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Keep The Marketing and IT Teams Apprised
For those who have been following this blog since its inaugural month, you may remember a post entitled “Incorporating SEO in Website Creation” in November. It reiterates the novelty of search engine optimization and highlights the benefits in considering SEO factors early on in any website design project.
However, the marketing and IT departments need to continue their joint sessions and have meetings from time to time, since ranking highly is only part of the equation. The next step is to convince searchers to click on your particular organic listing and draw them to your pages.
Tags: SEM, SEO, web developmentFlickr Begins To Nofollow Outgoing Links
After a nice little run by black-hat and grey-hat SEOs, Yahoo’s free photo hosting website Flickr has begun to take a stand. In the past week, Flickr has started to apply the nofollow attribute to comments on photos and even to links from photo descriptions.
Prior to this change, blackhats and greyhats had two main ways to steal link juice from Flickr: photo captions and; comments. The former wasn’t too big of a problem, but the latter was prone to abuse because it was so easy. Flickr users would often neglect to moderate comments on their pictures or even be aware that a comment was posted to something they uploaded.
Tags: PageRank, SEO, YahooLong Tail Searches Are On The Rise
An introductory post was made here on SEP last November about capturing long tail search traffic, and this subject is getting more attention as of late. An exclusive meeting was held earlier this month, where Google’s Analytics expert Avinash Kaushik disclosed an interesting trend.
In Q4 of 2007, the average query on Google reached four words for the first time ever. All previous averages were limited to three words or less, and the three-word average was unwavering for quite a while. In light of discovering this trend, I thought it was time that we revisit the topic of long tail searches and how to optimize for them.
Tags: Google, keyword research, long tail, search traffic, SEO, toolsVideo Ads Tested in Google Search Results
With last year’s introduction of universal (blended) search results followed by the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, we knew that video ads were next to appear on Google search result pages. Google has begun testing last Thursday according to a NYT article.
It looks as though these ads will operate on a cost-per-click basis and be directly integrated to the current AdWords network. That is, the ads themselves are not videos like a T.V. commercial, but are text advertisements. It’s also not that big of a surprise that advertisers are not being charged extra to advertise on a video. In fact, we’re unsure whether advertisers will even be aware that a visitor came from a video ad.
Tags: AdWords, Google, pay-per-click, SEM, universal searchEffectively Using Pay Per Click & Banner Adverts
Pay per click advertising has become a staple in most online advertising strategies over the past few years, with the growing use of search engines for looking up just about anything. All the while, banner advertising has been cast aside and deemed ineffective simply because no one clicks on them anymore. Unfortunately, the purpose of display advertising is misunderstood and its effectiveness undermined.
The fact is that banners can serve well in pushing a brand, product and service into a customer’s subconscious. Search marketers also seem to forget that display advertising existed long before the Internet was born, and the terms CPM, “above the fold”, etc all originate from the offline print world.
So let’s see how we can effectively integrate banner advertising with our beloved metric-centric (it rhymes!) pay per click campaigns.
Tags: display advertising, pay-per-click, reputation management, SEM, SEP