somewhere in the middle."

For example, White Hat web programmers teach us how to install Captcha scripts on our websites to keep the spammers at bay. Then the Black Hat web programmers come along and teach the spammers how to break Captcha software (http://www.blackhat-seo.com/2008/how-to-break-captchas/). And as Grandma used to say, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The White Hatters try to teach us good programming technique and to present us with safe protection from spammers. And the Black Hatters teach us how to break the coding. You and I are in the middle, and by seeing the world through two sets of eyes (white and black); we can find better ways to protect our websites. Our websites are only as safe as the intelligence level of the programmers who try to protect us. If the bad guys are smarter, we lose. If the good guys are smarter, we rest safe in our protection schemes.

Some Black Hatters even call what they do Grey Hat SEO. One that I really like is called http://www.SlightlyShadySEO.com They did a post about the little fun pill and the folks who push it. They referred to it as a keyword that will give a lot of insight into how Google is combating the spammers online: http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/index.php/some-insights-from-the-buy-viagra-results/

The previously mentioned post spoke at great length about the people who spam forums. We all despise these guys who trash up our favorite forums, and Slightly Shady exposes why our forums are always on the spammer's target list.

As my grandmother said, "the truth is somewhere in the middle." The little pill Black Hatters play an expensive game with the Google results, but at $2 commission per little pill, no wonder.
But now that we understand what is going on, we know that we need to make sure that we keep our own forums clean of this trash, to protect our Trust Rank. We also know that one slam is not the end of the world for us, if we are quick to clean our own houses. But, if we cannot keep our houses clean, the Google will stop coming by to visit, for the exact same reasons why most girls
avoid visiting bachelor pads.

Light Sources Are Always Brighter When We Stand In The Dark

One of my favorite television personalities, Carl Sagan said, "The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self discovery."

This quote reflects the reason for my voyages into the light side and dark side of SEO. I study Whitehat SEO and practice the same. I also study Blackhat SEO to understand what is defined as the opposite of Whitehat SEO practices. By seeing what is dark, I can better see what is in the light.

I am comforted in knowing that I will never be pulled blindly into the dark side with Darth Vader. ;-) To quote from the Bible, "The blind will lead the blind into a ditch." Now that my eyes have been opened to Blackhat SEO, I will never stumble and fall as I fish for better rankings in Google and the other primary search engines.

About the Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article marketing to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article writing success that can be found at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

Read his blog at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

Get More Targeted Traffic To Your Site

By Casey Moher

There are dozens of good ways to send people to your website. These methods come with a wide variety of results and difficulty. As much as possible, I've worked with and tested many of them. Here's a run-down on one that I believe is highly effective.

Give Your Visitors A Free Gift:

Information that can truly be a help to your visitors is a great place to start. The right information can truly make someone's life better.

Overcoming an ever-present hurdle in the form of inherent mis-trust on the part of your visitor will always be with you. Overcoming this hurdle is vital to the success of your venture.

Your focus should be to find and share valuable information. An on-line approach is the most efficient way to find and distribute valuable information. It doesn't take much search time before you will be discovering subjects and information that folks want to know. Once you find the topics being sought-for, you will want to spend your time learning and writing about them.

One strategy you can employ is to share the information in the form of a multi-day mini-course that people can receive from you. You will find more success if you spend the time necessary to
make this a high-quality gift. Extra effort at this point will increase the value of your subscriber list. Very little cash takes you a long way in this project.

You will be offering to share this information in exchange for your visitor's name and e-mail address. The best way to perform this information capture function is to use a 'squeeze page'.
Establishing a squeeze page can readily be done starting with a simple website.

Some very professional design work is available at affordable prices these days. In a very short time, your own squeeze page can be activated and running.

You can have your own squeeze page up and running fast, just let me know. You can move things to auto-pilot function starting with these strategies.

With care, your subscriber list can be cultivated and a long-term relationship built with the members. Your efforts can become continually more rewarding all the time for all concerned as you move forward with this venture.

You can reach people around the entire world and provide them with value using your valuable products, services and information. You can be paid very well in the process.

Here's another way to utilize the power of free information to build good will and interest before a person ever visits your website There are a number of methods, strategies and delivery
formats available to you. Take the time and whatever the minimal expense is to do a professional job.

Remember that your internet visitor is there because of a desire and a need for some basic information. Put their needs first and realize they did not log on looking for an opportunity to send some cash your way. You have to overcome an always-present barrier of doubt in your visitor's mind. Provide valuable information at no cost and you will quickly erode the doubts. Valuable information can be found readily on the internet. You also likely have more information and knowledge of your own than you realize. A quick search of some key-word tools will reveal to you the topics of interest and need of large groups of people.

The whole key to making article writing and publishing work for you lies in NOT trying to sell something to the reader right away. If you write a self-serving article that is really a sales
promotion, it will be very transparent. You will have done more to alienate and push people away than to pull them close. After your article has presented the information, it's fine for you to include a resource box at the end. The resource box gives your name, website address and what the reader will benefit when they visit it.

Everything got much easier in the article-publishing process recently. There is some new software out there that makes the process push-button easy. This program keeps content unique and speeds things up tremendously. Science and industry now have the capacity to produce, publish and distribute articles to thousands of readers.

You will do well to include article publishing and distribution in your long-range strategy. Automation and professional publishing services can reach thousands of readers very quickly.
If you want more information on these useful tools (or anything else in this article), just contact me.

About the Author:

Casey Moher - Caseymoher@... (801) 941-3334

Mr. Moher is a Registered Pharmacist and Life-Long Marketing and Sales Professional. You Can Get His Free Five-Day Mini-Course on Building Targeted Website Traffic by visiting: http://www.newtrafficmaster.com

SEO ROI vs Other Marketing Mediums

By Toronto SEO Guru

Every type of business needs to showcase their product or service to their discerning customers in order to induce or motivate purchase. Purchase yields profit, and profit produce Return on Investment or ROI. The core objective of any business is to achieve the best return on their investment.

To obtain the best results, businesses should have a well-defined business plan supported by an appropriate budget. Having these tools put in place, the next question will be the venture to employ the available budget for optimal results. Do you choose SEO as your primary medium or would other more traditional mediums yield better results?

The purposes of marketing are diverse. These include revenue generation, increasing market share, influencing preference over other brands, building brand equity and building brand awareness among other things. Studying competition from all its angles including the marketing communication strategy adopted by them will guide you through the process of investing your marketing budget into the right medium.

Your prospective customers face a bombardment of advertisements through various media in their daily lives. They are naturally inclined to filter out most of it before arriving at the buying decision. To really stand out from the crowd, you need to be extremely different and of course have a huge advertising budget.

