SiteProNews |
- Best Pay Per Click Search Engines- What Are the Pros and Cons?
- Facebook Traffic System – The Next Marketing Opportunity?
- The Internet is a Dangerous Place for your Data: Debunking the Myth
- 7 Different Levels of Web Hosting for Your Site
- The future of the internet: fragmentation and balkanisation?
- Website Speed Penalty – Google is Testing Your Load Time!
| Best Pay Per Click Search Engines- What Are the Pros and Cons? Posted: 06 Sep 2010 08:45 AM PDT 
3 of the best pay per click search engines for traffic quality are: Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search and Microsoft’s adCenter. According to ComScore.com these 3 have the following search market share in the United Sates (in March 2010): Google Sites: 65.5% Why is this important? Between just these 3 search engines they have an astonishing 94.1% of the search market share in the US. Ask have a 3.8% share and AOL have 2.5%. This means the top 3 have the most traffic for you to tap into. Which search engine should you use to run your Pay Per Click Advertising on and why? Here is a pro/con review of each… GOOGLE ADWORDS Pros: Huge search volume. Because of this you can also dig deeper into your market and target niche markets. Keyword research. They offer the best keyword research tool in my opinion and it is very simple and easy to work with. It gives you a ton of data on just about everything. Excellent user interface. The AdWords interface has always been very clean and user friendly. They recently changed the interface and have improved it further to allow you to make multiple changes faster amongst other things. Target different networks. You can target their content network (also known as Google AdSense) as well as different search networks. Target different devices. You can target mobile phones as well as computers. Ads go live fast. You don’t have to wait too long to get your ads approved. Upload multiple campaigns easily. If you have big campaigns and many of them, you can upload them quite easily using the Google Adwords editor program. Cons: Very competitive. It is getting more and more competitive so you must get a good quality score with them. And this can also affect your sales. Uncertainty for the future. If you base your business around this type of traffic you are vulnerable to the changes in Google that could happen overnight and stop your traffic dead. Stricter guidelines. Guidelines are getting tougher as Google try to thin the herd and unlike the old days, it does take some work on your campaign to get a good quality score. YAHOO SPONSORED SEARCH Pros: Good amount of search volume. So you can target different markets and niche markets. Guidelines not as strict. Guidelines can be more relaxed than Googles’s but not by much. Less competition. Less than Google that is but is still competitive. Cons: Keyword research. The keyword research tool is not as good as Google or Microsoft’s. User interface. Not the cleanest and easiest use. Takes longer to put your campaigns together. Less targeting options. Not as many as you would find at Google and Microsoft. Uploading multiple campaigns. This is not as easy to do as it is in Google and Microsoft. You have to email your campaigns to Yahoo unless you have a gold account. MICROSOFT ADCENTER Pros: Keyword research. Their keyword research tool has been improved lately and does include a demographic search option (something Google doesn’t offer). But Google’s keyword research tool is still more advanced. Not as competitive. Not as competitive as Google and Yahoo. Target by demographics. You can target by age and gender which can increase your sales. Less strict on guidelines. A little less than Google but not by much. Upload multiple campaigns. This requires the Microsft Silverlight application which is free. You can also import campaigns from Google and Yahoo. Cons: Not as much search volume. No where near as much search volume as Google and Yahoo which means less traffic. User interface. This user interface is not as clean and as simple as Google’s but is better than Yahoo’s. Less targeting options. You can’t target as many networks and devices as you can in Google. Summing up The best pay per click search engine (in my opinion) is Google AdWords because the keyword research tool is the really good. The competition is high and guidelines are strict but they also have the most traffic which really helps. They have a great user interface which makes setting up campaigns quick and easy. Both Yahoo and Microsoft don’t have the search volume that Google does. This means it is harder to get traffic in niche markets where the competition is lower. But with the merger of Yahoo and Microsoft, there should be some great improvements ahead. And now i would like to invite you to download your FREE eBook “Traffic Generation for Newbies” when you visit: www.RealWaysToMakeMoneyOnline.org/freebook.html Read this eBook and you will learn the real ways to make money online and avoid the mistakes that stop 95% of people from doing so. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Facebook Traffic System – The Next Marketing Opportunity? Posted: 06 Sep 2010 08:36 AM PDT 
