ArticleSnatch Blog

You are browsing the search results.

Deafness Posted By : rosy123: A hearing impairment or hearing loss is a full or partial decrease in.. http://tinyurl.com/62anmu #
Anthrax infection Posted By : rosy123: Anthrax infection can occur in three forms: cutaneous (skin).. http://tinyurl.com/55yc24 #
New Article - Top 10 Keyword Practices To Kill Your Business Posted By : Liza Martinez.. http://tinyurl.com/5tqqof #
New Article - [...]

Canadian Business Magazine has an excellent Q&A with Google’s Tim Armstrong. Here are some choice excerpts that show where Google’s headed and why.

Canadian Business: What are some other emerging trends you’re seeing in Internet advertising?

Tim Armstrong: Social networking will be a big part of online advertising in the future. There’s also going to be a lot more analytics beneath Internet advertising. It’s still hard to measure how different types of online ads and targeting techniques affect a consumer’s perception of a brand. We’re also excited about mobile opportunities.

CB: How big could mobile advertising become for Google?

TA: It will vary depending on the country. For example, in some developing countries, the infrastructure is being built more for cellphone access than stationary computer connections, and some people are skipping the computer generation altogether. We’ve done a lot of mobile testing in Japan, which has done a nice job of building high bandwidth access for cellphone users. I don’t think one mobile search will eliminate one computer search or interaction on the web. Consumers have different needs when they’re using those devices.

CB: How will the advertising industry change in the future?

TA: Advertising over the last 50 years has been about coming up with a big idea, planning around it for a year, then launching a six-month or year-long campaign for a product or service. In the future, advertisers will come up with 10, 100 or 1,000 creative messages for their products and services, then run, test and optimize them in real time. Campaigns won’t be based on a time schedule, but on consumer behavior patterns.

As many of your know I am a big fan of both Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. But these excellent tools, along with Google Webmaster Tools are treated by most people as individual single-purpose applications.

There are tremendous synergies possible when you combine them in innovative ways. For the first time, the product teams for each one are stepping out of their respective silos and putting on a joint webinar about how to get the most out of combining them.

More info on the The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer webinar (July 8th, 9-10am PDT)

I strongly urge everyone to listen in…

New Article - The Beautiful Town of Lake Cowichan, British Columbia Posted By : tcn: O.. http://tinyurl.com/624679 #
New Article - The Power of Duplication And The Google Adsense! Posted By : $Mandeep Sa.. http://tinyurl.com/66rr6q #
New Article - The Google Adsense Monetizing Your Website With Adsense Is Profitable! P.. http://tinyurl.com/5pmw4a #
The Beautiful Town of Lake Cowichan, [...]

Writing college term papers are a very common requirement when you reach the upper-division courses. You will find that it counts as an influential part of your final grade. Remember that you are no l…
More: continued here
how to write an excellent college term paperRate this: 2.5

WhiteFence.com is the first vertical search engine that enables people to search for the best values in 40 home service categories, including home phone, Internet, TV services and utilities. The target audience is people who are moving but it’s a one-stop shop for anyone searching for the best bargains in communications technologies.

The search engine is built around solving basic problems. For example, users can decide whether they want to:

* lower my bills
* bundle my services
* find a better deal on my services
* shop for service on my new home
* find the best price in my area on residential service
* get reliable service from trusted national companies
* order home essential services today

Search by Category:

Bundle your services and save.

Home Phone
Get local phone and long distance.

High-Speed Internet
Find fast Internet service.

Television Service
Compare satellite and cable TV.

Electricity Service
Find your local electricity provider.

Natural Gas
Warm up with your local natural gas company.

Change of Address
Let everyone know you’re moving.

Green Energy Offset
Buy RECs to offset your energy usage.

Moving Services
Mover quotes, tips, checklists & more!

Financial Services

If you’re not moving, it’s still an excellent search engine to compare your current deals with what’s available. For home energy conservation tips, check out the WhiteFence blog.

When concerns over data collection and behavioral advertising arise, it seems that the glass half empty people are the loudest. But in a recent response to the FTC’s Self-Regulatory Principles, Google has pointed out the impact that online advertising has had on the economy.

Google highlighted that in 2007, they paid out $4.5 billion to publishers utilizing the Adsense network. These monies either supplements or provides full-time income to many site owners including bloggers. They pointed out that many people have opportunities that just weren’t available 10 years ago.

Additionally, the revenue that Google generates enables them to provide services for free to the general public.