Why not make things easier on yourself and follow the logical step of placing your marketing message where the customer is already looking for it? This is the logic that racks up huge points for SEO versus traditional marketing mediums.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO scores over almost every other medium in terms of ROI. To understand the reason, it is essential to have an overview of how search engines work and how to get the best out of them.

When a customer decides to buy goods or services, he or she uses the Internet search engines to provide the customer with the information on the quality, pricing, warranty, after sales service etc, of the particular product. More often than not, the customer will be provided with a list of several thousand web sites with the information he or she needs.

In effect, most individuals will look at the first ten or 15 sites for the information they need. When they are finished with the 10-15 sites, their buying decision would have been finalized. Getting into the first 10 to 15 positions is what SEO is about and several tools are available to achieve this.

The global character of the Search Engines affords you the opportunity of your product/service being accessible to customers round the clock all through the year. The numbers that an SE optimized website can provide in terms of sales and profit will naturally be several times higher than any other media or perhaps all of them put together.

The limitations of time zones, language, overbearing influences (like positioning in a magazine) are absent in the case of search engines. You will no doubt have to spend a decent sum of money to get your marketing message optimized for search engines. This would not only be an investment for a very long time to come. Rather, it would also bring you the best Return on Investment at a fraction of the cost of traditional mediums.

About The Author:

Toronto SEO http://www.searchengineoptimizationtoronto.com/ SEO services provider in Toronto Ccanada

The Mythical Google Sandbox And How To Escape It

By Bill Platt

With an article title like this, it almost seems like I am playing the fool, by telling you something doesn't exist and then telling you that I will show you how to beat that thing I said does not exist. Maybe I am the fool, or maybe, I have something valuable to share with you today. You be the judge.

I Don't Believe In The Google Sandbox, Dragons or Unicorns...

I was browsing the Digital Point forums earlier, when I came across this quote:

"The Google Sandbox is something that people either believe or don't believe. It usually means that within the first 6 months - 1 year you won't get a lot of love from Google." -
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8286280

I saw the quote shown above and I had a good laugh. Yes, many people believe in the existence of the Google Sandbox, and I am not one of those people. I place the "Google Sandbox" in the same category as the leprechaun... they both make a neat children's story, but I see no truth in either.

What Is Google Love?

Google love is the imaginary "feeling" that Google has for the websites in its index. The more Google loves a website, the higher that website will rank in the Google search results.

No matter how many search results Google shows for a particular search term, Google will only show a maximum of 1,000 website listing in its search engine result pages (SERPs). However, few people, except nuts like me know that as you go to each consecutive page in Google's SERPs, the actual number that Google is willing to show you gets smaller with each additional page visited.

For example, I just did a search on the keyword phrase "Google Love". My default Google settings are set to 100 results. When I first typed the search phrase, Google showed 68,300,000 results, and Google shows me that I can look at ten pages of results. But, when I get to the tenth page in Google's results, there are only three listings. Google only loves 903 web pages for the search term "Google Love".

Google has told us that they attribute value to a web page, based on the number of inbound links that page might have. Google Love primarily comes from link popularity, which is derived from inbound links.

The Suggested Lifespan Of The Google Sandbox

I see the "sandbox" as being a term that some person working in SEO derived to explain why so many of his client's new pages appeared in Google's search results for about one month, before the pages disappeared into the deep recesses of the Google index.

In absence of a better explanation, some SEO person coined the term "Google Sandbox" to explain to his or her customers why a page disappears from the Google index and stays missing for months or years.

According to those who preach the Google Sandbox theory, the lifespan of the Sandbox is six months to one year. That is a lifetime when you are running an online business.

The Life Curve Of A Web Page

Google's algorithms rely heavily on inbound links to determine the value of a web page. But a brand new web page has not had the opportunity to attract any inbound links, because after all, it is a brand new web page. So Google gives new web pages the benefit of a doubt.

News stories are a good example of web pages that may very well be important to the world-at-large, but its importance cannot be determined by the number of inbound links available to that page.

As a result, all brand new web pages on the Internet are given an intrinsic value by Google, as if the pages housed a news story. But what was important thirty days ago, will not necessarily be important today. So news stories are given early value and then their value fades with time.

Once the news cycle is completed, the web page will slide down to where it deserves to be according to the normal Google algorithms. This often means that a new web page will disappear
into Google oblivion (or the theoretical Google Sandbox), if after 30 days the page has not generated any link popularity of its own.

After The News Cycle, All Normal Rules Apply

We have all heard it before. The way to get a web page to rank in Google is to build link popularity for the web page.

And how do you build link popularity for a web page? Build inbound links to that web page, of course.

Once the news cycle is done, a new web page must compete with every other web page, based on Google's normal algorithm.

What If A Page Could Develop Link Popularity In 30 Days?

What if you were able to build inbound links and therefore link popularity for a web page, before the news cycle runs out? That would be a twist, wouldn't it?

Personally, I know for a fact that if you can build link popularity on a page, within the news cycle window, that this new page will not fall into the dreaded and mythical Google Sandbox. The page will not fall into the Google Sandbox at the end of the news cycle, because the page will have already accrued some link popularity within Google's primary algorithm.

You Are The Master Of Your Own Domain

As the master of your domain, you get to choose how long a page is sandboxed. Most people don't realize they have that kind of control, but with smart link building, one can prevent a web page from entering the sandbox. Or, if the web page does slip into the sandbox, the smart online marketer can bring a web page out of the mythical sandbox in days or weeks, instead of months or years. The beauty of this truth is that you define the time line for when a web page exits the sandbox, not Google.

I Boast That I Can Prove It To You

I built a new page 16 days ago (June 10th, 2008) that is holding page one results in Google against 200,000+ websites, with my Blackhat Fish SEO Contest entry.
(http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/whitehat-vs-blackhat-fish- for-links-or-die-trying/2008/06/10/)

Now, one could argue that I am still in the news cycle for this web page, so in another two weeks, my page could disappear from the Google results. But, I have built so many inbound links to this page that I fully expect that when the news cycle is done, my page will remain outside of Google's mythical sandbox.

I Challenge You To Test My Results

Test my proof by checking back here in a couple weeks, or even in four weeks or six. If I am right, you will be able to click this link to Google's search results for the keyword phrase Blackhat Fish (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=blackhat+fish), and you will be able to see my page title on page one or two of Google's search results: "Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish For Links or Die Trying".

