The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11% increase over the same period in 2007. While double-digit annual growth continues, the quarter-to-quarter curve remains relatively flat compared to recent past performance. The Q3 2008 figures, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are 2% higher than the Q2 2008 results. Set against strong economic headwinds in the U.S. economy, Q3 2008’s $5.9 billion represents nonetheless the second-highest quarter results ever. For the first nine months of 2008, revenues totaled $17.3 billion, up from $15.2 billion in the same period a year ago and surpassing the record set in the first nine months of 2007 by nearly 14 percent.

The growth of interactive advertising that we’ve been experiencing over the past few years has stabilized due in large part to the difficult current economic climate,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “Interactive advertising continues to be the most measurable and cost-effective way to reach consumers, and we see more and more marketers seeking to harness its power.”

David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, added that, “a weakening economy will continue to be a challenge to all forms of advertising-supported media. However, the Internet should be better poised to withstand the storm given its ability to combine performance-based advertising along with broad-based branding.” Search marketing continues to be the primary focus for internet advertising. Read the complete article >

In a recent Site pro News article, Suzanne Morrison delivers the “7 deadly Sins” for search engine optimization.  This is a “must read” for all SEO professionals who are serious about maximizing the search engine results with Google, Yahoo and MSN.

1. Keyword Ignorance

One of the most common mistakes that people make when building a website is to completely disregard keyword research. Take a look at the results and be sure that the keywords you pick have a good number of searches per month. Also type your keywords into Google and make sure that you feel confident about beating the competition and getting your site on to the first page of results.

2.  Keyword Spamming

Mentioning your keywords over and over hundreds of times throughout your web page or making large lists of keywords with a font color that is the same as the background color is not going to help your search engine rank. Neither is adding keywords that have nothing to do with the content of your page.  Read the complete article > 7 Deadly Search Engine Sins written by Suzanne Morrison.

 

Website navigation continues to be regarded as a critical element for search engine optimization and visitor activity.  Easy to follow navigation is essential to guide visitors through your website.  Site visitors need assistance finding the offer or service that you are promoting online. This also helps search engine spiders define what content is important to the website’s offers.  Google recommends that search marketing professionals develop websites that provide a “home page” which is in most cases is the most popular URL on the site and it’s usually the origin for many visitors being directed by search engine results.

o    Utilize text in navigation links

o    Implement a naturally outline of navigation that is fluid

o    Repeat a row of internal links throughout the site

o    Add a HTML sitemap link on your home page using an XML Sitemap file

Not too long ago, Google introduced a SEO tool called Website Optimizer that enables search marketing companies to test several variations of web pages and their performance with site visitors.  This helpful search engine optimization tool enables the programmers to see which version converts better.  Increasing conversion rates is one of the best ways for SEO webmasters to achieve better results quickly.  Test and optimize your new content to maximize conversions from search marketing.  As a leading search marketing firm, Nationwide recommends taking advantage of the free SEO tools because they provide cost effective marketing analysis and analytics.

o    Choose the specific content and web pages to test

o    Test website modifications with your visitors

o    Learn which alterations will increase conversion ratios

Check Google’s Website Optimizer and achieve better results immediately.

In a recent SEO Chat article, Terri Wells discusses about the obstacles of content theft online.  Web copywriting and the security needed to protect your content can be challenging and frustrating, but unfortunately it’s a reality that search marketing professionals simply have to deal with.  Wells tells a story about finding published articles that were posted on someone else’s website with no permission or authorization for republishing the copy written articles.

 

Stealing content, also known as e-thieving is a serious problem that dilutes the original article with no compensation while damaging any search engine optimization that should be benefitting the author.  Quite often the duplicate content can cause each site to be penalized by Google, Yahoo or MSN.  So even the original business publishing the article on their website can be penalized for the duplicate content even though somebody ripped off their genuine writing.  Many of this e-thievery has become profitable in the advent of Adsense, an revenue sharing affiliate program offered by Google.  Wells points out that if the website is hosted in the US, that laws were created to protect you and your website.  Nationwide Marketing supports SEO Chat and their content writers.

Ø  Read the Original SEO Article-  Thwarting Content Theft Written By: Terri Wells

Nationwide Marketing recommends using your own domain whenever possible….
According to Scott Kublin, people often wonder whether it’s better to host a Wordpress site on Wordpress.org or install and host Wordpress on their own domain. Aside from the benefit of not having any out-of-pocket expenses to start, there’s really no other reason to use Wordpress.org. If this blog is going to become a source of income, not having full control over the future of it is a big mistake.

For example, suppose the people responsible for running Wordpress.org decide to terminate your account for some type of inadvertent violation? Or if the taxonomy of your URLs changes because of a major restructuring that the developers decide to take? Countless hours of your time would be wasted as all of the other external SEO factors such as article backlinks, press releases, social bookmarking, and comment links would no longer point to valid URLs.

