In this interview, Stephan Spencer sits down with Netconcepts’ analyst Jeff Muendel, to talk about MySpace marketing tips. Learn how to utilize this social media tool to market your business, expose your brand, and make friends!
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Paid Search online marketing
Jeff Muendel shares MySpace marketing tips
Web 2.0 for Publishers
In this presentation to The Wisconsin Publishers’ Production Club’s (WPPC) Catalog Innovations meeting in January, Netconcepts’ Director of E-Business, Hershel Reese explains how Web 2.0 has great implications for catalogers and publishers online.
RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.
Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.
This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.
Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.
You Will Discover:
- Best practices for RSS usage
- The benefits of user generated content
- Why tagging matters for website owners
- How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
- How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions
This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.
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Beneath the Surface of Search
It’s 2007 already. If you are like most merchants, you’ve followed the advice of your NSO firm and completed some basic site optimization projects. You routinely spot check your Google indexation, and your rankings on 100 or so “trophy” keywords to show your executive team. And a look at your web analytics shows your natural search channel sales growing. So what’s wrong with this picture?
Let the Long Tail of natural search and KPI metrics strengthen your website through best practice SEO.
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Replace by Referrer 1.0
The WordPress plugin “Replace by Referrer”, written by Charlie Evans, Sr. Developer at Netconcepts, was designed for a client who had advanced tracking capabilities in place but no way to utilize them. When prospect phone calls came in they wanted to know which search engine referred them. Additionally, they wanted to offer a different phone number displayed for each search engine. The Replace by Referrer plugin was developed to automatically replace defined text on pages and posts within content depending on search engine referrer.
If Google refers a visitor to your site, a custom phone number (specific to Google traffic) or a custom link (to a specific Google referred landing page) will be displayed to that visitor. The same technology can be applied to MSN (rebranded as Live Search), Yahoo, and all other search engines as well without having multiple pages for each search engine.
It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!
Features include:
- Allows you to replace specific text strings in pages and posts with search engine specific referrer content.
- Session identification specific to search engine. Replace by Referrer remembers which search engine the visitor came from throughout your entire site.
- And best of all, it’s FREE!
Installation instructions
- Upload replace_by_referrer.php to your wp-content/plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin.
- Go to Plugin Editor
- Click the “Replace by Referrer” file in the right hand column
- Scroll down to “// comment about this replacement” (See example below)
// comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
'google' => 'google1',
'msn' => 'msn1',
'yahoo' => 'yahoo1',
'default' => 'default1',
)Replace google1, msn1, yahoo1, or default1 with any text string.
For Example:
// comment about this replacement
'{test1}' => array(
'google' => '1-888-207-1109',
'msn' => '<a href="http://www.netconcepts.com">netconcepts</a>',
'yahoo' => '<img src="http://www.example_image_URL.com" />',
'default' => 'This default text would appear in place of {test1} if the referrer is not Google, MSN, or Yahoo',
) - When you have everything configured, insert {test1} within a post or page where ever you want the specified text seen above to appear.
Note: In the example seen above, if Google were the referrer, {test1} would appear as “1-888-207-1109″, if MSN were the referrer, {test1} would appear as netconcepts, etc.
To-do
- Configure all the referrers and replacements via the WordPress options menu in the Admin, as opposed to hardcoded in the plugin.
- Modify the code so that you can serve the text string based on referring keyword, as opposed to referring by search engine.
Feedback?
Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback by commenting to this post.
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Interview with PPC expert Alan Rimm-Kaufman
The biggest challenge (and opportunity) facing retailers in Paid Search is complexity and the speed of innovation. In an interview with Netconcepts founder and president Stephan Spencer, direct marketing guru Alan Rimm-Kaufman said every week brings new innovations, more options and more complexity, and retailers and agencies alike need to scramble every week to keep up. He doesn’t see this trend slowing – if anything, it may be accelerating. If you’re into thinking about future, he encourages you to check out …”
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A level of web dev and SEO experience that’s rare to find
“We are very happy with the growth in sales online, and Netconcepts’ management of our online media campaigning and paid search program has been a key driver of that….Netconcepts have very strong core competencies around the technical aspects of web
development and search engine optimisation…”
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What it means to be an online marketer
As a brand owner, it is important to recognize the role in which search marketing plays in the wider marketing mix and understand that it is more than sprinkling a handful of keywords on pages. Natural search marketing or search engine optimization is more than just keywords.
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PPC: In or Out Part 2
In part 2 of this article for ClickZ, Netconcepts’ lead search strategist Pat Fusco goes on to say that while PPC advertising and SEO strategies may have the common foundation of keyword research, that’s where the similarities end.
Should you hire an in-house SEM, external agency, or both? Pat says it primarily depends on your online marketing goals, marketing budget and risk management mindset.
