SEO Myths and Affiliate Marketing QA Interviews

By Shawn Collins
Dec 22, 2006, 12:33

The third installment of the Affiliate Summit preview conference call series took place on December 7th, 2006 and it's now available via streaming audio or download.

Wil Reynolds from from SEER Interactive chatted with host Marty M. Fahncke, Founder of Conference Call University, about the conflicting advice out there on SEO and the SEO issues keeping you from the top of the search engines.

Marty then spoke with Kellie Stevens from AffiliateFairPlay.com about new quality assurance considerations with sub-affiliate transparency, cross-channel company layering in ad delivery and new behaviors by adware.

Download the interviews with Wil Reynolds and Kellie Stevens.

You can also stream this and previous Affiliate Summit preview calls in the archives at http://www.cculearning.com/summitreplay2007.

Google Releases "Most popular search terms in 2006"

Google released the most popular search terms that were used in 2006. It is amazing to see that no one is using any porn or gambling related keywords on Google...:)

I guess the top 10 keywords were all those junk words and this made them to remove all such releated terms to porn and gambling...

Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid

By Joe Laratro, Chief Technology Officer

During the recent WebmasterWorld conference in Las Vegas, there was a session entitled, "Interactive Site Reviews and SERP (SERP = Search Engine Result Page) Quality Control Forum". This panel consisted of top representatives from Google, Yahoo, and other industry experts. The goal of this session was to have audience members volunteer their Web sites for review by the panel. This was a double-edged sword. While the feedback was priceless, it was embarrassing when spammy techniques were uncovered.

Every Web site that was reviewed employed at least one major spam technique recognized by the panel. The audience member’s usual response was that of surprise; they wanted plausible deniability that they did not know it was a bad technique or that someone else within their company was at fault.

Some of the top reviewed mistakes:

* Link Farms - almost every site had them. They are plain and simple spam. Penalties are given by the Search Engines for participating in them.
* Duplicate Content - A few sites had session ids, others had multiple domains with the same content, or multiple paths to the same content on the same domain.
* Duplicate or Unnecessary Meta Tags – Description and Keyword are the main meta tags recognized by search engines.
* Over optimized Meta information - There can be only one Title tag on the page. Alt tags and H1 tags should be optimized.
* Do not register domains that are trying to capture AdSense dollars in the same account that you register your main domain. Search Englwines can quickly tie domains together based on readily available domain registration information. It is undesirable to have poor quality domains associated with high quality domains.
* Do not use a 3rd party database to populate a Web site without customizing the content.
* Do not hide text. This is a poor technique that is very easy to identify.

Since the problems were reoccurring, the composition of participants was of interest. They were mainly webmasters, online marketers, and Web site owners. This group paid to be at a conference known for its high caliber of Search Engine

Marketing & Optimization information. Besides being brave enough to participate, most of them had a complaint about why their Web site was not ranking well.

Spam is spam. There are some grey areas of techniques used for optimizing a Web site, but the mistakes mentioned above are absolute no-no's. Inexperienced Web marketers could harm a Web site without proper guidance. The saying, "it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is not applicable to SEO. Spam penalties levied by a Search Engine can cripple a Web site's organic traffic.

The WebmasterWorld conferences are a great forum for communication between Webmasters, etc. and Search Engines. Answers to online marketing questions can also be found through reputable Search Engine Marketing Companies. MoreVisibility is currently offering a free service called “Ask an SEO Expert”. One of our Natural Search engineers will try to answer one SEO question about a Web site Free of Charge. Visit this page for more information: http://www.morevisibility.com/askanexpert

Google Steps More Boldly Into PayPal's Territory

"I think it's fantastic," Steven Grossberg, who sells video games in Wellington, Fla., said of Checkout. "I'm selling the product. Google is getting tons of customers to sign up for Checkout."

By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: December 20, 2006

Steven Grossberg, who sells video games online from his home in Wellington, Fla., recently sent an enticing offer to 20,000 customers: $10 off any purchase over $30 using a new payment service, Google Checkout.

Traffic on his site more than tripled, and best of all, he said, Google picked up the tab for the promotion.

"I think it's fantastic," he said. "I'm selling the product. Google is getting tons of customers to sign up for Checkout. Customers are happy because they are getting a monster deal."

And Google is not charging merchants any processing fees through the end of 2007.

As a result, getting customers to use Checkout will increase profits, Mr. Grossberg said.

So starting next year, he plans to take some of the money he spends to list items on eBay and try a new marketing strategy: placing ads alongside Google's search results.

That is exactly what Google wants to hear.

