Monday, November 3, 2008

Section 2: Around the Net in Search Marketing

, November 3, 2008 Subscribe | Back Issues | Reply to Editor | MediaPost Home

Using Split-Testing For Effective PPC Campaigns
SEMscoop
Test the effectiveness of your keywords by using a technique JP Schoeffel calls "split-testing." In his most recent blog, he refers to an older post from Oct. 17 where he steps you through instructions on spit-testing your website. He writes that it's important to take "advantage of this type of tool" to help "refine keywords or wrap keywords effectively." You can use the technique not only for Web sites, but to optimize PPC keyword campaigns, too.

In this post, JP suggests using the PPC Ad Wrapper tool to double check the effectiveness of your keywords, which helps you make the most of your PPC strategy. You can find it at http://tools.seobook.com/ppc-ad-wrapper. This site will help you organize keywords into broad, exact, and phrase matches, which can save you time and make your campaigns more effective. - Read the whole story...

SEO Dupes Unsuspecting Video Visitors
Security Park
Scammers have been using SEO to infect unsuspecting searchers' computers with malware, according to the news portal securitypark.net. Here's how the scheme works: using tools like Google Trends, scammers identify the most popular search terms, which they then insert into fake Web sites. When users visit those sites, they are directed to video players where they are told they must download a "codec" to watch the clip. Instead, they're unwittingly downloading infecting malware, including "fake anti-virus software which promises to clean non existent viruses from the computer in return for their credit card details."

"Using search engine optimization to promote web pages hosting malware shows increasing levels of sophistication and professionalism on the part of the criminals," according to Phil Hay, Lead Threat Analyst for Marshal's TRACE Team, cited in the article. "The use of fake video players to disguise the installation of fake anti-virus programs is not new. This kind of activity has been going on for many months now, but previously the links have been promoted via spam. This new approach shows a diversification of tactics." - Read the whole story...

SEOing PDFs So Spiders Can Find Them
Search Engine Journal
How many times have you tried to read through a PDF posted on a Web site only to reach the end of the document without discovering the word you were searching for? Google now searches through scanned PDF documents, such as research reports or chapters in books, posted to your website, which is good to consider when putting together SEO strategies. Previously, Googlebot didn't scan PDF documents, neither image or text-based converted to PDFs by scanning files in programs such as Adobe Acrobat.

When a printed document is converted to PDF through a scanner, the only way to can make that PDF searchable is through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It's a "pretty nifty way" of searching for words or phrases, writes Arnold Zafra. "The OCR process converts picture into words that can be searched and indexed." - Read the whole story...

SEO/SEM: Searching, Linking, Analyzing
SEO Design Solutions
This post details a basic approach for SEO and SEM optimization by providing definitions, such as the differences between organic and paid search. Jeffery Smith also serves up tips and trick, such as choosing the correct content management system; tracking and analytics; and explains the importance of your site attracting others, or being popular, which means keeping the quality of content high, so you get many websites linking to yours. Smith tells us that carefully choosing a CMS can be as critical as choosing your keyword terms. Many of the CMSs were developed prior to clearly outlining search engine conventions. "As a result, not all content management systems are SEO friendly or lend themselves to search engines as an easy platform to parse," he writes. "This means even though a website may have thousands of relevant pages, if search engines cannot interpret them due to the way it is coded, they essentially are ignored as irrelevant." - Read the whole story...

Hey, Are You There?
ClickZ
Search engines are looking for a new type of signal. Keywords in prominent places, tags on pages, good linking data, and anchor text were the search workhorses of yesteryear, according to Mike Grehan. "But now there are so many different signals," he writes. "Social media bookmarking, tagging, and ratings send out half-decent signals. Number of plays and distribution of a video send out sharp signals. But the biggest signals come from the toolbar and end-user data."

Grehan believes the toolbar can help build the tools that you need to track end users "from the click on the search result to their final destination page" and then aggregate that data. It's all about discovering resource locations. But the old idea of "throwing up zillions of pages to see if you can get the odd click here and there is the wrong way to go now." Creating quality content that's visited frequently works, but having a "Web [site] with millions of redundant pages that rarely get any visits may send a signal that a particular domain hosts lower-quality content," he writes. - Read the whole story...



Search Insider - Around the Net for Monday, November 3, 2008
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?sfa=ed&t=44&d=2008-11-3

 

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