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Tools for Managing PPC Campaigns…

June 1, 2009 By 2 Comments

If you are using the Internet as a vehicle to market your products or services through PPC campaigns I strongly recommend ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools.  And trust me, I know that when you are running PPC campaigns that you often find yourself on the front end getting ready to shell out some serious cash, and it’s intimidating.  I also know that the last thing you are looking for when getting into PPC is another online service that is going to cost you money, but if you take into consideration that by investing in a service such as this it can actually save you money in the long run, or allow you to get the most bang from your investment, it really makes a lot of sense.

Managing PPC campaigns is a service that my partners and I have offered for a number of years now, and the sheer amount of buys that we have made on our clients behalf over the years is amazing, and the management fees that we have made from our clients for providing this service is substantial, so trust me when I tell you I would not recommend using anything that I didn’t believe in because honestly I would just assume to sell you our management services, but I know that in a lot of cases clients don’t have the budget to do PPC and to pay a company like ours to manage it for them, and I hate to see our neccessary management fees cut into what the client could be investing into PPC buys.  But this program works, I have seen it in action and I can say that ShoeMoney know’s his stuff.  Here are just a few of the features that come along w/ ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools that you should consider:

Generate Ads – Ever wonder if your competitors’ ads are working better than yours? With the PPC Ad Generator, simply input your keyword, display URL and click URL. Click the Generate Ads button and receive sample ad copy for that keyword. This ad copy comes directly from actual competing ads currently displayed on major search engines. Select the ads you like and save them for your future campaigns.

Manage Ads – Increase your efficiency by managing all of your PPC ads from one location. Use the PPC Ad Manager to create, edit and delete your saved ad copy. You can then export your ads to Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.

Manage Keywords – Easily manage all of your keywords from one place! After using the ShoeMoney Keyword Generator, Grabber and Suggestion tools, use the PPC Keyword Manager to create, edit and delete your saved keyword lists.

Generate Keywords – Are you looking for great keyword ideas? Type a niche keyword into the Keyword Generator and create a list of possible PPC keywords. Once you’ve edited your keyword list, you can simply save it to your ShoeMoney Tools account.

Get Your Competitors Keywords – What if you could get your competitors’ keywords? Now, you can! Other people have tried to imitate this tool, but none with our accuracy. Use the Keyword Grabber to reveal all of the keywords being bid on for a particular domain.

Get Keyword Suggestions – You can get quality keyword suggestions from various search engines. But where else can you get keyword suggestions from multiple search engines all in one place? With the Keyword Suggestions tool, simply enter a base keyword and the tool will expand upon the keyword using five different databases including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ask and Cuil.

Build PPC Campaigns Instantly – Maximize your efficiency with the Instant PPC Campaign tool. After you have generated quality keyword and ad lists in your ShoeMoney Tools account, choose the lists you would like to use, name your campaign and determine your maximum cost per click (CPC). Ad files for your Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising accounts are then instantly generated! Start earning more PPC cash now.

Build Local PPC Campaigns – Pay per click marketing on the local level is like shooting fish in a barrel! When people search locally, they typically use the keyword mixed with a zip code, city, state, or a combination. Input your keyword, zip code, and the radius you would like to target. With the Local Keyword tool, you can then develop a solid, local keyword list targeted towards specific geographic areas – perfect for local PPC marketing!

Find Local Keyword Competitors – Often times when people search for local businesses and services, they do so by searching for specific brands, stores, companies or professionals. By using ShoeMoney Tools’ Local Brand tool, you can find the names of local competitors to add to your PPC keyword list. When you’re done editing your list, simply save it to your ShoeMoney account.

Build Google AdWords Campaigns – Maximize your PPC profitability in four simple steps! With the Google AdWords Campaign Builder tool, you can instantly build a PPC campaign that gives you great, competitive results. First, select your campaign name and bidding options. Next, choose your keywords and keyword mixing options. Third, determine your display and click-through URLS. Finally, input your ad copy and click the Build PPC Campaigns button. Upload your campaign directly to your Google AdWords account and within minutes, you can start generating cash!

 

ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools

Filed Under: Monetization, Search Engines Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Tools for Managing SEO…

June 1, 2009 By 1 Comment

One of the popular services we offer our clients at Pleth is SEO, or search engine optimization.  I know that lately I have made profound statements saying things like SEO has taken a backseat to social saturation, etc., but honestly SEO is still something that your company should take a look at and track pretty closely.  One of the worst things that can happen for your online presence is for your search engine rankings to deteriorate, especially after all of the time and effort you have put into your rankings.

