I have been talking about ethics when it comes to whether a site designer should or shouldn’t put a hyperlink back to their site at the footer of anew sites pages that they have just built. Here is more on the subject from SEO Roundtable
Tag Archives: seo
Driving quality traffic to your website.
So you have built a killer website, it’s optimized and ready to go, but you want to drive traffic to the site, and you don’t want to spend a dime. You have one month to do it. What are going to do? Do You:
a) link bait
b) blog spam
c) forum spam
d) submit to all of the free directories
e) whore out your sites ad space
f) manually try and create backlinks with sites that have cross-promotional relevance with your site
g) create 10 other sites and link them together…
h) something that has not been written here
i) ask for more time
j) ask for money to do some ppc
k) social networks and social bookmarking
The reason I ask, is I am faced with that challenge from time to time, and as much as I wish I could make the process move quicker, unfortunately it does not. So I am always curious as to what other people do. Perhaps a few dimes need to be spent on certain things, if so what would you spend your money on to get the biggest bang of sustained traffic? For more answers to these questions I would check out one of the few Naples, Florida’s SEO companies.
PPC Nosebleed
Ok so here is a quick primer for those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the past ohh…7 years….PPC advertising is when you choose “keywords/phrases,” and then you bid how much you’d like to pay for each click. By paying anywhere from a nickel to a $100 per keyword term, you are essentially reserving ad space on the Search engine page that comes up when someone has typed in that key word. pretty nifty huh?
So when a searcher goes to a search engine and types in one of your keyphrases, your short text ad appears, and if someone click on it your account is then charged. When the click occurs, it takes them to your landing page, peddling your goods and or services. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But thanks to dishonest people, I know, who would have thunk it.. we have something called “click fraud”Click fraud is simply the act of clicking on ads for the direct purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is recognized as the biggest problem today in PPC marketing. According to InformationWeek.com, “60% of people surveyed by the “Search Engine Professional Organization” have stated that fraud is a problem when it comes to PPC advertising”PPC marketing can cost you a lot if you do not administer it right. Bad targeting plus fraud can be a costly problem. The main sources of click fraud are the following four:
1) AdSense
Google Adsense pays website owners to run their Adwords ads and compensates them per click. Google does monitor this and it’s against their terms of service to click on any of the ads on your own site. If they find a publishers doing this, they will lose their accounts, but some may still be clicking under the radar.
2) Competition
Your competitors could be clicking on your ads over a period of several days in order to deplete your ad budget. This way they neutrilize your advertizing campaigns. Don’t think this happens? Think again!
3) Bots
There are those who use automated clicking tools, such as robot programs, to click on PPC listings.
4) Professional Clickers:
In some Asian countries, people are often paid to click on PPC ads for hours. Many don’t know why they do it, and don’t care. The only important issue is that they will be well rewarded for their efforts. If you do a search on any search engine you’ll see plenty of sites offering to hire people for just this purpose. Type in ‘earn rupees clicking ads’ in Google and you get quite a few leads.
Most PPC networks have measures in place to protect you against click fraud. Overture tracks more than 50 data points, including IP addresses, browser info, users’ session info and what they call “pattern recognition.” They have a “proprietary system” in place for detecting fraud and a specialized team that monitors things and works with the advertisers to stop it.
Google offers suggestions to avoid click thru fraud, such as “using negative keywords” to keep your ads from showing up for products and services that are unrelated. They also suggest adding tracking url’s to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google. If you go through your log files, you’ll be able to see your Google traffic at a glance.
If you suspect fraud, Google asks that you contact them right away, because they have a team of researchers that will investigate. They also take action to block future impressions from anyone they identify as committing click fraud. Like Overture, they also have “proprietary technology” that distinguishes between normal clicks and invalid ones. Google never bills you for any “bad clicks” that are caught by their system. But there have also been instances where Google has missed click fraud, so it is imperative that you monitor your PPC campaigns, unless of course you like paying out the wazoo for useless clicks..
All honest website owners need to be alert to any “suspicious activity” by researching their server logs or stats. If you’re experiencing a lot of clicks and no sales you’ll also want to take a closer look. You need to watch for any spikes in traffic, usually on one keyword or phrase and coming from only one PPC source. You need to measure and track all of your PPC accounts closely.
The bottom line is, you need to be very vigilant of your clicks in any ppc campaign. The more competitive, the more you have to watch. It’s the nature of the beast that anything that can be done to make money without having to work is going to attract the leeches. And what attracts leeches? Blood. So don’t get a ppc nosebleed.
Web 2.0, Ajax and SEO…
For those who are unaware of Web 2.0 and what it means, here is a quick loose definition for you. Web 2.0 refers to the advent and rise of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites which aim to make collaborating easier and sharing between users much more inviting. Ok, so now that you have been able to swallow that lets talk about Ajax. AJAX, is a web development technique used, for the sake of this argument, to create interactive web sites. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive, and by doing this it increases the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability. Things that we all want and like out of the websites we visit these days.
