Search Marketing Company - WebNatics

2009-02-09T01:21:00.000-08:00

Battling Click Fraud

By Frank Watson

Seems everyone sees the presence of click fraud, but we're just disagreeing about the numbers.

Click Forensics published its numbers for click fraud during Q4 2008 and it appears the fraud numbers are climbing. They found that:

* The overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1 percent for Q4 2008. That's up from 16.0 percent in Q3 2008 and from 16.6 percent reported for Q4 2007.
* The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.2 percent. That's up from 27.1 percent reported for Q3 2008 and down slightly from 28.3 percent reported for Q4 2007.
* Traffic from botnets was responsible for 31.4 percent of all click fraud traffic in Q4 2008. That's up from 27.6 percent reported for Q3 2008 and 22.0 percent reported for Q4 2007.
* In Q4 2008, the greatest percentage of click fraud originating from countries outside the U.S. came from Canada (7.4 percent), Germany (3.0 percent) and China (2.3 percent).

Interestingly, Google quickly protested the numbers. Shuman Ghosemajumder, a well-known Google employee in the analytics area, has previously challenged the validity of Click Forensics' numbers in a personal blog. Well, I've been involved with the Click Quality Council and know the people at Click Forensics, and I have to think Google doesn't want to admit to click fraud.

The official AdWords blog suggests there is only .02 percent click fraud. Yeah, OK. But Shuman admits higher numbers when he states the numbers are inflated by 40 percent. That still leaves double-digit fraud, and not the double decimal place number pushed by the largest seller of clicks in the search space.

Shuman offers plenty of reasons for the inaccuracy: they don't count right, so numbers are inflated; they're counting wrong things, in the wrong places; and content is the largest place for click fraud.

This situation needs to be addressed. We hope that the search industry will do well in this poor economy, given its ability to measure ROI. If higher numbers of fraud are being published, maybe the change will take longer. People need to know that click fraud increases the cost of conversion. But so long as the CPA is acceptable, fighting it is just a way to make search even more profitable.

We need to understand click fraud exists and that it may have a bigger impact than Google suggests. Proactive actions, such as filtering and offline analysis, are definitely needed, and reactive investigations should be always done.

There's a market for people who analyze and argue to get money back for fraud and other issues from Google. Given the number Google suggests is that off, there's good money to be made in the double-digit discrepancy.

Shuman seems to use some conflicting logic to attack the click fraud industry:

Click fraud protection is something we take very seriously at Google, and it requires a high level of scientific rigor to do well. It's frustrating to see basic mistakes being made by firms selling "additional protection" to AdWords advertisers - in essence, charging them money for advice which can actually hurt their businesses.

I've spoken with many firms and a number of academics interested in this area, and the ones who are investing in serious R&D efforts recognize the limitations of their data and analysis and have not been focusing on publicizing unsupportable and flawed numbers such as the above. We're very supportive of those efforts (and in scientific research in this area in general) and we'll continue to work closely with them.

Google isn't alone in taking this situation seriously, and they're also not the only people able to bring the high level of scientific rigor to their examination. To suggest that people who monitor click fraud -- an added protection -- are deceptive by charging money is flawed. Google makes its money on the other end, and people are employed in the space, so they just write that expense against what is charged the advertisers.

I'd also like to know who are "the many" and how much is "a number." The "publicizing unsupportable and flawed numbers" comment is also questionable. The numbers are gathered and collated; obviously, they aren't as all-encompassing as Google's. But they're legitimately counted.

Google has a responsibility to be more transparent. The legal problems aren't likely to go away any time soon, and Google has to learn they aren't the final say -- they're a contributor to the conversation. As AdWords customers, people have the right to go to someone other than the Ad Quality Team.

Chris Boggs Fires Back

Search engines versus fraudsters is a long-raging battle. Click Forensics and Google is an interesting side story. Perhaps still the best panel I've ever attended at Search Engine Strategies pitted Tom vs. Shuman, perhaps the original "Rocky," to some who have followed this pertinent saga between Google and click fraud perps.

