All about Google's new PPA advertising product

Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis. You can find Google's own announcement.

How does Google's new product work?

Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad.

Google AdWords has one big advantage and one big disadvantage: You only pay for clicks of potential customers, but you risk paying a lot of money for nothing because of click fraud.

There has been a lot of debate around click fraud because Google has a short term financial incentive to promote it. Google's new advertising product is "pay per action" (PPA). You don't pay per click anymore but you pay when a customer takes further action, such as requesting a catalog, signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.

PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud.

How can Google track the action?

If you use Google's PPA advertising product, then you must use Google's conversion tracking code in the HTML code of your web pages.

Of course, the advertiser has an incentive not to confirm the action, but cheating does not make sense. Like PPC ads, PPA ads will likely be ranked by profitability to Google.

What are the consequences for the market?

Google will be able to better maximize revenues on its advertising network, and it also should allay the concerns over click fraud.

Google's new PPA program is in direct competition to affiliate marketing networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare. Publishers could leave those affiliate marketing networks and concentrate on Google's PPA program.

Yahoo und Microsoft will certainly offer similar PPA programs in the future. The current players on the PPA market Snap and Turn now face heavy competition.

What are the consequences for you?

If you already track the return on investment (ROI) on your PPC ads, then you won't be affected much. If you don't track the ROI yet, take a look at ROI tracking tools such as AxROI which can save you a lot of advertising money.

If you are a smaller advertiser, then PPA advertising could mean that you will pay less for better results in the future, and that you will never worry about click fraud again.

Note that Google's pay per action program is currently in beta test. This means that there are some limitations:

* participation is by invitation only, you must fill out a web form to request participating in the program
* the PPA program is currently only available to US customers
* ads are limited to Google's content network of partner sites (Google AdSense)

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What Google thinks about hidden and paid links

What are hidden links? Can Google detect them?

Hidden links are links that can be seen by search engine spiders but not by human web surfers:

* White text on a white background (or any other text that has the same color as the background).
* Links that have been changed with CSS so that they are extremely small.
* Linked periods in the middle of a paragraph.
* Links in invisible CSS divs.

If you use links like these on your web pages then you violate Google's quality guidelines and you risk being banned on Google by using these links. It's likely that Google can detect most hidden links. While some hiding techniques still might work, Google's anti-spam team will probably be able to detect them very soon.

What are paid links? Do they work with Google?

Paid links are simply text links for which the webmaster of the linked site paid. Paid links can be used to advertise your web site on other sites. Most webmasters buy links to increase their search engine rankings. Unfortunately, Google doesn't like paid links.
Google is currently working on an algorithm that helps them to detect (and downgrade) paid links. Last week, Google asked webmasters to report web pages with paid links to the Google spam team.

What does this mean to your web site?

If you use hidden links or other hidden content on your web pages, you should remove these web page elements as soon as possible from your site. The more spam elements you use on your web site, the more likely it is that your web site will get a ranking penalty.

Paid links to your web site won't hurt your website rankings. However, it's likely that paid links also won't help your rankings anymore with Google's new algorithm change.
Inbound links are very important to get high rankings on Google. That's why Google works so hard on filtering the wrong kind of links. If you want to succeed on Google, you have to build the right links that will help your search engine rankings.

Source: www.free-seo-news.com

Freeware tool

Meta Tag Generators

1. BHead 4.1.1 (1.0 MB) is an advanced meta tag generator that can create your entire HEAD section, including CSS style sheets. Generates the code for all popular meta tags and also has an option for custom tags. Keywords and description can be imported from files. Comes with a basic Style Sheet editor that includes a color picker. Other features include spell chëck, search replace, syntax highlighting, etc. For Windows 9x/NT/ME/2K/.

2. Metty Meta Tag Maker 1.31 (2.5 MB) is a meta tag creator with support for 33 meta tags that ensure search engines properly index your website. Easy to use and requires no knowledge of meta tags. For Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP.

3. Search Engine Buddy 1.0 (2.7 MB) analyzes web page meta tags and web page content on or offline to help you create the best possible meta tag combinations and web page content based on the requirements and algorithms of the major search engines. For Windows 9x/2000/NT.

4. MetaWizard 1.2a (617 KB) is a simple, bare bones meta tag generator that guides you through the process of creating basic tags for your web site pages.

Link Popularity Tools

Another category of programs that has suffered attrition in the last few years. At least half a dozen are no longer available, no longer supported or no longer freeware. The first two are the best of the three listed.

