Search engine optimization aims to index and improve rankings for the webpages which are most relevant to the keywords searched for according to the algorithm of each search engine. The relevant pages are returned in search engine result pages (SERPS). Basically this is done by writing a naural copy of each page containing the keywords that genuinely represent the goods and the services described within the corresponding webpages. Keywords are also used in the Title Pages, Meta Tags, Headings within a density of about 6% i.e., about 6 keywords spread over a page containing 100 words.

In order to further fine tune the pages and keep them user and search engine friendly, the architecture of the website, including its internal link structure, navigation etc., are also suitably modified for human beings and search spiders to nevigate through whole wbsite pages. Search spiders then can scan all necessary data about the whole site and store in engines’ data base. A good navigation systems imparts excellent experience to the users and they tend to visit the site again and again. This a sign of good achievement.

Numbers of inbound links to the site and the ‘quality’ of the links determine the Reputation of the website within the industry it belong to. This Reputation is one of the most important criteria for search engines to consider higher levels of rank to the deserving webpages. Algorithms are evolutionary and strives to develop every day in an attempt to provide most relevant & useful pages to the users and strike out the websites that trick them and attain higher positions for a while.

These processes are known as Organic or Algorithmic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of websites. Eventually it is essential for each and every website to get optimized organically, though temprarity they can make use of Pay-per-Click (PPC) to market their website without having to wait for the results of Organic SEO. However, users still prefer Organic Result Pages than Pages for which Advertising charges are paid to search engines. So far for inclusion in Organic Result Pages no fees are prescribed except the high usefulness of the information to the users.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Search engine optimization aims to index and improve rankings for the webpages which are most relevant to the keywords searched for according to the algorithm of each search engine. The relevant pages are returned in search engine result pages (SERPS). Basically this is done by writing a naural copy of each page containing the keywords that genuinely represent the goods and the services described within the corresponding webpages. Keywords are also used in the Title Pages, Meta Tags, Headings within a density of about 6% i.e., about 6 keywords spread over a page containing 100 words.

In order to further fine tune the pages and keep them user and search engine friendly, the architecture of the website, including its internal link structure, navigation etc., are also suitably modified for human beings and search spiders to nevigate through whole wbsite pages. Search spiders then can scan all necessary data about the whole site and store in engines’ data base. A good navigation systems imparts excellent experience to the users and they tend to visit the site again and again. This a sign of good achievement.

Numbers of inbound links to the site and the ‘quality’ of the links determine the Reputation of the website within the industry it belong to. This Reputation is one of the most important criteria for search engines to consider higher levels of rank to the deserving webpages. Algorithms are evolutionary and strives to develop every day in an attempt to provide most relevant & useful pages to the users and strike out the websites that trick them and attain higher positions for a while.

These processes are known as Organic or Algorithmic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of websites. Eventually it is essential for each and every website to get optimized organically, though temprarity they can make use of Pay-per-Click (PPC) to market their website without having to wait for the results of Organic SEO. However, users still prefer Organic Result Pages than Pages for which Advertising charges are paid to search engines. So far for inclusion in Organic Result Pages no fees are prescribed except the high usefulness of the information to the users.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Googletestad appears to stand for Google’s Test Ad which is used for live testing of their AdWords and AdSense pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system.

At the moment there are no define: googletestad definitions in Google’s database for this keyword.

The Google Test Ad

The following paid advertisement appears for a Google search on googletestad:

Popularity of googletestad as a Search Term

In June 2005, googletestad began appearing increasingly in the top search terms for search engines such as Yahoo! Search Marketing. and WordTracker.

