Fast-forward to the present day and banner ads have fallen from grace with few companies buying banner ads purely for the sake of one-upmanship on the competition. In their stead, search engine marketing has become the medium of choice for companies looking to increase website exposure. With the steady growth of search engine use, thanks in part to the technology and reliability offered by Google, companies already know that obtaining top positioning on the search engines will result in qualified traffic to their website and increased online revenues. However, there is a new phenomenon rising up to replace the battle once seen with banner advertising; Search Engine Vanity.

Search Engine Vanity occurs when a company seeks to obtain number one search engine positioning for the simple purpose of one-upmanship on their competitors. Traffic data, click-thru-rates and conversions are all secondary considerations compared to the desire to ensure that when an Internet user searches for a product or service, their company website is listed above that of their competitors. Whether it’s Apple and Dell vying for the top ranking for “computers” or Wal-Mart and Netflix battling for the number one spot for the phrase “dvd rental”; these and other companies know that being #1 on the search engines can be vitally important when demonstrating market share to the press or investors.

Companies can spend millions of dollars each year in advertising and branding. A single 60 second Super Bowl ad will cost you over $2 million and have little discernable benefit compared to the same amount spent on a series of ads elsewhere. Yet the prestige offered to a company that advertises during the Super Bowl cannot be denied. The same holds true when it comes to search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. Companies are acutely aware that being highly positioned within these search engine results will strengthen their brand and increase their credibility within their industry. Take Alaska Airlines as an example, while they had great search engine exposure, with hundreds of search terms listed on the first page of the search engines, they knew that they needed to be in the top spot for “Alaska flights” if they were to solidify their position as the number one airline provider to Alaska. Being somewhere in the first 5 search engine listings, was perfectly adequate to drive traffic to their website, but the prestige of being the very first site listed would have an intangible benefit. By being the number one listed site on Google, Alaska Airlines would immediately position itself as the Google’s favorite, automatically ensuring brand dominance. Number one on the search engines became the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad; your company’s very presence signaled you were the best in your industry.

So are companies throwing money at search engine marketing for the sole purpose of being number one, with little regard to actual traffic and revenues generated? Has Search Engine Vanity taken over from common sense? Yes and no. More and more companies are seeing search engine marketing as the latest trend, something they must do because their competitors are already involved. They fear being left behind and are rushing to secure top positioning for the terms that they believe represent their brand. A company such as IBM, that has spent many years and millions of dollars to ensure that their name is synonymous with “computers”, knows that the Internet offers a new playing field with different perceptions. In their efforts to secure their brand, it is important that they “own” the term “computers” and hence invest a lot of effort to ensure that ownership is carried over to the search engine results. However, like most companies you can be sure that IBM knows that the by-product of a number one position on the search engines is increased traffic and sales. With more than 500 million searches being carried out each day, being number one for a generic term or phrase not only increases brand awareness but also increases website traffic and ultimately, revenues. As Penny Oslund, Executive Director, EMBA Programs at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School put it, “we want to ensure that our OneMBA website is positioned above all other business schools to ensure the prestige of our program, the traffic will take care of itself”.

So as search engine marketing becomes a valid and widely adopted marketing medium for companies of all sizes, not being positioned at the top of the listings is something business wish to avoid. Just as companies rushed in the mid 90s to secure a domain name that reflected their company image or brand, many businesses now seek to ensure that when the average Internet user searches at Google, it is their website that sits at the top of the pile, proudly announcing “Look at me, I am number one”.

Author Bio:
Andy Beal is Vice President of Search Marketing for WebSourced, Inc and KeywordRanking.com, global leaders in professional search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine marketing advice, Andy has had articles published around the world and is a repeat speaker at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conferences. Clients include Real.com, Alaska Air, Peopleclick, Monica Lewinsky and NBC. You can reach Andy at andy@keywordranking.com and view his daily SEO blog at www.searchenginelowdown.com.

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If you have new ideas or a new product your company would like to promote, business blogs are a good, inexpensive vehicle. And there are many other advantages to using blogs too: major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo, Google Alta-Vista and most of the others crave on fresh and new information that is frequently updated, sometimes many times a day. Business Blogs consist of many links, written with fresh content that is propagated everywhere on the web.

The more search engines like Google find daily and updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit that business blog, resulting in high search engine rankings for a good part of your business blog-powered data. If you still have your doubts on business blogs and are wondering if they are just a passing fad, for your information, in February of 2003, Google bought Blogger, itself a blogging software pioneer. Google publicly said they don’t even know how they are going to use the company, but they will certainly have some use for it… (!) (Quoted in the New York Times).

If you are still asking yourself why should your business start a business blog (b-blog), here are a few answers to ponder about:

1. If you have timely information to share with your customers

2. If you’re unhappy with the results and ROI from email marketing

3. You would like your web site to have top-ranking positions in Google

4. Many observers think that blogging will last for a long time

Here is a list you might want to read of the many business benefits of starting a good and serious business blog:

- Higher search rankings on Google with no paid-submission

- Other search engines will most likely position you higher too

- Pay-per-click (PPC) is great but free marketing has infinite ROI

- Create visibility with information by sharing with your customers

- Fresh information appears on Google in only a few days, not weeks

- Other business bloggers will point prospects towards you for free

Now all of this is great and can help companies a lot in their search engine rankings. But Business Blogs should not be viewed as the single winning solution that will do the magic. Business blogs should be viewed as an added, parallel solution to increase communications and ideas to your prospects and customers, while at the same time helping your web site in the search engines.

To be real successful, a business first needs to have its web site properly optimized by a professional search engine optimization (SEO) firm, one that knows search engines and truly understands your specific business needs. After a serious optimization campaign and the ensuing positive results that can be analyzed in detail and carefully measured, business blogs should be considered as an added way to help increase search engine rankings in the major search engines, while at the same time more effectively communicating new ideas, products or services to the business community, your clients, prospects, suppliers, business associates, etc.

Be prepared to see a lot more developments in this area. Already the Internet is seeing a new wave of business blogging software and related applications claiming to propel your web site to the top of the search results. Be careful before choosing any such software. While some can be of help, as with anything that is new and revolutionary, careful analysis, due diligence and product evaluation is necessary before deciding on one final choice. We will continue to monitor this development closely and will keep you posted on our findings through this web site.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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Hello Serge!
Just wanted you to know that I diligently read all your articles that you write on search engine optimization and I have learned so much from you since. I’m writing you regarding an article you wrote on your website about doorway and gateway pages. After listening to a number of people around me, I had planned on getting increased visibility from search engines to my site and some have told me that making a mirror of my existing site or a few “duplicates” might help me in the engines. They also told me each site should have a new, unique URL and unique domain name, a unique title and description tag, and body text “slightly” modified to focus on different keywords and key phrases might be a splendid idea. While I am at it, I also taught of a newer, fresher “look” with different background colour and font.