This situation is more like the "Terminator" series. Is Google, the largest and most important search engine, Skynet in this battle? Much like the series, the resistance (fraudsters) uses technology against its own inventor to a clip of over 30 percent. That's some serious firepower.

To many, Click Forensics and the Click Quality Council are a noble group of knights waging battle for transparency against the in-your-face "our-technology-works-and-your-basic-math-is-faulty" perspective that Google pushed out in the beginning and now seems to be angling toward again. The war definitely cooled for a while between Click Forensics and Google, as far as SES goes. The sessions lost a lot of pep.

It was refreshing to see Reggie Davis of Yahoo become the most Click Forensics-aligned "we'll work together" figure, however. They've painted themselves a little less evil in this story (again based on attending this topic's panel at SES over the years).

I respect Tom and other friends at Click Forensics and on the council. Using technology is the only way to ensure that advertisers have true protection from fraud.

The real step that needs to be taken is for Shuman and Tom to kiss and hug, and join forces against the "resistance," which isn't as romantic as it sounds. Fraud costs everyone.

The analytics and business intelligence being performed by top advertisers is a hedge, and the prevailing undetected fraud rate is probably closer to Google numbers for organizations able to better protect themselves. Remember also that many advertisers are willing to give up a small percentage of "shrinkage."

This battle won't be over any time soon. Hopefully the relationship between Click Forensics and Google warms to a serious affair sooner than later in order to save advertisers sooner than later.

Local Search Tactics for Tough Economic Times

2009-02-09T00:47:00.000-08:00

From Gregg Stewart, Search Engine Watch

In tough economic times, small business owners tend to be better at targeting their marketing and advertising expenditures to tangible sales results more so than the large brands. Size and scale of their trading area and local market expertise certainly plays an important role. However, small business owners skillfully micromanage budgets and are able to match dollars to opportunities better than their fortune 500 CMO brethren.
What tactics and best practices can we glean to improve our local search campaigns in these challenging times of credit crunching and receding sales opportunities? Before we get there, you should ask:
• On a high level, how are your expenditures allocated?
• What percentage supports branding, promotional and direct response?
Allocating Expenditures
Small businesses tend to allocate their promotional dollars more heavily toward direct response and directional marketing, as branding is usually of secondary consideration. If you envision a sales funnel, these folks appear right at the purchase decision. It's a lot easier to grab consumers who are in the "where do I buy" mode, rather than the "what do I buy" mode (which is harder to convert, as it is higher up on the sales funnel).
Branding/Direct Response Mix
OK, before you hit the comment button to ask if you should stop spending on branding, the answer is no. I only ask you to consider the priority of your spending based on the ability of that spend to produce a sales conversion.
Marketers should be able to scale back their brand awareness investments with little to no impact to their overall business, allowing marketing efforts to focus more around ensuring you're the one chosen when that question of "where to buy" arises.
To yield these "bottom of the funnel" consumers, it's all about being in the right place at the right time. Local search, and the arsenal of tools associated with local online marketing, can help deliver these prospects and customers.
In looking back through all my Search Engine Watch articles, I realized it might be helpful to organize the topics into a checklist of tactics in order of priority to help your firm weather today's economic environment:
• Local Listing Management: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and thousands of other sites utilize local directory listing information to direct searchers to physical brick-and-mortar locations. Because of the nature of how this information is captured and updated, it's important for businesses to proof the listing information (name, address, phone number) to ensure accuracy.
• Internet Yellow Pages: With highly desirable conversion rates, advertisers want to ensure Internet yellow pages (IYP) are maximized from a sales lead generation standpoint. Unlike other media sources, IYP users don't scour these resources for rich robust content. Instead, they seek location information and telephone numbers because they're at the moment of purchase.
• Local SEM: A correctly executed SEM program will yield highly desirable sales leads at a very efficient cost. For national or regional advertiser looking to incorporate local SEM into your mix, check out this local search "how to" guide. Local search, and search in general, suffers from one problem: it may be too efficient and provide advertisers with such a desirable ROI that we grow complacent. Make sure you review your landing pages and employ landing page optimization techniques to maximize sales conversion from your SEM leads.
• Local SEO: Local SEO is a vital marketing strategy for businesses that sell products locally to a specified geographical area. The goal of local SEO is to increase your listing position to the top of the natural or organic search page results. Sounds easy, but it's complicated and requires a steady progression of work to get (and stay) on top. "Getting to Know Local SEO" can get you started.
• Mobile/Directory Assistance: The free directory assistance area has grown rapidly since I wrote about it in "Voice Search: Mobile Tactic Here. Now. 2DAY." Several new advertising supported offerings have emerged as this segment has developed.
Our advertising and marketing efforts must be cost efficient and convert to desirable sales. In today's atmosphere, it's important to question everything. Make sure you measure and validate to ensure historic media efforts continue to deliver meaningful ROI from the investment allocated.
Taking a "business as usual" approach probably won't deliver the magnitude of sales leads necessary to survive and prosper in this tough economic environment. If you have expenditures that you can't value through measurement of actual business created, then reallocate those funds to media types that can provide you with proven results. Remember, that which can be measured can be optimized.

