Search Engine Solutions Blog

These two emails sent by Google found in my Outlook Junk Folder:

Subject: New Optional Benchmarking Feature Available in Google Analytics
From: google-noreply@google.com
Message text:
Dear Google Analytics users,

We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings. If you have logged into your account recently, you may have noticed that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

To learn more about data sharing settings, visit our FAQs:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515

We’re also happy to announce industry benchmarking as the first new feature available to those who opt to share their data. Benchmarking lets you compare your metrics against industry verticals.

To enable this optional new feature, an administrator on your account will need to make the following selections on the Google Analytics data sharing settings page:

1. Log into your account. You’ll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page.

2. Click the “More data sharing options” link within the yellow box.

3. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data “Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service”. You can also choose to share your data “With Google products only” to take advantage of advanced Google advertising products and services as they become available.

The industry benchmarking feature is currently in beta. Once you have enabled benchmarking, it may take up to two weeks before the categorized, aggregated and anonymized benchmarking data shows up in your reports.

For more information on the benchmarking service, visit our FAQs: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

In addition to the new benchmarking service, opting to share your data will also enable you to take advantage of new advanced Google products and services as they become available. We think these services will offer greater insight and sophistication to users who have opted to share their data. However, if you would prefer not to use these services, simply specify on the settings page that you don’t want to share your data.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

Does anyone have any idea why this happens?

My collegeaus and competitors have been writing about their website performance on 2007. Now it’s my turn.

Yep, my old login to PayScale still works! Site URL is payscale.com

They do have SEO category now and offering 16 SEO job categories. I typed “sempo” for the “Certifications” question and asked to choose:

[_] Advanced SEO, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)
[_] SEM Fundamentals, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)
[_] Advanced Search Advertising (PPC), Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO)

Salary for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist National Median is $41,228 and SEMPO Certification can get you more of $13,000 in the pocket.

I set this test scenario:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Manager - New York

Anonymous Profile: Years In Field/Career 7
Job Location (City withheld for privacy), New York, United States
Salary (Annual) $75,000
Bonus (Annual) $3,750

More Details:

Number Supervised 0
Reports To Vice President (VP), Marketing
People Managed None
People Management Tasks None
People Management Scope None
Employer Type Company
Years with Employer 3
Number of Employees 40
Salary Type Standard Full-Time 40+ Hours Per Week
Vacation Weeks 3
All Benefits/Perks Paid Holidays / Vacation, 401(k), Life Insurance/Disability, Laptop / Notebook Computer, Internet Access (DSL/ISDN/Cable…)
Health Benefit None
School/Degree (School Name withheld for privacy), Bachelor of Science (BS/BSc/SB), Marketing, 2000
Age (Age withheld for privacy)

Acroterion is pleased to announce our new mobile site accessibility tool allows you to optimized websites for cellular phone, mobile devices and Google Mobile.

Search3w Mobile Site Builder / Generator is a static publishing system. XHTML pages are pre-generated by the Static Site Wizard publishing software and stored as XML files on the web server, ready to be served. Pages are W3C XHTML Validated and ready to Google Mobile Sitemaps (Mobile Site Builder provided with the appropriate Google, Yahoo & MSN XHTML schemas).

Mobile Website Simulator
This is realtime sample generated by Mobile Site Builde for: Mobile.FlatRate.com. Click on the imahe to see how this site Search3w/mobile looks.

How does your website look on a Mobile Phone?
Try typing this URL in the address bar:

http://www.search3w.com/mobile_site_builder.php?url=http://www.your-domain.com

Both formulas are measuring success of a website keywords in the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Web Visibility

Web Visibility refers to be how easy it is for someone to find a Web site when they do a search. The Web Visibility Ranking gauges how visible a web site appears based on the search engines and keywords selected. Visibility of 100% means any keyword a prospect will choose (not just the keywords used in the comprehensive reports) that related to specific business - They’ll find it on Google, Yahoo & MSN 1st page. Visibility of 0% means no keyword can be found on major three engines 1st page. A successful SEO project ended up with 60%-70% visibility. A higher score usually kept for spammers or “black hat SEO” as they called. The bad guys enjoy very short happiness, about 3 to 6 months, and they vanished.

Ranking Score

Ranking Score is same blah-blah-blah of Web Visibility with these significant differences:

1. It monitors the site’s performance on a multitude of search engines, uses a weighted rank to score each one of the engines. Today every marketer asking us to be on Google’s 1st page, so Google assigned with the highest weight score depends on its “Search Engines Market Share“.