Now I just read your article on doorway and gateway pages and I strongly realize that the whole thing is a real bad idea. Instead you suggest creating keyword-rich content pages for my main website, and one should really concentrate on that single site for maximum long-term results and increased visibility in the search engines. My questions to you about this whole matter are:

1) Are you saying I need new pages or to rewrite just the marketing copy?

2) If you mean rewriting just the marketing copy, isn’t it necessary that the keywords I want to focus on should be in the page’s title and meta description tags? Let’s say I want to focus on five search phrases, the title & description would look pretty crowded, don’t you think?

3) I would like to concentrate on different search phrases that are related to the terms “career goals,” “get higher education”, “get a better future”, etc.

I think it is very tricky to try to make for example five new keyword-rich content pages and make them “merge in” with my current website, since the search terms are so general. I am aware that some companies put up “mirror sites” to accurately measure how small changes to their site might affect overall sales. Isn’t this forbidden? I sincerely hope you can help me with all my questions. Thanks again for such good professional advice and I am looking forward to more of the same!
Best wishes,
Muriel Westgate

Serge Thibodeau’s response:

Hello Muriel,
I’m happy you appreciate my advice. More and more business people have been writing to me lately to say it is on their “must read SEO list” which is encouraging. As for your questions, they are very good ones and very representative of the many others I constantly get regarding my article on doorway and gateway pages. It would appear that creating multiple websites and gateway pages has become such a common practice in the minds of so many search engine optimization technicians that my own way, and “correct way” of doing things is a difficult thing to accept for many would-be SEO’s.

Despite all that, I fully support and emphasize everything I said in my article because the more the search engine databases get “tainted” and distorted by duplicate content and mirror websites, the more the search engines will truly fight against it. In light of all this, I strongly recommend all site owners to stop thinking only of their own little search engine needs and instead think about the whole search community and the search engines themselves. If some search engine optimization technicians as an industry stubbornly refuse to work and cooperate with the search engines and continue to vastly undermine their search databases, in the end, everyone will lose and that would be a very sad thing in itself.

I will add that if Google has done so well it’s simply because of the high quality and relevancy of their search results. Most people love to search the web using Google because they are pretty certain they will find what it is they are looking for. These same people do not wish to have SEO’s and webmasters damaging or negatively affecting their search results because of their own little selfish needs. Google doesn’t care if your website is in the top five or top ten of their results pages. What they do care is relevancy and quality search results.

And if that means temporarily penalizing or permanently banning the websites that are of similar nature and have very similar content to another existing site, then they are in their full right to do so. Remember, it is their search engine and they have the right to do what they want with it. Google, or for that matter any other search engine where you don’t pay to get listed don’t owe anybody anything. All of this means that they hold all the rights and everyone who wants to be listed must all play by their own rules.
Having said that Muriel, I will answer each of your questions one by one:

“You suggest that I create keyword-rich content pages for my main site…
1) Do you mean new pages altogether or to rewrite just the marketing copy?”

You can do one or the other. Whatever meets the needs of your website and of your business. If you already have a lot of text, then yes you can rewrite it to incorporate your keyword and key phrases for that particular page. If on the other hand you don’t have much copy or many pages, then yes, you should create new pages and concentrate your copy around your three or four keyword phrases targeted for that single page.

If you create new pages, they need to be blended into your site as regular, standard pages too. Remember that they should not be stand-alone pages or “orphaned pages” that are found only in the search engines. They all need to be text-linked within your site’s current page navigation system.

2) If you mean rewriting the marketing copy, isn’t it necessary that the keywords I want to focus on would be in the page’s title and meta description tags?

Muriel, yes absolutely. When I said creating new keyword-rich marketing copy, I never meant to insinuate that this is the only thing you should do. After proper keyword research using WordTracker, your marketing copy is the first thing to do, but of course you will still have to create title and meta description tags to match the rest of your copy. To be real successful, write the copy first and only then your meta tags.

3) I would like to focus on different search phrases that are related to the terms “career goals,” “get higher education”, “get a better future etc. I think it is very difficult to try to make five new keyword-rich content pages and make them blend in with my current site, since the search terms are so general.>Muriel, if it sounds difficult, it’s because anything you do for the long term will probably be slightly difficult. In SEO, quick fixes are a thing of the past. One very helpful indicator I like to use is this: if you’re having trouble working particular keywords or key phrases into your pages, then most likely you’re targeting the wrong search terms for that particular page or section. Too vague or too general search terms will not convert your visitors into customers and therefore you shouldn’t target those. If you can’t write about them so that they make sense, then they’re not the right keywords for your site. It’s just as simple as that!

Search engine optimization is a science as well as an art. It’s not about getting the most traffic you can get for any keywords or key phrases that are out there. SEO is about bringing highly targeted visitors to your website who are looking for precisely what your site is offering. I can’t imagine any other form of marketing that can do so much for so little. People looking and searching for your specific products or services are already very qualified future buyers. Sometimes the “future” is a lot closer than you might think.

They’re searching for something to learn more about it or to just go and buy it. If you have that certain something they’re looking for, it’s important that your site is among the first one they find in the search engine results pages. There’s a big mystery out there that says you should bring in customers looking for things that might be similar to what you have, and then convince them to try your product instead. That could work for other forms of advertising, but that’s not what SEO really is. Think highly targeted keywords and think exact keyword phrases.

And I know that people put up mirror sites to accurately measure how small changes to their site affect sales. Isn’t this allowed either?

Absolutely not! Mirror sites are usually negatively seen by all search engines. You should use your regular site to test your marketing copy. You can also use pay-per-click (PPC) ad programs to test “landing pages” and sales copy. Plus, you can test site pages through many of the search engine pay-per-inclusion (PPI) programs since they pick up your new content fairly quickly.

The fact remains that search engines are rapidly moving away from allowing any kinds of “tricks”. You might still see plenty of sites that get away with some tricks. However, at least where Google is concerned, you’ll be seeing it much less often in the future.

Author :
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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In the first part of the series, I wish to ensure we discuss the importance of a solid foundation. When starting any SEO campaign it is tempting to leap straight in and start tweaking meta tags and changing text. However, like any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them. In the same way traditional advertising agencies survey their demographic audience, search engine marketers must ensure that their SEO campaign targets the correct keywords or search phrases. Target the wrong search phrase and you could end up with great search engine rankings for keywords that have no search requests. A few hours now spent ensuring that the correct search phrases are targeted, can save months of useless optimization.