I say page one or page two of Google's search results, because I would be surprised if I actually won the competition. However, if I am still in the top20 results for the search key term after July 10, 2008, then I will have proved to you that anyone can beat the sandbox, if only they exercised the right strategy for escaping the sandbox ahead of the end of the news cycle.

I have actually pulled this off with three web pages in the last 60 days. The above listed example is just one of many examples I could show you as proof of concept here. But for brevity's sake, I am only including the one example here.

In Conclusion...

You can accept my analysis as sound, or you can call me the fool. It does not matter to me which you choose. If you want to believe that the Google Sandbox really exists to thwart your online business, then more power to your fears.

For those of you who have found my words worthwhile, let's meet next Saint Patrick's' Day to share a green beer and a laugh.

About the Author:

Bill Platt has been providing article marketing to his clients since 2001 at: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ He offers ghost writing and article distribution services. With lots of experience writing articles that attract publishers, readers, traffic and sales to his website, Bill wrote an ebook to share the secrets of his article marketing strategies at: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-traffic.html

Read Bill's blog at: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

SEM Industry Standards: Nonsense or Necessary?

By Kalena Jordan

A storm in a tea cup has been brewing in the search industry over the past few days. It was prompted by Jill Whalen's recent blog post titled We Don't Need SEO Standards where she came to the conclusion that she didn't think the search industry needed standards or regulation, at least in relation to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Here are Jill's top 4 reasons why she believes we don't need SEO standards:

1. There are too many ways of skinning the SEO cat.


2. We can't even agree on the definition of search engine optimization.


3. There are already laws to protect people from SEO scams.


4. There's no such thing as "cheating" in SEO.

The post got a few people fired up and they blogged fiery rebuttals pushing their case for standards. Their reasoning included:

• That the industry has a black eye and needs a regulating body.


• That industry-wide standards need to be put in place to protect the public from unethical SEM operators.


• That SEM practioners need to take responsibility for their own profession.


• That it's about time the industry adopted a set of agreed best practices.

Yadda yadda.

Passionate commentary ensued on Sphinn, proving that the industry is divided on the issue. But the truth is, we have been arguing about this very subject for years.

Personally, I agree with Jill's post.

As an educator, I can understand the frustration at the lack of industry standards. But do we "need" them? Are standards going to solve the problems people perceive as dogging the industry? I think not. Creating standards is not going to get rid of shoddy SEOs or make them switch hats. Creating standards is not going to prevent the general public from being ripped off by SEM cowboys. Industry veterans will understand this. Education and publicity has always been the solution but it just took some of us years to work that out.

This industry has unspoken standards and they've worked well for 10 or more years. We white-hat educators promote the unofficial standards and search engine guidelines already. The creation of official standards would, in my opinion, just spawn more problems.

It's interesting to see how personally some people are taking this issue. I too recall the days when I took SEO scamming quite personally and made it my own little agenda to hunt, expose and ridicule dodgy SEO firms in an effort to save the great unwashed masses from themselves and rid the industry of it's shoddy reputation in the media. Now I simply educate as many people as I can about what tactics to avoid rather than who to avoid. I think this is more of an issue of buyer beware than anything else. Standards are a nice idea, but they can't be discussed in isolation when we don't have a governing body to determine or implement them.

I used to get so annoyed at the black eye given to the industry thanks to dodgy operators and ignorant journalists, but the tide has turned so we must be addressing the problem. These days, the general public and the media (with the exception of American Express perhaps) *get* that most SEOs aren't out to rip them off.

As for best practices, these can't be created from the outside in, they have to be generated from inside out - and that means with involvement from the very top - from the search engines themselves and possibly an independent regulatory body. No search engine or government body has imposed formal regulations on the industry so right now we just have guidelines and ethics and semantics. We white hat advocates can all pat each other on the back for following Google's Webmaster Guidelines and not spamming, but we can't be too hard on the black and gray hats for breaking the rules when there are no clear rules to begin with!

So who should be entrusted with the creation and regulation of SEM industry standards or best practices? Some are suggesting an existing organization or SEM firm should be given the job.

Within the Sphinn commentary, Jill said: "...those that would create the standards all have their own agendas."

She's got a point. I for one would balk strongly at one of the existing search marketing organizations or firms being given the power to determine best practices for the entire industry. The conflict of interest rumpus that would create would be unbearable and accusations would taint the reputation of those involved, even if their intentions were honorable - remember the drama relating to ethics in SEMPOs first year? Until we have a completely independent board/panel consisting of government officials and nominated representatives, the argument for standards is circular.

Meanwhile, we have to rely on our interpretation of the search engine's guidelines, our own experience and our voices to educate webmasters about SEM best practices, as we see fit. As an industry, we're doing this already via the many channels we have access to: forums, blogs, articles, webinars, media, training, conferences and the like. Do we need standards in order to educate? Nah. I think we're doing a pretty good job without them.


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.

How Google Applies Science to Search

By Kalena Jordan

Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning is a New Zealander who joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist to develop more precise search techniques. Previously, Craig was an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Before that, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed a software suite used by pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.

A scientist at heart, Craig is probably best known as the developer of Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search) and the founder of Google's software engineering center in New York City. Google New York is responsible for developing products including Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheets, and many important features in web search and advertising. This article is a summary of his presentation at Webstock 2008.

Google's Spelling Bee

Craig started his presentation by talking about one of his first challenges: Google's spelling correction tool. As the popularity of the search engine grew, Google needed to be able to spell-correct lots of obscure words. So his solution was to take a sampling of content from the entire web. Craig's team came up with a algorithmic model and ran it over the web. He discovered that there were several correct answers to the same question. For example, words like “kofee” could mean either the searcher is seeking a cup of java or information about Kofee/Kofi Anan.

To combat this, Craig came up with an interesting solution: the "Did you mean?" alternative spelling option, based on predictive examples of searcher spelling patterns. You can see this in action if you type in "kofee anan" in Google. Above the search results is a line that reads: "Did you mean: kofi annan" and links to the search results for this spelling variation too.

But the research went even further. Craig's team worked out how to take into account the context of the search query by studying the 2 or 3 other keywords surrounding the query, for example "kofee cup" or "kofee anan". The research used the science of bigrams and trigrams to better understand how people search. Bigrams are groups of two written letters, two syllables, or two words, very commonly used as the basis for simple statistical analysis of text. So Craig and his team applied this knowledge to Google's spelling correction system and now, Google's algorithm can determine the searcher's intent with much more accuracy, based on the context of the search query.

As an example of the spelling challenges that Google face, Craig showed the audience the huge number of ways "Britney Spears" is misspelled on the web. He said it's encouraging to see that the most popular spelling is also the most correct one. Scale is important!