When Google introduced Checkout in June, it was seen as a formidable rival to PayPal, eBay's online payment service. And with Google aggressively promoting Checkout during the holiday season and beyond, its use with some merchants has already surpassed PayPal's.

But Google's plan for Checkout has always been about more than online payments. The service is a calculated effort to expand Google's base of advertisers, which provide the bulk of the company's revenues.

And Google has made a substantial financial commitment to the service's success. Goldman Sachs estimates that Checkout promotions will cost Google about $20 million in the current quarter.

The campaign to promote Checkout also says something else about Google: As rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are working on getting the basics right in their search and advertising systems, Google is racing ahead to consolidate its lead.

"I believe that Google's advantage is widening with time and this is one example," said Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus & Company. "Checkout could be a game changer, and the competitors are doing nothing of the sort."

Unlike PayPal, a full-fledged payment system that can be used to transfer money between individuals and can draw funds directly from bank accounts, Checkout merely offers users an easy way to use their credit cards. Checkout users enter their credit card information, shipping and billing address into Google's system. Then, they can pay with Checkout at participating stores without having to enter their personal information again and again.

Google says thousands of merchants are using the service. That is dwarfed by PayPal, which has millions of merchants and 123 million users around the world. In the most recent quarter, PayPal processed $9.1 billion in transactions, up 37 percent from a year earlier. While most of those were payments between eBay buyers and sellers, the number of PayPal transactions outside eBay rose 59 percent, to $3.3 billion.

Google has not released figures on the number of Checkout users. Still, there are signs that with the heavy promotions, the service is making significant inroads.

GSI Commerce, a company that runs about 60 online stores, including toysrus.com, levis.com and timberland.com, said that one in five holiday sales at its partners' stores through the end of November were completed with payment systems other than credit cards, which include PayPal, a service called BillMeLater and Checkout. Of the three, "Google is the biggest by far," said Michael Rubin, chief executive of GSI Commerce.

At StarbucksStore.com, Checkout transactions topped PayPal transactions by about a third, said Tracy Randall, president of Cooking.com, which operates StarbucksStore.com.

Checkout's gains have not necessarily heralded a PayPal decline. A Goldman Sachs report this week said that based on conversations with various merchants, Checkout appeared to be making gains against traditional payment options and that PayPal's share of online transactions was also growing.

Regardless, it is clear that the promotions have played an important role in Checkout's quick adoption.

When Google introduced Checkout in June, it charged merchants 20 cents plus 2 percent of the purchase price for every transaction. (PayPal charges 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents a transaction, while credit companies typically charge about 1.95 percent and 30 cents for every purchase.)

Yet, to lure merchants to its advertising system, Google offered them $10 worth of free transaction processing for every $1 in advertising they spent on Google.

But Google recently got more aggressive. On Nov. 8, it waived transaction fees for all merchants, regardless of whether or not they were Google advertisers, through the end of the year. Then, on Nov. 27, it began offering Checkout users $10 off $30 purchases at many e-commerce sites and, in some cases, $20 off $50 orders. And on Dec. 5, it announced that transaction processing would remain free to merchants through the end of 2007.

In other words, Google plans to lose money on every Checkout transaction for more than a year. Yet the company believes it will be worth it.

"It's a way to incentivize more merchants to join our network," said Benjamin Ling, a product manager for Checkout. "We want everyone who sells online to be a Google advertiser."

The incentives offered by Google could benefit merchants and the company in several ways, according to online marketing experts.

Consider first that the ads of stores who accept Checkout are highlighted with an icon - a Checkout shopping cart. That increases the likelihood that users will click on those ads, which creates revenue for Google. What's more, once users click on an ad, the availability of Checkout makes it more likely that they'll complete a transaction.

In other words, Checkout generates more sales leads for online retailers - what online advertisers call click-through rates - and more of those leads turn into actual sales.

But the system offers merchants ancillary benefits, said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor.com, an e-commerce services company that helps independent store owners sell on multiple online marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon and their own Web sites.

Google ranks ads based on a secret algorithm that combines factors like the price advertisers are willing to pay and the click-through rate of a particular ad. The idea is that ads that are clicked most frequently are those that users find more relevant.

So by having a Checkout icon that increases click-through rates, over time advertisers will have to pay less to get the same ranking for their ads. Or, they could pay the same amount for more ads with better placement, Mr. Wingo said.

"When you factor all of these together, it can have a pretty significant impact on your economics as a retailer," Mr. Wingo said, adding that many merchants are likely to plow any savings back into Google.

