Facts, Fiction and views by valuepitchers

SEM??!! - Valuepitch Interactive

Some test trackback

SEM - selling stuff online using search engines...how tricky could that possibly be??

Well..especially when you have these search engines where millions of people keep searching and searching...and searching!!

Right from "mallika sherawat" to "where are my house keys" to "free home-made dog food recepeis" to "1 billion e-mail addresses".........anything and everything basically! And more often than not, they do find what they are looking for!

An engine like Google scans through millions of pages in seconds and provides results most relevant to the user's search. So, it's pretty simple...you bid for keywords that a user might search for when looking up for something you think u can provide him with..the keywords would trigger your ad to show up in one corner of the search page as "sponsored links".. just hope he sees it..finds it appealing enough to click on it..goes to your web page and takes the desired action..and you end up making money out of it! Simple, ain't it??

Well, atleast the entire concept of SEM as it is, sounds not too difficult to comprehend. But to implement it most effectively requires deep (i mean really DEEP) knowledge of how things actually work!

That's where the real game begins!!

The rules are straightforward...each keyword is assigned a "quality score" depending on how relevant it is to your product, its history and many other factors. This, along with the amount you bid for that keyword, in turn determines the price you actually pay for that keyword to trigger ads.

Now, you obviously would want to stay ahead of the competition and would want your ads to show at higher positions than your competitors (which increases the likelihood of someone seeing it and then maybe clicking on it), so you either bid more or work out a way to improve your quality score. And since you would want to limit the amount that you spend, you could really benefit from improving your quality score!

QUALITY SCORE - this is where I believe that the GREY area lies!!

It is assigned by the Google as "Great", "Ok" or "Poor" depending on numerous factors of which only a small percentage is known to you! So there's only so much that you can do to improve it!

There was a time when one was kept totally oblivious to the keyword's quality by the Google. So u never knew what quality your keywords had..all you could do was to make random changes and see if that worked! So, just the fact that we now get to see how our keywords are rated (as great, ok, poor) is a blessing!

Now, clearly quality score is one of the MOST important parameters to anyone who is into SEM since it determines to a large extent the price that you pay...and yet not everything is known about it! Why won't the Google give out your quality scores in the range of 1-100 (say) and reveal all the factors they take into account to determine quality??

Google would probably argue that the quality score must be complicated and must be hidden, because the problem of determining ad relevance is a fundamentally hard problem, and because openness would enable the Bad Guys to game the system.

Huh??So is it like..you don't know about it and hence can't do much about it? Isn't it "security through obscurity"??

Anyway, it is as it is and we really can't do much besides raking our brains to know as much as we can about the QUALITY SCORE ..something which has always intrigued every one working with it!

There are people all around who are working at it...putting in their best efforts to crack the hidden secrets-

reading up information, experimenting with their accounts, sharing knowledge and still learning and improving all the time!

That's all that one can do after all!

And the QS is only one parameter...there are a numerous other things that still need some detailed study to be understood and executed to perfection!

There's a lot of knowledge to be gained from the EXPERTS with vast experiences in the field, but they too differ in their opinions!

That's something very typical of SEM...there's no standard solution to a problem..because each problem is quite unique in itself! There are guidelines...but they are strictly to GUIDE you! It's for you figure out what works best for you!

The best way is "trial and error", they say!

Everyone is still in the process of doing just that - trying out different things, learning with each experience and figuring out best ways to optimize results!

This is something I derive my KICKS from! There's always scope for experimentation, room to explore, knowing the 'unknown'; or rather the 'lesser known'!

Which is why I believe..."SEM-It's deeper than you think it is"!!

How deep??

You've got to just keep digging!!

If a webmaster wants to avoid search listings that are not desirable, he can instruct the spider to skip the procedure of crawling certain files or directories which are not relevant. He can give the spider this instruction through a standard file called the robots.txt file, which is in the domain's root directory.



On the other hand, the webmaster can also explicitly exclude a page (or pages) from the database of a search engine. He can do so by using a meta tag which is specific to robots. A meta tag is defined as a set of elements in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). They are used to provide meta data about a web page. The meta data provided by the meta elements are structured. They are placed into the form of meta tags and found in the head section of a document in HTML.