Brainstorm
When you started your company or developed your products, you no doubt sat down with your friends, relatives and business partners and discussed the needs of your target audience. You would have been foolish to stubbornly press ahead with your products without first testing the market to see if there was a demand. Likewise, when you start out on your SEO campaign it is important to brainstorm search phrases that are likely to bring qualified visitors to your website. Sit down with your co-workers and business partners and discuss which keywords are relevant to the products and services you offer. Compile an initial list of 5-10 search phrases that you feel best represent your company and which you believe people would type into a search engine when trying to find you. Consider the following factors when brainstorming:

* Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?

* Which of your products are in stock? There is no point targeting search phrases that are popular if you don’t actually stock that item.

* Which products have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.20 mark-up on a very popular product, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.

* Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

Make use of any PPC data
Chances are, your decision to begin a SEO campaign is fueled by your desire to reduce costly pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While reliance on PPC will be reduced with a good SEO campaign, you can make use of your current PPC efforts when researching your search phrases to target. Analyze your PPC keywords and look to see which of them have brought the highest traffic levels, best click through rates and greater sales conversions. It is likely a search phrase that brought successful results through a PPC campaign will be very relevant in your quest to obtain top search engine positioning.

Expanding your Keyword list
Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it’s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will not, as I am sure you will know, bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, MSN et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are a couple of very useful tools you can use to expand your list.

The first and most well known, is the Overture Search Suggestion Tool. This great little research tool is primarily for the use of Overture PPC users and if you have ever endeavored on a PPC campaign with Overture, you will no doubt have come across it. Take any of your main search phrases and enter them into the suggestion tool. Overture will then spit out all other popular search terms that contain that phrase. In addition, Overture will place the search phrases in order of popularity and give you an idea of the number of searches per month for each phrase across their network.

While this tool can be very useful, especially as it is free to use, it does have some key drawbacks. First, it does not differentiate between singular and plural search phrases. Consequently, “desktop computer” and “desktop computers” are combined together, leaving you to use your own judgment as to which variation is the most popular. For many search phrases, you can take an educated guess as to which one is likely to be the most searched, but often you will be left without a clue as to whether to target the singular or plural. Secondly, the Overture Suggestion Tool does not handle punctuation very well, preferring to ignore it completely. Thus “kid’s toys”, “kid’s toys”, “kid- toys”, “kid’s toy” would all be shown as “kid toy”. Again, this never used to be a big problem, but go to Google and search for each of these phrases and you will see different results for each one.

If you are serious about your SEO campaign, you will consider a subscription to WordTracker to be a worthwhile investment. Starting at just $7 a day, with discounts all the way up to one year of service, WordTracker offers a similar type of research tool as Overture but with many more bells and whistles. The biggest advantage with WordTracker is that is uses Meta-Crawlers when sourcing search phrase frequencies. This eliminates inflated search phrase frequencies from Overture users checking their own rankings and thus artificially increasing the popularity of certain phrases. In addition WordTracker offers the following advantages:

* Offers a “thesaurus” and “lateral” search. Allowing you to view search phrases that are related to your main search term, but not necessarily containing that term.

* Shows search frequencies for both singular and plural phrases; allowing you to determine which is the most popular.

* Identifies which form of punctuation is the most popular.

* Allows you to place your targeted keywords into a “shopping basket” so that you can analyze all of your phrases together.

* Has an exclusive KEI analyzer that allows you to compare the popularity of the search phrase with the number of websites competing for that keyword.

Determining Competition
Once you have identified possible additions to your search phrase list, you must research further to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized top search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. While it can be tempting to target only search phrases that are very popular and searched hundreds of thousands of times in a single month, you must also consider the likelihood of you being able to obtain a ranking higher enough to capitalize on all of that great traffic. Many, many search terms are so saturated by competitors that it would be highly unlikely that you would achieve a high enough ranking to reward your efforts. Therefore, it is often worthwhile considering those search phrases that may not have quite the same level searches each month, but likewise do not have as many websites targeting that term.

WordTracker’s KEI (keyword effectiveness index) allows it’s users to analyze their chosen search phrases to determine the level of competition for that phrase. WordTracker has a great explanation on their website as to how to use this index, but in summary it provides a numerical scale for identifying the popularity of a keyword compared to the number of competitors targeting that phrase.

For those of you on a strict budget and opting to use Overture for keyword research, there is an alternative answer. Enter each identified search phrase at Google, using quotations around the phrase (e.g. “discount computers”). Google will then display the search results for all pages that target that phrase exactly as entered. View the top right, blue navigation bar and you will see the number of results Google matched. This number represents the total number of web pages that Google has identified as targeting that exact search phrase. This number represents your competition or your very own KEI. Make a note of this number for each of your identified search phrases and pretty soon you will be able to see which of your search phrases have the most competition and which have less competitors and therefore a better chance of obtaining top ranking.

Selecting Your Keywords
By now, you should have an expanded list of search phrases to target, taken from either Overture or WordTracker. In addition, you should also have a good idea as to the competition for each of those keywords, whether you used the KEI or Google format. Now is the time to start selecting the search phrases that will form the foundation for a successful SEO campaign. Ok, deep breath, we’re almost there.

When selecting the keywords to target, there are many factors you must take into consideration. You will no doubt have your own unique considerations, but you must also take into account the following:

* Is the search phrase relevant to your website and the page that you are optimizing?

* Is there a page within your website that would be particularly suitable for targeting the selected search phrase?

* How many other websites/web pages would you be competing against?

* Do you offer competitive pricing for the product or service that relates to the keyword?

* Will top search engine ranking for the search phrase generate enough revenue for your company?

Arranging Keywords into Themes
Once you have asked yourself the above questions, it will become easy to narrow down your list to the main search phrases that you wish to target. When doing so, remember that you should not try and target every selected search term on your index page. Your index page is the most important page of your website and likely to have the best positioning on the search engines, therefore choose 5-10 search phrases to target here and ensure that they are all closely related. Trying to target “desktop computers” and “dvd players” on your index page will get you top rankings for neither. Instead, identify the pages within your website that target those particular keywords and use those instead. The key to selecting keywords to target for each page is to think of “themes”. Each page should ideally target just one theme. This will assist you in making sure that the targeted page is relevant to the selected search phrase. In turn, this will not only increase your chances of obtaining top rankings, but also increase your customer sales conversions by bringing the visitor to the most relevant page.

In summary
When researching search phrases and targeting keywords for your SEO campaign, it is important to follow the steps above. Research your industry, talk to your potential customers and make use of the themes within your website. In addition, consider these final tips:

* Determine the intent of the visitor. Thoroughly research all search terms to ensure that the searcher intended to find your product or service. E.g. reconsider targeting the keyword “DVD” if you store only sells blank DVD discs, the chances are the searcher intended to find DVD movies rather than blank media.

* Don’t always rely on the numbers. Both Overture and WordTracker use historical data when displaying search phrase frequencies and neither archive more than two months back. Therefore you must know your industry and account for any seasonal or other trends. E.g. the search phrase “red roses” will be more popular for Valentines than at Christmas.