As I mentioned earlier, my partners and I manage SEO for our clients, and it’s something that keeps evolving over time.  For example, things that we used to do a year or two ago to help our clients outrank their competition have changed dramatically in only a short period of time.  But, for the most part there are things that remain constant also, these elements are somewhat easy to track.  If you are a do it yourself SEO person, I have one set of tools that I recommend, and that’s it.  These tools are provided by ShoeMoney.  Here are a few of the high points included with the tools if you are interested:

Analyze Your Backlinks – More links equal higher search engine rankings! It’s that simple. The Backlink Analyzer tool allows you to see first-hand where your competitors are gaining links from and the exact anchor text being used in the links. Now you can use their same tactics! With this tool, you can also find out how people are linking to you and increase your rankings by contacting those sites that have misspelled your link.

Buy Valuable Backlinked Domains – Want to give your domain a boost in the search engine rankings? At the ShoeMoney Tools Domain Marketplace, you can find thousands of currently unregistered sites – each one with a valuable amount of powerful links pointing to them (including .edu, .gov., .mil, and .org). Purchase and redirect 5 to 6 of these domains to a site you already have in a particular niche for a ranking boost.

Find Backlinks – Want to see if a site is worth pursuing? Want to find some quality places to purchase links? Want to view your competitor’s backlinks? With the Backlinks Finder tool, simply type in a keyword for any niche. You will then be able to view the top 10 Google results for that keyword as well as each site’s backlinks along with corresponding PR and Alexa data.

Find Out Your Keyword Density – See how your competitors are using keywords and compare it to your current strategy. The Keyword Density tool allows you to compare one keyword and one domain against the top 10 Google competitors. The tool analyzes the keyword density of on-page text and also whether or not the keyword is in the title tag, meta tags and even heading tags. Improve your keyword strategy today.

Find Most Linked to Pages – Analyze any domain to see which pages are the strongest, or the ones with the most "link juice" from incoming links. With this tool, you can view the top 10 most linked to pages for a specified domain. Now you can see what sort of content is working for your site and others when it comes to gaining links.

Optimize Your Text – Ever wondered if your website copy was keyword rich? Most well ranking pages have at least 11 to 20 repetitions of a keyword. With the Text Optimizer tool, simply paste copy into the text box. Then input the keyword for which you would like to optimize the text. Within seconds, the tool analyzes any page or article text for that particular keyword’s density. Optimize your text today!

Find Your Outgoing Links – Before approaching a website about a potential link exchange or purchasing a link on the site, it’s good to see what other sites they have already linked to. With the Outgoing Links tool, enter a specific domain and you will instantly see all the websites this domain is linking to.

Track Your Keywords – Enter the domain that you would like to track keyword rankings for. After you have entered the domain you would like to track, enter the keywords you would like to track for that domain. The system will then determine what URLs rank for those keywords.

 

ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Set To Change Algorithm

April 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

google-logo1 It looks like blackhat seo spammers have finally forced Google’s hand and they are in the process now of making adjustments to their ranking algorithms to counteract the manipulations.

For the record, few people outside of Google, if any, are going to really know right off the bat how this algorithm change is going to affect Google’s overall search product until the changes actually go into affect.

My advice, just keep writing good content and do what is recommended by Google and the other Search Engines for getting good search engine positions and don’t try to fool or break the system, it just doesn’t pay off in the end.  Be patient…

Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.

Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”

A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.

Google’s response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.

The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimization experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.

Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.

Google Set To Change Ranking Algorithm | WebProNews

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: ,

Stephan Spencer on SEO

January 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

I just watched a great interview with Stephan Spencer from this years Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago on the webpronews video blog. 

Stephan is pretty high on WordPress as a CMS, most of the speakers that I have seen from this years conference were, which was good to hear. He also recommends a few other platforms that he likes for SEO.  Here is a link to his interview…

We’ve talked many times about the advantages of blogging. One area that we haven’t touched on a lot however is the SEO benefits of blogging. In this video, Stephan Spencer discusses the SEO friendly blogging platforms and the non-SEO friendly blogging platforms.

First of all, Stephan debunks the theory that simply having a blog makes it search engine friendly. While there is a bit of truth to the theory, there are many other benefits that people are missing. For instance, PageRank isn’t always accurate and tag pages and tag clouds aren’t used to their full potential.