Google Maps Lead to Apps

The Google team wrote the code for Google Maps many years ago but the code was actually built into your browser. When Google maps first launched, people took the dense data-script and worked out how to reverse engineer it for their own use. Google engineers decided to release an API key to make these mash-ups easier after seeing so many people reverse engineer Google Maps without Google's help. Now people can mash-up Google maps within minutes to create their own applications.

To show how easy this is, Craig took the audience through the steps to create an interactive application with Google Maps. In the space of about 2 minutes, he signed up for an API key, grabbed the HTML code and pasted it into his page. He then hacked the map to show Wellington Town Hall (our location) and made the point how easy it is to create really useful tools out of technology that is already available.

As an example, Craig showed the audience Seattle Bus Monster. This site used an API key for Google Maps to make Seattle bus data and tracking available 24/7. Anyone who needs to catch a bus can look online and instantly find their nearest bus location and run to the bus stop in time to catch it. It's these type of interactive applications that add value to both corporate and government sites. Craig referenced Rodney Brooks from MIT whose provocative paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" offered new logic and a completely different view of machines. The idea is that there is no center of control among robots so you should make lots of them; don't treat them so precious. Craig said developers should use this logic to create lots of small apps that you can replicate and tweak, rather than one big expensive app that can go horribly wrong. Scale trumps smarts every time!


Experiments in Scale That Have Impacted Google's Operations

Precision vs. Recall

Back in the early 90's, information retrieval on the web was limited to things like Lexus/Nexus. So at that stage, Google would take queries and apply it to the broadest possible search. This was great recall at the cost of precision. But Larry and Sergey wanted something better so they decided to use Boolean search. At the time it was heresy because everything was focused on recall. But the Google founders knew that things had to be super relevant so they developed an algorithm - the core algorithm. It was very simple and relied on Boolean search to determine relevancy.


Genomic Sequencing

In the mid 90's a large project - the Human Genome Project - was underway. The race was on to sequence the genome. Scientists decided to feed this out to a bunch of different people. They chopped up the genome for researchers everywhere and allowed it to replicate. The researchers mapped each chunk with genetic markers and computed a tiling path of tiny fragments.

Sequencing was very expensive, so the data was computed based on a minute number of chunks - very labor intensive. The sequencing took forever and reassembling was a long way off. But then a company came along that said they could do it faster. Sequencing becomes cheaper by automating the job using machines rather than individual people so this company used a clever computer algorithm to conduct the sequencing. This reduced the cost and the researchers were therefore able to reassemble more fragments and achieve a rough draft of the genome in 2000. This sequencing approach was the shotgun approach, where accuracy is lower, but the larger scale allowed the impossible to become possible.


Web Definitions

Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for "definition of...", or "what is a...." etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.

The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.

Now Google allows you to use the "definition:" query and the question format to get definitions from around the web. Type in "what is a blog?" and you'll get lots of results from Craig's original script.


Protein Sequencing

In biology, Craig says, you're constantly producing proteins. The proteins fold up with particular sequencing. Within computing, you can use this knowledge to do amazing things. You can conduct computations with this type of data but it's time consuming. Somebody at Stanford University noticed that proteins spend a lot of time moving about before folding into an alpha helix. So it was suggested they start the computations with lots of configurations. In this way you can parallelize the data by scale and one will be magically close to a folded protein. So they worked out a way to reduce the problem to a simple process based on mass scale. This is why Google uses maximum scale to conduct algorithmic computations.


Chess vs. Go

You can now compute the value of any potential move in chess. Based on that information, you can compute your projected probability of wining the game from any move. Chess grand masters put a lot of time into this knowledge. But the opposite is true for the game Go, because there is more randomness to the game play.

The smart way (Chess)

- study lots of past games
- compute the probability for each position
- compute far into the future

The stupid way (Go)

- pick moves at random
- re-create the Monte Carlo simulation (a computational algorithm that relies on repeated random sampling for results)
- play like a human

Curiously, the stupid way works better for Go players because it's more logical to compute the data based on the game's inherent randomness.


How Google Applies the Lessons of Scale

So how does Google apply these lessons of scale? For starters, Google does not buy expensive hardware. PCs are unreliable, especially if you have thousands. However, they are cheap and fast. So what's Google's strategy? Craig says they exploit the processing power of off-the-shelf PC hardware and simply make the software more reliable.

Craig revealed that Google buys cheap hardware on a mass scale. The problem is that these cheap processors are notoriously unreliable because they are packed into datacenters by the thousands and they are running 24 hours a day so they get very hot. Commodity hardware therefore fails at an accelerated rate. Once you cope with that realization, you need to design recovery situations to deal with the problem. So Google's software understands that their data can fail at any moment and works harder to cope with that.

For every server at Google, there is another with exactly the same data on it, the same configuration, the same everything: a clone. Replication is needed for scalability so that if requested data isn't fetched instantly, the backup or clone computer is searched instead. The result is that failures don't hurt Google, they only reduce capacity. When hardware crashes or software hangs, there is a time out and a re-issue request. Google has a central control system in place to manage all this.

Cooling failures at Google can be exciting!. Craig recalls the time when the air conditioning failed entirely at one of the datacenters and the monitoring system recognized that the centre was heating up, so they were able to shut down remaining PCs at the datacenter within minutes. The fire brigade turned up and it was quite a big event internally. But the best thing was that nobody using Google even noticed! Because of Google's scalable solution, searchers were unaffected by the major hardware outage.

Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google's secret weapon! All Google's hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.


Google: The Startup

Craig showed the audience a photo of Google's original PC configuration put together by Larry and Sergey at google.stanford.edu. It consisted of three hard drives and a couple of monitors. Larry and Sergey used Lego to enclose the hard disks and when Lego became too expensive, they used cheap Lego knock-offs! He then showed a picture of Google's first office inside a residential garage and the hard drive racks that they built in a rented datacenter to save money. Larry and Sergey packed the racks together and used layers of cork between the motherboards so they wouldn't explode. Eventually they hired people who knew about safe wiring, but they still used floor fans in the datacenter to try to keep the PCs cool.


Google and the Brady Bunch

Google's Zeitgeist pulls together interesting search trends and patterns generated from the billions of searches conducted on Google. Craig is consistently fascinated by search trends and recalls a particular event that sticks in his mind. On the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the competitor got down to the final question for $1 million and it was: "On the TV show The Brady Bunch, what is Carol Brady's maiden name?" The competitor used his phone-a-friend lifeline and his friend was able to look it up live on Google and provide the competitor with the correct answer, earning him a million dollars.

