Overture Adds Disney Owned Sites to PPC Distribution

Overture sent this news announcement today. They've made a deal to replace Google AdWords at all the Disney owned sites including, Disney.com, Movies.com, ABC.com, ABCNews.com and ESPN.com.

MSN To Launch New Paid Listings Program

MSN officially announced its plan to roll out a paid listings program similar to those run by Google and Overture/Yahoo. Although no date has been set for the US release of the program, MSN will begin testing it in France and Singapore within the next six months.

Currently, advertisers running campaigns through Overture/Yahoo show up in MSN search results. However, when the new program rolls out those who wish to continue showing up on MSN will have to enroll in MSN’s program. And with three paid search providers, bid management is going to become even harder and more time consuming. Read more about it here.

Favorite RSS Feeds

Several of you have asked me to post my list of favorite RSS feeds. Much of what I read every day is Internet Marketing related, but there are a few that are just for fun.

Here’s my list. Where there is just one feed available at a site, I’ve posted the feed URL. Where there is more than one feed, I’ve posted the URL of the page which lists the feeds.

Terri’s RSS Feed Favorites:
Search Engine Watch
Yahoo News: RSS & Blogging
Yahoo News: Technology
NPR
Slashdot
ClickZ News
ClickZ Stats
eMarketer
GrokDotCom
Web Marketing Today
SitePoint
Comics
UserPlane

Sites to find more RSS Feeds:
Syndic8.com
Feedster.com

And if all of those aren't enough, just type in “rss feed” at Google or Yahoo and you’ll find more than you could even begin to read. ;)

New data RE: Natural SEO vs. PPC

A very interesting eye tracking study was released today that shows how a searcher views a search results page at Google. Those of you who have spoken to me about this topic know that I beat the "integrated approach" drum regularly with regard to SEO and PPC.

This study shows that the average searcher will look at the organic search results first with the first three ranked sites being viewed by 100% of the searchers! Followed by the PPC listings at the top of the page (again, first three). However, the PPC listings get only half the views that the SEO listings get.

The study points out in a very concrete way that SEO should always be the first piece of your online marketing exercise, followed by a good linking program and PPC campaign. It will help your ranking and most importantly, it will help your sales.

Important Search Engine News - Week of 3/1/05

Latest Search Engine Ranking Stats

Here are the Nielsen/NetRating February Search Engine market share numbers. No surprises here, Google is still number one providing 47 percent of all searches done in February, followed by Yahoo with 21 percent and MSN trailing at 13 percent.

Of particular interest in this article is a finding that the majority of searchers use multiple search engines. Again Google comes out on top, but they share 58 percent of their visitors with Yahoo and MSN. This finding clearly points out how important it is to spread your Search Engine marketing attention and dollars across the 3 major engines rather than focusing only on Google.
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Overture to become Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions

Two years after Yahoo! acquired Overture, it is dropping the Overture name and moving to integrate it into the Yahoo! advertising unit. The change will occur in the 2nd quarter of 2005 with the launch of a new Advertising Solutions Center Web site, where advertisers can access search marketing tools as well as the company's other offerings like Yahoo! Shopping's Product Submit and Yahoo! Directory's Express.

Yahoo! is making a big push to be responsive to smaller advertisers/publishers. My guess is they'll have new tools more like Google's AdSense soon.

SEO & Website Design Considerations

I am often asked to give a list of guidelines when a client is considering re-designing their website. The question usually arises as a budgetary consideration. The client doesn’t want to spend money on a new website only to discover that the new site causes issues with their search engine listings. They don’t want to find themselves spending even more to fix problems caused by a site redesign. They’d rather do it right the first time and frankly, I’d rather not have to be the one to tell them that their new site has problems.

So, here’s my basic list of do’s and don’ts for SEO friendly site design.

DO:

• Do make sure that your pages have plenty of content. Around 300 to 500 words of plain html text on the page will give the spiders something to work with.
  
• Do focus on no more than 2 or 3 keywords per page
  
• Do make sure that your text has a keyword density of between 3% to 5%
  
• Do write a Title Tag of around 80 characters in length. Include the keywords that are important to that page. Each page should have its own unique title tag.
  
• Do write a Meta Description 200 characters in length. Include the keywords that are important to that page. Again, each page should have its own unique Meta Description.
  