Hosting Wordpress on your own domain gives you much more control and isn’t that expensive. You can easily register a domain with any one of several registrars for under $10 (search online for coupon codes) and many of these registrars will offer low hosting fees as well. Some will even offer free add-ons and most will have a control panel that includes an easy way to install Wordpress.  Read Complete SEO Article >

Nationwide Marketing recently provided a successful lead generation system with Community First Bank.  According to CFB Loan Services President, Ben Lyons, “Nationwide Marketing was instrumental in integrating the mortgage leads from Lead Planet with the Live Transfer feature of Inside Sales. 

CFB was successful with their “app to funding ratios” that remained between 3 and 5% after the second month.  Lyons continued, “We came to Bryan Dornan at Nationwide because in the past they had gotten lost on the internet and it was important for us to  generate quality leads at a fraction of the cost we were spending on marketing.

Community First Bank Loan Services is a federally charted bank located on the East Coast, but offering government and conventional home loans nationally.

Branch Development Manager, Steve Park stated, “Going above and beyond the average marketing lead company, Nationwide enable us to reach more of our targeted borrowers rather quickly. Our closings per month increased and out our cost per acquisition went down because the conversion ratios were so high. Thanks again for your concerted efforts that helped increase our revenues in 2008.”

Take advantage of Google’s Adsense programs that share revenues with publishers that feature Google Ads on their website.  In a recent article, Akintomide suggest that Google has been migrating toward a system that displays personalized ad groups based on the consumers search history.

 

Google advertisers increase their click-through rates by providing good content that ranks high in the search engines for targeted key words.  With Google Ad words are chosen, based on the content and how it relates to the advertisement.  .

 

Google Adwords has stated that advertisers have the option to choose to display their ads on specific pages within a website. For example, advertisers can choose to advertise on the website for the Wall Street Journal in the Finance section, if they want to have their mortgage ad featured on a relevant page. Google’s publishing program continues to growing as nearly all major media portals are represented with magazine and newspaper publishers to television networks.

 

Normally advertisers find which Web sites display Google AdWords content ads by using Google’s placement tool, using a list of categories and keywords, and also listing specific URLs of sites, or by setting the desired user demographics. The tool digs into the pool of site publishers and lets you choose which sites will carry your ads.

 

 

Apply these four tips to dramatically improve the efficiency and ROI of your AdWords campaigns.

Tip #1:  Beware of Broad-Matched Sponsored Keywords
Are you using broad-matched sponsored keywords in your AdWords account? If so, you need to be careful because Google often triggers ads to display from irrelevant search keyword phrases. Showing your ad with irrelevant search queries costs you money in two ways.

First, your ad will likely not get many clicks, which reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for that keyword and pulls down the average for the whole AdGroup. A low CTR results in a poor Quality Score, which means that Google will require a higher bid from you to keep from disabling that keyword altogether. In addition, Google will charge you more per click for the same ad position than someone else who is sponsoring the same keyword but has a better Quality Score.

The second problem is that the clicks that you do get from non-relevant keywords generally have a much lower tendency to convert into leads or sales.
How do you avoid this problem?

First, you should always start out your new campaigns with phrase-matched and exact-matched keywords. They are safer because you have more control over when your ads will appear. But sometimes you will find that you just can’t get enough paid click traffic this way and you still have money left in your budget. In that case, add some broad-matched keywords back in, but be sure to monitor the actual search term used via your web analytics tool and use Tip #2 below to filter out irrelevant keyword phrases.

Second, from time to time, you should prune underperforming keywords from your campaigns. These are keywords that have low CTR or poor conversion rates. Just set up a reasonable date range in AdWords and go down your keyword lists. To speed up the process, you can sort columns by CTR and Conversions from low to high.  Read Complete Article >

Google and Yahoo! have been working hard over the past several years to clean up web spam, and discredit websites that use questionable tactics to increase rankings.  In fact, search engines have been penalizing websites, and filtering link publishers since at least 2002. Back then filtering paid linking was much more selective and wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as the operations running today.

Increasing your website’s link popularity is vital to the growth of your online brand, at least for most of us. Unfortunately, many traditional best practice link building models have come under fire. Rather than simply discrediting paid links Google has taken action to penalize in varying degrees some websites that participate in certain link building type programs. Generally these penalties are at the keyword-level, affecting only one phrase, which is much better than a site-wide penalty.  Directory registration is one example. There are many ethical ways to build links using directories, but unfortunately the layman webmaster can’t tell the difference between a valuable link-passing directory, and one which has been filtered in Google. Often, the filtered directories still have PageRank and pages indexed in the Google database.  Read Complete Visibility Article > Article written by Joe Griffin

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