The next day, out of interest, Google staff looked at the logs for "carol brady maiden name" and saw a huge spike in traffic when the show aired on the West Coast, then another spike when it aired on the East Coast and then a tiny spike when it aired a few hours later in Hawaii.

So Google Trends is a useful tool to study data patterns, but Google keep a bunch of statisticians on staff who check that random effects aren't making the data significant. Craig says that in the same vein, you should look at your site logs and react, but be careful about jumping to conclusions about what the trends say.

At the end of his presentation, I asked Craig whether he is concerned that Google's PageRank algorithm will gradually become less accurate due to the demands of scale. Craig acknowledged that as Google's indexed data grows, user input and search patterns will become increasingly important. He says PageRank will need to learn to become better at providing search results and scale up accordingly. But scale makes things interesting!


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.

Ambient Findability and the Future of Search

By Kalena Jordan

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute and Yahoo! Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

In his presentation for Webstock 2008, Peter called himself a crazy librarian who fell in love with the web. Peter designs sites so that people can find what they're looking for. It's not just about findability, Peter says. The structural design of shared information environments is important. The vast majority of Internet architects don't even know the term Internet architects. Content authors, bloggers etc. have a responsibility for shared information. One lesson Peter says he constantly needs to give clients is that it's not enough to provide a single taxonomy. You can bring multiple ideas and formats to a single document to a wide audience with different needs. The Stanford University site is a good example of a usable site. When you design for the web, you should provide usable navigation and a site search facility at the very minimum.

The Consumer Reports site is another good example. It doesn't stop with global navigation but gives a couple of information sub-sets to tell the user what the site database consists of. One size does not fit all in taxonomy. The Mayo Clinic use a more user-friendly design by listing all diseases by their most common name rather than the formal medical terminology. The site was re-designed with users in mind and has positively flourished as a result. It demonstrates that you need to design site taxonomies for specific audiences and users.

The elements of the user experience are multilayered. Peter is sick of the word "usability" as it means different things to different people. Depending on who you talk to, usability could mean:

useful
usable
valuable
findable
credible
accessible
desirable

All these elements are important. Peter recommends asking these three questions when designing a site layout:

1) can users find your web site?
2) can users navigate your web site?
3) can users find your products and services despite your web site?

He also claims that not enough attention is paid to accessibility these days. Your web site needs to advance your business goals and inspire trust. Peter mentioned Google search as an example. People tend to trust results that are listed high in Google. Findability and credibility are therefore increasingly connected.

Peter has provided site usability services for the National Cancer Institute. When he began working with the site, 90 percent of traffic was from the general public who had been diagnosed with cancer and were seeking specific information. Peter helped re-design the site to make sure these people found the information they were seeking about specific cancer types. At the time Peter worked on the site, an amazing 70 percent of searches on the major search engines were for specific types of cancer so the Cancer Institute used this information to improve the findability of their specific cancer pages.

We can talk about findability at the level of the object and the system, says Peter. What are the ways the object/data can be found? How do we make it easier to be found? How does the environment support the navigation and retrieval of the object/data? What he calls ambient findability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. The destination is never quite reached because perfect findability is impossible.

We're now drowning in information and suffering from information anxiety in the information age. "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." says Herbert Simon (Nobel Laureate Economist) or the Dilbert version of this is: "Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehouse aimed at a teacup". We are creating alternate ways to receive information via our digital networks, Google Earth being a good example. Another example is the "kid tracker" which is a GPS wristwatch your kids wear so you can know the location of your kids 24/7. Soon, people will be able to track other people every second of every day. This raises privacy concerns.

Peter showed a couple of examples of findability technology available now. Within a wireless network area, you can now use the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to add electronic tags to items so you can locate them at any time. Hospitals use the technology to tag wheelchairs so they can be found instantly and save staff time and money searching for them. It's claimed this saves one hospital $28K per month. Another example was the keen couple who had tagging devices embedded in their hands so they could open each other's apartment doors and access each other's computers. How romantic!

So in a world where the information haystacks are getting larger, how do we create information needles? How do we solve the findability question? We need to think about business intelligence, visualizing patterns etc. Back in the 1980's Peter wrote an article claiming that the Internet will turn everyone into a librarian and now it's happened. We can't stop talking about meta data, social media labels, bookmarks and Flickr tags! In 5-10 years, Peter thinks that many sites will become like Amazon in terms of findability.

Search is one of the most important ways we learn. "Search has become the new interface of commerce" says John Battelle. Search startups such as Endeca and Trexy are pioneering new ways to search. Everyzing is a search engine that allows you to search audio files by individual words within the transcript. Buzzillions is an example of a site using both structured meta data and tag search. Hybrid search solutions are launching all the time. Google is struggling with how to provide data the way people categorize it. Google Book Search is an example of a site with usability issues. Flickr solved this issue by using clusters to sort photo tags, with huge success.

Peter says that we need to focus on usability in the future. Everyone working on your site needs to have the same goals in mind. He completes his presentation with the story of the three stone cutters. There is a guy wandering in the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry and asks the workers there what they're doing. The first stone cutter is working at a slow pace and says "I'm making a living". The second guy is working really hard and fast. He says "I'm doing my very best". The third guy is working at a pace somewhere in the middle but with a smile on his face. He says "I'm building a cathedral".


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.

A Beginner's Guide to Pay Per Click Marketing

By Kalena Jordan

Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine marketing refers to a specific type of advertising where you pay a search engine every time a potential customer clicks on your ad. These ads appear on search engine results pages and sometimes on sites within a search engine's network of partners.

How do Pay Per Click Ads Work?

If you look at a search engine results page (SERP) carefully, you can generally distinguish between search results that are regular algorithmic or "organic" search listings and PPC search results which are actually paid advertisements. The latter are generally listed under the headings "sponsored results" or "featured listings" and consist of specially designed text, image or video ads that are triggered to display when your target keywords are used in a search query. The PPC ads generally appear on the right hand side and/or at the top of the search results pages.

To appear in the PPC results, advertisers sign up for the PPC program of their choice and create short text ads, image ads or videos describing the product or service available on their site in a way that will best entice searchers to visit it. During the program setup, an advertiser will decide which trigger keywords/phrases they wish to bid on and how much they are willing to pay when a visitor clicks on their ad. Generally, the higher the bid, the more likely their ad will show above their competitor's.

The Origins of Pay Per Click Marketing

The PPC industry was pioneered by GoTo.com (later re-branded as Overture before it was purchased by Yahoo! in July 2003). Despite their enormous success, GoTo's PPC model was met with a lot of skepticism in the industry following their IPO in 1999. Their eventual purchase by Yahoo put to rest any doubts that pay per click advertising was here to stay.