Stephan highly recommends WordPress as a blogging platform. The great thing about many of these blogging platforms including WordPress, is that a blog doesn’t have to look like a typical blog. WordPress can be used as a content management system (CMS) and is very search friendly. Stephan’s company site, Netconcepts.com, is a perfect example of this. If he hadn’t told us, no would ever know that the site was running as a WordPress blog.

Another blogging platform Stephan recommends is b2evolution. It brings SEO improvements that aren’t available in other blogging platforms. This platform is also free and runs on your own domain or website.

Lastly, Stephan does not recommend Blogger. His main arguments against it are its limitations. According to Stephan, Blogger users cannot set up 301 redirects and cannot incorporate tag clouds.

Now that you have a couple of recommendations to work with, go out there and utilize these blogging platforms!

Video: Stephan Spencer on SEO Perks in Blogging

Filed Under: Search Engines, Wordpress™ Tagged With: ,

Top 15 Stories of 2008

January 6, 2009 By 3 Comments

I am a big fan of SitePoint, they not only put out some great resource books for web developers and hosting companies, but they also have a great list of contributors that post some great content. 

I was reading their newsletter today and found the Top 15 Web Tech Stories posted by Josh Catone and thought that it was worthy of reposting. This is definitely a comprehensive look back at the year 2008 and all that we saw happen within our industry and kudos to Josh for putting together a great piece.

2008 was an eventful year on the web. From Yahoo! spurning Microsoft to Google launching both a browser and a cell phone (sort of), there was a lot to write about this year. Even though I only started writing about web technology news for SitePoint starting in July, I’ve actually been writing about this stuff all year. So it was fun and interesting to take a look back at everything that’s happened this year on the web, and try to pick out the top 15 stories. Below are my selections, along with plenty of links to further reading material to keep you busy. It’s a lengthy post, but it was a long and action packed year.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading this year-end recap as much as I did creating it. Let us know if any big stories were left off the list that you think should have been included by leaving a note in the comments at the end of this post. These are presented in no particular order (but numbered for readability).

1. The US Presidential Campaign

The Internet played a huge role in the presidential election in the United States in 2008. No only did more people than ever turn to the web for election information, the Internet also allowed candidates to raise incredible amounts of money from small donors and build powerful grassroots networks that were never before possible. US President-Elect Barack Obama in particular was able to build a campaign on the back of this emerging political long tail and energize people who were not easily reachable using previous methods of organizing and fundraising.

The second episode of the new SitePoint Podcast was dedicated to the effect of the Internet on electoral politics.

2. Yahoo! Turns Down Microsoft

On February 1, 2008 Microsoft made a $44.6 billion takeover offer of Yahoo!. A couple of week’s later Yahoo! would reject that offer — a move that might go down in the annals of company history as their second worst decision (the first being not buying Google in 2002 for $5 billion) and ultimately led to CEO Jerry Yang stepping down in November. Yahoo! tried to sign an advertising deal with Google a few months later that would have outsourced their search ad sales to the more popular search engine, but that went south when the US Department of Justice got interested in the potential antitrust implications.

Rumors still run rampant about Microsoft potentially coming to the table again, purchasing just a piece of Yahoo!, or offering their own search advertising deal, but one thing is for sure: Yahoo!’s market cap is now less than half of what Microsoft offered to spend to acquire the company.

3. Apple’s iPhone App Store is a Huge Success

iPhone debuted the App Store for their iPhone device in July of 2008 and it has been an undeniable success. Analysts predict that next year the App Store will be a $1.2 billion business for Apple, and we reported in August that many developers are doing quite well writing software for the phone platform full-time.

The iPhone platform now has over 10,000 applications, but we’ve wondered how many of them are worth your time and money. More importantly, we’ve wondered if the Apple model for the App Store is really good for consumers. Closed platforms like Apple’s, in which one company is the ultimate gatekeeper, are ultimately a bad thing for the web.

Regardless, iPhone users should not miss our list of 5 awesome iPhone productivity apps.

4. Google Delivers Android

Not content to let Apple have all the mobile fun, at end of last year Google launched Android, their open source mobile phone operating system. In September of this year, the first Android phone arrived, in the form of the T-Mobile G1, manufactured by HTC.