Traditional Means of Communication Traditionally, marketing communications were conducted via print, broadcast and such traditional media through disruptive advertising, where advertisements appear in between the content of interest for the customer. Traditional media does give a large reach to a marketer with its programming of mass appeal. However, the wastage is equally high, since a large portion of the audience would belong to a different segment than the one that is to be targeted by the marketer. Enter Social Media and the Internet The revolution stirred by the internet as a medium took place because of the fact that it is highly personalized and provides more content on-demand than any other available medium. Social sites proliferated far and wide in their usage for a few simple reasons: The power of creating and distributing products and content is endless these days regardless if you are a newbie or not. In the earlier forms of media, that power rested with the editorial staff of the channel or the advertiser, but hardly ever with the user. The medium is completely personalized, and a user can create or join groups and further create content based on what he/she likes. Opinions are free and fair. This is one reason why social media is of utmost concern to marketers, since buying decisions are no more influenced as much by advertisements. The traditional word-of-mouth marketing approach is nearly a thing of the past as it has morphed into an automated marketing giant these days through social networks. Facebook – At the Center of Social Media With 500 million (and growing) unique users worldwide, Facebook is the number one social networking site in terms of activity and subscriptions. What started as a garage initiative by Mark Zuckerberg has now become the biggest phenomenon on the internet. A user interface that allows for quick communication and the ability to create fan pages and groups at the click of a mouse button are what make Facebook extremely popular. Another important reason for its immense popularity is the wide variety of social applications that have been developed and made available within the Facebook environment. These applications provide endless possibilities for users, which is why they continue to be so popular. People can do joint activities like playing games that run endlessly, sharing photos, videos, and web links, and many more. How does this help a marketer? Traditionally, media plans were drawn to include television channels, publications, or any other media that can grab maximum eyeballs and effectively reach a selected target audience. The science of segmentation and targeting has become only more accurate in the case of social media. Facebook provides a wide variety of avenues to communicate with your target audience, which opens up a completely new and exciting world of vast possibilities for you to have fruitful dialogue with customers. Some of these methods used popularly by marketers are: Advertising: The first opportunity, which is the most obvious one, is advertising on Facebook. The difference, however, is the fact that you can create your own advertisement in a matter of minutes and also specify the details of your target group in terms of demographics and types of discussions where you want your advertisement to appear. Fan Pages: Facebook allows every brand, as well as individual users, to create fan pages for their favorite celebrities and their own homegrown businesses. Large brands have also created their official pages on Facebook that have a huge, immediate fan following around the world. Branded applications: One of the most effective ways to engage a user toward your brand is by creating an application; this could be a game or a contest, with your branding coming across subtly through it. What makes Facebook even more exciting is the way it allows you to target your communication sharply just to the customer segment you want to attract. It also provides analytics and page insights that give good highly targeted feedback with an instant measurement on the activity done. The options provided by Facebook can be creatively explored and used judiciously for bringing about maximum benefits to any brand. However, you need to be aware that customers always have equal say and have the ability to respond immediately to any of your actions with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Availing the service of a social media consultant to work out a social media strategy may be required so that your efforts will not be in vain. The author has been marketing online since 2002. Over the course of his career online, he has successfully helped thousands of regular people make money from home. To learn more information, visit: www.hyperfbtrafficsystem.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| The Internet is a Dangerous Place for your Data: Debunking the Myth Posted: 06 Sep 2010 08:29 AM PDT  We’re always being warned about the many perils and dangers lurking in the deep dark recesses of the Internet. Those of us with children are constantly being urged to protect them from ‘Stranger Danger’ and Cyber bullying on chat rooms, instant messaging and social networks. According to the media, dating websites are full of predatory strangers waiting to murder us or empty our bank accounts. Scams, Identity Theft, Spam, Spyware, Adware, Malware, and Computer Viruses: the list of hazards goes on and on. It’s not just a web, but a veritable labyrinth full of pitfalls and hidden traps for the unwary. So it stands to reason that a web-based, or SaaS system, for applications such as Document Management and Project Planning and Time Reporting, must be inherently unreliable, and the Cloud must be a bad place to store your data, right? Wrong! Entrusting your personal or business data to an outside company is a risky undertaking, isn’t it? Not necessarily! To entrust your irreplaceable, confidential data to an external agency is a leap of faith, no doubt, and obviously you must choose your SaaS system very carefully. Choose a well-established and reputable service provider, however, and your data will actually be more secure than it would be