When a search engine visits a website, the robots.txt file which is located in the root directory of its domain is the first file it will crawl. It then parses the robots.txt file and gives instructions to the robots as to what pages they should avoid crawling.



The phrase robots exclusion standard is similar in meaning to the phrases robots exclusion protocol or robots.txt protocol. It is defined as a convention which has been laid down in order to prevent web spiders and web robots from gaining access to a website, or any part thereof, which is deemed fit for viewing by the public.



Search engines usually enlist the services of web robots for the purposes of categorising and archiving websites. Web robots also co-operate with webmasters for the purpose of proof-reading the source codes. The robot exclusion standard is complementary to Sitemaps, which is a robot inclusion standard for websites.



It is highly possible that a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of the robots.txt file, which will enable it to occasionally crawl the pages that the webmaster does not want it to crawl. The pages that the webmaster is most likely to prevent the search engine crawler from crawling include pages which are login-specific. Some examples of login-specific pages are shopping carts and content which is specific to users, such as the search results that emerge from internal searches.



In the month of March in the year 2007, Google issued a stern warning to webmasters to prevent the indexing of the results of internal searches with immediate effect. According to the world's most popular search engine, these pages are tantamount to search spam.

Google, Yahoo! and the Microsoft Corporation are the three leaders in the search engine industry. They use crawlers to find their algorithmic search result pages. It is not necessary to submit the pages that are linked from the other indexed pages of search engines, as these can be found automatically.



Yahoo! and some other search engines either charge a pre-determined fee or the cost per click (CPC) for their paid crawling and submission services, but they guarantee a fairly good service. These programs usually guarantee being included in the database, but they do not guarantee a specific rank within the results on the search engine pages.



Critics have come down heavily upon the paid inclusion program launched by Yahoo! These critics not only include the advertisers, but also the competitors. The Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project are two major directories which require manual submission. The editorial review is not automatic either.



It is possible to create an XML-type of feed for Google Sitemaps, which is offered by Google, and submit it free of cost to make sure that all of the pages of search results are found, especially those pages that cannot be discovered easily (that is, by automatically clicking on the links provided).



The crawlers employed by search engines may look at various factors while crawling a website. The search engine does not index every page of search results. One of the main factors that determines whether a page would get crawled or not is the distance between the page and the root directory of the website.

By the year 1997, the realisation that efforts were being put in by webmasters to improve their ranking on the search engines had dawned upon every search engine, even if these attempts involved manipulations in the rankings of the pages of search results.



Infoseek and other early search engines adjusted their page ranking algorithms in order to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from painting a rosy picture about the ranking of each search results page merely by filling each page with too many keywords that were not relevant.



It is because of the high value (from the point of view of marketing) of the targeted search results that the chances of the relationship between the search engines and the search engine optimisers souring are higher.



In the year 2005, AIRWeb (or Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web), a conference that is held every year, was created. The purpose of this annual conference was to discuss the ill-effects of providing content aggressively on the web and also to find solutions to these problems.



The client websites of search engine optimisation firms which use very aggressive methods to optimise search engines are liable to be banned from the pages of search results. In the year 2005, a company called Traffic Power was profiled in an issue of the Wall Street Journal. This firm allegedly used highly risky means and did not disclose the risks to its clients. According to a report that appeared in Wired, Traffic Power filed a lawsuit against Aaron Wall, a blogger, for his post about the ban. Matt Cutts of Google later confirmed that Traffic Power, as well as some of its clients, were, in fact, banned by Google.



Several search engines have, in fact, reached out to the search engine optimisation industry. They frequently sponsor and attend conferences and seminars on search engine optimisation. With the advent of paid inclusion, many search engines actively participate in the well-being of the optimisation industry.



Some search engines also provide information to and guide websites with instructions about website optimisation. Google has launched a program called Sitemaps. This helps webmasters understand the problems faced by Google in indexing their website. It also provides information about the traffic from Google to their website.



Yahoo!, on the other hand, has a program called Yahoo! Site Explorer, which provides the webmasters away to submit uniform resource locators (URL), to determine the number of pages in the Yahoo! Index and to view information about links.

The optimisation of websites for search engines by specialists known as webmasters and providers of content dates back to the mid-1990's. The first search engines catalogued the World Wide Web in its early days.



