SEO Tip: Title Tags

SEO Tip: Title Tags

Have a look at the most recent page you are working on. Can you identify just one single benefit that your content is offering?

Whether it might be a "special low cost" or perhaps the product you sell is a "time saver." Think about how you can possibly move whatever the benefit is, right up into your Title tag where you will have it visible within the search results.

The result should be a Title that includes your keyword phrase but also reads well and compels the reader to take action and choose your link over other competing links regardless of where you rank in the top 10 results. By highlight a benefit or trigger into your Title tag, you can increase your click through ratio for the page.

Write in a compelling fashion and try to get your triggers and benefits right up in the Title for searchers to see.

SEO Tip: Keep Your Web Site Sitemap Current

SEO Tip: Keep Your Web Site Sitemap Current

Put links to new pages on your site map. Make sure you link to your site map from every page of your Web site.If there's a corresponding page on your site that you can use to link to the new page, do so.

Mention the new page on your blog. Do you have a directory associated with the particular topic dealing with the content of this new page? Add a link on that page.

Just make sure that you give the search engines multiple ways to find all of your most important pages and never assume that a search engine robot will always find you through your home page.

How Pharmaceutical Affiliates Sites Can Achieve Top Organic Rankings

How Pharmaceutical Affiliates Sites Can Achieve Top Organic Rankings

If you are planning to make income from a Pharmaceutical affiliate, you need to do much more then load up their template website and hope that you will be found by searchers. You need to spend the time to work the site and market the site just as you would any business veture. The below article from iprosect provides excellent tips, which we highly suggest you follow as we know it does work, on how you can succeed with an affiliate Pharmaceutical website.

How Pharmaceutical Marketers Can Leverage Web 2.0
By Elizabeth Dillon
Search Marketing Specialist
iProspect

Pharmaceutical marketing is a different animal. Marketers in this field have to overcome a myriad of challenges, including strict legal guidelines, consumer beliefs, and stiff competition from thousands of other pharmaceutical companies. Given that climate, it is easy to understand why conducting a successful pharmaceutical search marketing campaign has unique challenges.

Fortunately, Web 2.0 has opened up new opportunities for search marketers in this industry. In fact, considering the fierce online competition that pharmaceutical marketers face, having a presence in social media is practically a necessity. Today there are several options that search marketers can leverage, including video optimization, online community sites, shared blogging, and more.

Where should you begin?

Start by utilizing what is already on your site. For example, many pharmaceutical websites host videos - on patient stories or doctor's advice - but are not making the best use of them. Smart marketers will leverage the power of social media to fully capitalize on these digital assets. To do so, ensure that your videos appear within the search results by optimizing them with keyword phrase-rich meta data and URLs. Then submit them to video hosting sites, such as YouTube. By taking advantage of these networks, your brand can be placed in front of thousands of attentive users who otherwise might not find your website. If they find the content valuable, it's likely that they will share the video with friends. This can jump start a viral brand awareness campaign.

What else can you do? Identify some social media networks that you think could be a fit. But before you dive in, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

Do Your Research

First, the venue you choose be in alignment with your target audience. Take the time to study some of the channels you are considering, and get a sense of its users, the topics they post, and the products/services that would be appropriate for them. For example, you may want to research websites where users are actively looking for health or medical advice - such as iMedix.com - where members are able to assist each other by sharing their experiences, and ranking medical content.

Actively Participate

Next, you need to find a way to participate within these online communities - post comments, create symptom quizzes, or health checklists. When users find a resource or company that is consistently interacting with the online community, they see that brand as loyal and attentive. This type of networking can build a strong connection with users. But to keep that relationship going, your content needs to be fresh, engaging and useful.

Play by the Rules

Lastly, think beyond tactics. Ultimately, you want to become a trusted member of the community. To accomplish this, not only do you need to contribute in a meaningful way, you also need to play by the rules - this includes openly disclosing yourself as part of a pharmaceutical company. Don't underestimate the importance of this as each online community has its own culture, and set of unwritten rules for what is - and isn't - acceptable on the site. Moreover, online communities don't hesitate to meter out punishment to those who don't abide by the rules (They can be particularly spiteful to marketers who pretend to be users.) Given that, you would be wise to study how other marketers participate, and assess the response their efforts generated within the community. Smart marketers will emulate what works and do it in a total transparent fashion.

Create a Blog

Blogs offer pharmaceutical marketers another viable path to capitalize on social media. Like a community site, a blog can create a destination for users - a place where they can find out more about a drug and the disease or the condition it treats. If the blog is accurate, comprehensive and current, users will see it as a reputable source for support and a place to learn.

The bottom line is that pharmaceutical marketers know all too well that it's a jungle out there, and that they need every advantage they can get. The savvy ones are finding ways to embrace social media, incorporate it into their overall search marketing efforts, and benefit from all it has to offer.

FTC OKs Google's $3 billion purchase of DoubleClick

FTC OKs Google's $3 billion purchase of DoubleClick

WASHINGTON - U.S. antitrust regulators approved Google Inc.'s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick Inc. Thursday, removing a key obstacle to a formidable combination in the burgeoning online advertising sector.