Ok so now that you know these 2 tidbits, what you need to know next is that for SEO experts, there are some issues on how to optimize pages that are using AJAX.Websites that use Ajax to load data which should be indexed by search engines must be careful to provide equivalent Sitemaps data at a public, linked URL that the search engine can read. Because search engines do not generally execute the JavaScript code required for Ajax functionality. This problem is not specific to Ajax, as the same issue occurs with sites that provide dynamic data. I’m sure within the next few months that the issues will be ironed out, but in the meantime Naples SEO experts will have to make sure that the sites they are optimizing are compliant with the latest technologies. However it does go without saying that SEO folks better have already built a site map for each and every website that they work on.
SEO: Actual rankings versus expectations
So the client comes in and says,”I need more traffic”. Ok you say, do you want the quick fix or do you want something that will last. In other words, are you willing to do the work that it will take to sustain a site that has traffic day in and day out or do you want to blow it out regardless of the cost? As a business owner, and depending on your product, your site and what you expect it to deliver to the bottom line there is reality and then there is the sweet smell of false traffic so to speak. I’m not saying that the traffic won’t convert to actual sales but when you run out of money acquiring traffic, then what are you going to do? So you’re sitting there saying, I have to or can spend money and I can generate traffic to my website. Absolutely. And you’re not the only one doing it. If you think the Big Players in your business of choice are not doing it, then you better think again. And they can outspend you right into the ground…
Some people think that once you build it and they come, they will keep coming back over and over and over again. That very well might be true if your brand is abercrombie, Gap, or Limited Two. But the online shopper is so fickle and so NET saavy anymore, that you really really have to work hard to keep that buyer coming back.
So having said that, your goal as business owner who has a web site, should be to acquire traffic, keep the traffic, sell to the traffic and keep them coming back. And the only way to really do that is to build your website right the first time. Granted you come back to the site and re-do it. We all do that. Or we tweak a page, upgrade this or maintain that. But I’m talking of SEO 101 where you build the site with the search engine’s in mind from the inside out, so to speak.
Some times we become so enamored of a design, a logo, a bell or a whistle that we forget the effect that the design will have on the design and how the SE’s( search engines) will view it. Make sure that whoever you are dealing with knows what they are doing in regards to a SE friendly design.
So to sum it up, if you think you are ranking well make sure you are looking at an organic or natural listing versus a paid one and understand that the paid listing is good only as long as you can afford to have it in the top 3 of the first page.
I could wax on, but I will save that for another post. The bottom line. Build your website right the first time so that the traffic keeps coming back. Oh and one last thing, make sure you have the right analytics tool to measure your traffic as well. For a company that is doing it right, you might want to check out my new venture, truly one of the few Naples search engine optimization companies
Search engine Algos’ change quicker than a stoplight.
As an SEO/SEM expert like me can attest, one of the first things we do in the morning is to check the natural rankings of all the sites they work on. Why? Because as much as they know what the the “Big Three”( For those uninitiated-Google, Yahoo and MSN) require, want and need for optimal organic rankings, they still are not quite sure where the respective sites that they’re working on, are going to end up ranked each morning.
Part of this can certainly be attributed to each SE marketers’s belief in what they do, is what is needed. But the other part is that because search is so ingrained in what we do and is so profitable to each of the SE’s, they, the SE’s, constantly tweak and adjust and change alltogether their Algo. They then look up out of the huddle to see what the other team is doing. Remember when you were a kid, or maybe you still are, and each team huddled up. Most huddled up, but some of us always looked up to maybe catch a glimpse of what the other team was getting ready to do?
The same thing goes on daily, hourly, weekly, in the SE wars. Why? Because search is so important in our daily lives and is so lucrative. Google is not the behemoth that they are because of all the tools they’ve rolled out over the last 3-4 years. It’s their core business of search. They do it well, they’ve done it best and they are completely branded and part of our culture. few have done it so well.
Think about like this. How many companies have become a verb. I.e. “I Googled Tim and found out that he is actually a multi-millionaire…. ”
I remember when Google launched and the first thing I thought was, a) what a cool name, and b) what a light and simple landing page. But that was the beauty of the user interface. Almost like walking into a club with a simple facade. Doesn’t seem like much until they let you in the front door, and as soon as you get in, you look around and say., “My goodness, I had no idea”. The same thing holds true with Google. Who Knew?
It used to be that Microsoft was the big dog on the block. Well for those living under a rock. It’s Google now. And because Google calls the shots in regards to Search they can also redefine the search algoritham, and by doing that, they force the other 2 to do the same. Do you see where I’m going. By changing or tweaking, they force the others to do the same.
It’s the essence of competition. In order to be the best, you can’t stand pat, you have to continue to prove why you are the best, you have to be different but you always have to do it better. You are always scruitinzed and you’re always held to a high standard and expectation. So far Google has done that, but it sure can be frustrating to the Naples Based Search engine marketers who are trying to figure out, just what are they doing over there in the huddle.
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