In those days, a webmaster simply had to submit a page or a URL (uniform resource locator) to the various search engines. The search engines would then send a spider to crawl down the page containing the search results and extract links from it to other pages. The information returned would then appear on the page and be indexed.



The process of search engine optimisation involved downloading a page (which was done by a search engine spider) and storing it on the server of the search engine. A second program, called the indexer, would then extract information about the page (such as the words contained on it, their location, the weightage given to specific words and the links contained on the page) and place into a scheduler to be crawled at a date in the future.



The owners of websites began to understand the importance of the system of ranking of websites (that is, they began to realise that websites that were ranked higher were more clearly visible on the pages of search engine results). As a result of this, opportunities for both White Hat search engine optimisation as well as Black Hat search engine optimisation professionals were created.



According to Danny Sullivan, an expert in the field of search engine optimisation, the term search engine optimisation was first used by Usenet, who sent a spam message on the twenty-sixth day of the month of July in the year 1997.



The search algorithms used in the early days of search engine optimisation were heavily dependent upon the information provided by the webmaster. This included such keywords as meta tag and the index files that appeared in such search engines as ALIWEB.



Meta tags provided the guidelines to the content on each of the pages of search results. However, the use of meta data for the purpose of indexing the search result pages was found to be unreliable. This is because there were many instances of abuse of the meta tags by the webmasters. They did so by using keywords that were irrelevant, in order to increase the number of impressions per page. This was done in order to increase the amount of revenue generated through advertising, although it was not an ethical act on the part of the webmasters.



The most common method to monetise a content-related website at that time was to calculate the cost per one thousand impressions. The webmasters often resorted to providing meta data that was neither accurate nor complete nor consistent in the meta tags. This resulted in the pages giving the rankings for searches that were not relevant and not displaying the rankings for the relevant searches. It was not uncommon for the providers of content on the websites to manipulate the number of attributes within the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) source of pages either. This was done in order to attempt to rank higher on the pages of search engines.



The heavy reliance upon the factors that were exclusively within the control of the webmasters resulted in the abuse of the early search engines and the manipulation in the ranking of search results. However, they eventually realised the need to display relevant search results on search engines in order to provide better search results to the users. The search engines soon began to adapt in order to make sure that the pages were not filled with content that did not make sense to the users and keywords that were written by webmasters who were unscrupulous in their behaviour.



The search engines resolved the problem by developing a more complex system of ranking the websites with the help of algorithms. They took into consideration the factors that were beyond the control of the webmasters to prevent further manipulation.



Two students of Stanford University, namely Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine named backrub. It relied upon a complex mathematical algorithm that facilitated the system of rating each web page in the descending order of its prominence. PageRank was the name the duo gave the number calculated by this algorithm. It is not only a function of the quantity, but also that of the strength of inbound links.



The main function of PageRank is to estimate the chances of a given web page reaching the random user of the Web, who surfs and follows the link from one web page to another. Some links are stronger than others, and a web page with a higher PageRank is likely to be reached earlier by a random Web user than one with a lower PageRank.



Page and Brin founded the most popular search engine on the Internet, Google, in the year 1998. Google soon became a hot favourite among Internet users, basically because of its simple design. PageRank and hyperlink analysis were two of the off-page factors that were taken into consideration in addition to the on-page factors. This enables Google to avoid the sort of manipulation that is a common feature of most search engines that only take into account the on-page factors. Webmasters found PageRank too hot to handle, but they immediately set about developing tools that would enable them to build links as well as schemes that would make it easy for them to influence the search engine called Inktomi.

These methods could also be applied in order to gain PageRank. Some websites mainly focused on the exchange, purchase and sale of links, and these activities often took place on a large scale. Some of the link farms or schemes involved the creation of several websites which solely focused on link spamming.



As of the year 2007, search engines have begun to take into account a variety of factors for their ranking algorithms. Many of these factors are undisclosed and their main purpose is to reduce the effect of the various link schemes.



Google, for instance, claims to use more than two hundred different criteria to rank websites. Google, Yahoo and the Microsoft Corporation's Live Search, the three leaders in the search engine industry, keep their page ranking algorithms a closely guarded secret.