In July 2005 this keyword was consistently in the top 30 searches as measured by WordTracker, and received over 100,000 searches according to Yahoo! Search Marketing thus:

• 72,161 searches – google googletestad monitor query
• 39,436 searches – googletestad
• 96 searches – foo google googletestad monitor query

The WordTracker Keywords Report dated August 9, 2005 (top 10 queries from the last 48 hours) reported:

• 1 jessica simpson (3377)
• 2 jessica alba (3314)
• 3 music lyrics (2679)
• 4 daniela hantuchova (1955)
• 5 paris hilton (1469)
• 6 playstation 2 cheats (1243)
• 7 xbox cheats (1231)
• 8 jokes (1069)
• 9 googletestad (1048)
• 10 google (1013)

Regarding the keyword’s trend, back issues of that service’s Top 200 long-term keyword report (for the last 110 days) showed gaining popularity:

(date – rank, and count)

• August 9, 2005 – 55 (35,032)
• August 2, 2005 – 64 (32,737)
• July 26, 2005 – 94 (28,793)
• July 19, 2005 – 105 (24,878)

As of August 13th 2005, there were 12,800 hits found for googletestad in Google’s search engine.

Links

• Official Website
• Program Details and FAQ

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. Due to the ease of managing keyword density, search engines usually implement other measures of relevancy to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from creating search spam through practices such as keyword stuffing.

Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose src attribute includes the URL of the page. Google’s servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. (Some of the details are described in the AdSense patent.) If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.

The storage requirements of an AdSense system are stunningly modest. If each URL has just 8 “high-value” keywords, each represented by a single 32-bit number, then the keywords for each URL could be represented with just 32 bytes. The high value keywords of 4 billion URLs could be stored in 128GB, which would cost only $100 (circa 2006). 400 billion URLs or 100 drives (for a redundancy of 100) would require only $10,000 in storage costs.

AdSense serves a very large number of pages each day. If each day around 1B people saw 10 AdSense impressions (or 100M people saw 100 AdSense impressions), then AdSense would serve around 10B requests/day, or 115,741 requests/sec. If one machine can serve 20 reqs/second (seek times to read a random 4096-byte location on a drive allow for bursts of well over 100 reqs/second), then Google would require 5,787 servers to serve these 10B reqs/day. If each of these servers were hosted at a cost of $100/month, then it would cost $579K/month to run the adservers needed.

Suppose these 10B impressions/day generated clicks at a clickthrough rate of .3% and an average CPC of $.10. Then each day Google would receive 30M clicks/day (347 clicks/sec), generating $3M/day ($34.77/sec), or 900M clicks/month, generating $90M/month.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Smith and Chaffey (2001) describe five key online marketing activities (the ’5Ss’) which can be applied by an organisation to implement various online marketing tactics. For example, for an e-newsletter, the 5Ss are:

• Sell – Grow sales (the e-newsletter often acts as both a customer acquisition tool and a retention tool – the lastminute.com e-newsletter has this dual role)
• Serve – Add value (give customers extra benefits online such as an online exclusive offer or more in-depth information about your products or the industry sector)
• Speak – Get closer to customers by creating a dialogue, asking questions through online research surveys and learning about customers’ preferences through tracking – which content are people most interested in.
• Save – Save costs (of print and post if you have a traditional offline e-newsletter can you reduce print runs or extend it to those customers you can’t afford to communicate with)
• Sizzle – Extend the brand online. A newsletter keeps the brand ‘front-of-mind’ and helps reinforce brand values. Added value can also be delivered by the e-newsletter by informing and entertaining customers.

Capturing attention of potential customers can be as simple as advertising using some of the new advertising tools the online world provides, such as advertising on search engines, but it can also be about configuring more remarkable methods that tend to spread across many sites and capturing the imagination of many people in the process. There are at least three major configurations of links and tools that have been used to capture attention online: funnel building, buzz marketing and cool tools.

Building a sales funnel requires working with search engine optimization, email newsletter distribution, discussion board entries, advertisements, affiliate activities and more. In fact, any way that additional links can be provided so that a potential customer can begin a conversation with a business, is educated about that business’ products/services, or is provided with concepts and propositions that will eventually lead to a sale. A funnel is usually laid down over time and is the result of continuous activity of marketers in online activities.