* Look for opportunities. Identify the search phrases that have been untapped by your competitors. Some search terms may have slightly fewer searches, but may have dramatically fewer competitors.

* Target the right pages. This cannot be stressed enough. Do not try and target every keyword on every page. Identify themes within your website and group relevant search phrases around those pages. You will see much better results.

I hope you have found the above useful. This series is designed to help the beginner, but I hope a few experienced SEO marketers will find something fresh to consider. In the next installment of this series, we will look at the use of Meta Tags. These once champions of SEO have recently taken a battering, but are still extremely important for the success of any campaign. We’ll look at how they are used, how to construct them and why they can help achieve top search engine rankings. In the meantime, you should have enough information to assist you in your search phrase research and build the foundation for a successful search engine optimization campaign.

Author Bio:
Andy Beal is Vice President of Search Marketing for WebSourced, Inc and KeywordRanking.com, global leaders in professional search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine marketing advice, Andy has had articles published around the world and is a repeat speaker at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conferences. Clients include Real.com, Alaska Air, Peopleclick, Monica Lewinsky and NBC. You can reach Andy at andy@keywordranking.com and view his daily SEO blog at http://www.searchenginelowdown.com.

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With rumors circulating for some months that Yahoo! had built a “war-chest” and was preparing to make a significant acquisition, investors have been watching and waiting for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company to make its move. With Google increasing its audience reach and MSN announcing that it had recently started spidering the web with the intent of launching a revamped search engine, Yahoo! knew that in order to compete in the search engine industry it would have to make a move to increase its arsenal and improve investor confidence.

It appears that this acquisition is just the ticket for Yahoo!, with the purchase broadening the company’s focus and increasing advertising revenue from search services, especially in shopping, travel and yellow pages categories. The deal will also provide an audience of more than 88,000 Overture advertisers who will now be encouraged and enticed to purchase the many advertising services already offered by Yahoo!. While the deal looks to be a good fit for Yahoo!, which needed a new channel to generate additional revenue, and for Overture, which has faced fierce competition from other “pay for performance” companies, is this announcement good for Overture’s customers?

While it is too early to determine the full impact of Yahoo! acquiring Overture, there are some concerns already being raised about the future of Overture’s thousands of customers. Overture advertisers have already seen the loss of valuable exposure at AOL and Netscape, with both of those search engines turning to Google’s popular AdWords service for it’s sponsored listings. In addition, Looksmart recently announced a partnership that would see it providing it’s new Looklistings ads to Lycos, which could ultimately replace or at least reduce the impact of the current deal with Overture. With Yahoo! now taking over the reins at Overture, there is a definite possibility that MSN will not seek to renew it’s partnership with Overture, choosing not to share revenue now that the company is owned by one of their biggest online competitors. If this theory turns into reality, Overture advertisers could see a drop in the amount of traffic they receive with some estimates indicating a 30 percent reduction in traffic levels. If this holds true then it will not only reduce the value of a pay-per-click campaign with Overture, but could also reduce future earnings that Yahoo! had hoped to achieve from the deal.

So if buying Overture means that MSN and perhaps other search engines pull the plug on their partnership, is this a bad deal for Yahoo!? Actually, not only has Yahoo! likely already considered all outcomes from making such an acquisition, it has probably factored in the loss of such large Overture partners such as MSN. However, with the acquisition of Overture’s pay-per-click technology, Yahoo! can now offer its own advertisers a PPC model that many suspect will ultimately mimic that of Google’s AdWords. No longer having to rely on a third-party technology, Yahoo! can utilize this valuable advertising model and further improve its revenue, keeping its customers and investors happy. With the recent purchase of Inktomi and it’s crawling technology, Yahoo! can now stand against rivals such as Google and MSN and offer a complete package to both the search engine user and search engine advertiser.

There are many directions that Yahoo! can now take, with Overture and Inktomi safely under its belt. My personal opinion is that Yahoo! will not be able to sustain many of the relationships that Overture has developed over the years. This will be partly due to partners such as MSN not wishing to continue a relationship with a company now owned by a competitor and partly because more and more of Overture’s competitors are developing their own internal pay-per-click or sponsored listing technology. I see a future where, just as Overture planned to use the technology of AltaVista and AllTheWeb for its benefit, Yahoo! will in turn use Overture’s technology not to continue down the path of acquiring external partnerships, but to provide Yahoo! and it’s advertisers a new opportunity for increasing revenues. Many people will disagree and say that Yahoo! can continue to make Overture work and will continue to ad partners. But then the world would be a very boring place if we all agreed now, wouldn’t it?

Author Name: Andy Beal

Author Bio:
Andy Beal is Vice President of Search Marketing for WebSourced, Inc and KeywordRanking.com, global leaders in professional search engine marketing. Highly respected as a source of search engine marketing advice, Andy has had articles published around the world and is a repeat speaker at Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies conferences. Clients include Real.com, Alaska Air, Peopleclick, Monica Lewinsky and NBC. You can reach Andy at andy@keywordranking.com and view his daily SEO blog at http://www.searchenginelowdown.com.

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Both domains point to the exact same content. The Apache configuration file at my web server just treated them both as virtual domains having the same filesystem location. There was no difference: no matter what domain name you used, you’d get the same pages. These are just duplicate domains.

For several years I flopped around, using the names inconsistently. When I’d refer people to my site, sometimes I’d send them to pcunix.com and sometimes to aplawrence.com, depending on my mood. Of course other sites that made link references to pages on my site were just as inconsistent: some of them point to pcunix.com, some to aplawrence.com, depending upon their whim or how they happened to find me.

Google Page Rank
It turns out that was a bad mistake. Google (and other search engines) don’t really know that these are actually the same site, so they index the sites independently. That causes problems for ranking.

Google uses a lot of undisclosed criteria to determine how “important” they think a page is. One is incoming links: other sites that reference your site. In Google parlance, that’s a “vote”: a site is voting for your site’s page rank by referencing it in a link. With two apparently separate sites as I had, that caused a dilution of votes: some sites link to pcunix.com, some to aplawrence.com, and therefore neither really gets the votes they really have.

Worse, Google apparently will penalize sites it thinks are too similar to other sites. As these sites are really identical, that could cause Google to downrate one even more than it might otherwise. I’ve seen people complain that one of their duplicate domains actually went to a Page Rank of 0.

So having duplicate domains isn’t a good strategy for web site popularity. As that popularity drives business to me and increases my advertising revenue, it’s very important to me that I get the best ranking I can in search engines, and especially in Google.

In June 2003, that’s where I was. Something had to be done.