The transaction still faces substantial antitrust scrutiny from European regulators and cannot be completed without their approval. The European Commission has set a deadline of April 2 to finish its review.

The Federal Trade Commission appeared to accept many of Google's arguments that its online ad sales business doesn't compete with DoubleClick's ad-serving tools, saying its analysis "showed that the companies are not direct competitors in any relevant antitrust market."

"The FTC's strong support sends a clear message: this acquisition poses no risk to competition and will benefit consumers," Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said. "We hope that the European Commission will soon reach the same conclusion."

The deal, announced in April, will combine Google's leading position in online text ads with DoubleClick's ad-serving tools that help publishers place and track display ads.

Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc. and other critics have argued the transaction would give Google a dominant share of the rapidly growing online advertising market. Google contends its business doesn't overlap with DoubleClick's and as a result a combination won't reduce competition.

Privacy advocates also strongly opposed the deal, saying the combined company will have access to a huge amount of data on individual Web-surfing habits. The FTC said it lacked the legal authority to block the deal on any grounds except on antitrust matters.

However, in an apparent nod to these concerns, the FTC on Thursday proposed a set of privacy guidelines for the online advertising industry, describing them as something that "clearly transcend" the Google-DoubleClick deal. It remains to be seen how such guidelines would be enforced.

Privacy advocates were not assuaged.

The FTC "sidestepped its responsibility today when it approved the merger of two companies whose new, extended data-collection reach will give it unprecedented access to track our every move throughout the digital landscape," Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said. The CDD and the Electronic Privacy Information Center fought the deal on privacy grounds.

The five-member commission voted 4-1 in favor of the deal. Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour dissented "because I make alternate predictions about where this market is heading, and the transformative role the combined Google/DoubleClick will play if the proposed acquisition is consummated."

Online ad spending is projected to reach $21.4 billion this year, according to research group eMarketer, surpassing the $20.5 billion radio advertising market for the first time. EMarketer expects online ad spending to nearly double to $42 billion in 2011.

The size of the market and Google's bid for DoubleClick has spurred other purchases. Microsoft agreed to pay $6 billion for Seattle-based online advertising firm aQuantive Inc. earlier this year, and Yahoo Inc. bought Internet advertising exchange Right Media Inc. for $680 million in April. London-based advertising giant WPP Group PLC purchased online advertiser 24/7 Real Media for $649 million in May, while Time Warner's AOL bought Tacoda for an undisclosed amount in July.

Shares of Google added $5.88 to $683.25 in morning trading.

Converting Your Web Visitors To Buyers. Do Not Hide Prices

Converting Your Web Visitors To Buyers. Do Not Hide Prices

We all hate surprises, especially when we're shopping online. Don't hide the price and don't hide the shipping cost.

Some online merchants may do this on their sites, but it doesn't mean you have to. In fact, if you clearly state the price when a merchant isn't, then you're doing the potential customer a service.

If you can state on your page that Product A costs $50, tax is an extra $5 and Shipping is $10 then the potential customer can dance merrily through the shopping cart without being stopped in their tracks by extra costs.

If a customer knows from the very beginning that to get Product A delivered to their door is going to cost $65 then their brains and credit card are prepared for the dreaded process of the shopping cart and parting with their money.

Also, remember people in other countries. If Product A is only shipped in the USA and Canada then state it early on. You're not going to lose a customer as they can't receive Product A anyway, but you do gain the trust and respect of that person as you've saved them the hassle of going through the whole shopping cart process only to find at the last page, in the small print, that they don't ship to the UK.

If you want to know how to get high search engine rankings without offending search engines, take a look at OnTheAvenues.

Google starts Wikipedia rival Knol

Google starts Wikipedia rival Knol

The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that. The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

As always, a picture is worth a thousands words, so an example of a knol is below (double-click on the image to see the page in full). The main content is real, and we encourage you to read it (you may sleep better afterwards!), but most of the meta-data -- like reviews, ratings, and comments -- are not real, because, of course, this has not been in the public eye as yet. Again, this is a preliminary version.

Source: Google Blog Posted by Udi Manber, VP Engineering

How Google, Yahoo & MSN Pick Your Organic Listing Description

How Google, Yahoo & MSN Pick Your Organic Listing Description

Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it's also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.

How do Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live create the descriptions and snippets that are used in the search results?

How Google creates descriptions and snippets

Google seems to use the description from the meta description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the found page.

If the found web page doesn't have a meta description tag then Google seems to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.

If a web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

How Yahoo creates descriptions and snippets

Yahoo seems to use only the first part of the meta description which is complemented by a text snippet from the searched page that contains the searched keyword.

If a web page doesn't have a meta description, Yahoo will use the description of the web page from Yahoo's directory (if the page is listed there).

If a web page has no meta description and is not listed in the Yahoo directory, then Yahoo will display sentences from the found web page that contain the searched keywords.