In October 2000, Google which was eventually to become the world's most popular search engine, launched their own keywords advertising model (Google AdWords), blending algorithmic search results with pay per impression ads.

In 2002, in an attempt to compete more successfully with Overture, Google expanded AdWords to include the pay per click pricing model we are familiar with today. This model provide both more popular and more successful and eventually replaced the pay-per-impression model as the default system.

By 2002, GoTo (by then rebranded as Overture), had distribution deals with an impressive range of search engines including Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, InfoSpace and a number of meta search engines including MetaCrawler and Ixquick. Overture's powerful distribution network guaranteed advertisers placement of their ads in front of a LOT of eyeballs and it became clear that many were willing to pay big bucks for the privilege. Other major search engines also formed successful distribution partnerships with PPC providers during this time, noticeably AOL, AskJeeves and MSN with Google AdWords. The pay per click industry had officially arrived.

Scores of PPC search engines began to spring up following Overture's lead, however the PPC industry continued to be dominated by the two big PPC players, Overture and Google AdWords, while Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Google fought it out for dominance in the general search market.

In July 2003, in a move that shocked the industry, Yahoo! purchased Overture to enable them to better compete with market leader Google. In April 2005 they rebranded the PPC engine as Yahoo! Search Marketing and in 2006 they launched a revamped version of the service, code-named Panama.

Meanwhile, in October 2005, Microsoft quietly launched their own PPC service called MSN adCenter. An official launch in the US, together with a name change to Microsoft AdCenter occurred in May 2006. In May 2007, Microsoft revamped AdCenter with new features and rolled it out to advertisers worldwide.

Currently, Yahoo and Google continue to dominate the PPC landscape, although Microsoft AdCenter is beginning to make an impact. Second tier PPC engines such as MIVA (formerly Espotting and FindWhat) and Kanoodle are fast catching up to the majors.

There are now hundreds of PPC search engines worldwide, servicing global, regional and niche markets, but only a few that have achieved a significant market share of advertising revenue. A summary of the majors are listed below.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search

Yahoo! Sponsored Search is the current name for what was originally called Overture Precision Match. Yahoo! Sponsored Search prominently displays your site in search results on some of the top U.S. search properties that Yahoo! partners with. With Sponsored Search, you set the price you're willing to pay for each customer who clicks on your listing. Your ads appear at the top, bottom or right hand side of Yahoo search results pages under the heading "Sponsor Results". Your ads are triggered on search result pages when searchers enter the keyword combinations that you've bid on. Your ads can be targeted by language and country.

If you create a keyword campaign and you use the ContentMatch option, your bid also buys you top listings on Yahoo's partner sites AltaVista, InfoSpace, eBay, CitySearch, AllTheWeb and a range of news and content portals, such as USAToday, National Geographic, iVillage and NBC.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords gives web site owners the ability to promote their site when particular keyword or phrase searches are conducted at Google and partner sites. Your ads appear at the top or on the right side of search results pages in a "call out" box under the heading "Sponsored Links". Your AdWords text, image or video ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country. With Google AdWords cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad, regardless of how many times it's shown. Google adjusts your bids automatically to keep you ahead of your competition at the lowest possible price. Google AdWords results appear on Google search results pages, Google's distribution partner sites, Google Gmail, and numerous content sites which are syndicated through the Google AdSense program.

Microsoft AdCenter

Microsoft adCenter is the newest kid on the Pay Per Click block. It includes the ability to target your ads to MSN Live Search users who match your target regional and demographic criteria. Microsoft adCenter allows you to submit base bids for keywords or phrases you associate with your ads. This base bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay if any Live Search user searches for one of your keywords and clicks your ad. You can also increase your bid in order to reach specific audience targets, which help increase the chance your ad will appear for a user who fits your buyer profile. Targeted bidding in the Campaigns tab allows you to add amounts to your base bid to increase the possibility that your ad will show to searchers who fit your optimum buyer profile. You can use your bid amounts to influence your ad's position in the Live Search results. In general, the more you bid, the higher the position your ad will have. You can use Microsoft's Intelligent Targeting feature to adjust your ads to match these variables:

• Geographical location


• Age and gender


• Day of the week


• Time of day (morning, afternoon, or night)

Interestingly, Microsoft pitch the ability to "build brand awareness" with their PPC program, due to the continued exposure of your ad and brand to a large market, regardless of whether that ad attracts clicks. This is an important feature of all major PPC programs but one that is rarely promoted by Google or Yahoo! Perhaps brand-building is adCenter's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) because Microsoft claim to reach more potential eyeballs than their competitors: over 99 million people per month have access to their Live Search tool across MSN and Windows Live.

The Advantages of Pay Per Click Advertising

The growth of the search industry worldwide has created a huge market for paid search advertising and most search engines and directories now have some type of Pay For Performance or Pay Per Click (PPC) element to them.

Pay Per Click advertising:

• Enables webmasters to target geographical and niche markets more precisely via specific search queries.


• Enables webmasters to have their page URL displayed at the top of the search engine results pages without having to figure out complex search engine algorithms or pay an SEO expert to tweak their site for higher rankings.


• Enables webmasters to receive new traffic instantly.


• Enables a website or offline store to be found by search engine users even if no site exists or the site is not search engine compatible.


• Enables small businesses to operate globally and compete on an equal footing with much larger competitors.


• Enables instant sales and more measurable ROI via conversion tracking.


• Enables more precise visitor pathways to be plotted (e.g. by leading visitors to specific landing pages).


• Enables campaigns to be switched on and off on-demand to meet specific needs, search trends or specific events (e.g. Christmas sale).

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.

Should You Change Your Copy When Rankings Fall?

Article By Karon Thackston

I've been on a seesaw for the last year. I have a client who, for almost 12 months, has been asking me to rewrite their home-page copy because they dropped from the top 10 to position #11 (the dreaded second page!). My question to her was always, "Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?" She answered yes every time, to which I advised, "Leave the copy alone."

"But what about my rankings?"

"Is business suffering?"

"No, we're swamped."

"Leave the copy alone."

"But it's over a year old. Don't you think it needs to be refreshed?"

"Is your copy still converting the way you want it to?"

"Yes."

"Leave the copy alone."

We'd have this same discussion every 3 or 4 months. Some people just get hung up on being in the top 10, and their tunnel vision can cause them to make decisions they otherwise would not make. Others think that, because they are tired of seeing their website copy, others are too. This is usually not true.