Google Image Search Text Ads assumes the reins of goverment

2009-02-01T23:16:00.000-08:00

Google announced that it would begin experimenting with display ads on Image Search on August 2008. Until recently, after servral month's test, this services had been brought out from the laboratory. In 2006 the company estimated that it was missing $200 million a year because the ads was not included into image search results. It was said that Google has previously tried to incorporate text ads into results, but abandoned the practice after seeing a marked decline in traffic(From techcrunch.com). Anyway, it appear again and hopefully the traffic will not drop this time. Different with the Ads that was found by other internet surfer(image shown below),

the Ads shown now are purely written in text just like the Ads shown on web search results.

We can't doubt that there will be more and more useful or no-use ads shown on Google image search results soon.

SEO – Link Building

2009-01-27T18:09:00.001-08:00

SEO is not as easy as the past, as search engines become more sophisticated, SEO has evolved, making it more difficult to manipulate search results. Link generation is certainly one of the key components is today’s search results, to do so, you need contents and quality links.

Contents – search engines want you to provide high quality contents to your visitors, and here’s the challenge, how often can you make a commercial content linkable? Many times, we do a link exchange with another Sites, but as Search Engines become more sophisticated, able to “read” this is an exchange links, and treat you as a “partner”, so search engine would prefer a one-way link instead. Another possible risk is that the Site that exchange links with you could be banned or blacklisted. So one solutions will be creating a blog within your site, a great way to create non commercial contents and generate natural links.

Finding Quality Links – said is easier than done, so this can be done through 3rd party tool, e.g. Linkscape, Advanced Link Manager, Traffic Marks.

The best time to do SEO

2009-01-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

The best time to do SEO is during construction, here’s the practice to make users and Search Engines “Happy” : Enhance on Information Architecture & Usability of Site
1. Implement Web Analytics
2. Create an eye catching Heading and Logo
3. Right balance of graphics and text
4. Allow min space of 250 words of relevant text if possible
5. CMS for future redirect or inserting of pages
6. Unique page title and meta descriptions of each page
7. Use CSS code to keep excessive code out of the way – make concise space for search engines
8. Phone number should be prominent and located at the top of page
9. Readable fonts and font size
10. Readable and make available Call to Action, e.g. buy or register here, throughout the Site
11. Break up long paragraphs with photos or bullet points, use only quality graphics and photos
12. Do not over emphasized, Bold only Key ideas
13. Use text navigation, not Java script, HTML contents make engines easier to crawl
14. Anchor text links, but do not over do – make it readable
15. Use header tags (H1-H6) on every page to support page title and page contents
16. Don’t overload data field in contact us form, e.g. name, email, phone, comments are the basic
17. Have a static HTML sitemap, wrap simple description in Sitemap links
18. Update navigation and Sitemap when loading new pages