What is my Page Rank?
Ah, that’s a good question, and it turns out not to have an easy answer. If you want a heavy on the math but still interesting dissection of this subject, see http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/.Otherwise, for a sometimes inaccurate look at Google Page Rank, download the Google Tool Bar for Internet Explorer (unfortunately Google doesn’t provide this for any other browsers). It will show a gray/green bar for any page you visit. The more green, the higher the Page Rank. If you hover your cursor over the bar, you’ll see a numeric score, expressed as X/10. This is apparently a logarithmic scale, so a rank of 2 is much more important than 1, etc. The problem with this is that there are reports and indications that it is not always accurate, but as it’s all we have to go by, we can probably trust it to the extent that a page rank of “2″ is definitely much less popular than a rank of “4″.

By the way, I’ve found Google’s tool bar to be strange in other ways. For example, if I just call up “aplawrence.com”, I get a Page Rank of 0, while “aplawrence.com/index.html” gets 6, as does “www.aplawrence.com” and “www.aplawrence.com/index.html”. They are all, of course, the same page.

So, back to my problem. The pcunix.com site main page had a Google page rank of 4, while aplawrence.com had 6. So, if I could merge them together, I’d get 10, right? No, because it’s logarithmic. I *might* push it to 7 if my present 6 was close, but there’s no way for me to tell that ahead of time. No matter what, getting the two to be one has to help. So which one should be the “real” site. Well, no matter what attachment I might have to “pcunix.com”, the “6″ page rank says that’s the one to concentrate on. So I needed to get “pcunix.com” to become “aplawrence.com”.

301 Redirect
Well, there are a couple of ways I could approach that. I could just kill off pcunix.com and hope that the sites that link to it will eventually find aplawrence.com and change their links. That sounds like a dumb idea.

I could move pcunix.com to its own content and put up big banners asking people to change their links. That doesn’t sound much better.

Finally, I could use a “301″ redirect, which is what I did. The first thing needed was to set aside some space for pcunix.com separate from aplawrence.com. In the htdocs (the html root) directory, I put one file named .htaccess which contains this:

redirect 301 / http://aplawrence.com/

I then changed the Apache configuration to point pcunix.com to this area, restarted Apache, and I was done. It’s that simple: any request for any page at pcunix.com is redirected to the same page at aplawrence.com.

Time will tell how this will affect me. I’ll check back here in a few months and update this page with what I have learned.

Author:
Tony Lawrence of APLawrence.com

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3. Getting A Better Search Engine Rank For All Of Your Pages!

There’s a lot of snake oil out there.

Well, you probably knew that. On the other hand, I did have some pleasant conversations with a few people, and even got a few snippets of free advice. Some of that advice might have even been worthwhile, though most of it was rather generic and nothing you couldn’t find easily on the web.

A few of the companies never responded to my email solicitation, which is always interesting: business must be very good for these fellows if they can ignore leads. Some of the firms were blatantly dishonest (immediately talking about “fooling” the search engines) and others seemed ethical and above board. Most (ethical or not) seemed to be reasonably technically competent, though there were some amusing exceptions here and there. Most interesting to me is that all of them failed to really listen to what I told them. I’d call that “hammer syndrome”: if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

What I told them
My initial email correspondence went something like this:

I’ve been running http://aplawrence.com since 1997, and have managed to build it to the
point where it is starting to make a little money, mostly thanks to Google Adsense.

I do pretty well in Google, often in the top 10 for many related searches. Google
Page Rank has most of my pages in the 4-5 area, the main index.html at 6. Or so it was
today anyway.

Having struggled to this mostly by trial and error, I can’t help wondering if some
professional advice could get me to the next level.

So.. is it likely that you could help me move on up, and if so, what might it cost?

Any other info you would need to make a judgement of course will be supplied.

An important thing to notice here is the “often in the top 10 for many related searches”. In almost all cases, the folks I talked to or had more email correspondence with ignored that entirely and kept pushing the idea of improving my Google position. As I’m almost always in the top 10 and fairly often number one for the searches I’m most interested in, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to talk about improving that, at least not in the manner that these folks usually did. Over and over again I was warned that it could take months for my pages to show up in Google at all, and that I needed to “hang in there” (presumably still paying the monthly fee some wanted) and have faith. From that I would guess that most of these folks work primarily with unknown sites, though when I asked that directly, I was usually told no, they worked with sites just like mine and larger. Of course. Why did I bother to ask?

Cloaking and doorways
Cloaking is serving up different pages to different users, specifically to search engine spiders. There are some folks unabashedly promoting cloaking of pages: http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/cloaking_agents.htm for example.

If cloaking were done only for honest purposes, nobody would have any problem with it and in fact the search engines themselves might encourage it. If the search engine spiders saw a page that was easier for them to understand and that would be indexed correctly so that hits on it would be more likely to truly reflect what the user was actually looking for, that would be great. Unfortunately, people use it for less honest purposes, and therefore Google and other search engines object: Google’s Cloaking Policy says that they “may permanently ban from our index any sites or site authors that engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings. ”

Of course folks disagree on what is and what is not cloaking: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum24/411.htm. My feeling is that if Google rank is important to you, why take a chance of screwing it up?

Doorway pages have a similar purpose, and are just as disliked by search engines like Google. At http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html, Google explains some reasons why they might not index you at all, including:

You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. We want to
point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.

Doorway pages are pages that contain “bait” for search engines, but then immediately jump the visitor to other content. Again, if this were done for honest purposes, it would be beneficial to everyone. But of course people just aren’t honest everywhere: http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167831.

Personally I would stay far way from someone using this sort of technique. Several of the folks I contacted were quite outspoken against the use of such tricks and complained that competitors who do such things ruin the business for the ethical purveyors. Those in favor of these maneuvers tended more to a “Get Real!” response, insisting that “Everyone does it”. Personally, I’d stay away. But then I’m the kind of person who reports my cash income, too.

Rewriting of Content
Rewriting content is probably the best and most valid suggestion any of these folks had to make. Naturally enough, it’s also pricey: I had quotes ranging from $2,000 to $18,000 to rewrite my “important” pages so that they would be more tasty for search engines. One search engine optimizer (whose “down payment” would have been $7,500.00) told me that he could rewrite my main page so that “sco unix support” would be the search engine key. He said my page is too large now (actually several of them made the same comment) and that would cause Google etc. not to be able to index it well. While we talked I typed “SCO Unix support” into Google and my home page came up as position one and two. Apparently he hadn’t bothered to do that before giving advice..

But there is value in rewriting content, and it is hard to do well. The search engine spiders want to see phrases and keywords repeated often enough so that they know what the page is about. Do too much of it, and your pages read horribly for human visitors (hence the attraction of “doorway” pages).

The idea of spiders reading pages also led to another fun conversation. This person (who was otherwise intelligent and ethical) said that I should move my links table to the right side of the page because “spiders read just like you do, left to right, and you want them to see your content first”. That sounds plausible unless you understand typical html design and realize that the table with an “align right” tag will still be the first thing the spider sees. Of course there are ways to do what he suggested, but again it’s also obvious that Google’s spiders in fact have no difficulty with this page.