2. Web Visibility is only checking “is the keyword on 1st page” or not. Ranking Score monitors the site’s performance on a weighted rank basis to score each one of the keywords by its position. Therefore “top three” ranking will enjoy the higher overall scores than 7th, 8th and 9th position.

3. Competition Weight - Search term that returns 20,000 pages is not as difficult to SEO as 2 million returned pages. Search3w new Ranking Score formula is calculating the competition figures also.

Since past two months we are closely observing major search engines changes. Yes, its XMAS and changes are all around Ranking algorithms, pay-per-click bidding changes and many new features.

The following paragraph will shortly describe these changes for Google engine (unless else mentioned) and its influence on your business. Since each of the changes is huge by itself, which is the subject of this e-mail, the latter will be described more in detail. Stay tune to new BLOG posts here.

The facts

Updates, dancing and PageRank updates.
Google claims for a year on their intention to shoveling major updates (with scary names like bigDaddy) to smaller more frequent updates resulting in no public noise for each major update and keep shareholders happier. As of May 20th, PageRank updates occur every 20 to 120 days. BackLinks updates are no longer called this way anymore as BackLinks are updated continuously every 20 days. I definitely sure Google doing Algorithm Updates - a major update in the Ranking algorithm that causes a large position changes like the one they did at Jan 25, 2007 called Googlebomb Impact update http://searchengineland.com/070125-230048.php

Paid Links and Google Hell
.
The SEM community (which I’m sitting in its research committee) was like humming bees after Forbes article (here http://www.forbes.com/2007/04/29/sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell_print.html ) about Google Hell or its Supplemental Index marker. Matt Cutts, Google official response is here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/ and one the souls in the story refused by Acroterion as we determine he’s using wrong methods.
I still believe links tempo, among links neighborhood is the hidden trick that distinguishes between good and bad link campaign.
The buzz didn’t stop there and new paid links filter was disclosed. Acroterion is working now with our link partners to develop new link paradigm that fits Google changes.

TrustRank
Yet another BackLinks synonym to calculate a back links weight.
http://blog.acroterion.ca/google-uncover/trustrank-is-pagerank/

New patents.
I find it pretty scary the new patent numbers filed by Google. You can’t ignore them as I always said if they published, they already put in practice. Here are some:
1. System and method for searching and recommending documents in a collection using share bookmarks
2. DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON TRAFFIC ASSOCIATED WITH A DOCUMENT
3. DOCUMENT SCORING BASED ON QUERY ANALYSIS

New features.
Google keep testing new features, buying more companies and releasing beta products developed by engineers spare time. Each of them needs to be examined how it can help our clients. Want to hear one? Call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and see why is so important to be on top local A-B-C results.

Google Local.
Google Local Formula is well known to our engineers. It’s straightforward… Just follow the 10 steps we guide you to be located on the A-B-C top results within 6 weeks!

E-mail and Affiliate marketing.
Acroterion joined with two companies that can help you filling this gap. Call us for more information.

Pay-per-click.
Amazing how many changes can happen in only few months. Here are some of the changes we need to focus on:

1. Google Pay-per-action and Cross-channel campaigns.
2. New Google Analytics Reports!
3. new MSN adCenter (new change releases every month)
4. new Yahoo Panama (new change releases every month)
5. Vertical search providers like 7search, bravenet and more.

The actions

Acroterion clients benefit from using our experience to deliver effective SEM within the context of the business strategy. This means that we will be very busy in May/June getting theory is put into practice so clients experience real and measurable improvements to their business.
As a client you will see the change everywhere: Analytic Reports, Replacing paid links with limited value (they was okay in the past!) with better ones and much more.
Good business starts with a conversation and we are always happy to talk. Email acroterion@gmail.com or call (888) 809-9012 ext 704.

Hooray robots.txt is useful for its new sitemap.xml option! For the first time it tells the search engine what pages to spider and not just not to spider.

Ask.com official announcement http://blog.ask.com/2007/04/sitemaps_autodi.html -

“Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of autodiscovery of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. Comprehensiveness and freshness are key initiatives for every search engine, and with autodiscovery of sitemaps, everyone wins:

It looks like the rumor mills are churning out about Google again. The rumors say that having Google checkout improves site’s ranking — Google denies, but does anyone really trust them anymore?