What’s new? Google's Search Personalization – SEO basis

2009-01-18T22:04:00.000-08:00

Google has personalize Search results, in the near future, you cannot rely on search engine ranking anymore.
• So How to measure success if it’s not for ranking in SEO?
o Track your traffic, conversions, and ROI! Google customize search results based on language, location, your recent search activities as Google believe this will bring us more useful and relevant search results.
• What will happen to company website?
o Since search results are customized for users, targeting more useful or relevant information searchers are looking for, conversion will improve in the long run, but traffic may reduce.
o Perceptions of ranking in search results will change in the future
o Google’s search results will vary with different search intents, such as research, looking to buy something, or looking for something locally in our area.
o Search results will depend on your web contents, geography and IP address of users
• What to focus now?
o Web contents to ensure your users will stay on your site, and usability of your site to make sure of easy navigation; and instead of ranking, focus on overall traffic, conversion, and ROI

Fixable Search Marketing – The common errors, SEO & Search Engine Marketing

2009-01-13T00:23:00.000-08:00

1. Duplicate contents, many times, we have seen many web pages having the same page title, & meta keywords or descriptions. Apart from giving the search engines the wrong impression of your site, you are also missing opportunities for search engines to bring in qualified traffic to your sites
2. Building a site without keywords research, Keyword research is the foundations of search marketing, this can be done using some of the keyword tools such as Wordtracker of Adwords Keyword tool
3. Landing traffic at the wrong page, many times, we have seen search advertisers land their users in the home page, a page is not directly relevant to what the searchers are looking for.
4. Link building ignored, having good contents or keywords in a web page is never enough, search engine or Google weighs incoming links heavily, you need to increase your familiarity and trust online!
5. Over obsessed in page rank, for example, having page rank 6 does not mean it can yield a better return than page rank 3

Fixable Search Marketing

2009-01-13T00:13:00.000-08:00

The common errors, SEO & Search Engine Marketing
1. Duplicate contents, many times, we have seen many web pages having the same page title, & meta keywords or descriptions. Apart from giving the search engines the wrong impression of your site, you are also missing opportunities for search engines to bring in qualified traffic to your sites
2. Building a site without keywords research, Keyword research is the foundations of search marketing, this can be done using some of the keyword tools such as Wordtracker of Adwords Keyword tool
3. Landing traffic at the wrong page, many times, we have seen search advertisers land their users in the home page, a page is not directly relevant to what the searchers are looking for.
4. Link building ignored, having good contents or keywords in a web page is never enough, search engine or Google weighs incoming links heavily, you need to increase your familiarity and trust online!
5. Over obsessed in page rank, for example, having page rank 6 does not mean it can yield a better return than page rank 3

Search Geeks' SEM Smart - Article marketing

2009-01-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses or companies write short articles related to their respective products or services. These articles are made available for distribution and publication. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

With the rise of e-commerce and Internet marketing especially the Search Engine Marketing (SEM), article marketing has made a move to the online world as well. As in traditional forms of media, online article marketing has served the dual role of providing publishers with essentially free content, and advertisers with essentially free advertising.
Article marketing has become increasingly popular as a marketing method under the Web 2.0 generation of business on the Internet. Many subjects have gained popularity through viral propagation of articles via social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Article marketing has proven to be a useful and effective way to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which deals with the order in which web pages are ranked for specific keywords. One method of SEO encompasses the idea that a website's rank in search engines will be higher as it obtains more back links. Therefore, writing and distributing articles that contain a link to a business owner's website result in more links back to that website. Theoretically this process will increase that website's rank within search engines. This theory has led to a trend in online marketing toward writing articles solely for SEO purposes. This trend has been matched by a wide selection of article marketing directory websites which accept, vet, and provide redistribution of such articles to online publishers.