The phone hasn’t been quite the iPhone killer that pundits hoped for, but it is certainly one of the most compelling phones on the market, and because Android is open source, more “Google phones” from other handset manufacturers are sure to follow.

5. Google Releases Chrome Web Browser

The mobile web isn’t the only place Google was getting “Googley” this year. The Mountain View, California-based search giant surprised everyone in September by releasing their own web browser. Called Chrome, the open source web browser is based on the WebKit rendering engine and left beta earlier this month. Though still very rough around the edges, Chrome has already garnered as much as 1% of the browser market worldwide in just 3 months, a number that we expect to rise as important planned features — such as extensions — are added.

Chrome is specifically designed with web applications in mind, and as we’ve discussed, it is an important part of Google’s 3-pronged Web OS strategy. Along with Gears (offline data store) and Native Client (local CPU resources for web apps), Chrome gives Google a compelling platform for the delivery of web applications.

However, Chrome might be coming at the expense of Firefox, which Google has long supported. At the very least, the release of Chrome has complicated Google’s formerly warm relationship with Mozilla.

6. Microsoft Plans to Bring Office Online — Finally

Starting sometime in 2009, Microsoft will finally begin to offer a web-based version of Office. That’s a huge departure from their previous attitude toward web applications, and a somewhat surprising development considering what a cash cow the Office line of products has been for Microsoft. It is, however, in line with the new future that Microsoft has been talking up in which both the client and the cloud play complimentary roles.

“I contend it makes no sense to try to push [lots of data and processing] up the wire [to the cloud, just] so that it can come back and talk to you,” Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie told Technology Review in September. “And so, ultimately, that leads us back to what I call this composite platform, where you’ve got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.”

In Microsoft’s vision of the future of software, web services and web-based applications rely on local client software to get more intensive processes done. That’s a future that isn’t all that different from the one that Adobe is also working toward.

7. Economic Recession

In December, the United States’ National Bureau of Economic Research officially admitted that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The effects of that recession have been felt worldwide, including in the tech industry where over 110,000 jobs have been lost since October.

That’s some depressing stuff, and it’s putting a damper on my holiday spirit, so we’ll not spend much time on it. But if you were one of the unfortunate people who lost their job or have found yourself a few clients short as a result of the economic crisis, be sure to check out our 10 essential tips for landing your next job, as well as our list of 20 places to find your next web dev job. Also don’t miss our 12 killer ways to make extra income on the web.

We definitely wish you luck in finding a new job in 2009!

8. OpenID Gains Traction — Sort Of; So Does Facebook Connect

OpenID won some huge partners over the past year. Most impressively, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are all now OpenID providers. Unfortunately, that’s as far as their integration of the single sign-on standard has gone — none of them have taken the plunge to become relying parties. Further, they have each implemented OpenID in their own way creating a single sign-on war (they each want to be the de facto identity provider for the web), that is ultimately bad for consumers in our opinion.

Perhaps worse news for OpenID: according to Yahoo! research most people still have no idea what it is. And, Facebook might just eat OpenID’s lunch.

Facebook Connect, which was announced in July, is a single sign-on solution that on some level competes with OpenID. What gives is an advantage is that Facebook Connect comes with your social graph data.

“Because Facebook Connect is not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users (according to Facebook), this program will crush competing registration systems,” wrote CNET’s Rafe Needleman about Facebook’s system. “Sites will adopt Facebook Connect for two reasons. First, their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID log-ins and don’t even know it. And second, because it’s not just a registration system, it’s that marketing channel. Self-interest (on the part of site owners) wins over philosophy. Facebook gets that. That’s why it wins.”

9. The Price of Music is Now … Free?

Radiohead’s name-your-own price release of their album In Rainbows last fall set the stage for the price of music to start a decent toward zero in 2009. The success of Radiohead’s gimmick encouraged other bands to follow suit. REM streamed their new album for free on iLike, and Pennywise put their album on MySpace, as did Oasis.

But the most famous free release from 2008 was from Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor — who had previously experimented with alternative album release schemes with Saul Williams, a slam poet whose album he produced — put out not one, but two new albums for free on the web.

By selling value-adds, such as signed copies and deluxe DVD editions of the albums, Reznor was able to still make a considerable amount of money by self-publishing his music online and giving it away for free. Likely, he also garnered some new fans to support NIN’s 2008 tour due to the all the attention and awareness that the word “free” commands. Though Reznor had a lot of help from major labels in building his group of core fans, his success at giving away a free album was on some level a confirmation of Kevin Kelly’s theory of “true fans,” which states that artists can make a living from a small group of die-hard fans.