1. Indexa 2.0 (115 KB) is a java website popularity program that reports Google Pagerank, the number of backlinks recorded on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and AlltheWeb and the number of pages indexed. Limitations: Analyses 4 urls and 2 search engines. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003/Unix/Linux/MacOS X.

2. Link Popularity Chëck 3.0.3 (941 KB) checks how many sites link to yours and your competitors in 5 major search engines. For Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.

3. BackLinks Master 1.5 (1.3 MB) helps you find who is linking to you, whether links are direct and what keywords are in the anchor text. For Windows 98/ME/XP/2000.

Link Checkers

Where oh where did all the good freeware link checkers go? Well, apparently they went offline with the cos. or individuals that developed them or they went the shareware route. Of the three listed below, CheckWeb is probably the best.

1. CheckWeb 1.23 (74 KB) is a small, powerful links analyzer that can scan online/ offline HTML pages and generate a report on link, error and page size information. For Windows 95 and above.

2. Mihov Link Checker 0.5 (250 KB) can chëck multiple links on a web site or a local web page. It reports the state of each link as valid, missing, forbidden or otherwise not accessible. Links can be stored in a text file or extracted automatically from a local or internet page. For Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.

3. SiteLinkChecker 1.0 (480 KB) is an easy-to-use link checker tool that checks websites for broken links. Easily locates broken links and links containing syntactic errors and reports the status of each link. For Windows 2000/XP/2003.

Knowing Your Visitors Through Website Traffíc Analysis

Traffíc Analysis

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffíc to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffíc.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffíc is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffíc statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffíc stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your salës copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact förm. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice an exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphics may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact förm or make a purchase - the more valuable that keyword is.

Source: sitepronews.com

Embracing Cascading Style Sheets Makes Good Sense

The Holy Grail of CSS is to separate the content of a web page from the instructions that control what it looks like. The same page would display correctly on all standard web browsers , and devices used by persons with a handicap, cell phones, other devices, and yet-to-be-developed interfaces. The web site designer would not have to make separate pages for these devices. However, reality is different and here in the real world CSS does not do all these things. It does have enough positive points to make it worthwhile to learn and incorporate it into your web pages.
There are multiple ways to control how something looks on a web page. The color, size, and font used for a headline or for a paragraph of text can be defined with in-line styles and tags. The term "in-line" means that the commands for controlling the color, size, and font are mixed in with the content. This makes the source code for the page cluttered and hard to read and edit when you want to update it or fix something. Also, because you're repeating the same commands over and over throughout the page, the file size of the page gets largër and hence slower for those browsing your site.
As opposed to in-line styles, CSS is not repeated throughout the page. CSS can be defined in the head section, or put in a separate file and referenced from the HTML file, or both. CSS consists of definitions of how a page component should render itself on the page. For example, you can define that a headline should be blue, 24 point, centered text and that a paragraph should be black, 12 point, justified text. Once that is defined, any normal HTML paragraph tags or headline tags would use these definitions when rendered.

You can define almost all the normal HTML objects this way; background color, background image, background image position, tables, cells, images, divs, etc. This leaves your HTML code clean and much easier to read. Just like those Ronco TV commercials, there's more! If you have a multi-page web site and you use CSS and all your CSS definitions are in a separate file, you have one place to go to change the look and feel of all the pages in your site. Imagine if you have a 50 page site and you learn that the size of your text in all your paragraphs is too small or the wrong color to maximize salës: instead of having to edit 50 pages and change the definition of each paragraph, you simply edit the CSS file and you're done!
But with CSS what do you do if you want one paragraph or a set of paragraphs to look different? You define a class. If you have a right column where you display ads in your CSS, you would define a class and give it a name such as ".rcol", then you would define the necessary items that you want to look different (p tags for example). ".rcol p" would be used to control how a paragraph tag was rendered. You simply add "class=rcol" to the paragraph tag, or the table tag if it's in a table, or div tag if it's in a div, etc.

This is also where the cascading in CSS comes into play: the default definitions cascade down into a class as long as the class does not contain something that overrides the default. This means that in our example text rendered in a paragraph tag looks different for the rcol class, but because that's the only thing we've defined for rcol, everything else would use the same styles as the rest of the page.You can also define size and positioning for objects in CSS.
Not all web site software packages like Microsoft Front Page, Dreamweaver, or Adobe GoLive, etc. fully support CSS. You'll have to do some coding manually. UIt's not that hard.

