Category: Digital

Yahoo's long-anticipated next-generation search advertising platform is now live. Source

Apogee Search is offering a new form of online advertising to reach customers and prospects who are in market for your product or services. Pay Per Call advertising is similar to Pay Per Click advertising, but instead of directing visitors to your website, they contact you via the phone.

You only pay for those who call. Just as display advertising with its CPM model gave way to the paid search model, so this new form of Pay Per Call advertising is opening up the door for ROI based call-in advertising. Apogee says of this new technology:

Pay Per Call is a great way to immediately boost your call and prospect volumes. Advertisements are shown on major portals such as America Online, Verizon SuperPages, and Miva. Apogee's Search can provide your company with a complete, fully managed program for Pay Per Call advertising, including accounts with Google, Ingenio (the service that powers AOL) and Verizon. This way, you can take full advantage of the ever-increasing volumes of traffic flowing through today's major web portals. Source

Drive prospects directly to your phones, but only pay when they call. To learn more of this ROI based model, visit Apogee-Search.com.

DMOZ is vital to your site's SEO strategy. DMOZ and the Open Directory Project (ODP) are what drive Google's categorization and description of your site in SERPS (search engine results pages). Getting listed in DMOZ is no cake walk, so it is handy to know more about DMOZ before you start this process:

There is more to luck than getting listed in DMOZ and there really isn’t any need to despair, all that is needed is some basic understanding of how DMOZ works and how you can take advantage of that fact to help get your site (or even multiple pages on your site) listed in DMOZ. Source

Read this handy list:

• 11 Tips to Getting Your Site Listed in DMOZ
• The Ultimate Guide to Getting Your Site into DMOZ (by SearchEngineNews.com — requires a paid subscription to read their articles)
• 5 Basic Tips For DMOZ Listings (by Search Engine Journal)
• Getting Listed in DMOZ. Not as easy as we’d like it to be. (by Joe Balestrino, Mr. SEO)

Once you're listed in DMOZ, make sure and understand the NOODP tag, as your next move will be to customize you site to selectively use this tag.

An excellent article on MarketingSherpa showcases how a great performing shopping cart can perform even better. Adagio Tea had a below-average abandon rate (35% compared to the 59.8% industry average). They offered a $5 gift certificate to incent people who had abandoned their shopping cart. Test emails were sent at a minimum three days after a cart abandon and maximum six days after. The results?

The campaign has performed admirably for 18 months now, and Kreymerman recommends other ecommerce sites test something similar.

They’re seeing a 5.6% lift in conversions from the shoppers who receive the email. Source

The lift you receive will vary greatly on your audience, your offer, and for some markets, seasonality, but auto-emails should definitely be on your short list of techniques to test. This presumes you capture the users email on a landing page or early in the cart process. When capturing emails, you should also highlight a 'No spam' policy, usually a simple sentence to help encourage the resultant user.

Want to configure the SERP (search engine results page) description? The NOODP tag let's you do this, but note these caveats when using Yahoo:

In short, the NOODP tag allows webmasters to tell the search engine not to use the ODP's title in the web search results. MSN was the first to implement the standard, and then Google followed. Tim Mayer said that Yahoo will be supporting the NOODP tag starting next week or the week after. But the tag will not prevent the Yahoo Directory title from displaying in the Yahoo search results.

Tim Mayer explained that Yahoo uses an algorithm to figure out when to use the title provided by (a) the webmaster, (b) the ODP directory or (c) Yahoo Directory. He said that since the NOODP is a standard already, they will add support for it. But they did not want to create a new meta tag to exclude the Yahoo Directory, because they use algorithms to best determine when to use which title. He said it doesn't mean they will not create a new tag in the future, but the NOODP tag that will be released next week will only prevent the ODP title/description from displaying. Source

Ian McAnerin, an SEO expert on the Search Engine Watch Forums, had this to say on how much HTML and technical knowledge an SEO specialist needs:

In my experience, about 60% of all difficulties in rankings are due to technical issues with coding or hosting/DNS.

Therefore, if you do not know enough to troubleshoot these two areas, you are only able to do about 40% of your job.

Ian goes on to explain why technical expertise is needed:

You don't have to be an expert, but you need to know what code is supposed to look like and what bad code looks like. How else would you tell someone to fix it?

For example, if you can't tell a link has been nofollowed, or that popups were made with unspiderable javascript, or that the CSS layout system has placed your links with bad anchor text under links with good anchor text, or that the headings in the code were made with text sizing rather than H1 tags, you would not be able to detect and fix those issues.

The examples are numerous - bottomline, it's like trying to become a translator without learning linguistics, or trying to be a programmer without knowing anything about computer hardware or the operating system. Sure, it's possible at a high level and for minor issues, but you'll never be really good unless you know the WHY as well as the HOW.

Read this full conversation at the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Designing a web site and need a color scheme? Try the Color Palette Generator.

Simply provide a link to where your photograph is hosted, and press a button. This tool extracts the "dull" and "vibrant" colors from your photo with corresponding color palatte colors, ready to use for web page design.

Use it at: Color Palette Generator

Just in case you needed ammo as to why splash pages were bad:

The number one reason for getting rid of our splash page was that it turned away at least 25% of our site visitors, sometimes more. This percentage is has actually been researched and it turns out that at least 25% of site visitors will immediately leave a site as soon as they see a “loading” message for a Flash splash screen (even if there’s a “skip intro” link). Our access logs confirmed this for us and this over all the other reasons caused us to get rid of it. source

Much is being said about Web 2.0 and the Long Tail. Web 2.0 is the marketing term for next generation web sites, but what is 'The Long Tail'?

In a nutshell, it's being able to put those infinitely large inventories of product up on the web for consumption, and making money off niche markets. In the new world of the Internet, the 80/20 rule no longer applies. Take this quote as an example:

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales." Source

Amazon doesn't make 80% of it's money from 20% of it's titles. They make > 50% of their money from < 50% of their titles. The Long Tail is changing the rules of Internet retailing. Note these three rules of taking advantage of the Long Tail:

• Rule 1: Make everything available.
• Rule 2: Cut the price in half. Now lower it.
• Rule 3: Help me find it.

Read more

Google search keeps getting smarter and smarter. Search relevancy scores have changed recently. Insiders attribute this to latent semantic indexing, which Google had already been using, but recently increased its weighting to make this algorithm all the more important. So what is it?

Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. A page about Apple computers will likely naturally have terms such as iMac or iPod on it...By placing additional weight on related words in content LSI has a net effect of lowering the value of pages which only match the specific term and do not back it up with related terms. Source

To give another specific example:

In an AP news wire database, a search for Saddam Hussein returns articles on the Gulf War, UN sanctions, the oil embargo, and documents on Iraq that do not contain the Iraqi president's name at all. Source

Question: How do you know if your content is laced with enough related keywords to rank well in this new world of latent semantic indexing?

Answer: Search Google for search results with related terms using a ~. For example, Google Search: ~computer will return pages with terms matching or related to computer and will highlight some of the related words in the search results. In this example you can see hardware and Laptop show up on the first page of search results, showing how deeply important these related keywords are to improving the relevancy of your content. If Google is showing related keywords in the first couple of pages which your content lacks, rework your content to include these terms.

For further reading on the latent semantic indexing:

• http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml (A great overview!)
• http://javelina.cet.middlebury.edu/lsa/out/lsa_definition.htm
• http://lsi.research.telcordia.com
• http://research.microsoft.com/users/marycz/ht98.htm
• http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/papers/index.html