The free distribution of articles has, however, led to a large amount of duplicated content appearing on websites across the Internet. The sudden popularity of article marketing has caused an overall reduction in quality in many subjects, mainly due to individuals writing low-quality articles as a quick way of achieving exposure. The quality of articles can also suffer as some authors seek a large quantity of back links at the possible expense of content quality. Efficient use of article marketing as a form of promotion requires invested effort in writing high-quality, relevant articles which is apparently not every business or company can do.

Search-based Adwords keywords suggestion tool

2008-12-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

For a quite long time, it seemed that Google was uncomfortable sharing their search data, maybe afraid of giving competitors too much dope. But that is not the case anymore. Google recently is sharing more and more search data to the world. This search-based Adwords keywords suggestion tool gives data on actual Google search queries and it can even matched the keywords to specific pages of your website which makes this advertising product Adwords more and more useful.

Now, let's do a short test of this tool and see what kind of suggestions that Google can give us. Look at the picture below: we use website www.webnatics.biz as the website to be investigated and SEO as the word that we want to analysis.

Click the find keywords button, then we see that Google give us few keywords with the actual monthly searching volume, suggested bid and the page that Google recommended as the landing page etc. The quality score can be high if you take Google's suggestion, and Google is telling you that there are people who are really searching these keywords. So don't hesitate to buy the keywords if the competition is not very high and you are comfortable with the suggested bids.

How To Determine Your Optimal CPC Bids

2008-12-18T22:27:00.000-08:00

Bidding for your Search Engine Marketing campaigns can be quite a tricky thing. The whole idea is not to bid too high or too low, but just right for your business.

Bidding too high will cause your daily budget to run out after a few clicks. Bid too low and you might not rank high enough in search result to achieve the number of clicks you want. Before you set your bid, consider what you can afford to pay for a click. Remember that the bid you set is the maximum amount you will ever pay for a click. Your actual cost-per-click (CPC) will likely end up being less than your bid.

Consider the actions that you want users to make when they are at your side and determine how much that particular action is worth to your business. Bidding is different for every business even if they are in the same industry. A completed action is called a conversion and it can be anything from signups to online purchase.

The performance metric CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) is a useful metric to determine your CPC bids. How much you should bid would be determined by how much that particular conversion is worth to the company. Think about the bids for individual keywords and their conversion rate. It is logical to bid higher for for those keywords that tend to have a higher conversion rate.

Because the market and customer behavior changes, competitive bids change, too. Constant monitoring of your clicks cost and bids will alert you to those changes. Remember that paying too much for clicks can mean losing money, but paying too little may result in your ads ranking so low that prospective customers overlook them.

Future of Advertising - Social Media

2008-12-15T18:30:00.000-08:00

According to Wikipedia, social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.
But after you finish reading this paragraph you may be still confusing: what is it all about?
Now here it is an interesting explaination about social media in plain English. Take a look.

Oxite, another open-source blogging platform from Microsoft

2008-12-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

Microsoft launched Oxite, another open-source blogging platform on December 8th. However, they anounced quickly that the product is not aimed to compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress, etc.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site made an official announcement. The software is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft's OSI-certified open-source licenses. Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites; the platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level, Microsoft said.

Users can create and edit a set of pages on a site, add customized HTML into pages, and support multiple blogs on a single site. Oxite is also able to integrate with Microsoft developer software such as ASP.Net MVC, Visual Studio Team Suite, and Background Services Architecture. The project began as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of ASP.Net MVC to developers as announced.

The Web site for Mix Online was built using Oxite, and Microsoft is providing the Mix Online Web site code for developers to learn from. Mix Online is the online community centered on Microsoft's Mix Web developer conference. Oxite project coordinator Erik Porter mentioned: Oxite is not a direct competitor to existing, established blogging systems, nor is it intended to challenge Microsoft's own SharePoint, which includes content-management-system capabilities. The software is intended for developers but could eventually be made suitable for the general public. "We have no plans to make this anything but a really good developer sample that should be able to run any site you want," he wrote. "That said, this is a community project now and, if the community decides to take it a different direction, we won't stop it."