The likes of Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall, Jill Whalen and others, who are big names in the field of search engine optimisation, continuously update their knowledge of the topic by studying different techniques and approaches to achieve the optimisation of search engines. Their findings have been published in blogs and online forums. Practitioners of search engine optimisation also study the patents held by search engines, which helps them understand the algorithms used by them.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is defined as the process by which the volume and quality of traffic from a search engine to a website via natural search results can be improved. Natural search results are also known as organic search results or algorithmic search results.



The ranking of a website is determined by its position on the search results pages. If a website appears in the first ten search results, it has the highest ranking among all the websites, and will obviously have the most visitors. Search engine optimisation is useful if a person wants to different image search engines, local search engines, vertical search engines (which are specific to a particular industry) and other kinds of search engines.



Search engine optimisation can help an organisation to develop an effective marketing strategy in order to increase the relevance of a website. It takes into consideration what topics people generally search for when they log on to a search engine and how a search algorithm works.



The functions performed by a professional in the field of search engine optimisation typically include writing the coding for a website and presenting it in an interesting manner with a structural framework. No technology is completely error-free, and search engine optimisation professionals, who are known as search engine optimisers, must solve the problems which could prevent a search engine indexing program from spidering a website at the earliest.



A search engine optimiser can also put in more efforts to improve the process of search engine optimisation, such as adding content to a website. The content must be unique (and free of copyright violations) and should be indexed by search engine robots in order to make it more attractive to the people who want to visit the search engine.



Black Hat search engine optimisation is also known as spandexing. It is defined as another class of search engine optimisation which uses such techniques as keyword stuffing and link farms. These methods have the tendency to hinder the experiences of the users of search engines. Search engines may remove the listings of websites that employ the aforementioned techniques when they find them.



The term search engine optimisers was coined by the industry of consultants who are responsible for carrying out projects in the field of optimisation on their clients' behalf, and is also used by the employees of companies that offer in-house search engine optimisation services.

They may either offer search engine optimisation as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broad marketing campaign. In order for search engine optimisation services to be effective, changes may have to be made from time to time to the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) source code of the website.



Search engine optimisation techniques may also be incorporated into a website at its designing and development stages. These techniques make the websites more search engine friendly, and can also be used to describe the designs, menus, systems for management of content and shopping carts, which are quite easy to optimise.

What is search engine marketing?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is defined as a form of marketing on the Internet. It basically comprises all the activities which are aimed at the promotion of a website and increasing its visibility in the SERP (search engine results pages). It has been proved that SEM has a high return on investment (ROI).

What is SEMPO?

SEMPO is the acronym for the professional non-profit organisation that was set up in the year 2003 to act as the governing body for search engine marketers. The full form of SEMPO is the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation.

What are the methods of search engine marketing?

There are basically three methods of search engine marketing. They are search engine optimisation, paid placement and paid inclusion.

Search engine optimisation: Search engine optimisation (SEO) is defined as the process by which the volume and quality of traffic from a search engine to a website via natural search results can be improved. Natural search results are also known as organic search results or algorithmic search results.

According to various sources, including the New York Times, search engine marketing is defined as the practice of purchasing paid search listings. It is different from search engine optimisation, which is basically aimed at obtaining better free search listings.

Paid placement: Paid placement is also known as pay per click (PPC). It is defined as a model of advertising which is found on websites, advertising networks and search engines. The advertisers pay only when a user actually clicks on an advertisement in order to visit the website of the advertiser. Advertisers bid on a set of keywords which they expect their target market to type in the search bar in order to look for a specific product or service. The advertiser's advertisement is likely to appear on any of the pages of search results when the user types a keyword query that matches the list of keywords that the advertiser has at his or her disposal.

Paid inclusion: Paid inclusion is the term used to refer to an SEM product in which a search engine firm charges a fee which is related to the inclusion of a website in its search index. A majority of the search engine companies of the world, excluding Google, provide paid inclusion products.

What is the market structure of search engine marketing?

In the year 2006, it was estimated that advertisers from the continent of North America spent approximately 9.4 billion United States dollars on SEM. It was an increase of approximately 62 per cent over the year 2005 and an increase of approximately 750 per cent over the year 2002.

Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are called the Big Three, as they are the three largest vendors of search engine marketing in the world. In the year 2006, SEM had a faster rate of growth than the traditional methods of advertising.