Source...

Embracing Cascading Style

The Holy Grail of CSS is to separate the content of a web page from the instructions that control what it looks like. The same page would display correctly on all standard web browsers , and devices used by persons with a handicap, cell phones, other devices, and yet-to-be-developed interfaces. The web site designer would not have to make separate pages for these devices. However, reality is different and here in the real world CSS does not do all these things. It does have enough positive points to make it worthwhile to learn and incorporate it into your web pages.
There are multiple ways to control how something looks on a web page. The color, size, and font used for a headline or for a paragraph of text can be defined with in-line styles and tags. The term "in-line" means that the commands for controlling the color, size, and font are mixed in with the content. This makes the source code for the page cluttered and hard to read and edit when you want to update it or fix something. Also, because you're repeating the same commands over and over throughout the page, the file size of the page gets largër and hence slower for those browsing your site.
As opposed to in-line styles, CSS is not repeated throughout the page. CSS can be defined in the head section, or put in a separate file and referenced from the HTML file, or both. CSS consists of definitions of how a page component should render itself on the page. For example, you can define that a headline should be blue, 24 point, centered text and that a paragraph should be black, 12 point, justified text. Once that is defined, any normal HTML paragraph tags or headline tags would use these definitions when rendered.

You can define almost all the normal HTML objects this way; background color, background image, background image position, tables, cells, images, divs, etc. This leaves your HTML code clean and much easier to read. Just like those Ronco TV commercials, there's more! If you have a multi-page web site and you use CSS and all your CSS definitions are in a separate file, you have one place to go to change the look and feel of all the pages in your site. Imagine if you have a 50 page site and you learn that the size of your text in all your paragraphs is too small or the wrong color to maximize salës: instead of having to edit 50 pages and change the definition of each paragraph, you simply edit the CSS file and you're done!
But with CSS what do you do if you want one paragraph or a set of paragraphs to look different? You define a class. If you have a right column where you display ads in your CSS, you would define a class and give it a name such as ".rcol", then you would define the necessary items that you want to look different (p tags for example). ".rcol p" would be used to control how a paragraph tag was rendered. You simply add "class=rcol" to the paragraph tag, or the table tag if it's in a table, or div tag if it's in a div, etc.

This is also where the cascading in CSS comes into play: the default definitions cascade down into a class as long as the class does not contain something that overrides the default. This means that in our example text rendered in a paragraph tag looks different for the rcol class, but because that's the only thing we've defined for rcol, everything else would use the same styles as the rest of the page.You can also define size and positioning for objects in CSS.
Not all web site software packages like Microsoft Front Page, Dreamweaver, or Adobe GoLive, etc. fully support CSS. You'll have to do some coding manually. UIt's not that hard.

www.websitetrainingonline.com

Top 10 Sources for Massive Web Site Traffíc

Experienced webmasters know there are special sources or places on the web which will send massive amounts of traffíc to your site. They also know, if harnessed properly, these mega traffïc sites will supply any web site with a steady stream of visitors.

Perhaps the best source of web site traffíc is Google. That's not exactly a Newsflash, but the key to getting massive amounts of traffíc from Google is to go wide and long. With this strategy, instead of targeting highly popular keywords which may be too competitive for your site to win, you create a whole multitude of lesser known long tail keyword phrases to bring in the traffíc.
This traffíc takes longer to build but because very few webmasters bother with these longer phrases, your keywords will be more stable and secure. Develop a whole líst of these traffíc generating keyword phrases and Google will reward you with a whole flood of targeted visitors stemming from these thousands of small dribbles of long tail keyword traffíc.

Turning these dribbles of traffíc into massive amounts is not a difficult task. One very effective way to tap into the entire search engine source of traffíc is to tag everything. Tags are just another name for keywords. As Web 2.0 or Social Bookmarking sites become more and more popular, tagging will become extremely important.

You must be especially careful of how you tag the content on your site or sites. If you're using a blogging system like WordPress, all your categories will be considered tags automatically. If you're creating URLs, be careful to place your keyword phrase in your links.

Another effective way to tap into the whole keyword traffíc system is to include your keyword phrase or variations of it in your articles while promoting your site. Place your anchor text in your links in the resource box at the end of each article.

Over time, as these articles become distributed all over the web, they will create a steady stream of targeted visitors to your site. Simple, effective and very powerful.