Landing Page For PPC

2008-12-05T00:55:00.000-08:00

What's a PPC Landing Page? It is simply a page on your site that is customized to match the theme of a particular PPC ad group -- the keywords and ad message. The PPC Landing Page can, and often should, look very different from the other pages on your site.

This is often a difficult but crucial concept that's hard for many site owners to grasp. They are accustomed to thinking about their site as a bricks-and-mortar storefront: one entrance (the home page) through which all customers enter, linked to other pages where site visitors can hopefully find what they're looking for. Site owners often design their home page to satisfy the needs of casual browsers as well as visitors who are looking for specific items or information. While this may be fine if you are not looking into getting a better ROI, such site often does not work effectivetly for search engine marketing campaigns.

The landing page has to convince the user that they have come to the correct page and motivate them to complete a conversion, be it registration or sales transaction. This bring us back to the point earlier on, a landing page should look very different from the other pages on your site. Great search engine marketers would spend alot of time testing, optimizing and customizing every single page of the conversion process.

If you wish to optimize your landing page, contact us at Webnatics.

Google published 101 SEO guide

2008-12-02T22:40:00.000-08:00

While SEO becoming more and more popular, people start to ask more questions about it on Google webmaster blog or at Google's conferences. Questions like: "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?", "How do I improve my site?" spread everywhere into Google's forums.
In order to satisfy people's curiosity, Google announced what the search engine really like and published their 101 SEO Starter Guide.

For your convenience, you can download it here.
Within the document, Google also gives the tips to choose SEO professionals.
This document really describes the basic theory of doing SEO and it could remove the mystique of doing it. And Google helps to eliminate all the myths that are mis-leading the consumers.
Some client asked us: "So what do you actually do to optimize our website?". It's not easy to explain in one or few sentences. Now, we can show this document to our clients: the method of doing SEO is not our invention, we are following what Google announced. What we do is to configure your website to be Google friendly and try to increase the online visibility, not to just targeting some keywords and try to make your website ranking higher.
Although Google's SEO guide is written in very easy-to-understand English. There's still some technical terms or methods which are hard to be understood by people who never touched HTML. Anyhow, feel free to contact WebNatics if you have any questions with this document. We'll see what we can do to help as a Google's Agency.

SEO Methodology – Use humour for link building

2008-12-01T21:25:00.000-08:00

Many times, we are trying to get links from people, but put yourself as others, why must they link to your site? (of course, one of the reasons is to have a link exchange) In this case, using humour could be one of the reasons for people to link to your site. The strategy could include all kinds of humour, including cartoons, animations, videos, jokes, confessions, or even things overheard.

But the challenge is not everybody is humorous or funny. Here are some recommendations:
· Getting staff to be involved in such activities, note down every funny contents they encounter, I’m sure everyone has such encounters in life.
· Rewards : reward those who contribute good contents; the fact is everybody or the majority buys rewards.
· Customers involvements, who is in a better positions to poke fun of their own industries?
· Viral the contents to maximize results.

While all search marketers trying to outsmart competitors in SEO deliverables, Humour can be a good approach.

The Fundamentals of Quality Score in Search Engine Marketing

2008-12-01T21:24:00.000-08:00

Search Engines, (Google, Yahoo, MSN) have common goals
· They want users to find exactly what they are searching for
· They want advertisers to offer what the searchers are looking for.

In return
· Satisfied users return to engines to depend on search results
· Advertisers see return on advertising spent and advertising more money on engines.

Years ago, engines deployed on purely auction system to decide on advertisers’ position. This may sound fair to advertisers with budget and willing to invest but making difficult for users to find exactly what they are searching for. E.g. HP could bid very high for Dell keywords. Resulting users do not find exactly what they want at the top of the page, and relevant advertisers do not appear on Top.

