Get indexed faster in Google

At last weekend's PubCon search engine marketing conference in Boston, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed that Google does have two types of spiders, Googlebot and Mediabot which is linked to Adsense.

Matt also revealed that even though it is Not true that having Google Adsense ads would improve a websites ranking, it may in fact help getting the website indexed faster.

Click here for more

Conversion Rates are the easy wins

Working in search engine marketing usually means looking after online ad campaigns as well as the optimsation. This then normally leads to clients expecting the conversion rates to increase with the levels of traffic.

What seperates the SEO people from the Techie is understanding online business. Traffic generation is marketing but once someone lands on the website it should be a well though out sales process. Throwing someone straight to a sales order expecting to close the sale is a trap people can get. Push heaps of traffic to a website isn't necessarily a magic pill to increased sales.

Sometimes just making small changes on a website can increase conversion immediately and is an easy win. Something as simple as more relevant copy or adding a stronger call to action can lead to greater sales from the current traffic that is going to the site already.

Google wins rights to Aussie algorithm

Google is adding to it's already comprehensive search services with a new search algorithm developed at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia.

Search for secret millions + Google - Breaking - Technology - smh.com.au

Tracking results

It never ceases to amaze me that there are commercial websites out there that still don't track what the site is doing. Maybe that is still a hangover from the good old days of brand advertising where if sales increase the ads must be working.

If anything internet marketing is more related to direct response ads, even more so with pay per click advertising. With PPC you want to know which keywords are producing sales, not just click throughs. Google adwords even makes this easy for you by providing code to insert in your success response page to make tracking easy.

MSN AdCenter takes on Google AdWords

With Microsoft's contract with Overture finishing up on the 6th June 2006, MSN is now going to enter the PPC market with it's own program called AdCentre. This is definately something to keep an eye on in the near future.

Web design and optimisation starts with Keyword Analysis

As in the offline world, starting a website business should begin to some market research. You need to find out if there is demand for a certain product or service and find out how much supply there is.

Keyword analysis is the science of finding out which keywords are the most popular that gets typed into search engines. This shows you the demand as well as what keywords to optimised, kind of like quantitative market research.

I normally use this keyword popularity list to influence web site navigational design. For example if you did some analysis on financial keywords you will soon discover a huge demand for mortage calculators. If I had a mortage company I would make sure that my website hand some kind of calculator on it because that is what people are looking for.

The main tool for keyword analysis is the Wordtracker service. It's quite an intelligence service where you plug in a keyword phrase and it comes back with some numbers on how popular they are together with other suggested keywords.

What is also unique with Wordtracker is that it will also tell you the competing websites for specific keyword phrases. This is the supply side and Wordtracker will crunch the demand and supply figures to indicate how effective a keyword phrase may be to optimise and buy.

Wordtracker lets people trial this service for free but for any serious analysis the service is cheap at about under $8 for a one day access.

Another useful free software tool that I stumbled across is Good Keywords which can tell you how popular keywords are on other types of search engines like Yahoo, Overture and Ask all in the one place.

Google PageRank Calculation table

Google pageRank calculation table is a nice little site that estitmates how many inbound links a website needs to achieve a certain PageRank.

This is why it's good to give away free content. If it gets picked up by a syndicated news network then this will boost the chances of a PageRank increase