How MSN/Live creates descriptions and snippets

MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description. If the searched keyword does not appear on the page, MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that appears on the page.

If available, MSN/Live will also use the DMOZ directory description in the results.

What does this mean for your web pages?

If you want to make sure that your web pages are listed with an appealing description in the search results, you should use meta descriptions on your web pages. If you don't want to use the description that is used in the Yahoo directory and on DMOZ.org you should use the corresponding tags that prevent search engines from using these descriptions.

Top 50 Real Estate Marketing Bloggers

OnTheAvenues Makes Top 50 Real Estate Marketing Bloggers

Click here to see the top 50 real estate marketing bloggers

Every real estate agent and developer is different, and each one believes one form of marketing works better than another. Word of mouth, or viral marketing, represents just one method of marketing. Others include print, radio, television, Web sites, and blogs. This marketing “to-do” list can grow, and it would take a ’superperson’ to take advantage of every marketing situation - let alone to use each one to its peak performance.

This is where marketing bloggers can come to the rescue. The list includes bloggers who focus on general and online marketing, including blogs. More specifically, the list focuses only on real estate marketing, a necessity that can prove both very expensive and time-consuming unless you learn how to get around those obstacles. Click here to see the top 50 real estate marketing bloggers

Please note that the blog numbering is not meant to be a ranking, as each blog topic is listed in alphabetical under five different categories.

You will find that OnTheAvenues has been selected as one of the top 50. Find us under Marketing Tools

If you want to know how to get high search engine rankings without offending search engines, take a look at OnTheAvenues.

SEO Secrets Revealed By Top Google Staff Video

SEO Secrets Revealed By Top Google Staff Video

From blogging to site content, links from other sites, sitemaps, Google webmaster tools, meta tags, Google base, indexing and more. This is a nice 10 minute video interview with Matt Cutts 'the Google guy'

Turn Yourself Into Santa Claus with SantaSnaps

Turn Yourself Into Santa Claus with SantaSnaps

SantaSnaps is pretty much like Photobooth, except it doesn’t have near as many features as Photobooth, and it has a holiday twist.

You can take a photo of yourself, someone you love, or someone you hate for that matter, and deck their halls with enough Christmas cheer to make you feel wonderful.

SantaSnaps is a Cocoa Duel project by John Casasanta (Which I believe means “Santa House” in Spanish) and is a fun family time waster.

Just think - when Uncle Carl has one glass of Egg Nog too many, and passes out in your Dad’s recliner, you can take a couple of snapshots, then turn him into an Unconscious Alcoholic Elf.

Holiday Merriment at it’s best! Click here to turn yourself into Santa Claus

Santa Letters. The Santa Claus House Has Lowest Prices On Santa Letters and So Much More. We Recommend Santa Clause House For Exceptional Service and Products. Click Here Now

Elf Yourself. Turn Yourself Into An Elf

Elf Yourself. Turn Yourself Into An Elf

You may never have felt the impulse to "turn yourself into an elf," but once you see this Yuletide e-card from OfficeMax the urge could wash over you. We usually hang back from highlighting promotional sites (unless they involve Bob Dylan) but ElfYourself is just too funny to ignore.

Begin the "elfamorphosis" by uploading one or more JPEG images of you and your loved ones to the site. Follow the few simple steps. Once your smiling mugs are firmly in place on top of the dancing, velvet-clad bodies of Santa's little helpers, blast the ebullient greetings off to everyone you know. There's something about placing your partner's frozen smile on top of the freewheeling impish forms that will crack you up every time. At least, it did for us. Elfin hilarity is guaranteed.

Santa Letters. The Santa Claus House Has Lowest Prices On Santa Letters and So Much More. We Recommend Santa Clause House For Exceptional Service and Products. Click Here Now

Google Doesn't Like Cloaking

Google Doesn't Like Cloaking

In a recent blog post, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts wrote about cloaking. The blog post makes several things clear:

Google doesn't like cloaking.
It doesn't matter if a small or a big company uses cloaking.
Websites that use cloaking will be removed from Google's index.
Google will detect all cloaking attempts sooner or later.
What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the web page content presented to search engine spiders is different from that presented to the normal web surfers.

This is done by delivering web page content based on the IP address or the User-Agent of the user requesting the page.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a script on the server delivers a different version of the web page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines.

All major search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines. For that reason, websites that use cloaking will be banned from the search results.

Google's opinion on "undetectable" cloaking

In his recent blog post, Google's Matt Cutts commented on a Danish company that offered 'undetectable' cloaking to its customers.

Google tried to check if this claim was true and they quickly found a website that used the services of the company. It turned out that their cloaking wasn't undetectable at all:

"If someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users.

That’s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not 'undetectable.'"

Don't risk your search engine rankings

You might get short term results with shady SEO techniques such as cloaking but it is very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use them. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use black-hat SEO methods.

If you want to get lasting results, better use ethical search engine optimization techniques.

It's not a good idea to trick search engines. They will discover this sooner or later. If you want to know how to get high search engine rankings without offending search engines, take a look at OnTheAvenues.