Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is a form of advertising that dynamically appears on a Web site or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. A contextual advertising system scans the text of a website for keywords and returns advertisements to the webpage based on what the user is viewing. Contextual advertising also is used by search engines to display ads on their search results pages based on what word(s) the users has searched for. Contextual advertising has made a major impact on earnings of many websites.

Service Providers

Google adsense was the first contextual service provider network.

5 Easy Steps to Create a Contextual Advertising Solution Campaign

Ø Getting Started - First select either a Contextual Targeting or URL Targeting campaign. Create your contextual advertising campaign name for your advertising solution, and set the maximum CPC/CPM/CPV/CPI bid price. The bid price affects your advertisement’s average traffic delivery, position, and clicks.

Ø Design/Upload Your Campaigns - Fill your advertisement information which allows actual website users to land on your ads.

Ø Select Additional Targeting Features - Choose from nearly 40 countries. You can even target your ads to specific cities!

Ø Target By Keywords/Phrases - Enter a list of keywords or phrases on which you would like to bid. You can also target your ads to over 150 channels.

Ø Launch Your Campaign - After your campaign has been approved, we will be able to connect globally to a target location, and demographic of your desire.

Subscribed Links

Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services, products for your customers, provide news and more.

What to do with Subscribed Links

Ø Create search results specific to product or service.

Ø Design a basic subscribed link.

Ø Build a dynamic version using XML or RSS files or feeds.

Ø Include images in subscription links

Why to use Subscribed Links

Using Subscribed Links, users can add information created by providers they trust to their Google search results pages. Whenever user search on Google in an area of their expertise, User will see a custom result from those providers in his search results. Subscribed Links are associated with your Google Account.

Design a basic subscribed link

Ø Add Keywords to trigger on.

Ø Add Title of product.

Ø Add some text lines that define the product.

Ø Add URL.

Ø Save this Subscribed Link file and download this file in XML format.

Ø After this upload Subscribed Link file.

Ø Create description page so that your visitors can learn more about you before subscribing.

Ø Add Subscribed button into your coding.

How Subscribed Links Looks

For seeing custom result, user has to sign in to his Google Account.

Google Algorithm Change February 2011 Losers & Winners

Google’s algorithm change on or around February 25th saw 12% of all search rankings change, which means sites either lost a lot of rankings, ie Millions of dollars and some sites gained. So who were the biggest losers and winners?

Biggest Losers
















Biggest Winners

Blocking user-agents

The Disallow line lists the pages you want to block. You can list a specific URL or a pattern. The entry should begin with a forward slash (/).

To block the entire site, use a forward slash.
Disallow: /To block a directory and everything in it, follow the directory name with a forward slash.
Disallow: /junk-directory/ To block a page, list the page.
Disallow: /private_file.html

To remove a specific image from Google Images, add the following:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg

To remove all images on your site from Google Images:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

To block files of a specific file type (for example, .gif), use the following:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

To prevent pages on your site from being crawled, while still displaying AdSense ads on those pages,

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

Do the Little Things in SEO Make a Big Difference?

Many companies and professionals in the SEO sphere often make “best practices” recommendations to clients that include items like:

* Switch from underscores to hyphens to separate words in the URLs
* Employ the H1 tag for page headlines
* Use H2s and H3s for subheadlines
* Use the keyword you’re targeting on the page in bold/strong at least once
* Change your internal links to contain the anchor text you’re targeting on the page
* Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
* Reduce the code to content ratio
* Apply relevant alt tags to images & photos
* Nofollow links to pages like login, register and legal disclosures

Tips to Optimize Images

1. Use a unique, attractive image which can earn natural links from other websites. Just copying an image from another website and optimizing it properly may not help you all that much.
2. Put relevant keywords in the file name of the image.
3. Describe your image via the ALT tag, including relevant keywords. It i best to describe the image with some text around the keyword, to make it look more natural.
4. Create some text surrounding the image which is relevant and contains keywords relevant to the image.
5. Optimize the page containing the image. I f your page is well optimized for the targeted keyword, then your image has a better chance of appearing in the search results. For best results, make sure that the targeted keyword appears in the page title tag.
6. Try to acquire quality links, with correct anchor text, both to the image and to the page itself.
7. Don’t make your image too large or too small
8. Use a PNG, JPEG or GIF format.
9. Make sure that your URL is not in any way suggestive of "adult" themes. E.g. if you want your image to be optimized for Women's Gifts and you have just the keyword women in the URL, this may give Google that the idea that your website is somehow related to porn, which may cause it to be filtered it and from the safe search results. You can read more about this issue here.
10. Create an image sitemap and follow all other guidelines and best practices provided by Google for image optimization. Last but not least, share your image on various social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr, to give them more visibility in Google's eyes.

Ten Controversial Search Engine Optimization Techniques

1. Duplicate Pages

In general, search engines ignore duplicate pages. In extreme cases, they may ban a site.

2. Invisible Text

Search engines consider the use of text that is the same color as the background color as spam. So stay clear of using invisible text.