• Do write a Meta Keywords tag of up to 500 characters. Use keywords important to that page. Each page should have its own unique Meta Keywords.
  
• Do put plain html text links on your pages. You want the spiders to follow the links to the other important pages of your site. It helps your site visitors too.
  
• Do put a site map in your site. Make sure you link to it from the front page.
  

DON’T:

• Don’t spend too much time on your Meta Tags. They are secondary in importance to most search engines and some don’t use them at all.
  
• Don’t put your content (body text) into graphics, flash, frames, scripts, etc. The major search engines have problems indexing content that isn’t in plain html. They like html text… so, give them html text!
  
• Don’t clutter up the top of your code with everything but the Body text. Try to put the content as high on the page as possible.
  
• Don’t repeat keywords more than 3 times in your Meta Keyword or Description tags and no more than 2 times in the Title.
  
• Don’t put your links in graphics, flash, or javascript. The search engines may have difficulty following them to index the rest of your site.
  

Now before you get excited, i’m not saying that Flash and JavaScript are not to be used at all. They have their place, but must be used with care.

If you follow these few basic guidelines, you’ll have a site that is easy for the spiders to crawl and has the best chance of ranking well. Then you get to start the process of tweaking the pages for conversion. But that’s another topic!

Search Engine Optimization: Turning Mystery into Mastery - Part 1

Today, W3PR launches our new RSS/Atom Feed service with a series of articles designed to help you understand and take advantage of Search Engine Optimization.

Over the next days and weeks, I'll be posting articles that cover every aspect of SEO. So, go ahead and sign up! You can discontinue the feed at any time, but my guess is that you'll find it helpful and want to know more. We’re starting with the basics and will quickly move into more complicated issues as well as other Internet marketing topics. So, send me your questions and I'll try to address them as soon as possible.

Search Engine Optimization: Turning Mystery into Mastery - Part 1

Do you know how your customers find your website? After email and instant messaging, using search engines is the second most popular activity among Internet users worldwide. (Source: USC Annenberg School 2004 Digital Future Report September, 2004) Therefore it is critical that your site be listed well in the top search engines. Unfortunately, the search engines don't "just find" your site. You must optimize and submit it to them.

When most people think of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) they think of it as "too technical" at best and "black art" at worst. In fact, optimizing your site to rank well at the search engines is neither. SEO should be thought of as just another marketing tool that you have at your disposal in the larger marketing mix of Internet advertising, direct marketing, yellow pages, newspaper or magazine print ads, radio or television, etc. And though it takes time and effort, Search Engine Optimization is probably easier than you think.

Is SEO Worth The Bother?

You spent a great deal of time and energy building your website. You thought through the products that would be featured and how they would be presented to attract the customer and stimulate a sale. You considered what the page would look like and took into account your company's image and brand look and feel. You also considered the knowledge you have of your customers and what they respond to.

Similarly, your listings at a search engine should be looked at as an extension of your brand and image to both your current and future customers online. You wouldn't consider letting a newspaper or the yellow pages write your copy and define your business to their audience without your input. Neither should you do that with your search engines listings!

What's Important To The Search Engines?

To start with, you need to understand what the search engines are really designed to do. Understanding this helps you to design your website pages to take full advantage of this great marketing tool.

Very simply, Search Engines are designed to do three things:

Index text - This means the text that appears in body copy on any page of your site. This is where the search engines prefer to find your keywords as well as the ?theme? (or whole picture) of your site.

Follow links - The search engine spiders will follow any html link on a submitted web page. The spider then will index the content (text) on that page as well.

Measure popularity - This mostly applies to Google. The search engine follows links from all the sites that reside in its indices. If a site has links to other sites that are about the same topic, then those sites are ascribed a certain amount of "popularity" because they were linked to the first site. All other things being equal, a site with many links to it is ranked higher than a site with few or no links from other sites.

Remember that the search engines are in business to deliver the most relevant results to their visitors. Your content and links need to tell the search engine what your site is about. The search engines in turn will deliver qualified visitors, (i.e. those that are searching for what you offer) to your website.

Once you understand what the search engines need to list your site well and take advantage of that knowledge, your site will fare much better than the 85% of sites that do nothing.

Next up, we'll talk about the basic process of optimizing a website. Stay tuned and don't forget to send in your questions for future articles!