Author : Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

News, events, and happenings around the internet marketing universe this week.

Google Launches Google Trends for Websites
Google didn’t wait for the buzz to simmer on Google Trends before launching the Google Trends for Websites, a variation of the original tool. What’s the difference, you ask. Whereas regular Google Trends allows you to see how people are searching for specific terms, Google Trends for Websites allows you to compare website searches, estimated growth patterns, among other variables. You can also compare two competing websites to see who has the edge. It has an added value of showing related sites under the web search results.

Google Introduces Ad Planner
I’m all Googled out this week. What with all the Internet marketing tools Google has been dumping on us lately. Ad Planner is actually a precious little tool for Internet media planners that makes it easier to identify target audiences based on location, traffic, and a wide range of demographic information.

ICANN Okays New Domains
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the Internet regulating body, unanimously agreed to add new top-level domains to the web. This means that your domain registration options will no longer be limited to .com, .net. .org, and the like. In addition to allowing new top-level Internet addresses, they also approved the creation of domains with non-ASCII characters. Which means you can now go ahead and create that website you’ve been planning to name after a Russian relative or any other non-English names you prefer.

Online Marketing Future Looks Bright
Can you guess what the 4 most popular online ventures are? Believe it or not, adult content, gambling, information, electronics and computing are the biggest online ventures today. Researchers predict that those fields will account for $5 billion of ad spending each by 2011. That’s a lot of dead presidents exchanging hands! But it gets better. Comprehensive online advertising is expected to reach $65 billion globally by the end of 2008. So, are you still thinking about that offline marketing job?

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Last Week in Internet Marketing

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Author : Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

Talk to any savvy web marketer and they’ll tell you that social networking is all the rave these days. As the popularity of social networking grows, so does Digg’s status as one of the preferred vessels of social media marketing. Digg users are often trying to establish a presence on several social media sites. Constantly inundated by non-stop flow of information, social networking users sometimes find it difficult to balance the demands of every site. If that picture fits your situation, fret no more. There’s hope.

So, why exactly is your popularity index is stuck on that undesirable number called “0″? Read on.

You’re not an active user
Or maybe you are, but you’re not consistently active. Those are two different things. You can’t digg 500 articles one day and then disappear for 3 weeks. You have to show that you’re not just on Digg to promote your own agenda. One way to demonstrate that is by making sure you participate on a regular basis. It’s common practice for diggers to remove inactive users from their friends list.

You indulge in shameless self promotion
Most diggers can spot blatant self advertisement from a distance. If you’re submitting a bamillion links that all point to your site, you can kiss that dream of making it to the homepage goodbye. It’s a turn-off for many web users. An effective way to earn respect from your fellow diggers is by submitting stories that are unique, from a wide variety of sites. This may sound asinine to new diggers, but you can effectively drive traffic to your site by promoting other people’s content.

You lack focus
If you’re not getting any diggs on your submissions, chances are you’re not sharing quality links with your Digg community. If there are other things making demands on your time, consider setting aside a block of time each day to scour the Internet for quality content. If you consistently submit diggable items that will add value to other people’s socializing experience, many of them will notice and eventually digg your submissions.

You haven’t studied the success models
Here’s a bittersweet pill for new diggers: You can submit all the quality stories in the world and still wind up with 0 popular stories. Take time to study the Digg success models and observe the types of submissions that are constantly making it to the homepage. Notice the catchy titles, the high-quality articles, the seriously active users, among other things that make success possible on Digg.

You’re targeting the wrong users
If you’ve been adding friends randomly on Digg just to boost your friends list, you’re on the wrong track. If you take a closer look at that friend’s list, you may notice that some of your friends haven’t been active in ages. Cultivate an inner circle. Extend an invitation to people with similar interests and reach out to them.

You have no identity
If you’ve ever submitted a story on Digg, then you know that the site is very big on making sure that humans and only humans access their website. Put a name to the face and tell people about your interests. This will also enable others in your field to find you and socialize with you. That’s the bottom line, connecting with like-minded people, right?

You lack patience
Many users hear about Digg from their friends or through other sites and quickly sign up with high expectations. Devoid of successful submissions, many give up after a few weeks or even days of trying. The reality is that the major users that have prominent presence on Digg and other social media sites have been building up their profiles and relationships for a long time. Rather than approach Digg as a link dump, become genuinely interested in adding value to the community while maximizing your brand visibility. Digg diligently, but most importantly, digg patiently.

