The new issue of Business Week notes that Pay-per-call ads are luring to the Web service-oriented businesses that don’t have Web sites and prefer calls over clicks to rack up sales.
Small-business customers like Appleton say it offers a better return on investment than pay-per-click advertising and suits the needs of businesses that often can’t close a sale via the Web only.
Most pay-per-call advertising services work like this: First, companies bid for placement on keyword searches. Then their ad is served to the user based on location, and the company is charged each time a user calls; the ad itself is placed for free.
When companies register with most providers, their site is assigned a unique phone number that appears in the ad, so that the company can track how many calls actually come through the pay-per-call advertising system. Businesses only pay when someone searching for their product or service picks up the phone and calls them.
Ingenio, a San Francisco-based local search advertising company with 110 employees and more than $100 million in annual revenue, is one that’s betting that the torrid growth rates of pay-per-click advertising can’t continue forever.
Barach thinks the advertiser’s return on investment more than makes up for the higher initial price of pay-per-call vs. pay-per-click. He says the average conversion rate on a pay-per-call ad is three to five times more successful than a pay-per-click ad in a field like legal services, and that rate grows to eight times for smaller purchases like flower shops.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 4:03 pm
Filed under: Pay-Per-Click Marketing, Search Engine News, The Business Of Search, Pay Per Call Advertising
comments ?A little website optimization can go a long way toward helping an entrepreneur get a site placed highly enough in search results to make a marked impact in the bottom line, writes David Utter in this article on WebProNews.
Is this really news, methinks? Perhaps, for the uninitiated. But for people who know their way around the web it will come as no surprise that many sites have turned to search engine optimization to help their chances of gaining a place in the top-of-fold first page organic search results.
Utter also quotes The Wall Street Journal’s Startup Journal, which acknowledged the importance of SEO for new websites, and advocated a few marketing ideas to help extend the reach of a site including - inviting users to write reviews of the business on sites like Yahoo Local; avoid overspending on a flashy site that won’t attract search engines; design landing pages that will be useful to searchers querying for particular information; and track those results.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 6:36 pm
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, The Business Of Search
comments ?There’s a troubling trend on the internet - that of stealing other people’s content for the purpose of boosting Adsense earnings. Splogs were one of their manifestations.
Once those evil tactics stopped working, marketers came up with private label rights (PLR) articles and software tools that mislead people into believing they will help them create unique content.
I’d been meaning to write about this, so I was glad when publisher Chris Knight, of the high-quality EzineArticles directory, took a stand about it on his blog.
His post inspired me to pen my own thoughts on this topic. So here’s my article on why these methods of content creation are baaaad karma.
Read: Three Good Reasons Why PLR Articles Are A Bad Idea
Feel free to post it in your newsletter or blog with the resource box and links intact.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 4:31 am
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, SEO Copywriting
comments ?SEO Black-Hat techniques are in the news with the BBC reporting that Google has “blacklisted” the website of German car manufacturer BMW for breaching its guidelines.
Investigations by Google found that BMW’s German website influenced search results to ensure top ranking when users searched for “used car.” Google website guidelines request that webmasters “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.
“BMW admitted using so-called “doorway pages” to boost search rankings, but denied any attempt to mislead users. Google has now reduced BMW’s page rank to zero, and confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches.
Will the reportage by BBC brand SEO’s universally as bad guy Black Hat SEO’s and ignore the good guy White Hats? Well, bad news always make the headlines, so its not surprising that the news about a company like BMW losing its search engine rankings is big news.
As Matt Cutts reports on his blog, Google is ramping up on international webspam and when a large corporation like BMW happens to get caught in its nets, it makes the case for ethical SEO practices stronger than ever.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 12:18 pm
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Google News, Black-Hat SEO
1 commentGoogle is testing a new data center infrastructure, a feat much bigger and comprehensive than an algorithm change.
Dubbed “Big Daddy”, this new data center will reportedly add new ground-level capabilities into the Google search function and drive those powers deep into all the algorithms with which Google searches, studies and indexes the Web.
The new BigDaddy data center contains new code for examining and sorting the Web, and once it has been tested fully, will become the default source for Web results, according to Google’s chief search engineer Matt Cutts. In a January 4 post on his blog, Cutts said that might happen in early February or March of this year.
Among others, some of the issues that the BigDaddy update plans to tackle are “canonicalization” - the process by which the search engine decides which of a series of related URLs is the proper one to insert into the Google index. It also plans to tackle the issue of 302 redirects that are used to hijack content and pages .
Yahoo! and MSN have been handling 302 redirects for a year or more, but according to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, other aspects of BigDaddy will help position Google to lay the groundwork for more advanced algorithms, larger databases, and being able to index different types of content more effectively.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 2:36 pm
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Google News, Search Engine News
1 commentI just came across this interesting article by David Utter, on how personalization and social networking will impact the SEO industry.
He predicts that networked users will prefer searching within their network for resources, and quotes Danny Sullivan on how social networks will help eliminate a lot of search spammers and impact anyone who uses SEO without the backing of good content.
Now, anything that takes searchers away from search engines is bad news for SEOs. That’s one of the reasons why search marketing should never be considered in isolation from other methods of building traffic.
There are a number of ways you can get your website noticed on social networks.
1. Forums: Participarte in forums, especially those in your industry
2. Social Networks: Join and participate in social networking sites like Ryze.
3. Blogs: Write an authoritative, content-rich blog with original content
Blogging allows you to combines the power of SEO with social networking. Writing well, and often, on your chosen topic can make you a thought-leader who gets recommended within a network. That’s why we consider blogging an important part of an overall SEO strategy.
If you’re thinking of creating a splog or a blog without unique content just for the purpose of getting indexed, we recommend you don’t do it. Not only will it piss off visitors who come there expecting to read good content, its bound to backfire and/or get your site banned.