You are probably tired of hearing about Web 2.0 and the new Social Bookmarking sites but they are some of the best places for massive traffíc on the web. Any webmaster who has been Slashdotted already knows this fact all too well; if you get a listing on the homepage of Slashdot.com you will immediately start receiving thousands of visitors to your site. It can be somewhat scary.
A similar experience is getting one of your articles published in ezines run by Addme.com, SiteProNews.com, WebProNews.com, as well as others. These ezines go out to hundreds of thousands of readers and can produce massive traffíc back to your site.

However, much of this sudden traffíc is only temporary and most savvy webmasters know it would be wise to try and capture the contact information of these temporary visitors for follow-up targeting. Turn that temporary visitor into a patron of your site by offering a free ecourse or an email newsletter.

The same marketing technique should be applied to traffíc coming from all these social media sites. Don't think of your traffíc as just numbers in your website's stats, but rather as potential customers who will return to your site again and again.

Keep this strategy in mind as you target some of these Top Sources of massive traffíc on the web:

1. Digg.com
2. Netscape.com
3. Ezinearticles.com
4. Del.icio.us
5. StumbleUpon.com
6. Reddit.com
7. Slashdot.org
8. BlinkList.com
9. Furl.net
10. Squidoo.com

You should be actively promoting these social bookmarking sites by allowing your visitors to easily bookmark your content. You should be creating your own content on sites like Squidoo and placing links back to your site.\
Of course, there are countless other sources of massive traffíc on the web. Press releases is another effective way of quickly drawing in massive traffíc to your site. Sites like PRWeb can deliver targeted traffíc very quickly and efficiently.

Another very effective and high converting venue you should try is Yahoo! Answers, a simple process where users post a question and other members/experts offer answers. Used correctly this can be a good source of targeted traffíc.

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Your Article Submission Strategy Won't Work - Unless...

An article submission strategy should form an essential part of promoting your web site, but if you are missing one vital ingredient, most of your efforts will be in vain. This article will show you what you could be missing, and how adding this to your strategy can have a hugely positive effect on the results you get from your article submissions.

Many people seem to believe they can spend just five minutes writing an article, submit it to lots of article directories, and then enjoy an avalanche of traffic to their web site the following morning.

If only it was so simple. Once again, there is no such easy route to success.

Which of the following articles do you think would achieve the best results after it has been distributed?

- One that has a great title, is focused, provides valuable information, reads well and is error-free;

- Or, one that contains grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, reads poorly, is badly structured, and fails to provide any insight of value.

Or to phrase the question slightly differently, which article do you think is more likely to be selected by a publisher looking for some quality content to put in his ezine with a readership in the thousands if not tens of thousands?

It's obvious of course - he will be looking for a quality article that will reflect positively on him and his ezine.

There is another important factor you need to remember. Once you have distributed an article online, it will exist online FOR A VERY LONG TIME - with YOUR NAME attached to it. And if you have distributed it correctly, it will sit on hundreds of different web sites. Clawing an article back at some point in the future will be a very difficult if not impossible task.

This means you need it to reflect positively on your name, and on your business, not just now, but for a long time into the future. And an article you have put together in just five minutes with little care or attention is unlikely to do you or your business any justice.

If you want article submissions to work for you as an online marketing strategy, it is absolutely essential that you give the highest priority to ensuring the quality of the article.

Imagine yourself in five years time, with your business, your own level of success, and your reputation, growing healthily over that time. Do you really want a poor quality article with your name attached still in publication?

I would think not.

There are, however, some easy tips to follow that will help guarantee the quality of your article and ensure that article submissions are of benefit to you both now and in the future:

1. Ensure you have a clear focus for your article - the title should also reflect this.

2. Run it through a spell-checker - you may be surprised what you may have missed.

3. Leave it for at least a couple of days, then come back to it and re-read it. This will mean you spot elements of your article that read poorly and need to be revised or rewritten. This is absolutely essential for improving the overall quality of your article.

4. Leave it again for a day or two, then come back and re-read it. Hopefully this time it will read a lot better, although you may still notice the odd element that requires a final improving touch. When I write an article myself, I often return to it several times before finally distributing it.

5. Ask a third party to review it - this could be a partner, friend, associate, or even a professional editor. This again can reveal problems with your article that you hadn't spotted yourself.

6. Once you are completely happy with your article, run it through a spell-checker one last time.

These few steps add very little time on to the process of creating your article, but they can improve the quality of your article immensely. By ensuring the quality of your article, you will maximize the results you can achieve from your article submission strategy and boost your own credibility and reputation over the longer term.

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