So Search Engines decided to reward relevant advertisers with a Scoring systems; starting with Google, and Yahoo to follow on 28th April 2008 for South East Asia, and MSN. In this case, relevant advertisers rewarded with better positions and lower cost per click, and competitors get to pay a higher cost per click; relevant advertisers benefit from more click as position is higher, and better ROI since cost is lower.

So Quality Score is important, but how do advertisers get good quality scoring on SEM campaigns? Search Engines do not reveal the full algorithm of Quality Score, but in general, we could
· Build small adgroups consist of small number of keywords closely related to each other
· Write relevant ad copies that contains the keyword, dynamic keyword insertions, or DKI can be a good approach
· Contain searched keywords in the landing pages

Marketing Mix of Search Engine Marketing & SEO

2008-12-01T21:21:00.000-08:00

So how do you define Search? Today’s Search is getting more complicated, social media, local, universal all has Search Components, but no matter what, it’s still Search. Despite all these changes, the principals of SEM & SEO still apply, organic listing or PPC.

· Paid Listing and organic listings work hand in hand, and they must be balanced carefully. Before you maximize your Paid & Organic listings, make sure your research data is correct. Conversion is the key, and if your paid listing is converting well, it will be foolish to withdraw if if your site is ranked well organically; and do not assume organic listing converts the same as well as SEM listing as paid listing is more tactical that it creates conversion mindset to audience.
· The interaction between SEM and SEO is extremely important too, because if your site requires revamping, and this is when SEM is able to continue the visibility of your site.
· According to sources, SEO contributes 75% of all search traffic, and acquires only 15% of Search Marketing budget. As PPC becomes more competitive, the cost of investment become very expensive, and this is where SEO come to lessen the investment budget, and this is when Web Analytics comes in useful, because ultimately, SEM or SEO, still conversion or ROI counts.

Tips for a Wordpress SEO blog

2008-11-29T01:16:00.000-08:00

Here we posted some tips to get your wordpress blog rank higher in search engines without buying or exchanging links.

1. Google doesn’t care about link depth.

2. The file extension doesn’t matter - you could call files as php, html or even mattcutts.. this is not taken into consideration while calculating the rankings but don’t use the .exe extension.

3. Use a 3-4 word long ALT tag description with every image - good for SEO plus screen readers.

4. Use dashes to separate words, hyphens are OK but spaces are bad.

5. Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www).

6. Make sure post creation dates are easy to find.

7. Use full-text RSS feeds to get loyal users. partial feeds get more page views, but not as much love.

8. Don’t include the post date in your URL.

Google Forums Improvement

2008-11-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

A big welcome to the Google Southeast Asia Solutions blog ( http://cse-sea.blogspot.com ) which is for all of our advertisers, partners, agencies, developers, and Google users in Southeast Asia.
This blog will prevent you from all kinds of Google myths and present you with relevant stuff for the Southeast Asia region working as a official blog from Google. The articles in this blog will help you to really understand Google products and technologies which can make big impacts on you and your online activities. You can get information beyond the product of advertising with AdWords and AdSense; and so you will find a lot here about Google Maps, Google Earth, OpenSocial, iGoogle, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and much much more.

Another big welcome to the Google's Asia Pacific Developer Blog. See how the web developers help to move the web forward and find out information about the latest event. Check out the new direction that Google want to lead the developers to go. In the near future, everybody might have their own customized search results due to the new project like SearchWiki etc. Check out the blogs for more information.

Google is making great improvement for their help forum. This video gives you a few more details on their latest changes:

How to Get Better Visibility on Google | Suggestion from Matt Cutts

2008-11-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advised the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.(from Wikipedia)

Cutts ever said, "I'm not sure I would say ranking is dead but it's not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It's great if you're ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn't help you very much."

"The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don't worry about 'can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.'"

Quality Score for Search Engine Marketing

2008-11-14T01:03:00.000-08:00

The search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) want two things to happen:

They want users to find what they're looking for.
They want advertisers to get site visitors whose intent that matches what's offered by the advertiser's site.