Google wrote that these innovations only occur within a self-regulatory framework:

“To be effective and credible, however, self-regulation must have as its foundation agreed-upon fair information practices and must be informed by ongoing dialog with and input from consumer advocates, the Commission, and other stakeholders. The FTC staff’s draft self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising provides an excellent foundation for developing the most effective consumer protection, while maintaining an online environment in which innovation and competition can thrive.”

But Google is careful to distinguish its advertising from being labeled “behavioral advertising.”

“As currently drafted, the proposed principles would apply to contextual advertising, which we define as advertising that is provided in response to the current activities of a user. For example, our AdWords program allows us to provide ads on Google.com in response to search queries entered by our users. In addition, our AdSense product allows us to provide ads to visitors to the web sites of third-party publisher partners based on the content of pages visited. In essence, then, our contextual advertising allows for the delivery of advertisements based on search queries or our analysis of the content of a web page being viewed. We believe that this type of advertising should not be considered behavioral advertising, even if such analysis takes into consideration previous search queries.”

These comments also come in the wake of news from Europe of a policy adopted by the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, which would reduce data collection by search engines to just 6 months. Such a regulation could greatly impact the ability of search engines to provide relevant ads, which could have a ripple effect on the greater revenue streams generated by their ad networks.

Short term financial success in social media can be a multi-layered enigma, ranging somewhere between daunting and infuriating. As the socialized Internet explodes it has become increasingly difficult for companies to ignore the ramifications of not tuning in to deal with SMO vernacular & channels.

We all hear buzz words like "reputation management," "social news," "blogs," and "Wikis" but exactly WHAT the heck does all this mean to a business? How do I convince my boss or client that forays into the social media universe will actually pay cash-money any time soon? How DO we engage visitors? Where’s the revenue?

In Part One we discussed ideas for Facebook social PPC, the PR tactic of pinging sales prospects with outbound links, increasing landing page conversion by mashing in "evidence of human life" and touched on the Tao of one-on-one conversational marketing.

In this installment, we’ll talk about using blog comment threads to create uber-targeted micro-topical email lists, a tactic which can easily result in short term sales and cash. ("Thread" simply means the ongoing exchange of comments in a blog type CMS structure.)

At base, a blog is an open source (free) content management system (CMS) with built in goodies like RSS feeds, automatic content archives, easy WYSIWYG publishing and many other friendly features designed to engage visitors. A staggering percentage of websites incorporate blog-type software for some purpose. What’s important to understand is that blogs are much more than the stereotypical perception thereof.

Everyone knows email marketing works. I’m not talking about the junk-spammy kind, rather nice clean opt-in lists that companies build over time. Responsible and compliant email marketing is a component of many a corporations’ array of marketing tactics and proving ROI is not difficult. Email just works. Benefits include great "open" and conversion rates, customer loyalty, predictable results, low costs and repeat sales.

It’s true that payday loan email blasts are not going to convert at the same level as $1.50 bagged cereal coupons but it’s all good. Email is a timeless and undeniable SEM tactic. That said, building great targeted lists takes time and ingenuity. Conversations that take place using blogging software like WordPress are an excellent source for harvesting incredibly focused segmented lists quickly by inviting user interaction, mining the data, and using the thread’s mini-list to send email blasts now and later.

Blogs and Email: Anatomy of a Comments Thread
When a site visitor comments in a blog, they automatically subscribe by email to the conversation if you’ve set it up properly. Then with each new comment, including yours, every previous visitor magically receives the new comment by email. Think about it. The pot of gold at the end of successfully engaging users in blog-type comments-dialog is the ability to email all of the conversation’s participants simply by commenting yourself. As with all of social media, there is profitable power in marketing to micro-targeted highly specific demographics.

Perhaps you’ll return comments by answering users’ questions, refuting incorrect assertions, clarifying a situation, explaining a product, or just indulging in a little ol’ fashioned meet & greet. Bottom line: get users to converse with each other in a blog and you’ll have the entire group at your fingertips to exploit just by commenting again yourself and pressing submit. Everyone who has participated in the thread to-date gets an email! It’s so easy.

Now that you understand the theory, the obvious question is "how DO we engage users in comments-thread conversations?" The answer is only limited by your team’s creativity. Since every product is different somehow, there is no "one size fits all." However here’s a couple of examples from clients aimClear works with to provide insight into the "market think" required to start conversations like a pro. These are all real examples of opportunity turned into creative comments-thread solutions for engaging users for micro-email list building purposes.