Tracing the history of search engine marketing

The number of websites increased between the mid-1990's and the late-1990's. It was because of the rapid increase in the number of websites that search engines began to appear during this period. This made it easy for people to find information at a much faster rate.

These search engines also made it easier for various business models to finance their services. For instance, Open Text offered pay per click programs in the year 1996 and Goto.com offered a similar program about two years later.

In the year 2001, Goto.com was rechristened Overture. Yahoo! Purchased Overture two years later. It now provides advertisers the opportunities for paid search through Yahoo! Search Marketing.

In the year 2000, Google started offering the Google AdWords program, through which Google could offer advertisements on its search results pages. By the year 2007, it was proved that pay per click programs generate the largest amount of income for search engines.

Consultants in the field of search engine optimisation continue to expand their services so that they can help businesses learn more about the advertising opportunities that search engines offer and use them. It is because of SEO that a number of new firms have emerged in recent years, which focus mainly on using search engines to undertake marketing and advertising activities.

The term search engine marketing was first coined by Danny Sullivan, who proposed it in the year 2001. It is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of activities, such as performing search engine optimisation, managing paid listings on search engines, submitting a list of websites to online directories and developing online marketing strategies that can help businesses, firms and individuals market themselves better.

Search engine marketing is growing at a much faster rate in the year 2007. The budgets for search engine marketing activities have increased by approximately 750 per cent as compared to those in the previous five years.

Ethical aspects

From time to time, critics have expressed their doubts about the ethics in the paid search advertising industry. There is a raging controversy about the number of search engines that actually present advertisement on their pages of search results.

This issue has often been raised and is the target of a number of studies and reports by an agency called Consumer Reports WebWatch and another agency called Consumers Forum. (Consumers Forum is an independent non-profit organisation involved in the activities of testing and providing information that serves the interests of consumers in the United States of America.)

The FTC is another body which issued a letter to this effect in the year 2002. The letter dealt with the need to disclose paid advertising on search engines, and was issued in response to a complaint filed by a body called Commercial Alert. This body is a group involved in consumer advocacy, and it is known for its close links to Ralph Nader, the well-known attorney and political activist.

People associated with the SEMPO

The founding members of SEMPO are Barbara Coll of WebMama.com Inc., Dana Todd of SiteLab International Inc., Kevin Lee of Did-It, Noel McMichael of Marketleap (which Digital Impact later acquired), Christine Churchill of Key Relevance, Frederick Marckini of iProspect, Jessie Stricchiola of Alchemist Media and Brett Tabke of WebMasterWorld. Tabke was added as a member of the board of directors soon after SEMPO was launched.

Danny Sullivan (who coined the term search engine marketing) briefly served as one of the founding members of the association's board of directors, and then served as one of the original members of the board of advisors. Chris Sherman of Search Day, Dan Boberg of Overture, Chris LaSala of Google and Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray were the other members of the original board of advisors to SEMPO.

Profiles of three important personalities associated with the field of search engine marketing

Barbara Coll: Barbara Coll was born in the year 1960. She was brought up in the city of Ottawa, the capital of Canada and graduated with a bachelor's degree in engineering from Carelton University in the year 1986. She moved to Silicon Valley in the state of California in the United States of America and worked with giants in the field of information technology such as Sun Microsystems and Ipsilon, before founding WebMama.com Inc. in the month of September in the year 1996. WebMama helps people understand the importance of search generated traffic. Coll, a resident of the city of Menlo Park, California, is married and is the mother of one child, a son. WebMama has its headquarters in the city of Palo Alto, California.

Brett Tabke: Brett Tabke is a programmer and search engine optimisation professional from the United States of America. He is the founder of WebMasterWorld, which is an online search engine and a forum for marketing activities on the Internet. He began his career as a software developer for Commodore home computers and then worked for such companies as Epyx and Berkeley Softworks (the makers of the GEOS operating system), which was later rechristened to GeoWorks. The first bulletin board system stated by Tabke in the year 1984 had a 300-baud modem on a dial-up connection. In the year 1996, he moved on to the Internet and web technologies. Tabke lives with his wife Erika in the city of Austin, which is located in the state of Texas. He met Erika online on his forum. The couple has a pet llama, which has been brought up on a diet of green ham and eggs. It is interesting, but ironic, that Tabke does not know how to code.