Posted here at July 3, 2006 - Google Checkout - Grab it now! (Filed under Google Essentials). I said “Why to wait a second? Grab it now”.

Just for joking purposes (if you notices PageRank zero on this page you’ll understand why…) I took Google’s marketing text and changed it to align with the rumor. This is the way it goes:

• Stop creating multiple links and web pages.
  With Google Checkout„¢ you can quickly and easily get higher position on organic result pages across the web and track all your orders and shipping you made using this trick.
• Improve ranking with confidence.
  Our fraud protection policy covers you against unauthorized PageRank tricks made through black-hat SEO companies. Google Checkout will improve your ranking with confidence.
• Control AdWords & AdSense costs.
  You can keep your pay per click money in your pocket, and easily turn off expensive ad campaigns where you use Google Checkout instead.

BTW, if your site ran into Google Problems, Acroterion can help you out!

http://services.google.com/payperaction/

The new Google model runs much like an affiliate program, costing advertisers only when someone completes a desired action on their web site. For companies that know their customer acquisition cost, it could be a good opportunity for them to take advantage of Google’s broad viewer base.

The system works through Google’s content network and allows publishers to select the ads that they wish to run on their site. Advertisers can run text ads, image ads or new text link ads that appear inline with a web site’s content. (Meaning that the ad shows up as a link just like an editorial link would, though it’s noted as a Google Ad when a user mouses over the link.)

While many bloggers are focusing on the publisher side of the program, I thought it might be a good idea to dive into the act of setting up a campaign. It’s pretty straight forward if you’ve ever used the Google AdWords system, but here’s a step-by-step walk-through of the process.

Once you’re logged into your Google Adwords account, you’ll notice a new tab called “pay-per-action.” It sits next to the standard and cross-channel tabs on your campaign page. Simply click on thetab to enter the pay-per-action campaign area.

Once you’re on the pay-per-action campaign page (as shown above), you’ll want to select the “create new campaign” option.

At this point, you’ll need to enter some information about your web site. You can see the fields in the image above asking for your product name, a description and a logo. This will help Google provide publishers with information to help them decide if they’d like to run your ad on their web site.

Next, google will have you enter a list of keywords or keyword phrases that relate to your product or offering. These terms will trigger your ads when the publishers are searching for new pay-per-action ads to feature on their site.

Once you’ve given Google enough information about your product to index it for potential publishing partners, you’ll move on to creating the ads that you plan to run. This part of the process works pretty much the exact same way that standard Google Adwords ad creation works.

After you set up your ads, you’ll need to define the action that you consider to be a conversion. That might be a sale, a newsletter sign up, a sales lead via a web form, or any other action that you feel is worth paying for.

You’ll give this action a name and then define how much you are willing to pay for it. This is the amount that you’ll be charged when someone converts via the campaign. Finally, you’ll snag the conversion tracking code that is created by Google Adwords and paste it on your landing page. This allows Google to match up the conversions with the campaign so that publisher partners are properly compensated. It also helps you track the conversion rates of your campaigns. While the set up is pretty simple and runs pretty much in line with traditional AdWords campaign set ups, there is a potentially fatal flaw in the system.

Google doesn’t seem to have built anything into the system to account for charge backs, product returns and so on. Many traditional affiliate programs hold a percentage of affiliate commissions in reserve to cover charge backs, returns and other issues. Google’s new pay-per-action model doesn’t have this feature. That means that while Google will get paid by the advertiser when someone makes a purchase, Google isn’t going to refund the money if the person that makes that purchase decides to return the product. In other words, it opens up a whole new potential for click fraud. Imagine legions of paid surfers visiting sites and going through the motions to sign up for a newsletter or make a purchase only to then cancel out once Google and the publisher have been paid.

That means that setting up your campaign isn’t as simple as knowing what you can afford to pay for each conversion. Instead, advertisers will need to factor in their return rate and their charge back rate and will need to calculate new figures for this specific campaign. It looks like testing will be the name of the game for those in the beta program. Testing to see how well the system works. Testing to see if charge backs and returns become a serious issue. And, testing to see if any publishers will actually be interested in using up their ad space for the program.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide.com/laycock/009781.html

Google official site:

http://services.google.com/payperaction/

MSN new live.com introducing a new amazing map services includes 3D view and street traffic optimizer. Google need to run and do their homework and forget the “not evil” slogan at this point of time