My suggestion was to enhance her linking campaign with some quality articles through an article distribution campaign, but to leave the copy alone since it was still doing its job. Search engine positioning isn't the whole ball of wax. Getting top 10 rankings shouldn't be your primary goal. Attracting and keeping more business is what it's all about. If that means using search engine optimization as one tool, so be it. But too many times, website owners bow to the SEO gods and sacrifice conversions and their best business sense all for the sake of saying they are #1. Not advisable, if you ask me.

I am happy to report that, after holding at #11 for many months, this company's site is now back in spot #5. While we can't say with any certainty that it has driven any more business to their site than being at #11, the managers are quite pleased.

Never Change Your Copy?

Is this my advice in every case where rankings drop? No. There are instances where you do need to change your copy if your rankings decrease. Ask yourself (or your client) these questions:

1) Are conversions suffering?

If you're experiencing a decline in conversions, by all means take a look at your copy. It might need some help. But keep in mind that decreasing conversions may also be due to a new and more complicated shopping cart, recent design changes that impaired usability for your visitors or a dozen other reasons.

2) Have products or services changed?

If you have products or services to add or remove, certainly you'll want to change your copy to reflect that.

3) Has business fallen off?

If, due to the decrease in search engine positioning, you've tracked a definite lag in business, then yes, you'll want to make an effort to gain the lost rankings back. But, changing the copy isn't the only way to do this. If you answer no to the other questions, I'd leave the copy as-is and opt for an article distribution campaign first.

4) Other than hoping to appease the SEO gods, is there any other reason that the copy mandates changing?

If the answer is no, don't change the copy.

With all of the above, if the answer to each question is no, leave the copy alone.

There are as many reasons for your positioning to change as there are days in the month. Guessing at and trying to adjust for mysterious shifts usually does little good. Plus, while you're chasing the golden ring, you may be losing sales.

About the Author:

Learn to write emotionally driven SEO copywriting with Karon's Step-by-Step Copywriting Course at http://www.copywritingcourse.com. Read Karon's copywriting blog at http://www.marketingwords.com/blog.

Thirty-Two Tips in Writing Articles for the WWW (Updated)

Article by Craig Lock

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to use the Internet and he won't bother you for months...or perhaps even years! (Sorry men... however, I presume this principle also applies to our women-folk!)."

Articles are an incredible source of traffic and free advertising for your online business, as they create LINKS (which are a vital criteria for the major search engines in their rankings of your web- site). Writing articles can provide you with enormous amount of exposure on the Web (sounds "rude, that). You are branding yourself on a shoestring budget - it hasn't cost you a cent, but a little time and effort.

People want quality content for their ezines and their web sites; however, the competition for content is fierce. Every Web site owner wants content and hundreds of writers want their content visible on the Web. It's FREE promotion through your signature file at the end of your article*.

If you can write an article about your business, you can increase your links in 24 hours! As the internet adress in your resource box at the end of your articles gets picked up by the main search engine spiders, like Google and Yahoo.

Writing a free content article is simple and follows a similar professional approach as an article for a standard, paying market. Here are some pointers in writing articles for the www:

Firstly,

1. Offer Something of Value, a Real Benefit to people. Articles that give good helpful information or explain how to accomplish something are usually best, and will be read most often.

2. Try to get into the publishers mind. See things from their point of view - why should they publish your article? In what way will it benefit their readers?

3. Accept that writing for the web is different to writing for the off-line world. People tend to skim and scan (note alliteration) when reading online. They read quickly scrolling down the page.

4. Identify your target audience.

5. Give your article a catchy title that will grab attention and make people want to read.

6. Keep your title reasonably short. Put some thought and effort into your heading - again to get your reader's immediate attention.

7. Be professional and take your article writing seriously. Write about something you know professionally. Don't be overly casual in your writing (ie. don't write exactly as you speak)

8. Keep your paragraphs short.

9. Be Clear and Concise. Get to the point quickly (enough waffle with maple syrup, Craig!).

10. Target your article to your audience with "focused information".

11. Be brief, if you are a "waffler", like this writer. People want immediate information online and have limited time usually - it's the "instant coffee, sorry generation.

12. Write briefly and concisely (redundant words, meaning the same thing, Craig!) Try to keep your article under 1,500 words. Most paying markets usually only accept between 500 and 2,000 words... and with a bit of luck they may even "pick up" your great article. Try to be concise in your wording. Brevity is the hall-mark of good writing...or so say many of the teachers of writing!

13.. Use the OCCASIONAL exclamation mark (!) to get your readers attention. Forget the ALL CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation points!!!

14. Be credible (big word, eh?) at all times.I try to write my articles in a "conversational style with dashes of my funny humour".

15.. Use HUMOUR. People like to have a bit of fun with the occasional laugh, whilst being informed on a serious subject. At least I believe so!

16. Write from "your heart", so that you come across as a REAL person. Just write what comes naturally with INTEGRITY...and BE YOURSELF.

17. Be totally honest in your writing and don't "borrow" too much from others content. It's so easy to "steal" on the www - so do your own work and if you "borrow ideas or material, ACKNOWLEDGE. "Incidentally, I have borrowed some ideas in this article from some good writers and well-known internet marketers - thanks a lot, David, Michael, John, Meredith, Joe, Edward, Ken and Mark).

18. Be humble.and don't talk down to your readers.

19. Use bullets (not live, please, oops er sorry, bad taste) in your articles - it makes the points easy to follow.

20.. Don't forget your byline ...or your "business card". Make sure that you resource box at the end of the article provides enough information to identify yourself and provide contact information. It's FREE advertising.

21. Offer a free report with your article - this is an easy way to collect a list of adresses for marketing your product(s). An instant target market.

22. Check all the links in your article before submitting it.

23. Offer your articles by autoresponder

24. Conclude with a strong message. Your final point (and paragraph) should be a message that summarises your article or gets your reader to take further action, like "GET STARTED" (as I've done in this article).

25. Pay attention to feedback you get for your articles. Getting constructive feedback about your articles can help you to write better through encouragement. A very powerful motivator to write more articles..

26. Finally, make sure your layout is good (not one of my strong points!), as this greatly enhances your prospects of getting published Use plenty of white spaces, as this makes your piece more easily read.

27. Proof-read. Double check your articles for errors: spelling, grammar and punctuation. Use a spell-check. Go over your article carefully and be an editor yourself.

28. Make sure your article flows properly.

29. Re-read and re-read, until you get it "just right."

30. Keep a file of articles you've written or ones that lie unfinished. You may have many new ideas since then. Set aside time to work on them. You may even put them in the form of an ebook, as my "techno-friend", Stefan has done.

and finally...and most importantly

31. Remember the "kiss" principle: Write simply and keep your meaning (message) clear (As Ernest Hemingway advised). Never use a big word, when a dimunitive will do (get it)!