Link Exchange
This is another area of typical services offered, and it’s another one where you have to tread carefully. You do want people linking to you, but you don’t want dumb links – links from pages that have no purpose other than to link to other pages. Those kind of links will do you no good with search engines because search engines like Google also know (or try to know) how “important” a page is. A page with nothing but hundreds or thousands of unrelated links is not important, so the fact that you are one of the links doesn’t help you. Worse, most of those kind of places require that you link to them, so now your pages are filled with trash links that are meaningless to your visitors.

Incidentally, a very few search engine optimizers seem to think that you shouldn’t have any outgoing links because it takes people off your pages. True, but if you are providing information, and those other links have related content, you really need to include those links. If your site is valuable, people will return to it.

Links from relevant pages, especially if those pages are important in their own right, are good for you. So if your search engine optimization firm is just handing you out to link farms, you are doing more than wasting your money; you are doing yourself harm. On the other hand, an intelligent search for related web pages can be well worth paying for. I regularly get contacted by honest search engine optimizers who are working for sites with content related to mine, asking that I put a link up. If I agree that the content is relevant and worthwhile, of course I do so. Sometimes they return the favor, though I do not insist upon that.

Search Engine Submission
Unfortunately, too many of these firms still stress submitting your pages as an important function. It is not. There may have been a time when it was, but that time is long past. I don’t really think most of these folks even really believe this themselves; I think they say it because they think it is what the customers want to hear.

You do need to submit once, but all you need to submit is your main page – assuming of course that one way or another a trail of links leads from there to all your other pages. And while you can submit to the thousands of different search engines out there, you probably don’t need to. If the important ones (Google mostly) find you, the others will get you from that.

Content is king
I’ve said it over and over again, and the best search engine optimization firms agree: nothing beats content, and the more the better. Few of them offer content, though some may have ties to syndication services. Tempting as that may be, you have to be careful there too. Google doesn’t like sites that are just near mirror images of other sites, and one or both will suffer (see Solving Google Page Rank problems with a 301 Redirect for a related problem). That’s why exclusive content is better than something other people can buy as readily as you can. Exclusive content of course can be expensive, and again you need to be concerned that the writing is both intelligible to humans and easily digested by search engine spiders. That’s not easy to do, and someone with talent for one side of that may be untalented at the other.

Get all the content you can; write it or buy it, but get it. Some suggestions on content are also at Comments on Google Page Rank and at Web site promotion and popularity.

Wrap it up
Several of these search engine optimizers wanted a monthly stipend to cover on-going services. I’m not quite sure just what value they feel they are offering here. The fees quoted were nominal ($30 to $80 monthly), but for what? If Google has found you and you have good content, their spiders will automatically return and reindex you regularly. There’s no need to “submit” new pages. Some offered to regularly report on positioning for certain keywords and to check for broken links; that could be of value though it’s not hard to automate that sort of thing yourself. I’m not sure I’d want to sign up for such services, but you might see value.

In summation, you need to be very careful in selecting a search engine optimization firm. Check references carefully, and see if search terms really do show up in good positions for the sites they have helped. My advice is to stay clear of those offering things like cloaking and doorway pages, but there is plenty of disagreement on that. I’d err on the side of caution, but you may feel differently.

Author:
Tony Lawrence of APLawrence.com

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Step A)
Your full contact information needs to be there. Make certain that your full contact information is easily accessible, preferably with the help of a clearly identified contact button. An e-mail address is certainly not enough. Many ODP editors will tell you if they don’t see a real physical or postal address or telephone number, then that website in its particular category is usually tossed away and probably will never make it inside the directory. Most importantly, if you are wishing to sell anything, you need to build credibility and honesty with your clients. In such a case, giving proper and full contact information on the site is imperative.

Step B)
Do not attempt to SPAM the directory. You should only submit your site once and forget it for at least two to three months. According to DMOZ rules and regulations, you are only allowed to submit to one category. However, in certain isolated cases and if your website happens to be a very large one and offers lots of information, you may be able to submit a second section of it to a different category. As a rule of thumb, it usually takes time for most submissions to be processed. This is especially true of categories where there are many daily submissions. It is not recommended to submit a website more than once, as it could end up on the lower bottom of the large list of sites to be reviewed and approved, since they are processed according to their submissions dates.

Step C)
Your website needs original and good content. During the course of your work, if you are only trying to publish an assortment of affiliate links or if your site happens to be a “mirror-site” of other websites that are plentiful on the Internet, then you are increasing your chances of your submission being rejected. If in fact you really have to deal with affiliate products or services, we recommend that you add lots of new content, perhaps a product review category, an industry news section or any other additional information that will tell the DMOZ editors that your site has something original to offer and has lots of great content that will be of good use to their users.

Step D)
Double-check your website for spelling errors or typos. As much as the DMOZ editors are looking for great content, all are only human and will probably be irritated by some typos or spelling mistakes. Our experience with the ODP tells us that professionally written and carefully built websites with great content, usually always make it into the directory eventually.

Step E)
Keep good records of your submission to DMOZ. We strongly recommend in keeping a complete record of the date a website was submitted to the Open Directory Project and to which particular category it was submitted to. If the category you want to submit to has an editor, you should always make a note of who that editor is. Such information would be useful if later you need to inquire about the status of your submission. Some of you might ask: “How long does it take to get listed?” Recently, we had one site listed within three weeks of submission and, on other less fortunate occasions, we waited over six months for other sites. It is extremely hard to predict anything.

Step F)
Select the proper category for any submission. In Google or Alta-Vista, when people submit a URL to such robotic search engines, there really is not much to think about, since their crawlers or “spiders” will visit and index your site automatically, normally over a rather short period of time. However, when submitting to a directory such as DMOZ, a critical part of that submission process is choosing the right category. One good thing that is recommended is to go online and look where other websites similar to yours have been placed in the directory. When you get to the category that you think is best, press the “add URL” button. In other categories, sometimes the DMOZ editors might put a note mentioning certain restrictions to that category. It is recommended that these notes be read carefully and that you don’t submit to these restricted categories if your site doesn’t meet the parameters mentioned.

Step G)
Always contact DMOZ through the proper channels. Finally, a word of caution: if the category where you want to submit does have an editor, it will usually be written at the bottom of the page and you normally should be able to send that editor a message. There is another way to contact the DMOZ editors through their online forum. Once there, you can ask about the status of your submission, but you must always give them the category and submission date of your last attempt. Additionally, you can always ask a few questions about general DMOZ procedures and rules.

Try your best to meet their rules and regulations and normally your site should eventually be included in their directory.

Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales

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The start dates of previous Google Dances have been compiled by WebmasterWorld’s administrator Brett Tabke. The last Google Dance has just been finished. It took place from 06/15/2003 to 06/22/2003. There are rumors that Google is about to modify its update procedures. However, if there will be another Google Dance we will report about it. But mainly, the reasons for the Google Dance shall be presented here.

Technical Background
The Technical Background of the Google Dance
The Google search engine pulls its results from more than 10,000 servers which are simple Linux PCs that are used by Google for reasons of cost. Naturally, an index update cannot be proceeded on all those servers at the same time. One server after the other has to be updated with the new index.

Many webmasters think that, during the Google Dance, Google is in some way able to control if a server with the new index or a server with an old index responds to a search query. But, since Google’s index is inverse, this would be very complicated. As we will show below, there is no such control within the system. In fact, the reason for the Google Dance is Google’s way of using the Domain Name System (DNS).

Google Dance and DNS
Not only Google’s index is spread over more than 10,000 servers, but also these servers are, as of now, placed in eight different data centers. These data centers are mainly located in the US (i.e. Santa Clara, California and Herndon, Virginia), indeed, in June 2002 Google’s first European data center in Zurich, Switzerland went online. Very likely, there are more data centers to come, which will perhaps be spread over the whole world. However, in January and April 2003 Google has put two data centers on stream which are again located in the US.

In order to direct traffic to all these data centers, Google could thoeretically record all queries centrally and then send them to the data centers. But this would obviously be inefficient. In fact, each data center has its own IP address (numerical address on the internet) and the way these IP addresses are accessed is managed by the Domain Name System.

Basically, the DNS works like this: On the Internet, data transfers always take place in-between IP addresses. The information about which domain resolves to which IP address is provided by the name servers of the DNS. When a user enters a domain into his browser, a locally configured name server gets him the IP address for that domain by contacting the name server which is responsible for that domain. (The DNS is structured hierarchically. Illustrating the whole process would go beyond the scope of this paper.) The IP address is then cached by the name server, so that it is not necessary to contact the responsible name server each time a connection is built up to a domain.

The records for a domain at the responsible name server constitute for how long the record may be cached by a caching name server. This is the Time To Live (TTL) of a domain. As soon as the TTL expires, the caching name server has to fetch the record for a domain again from the responsible name server. Quite often, the TTL is set to one or more days. In contrast, the Time To Live of the domain www.google.com is only five minutes. So, a name server may only cache Google’s IP address for five minutes and has then to look up the IP address again.

Each time, Google’s name server is contacted, it sends back the IP address of only one data center. In this way, Google queries are always directed to different data centers by changing DNS records. On the one hand, the DNS records may be based on the load of the single data centers. In this way, Google would conduct a simple form of load balancing by its use of the DNS. On the other hand, the geographical location of a caching name server may influence how often it receives the single data centers’ IP addresses. So, the distance for data transmissions can be reduced. In order to show the DNS records of the domain www.google.com, we present them here by the example of one caching name server.

How data centers, DNS and Google Dance are related, is easily answered. During the Google Dance, the data centers do not receive the new index at the same time. In fact, the new index is transferred to one data center after the other. When a user queries Google during the Google Dance, he may get the results from a data center which still has the old index at one point im time and from a data center which has the new index a few minutes later. From the users perspective, the index update took place within some minutes. But of course, this procedure may reverse, so that Google switches seemingly between the old and the new index.

IP Addresses and Domains of Google’s Data Centers
The progression of a Google Dance could basically be watched by querying the IP addresses of Google’s data centers. But queries on the IP addresses are normally redirected to www.google.com. However, Google has domains which resolve to the single data centers’ IP addresses. These domains as well as their IP addresses are shown in the following list.

Domain IP Address
www-ex.google.com 216.239.33.100
www-sj.google.com 216.239.35.100
www-va.google.com 216.239.37.100
www-dc.google.com 216.239.39.100
www-ab.google.com 216.239.51.100
www-in.google.com 216.239.53.100
www-zu.google.com 216.239.55.100
www-cw.google.com 216.239.57.100
www-fi.google.com 216.239.41.100

For every domain www-xx.google.com, there is an additional domain www-xx2.google.com. The IP address of such a domain ends on .101 instead of .100. These pairs of domains and IP addresses belong to the same data center and, hence, the same index is searched by queries on them.

Note: Searches at www-zu are currently redirected to other data centers. Since results for searches at its IP addresses fluctuate heavily during a Google Dance, also these searches seem to be internally routed to other data centers. As we can see from our statistics for Google’s DNS records, there are currently no searches at www.google.com directed to www-zu. So, we can assume that the data center is offline.

Those that keep an eye on Google’s index updates often think that the Google Dance is over, when they see the new index at www.google.com or when they don’t see the old index at www.google.com for some time. In fact, the update is not finished until all the domains listed above provide results from the new index.

The index updates at the single data centers seem to happen at one point in time. As soon as one data center shows results from the new index, it won’t switch back to the old index. This happens most likely because the index is redundant at each data center and at first, only one part of the servers (eventually half of them) is updated. During this period, only the other half of the servers is active and provides search results. As soon as the update of the first half of servers is finished, they become active and provide search results while the other half receives the new index. Thus, from the user’s perspective, the update of one data centers happens at one point in time.

Finally, it shall be noted that the access to the single data centers is generally controlled by the DNS only, but sometimes queries are redirected. However, this is easy to detect: When for a query at one of the domains listed above, the links to Google’s cache do not comply with the IP address that belongs to the domain, then the query is redirected. If this happens, Google inhibits – for whatever reason – the access to one data center.

Test Domains
The Google Dance Test Domains www2 and www3
The beginning of a Google Dance can always be watched at the test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Those domains normally have stable DNS records which make the domains resolve to only one (often the same) IP address. Before the Google Dance begins, at least one of the test domains is assigned the IP address of the data center that receives the new index first.

Building up a completely new index once per month can cause quite some trouble. After all, Google has to spider some billion documents an then to process many TeraBytes of data. Therefore, testing the new index is inevitable. Of course, the folks at Google don’t need the test domains themselves. Most certainly, they have many options to check a new index internally, but they do not have a lot of time to conduct the tests.

So, the reason for having www2 and www3 is rather to show the new index to webmasters which are interested in their upcoming rankings. Many of these webmasters discuss the new index at the Google forums out on the web. These discussions can be observed by Google employees. At that time, the general public cannot see the new index yet, because the DNS records for www.google.com normally do not point to the IP address of the data center that is updated first when the update begins.

As soon as Google’s test community of forums members does not find any severe malfunctions caused by the new index, Google’s DNS records are ready to make www.google.com resolve the the data center that is updated first. This is the time when the Google Dance begins. But if severe malfunctions become obvious during this test phase, there is still the possibility to cancel the update at the other data centers. The domain www.google.com would not resolve to the data center which has the flawed index and the general public could not take any notice about it. In this case, the index could be rebuilt or the web could be spidered again.