There are other ways in which Google could benefit from Checkout, according to analysts. Checkout gives Google detailed knowledge of its users' buying habits, which the company could use to customize the delivery of ads or search results to specific users.

And the system could make it easier for Google to develop a new advertising model in which advertisers pay only when a user completes a transaction, rather than every time a user clicks on an ad. This model, known as "pay-per-action," could bring additional revenue to Google.

Mr. Ling said Google had no plans to tie search results to buying habits or to use Checkout to move to a cost-per-action ad model. But he added: "If there is a service that is of value to consumers, we will consider it."

Not everything has been smooth sailing for Checkout. In the middle of the holiday shopping season, the electronics merchant J & R suspended the use of Checkout, telling customers that it was experiencing delays in processing orders due to the popularity of the system. And Ms. Randall, of Cooking.com, said there had been some "operational issues" with Checkout at StarbucksStore.com, but that Google had worked quickly to resolve them.

Google acknowledged the problems. "We have experienced some growing pains," said Douglas Merrill, a vice president of engineering at Google who is responsible for Checkout. "Whenever we find issues, we drop everything else to fix them."

That is in part why laptopsforless .com, a retailer in Anaheim, Calif., chose to expand payment options by implementing PayPal first, said Jeff Gardner, vice president for marketing and e-commerce. "We feel like we want to wait until the bugs are worked out before jumping into it," he said about Checkout. But come next year, he added, "it is our intent to offer our customers both."

Google and Yahoo battling for every inch of search market

Wolfgang Gruener

December 19, 2006 14:40

Nielsen Netratings today released updated numbers of the U.S. search market. Google still leads the ranking with a comfortable lead, but Yahoo is not giving up easily.

The numbers released by the analysis firm hint towards a increasingly heated battle between the two largest search providers about their core business fields. Both firms outgrew every other search engine multiple times over the past year and were able to increase their market share by a couple percentage points.

Google has been approaching the 50% mark over the past year, but can't quite reach it yet. In November 2005, Google held a 47.7%, which has grown to 49.5% this
year. Google.com ran almost 3.1 billion searches in November 2005, according to Nielsen Netratings.

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The company has been hovering around the 49.5% mark for several months and while it is up significantly from 2005, its is slightly down from 49.6% last month. Partially responsible for an apparently slowing trend of market share gains appears to be Yahoo, which increased its market share from 21.8% in November 2005 to 24.3% (1.5 billion searches) in November 2006. Year-over-year growth at Yahoo amounted to 27%; Google grew the number of its searches by 31%.

Behind the top-2, there is little change. At least until now, Windows Live Search is having a small impact on the market. Searches declined year over year by 12% to about 515 million and the market share has now settled at 8.2%, down from more than 11% a year ago. According to Nielsen Netratings, AOL was able to gain some ground last month with searches increasing to 389 million (6.2% market share) and Ask.com
increased its rapid growth with a 33% jump to 160 million searches (2.6%).

Google Looks to Expand Online Office

By Jeremy Kirk

Google is reportedly in talks with a South Korean software company and its US subsidiary ThinkFree, a maker of browser-based office productivity software compatible with Microsoft file formats.

ThinkFree is a subsidiary of Haansoft, which is based in Seoul. Haansoft's chief executive officer, Baek Jong-jin, said he met twice this month with the Google corporate development team that was responsible for the $1.65bn acquisition of YouTube, the English-language newspaper Korea Times reported.

No deal has been made, although discussions will continue, the newspaper said. A Google spokesman in London said the company does not comment on speculation. Haansoft could not be reached immediately for comment.

Google is mounting a challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop office productivity software market, by introducing hosted applications that have the feel of a desktop program. Google's offerings, such as Docs and Spreadsheets, let users access and edit files through a web browser from any computer, with the files hosted on Google's servers.

ThinkFree's applications run in a similar way. The company's free offering, ThinkFree Office Online, is a suite of Java applets, downloaded from the company's servers and cached on the user's computer.

Users have 1GB of storage and can use ThinkFree's Calc, a spreadsheet; Show, a presentation program; and Write, a word processor. ThinkFree Office is compatible with Microsoft's Excel, PowerPoint and Word file formats.

ThinkFree offers a Server Edition for $30 a year, which the company advertises is a "fraction" of the cost for licences for Microsoft's Office suite. ThinkFree has a desktop edition and two portable editions, one of which allows the viewing of PowerPoint slides on iPod multimedia players.

Baek was quoted as saying other US venture capitalists were interested in ThinkFree if talks with Google ended.

- from PC World