10. Professional Video Content Fights Back

According to comScore, Hulu — a joint venture between Fox and NBC that offers professionally created content — cracked the list of the top 10 video sites on the web in July in the tenth spot at 88 million views. A few months later in October? Hulu is now sixth and streaming 235 million videos in the US each month.

Think that worries Google? You betcha. YouTube is still way out in front, dominating the online video market with almost 40% of all video views at over 5.3 billion, but the average length of the videos that users are watching is up from 2.7 minutes per video in July to 3 minutes in October. The likely reason: Hulu.

Clearly, people are responding to professionally created content. People are becoming so used to getting their TV content on demand, via web sites like Hulu and DVRs, that we think on demand will be television’s future. Not wanting to be left behind as long-form, professional content shifts to a web distribution model, YouTube began supporting full-length video content in October.

Remember, YouTube initially rose to its dominant position on the back of professional content (like viral Saturday Night Live clips such as “D*ck in a Box”) that were uploaded to the site. Everything old is new again.

11. Firefox Hits 20% Market Share

In June, the popular Firefox web browser released its third version with the goal of setting a world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period. They definitely met that goal with a super impressive 8 million downloads over the first day of release.

More impressively, though, Firefox hit 20% browser market share for the first time over a couple of weeks in October, and has since stayed there. Unfortunately, once extensions arrive for Google’s Chrome, Firefox might start to see those numbers slip. And their relationship with Google is already starting to turn, as we noted earlier in this round up.

12. DRM Almost Dies … Almost

DRM is still here, but it’s a lot closer to dead at the end of 2008 than it was at the end of the 2007. In January, the final hold out among the major labels from Amazon’s DRM-free music store, Sony-BMG, gave in and decided to start selling music on the service without the burden of DRM. That said, Apple’s iTunes, which controls about 70% of the digital music market, still only has DRM-free tracks from one major label (EMI).

That’s less encouraging, since it has now been more than a year and a half since Steve Jobs wrote in a treatise on digital rights management: “If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.”

However, Apple is apparently in talks with the other three major labels about offering DRM-free tracks via iTunes. Those talks may or may not come to anything, but clearly, the labels are open to selling DRM-free music, since they all now do it via companies like Amazon, MySpace, and Napster. What remains to be seen is what the labels want more: the ability to frustrate Apple (whom they don’t want controlling their digital sales channel) or pleasing their customers.

Looked at from that perspective, we’re less confident that DRM will die completely in 2009. Oh, but we’re so close!

13. Reading is Back! We Hope

The stats on reading don’t look good. Our attention spans are rapidly approaching zero, and that’s bad news for books. Or is it? Starting at the end of last year a curious thing happened: eBooks suddenly became cool. The reason? The November 2007 launch of Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader.

Amazon is projected to sell a billion dollars worth of Kindles by 2010. But the real eBook success story of 2008 might be the iPhone. As we reported in October, the iPhone and its cadre of eBook applications, is actually the most popular eBook reader. eBooks are so hot, that even Nintendo wants in on the action, and Sony is planning a huge marketing blitz in airports, train stations, and bookstores in an attempt to capitalize on Kindle shortages.

2008 might be remembered as the year that reading became cool again and books started going digital in earnest.

14. Yahoo! Gets Really Open

When it comes to Yahoo!, 2008 will be remembered in one of two ways: either as the year that the company put the final few nails in its coffin by rejecting Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover offer, or as the year that it began to claw its way back to the top by opening itself up to third-party developers.

First, Yahoo! launched SearchMonkey, a platform that allows developers and site owners to use structured data to enhance search results. Then came the Build Your Own Search Service, which opened up Yahoo!’s search infrastructure and allowed developers to create their own search mashups (including powerful custom site search applications).

Most recently, Yahoo! announced a brand new development platform on top of its super popular email application and MyYahoo! start page. Yahoo! is enacting its extremely ambitious plan to rewire their entire network of sites from the inside out to be more open and provide more hooks for developers. Incidentally, that’s close to what I advised that they should do a year and a half ago.

15. Everyone Has their Heads in the Cloud

The buzzword of 2008 was without a doubt, cloud computing. Early in 2008, the aggregate bandwidth of all companies using Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure services surpassed that of Amazon’s own sites. Amazon is a top 10 property worldwide, which means that a lot of sites are now putting their faith in Amazon’s back end services.

