Do You Pay Per Clíck Fraud?

Multi-billion dollar search industry is under attack and has been for quite a while. Clíck fraud has become the greatest threat to the rapid growth of the paid search marketing sector. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that 20 to 35 percent of ad clicks are fraudulent.
Who's to blame? Clíck fraud can come from a variety of sources, including competitors, bots that simulate the human behavior of clicking on ads in web pages, or even friends of the publisher who want to "help" the publisher gain some additional clíck revenue.
Clíck fraud is certainly no small matter. It has become largër than the total magnitude of credít card fraud in the U.S. Many of the search engines are already looking for solutions.

Pay-Per Percentage:
Pay-per-percentage is an advanced form of pay-per-impression. Within this system, someone can bid for a percentage of all impressions for certain keywords or keyword phrases over a specified period of time. In the pay-per-percentage model, clíck fraud is avoided because the advertiser is not charged any additional amount for clicks. The business model is based upon a percentage of ad impressions.
The Google Adwords system itself was initially based on a cost-per-view model. Unfortunately, there was a lack of enthusiasm for the cost-per-impression services and they switched over to the pay-per-click model.


Pay Per Action:
Under this model, advertisers do not pay every time a user clicks on an ad. Instead, payment is only made when a clíck through leads to a desired action. This could be a purchase, filling out a form, downloading trial software, or even making a call.

This model takes much of the risk out of advertising.
In fact, Google Adsense is currently beta testing a compensation system based on CPA. If you are an adsense pubisher, this would mean that instead of getting paid for clicks or impressions, you would get paid a commission for a sale or other desired action. These ads won't compete with the regular pay-per-click ads and will be on a separate network. However, they may be beneficial for advertisers looking to avoid clíck fraud.


Paid Inclusion:
Another possible solution to pay-per-click is known as paid-inclusion. The paid inclusion program offered by this community of search providers, known as the ISEDN, is a cross between the older paid inclusion models and the reigning PPC model.
The ISEDN program makes clíck fraud irrelevant because ads are displayed for a certain period of time, regardless of the number of clicks or impressions received.
Through the power of the collective community (the ISEDN currently has more than 230+ members), ISEDN paid inclusion ads are displayed over 150 million times per month. This equates to 150 million potential advertising opportunities.
Within this model, you can buy top 10 exposure across a rapidly growing network of search providers for $3 to $4 per month. If you choose to buy in volume, you can expect some significant discounts.
The ISEDN advertising model limits the sale of the same keywords or phrases to 30 advertisers. If a keyword term is sold more than 10 times, then those paid listings begin to rotate between the SERPs. So, for the worst case scenario, a listing would appear on the first page of results approximately once out of every 3 searches on most engines in the network.
This program gives advertisers the benefit of advertising with smaller search engines on a massive scale without the fear of clíck fraud. For more information on this advertising model visit ISEDN founding member ExactSeek.com.

Quality Content + RSS Syndication Equals Increased Exposure

RSS Marketing Techniques - From Basic to Advanced

Once you have created your RSS feed, it's time to start marketing it. Marketing your RSS feed is completely different from marketing an email-based newsletter. However, similar to newsletter promotion, promoting your RSS feed begins on your web site and with your existing audience.
To let people know that you are offering an RSS feed, you will need to display an RSS image on a high-profile space of your web site. Your visitors will be much more likely to see your RSS image if you use one of the well-known buttons to represent your feed. You should place this button towards the top of your page for best exposure.

To see some good examples of web sites that are promoting their RSS feeds, go to SitePoint.com and Lockergnome.com.

Just like your ezine subscription box, your RSS feed should be noticeable and available from every page of your web site.

RSS Presentation Page
You must also have a page on your web site that explains exactly what RSS is. Many of your visitors may not know about this new technology. This is especially true if your website does not pertain to internet marketing or some other tech field.

Take your visitors step-by-step through the process of locating, subscribing and reading an RSS feed. By doing this, you are informing your website visitors and helping to promote the use of your own RSS feed.

If you have different categories of RSS feeds, Provide a link to each of these feeds right next to the content category to which it belongs. For example, you could create a different RSS feed for different categorical topics. Not only does this provide more options for your visitors, but it also provides additional marketing opportunities.