So, the search results which are to be seen on www2.google.com and www3.google.com will always appear on www.google.com later on, as long as there is a regular index update. However, there may be minor fluctuations. On the one hand, the index at one data center never absolutely equals the index at another data center. We can easily check this by watching the number of results for the same query at the data center domains listed above, which often differ from each other. On the other hand, it is often assumed that the iterative PageRank calculation is not finished yet, when the Google Dance begins so that preliminary values exert influence on rankings at that point in time.

Page Rank
The New PageRank Values during the Google Dance
Most webmasters are interested in ranking changes for their website during the Google Dance. But, besides that, many also want to know about their new PageRank values. Normally, the Google Toolbar fetches the PageRank values from the data center that is specified by its IP address in the actual DNS record for www.google.com. Hence, when the Google Dance begins, the Toolbar usually displays the old PageRank values.

Google submits PageRank values in simple text files to the Toolbar. In former times, this happened via XML. The switch to text files occured in August 2002. The PageRank files can be requested directly from the domain www.google.com. Basically, the URLs for those files look like follows (without line breaks):

http://www.google.com/search?

client=navclient-auto&
ch=0123456789&
features=Rank&
q=info:http://www.domain.com/

There is only one line of text in the PageRank files. The last cipher in this line is PageRank.

The parameters incorporated in the above shown URL are inevitable for the display of the PageRank files in a browser. The value “navclient-auto” for the parameter “client” identifies the Toolbar. Via the parameter “q” the URL is submitted. The value “Rank” for the parameter “features” determines that the PageRank files are requested. If it is omitted, Google’s servers still transmit XML files. The parameter “ch” transfers a checksum for the URL to Google, whereby this checksum can only change when the Toolbar version is updated by Google.

The PageRank files that are requested by the Google Toolbar are cached by the Internet Explorer. So, their URLs and the checksums can simply been found out by having a look at the folder Temporary Internet Files. Knowing the checksums of your URLs, you can view the PageRank files in your browser. Since the PageRank files are kept in the browser cache and, thus, are clearly visible, and as long as requests are not automated, watching the PageRank files in a browser should not be a violation of Google’s Terms of Service. However, you should be cautious. The Toolbar submits its own User-Agent to Google. It is:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; GoogleToolbar 1.1.60-deleon; OS SE 4.10)

1.1.60-deleon is a Toolbar version which may of course change. OS is the operating system that you have installed. So, Google is able to identify requests by browsers, if they do not go out via a proxy and if the User-Agent is not modified accordingly.

Now, let’s see how we can get the new PageRank values. Taking a look at IE’s cache, you will notice that the PageRank files are not requested from the domain www.google.com but from IP addresses like 216.239.33.102. Additionally, the PageRank files’ URLs often contain a parameter “failedip” that is set to values like “216.239.35.102;1111″ (Its function is not absolutely clear). However, it is pretty easy to get the new PageRank values. Simply modify the IP addresses in the URL so that the request goes to one of the data centers that already has the new index. The necessary information is given above.

PageRank and Google are trademarks of Google, Inc., Mountain View CA, USA.

Author:
Markus Sobek

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But Advertising is very, very COSTLY! And if you don’t watch out, you may actually be going broke after paying your advertising bills, if your ads do not generate revenue. So, you should make sure you get value for your money.

With my own experiences in this field, I have drawn up some questions for Webmasters who are new to the field of Website Marketing. Take a good look at them EVERY TIME you make your advertising plan.

* Where are you placing the ad? Are you selecting the right kind of medium? It won’t pay to place ads on websites when you have a business of an essentially local nature. A newsletter or an ezine catering to the needs of locals of your area will be a better choice. And better still, do not advertise on Websites and Newsletters just because everybody else is doing it. Ask yourself strictly- Do I really need to advertise online? Perhaps you will get better results by sponsoring a local event or a press release.

* What kind of ad are you placing? A Banner, a button, text? A banner ad may be the best when it is to be placed on the top of middle of a page. But, when your ad is going to be placed on a page which has too many other banner ads, a simple text ad will bring you more attention.
Even attractively designed buttons on the side-menus generate a lot of clicks.

* Who is going to read it? Is this the TARGET AUDIENCE you wish to reach out to? It is very important to obtain the demographics of people visiting a certain website or reading a newsletter or ezine. By Demographics, I mean classification of visitors/subscribers according to their age, sex, occupation, interests, hobbies etc. That way, you can be sure that the people who will see your ad will buy your products/services. For e.g., for someone who is selling an e-book on Candle-Making, the best place to advertise will be Websites related to crafts & hobbies, WAHM’s, online gift-shops etc. And the last thing you should ever do is place your ad for ‘a dollar a week’ at a website which has no records of its visitors to offer. I am sure you can spend that dollar on something better.

* What does your ad say? Is your message to the point? A stylish banner saying ‘BOB’s Place’ can never persuade ME, at least, to click on it. On the other hand, if it says ‘BOB’s Place- The ultimate choice for Free Webmaster Tools’, I’ll definitely find myself clicking on it to see what he has to offer. In short, viewers do not have all the time in the world to surf the net by clicking on whatever they see. And those who do, are mostly those looking for Free Stuff, who will NEVER spend a penny. You don’t want to attract them, do you? It would help if you add a plain description of what your website is about, or a special holiday offer, or what’s different about your product etc. In any case, please DO MENTION your product or service.

* Is your ad compelling enough? Would it make YOU click on it? Does the content make you curious enough to care to click on it to find out more? The best way to do this is to research. How do I do that, you ask? Well, it’s very easy actually. For at least a week, whenever YOU click on an ad, save the text or the graphic to your hard disk. At the end of the week, go through them and try to find out WHAT made you click them. Was it the way they created a suspense, was it the Prices or was it unbelievable Offer they made? Then, gather together, what you liked best and try to mould it to suit your product/service. Don’t lift words off somebody else’s ad. Just pick up the idea behind it and get creative and form the outline of your own ad.

A few other things to keep in mind are to use Well-Made graphics ONLY. There is nothing worse than a badly done banner that affects your goodwill and it will be worthwhile to spend money on a good banner that you can use forever. Another thing is to ALWAYS compare prices of various websites or ezines keeping in mind what THEY offer you. Keep in mind the traffic, demography and click-through rate before you decide who’s offering the best deal. More often than you think, you will realize that a website who is charging $10 more than the other is probably giving you TWICE the number of viewers for your ad! So, play smart and get the best value for your money.

Author Bio:
Lata Budhrani is a Web and Graphics Designer and the CEO of Elements Web Services. She specializes in Website Promotion and also publishes an ezine ‘Web Elements’ to help webmasters promote their websites effectively.
Website: http://www.elementswebservices.com/
E-Mail: latabudhrani@rediffmail.com

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