What about buying your way into top rankings? There are seven fundamentals of any PPC campaign as Pat highlights…
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Bid jamming and gap surfing
Late last month I spoke at the “Successful Online Advertising conference in Auckland. One of the questions that came up during the session on paid search was around the tactics of gap surfing and bid jamming. A lot of people in the audience didn’t know the definitions of these terms; in fact, many had not even heard of them before. I’d guess that many of my readers are similarly unfamiliar with these two concepts. So I thought it might be useful to define them.
First off, bid jamming is something you can do in Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture). Bid jamming is when you increasingly raise your bid amount to just a penny below the top bidder who has foolishly set their maximum bid amount way too high. This forces the top bidder to pay that max bid amount per click, whereas you only have to pay one penny more than the bidder underneath you. Of course, this can cost the competitor a lot of money quite quickly but, if you are not careful, you can get bid jammed yourself in the process.
Gap surfing is a tactic for ensuring your bid is no more than it needs to be to maintain your target rank. So if you are happy to be lower than #1 position and you don’t want to pay too much, you might want to use this tactic. In a nutshell, you scan through the top ranking ads and find the big gaps in bid prices and you bid at the bottom of one of those gaps — e.g. the biggest gap within the top five positions.
I would recommend staying clear of bid jamming, and I would employ gap surfing only if you have a bid management tool that supports this capability. I wouldn’t try and accomplish it manually. Particularly since Google AdWords doesn’t even show you everyone’s bid amounts, so you’d have to continually revise your own bid amounts and monitor your position until you figured out the gaps.
As you can see, there is a lot of complexity and subtleties in pay-per-click (PPC) search advertising, and we’re only scratching the surface here. It goes on to include sophisticated web analytics, and constant automated revisions of bid amounts based on the web analytics data (e.g. the technique of dayparting). Trying to manage pay per click campaigns without the proper tools is like showing up at a gunfight with a sword. 
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To Buy or Not To Buy Text Link Ads
A few weeks back I blogged some advice here for business bloggers who might want to consider text link advertising as part of their blog marketing mix.
Well, there’s been a lot of controversy as of late about buying text links. Blogger Phil Ringnalder published a scathing post accusing publishing house O’Reilly of being a search engine spammer. O’Reilly’s founder, Tim O’Reilly, responded to the accusations on his own blog. Google engineer Matt Cutts posted a comment to Tim’s post admitting that Google has decreased the voting power of sites like perl.com and xml.com and downgraded the reputation of some of their outbound links. Ouch!
Matt’s (and presumably Google’s) position was loud and clear:
If you don’t want your own site to suffer the same fate as O’Reilly, you better tag your link ads with a rel=nofollow attribute so that you don’t pass any PageRank score to your advertisers.
In my mind, that doesn’t seem quite fair. Website owners and bloggers work hard to build a content-rich site with good PageRank score. Google’s black-or-white stance on this equates to a diminished earning ability for these websites by insisting webmasters cut off the flow of PageRank to their advertisers. This of course decreases the value of the link ads to those advertisers, and consequently the revenue likely to be realized from them. Granted, no savvy advertiser is going to buy a text link ad solely based on PageRank score, but PageRank does factor into the equation.
This makes me wonder what Google’s position is on BlogAds.com is, which is part banner ad, part text link ad. A good blog ad contains useful content. Why shouldn’t the blogger be allowed to “vouch for” (by not tagging the link with nofollow) the links contained within that ad if they so choose?
Most “white hat” SEOs such as Christine Churchill believe text link advertising is a legitimate practice. I agree with her.
I wonder what Google would do if all the websites across the Internet decided to take all their banner ad inventory they have and bypass the click-tracker redirect that counts all the clickthroughs. Suddenly all these new votes would start counting all over the Internet for commercial advertisers and sponsors. Wouldn’t that throw Google for a loop!
So what is the bottom line here for bloggers who are looking to advertise? It’s basically this: be discriminating in your link buying. Text link advertisements are not inherently evil. Just don’t buy ads on sites where any of the other advertisers on the site are misleading, deceptive or misrepresentative. By that, I mean things like the following:
- Setting the ad’s link text to some keyword-rich phrase that doesn’t accurately reflect the page that is linked to.
e.g. An ad on SeacoastOnline.com proclaims “The North Face” but that isn’t The North Face! - Linking the ad text to a landing page that is built for search engines and not for people.
e.g. the “Discount Vacations” ad on DailyItem.com points to one of Orbitz’s many “doorway pages”. - Hiding or obscuring the link so human visitors can’t see it, only search engines.
e.g. Doing a “View Source” on the home page of PRNewswire.com reveals these hidden links:
</noframes>
<a href=”http://www.icrossing.com”>Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href=”http://sev.prnewswire.com”>Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>
</frameset>
And it goes without saying that you should refrain from such practices yourself when you advertise.
This post is based on material taken from on my own blog across three separate posts: Link buying - ethical or unethical?, Buying links - Google’s perspective, and Buying link ads - the ethical debate rages.
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