1. Opportunity: Your company publishes service manuals for devices you sell. In the existing website hosts about 4000 daily visitors search for and access .pdf product manuals spread across 57 previous and current products.

   Solution: Install the ability for customers to comment or ask specific questions in a publicly posted thread prominently featured just to the left (and outlined in red) of the .pdf download. New visitors see prior questions and have the ability to directly engage previous commentors.

   Seed the interaction by encouraging visitors to post questions for the product’s design team with a promised response time of 24 hours. Respond by…you guessed it…commenting. Over time hundreds or thousands of users will engage as they likely own or are considering purchasing the device. Just about anyone looking for a product manual has some kind of question they need answers for. NOW you have a very targeted micro-list of those interested in specific devices. The list is worth it’s weight in gold. The next time you announce an add-on, upgrade, or other news about the device, all you have to do is comment. Everyone who has previously participated gets an email until they opt-out of the thread.

2. Opportunity: Say the regional niche’ music production school you market has a staff of experts in their respective fields. Organic traffic brings tons of unique visitors for searches directly related to the academic offerings. The success metric is information-requests from qualified prospective students. The site harvests organic leads each day at a nice conversion rate from which any sale could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Out of the organic visitors who do not convert, over half come back within 90 days. That’s a lot of potential customers just waiting to be engaged. There are millions of dollars on the table.

   Solution: Set a cookie for every organic visitor based on the incoming query and only delete the cookie if they convert. The next time the visitor shows up, read the cookie and direct them to a landing page which has headlines from thread featuring teacher-experts discussing topics specifically related to the user’s original search query. Invite the return visitor to ask a question themselves, in public, and promise a response. You guessed it! Everyone who has previously engaged gets an email with the visitor’s question and your response.

   The next time the college announces a new program, wants to highlight a student’s success, or announces a famous instructor, all you have to do is comment and everyone gets an email. (BTW, this tactic is called SMO post-search retargeting.)

When discussing possible social media plays with bosses and/or clients, the first question is often "how can we make money with this effort." Setting short and mid-term financial goals for social media efforts straight away can help smooth the pitch and bring in much needed cash to justify the investment.

Blog comment threads are a great way to harvest highly targeted micro-email lists which can earn money in a relatively short amount of time. Developing strategy and tactics to exploit the turnkey capabilities of free blogging software is only limited by the creativity of the SEM team. An excellent approach is to analyze site traffic that already exists, engage users, track behavior over time, and continually serve up opportunities to interact until they just can’t resist. Such is the power of social media.

Generally, I like to write about what to do in SEO. Today, I want to write about what not to do.

Lesson #1: Don’t spam people with your SEO services.
Lesson #2: Definitely don’t spam people who write for SEW and have close relations with spam blacklist owners about your SEO services.

This morning I got an email (my tenth) from a company that hadn’t read my rules: National Positions, an “SEO” firm out of California, promising me “five times the RELEVANT traffic at a substantially reduced cost.” The site, which I’ve linked to above using a 302 redirect so as not to give out any of my link juice, said they could place my “website on top of the Natural Listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN” using their “proprietary techniques” and “valuable closely held trade secrets,” without using “link farms or black hat methods.” And they charge “less than half of what other companies charge!” Awesome.

So I checked out their site, and their SEO service includes: Keyword Market Intelligence (umm…keyword research), Meta-Data Optimization (sweet), Title Optimization and a Best Practices Doc. Considering most companies give away most of that info for free, their prices must be excellent. Their “proprietary trade secrets” don’t seem to include, as far as I can tell, any blackhat techniques, so there is no need to worry about National Positions being the next Traffic Power (who cold-called me back in the day), but it’s still a rip-off. They’re charging people who know nothing about search to do nothing about search for them. And they’re advertising through pure spam methods; they contacted me via an email posted on my site that I have never used to sign up for anything.

The email came from npseocompany.org, which I already submitted to URIBL and SURBL, the major spam blacklists. Check your inbox, and report the email if you get it too.

One of the latest emails claimed that “Our services and proven strategies are all ethical.” Perhaps no one bothered to tell them SPAM is unethical—and illegal. I’ve received 10 emails from them so far, without ever opting in. According to the law, any company that “harvest[s] email addresses from Web sites or Web services…for the purpose of sending email,” as National Positions did to me, is liable for a fine up to $11,000. I opted out after the first email I received, and I continue to receive emails from them—some from Gmail accounts! The law gives 10 days to honor an opt-out, and prohibits “another entity send[ing] email on your behalf to that address.” It’s been more than 30 days; that’s another $11,000.

