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Link Building Tips using Alexa

Nov122009

Google Launches Product Listings Ads In Search Results

Tags: google

Today it was announced that Google product listing ads display in the google search results, a cost-per-action ad program:

Product Listing Ads is part of our effort to simplify the advertising process for merchants with large product inventories. Some of the key features of Product Listing Ads include:

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.
List your entire inventory: Product Listing Ads requires no keywords or additional ad text. Whenever a user enters a search query relevant to an item in your Google Merchant Center account, Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name. Product Listing Ads makes it easy for you to promote your entire product inventory on Google.com.

So far the ads display randomly around half way through the page and it is not yet defined exactly the point of preference. It may turn out in the future that the ads display just below the sponsored listings at the top.

For Affiliate Marketers it has been debated whether this would put them in jeopardy. Getting a product to display in the top of the search results is another story and something all SEO professionals Im sure will be studying more carefully along with the demand. Although it seems Google wants a slice of every action, they are always striving to find better search results but for me I some what think that their search results will end up looking very untidy.

What are your thoughts?

Nov122009

Teaching Staff What You Do & Then They Copy You

Tags: SEO

In the past I have had staff that have worked for me under the role of internet sales consulting to contact clients for SEO or online marketing and other website development projects. These staff have worked for me at the office on a regular salary and benefits.

After some time they prove to be trustworthy so you tell them how to do certain things other then their main role perhaps on the technical side that they were not aware of. Perhaps on SEO, Online marketing and whatever else you need done because you are just simply overloaded and have no choice but to pass on some work to others.

You know telling them how to build links and where to build them is one thing and then the funny thing is perhaps I would call it the stupid thing is they bluntly think they know SEO. What they don’t realise is there is so much more to know about SEO. How to get inside sites and tweak them, knowing html, knowing internal link structures, sitemaps using xml, broken links, validation which is only 10% of SEO, the other 90% is off-page techniques which is the biggest thing then constant learning as Google and other search engines change their rules and algorithm structure all the time, it takes time and effort to be updated with all this information.

But you know what after knowing all this you can still have enough knowledge to do SEO for yourself don’t get me wrong atleast after some months or years. But setting up a business is another story. After 3 months in total, 2 months doing invoicing and contacting clients and perhaps 1 month on some basic things I got them to help me with on the technical side, they think they already know everything and want to start up their own SEO company .

Remember this folks there is only one You, so this they can not take away from you. You are the one that puts all the blood sweat and tears and takes action. What I can’t stand is leachers, people who leach off you and want to be your best mate for information you can give them.

See there is a difference when you give someone tools or tips for them to then take that and find ways of doing it themselves then someone taking your whole business model which is a sneaky way. I will not give the name of the staff that was working for me that did this because I believe they already know who they are once they read this post. It is purely enough guilt in itself. Now I’m a believer in karma and I know also for a fact that these people do not last long.

Now what was even more upsetting is these staff I trusted were building up their own clients list during time that I was paying them during working hours. This is wrong. You don’t knock food out from the hand that is feeding you folks.

Running a full business with an office and setting up a company and handling tax, with office equipment with staff and having an accounting department and legal attorney, is all things you need to have prepared when going into business. If on the other hand they go into freelancing well that is another story. The freelancers rarely get taken seriously unless they are promoting them self on a well known platforms such as oDesk.

But the bottom line is if you work for a company and if you think you know how to do what they do then good luck, and I also say this whatever you do is fine, but never use unethical ways to get where you want including taking clients, and working on your own projects in their time. It is not good karma and if you work for bigger companies they can sue you and big time.

Perhaps we were too nice on that occasion!

Oct272009

25 Most Famous Quotes From Online Marketing Heroes

Tags: internet marketing

Recently I had read the book Online Marketing Heroes and I must say it’s one of the most inspirational books I have ever read. It’s a book from the same company that published Blogging Heroes.

Michael Miller interviews each marketer and really goes into great detail on what works for them and what has made them successful today.

From marketers with shopping websites through to travel and online marketing businesses there’s really a great mix. Lee Odden and Jill Whalen had some great tips in their also.

So with this I was inspired to give you a taste of the book and to list some of the most famous quotes from them that were also said in the book:

	“Focus on the user, build for the long view, and the money will come.” Greg Hartnett, Best of the Web, Hotel Hotline
	“E-commerce is an evolution. You Don’t have to get everything right immediately; you can learn from it.” Lauren Freedom, the e-tailing group, inc.
	“No matter how much you spend on it, a web site is invisible until somebody links to it” Eric Ward, Link Marketing Consultant
	“[If] you can get the PR people interacting with the search people, they will discover that there’s lots of things they can do together.” Greg Jarboe, SEO-PR.com
	“You need an information-rich web site and a web site that responds to [customer] needs, whatever they are.” Joan Holman, Legacy Achievement Foundation
	“Every year the marketing landscape changes, every year the customers become more demanding, every year they’re wanting more things. You have to always be sprinting to stay ahead of the competition.” Jacob Hawkins, Overstock.com
	“What we’re trying to do is make sure that we are providing the most flexibility and the most convenient ways for customers to shop, whether they start online and go in the store, or start in the store and go online.” Mark Oldani, Circuit City
	“People are passionate about brands, not necessarily because they’re getting some kind of buyoff. The best loyalty doesn’t necessarily come from loyalty programs.” Jeffrey Glueck, Travelocity
	“If you consider a personal character, then the experience you want to create is the story.” Tamara Adlin, Adlin inc
	“The bigger story here is that the fabric of the Net has changed; it’s a place for people to connect up around shared interests and then collaborate towards some sort of action.” Steve Rubel, Edelman.com
	“I think people are more informed because of the Internet than they were before.” Jordon Gold, Freedom.com
	“Do you ever want to sacrifice tone and feel for what you know the search engines are looking for on a page? That answer is no.” Heather Lloyd-Martin, SuccessWorks
	“It used to be that if you wanted sphisticated marketing tools, you had to be rich. That’s not the case on the Internet. Anyone can compete, just at different levels.” Chris Baggott, Compendium Blogware
	“[It's] a way to build up buzz in blogs, for people who want to get information out there to the blogosphere.” Ed Shull, NetResults
	“[The blog has] become a real conversation tool and forum to have a conversation with our customers.” Brian Lusk, Southwest Airlines
	“That’s where a lot of the benefit of social networks comes from; the ability to promoted information to communities of like minded individuals.” Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing
	“If you optimize it and it’s relevant for the keyword, it’s probably going to rank.” Liana Evans, KeyRelevance
	“You use Google to test everything and get the message right-and then you go to the other places.” Perry Marshall, Marshall & Associates
	“I think it comes back to Marketing 101. Who is your target audience? How are you trying to influence them?” Kevin Lee, Didit.com
	“General search engines can’t solve everybody’s unique needs, so vertical search engines in shopping or local are critical to the landscape.” Paul O’Brien
	“More and more marketers are starting to realize that, in a lot of cases, this should be thir first buy. It’s easy to do it, it’s easy to measure results, it’s not that difficult to learn, and there’s a low barrier to entry.” Ron Belanger, Yahoo Search Marketing
	“What we want, in time, is to offer all advertisers a very advanced set of features but in a way that’s incredibly easy to use, so our system can help optimize advertisers’ performance without causing too much work.” David Fischer, Google
	“Our job is to facilitate our clients’ direct experience of their customers.” Phil Terry, Creative Good
	“Interactive and digital technology doesn’t necessarily do a lot of things new, but it does all things better, faster, more cost efficiently.” Patrick Duparcq, Kellogg School of Management

Oct122009

Ten Year Update for eBay Australia

Tags: Australia, ebay

From the days where retailers were closing up their retail stores to come online in 1999, eBay Australia was launched by Kerry Packer’s ecorp and started off with 9000 members. Today they have 8 million registered users, and have generated 2.6 billion dollars worth of sales and have sold 173 million items and have recently celebrated eBay Australia Ten Year Anniversary

“The site has grown from an auction-based sales site with an average of 94,000 listings a month in 1999 to today’s online shopping phenomenon, averaging almost 80 times that number of listings each month.”

I remember back in the day where you could almost sell anything and it would sell, today this is still happening. It was reported that a Nutri Grain sold on eBay today for $1000, just 1 grain of Nutri Grain, how bizarre!

But even through growing times, eBay on the other hand is still cutting back on jobs as stated recently. With 1600 layed off in 39 countries, and 18 of those will also be cut in the land of Oz. They will then be investing in other ventures one company Bill Me Later .

For those of you who are not aware , Skype is owned by eBay but recently in September eBay sold 65% of Skype to a private equity firm Silver Lake Partners for 1.9 billion leaving ebay with 35% shares.

Oct62009

Ping Before You Bing

Tags: Search Engine

With the newly launched search engine from Microsoft Bing, It makes sense to take advantage of getting as much exposure from there as possible, as they are spending lots of money right now and all kinds of promotions, You can also find a great comparison just for the fun of it from keywords used both from Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask and furthermore check the difference in search results from both Bing vs Google.

So, you are probably wandering what is Pinging all about or if you have a blog you may have some idea. But in a nutshell if you submit your rss feed or blog site to a ping site this tells the search engines that you’ve just updated your blog. Because search engines (and people) like to read new and fresh content they are more likely to take a wander over to your site to see what’s new.

Be sure not to get banned though from pinging and if you run wordpress I recommend you install MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Here I have put together a list of pinging sites that you can submit your feed too. Make sure when you ping, you put in the url of the page that you would like to ping too, this does not mean pinging just your home page. Enjoy!

Last but not least have some fun and see how your pings come up in the search engines, give a try in Bing

Jun222008

8 Very Interesting facts about Google

Tags: google

Take a look on the inside and behind the scenes!

1. The size of googleplex / google headquarters is 129619 square meters, or 32.03 acres
2. They have their own Restaurant with Organic Meals that are served to all employees FREE.
3. They have 200,000 computers at their headquarters to cater for the massive amount of bandwidth needed to generate and support the millions of users online.
4. After Yahoo Secured a deal with AOL in 2004 (but without signing) to win the bid to take over the European Market, Google found out and flew in their private jet on the same day all the way to UK to convince AOL otherwise and gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Yahoo refused to get into a bidding war and let them get the better of it and win.
5. The staff at Google are allowed 1 day a week to work at whatever interests them, and can be anything ranging from developing their own commercial website to whatever they like. The founders Page and Brin see this as expanding their knowledge and allowing this keeps the staff enthusiastic.
6. Google’s first webpage ever recorded in the way back machine in November 1998, with the home page not having a logo.
7. Google invented a special scanner to digitize 15 million library books and have them published on their engine.
8. There is still to this day no resolution on click fraud.
All of these facts were found and put together after reading – The Google Story Book

googleplex