As is the theme of everything else on the web, if you have success, Google will eventually decide that they too want a piece of the action. 2008 saw Google become interested in offering developers cloud-based infrastructure services. In April they launched App Engine, their own cloud-based infrastructure service. According to venture capitalist Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, App Engine is the only true cloud computing platform. For now, App Engine only supports the Python language for development, but Google plans to add support for another runtime in 2009.

Microsoft is also getting in on the cloud computing buzz, preparing a Software as a Service release of Office (as we noted earlier in this round up) and talking up their client + cloud future. However, for all the talk of the cloud, desktop apps will remain important. Why? Because the cloud will go down. That’s why companies like Yahoo!, Adobe, Microsoft, and perhaps even Google think that the future of Rich Internet Applications will very much involve the desktop.

 

SitePoint » The Top 15 Web Tech Stories of 2008

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Hosting, Wireless Tagged With: , , , ,

Add your URL to Google

November 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I had an old friend ask me today how to submit his website to Google, the short answer was to send him a link to: Add your URL to Google, but I went ahead and elaborated as to how I approach Google submissions.  The first thing that I do is to submit an XML sitemap, preferably a dynamic sitemap that changes when new pages or posts are added to your website.  There are several plugins for doing this with some of the cms solutions that are out there, I know of at least two for WordPress.  Once you have your XML sitemap location, usually something like http://website.com/sitemap.xml then you will want to submit it through Google’s Webmaster tools section.

Once I have submitted the website xml sitemap to Google I will also take it a step further and verify the domain on my clients behalf.  This can be handled two ways, one way is via meta tag.  This meta-tag can be generated inside the Google Webmaster Tools panel and is simply added to the head of your pages and then verified inside the Webmaster Tools control panel.  Another method that is sometimes easier unless you are doing a lot of Apache redirection is simply uploading an html file.  The filename for this file is also generated somewhat randomly inside the Google Webmaster Tools section.  Once this is uploaded and in place, you simply click to have Google verify that this file is in place and then you are all done.

While this is not all that I do for a client project upon it’s launch, it does cover a lot of the seo for Google that I do directly.  Indirectly I have some other strategies that I do not care to divulge for free! Another recommendation that I have for do it yourself web people is to go ahead and put Google Analytics in place on your website prior to launch.  This usually entails adding a piece of javascript to the footer of your site files that will interact with Google’s Analytical tools.  Hope that you find this helpful.  (…And Marvin, if we can help you guys out with your project just let us know! :-) )

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: ,

Yahoo CEO to Resign

November 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I have to admit that I wasn’t too surprised when I learned yesterday that Yahoo Founder and CEO Jerry Yang was going to be stepping down as the CEO of Yahoo. 

This comes on the heels of a wicked 12 months for Yahoo where they have seen their market share decrease sharply as well as a potential Microsoft merger fall through the cracks.  All along I have felt that Yang was the sole reason that the Yahoo / Microsoft thing never happened and that’s an opinion I think I share w/ a lot of other Yahoo shareholders and employees.  Employees make up a large part of Yahoo’s shareholders too so I bet that company morale this morning is at a 12 month high!  This morning at the open, Yahoo shares were up!  Someone tell Mark Cuban, he loves to bank on these search engines! (sorry couldn’t resist)

November 18, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) co-Founder Jerry Yang has stepped down as the company’s chief executive officer, ending a tumultuous almost year-and-a-half long post as the head of the second-largest US Internet-search engine company.

After being named CEO in June 2007, the Yahoo board of directors announced Monday that 40-year-old Yang will be replaced and will continue his former role of “Chief Yahoo!” and continue to serve on the board once his successor is found.

Yang has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform, marred by failed mergers and partnerships, and dropping stock prices.

Six months ago, Yahoo failed to negotiate a Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) merger, causing Yahoo’s market value to fall by more than $20 billion. Added to the company’s troubles has been its failed partnership with AOL (www.aol.com) and only two weeks ago, Google (www.google.com) walked away from an advertising revenue-sharing deal.

However, its value rose as much as 13 percent in Nasdaq trading following Yang’s resignation. Just half-an-hour after markets opened, Yahoo’s stock climbed $1.38 to $12.01, the largest gain in a month. Bloomberg reports that Goldman Sachs Group suspects Yang’s resignation may renew talks with Microsoft and other suitors.