3. Keywords In Comment Tags

Hardly any, if any, of the major search engines index comment tags, so don't waste time adding them for optimization purposes.

4. Keywords In Hidden Value Tags

Keywords in hidden value tags are considered spam by all of the major search engines, so don't waste time with this practice.

5. Keywords In Style Tags

Very few search engines index the content of Link Farms And Link Exchange Programs

Search engines consider link farms and link exchange programs as spam, as they have only one purpose - to artificially inflate a site's link popularity, by exchanging links with other participants.

Do not confuse link farms and link exchange programs with reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is the exchange of links with individual sites, and certainly an accepted technique for improving your site's link popularity.

7. Links Only Pages

I recommend adding text descriptions to link pages and site maps. Some search engines have been known to kick out links only pages.

8. Meta Refresh Tags

In general, meta refresh tags set for under 30 seconds are considered as spam by search engines. As such, most search engine optimizers use JavaScript redirects.

Are you confused? I certainly am!

So to be on the safe side, I suggest sticking with JavaScript redirects, until there is conclusive proof that search engines accept meta refresh tags.

9. Tiny Text

Many of the major search engines consider tiny text (i.e. font size 1) as spam. Some use of tiny text is fine. Search engines don't like web pages that use a lot of tiny text. The reason is because some webmasters have used it to fool search engines by "hiding" dozens of keywords in a web page.

10. Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of serving search engine optimized pages to search engine spiders, while at the same time serving un-optimized pages to site visitors.

Cloaking is one of the most controversial strategies in search engine optimization. Major search engines publicly state that they consider all cloaking to be spam. However, many professional search engine optimizers have been using cloaking for years, with much success.

Until there is conclusive proof that search engines do indeed ban sites that use cloaking, I suggest you take care if you decide to use cloaking.

About SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO has been one of the major and useful tools in web marketing. Today, it plays a big role and will continue to be so in the future especially with a stiffer competition for online visibility. Its main function of improving traffic to websites through search engines is what makes it a standout among the other web marketing tools available on the internet.

Through the years, the SEO process has continually experienced upgrades to suit the advancing needs of web users. And this trend is just fitting because of the growth of the technology industry and the sprouting of SEO companies. Various additional tools have popped out to enhance SEO results and surely, more will come out in the coming years. There are so many free downloadable software today that web owners can rely on if they lack funds while companies who can afford can turn to the paid tools. As SEO campaigns become more effective, SEO firms are also adjusting to technology by adapting to new formats of search results. Of course, you have noticed that apart from the plain-text content, other forms of media like images, video and audio or the podcasts are now included in search engine result pages. The common goal here is to achieve the targeted visibility and eventually more traffic volume to websites. For the past ten years since the SEO technology attained its popularity, strategies in applying quality SEO has also improved although the basics are still the same. For one, the SEO process has become more personalized in an effort to be more effective. For example, Google is now providing varied search results to users depending on their location. If a web user searches for information within its locality, he or she can readily get results by clicking his own country. In addition, search engines are faster in detecting the speed at which a website obtains links. If your site is new and instantly shows a big amount of high PageRank pages, search engines will think that you are mainly dependent on link buying or link renting and will not give you a high ranking for those links.

Undoubtedly, Google remains the most popular search engine in most countries. It sticks to its rules including privacy policy which have become more rigid and continues to draw more users because of its being unbiased in its search results and SEO process. And despite the fraudulent moves taken by some people against this famous search engine, Google always comes out with a good solution. For more than a year now, Google has acknowledged a hacking technique aimed at destroying a websiteג€™s ranking. The technique is known as proxy hacking. Proxies are actually servers that function s a relay for internet requests. These web proxies enable people to surf the internet in an anonymous manner by forwarding their requests for content and delivering the requested content to web users. It is just like sending mail to another person by coursing it through the post office without any return address or information from the sender. A final tip: always be updated on the latest trends in search engine optimization. Do this by visiting forums and blogs on a regular basis and subscribing to some worthy SEO ezine or newsfeeds. Donג€™t be left behind because you will surely be missing a lot if you wonג€™t do your homework.

Page speed tool family

Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source Firefox/Firebug add-on and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.

Page Speed tool family

Page Speed is a family of tools for optimizing the performance of web pages.

• The Page Speed Firefox/Firebug add-on allows you to evaluate the performance of your web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
• The mod_pagespeed Apache module automatically rewrites pages and resources to improve their performance.

The Page Speed extension runs performance tests based on a set of best practices known to reduce page load time.
mod_pagespeed, the Apache module automatically optimizes resources on a web page.

E-mail marketing

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and
• sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network e-mail and FIDO).

Advantages

E-mail marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.^[2]
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.^[3]
• E-mail is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.^[4]
• E-mail allows marketers to reach out to consumers with personalized, relevant, dynamic messages.
• Transactional e-mails allow businesses to respond automatically to important consumer events like purchases or shop-cart abandonment.

Disadvantages

A report issued by the e-mail services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 e-mail deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.^[5]

Companies considering the use of an e-mail marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM),^[6] the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

Source : wikipedia