Auto-Discovery
If you have an RSS feed, then you should definitely enable Auto-Discovery aggregation. Some RSS aggregators have the capability of quickly finding an RSS feed on your web site if you have placed a simple piece of code in the head section of your html.

Here's the code:

< rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="ENTER-RSS-URL">

Simply replace the RSS feed URL and place the above code between the head tags on each page of your web site.
Submit Your RSS Feed to Search Engines and Directories
Having an RSS feed opens up entirely new marketing possibilities. You can now submit your RSS feeds to a variety of specialized search engines and directories. For a complete list, go to MasterNewMedia.org.

Syndicating Rich Media Content
RSS is not just about text. You can also use it to syndicate audio and video content. For example, you can now submit media RSS feeds to Yahoo. They are using these feeds to make it easier for visitors to find rich media content at Yahoo search.
To get started, go to the Media RSS feed submission page.

Exchanging RSS Feeds
As you know, link exchanges have lost much of their ranking power. However, there is an advanced förm of link exchange that everyone can take advantage of. This is the RSS feed exchange. By exchanging feeds with other quality sites in your industry, you gain additional content, about 5 incoming links, and some direct traffíc as well. Link directories are not beneficial to either partner. Each partner should put each other's content in a high-traffíc area on their site. This allows both partners to increase their web site exposure, which is much more effective than a link exchange that is often buried on unknown pages.

Customized RSS Aggregators
Another advanced RSS marketing strategy is to offer your own customized RSS aggregator to your web site visitors. This will allow you to enforce your brand and provide an additional point of contact with your subscribers. Hotmail did the same thing with email. Unfortunately, that kind of opportuníty is long gone. RSS, on the other hand, is still a fairly new technology that you can use to create an effective viral marketing campaign. If you have a large enough audience, you could certainly encourage them to start using your RSS aggregator. If executed correctly, your name could soon be branded all over the Internet because of this new communication model.

To start creating your own branded RSS aggregator, go to DeskShare.com or CustomReader.com.

Artificial link structure explained

Unnatural linking methods can get your site banned

An artificial link structure is a way of linking websites together in a method designed purely with the aim of getting higher search engine rankings. A few years ago, artificial link structures were popular and successful. I interviewed a webmaster who owned a cluster of 20 or 30 sites all about different kinds of posters. The sites were linked together using multiple links.

The sites ranked well and he was earning about $5,000 a month in affiliate commissions.

Unfortunately for him, those golden days didn't last. Eventually, all the sites in the cluster were penalized by Google. I don't think any of those sites exist any more.
hese days, the search engines are smarter. Excessive crosslinking is likely to get your sites penalized by Google and especially by Yahoo!, which is stricter than Google.

Some affiliates now do tricky things such as getting domains registered around the world in the names of friends and relatives, so that their artificial link structures are not obvious.

For long-term success, build a genuinely useful, interesting website that people WANT to link to. If you do that, you'll automatically have a natural link structure. Here are some other factors which seem to ring alarm bells, and what to do about them:

• Having a large percentage of reciprocal links could ring alarm bells. Good, popular sites have lots of one-way links. Try to get one-way links to your site, for example, by writing articles for other sites. In my experience, reciprocal links are still very helpful, but make sure they're not your only linking strategy.
  
• Having identical anchor text on all links to your site looks artificial. When sites link to you, try to persuade them to use a variety of key phrases in the anchor text (the words people click on). One way to do this is to provide the HTML code for them to paste into their sites.
• Sudden huge increases in backlinks (inbound links) look artificial. People doing something unusual get huge surges in links. Get links to your site steadily, a few at a time, in a natural way.
  
• Links to "link farms" are dangerous. Link farms create pages of links which are cut and pasted into large clusters of sites. To search engines, these are "bad neighborhoods". Also, it's not a good idea to link to sites which have huge directories indiscriminately linking to anyone. Link to good, useful sites related to your topic.
  
• It's possible that getting lots of site-wide links could cause you trouble. "Site-wide links" are links which appear on all pages of a site, linking to your site. That's an unnatural pattern, but probably less harmful than some of the other factors. A wonderfully generous man is linking to this site from more than 2,000 pages on his site. You probably want to avoid having a large number of friends who do that.

