PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Search Engine Guide
According to Stoney deGeyter, a “Destination Web site” is one that “truly deserves to be ranked well in the search engines.” It’s likely that every business owner wants to have a site that ranks well, so this post is the fourth in a series that details how to build and market Destination Web sites.

The four factors that go into marketing a Destination Web site are: strong on- and off-page SEO that involves more than just search engine rankings; compelling content that drives conversions; synchronized on- and offline marketing efforts; as well as business management and customer service that extends beyond the sale.

“The difference between a Destination Web site and any other is that all of the strategies above must be used together and you have to be at the top of your game with each one,” deGeyter says. “Too often businesses focus on only one or two of these areas simply looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales. These boosts are often effective, but are also just as often very short-lived.”

Adweek
A new survey claims that America’s slumping economy is having an effect on online ad growth. Conducted by William Blair & Co, the new survey forecasts that the gloomy economic outlook will contribute to slowing growth. The investment bank queried 150 Chicago-area interactive marketing companies about their budgets, and two thirds of respondents said economic conditions would affect spending.

According the results, the respondents expect Internet advertising to grow slightly more than 16% in the next year, less than the 19% William Blair tracked in previous surveys. Respondents pegged paid search and ROI-based direct response ads as the sectors most likely to thrive.

“Online’s healthy, but the economy is definitely having an impact,” Sean Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, a Chicago ad service for newspaper sites, told Adweek. “In a weak economy, people are going to move more towards direct response. We’re seeing brand advertising take a much bigger hit this year.”

SEO Scientist
If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the “juice” to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts.

Rihtman’s test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first link on each page carries all the weight. He tested one start page with two links to the same destination page, and found that Google only indexed the first link. Even with a nofollow tag, the giant’s spider still picked up the initial link and ignored the second.

The New York Times
Google is partnering with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane to distribute two-minute episodes of a new cartoon, “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy” through its AdSense advertising system. The search giant will syndicate the program to thousands of Web sites that typically attract young men. Instead of static ads, clips of “Cavalcade” will appear where AdWords ads usually go on these sites.

Advertising, of course, will be incorporated into the clips in a variety of ways, including prerolls, banners, or a simple “brought to you by” note appearing at the beginning of each clip. For more money, MacFarlane has been working with advertisers to animate original commercials for “Cavalcade.” While none of the launch advertisers are being revealed, MacFarlane and Google are both saying that several deals are among the largest ever for Google’s 5-year-old advertising system. Google refers to the new service as the Google Content Network. “Cavalcade” carries a multimillion-dollar production price tag.

MacFarlane described the installments to The Times as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.” As part of the deal, MacFarlane will receive a percentage of the ad revenue from the 50 two-minute episodes.

Practical eCommerce
“For the majority of small and mid-size, locally-focused businesses, your target market is more defined than everyone living everywhere,” says Lisa Wehr. “With local search strategies for both pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and natural search engine optimization, you can refine your search marketing program, cut costs and grow your business.”

For paid search, go local with regionally defined and geotargeted keywords. Geotargeting helps to restrict your ads to a smaller audience and delivers more qualified leads, while regionally-defined terms can give you wider exposure, yet still allow you to hone in on your target market.

Meanwhile, for SEO, make sure your site has accurate listings on the slew of IYPs and local search sites, from Superpages.com, to Citysearch, to Google Maps. Each one resonates with a different local audience, and their listings also show up within the core search engine results, maximizing your Web site’s exposure.

Conversation Marketing
Ian Lurie offers a step-by-step guide to creating a “great” 404 not found page, including how to build it (via HTML or a Web page editor), upload it and get your server to point to it–whether via Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) or the open-source Apache server.

He also lists the three components a quality 404 page must have, including a clear statement that the visitor is in the wrong place, advice to help get them back on track (via either links, a search box, etc.), and an option to contact the Webmaster.

What a 404 error page shouldn’t do is automatically redirect a user to the homepage, a Flash page or tedious registration form, or worse–another Web site! Learn more.

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin - Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts - Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker - Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator - Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps - Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 - A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag - Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs - keeps slugs from becoming too long Continue Reading »

The New York Times
Display advertising may suffer as the economy slows. Mixed results from the likes of Yahoo and Time Warner indicate that online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they sell. More and more advertisers are opting for automated targeting and delivery through cheaper advertising networks instead of buying directly from expensive publishers like Yahoo. And the cost continues to go down, dropping 23% from March to April, according to PubMatic, a technology firm that runs an online pricing index. The drop was even steeper among large Web publishers, falling 52%, according to the firm.

If those figures are accurate, the rest of 2008 will be painful for big media firms whose online services depend mostly on display advertising. That lengthy list includes Yahoo, AOL, Viacom, News Corp., The New York Times Co., Disney, CBS, NBC-Universal, CNET, and many others. As Sanford C. Bernstein & Company analyst Jeffrey Lindsay says: “The weakest form (of online advertising), the one that’s most susceptible to a downturn - and this is what we’re seeing - is display advertising,”

Lindsay added that recession fears might actually be a boost to some media companies, such as those depending on automated advertising systems like search. “In a moderate or even quite severe downturn, online advertising actually improves, because people switch their advertising budgets out of traditional advertising formats - TV, radio and print - and move more online because it’s got higher performance, it’s cheaper and it’s more measurable,” he said.

Google passed Yahoo in its share of monthly visitors in the United States for the first time this April, buoyed by growth in search and YouTube videos, according to ComScore statistics released Thursday.

However, underscoring the variability of this sort of measurement, which extrapolates overall data from the usage of a “panel” of users at home and work, ComScore rival Nielsen Online released its own data as well with some different results. Although it also showed Google as No. 1 in terms of unique users, it said Google passed Yahoo way back in January 2007.

ComScore said Google sites had 141.1 million unique visitors in April, a tad ahead of Yahoo’s 140.6 million. Microsoft was in third at 121.2 million, with AOL at 111.3 million.

Nielsen’s data showed Google at 128.2 million, Microsoft at 122.1 million, and Yahoo at 117.1 million.

Nielsen also provides information on time spent at the sites, though. There, Yahoo leads its rivals with 3 hours and 9 minutes per month, but AOL owner Time Warner leads Yahoo at 3 hours 40 minutes per month.

Microsoft’s usage was 2 hours and 17 minutes, and Google was 1 hour and 47 minutes, Nielsen said.

Stephen Shankland

Despite earlier speculation that the online ad space may be spared the effects of a downturn, the fallout from the soft economy appears to have reached the online advertising industry, dragging down monetization rates across many segments.

According to the May edition of the PubMatic AdPrice Index, publisher monetization across the board has dropped by 23% during the past month. The reason? The growth in online advertising is slackening, causing ad network payouts to fall.

The index shows that eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped 52%, from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to weather the storm, increasing monetization from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April. Continue Reading »