If SEO is an important part of your traffic building strategy, there’s no reason why you should not get started writing a good blog now. If you’re not upto doing it yourself, check out our business blogging solutions.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 7:06 pm
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Online Publicity, Business Blogging
2 commentsAn article in CIOL/Cybermedia News notes that increasingly companies abroad are outsourcing search optimization work to Indian vendors. In what seems to be more than a trend, it states:
Organizations are increasingly looking at SEO companies to increase their page ranking (sic) on the search engines and are looking at ways to increasing their margins by off shoring this work to India.
The article notes that while SEO consultants in London or Los Angeles charge anything from $100-300 per hour, an Indian firm would complete for just $6000. Language skills and technical proficiency are also some of the reasons for outsourcing SEO to India. With an increase in Internet penetration, the piece of the SEO pie that is outsourced to India is bound to increase.
Like other Indian SEO firms, a significant portion of our revenue comes through partners in the UK and Singapore. We’re currently looking for partners (SEO and web design firms) in the USA, New Zealand, Australia, the Middle East and the Far East. If you’re interested, contact us to discuss your outsourcing requirements.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 8:46 am
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click Marketing, The Business Of Search
2 commentsIndiaInfoline reports on ING Vysya Life’s launch of its new blogging portal that has made them the first insurance company to provide an online presence to its top insurance advisors.
The www.pickuradvisor.com site allows customers to interact with top life insurance advisors online, get answers to their insurance queries, and engage in a conversation with their chosen advisor through a private blog that the customer and the advisor start together on the site.
ING Vysya hopes that the portal will help to engage and interact with customers and enrich their experience. The 27 net-savvy advisors who will start blogs on the site have been trained to provide good answers to customer queries.
So are you starting a blog for your business yet? Check out our business blogging services to learn more.
Posted by Priya Shah @ 4:50 am
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Online Publicity, Business Blogging
comments ?A while ago we got our brand new company domain up from PageRank of 0 to a very healthy PageRank of 5 in under two months?
Yes, we know PageRank doesn’t mean much, except in terms of branding. But it does give some indication of how effective your link-building techniques are. So what was so remarkable about the way we achieved a decent PR in a short time?
It was more the fact that we used very sound techniques to make that happen. No reciprocal links, no link buying, no techniques that could get you banned. Just completely legitimate methods that you can use time and again to build links to your own website.
Why Press Releases?
Among the most effective techniques that helped us build quality links to our website was the use of press releases. In fact, using an optimized press release is such a powerful method of building links that we now recommend it to all our clients.
Just the single press release here helped us build links not only from high-PR press release sites, but also from competitor sites where our news was syndicated.
http://www.seoandmore.com/media/press1.htm
Competitor Sites? How Do You Do That?
Well here’s the secret (if you want to call it that). One of the best sites to submit your press release is on PRweb. Using the $80 option, you can get your release syndicated through Yahoo! News so that it gets picked up and syndicated on a lot of other sites related to your theme or topic.
Result: You can get up to hundreds of theme-relevant links pointing back to your site in just a few hours after your press release has been syndicated. Many of these sites could be your competitors.
Imagine having your competitors working to build links to you. What more effective link-building tactic could there possibly be?
Of course, once your link on Yahoo! News vanishes, your link popularity (and PageRank) could drop. But that didn’t happen to us, because we recommend that you always build redundancy into your link campaigns. So we use article marketing and directory submissions to continue to build quality links to our sites.
Why The New Google Loves Press Releases
One of Google’s recent patents states that it intends to monitor news stories, an indication that the new Google gives more weight to stories and links appearing on news sites.
But building quality links to your site is only one of the benefits of using press releases. They are an effective tool to use in an online PR campaign and have benefits that reach far beyond boosting search engine rankings.
A well-written optimized press release can.
· Create publicity for your company
· Draw attention to new products and promotions
· Get you in the news for the right reasons
· Boost visibility in your industry
· Boost your reach and influence among your target audience
Some marketers are touting press releases as the new “blog and ping” alternative to getting indexed in the search engines? We wouldn’t go so far as to call them that.
But if your business could benefit from the right kind of links and online visibility, press releases may be just the tool your organisation needs.
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Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog.
This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
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Posted by Priya Shah @ 11:22 am
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, Boosting Backlinks And Pagerank, Online Publicity
2 commentsToo often companies make their websites read like a sales brochure. Does this sound familiar?
XYZ company was founded in 1967, and has 16 directors, each of who are experts in their domain, with over 2348 hours of manpower experience. Our offices are spread out over many continents, blah, blah, blah…
Well that wasn’t a very good example, but you get what I mean, right?
The true “corpspeak” company starts by talking about themselves, continues the conversation by… talking about themselves… and ends it, you guessed it… by talking about themselves.
Who runs the company, how many man hours of experience they have, how good they are at what they do - do you think your visitors even care about that? Not!
In fact that’s the best way to turn them off and lose them right at the outset. The “corpspeak” approach to writing copy is the death-knell for any business that depends on conversions.
You need to understand one very important thing about your visitors. When they visit your site, they are tuned into only one radio station - WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).
And you have only a few seconds to get their interest and keep them reading long enough to take the action you want them to take - whether you want them to buy something, fill out a form or just initiate contact.
All your visitors want to know is what you can do for them. And if they don’t get that in the first few seconds, they go, vanish, vamoose - never to return.
As a business that depends on conversions, you need to learn the art of writing customer-centric copy that is optimized for the search engines, and also gets your visitors to take the action you want them to.
Or you can let your website be a boring online brochure that no one will ever read. The choice is all yours!
Posted by Priya Shah @ 8:39 am
Filed under: Search Engine Optimization, SEO Copywriting
1 comment