If all this seems terribly complicated, take heart from the fact that the search engines' ultimate goal is to deliver good search results. Build a useful, interesting, high-quality site and you've taken a huge leap in the direction of search engine success.

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10 Most Valuable Free Google Marketing Tools

Every marketer and webmaster should be taking advantage of Google's good-will and snapping up these professionally run services and marketing tools. Here's a quick run-down of the 10 most valuable frëe Google Internet marketing tools:

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google. It will prove helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster. Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google Analytics analyzes your traffíc, where it comes from and what it does once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites for frëe.

Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your marketing funnel. It tracks all the steps leading up to your salës or checkout page. Vital information for raising your conversion rate and ROI.

LINK: http://www.google.com/analytics/

2. Google Sitemaps

Webmasters can use Google Sitemaps to almost instantly place newly created pages on their site into the Google Search Index. This is an XML file that is uploaded to Google as new pages are added on your site. Needless to say this can be a valuable service for any webmaster or marketer who wants to get their information on the web quickly.

LINK: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

3. Google Alerts

Be notified when someone, or another site, lists your site or mentions your name. Great way to keep track of all your online activities. Great way to monitor all your online business interests and products.

LINK: http://www.google.com/alerts

4. Google Froogle

Froogle is Google's price directory! It simply lists all the cheapest prices for different products on the web. For marketers and webmasters who are promoting products, it should be studied and analyzed. Optimizing your site's content for Froogle may prove to be very beneficial.
Follow Froogle or Google directions exactly on how to list or display products on your site. Froogle will spider your site and display your prices and products to thousands of targeted customers. That, as they say, is priceless.

LINK: http://froogle.google.com/

5. Google Checkout

Not exactly frëe but for those marketers who use AdWords - for every $1 spent on AdWords you can process $10 for frëe. You can also place the shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad and take advantage of the prestige and trust the Google brand name has built up.

LINK: https://checkout.google.com/

6. Google eBlogger

Blogging has become vitally important to the health and functioning of your web site. No site should be without at least one blog and RSS feed. Creating a blog (online journal) on the topic of your web site or product will bring in extra traffíc and targeted customers. eBlogger is a simple frëe blogging service that even lets you publish or post your blog files to your own web site server. Keep in mind, each blog has that all important Google Blog Search bar.

LINK: http://www.blogger.com/

7. Google Toolbar - Enterprise Version

Try the new enterprise version of the Google Toolbar for your company or business. Integrates countless features with all your employees or corporate network. These could include a common customer database, company calendar, financial news...

Keep in mind, Google also ranks every page it indexes on a scale of 0-10. While it is important to know the Page Rank of your own pages, it is even more important to know the PR of your competitor's pages. You can use the toolbar to get the PR of each page you're visiting. Extremely helpful information for webmasters and marketers to know when forming online linking or business arrangements.

LINK: http://toolbar.google.com/T4/enterprise/

8. Google Groups

Every marketer knows the importance of having a large contact list of people with a similar interest. Social networking will play an ever increasing role in your success on the web. Just look at the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and LiveJournal.
Google groups is another form of social and business networking that every marketer should be aware of and pursuing.

LINK: http://groups.google.com/

9. Google Adsense

One simple way to monetize your web content is to use Google Adsense. Just place the Adsense code on your site and receive a chëck from Google each month. For webmasters who are not really into online marketing (do such creatures exist?), Adsense can be a painless way to earn extra income from your site. For professional marketers using the Adsense system can supply a tremendous amount of marketing information on the keywords in their particular niche. It keeps the marketer informed on what keywords are being bid on and how much advertisers are willing to pay.
Adsense also has an excellent real-time tracking system you can use to keep track of all your important web pages.

LINK: https://www.google.com/adsense/

10. Google Writely

A recent addition to Google's stable of frëe products. Writely is a full featured online writing editor with spellcheck and great collaborating features. It also lets you publish your content directly to your blogs. One feature that may be of interest to marketers - it lets you save files in the popular download format of PDF.

LINK: http://www.writely.com

How To: Optimize Your Images for Search

Have you every gone to Google image search looking for a quick photo, image or wine label? Image search is an area often overlooked when first dipping your toes into the world of search engine marketing.