Danny Sullivan: Danny Sullivan (whose first name is Danny, not Daniel) was born in the year 1965 in the city of Newport Beach in the state of California in the United States of America. He is the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, which he founded in the year 2006. It is a blog that contains news and information about search engines. He is the chief content officer and partner of Third Door Media, the firm that owns Search Engine Land and other companies related to search, including Search Marketing Now and Search Marketing Expo. The former is a provider of webcasts and organiser of live as well as on demand web seminars, also known as webinars, about search marketing. The latter is a conference on search engine marketing. Married with two sons, Sullivan is an alumnus of the University of California in the city of Irvine and has worked with the BBC for a year in England. He also worked as a reporter for such newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register. Sullivan then moved to a village called Chitterne in England, where he lives with his wife and sons. He started A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines in the month of April in the year 1996 and a website called Search Engine Watch in the month of June in the year 1997. The latter provided tips on how to get good search engine results. He sold it to MecklerMedia (now called Jupitermedia) for an undisclosed amount in the month of November in the year 2006.He has successfully organised a conference on search engine strategies (SES) six times each year during his stint as the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch, prior to its sale to Incisive Media for approximately 43 million United States dollars. Each of these SES conferences has been attended by between 1, 500 and 6, 000 people. He entered into an agreement with Jupitermedia to participate in the SES conferences in the year 2007.

The role of the SEMPO

Representation of a large number of companies, outreach and education, expanding and influencing the SEM industry: SEMPO represents more than five hundred firms located all over the world. It is associated with initiatives aimed at supporting a two-pronged general mission, namely outreach and education. These initiatives are, in turn, aimed at expanding and influencing the search engine marketing industry.

Public service, information, education, research, case studies, webinars, learning materials: It serves the public by providing free information, such as research, case studies, webinars and learning materials related to search engine marketing.

SEMPO institute, training programs and courses, involvement with the global SEM community: The SEMPO institute has recently been launched. It conducts courses and training programs in search marketing. SEMPO is basically a way to get involved with other members of the search engine marketing community all over the world and to further the mission of the search engine marketing industry, which is growing in leaps and bounds.

Committees, research, education, global working groups, metrics/standards: The members of SEMPO are also the members of various committees, including the research committee, the education committee, the global working groups committee and the metrics/standards committee. These committees are open to all the members of the association. They work on a wide range of activities and are committed to a number of issues pertaining to the search engine marketing industry.

SEMPO's annual state of the search market survey: SEMPO conducts a survey every year, which is known as the Annual State of the Search Market Survey. It is widely covered by the press and is subject to in-depth analysis by experts from the search engine marketing industry. It is one of the largest research studies conducted by search engine marketing analysts in the North American market, and has become a benchmark for similar studies in other parts of the world as well. The year 2007 is the third year since the inception of the survey. The search engine markets in Japan and Europe will also conduct similar studies in the year 2007.

Educational resources, promotion of the SEM industry: SEMPO plays a crucial role in providing educational resources to its members and consumers and promoting the search engine marketing industry.

SEMPO's sponsors

The association is sponsored by all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, SuperPages.com, Search Engine Strategies and Atlas. The members of SEMPO not only includes firms that belong to the search engine marketing industry, but also consultants from the industry, website developers, in-house marketing professionals and advertising agencies.

Many search engines have search engine marketing programs. These not only include the global search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and Ask.com, but also the ones that are specific to a particular country. The country-specific search engines include Baidu (a search engine from China) and Yandex and Rambler, the two Russian search engines.

Conclusion

There is no doubt about the future of search engine marketing. The search engine marketing industry is growing at a very rapid rate, and its future appears to be very bright. With an increase in the number of Internet users all over the world, marketing professionals can now tap the potential of the worldwide web as a powerful marketing tool.

As far as the SEMPO is concerned, the role it plays in organising the search engine marketing industry is commendable. If the rapid strides it has made in the SEM industry are any indication, the membership and the responsibilities of the association are likely to grow manifold in the future, and experts in the SEM industry can expect an even better performance from SEMPO in the years to come.