The core idea behind social networking is to provide an outlet for socializing with others. So, go forth, socialize, and be merry.

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Author: April Hall
Internet Copywriter

For internet media planners, much of the difficulty revolves around deciding which sites to target, how to find your ideal audience and reduce the number of missed opportunities. Many media planners eventually decide to reach out to a relatively few number of larger, well-known sites, deciding that it is best to aim for the known rather than to spend countless hours and unnecessary budget finances on online ad buys that may or may not hit their target customers.

Fortunately, the gurus at Google have developed a way to assist media planners as they organize their ad buys. Yesterday, Google introduced a new tool known as the Google Ad Planner. Like many of the tools offered by Google, Ad Planner understands that many users are like me–not overly technically-savvy, and intimidated by complicated applications. For this reason, this new media planning tool is surprisingly simple and completely intuitive. Of course, web design and internet marketing companies, which often have a talented media planner on staff, will also appreciate the capabilities of Ad Planner.

From the very first glance, users can recognize the value of using Google Ad Planner:

Media planners can easily find out invaluable information about sites that pertain to their industry:

• Which sites are the most popular for their target audience
• Smaller, less well-known sites that are popular with their customers
• How many countries each site reaches
• Page views
• Unique visitors information
• Demographic information of site visitors such as: gender, age, education and income
  

Aside from the vague disquiet I initially feel once I realize how much information that Google has about me at its disposal, and how willing they are to share that information (alas, a topic for another post), I am amazed at what a powerful media tool Ad Planner is going to be. Planners can now microtarget websites that reach the majority of their target audience, without wasting unnecessary time and resources.

Once you know which sites your business should target for online ad buys, you can efficiently transfer your media plans, and then export them to a .csv file for easy opening in spreadsheet applications. Or, if you prefer, you can export your plans to DoubeClick’s MediaVisor in order to manage all of your media planning, purchasing and other online campaign management activities.

While we all would love to begin using Google Ad Planner immediately, it is currently open to users by invitation only. Those of you who are interested in learning more about how it works, in particular the fascinating research aspects of the tool, will enjoy Arthur Freydin’s succinct walk-through, during which he points out that Ad Planner would be even better if it were integrated with Ad Words accounts.

Like most Google tools, this new facet of campaign management will continue to grow and develop as it makes its way out of the beta stage. Why not sign up to be a part of the group of media planners that helps to influence how it matures?

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Author: Thomson Chemmanoor
SEO Coordinator

The goal of every SEO is to build a site that ranks well with search engines. But building a website that ranks well with Google and other search engines has a great deal to do with how search bots see your website. With any type of SEO marketing, there are several factors that can negatively impact your ranking.

These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or Google rankings:

1. Server is inaccessible for search engine bots.
2. Duplicate of existing content within the site.
3. Outgoing links to low quality/spammy sites.
4. Duplicate Title/Meta tags on all pages.
5. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming).
6. Broken or missing internal links
7. Wrong syntax in robots.txt file
8. Wrong 301 redirects
9. Characters in your web page URL
10. Sites entirely built in frames and Flash

These are only some of the major factors that impact search rankings negatively. As you can imagine, there’s a host of other issues, such as no-follow links, which also make websites less crawlable.

At this point you’re probably wondering “Well, what can I do to enhance my site’s crawlability?” For starters, you can manage your site in Google Webmaster Tools to identify some other crawling problems your website may have. Also, ensure that your content is readable. Avoid excessive use of Flash animations and javascript. Supplement visuals with sufficient textual content. If you decide to outsource your optimization needs, make sure you’re not dealing with a bad SEO company.

Finally, continue to immerse yourself in website content usability tips and other natural search engine optimization resources. The goal is to build a site that is easily accessible to users as well as search bots. And as the saying goes, build it and they will come.

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Author: April Hall

Internet Copywriter

What is the ultimate purpose of the internet? (Wow-I know that’s a loaded question that could take forever to answer!) For some, the internet is a source of information. For others, it’s a place to interact with friends, play games and enjoy the range of available entertainment. For many of us who work with SEO, however, we have one true purpose for ourselves and our clients: to make money. We want to sell as many of our products and services as we can, and this is done by attracting customers–not just visitors–to our sites.