Remember, search engine bots are a series of algorithms and routines that determine ranking and image search engines are no different. But, you can't expect a bot to be as perceptive as a human and identify what your keywords your wine images should relate to.

So, give them a hand. Effectively labeling your wine (or any) images and alt tags is a great start. But, do so within reason. A few months ago we posted about the abuse of search engines by black hat developers who used 'keyword stuffing' on their meta tags to lessen the relevance of certain determination factors such as meta tags - and it too has been done in image tagging. This shouldn't thwart you from using images as an effective means of SEO however - but do so within reason and without keyword spamming.

Properties to understand about images.

Naming: When saving or selecting a filename for your image, be sure to use something which is relevant not only to the image description, but the overall keyword theme for your specific site or page.

Do's: Separate words with hyphens. Search engines cannot decipher where one word begins and another ends without an identifiable delimiter such as a hyphen (-).

Example: wine-marketer-logo.jpg not winemarketerlogo.jpg.

Don't: Separate words with spaces or underscores when a hyphen will do.

Example: wine marketer.jpg will conver to wine%20marketer.jpg.

Alt Tags: Alt tags allow you to provide a description of your image to visitors and search engines for multiple purposes. First, the alt tag will show prior to an image being displayed should it take a few seconds to load and will give visitors a description of what is loading (or even maybe pointing to a bad link). Second, they provide a hover over effect on the image, allowing visitors to see a description of images they place their cursor on. Third, they display an image description for browsers or users who are unable to load your site images including those visually impaired. Lastly, and most importantly for this article, they provide a description to search engines of what this image is about. Pairing this with the selective keywords on your site and image filename, it is another opportunity to reinforce your search engine worthiness!

Here is an example of SEO friendly image naming and alt tag in HTML format:

HTML format: < src="specify image path here" width=" " height=" " alt=" write text that you want to show if an image is not appearing ">

Remember to use alt tags whenever possible as another form of traffic allocation through image search and in helping boost your organic search results by providing even more keyword relevancy for your site.

Suprisingly Wine.com adheres to alt tag standards however does not relate this into the their image filenames. All the little things make a difference in SEO!

www.winemarketer.com/wineseo/041307.html

SEO Methods

White Hat Methods :

White hat methods of SEO involve following the search engines' guidelines as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Their advice generally is to create content for the user, not the search engines; to make that content easily accessible to their spiders; and to not try to game the system. Often, webmasters make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their websites, inadvertently "poisoning" them so that they will not rank well. White hat SEOs attempt to discover and correct mistakes, such as machine-unreadable menus, broken links, temporary redirects, or a poor navigation structure.

Because search engines are text-centric, many of the same methods that are useful for web accessibility are also advantageous for SEO. Methods are available for optimizing graphical content, including ALT attributes, and adding a text caption. Even Flash animations can be optimized by designing the page to include alternative content in case the visitor cannot read Flash.

Some methods considered proper by the search engines:

Using unique and relevant title to name each page.
Editing web pages to replace vague wording with specific terminology relevant to the subject of the page, and that the audiences that the site was developed for will expect to see on the pages, and will search with to find the page.
Increasing the amount of unique content on the site.
Writing quality content for the website visitors instead of the search engines.
Using a reasonably-sized, accurate description meta tag without excessive use of keywords, exclamation marks or off topic terms.
Ensuring that all pages are accessible via anchor tag hyperlinks, and not only via Java, Javascript or Macromedia Flash applications or meta refresh redirection; this can be done through the use of text-based links in site navigation and also via a page listing all the contents of the site (a site map).
Allowing search engine spiders to crawl pages without having to accept session IDs or cookies.
Developing "link bait" strategies. High quality websites that offer interesting content or novel features tend to accumulate large numbers of backlinks.
Participating in a web ring with other quality websites.
Writing useful, informational articles under a Creative Commons or other open source license, in exchange for attribution to the author by hyperlink.