Buzz marketing tends to be a much quicker process and tends to involve less activity on behalf of marketers and requires attention of people online to spread by word-of-mouth, word-from-keyboards, to be fascinated or intrigued. Purple cow was sold largely through buzz marketing that spread by blogs relatively quickly.

Another tactic of gaining attention online is through the development and release of a cool tool. A cool tool is something that captures the imagination of the online browsing public and it is thought to be so cool that it should be shared with online friends. This could be a video clip, standalone software that is cute such as a cartoon character that lives on a users screen, or some other device that is used often for a specific purpose, such as 3Ms Post-it Notes.

Right in the middle of a new marketing practice is eBay with its datafeed marketing. Essentially a store owner sets up his/her data in eBay and then by way of feeds make this data available to advertising avenues, such as Froogle, Yahoo Product Search and about another twenty of thirty other sites that take datafeeds. All the advertising feed services point the prospective purchaser to the eBay auction. This is perhaps a little like building a sales funnel as described above, however, it uses a specific technology that enables ease of use.

Marketing on the internet requires that one be found using keyword searches or some form of online advertising. In any case the trick to being successful in Online Marketing is being found within the top 30 search results. There are 3 ways that one can be found. 1.) natural search engine ranking (70% of searchers will skip over sponsored results and start with the naturally ranked sites) 2.) Paid inclusion and 3.) Pay per click. Due to the extreme difficulty of achieving a natural high ranking on a major search engine most companies opt for #’s 2 and 3 for their online marketing. Unfortunately the 3rd option is very costly and only the most well heeled companies can afford to market online via pay per click.

What is true of Online Marketing today is that one must pay to play. Since the dot com bust several years ago search engines have discerned that in order to survive and thrive they must generate significant revenue. At first the hope was that banner advertising would be sufficient to fill the search engine coffers but it soon became evident that searchers did not respond to banners. It then became evident that there were 2 primary ways to create income for search engines and online directories. Thus paid inclusion and pay per click were born!

Recently potential greed-related challenges have emerged. There are companies that create false hits and traffic. Most recently Google has been sued for click fraud. [1] Whether or not the charges prove to be true, actions like this make people think twice about using pay per click as part of their online marketing package.

Semantic logic will allow searchers to use not just keywords to search, but rather they will search using common language. This is a big departure from the crude Boolean logic which has served the Internet searching community for the last decade.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been from the start important to the Google algorithm [1]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

But manipulated it was. Webmasters had already developed link manipulation tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google’s algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank’s reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page’s value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

It was time for Google—and other search engines—to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Much current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely speculation and informed guesses. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization.

The following, though, are some of the considerations search engines could be building into their algorithms, and the list of Google patents [2] may give some indication as to what is in the pipeline:

• Age of site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Standard on-site factors
• Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for sites with extensive keyword meta tags indicative of having being SEO-ed)
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
• External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (finance/financing)
• Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
• Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
• Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
• Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
• Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
• Semantic connections of hosted documents
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
• Technical matters like use of 301 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
• Hosting uptime
• Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
• Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant’s viewpoint, is that with this pay for performance model, no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized.

Some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, although research has shown in general the increase to be approximately 15-20% of online revenue.

Some advertisers offer multi-tier affiliate programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-affiliates. In practical terms: publisher “A” signs up the affiliate program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher “A” attracts other publishers (“B”, “C”, etc.) to sign up for the same affiliate program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers “B” and “C” will result in additional, lower commission for publisher “A”.

Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup. Most affiliate programs are simply one-tier.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Currently there is much debate around the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of SEOing their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google’s algorithm update dubbed “Big Daddy” in February 2006 which was the final stage of Google’s major update dubbed “Jagger” which started mid-summer 2005 specifically targeted this kind of spam with great success and enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer generated duplicate content from its index.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.