This way, satisfied users will return to the search engine for dependable search results, and advertisers can rely on a steady stream of clicks that result in conversions, and so keep spending advertising money with the search engine.

Years ago, in the early age of Search Engine Marketing, the search engines employed a pure auction system, whereby the highest-bidding advertisers gained the highest ad positions. While this seemed fair from the advertisers' perspective, it sometimes resulted in irrelevant ads appearing at the top of the search results page -- making it more difficult for users to find exactly what they were looking for.

So Google (followed later by Yahoo and Microsoft) decided to reward relevant advertisers (and punish irrelevant ones) by instituting the quality scoring system. With the quality score system in place, relvant advertisers may achieve higher ads position at an lower cost than irrelevant advertisers who are paying higher CPC.

The quality scoring system is based on a complex group and series of calculations that take into consideration the relationships among the words in keyword lists, in ad text and on landing page -- as well as many (possibly hundreds) of other factors that the search engines won't reveal, in order to reduce the likelihood that some advertisers will try to "game the system" and gain unfair advantage.

If your campaigns are having problems with their quality score, contact us at Webnatics for a free consultation!.

Frightening Webmastering Myths from John Mueller

2008-11-10T02:37:00.000-08:00

Some people say to do SEO is easy thing. Everybody can do it.
So Everyone gets started somehow with:
* Keyword-stuffing
* Meta tags
* Submit & submit & ...
However the results are:
*nothing changed
*you wasted lots of time
Check out the top 10 myths as rated by a bunch of Googlers organized by John Mueller.

Increasing CTR for your Search Engine Marketing campaigns

2008-11-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

Why is increasing CTR (Click Through Rate) important? CTR is a rough indication on how your campaigns are performing. A higher CTR in general means that the users that saw your ad found that it was relevant to what they were looking for.

CTR is only one of the indication of how your campaigns are performing and should not be the only KPI for your campaigns. This is a common misconception that new advertisers commonly make. A high CTR may only mean that the Adtext that the user saw seem relevant to his query. However, activities after user clicks on the ads cannot be tracked unless some sort of tracking tool was implemented. A free web analaytic tool to track user behaviour and clicks would be Google Analytics. It is a free tracking tool offered by Google to anyone.

Don't be mistaken, even with all my ranting, it is still crucial to improve your CTR. If you have defined a conversion in your campaigns, having a high CTR is an important stepping stone to increasing your conversion.

Here are some tips to improve your CTR:

Using DKI in your adtext. However, keywords in your adgroups have to be carefully selected so that your ads will make sense and contribute to the effectiveness of your ads.
Capitalizing the first character for all the words in your adtext. This will tend to make your ads stand out.
Make sure your adtext and your landing page and website in general are speaking in the same frequency. Although this does not contribute directly to improving your CTR, users will tend to linger longer at your site. Long time = higher chance of a conversion.
Test and measure different ad messenging. Have a few variants of ad text and set them to rotate evenly. After a few weeks or even days, you should be able to see what kind of ad messenging works and what does not. Cull the ineffective ad and run those that are working for that particular adgroup.

The above are just some basic tips to improve your campaign's CTR. If you require any assistance regarding your campaigns, please contact us at Webnatics. We provide free consulation!

SEO methodology: Best Practices for 404 errors

2008-11-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

Having said so much about SEO, most of the time, technical, contents, links. It may surprise you 404 error can also affect your SEO or search engine ranking.

So from SEO perspective, why should be pay attention to 404 error? 2 main reasons, without a customised 404 error page for SEO, 2 possible actions, users may abandon their search, or search engine may think that this Site is not complete or still under construction, think that this Site is not worth of a high SEO ranking.

So what is the purpose to customize a 404 error page for SEO? 1st, it returns a correct code of URLs to tell users and search engine spider that the page they are seeking are not found, and you can also tell the users and search engine spiders what to do next. In SEO perspective, getting a higher ranking in SEO.