Black hat methods :

Main article: Spamdexing

"Black hat" SEO are methods to try to improve rankings which are disapproved of by the search engines, typically because they consider such methods deceptive, and unrelated to providing quality content to site visitors. Search engines often penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from the SERPs altogether. Such penalties are usually applied automatically by the search engines' algorithms, because the Internet is too large to make manual policing of websites feasible.
Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through deceptive techniques and the abuse of the search algorithms. Over time a widespread consensus has developed in the industry as to what are and are not acceptable means of boosting one's search engine placement and resultant traffic.

Spamdexing often gets confused with white hat search engine optimization techniques, which do not involve deceit. Spamming involves getting websites more exposure than they deserve for their keywords, leading to unsatisfactory search results. Optimization involves getting websites the rank they deserve on the most targeted keywords, leading to satisfactory search experiences.
When discovered, search engines may take action against those found to be using unethical SEO methods. In February 2006, Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of these practices.
Cloaking is the practice of serving one version of a page to search engine spiders/bots and another version to human visitors.

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Organic SEO

When does long term SEO show ranking results? It takes time for optimization to produce targeted traffic to your website. Organic SEO requires time to take effect, just as it takes time for your web pages to start showing up in the search engine results.

Clients regularly ask me about the timing of a search engine optimization campaign and when those results will be seen in the search engine listings. A long term marketing campaign based on search engine optimization takes time: patience is the name of the game.

Optimization Timeframe

SEO's timeframe depends on a number of factors. Part of this involves the accuracy of keyword phrase choices: is the keyword phrase one your visitors would use to find your product or website? If your keyword phrases are targeted to your audience, you will gain optimum results. Did you use Paid Inclusion and/or PPC services? The best combination for success involves using a combination of SEO, Paid Inclusion and PPC services. If you do not use Paid Inclusion or PPC, using organic SEO only, it takes more time to achieve results.

Paid Results

When you use Paid Inclusion or PPC (Pay-Per-Click) bidding, your results show up sooner than traditional SEO. Paid Inclusion submissions state the time-frame in which your page will be indexed by the search engine robots when you sign up for services. PPC bidding results show up as soon as searchers start clicking on your PPC ads. This type of search engine marketing requires an annual budget to renew Paid Inclusion submissions and payment per month for PPC click-through costs. If you are paying too much for your PPC services, organic SEO combined with PPC often helps to keep the prices down for the paid service. By generating additional targeted traffic on those costly terms you may be able to bring the bidding prices down in your PPC campaign or even eliminate some keyword bidding.

The timeline given for paid submissions means the search engines are generating income through this process. Paying for results also gives you a guarantee the listings will be relatively stable in the database.

Paid Inclusion submissions will always take precedence over free submissions because the company makes money from Paid Inclusion. For this reason most search engines will implement free search engine submissions over a longer period of time than paid submissions. When using SEO without the paid submission choices, the process is the same but the optimized pages take longer to be processed into the search engine databases.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO works differently. The best reason to use organic SEO is that it is a low-cost method to promote your website. It can take up to three to six months to see the full results of optimizing your website, especially if you are only using organic optimization. The plus to an organic approach is that once you optimize your pages, the main part of the work is done. You may tweak your keywords and text here and there, but unless you completely re-design your pages, you have what you need in place to begin drawing in targeted traffic. Continue checking your ranking status and reading your log statistics, especially for new keywords visitors are using to find your website.
When using free submissions, expect a three to six month wait before seeing most of the long term results showing in the search engine listings. If you build on a link popularity program and have links pointing back to your website, the search engine robots will find your website through the links, eliminating the need for free submissions. Look at it this way: you pay once for basic optimization and over time the results improve to optimum level. You don't have to keep paying for this service because, unless search engine databases drops your free submission pages (which is not often these days), you will be visible and present to the search engine users when they search on your targeted keyword phrases. Over time you should see a progression in your ranking, depending on how competitive your keyword phrases are.

Budget SEO

What if you can't afford Paid Inclusion or PPC services? Organic SEO is a great way to increase targeted traffic to your website over time. If you do not have a budget for Paid Inclusion submissions and PPC programs, organic SEO will give you good results if you are willing to wait instead of gaining immediate results. Combine organic SEO with plenty of good content and a solid link building program for optimum results. Remember, the search engine listings may entice visitors to come to your website, but you must give them a reason to stay once they arrive. Build your content to keep your new visitors at your website.



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