“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement. “Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”

Yang said that he also felt it was time for the company to transition to a new leader.

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang said in a statement. “When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. ”

The CEO position could possibly be handed to current Yahoo president Sue Decker, however, Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay told Market Watch that former Time Warner executive Jon Miller will be a more likely choice.

Web Host Industry News | Yahoo CEO to Resign

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With:

Explaining Google (PR) PageRank

September 10, 2008 By 3 Comments

At Pleth we tend to keep a close eye on our clients search engine rankings, I personally devote about an hour each day to just Google Hacking to see where we stand on things. This week, I have had 2 separate unrelated clients ask me about Google PR, or PageRank so I am going to attempt to explain it here as best as I possibly can without getting too technical. 

Google explains PR as the following:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.

What this means is that a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale. The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and spamdexing, Google provides no specific details about how other factors influence PageRank. This information exists inside of Google’s “top secret algorithm”, and that is something that I will not try to go into on this blog post, those of you who have taken advanced mathematic courses will understand why, ha.

Hopefully this helps to explain PageRank. Here’s something interesting that I did not know until the other day, PageRank is a licensed and trademarked term but not by Google, it’s actually trademarked to Stanford University.  I thought that this was interesting because it was actually Google who brought this terminology to the forefront of our industry.

To answer the ever so popular question, “Why did my website lose Google PR?”, here are a few possibilities:

  • There are fewer websites (of value) linking to you.
  • Websites that are linking to you have been devalued.
  • Google’s PR Algorithm (top secret) may have been tweaked.
  • Websites that are linking to you aren’t crawled by Google’s Bots.

Hopefully this helps…

Filed Under: Search Engines Tagged With: ,

Good Info on PPC Campaigns

May 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday my business partners and I met with one of our Real Estate clients about PPC Campaigns.  It’s coming up on his busy season and he is considering a PPC campaign this year to increase his website’s visibility in the search engines for a couple of key terms.  We first looked at his natural or organic search position and got a good idea of where he is at now with his website and focused on some keywords that he’s not pulling up as well as he would like.  We helped him to identify some good keywords for PPC and gave him a brief overview of our PPC management services.  While we offer our clients total PPC Management for a small monthly fee we have some that prefer to manage it themselves. 

While discussing PPC Campaigns I was looking around the web for some good information for him to look at on the topic and ran across a couple of good posts on my good friend Mike Muise’s Blog that I forwarded to him to take a look at. I admittedly haven’t spent a lot of time as of late researching PPC campaigns on my own since my business partner Stephen usually manages this side of our business.

In one of his posts, Basics of a PPC Campaign, Mike has posted some good information:

For some the thought of spending a little money to get quality, targeted traffic is a scary proposition. For many Pay-Per-Click is still something of an unknown. How do I get started, how much do I have to spend, can I manage it myself, what if I can’t do it, and on and on.

The truth of the matter is you can get started without breaking the bank. Even if you are an everyday individual without a huge budget. In a previous post I shared a promotion Yahoo! is running where you can setup a new account with them, deposit only $30 and they will add another $100. So right off, you have $130 to play with.

Obviously your first step is setting up an account with them. So what else should you know about using Yahoo! PPC?

1. You will be bidding on keywords that people search for on Yahoo!. Obviously you want to choose keywords that are both relevant to your site and that people actually search. To choose your keywords, try using a tool like the free keyword tracker. The popularity of a keyword will determine the amount you are likely to spend per click if you choose to bid on it. So I recommend you avoid the really generic, one word keywords.

2. The keywords you choose are not set in stone for any length of time, you can change them at anytime. If your site content changes focus, or if keywords just aren’t bringing you results, swap them for new ones.

3. You won’t spend more than you want to. You can set your max daily budgets, you can set an end date to your campaign. This allows you to make sure you don’t spend outside of your means. I am currently running a campaign using the $130 promo with a daily spend limit of $4. My estimated costs for the month will be right around $130.

4. Within your control panel you will have access to a number of reports that are easy to read and understand. The key things you may want to look at are the stats for your keywords. You can choose to display what your keywords currently are, your average positioning within the ad space, how many impressions your ad has received for each one (how many times your ad was displayed to a user), and how many clicks you had for each keyword. Using this information you can determine what keywords can and should be removed and replaced and you can determine if maybe your ad needs to be made more attractive. You may find that you are getting lots of impressions, but no clicks.