The following are the points to be dealt with or remembered while trying to optimize a web page.

First and foremost, google always believes in the natural process of getting a page rank.Meaning, it basically tries to make SEO hard for people like us. So any process which boosts the page rank (PR) of a page abnormally in a very short amount of time may be considered as malpractice by google and the site or the page may be penalized. The same goes for link building too. Any abnormal increase in the number of links to the site may lead to the penalty of the site by google. Having said that, i will now list out some guide lines that can be followed while trying to optimize the web pages.

1.Have more links to your page from pages of other sites.:- This will increase the PR of the page. Though page rank is a factor in assessing relevancy, it is not the only factor. So it is perfectly possible to have a page with lower page rank turning up as the first search result if its content is highly relevant to the search keyword.

2.Having inbound links from pages with high page rank boosts up the PR of your page more than that by having inbound links from pages having lower PR keeping all the other factors the same.

3.Having links from pages with large number of outbound links (to several other sites) on them adds less value to the PR of your page.:- having a link from a b2b directory will add a very insignificant weight to the PR of my page as the directory would have hundreds of other such outgoing links.

4.Site structure and internal links adds to the page rank significantly.:- having back links from the different pages of your site to other pages of your site adds to the PR of each of the pages.conversely, having outbound links from your site pages will decrease the PR of your page.It is suggested to have outbound links on pages of your site which have a low PR.

5.Keyword relevancy:- having the targeted keyword in the link anchor text, In the heading of your page etc will add to the PR .Having links from popular domains may also help in getting a better PR

6.Content relevancy:- Having inbound links from pages containing very relevant text to that of your page boosts up the PR of your page compared to having a link from a page with no relevancy at all in spite of both the linking pages having same PR.To increase the relevancy of the referring page, having the targeted word in the text or synonyms of the targeted word will also help.

The following are the link building strategies

1. Natural link-building through quality content.:- publish highly relevant content to a particular theme on your site so that others who read it may want to refer you in their own sites with similar themes

2.Requesting inbound-only links.:- A Public relation approach would help more than generating an electronic mail. Approach site owners having high page rank and relevancy to persuade them into referring your site.

3.Reciprocal linking:-This can be on a quid pro quo basis. A site refers yours and you return the favor.You can also advertise for such a thing.

4.Buying links:-Google is totally against this and claims to have methods to detect link buying.Many call it as a bluff by google. Google may penalize the sites buying the links.So if u are brave enough to call the bluff, then the following are the best buys.
a)buying links from a directory
b)buying links direct from another site
c)buying links from a link broker


5.Creating your own external links:- blogs are the best ways of doing this. But creating separate sites on a different domain which scrapes content from the main site and stuff it with related keywords may get penalty from google.

6.Online PR or SEO PR(Public Relations) :-SEO PR (public relations) is a method in which your press release is optimised and distributed to the leading online PR agencies for inclusion on the leading news portals and search engines.
Designed for businesses looking for increased brand awareness, publicity and targeted leads, SEO PR also perfectly compliments your search engine optimisation and any traditional offline PR activity.After all, public relation building is another form of link building!

Today, it seems that Google bought Urchin in a hurry. Me thinks 30 million $ down the drain?? The UI and usability of Urchin are no way near what Google would have offered if it had built on its own. There was nothing 'Google' about it. The information representation was more to please gullible clients than to any decision maker or data seeker.

This realisation is evident from the new Google Analytics. A look at the new analytics will tell us the Google way of doing it. Clean, uncluttered decision impactful data. The customizable Dashboard to start with. End to End data according to what the user wants. The users can customize, drag and drop dashboards to the post login page.

The export feature is a beauty. Downloadable PDF reports will save tons of time. Email and scheduling emailers is another cool feature. (though i have to test the date compare feature)

So is Visitor segmentation, continent, sub continent and country source and lots of stuff.

GA should be able to give customizable columns. (the way it gives in adwords). For example i want to see the visits, bounce rates and conversion rates according to country (or some other visitor segment) in a single table. Currently there are two separate tables.

GA should handle redirects well. (Currently we notice its not able to get the right sources of traffic)

There are some minor inconsitencies though. Am sure with the release of post beta version, it will win our hearts!

Good Work Guys@Google!
Venkat.