But, how can we attract those ready-to-buy customers to our site, when there are so many other sites floating around out there? How can we make our businesses stand out and make it to the top of the search engine results page when there are such giants as About.com and Yahoo to content with? The answer is to make use of long tail keywords.

I first head the term “long tail keyword” a few months ago; and although I got the gist of what that term meant, I was still confused about exactly how to write content using them. Did it mean that I had to put the entire string of terms together, without any words in between? Did I have to use the long tail keyword in its entirety every time? Some quick conversations with SEO pros, along with some sample searches, led me to these conclusions:

• Long tail keywords are one of the most effective ways to draw unique visitors to your site
• You may break up these strings of words with minor prepositions without causing any major differences to your page’s searchability
• It is best to use long tail keywords in conjunction with shorter keywords on the same page
  

Long tail keywords are 3 to 4 word keyword phrases that are very specific to what you are selling. For example, rather than a t-shirt company writing content that targets “t-shirts”, they may choose to target the long tail keyword phrase “funny political t-shirts”. It seems like targeting such a specific keyword would reduce your number of site visitors and reduce your page views, doesn’t it? Well, this may be true, but there are three very good reasons to use long tail keywords anyway:

1. It makes writing SEO Content much easier. Any content writer is more easily able to write a page of content on “used hybrid cars gas mileage” than they are “used cars”. A more focused keyword content makes for sharper, more focused writing.
2. It makes it easier to target customers who are actually ready to buy. An internet searcher who is looking for “home security systems company houston” is much more likely to be to the point of actually buying a product than a searcher who simply types in “house alarms”. You may be reaching a smaller pool of searchers, but you are reaching those customers who are ready to close the sale.
3. It makes it more likely to reach the front page of search engine results. Using long tail keywords means that you will have fewer competitors trying to reach the front page of the search results, because fewer pages have targeted that string of keywords. Big-name sites usually dominate the search result pages of simple, broad searches; but smaller sites that have created properly targeted content stand a good chance of reaching their ideal customers.

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Author : Henry Adaso
Internet Copywriter

No time to keep up with all the internet marketing developments out there? No problem, pull up a seat, grab a cup of coffee, and relax as we get you up to speed with the top stories and events of the last 7 days.

Firefox 3 Ignites 8 Million Downloads
After months of intense suspense, Mozilla finally unleashed Firefox 3, its open-source browser alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. FF’s grassroots movement quickly caught a wildfire, leading it to surpass its initial goal of landing 5 million downloads in 24 hours. More than 8 million people downloaded the browser (including yours truly), making it the most downloaded software in the history of the Internet.

So, what makes FF 3 tick? For starters there’s the “awesome bar” which allows web users to type in real words rather than urls to pull up websites. Throw in the faster navigation and extra memory capacity and you’ve got yourself a hot browser.

MySpace Gets A Makeover
If you’ve been on MySpace lately, you’ve probably noticed the new, sleek, user-friendly layout. The overhaul is aimed at improving usability and aesthetics throughout the site. Wait, who am I kidding here? Of course, the MySpace makeover was more about monetization than usability.

For evidence, look no further than MySpace’s litany of advertising options: a new splash page (entry point for users) currently serves up a “Get Smart” theme and the video player comes loaded with more ad options. Most importantly, the new design filters search by location and relevancy to search engine algorithms, which yields more relevant, contextual, as well as geo-specific ads. I’m not complaining though. After all, users also benefit from optimized search options.

1 Billion Reasons to Stay LinkedIn
One of the biggest news of the week was LinkedIn’s $1 Billion valuation. The professional social networking site raised a whopping $53 million from investors for its European expansion efforts. The million dollar question is, What does that mean for your online business?

Google-Yahoo Marriage Draws Criticism
After rejecting Microsoft’s $47.5 billion offer, Yahoo entered into a partnership with search behemoth Google. The deal, which is expected to increase Yahoo’s cash flow to $450 million within the first year, came under fire this week. Anti-trust experts criticized the Goohoo partnership, saying that it’ll take the competitiveness out of Yahoo’s advertising edge, since they’ll be generating revenue from almighty “G” anyway.

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Last Week in Internet Marketing

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