Self discipline is the key to writing success. "Aim for perfection, but settle for excellence" in your article writing... then just "give it a full go with all you've got".

and finally (and most importantly)

32. Don't treat writing articles for the www. as a loborious and necessary chore of internet marketing, but some FUN in your writing (as I have done in this article)

SUMMARY:

The internet is such an amazing medium for communication and SHARING information. I've just submitted this article and it's been published almost instaneously (big word!) in a few places. So YOU TOO can write articles on your chosen subject in your internet marketing efforts, as the more articles you write and submit, the more you will find web sites LINKING to yours (as many of the major search engines use the number of links as a factor in placing your web site in their rankings).

It's a "numbers game": MORE TRAFFIC = INCREASED SALES ("the more you tell, the more you sell")

Share YOUR unique knowledge and skills to help others "out there in cyberspace."

Writers and internet marketers - Grab this moment in history well. "Carpe diem" (seize the moment!).

Why not start writing articles for the www in your unique area of interest, knowledge and or expertise?

YOU CAN DO IT by writing articles for the www ... and so and "by giving, you receive" (far more).

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe (German philosopher)

Happy writing

Craig Lock (Eagle Productions Books)

P.S: We hope that these tips help in your article writing. In my opinion it's the best internet marketing strategy. To your internet marketing dreams in 2008...and beyond.

As the ancient Chinese philosopher said so well, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a ... broken fan belt and a flat tyre"... er sorry... a single step.

About the author:

Craig is a writer, who believes in sharing information with a 'dash' of humour, as well as encouraging people to believe in themselves and helping others to find their talents and gifts, to strive for and accomplish their goals and dreams in life - whatever they may be.
http://www.selfgrowth.com/experts/craig_lock.html
http://www.myspace.com/writercraig+ http://www.craiglockbooks.com

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe (German philosopher).

Does the cutting edge of social media really pay?

Aritcle by Mark Silver

Does the cutting edge of social media really pay? So someone asks you: "What's your Twitter name?" And you look at them like they are a loony. Twitter? Huh?

And then the next person asks you, "You blog, right? What's the URL?"

Hold it. What happened? In the seeming blink of an eye, suddenly there's all this new so-called 'social media' on the web, and you know nothing about it.

What's worse, is that everyone else seems to be there already. It's like you went to the bathroom, and when you came out, the party moved on, leaving you in a dark room with empty glasses all around you.

Time to drop everything and catch up with the party... quickly! Quickly!

And let's say you catch up with the party...

You've got your blog, your Twitter name, and all of those things. And no matter how fast you run with it all, it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference.

The world IS moving, you can't safely ignore it. And yet chasing after it isn't working. What to do?

Innovation is a no-no.

There is a teaching in Sufism that speaks against innovation. Well, not all innovation, and only in certain circumstances.

This is sometimes where people get the idea that Islam is anti-science or anti-progress. Not true.

In the twelth century, during Europe's 'dark ages,' Islamic culture had some of the most advanced universities, scientists, and doctors in the world, at the very cutting edge of modern technology. The problem with innovation is that it can feed on itself.

Innovation is forbidden when it becomes a false idol.

We've come to think about technology as 'computers' or 'science.' But, the word 'technology comes from the Greek 'tekhnologia' meaning, an interest in an 'art or craft' (Oxford American Dictionaries).

The problem comes when someone studies technology for its own sake. For our personalities, our egos, the lure of 'newness' is strong. New sensations and learnings can encompass all of our attention, immerse us in the experience.

This can be a good, because immersion is a great way to learn. The problem is that with something like all the innovation happening in web technology, is that there is no defined 'end' point. There is no way to tell externally when you've done enough.

If you get caught in this loop, you can emerge months or years later, having totally lost track of the path you are on.

The irony is- people want connection. The irony of web-based social media like blogs and Twitter is that it's coming out of the deeper hunger to connect to community, to love, to Source. Yet all of this innovation in the internet can leave you exhausted and isolated- even if you're good at it and like it.

As you may already know, that connection you're yearning for is in your heart, not Twitter. It's in the hearts of other people, not in the technology. If you forget that, you'll be lost. By remembering your true intention, then technology can be useful to you.

So do I blog and Twitter, or not?

Well, I'll give you a definitive answer: it depends. :) It depends on your business, and the hearts of the people you are trying to reach.

If you work with younger adults or teens, or with engineers or gadget geeks, then yes, you're going to want to meet them where they are, which is usually on the cutting edge of the latest toys. If you don't, it may not be as critical. And, even if you suspect that a good portion of your audience is found in the 'blogosphere' as it's sometimes called, there's still no need to be so urgent about it.

How do you proceed? Well, take breath, connect to your heart, and let's take a look.

Keys to Technology

• Your current website and newsletter is not obsolete!

Don't panic and discard what you've got now. Just because all of this new stuff is out there doesn't mean what you already have isn't perfect for what you're doing. My bicycle is more than fifteen years old, and it gets me around just fine. And, if you haven't even gotten your website done yet, it's still more than worthwhile to finish.

• You don't need the latest, just adequate. Unless your business is about social media and cutting-edge web technology, in which case you probably aren't even reading this article (hiya!), then forget about Twitter, Pownce, Digg, Stumble-Upon, del.icio.us for right now. You don't need anything but entry-level basic. Just start reading some blogs, without being in a rush. Here's a few to start with:

Dawud Miracle

Michael Martine

Adam Kayce

• Set a 1-3 month 'safe zone' of learning.

As you begin to learn, tell yourself that you don't have to do anything about it for one to three months, that you are just going to learn. It will work even better if you find a friend or colleague who can give you an hour or three for a personal guided tour of this stuff.

This approach doesn't just apply to blogs, but it applies to most anything new you need to learn about your business. And, once you understand the basics, the more obscure pieces will come MUCH more quickly.

You might actually find yourself enjoying the technology. :)

With blogs and other social media, remember that technology is just a tool, and that the craft you are studying is not blogs. You are involved with the craft of connection, and you're just learning a new tool to do what you already know something about.

Don't let gurus rush you. Take a breath, and dip in. You may find that all of this innovation and technology can actually increase your connection to what you care about most.

About the Author:

Mark Silver is the author of Unveiling the Heart of Your Business: How Money, Marketing and Sales can Deepen Your Heart, Heal the World, and Still Add to Your Bottom Line. He has helped hundreds of small business owners around the globe succeed in business without losing their hearts. Get three free chapters of the book online: http://www.heartofbusiness.com