5. In building your ad you should look to make you ad short but to the point. It is also recommended that both the title and the description contain all or a portion of your core keyword. My website which is found at both Dropthemike.com and Helpwithtraffic.com is bidding on numerous “traffic” related keywords and my ad looks like this:

Also, in his blog Mike posted an entry titled Online Marketing Budgeting – What Next? and he takes a look at how to decide how much money to devote to online marketing, it’s a great post, here’s an excerpt:

Previously I wrote that as a guide you should look to re-allocate at least 20-25% of your existing marketing budget towards online marketing. Specifically I mention PPC advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing. It is a good first step. But there are more options for you that you can spend your marketing dollars on as well and see a measurable return.

The 3 main components of a good online campaign (all compliment each other) are:

1. Search (paid listings, organic listings)

2. Email (mailing lists, newsletters, etc.)

3. Social (blogs, forums, community driven sites)

With search, you want to make sure to invest money, time, and resources into making sure your organic search ranking is high. This means that for the keywords that apply to your site, when a user searches for them on say Google or Yahoo that you are within the first few results returned (preferably the first 3 results). In addition you want to be bidding on those same keywords via PPC advertising through both Yahoo and Google. Users are more likely to click on either your organic search result or your paid search result if they have seen your brand/listing/url more than once. Hitting them twice on a single page dramatically increases your chances of attracting the customer to your site. Of your online marketing budget I would look to allocate as much as 60% of your budget towards search strategies.

With email you want to start devising a plan for acquiring and building a list of your clients/site visitors in which they have opted in to being contacted by you. Ideas for building a list include starting a newsletter, providing items for download such as a whitepaper or ebook, or even providing discount or coupon notifications. And there are likely many other ways of doing it depending on your industry. Once you have a list, keep it up to date and make sure to keep it clean. This is an invaluable sales tool for you to promote your services and to talk to your customers. On email, I would allocate no less than 25% of your budget. Again this is you communicating directly with the clients who endorse you and want to hear from you!

The last piece of your strategy is Social marketing. The internet world has gone “social” crazy. We have Facebook, My Space, YouTube, just to name a few of the big social site names. You can choose to advertise with such services. For instance using Facebook’s newly launched targeted ad service which works much like Google Adwords or Yahoo SEM. But that is not the most important piece of investing in the Social arena. Instead you want to be a part of it. Create a blog for instance. Or add a user review section to your ecommerce site where users can review products. Create and participate in forums based on your service. DO whatever it takes to further open up the lines of communications with your users. That is what the Social Scene is all about. User interaction. I would look to allocate 15% of your budget here now, but expect this to grow over time. The reason I would only invest 15% now is that, while booming, the social scene is still developing. Once the dust settles a little more and knowing where exactly to focus the majority of your funds becomes clearer and more defined, then you can look to increase the budget.

Filed Under: E-Commerce, Search Engines Tagged With:

Facebook Business Pages

May 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This weekend I was looking around on Facebook and discovered something kind of cool, they now have the option for businesses to add a profile page to their social network.  Now, keep in mind that this is by no means a “website”, it’s simply a “profile page” that sits on Facebook’s social network.  With these profiles a business can build a fan base, post forum or bulletin topics, and list their contact information.  With Facebook it’s always real clean and basic, and I think I like this idea.  It didn’t take me long to realize why Facebook had added this feature, when I was inside setting up Pleth networks business page I noticed a link that would allow me to purchase advertising within the Facebook Social Network.  It was a very specific advertising impression engine also, it gave you the option to target age groups, geographics, etc.

I was having a Starbucks last week with Joseph Rodgers of Mass Enthusiasm in Little Rock and we were discussing Social Networking and he informed me that 40% of web users today land in one of the social networks every time they get online.  This is a pretty impressive statistic considering that the other 60% probably are at work and have some kind of blocks in place on their internal networks that prevent them form visiting these social networks.  If this trend holds out, I predict that Facebook Advertising will be just as effective, if not more, than Google or Yahoo’s PPC programs.  This is all starting to make sense to me now, no wonder Google has been playing around with the idea of purchasing Facebook.

Oh, by the way, if you are a member on Facebook, please be sure to visit our Pleth Corporate Profile page there, click here.  Be sure to add yourself as a fan as well and once we have a significant fan base we may start doing some direct communications through our profile.

Filed Under: Search Engines, Social Media / Web 2.0 Tagged With:
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