on your own company’s data server. It’s not the Internet that is dangerous: it’s the people who use it, and the way that they use it. You wouldn’t hire a nanny for your children without checking out her references. You wouldn’t go on holiday and leave your house with the doors and windows open and unlocked. You wouldn’t leave your wallet on the bar counter while you go to the washroom. You wouldn’t lend your Credit Card to a stranger. At least, I sincerely hope you wouldn’t do any of these stupid things… The beauty of SaaS is that it frees you up to access all your projects, files and folders any time and anywhere in the world, and sorts out all your security issues at the same time. It’s much more secure to use a SaaS service, when traveling or working from home, than it is to rely on portable storage devices such as laptops, CDs and data sticks, which are easy to steal, easy to lose, and are regularly left on trains, buses and in taxi cabs. Still worried that the Internet is a dangerous place for your company’s confidential data? It’s very prudent of you to be aware of Internet security issues; we all know about the risks of hackers, viruses and Internet fraud. In order to fully benefit from the advantages of having your projects and documents online, you need to ensure that they are fully protected from hardware failure, good old human error, and from cyber attack. Look out for SaaS systems which offer additional security features for controlling file access and permissions. These will allow you to decide who can access your data, and also to control the level of access they are granted. Any reputable SaaS provider will be ISO20000-certified, and will regularly back up all your files and folders. All data transmitted via the internet should be fully secure and encrypted. Your data should be stored in a secure server environment equipped with fire protection, climate control and using multiple internet connections with a range of internet providers. Before you sign up for a new SaaS system, check out that these safeguards are all included. With a reliable SaaS system in place, and all your security controls set up, you can relax and let your service provider take care of day-to-day chores like file back-up and data encryption. That will leave you free to spend more time doing what you are good at – running your business! Charlotte Mooney is an IT professional with many years experience, currently working for International IT Software Consultancy Proswift, specializing in the Webforum online Document Management and online Project Planning Service. If this story strikes a chord with you, click here and check out what Webforum could do for you and your business – www.proswift.com/webforum Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| 7 Different Levels of Web Hosting for Your Site Posted: 06 Sep 2010 08:23 AM PDT 
As an online merchandiser, it is always vital to keep track of the growth of your online business. When your business meets higher demands, then your web hosting should be upgraded to accommodate all of it. Here’s a comparison of the different levels of web hosting you can use. Shared hosting With shared hosting, your site is set up on a server that is shared with other websites. This type of hosting is handy for those who are just starting or have a limited budget. Fees can be as low as $5-$-10 a month, because of the shared cost. One drawback, though, is that the cost also depends on the other shared websites. A site that has more traffic can affect your own performance. Reseller hosting Generally similar to shared hosting, reseller hosting has extra tools and options which assist you in reselling hosting space. Usually included in a reseller hosting package are free website templates, white label technical support, and servers under private names. This option is more costly than the shared hosting at $15-$50 per month, depending on the features. Cloud hosting Cloud or grid hosting is a more advanced hosting feature that allows many servers to seemingly fuse making it look like a giant single server. While the number of sites continues to grow, a new hardware can easily be added to accommodate them. The price you pay is parallel to the degree of service you are receiving. Fees for extra bandwidth and memory usage may be charged. Virtual private server A virtual private server, or VPS, acts like separate servers but actually shares only one server. They each have a specific program of the computing resources, though it is just sharing hardware resources. It spares your website from getting down from your hosting neighbors while at the same time evading higher costs. Prices usually range from $50-$200. Dedicated server You are entitled to one rental physical server from a hosting service when you have a dedicated server. This gives you full control of it. These options are much more expensive and may cost a least $100 per month. Co-location In this set-up, you rent a space in a date service provider. You have your own server hardware, while they provide power, internet uplink and other necessities. You are in-charge of your own software and data and are responsible for any drawbacks from your hardware. Self-service This is do-it-yourself set-up and is considered the best option of all. You purchase the servers and do all the configurations by yourself. Things you might need are extra bandwidth, server hardware, systems administrator, data back-up and more. Web hosting is important. Customers always go for the website which is accessible and convenient. If your site is slow due to heavy traffic or it needs a better web server, try getting a new one, or you may lose some potential customers. To check for VPS hosting comparison, view this page: http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=5440 . Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| The future of the internet: fragmentation and balkanisation? Posted: 06 Sep 2010 12:28 AM PDT  In this week’s Economist, it expounded on the future of the internet. They argue that there is a virtual counter-revolution in the making, one that has powerful forces of fragmentation that are “threatening to balkanise it”. I don’t agree. The Economist’s article this week argues that the internet’s “very success” has given rise to forces that are pulling it apart, mostly visible along “geographical boundaries” where there’s an Orwellian edge to government interference and the enforcement of laws in the digital realm. It cites China’s “great firewall” and of governments increasingly asserting their sovereignty, with India threatening to cut off BlackBerry service and “going after other communication-service providers, notably Google and Skype”. This sounds similar to Jonathan Zittrain, who attempted to define the internet’s future by that of the open, “generative” Net against “tethered, sterile appliances”, such as the proprietary devices of the iPhone. Andrew Keen is another willing disciple of the the olde media school of thought, who is loathe to tolerate a society where everyone has a voice. In Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur”, he describes how the internet is “killing our culture” and decries everything user-generated, which Adam Thierer of techliberation.com views as “unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist”. At issue here is a generation of “fewer intermediaries minding the culture”. As a result, Keen argues that “professional” media is giving way to “amateur” media. It must be said that there is an awful abundance of narcissism that is both alarmingly self-referential and totally pointless in the arena of public discussion. But at least the internet is a great leveller that has given everyone the ability to broadcast. On the one hand, this has given everyone an equal chance to be heard but on the other, disposable, inane crap such as this: OMGoodness what a great night…Even funnier was going to the toilet, getting talking to an old friend then going back out for the music to of been turned off and everyone gone.” Fascinating, absorbing commentary it is not. But on balance, I think we are a better society for the opportunity to say such things such as this in a public space. In the late Neil Postman’s book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, he argues that “information has become a form of garbage…not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems” which, if left unchecked, will ultimately mean “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” which will destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation.” In doing so, he argues, the Net is destroying the role of experts, authority, truth and traditional societal norms and institutions, such as The Economist, maybe? And that the personalisation and customisation of the internet has “spawned an unambiguously negative development for our society and culture.” The Economist then goes on to talk about Net neutrality and proprietary platforms: the plumbing of the internet. Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University, has called this “the Tony Soprano vision of networking”, alluding to extortion from every website by setting up different levels of access so that consumers’ data can be transmitted quickly along the fastest lanes to speed up access to websites that pay for it. The piece goes on to say that America’s broadband market operators argue that open-access requirements would “destroy their incentive to build fast, new networks” and that “it should come as no surprise that the internet is being pulled apart on every level” and provides an analogy that it is tantamount to world trade, which is that it “can collapse if there is too much protectionism”. This counter-revolutionary idea of The Economist is not too far away from Jonathan Zittrain, who contrasts two paradigms on the Net’s future: “Today, the same qualities that led to the success of the internet and general-purpose PCs are causing them to falter. As ubiquitous as internet technologies are today, the pieces are in place for a wholesale shift away from the original chaotic design that has given rise to the modern information revolution. “This counter-revolution would push mainstream users away from the “generative” internet that fosters innovation and disruption, to an appliancised network that incorporates some of the most powerful features of today’s internet while greatly limiting its innovative capacity — and, for better or worse, heightening its regularbility. A seductive and more powerful generation of proprietary networks and information appliances is waiting for round two. If the problems associated with the internet and PC are not addressed, a set of blunt solutions will likely be applied to solves problems at the expense of much of what we love about today’s information ecosystem.” What he fears is that the “tethered appliance” paradigm, in a search for stability or security, will overtake innovation and that by its very nature will be regulated by large corporations and governments. I agree with Adam Thierer here that we should surely have the best of both worlds in which the “generative” works harmoniously with the “tethered”. Social networking sites are a case in point in that there is generative activity mixed with the limitations of the tethered and that it works seamlessly to most users, however “imperfectly” this may appear to the purists. If there is a danger of the internet becoming a collection of “proprietary islands accessed by devices controlled remotely by their vendors”, as The Economist seems persuasively to predict, and that the internet loses much of its “generativity” where innovation slows down, it is not necessarily the case that it will denigrate and “dissolve quickly”. I rather feel that The Economist has raised its hackles about the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience and that it views the surrender of culture to technology as alarming, one that shows contempt for the information age, despite its going to the toilet and finding everyone gone. V9 Design and Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com) produce tasteful web design in Bangkok, Thailand, including ecommerce shopping cart solutions, with functionality that allows owners to set up and maintain their online stores. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Website Speed Penalty – Google is Testing Your Load Time! Posted: 05 Sep 2010 10:00 PM PDT 
From the announcement we learn that the speed penalty was introduced following experiments by Google that revealed the impact website speed has on Internet users. But the results of the experiment come as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently; users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites. However, the search engine giant has been careful to state that even though website speed is now a factor, it is not the primary parameter for determining results. The quality and relevance of information is still the determining factor, but if your website speed is slow, you will receive a Google penalty. This implies that it is important for you as a webmaster to assess the speed of your website to determine whether you are moving further down the search engine results pages (SERPs) because your website is slower than your direct competitors. How Can Google Know Your Page Speed? It is vital that you understand the basics of how Google’s algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment. First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot, the crawler program Google uses to find and index websites. Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. To better assist you in analyzing your website speed, Google has added a page speed report to their webmaster tools found within the Google webmasters ‘lab’ section. The tool and the reports can be used to compare your website’s page load times to that of other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where your page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster. Your first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Pages that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for website speed. When you have no slow pages left, try to make all your pages load in less than a second. Read on to see why this is important. Having a website that loads quickly has more benefits than just higher search engine ranking and avoiding a Google penalty. A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service, thus reducing your overall hosting costs. Faster websites also provide a better browsing experience because users are able to get information faster and navigate through your website more easily. In addition, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer. Even though you can have a mobile variant of your website which is trimmed down, some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have a better chance of successfully loading on such devices. As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to improve the loading speed of your website. I have listed three of the more popular ones below: Page Speed Page Speed is an open-source add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed. Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website’s front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website. Yslow Yslow is a free Firefox add-on from Yahoo integrated with Firebug software for website development. It displays statistics, an evaluation report and also provides suggestions on how best to improve the speed of your website using best practices. Yslow comes integrated with other tools for performance evaluation, including Smush. Use it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Yslow is a Yahoo product but is still useful for avoiding the Google speed penalty. SSEL Speed Tools There is also a website speed check at Secret Search Engine Labs where you can get a quick answer on how big your webpage is and how fast it loads. The Website Speed Quick Fix There are several factors that affect page load speeds on your website, many of them technical and best solved by your webmaster or developer, but some changes you can do yourself as long as you have some experience with HTML and creating web pages. Reduce the number, size and quality of images and use less audio, flash and Javascript. Reduce the length of the page by splitting a long page into several short pages. Strip the source code of redundant HTML, Javascript and CSS code that just slows things down. Don’t use images and other components that are linked live from other domains; instead use a copy on your own server. And don’t forget to keep your eyes on Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site performs compared to the competition. Aaron Steinheinkel is virtual lab scientist at Secret Search Engine Labs, a new search engine. Use the website speed checker to improve the speed of your website. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
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