I’m going to do all I can to make sure they get hit with those penalties—and I urge you to help me out if you get spammed too. Look out SEO Spammers—you pissed off the wrong group.

It’s Day 2 at SES New York 2008 and the folks from Pan Communications have found nearly 70 stories that have been written about the Search Engine Strategies conference. If you want a comprehensive list, Matt McGowan, the Global Vice President of Marketing for Incisive Media, will be posting one later this evening on the Search Engine Strategies Blog.

In the meantime, I’ve looked through the news articles and blog posts from Tuesday, March 18, 2008, to try to identify the top ten stories on Day 2 of the event. With five concurrent sessions, no one individual can see everything. So, even those of us who are at SES New York this week are relying on the news and blog coverage (as well as word-of-mouth) to keep up with all the latest developments from the event. (Trade shows and conferences are an off-line form of social media.)

1. Carr: Google Offers ‘Animal Sacrifices’ in Datacenters
Clint Boulton of eWeek’s Google Watch says, “Nicholas Carr discussed the past, present and future of computing during a keynote at the Search Engine Strategies 2008 show in New York this morning.” He adds, “Carr covered so much ground in the 60 minutes, touching on everything from the first water wheel used to generate electricity, to mainframes, to cloud computing and Google’s datacenters and the future of distributed applications and search engines strategies.”

2. Nick Carr Keynote
You can listen to Nick Carr’s opening keynote at SES New York on WebmasterRadio.FM. Nick discusses how computer systems and software algorithms are at the center of business today, and the implications for privacy.

3. Nick Carr at SES NY 2008 on The Big Switch

Anne Kennedy, Managing Partner of Beyond Ink, interviews Nick Carr, the opening keynote speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City and the author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the Word, from Edison to Google. Nick gives a recap on his New York keynote speech about Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo, net neutrality, and the implications on human thinking.

4. YouTube: Damon Wayans Pay-to-Play, Paid Inclusion or Pay-for-Placement?
Kevin Heisler of Search Engine Watch says, “At SES NY, John Battelle outted Damon Wayans, Google and YouTube. Battelle said Wayans spilled the beans on his YouTube deal as a “platinum partner” for WayOutTV.com. Wayans shared he was guaranteed 6 million impressions by YouTube. Those 6 million impressions — guaranteed — sounds very much like the structure of a MySpace-style minimum revenue deal. Plus, Wayans shared his YouTube rev share number. Wow.”

5. hakia licenses OntoSem technology to third parties
Paul Miller of ZDNet’s The Semantic Web says, “New York-based semantic search company hakia will today use the Search Engine Strategies Conference to announce that their Ontological Semantic technology, OntoSem, is available for licensing. Illinois-based RiverGlass, Inc. is the first licensee, and will work to enhance their existing real-time analytics solutions with OntoSem.”

6. SES New York: Converting Visitors into Buyers
Jolina Pettice of the Online Marketing Blog says, The conversions track at SES New York continues to be packed with those wanting to increase the performance of their search marketing campaigns.”

7. The Long Tail Not Always Good, If Quality Score is Your Thing
Andrew Goodman of Traffick says, “I had the pleasure of moderating the panel on Ads in a Quality Score World at SES New York today. Along with two advertiser-side speakers (Joel Lapp and Jon Kelly), Frederick Vallaeys of Google and David Miller of Yahoo weighed in.”

8. Earning Money from Contextual Ads
Tamar Weinberg of Search Engine Roundtable says, “This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying contextual ads offered by major networks. Learn about some programs out there and tips on getting more from the ads you carry.”

9. SES New York: Live Search “Tips And Tricks”
By Doug Caverly of WebProNews says, “Although people sometimes forget this fact, there are search engines outside of Google. At SES New York, two Microsoft managers walked an audience through ways to do well with Live Search.”

10. SES New York Day 2 … Start Your Engines!
Jeff Quipp of the aimClear Blog says, “Day 1 of Search Engine Strategies New York certainly lived up to expectations. The sessions were excellent, the city is spectacular, and I was fortunate enough to meet up with a large number of new and old friends. The day ended for most with a St. Paddy’s day pub crawl, primarily through Irish bars :).” He adds, “Day 2 is shaping up to be equally exciting. I’m personally live blogging some of the Local search sessions, which I’m really looking forward to.”