PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Practical eCommerce
“For the majority of small and mid-size, locally-focused businesses, your target market is more defined than everyone living everywhere,” says Lisa Wehr. “With local search strategies for both pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and natural search engine optimization, you can refine your search marketing program, cut costs and grow your business.”

For paid search, go local with regionally defined and geotargeted keywords. Geotargeting helps to restrict your ads to a smaller audience and delivers more qualified leads, while regionally-defined terms can give you wider exposure, yet still allow you to hone in on your target market.

Meanwhile, for SEO, make sure your site has accurate listings on the slew of IYPs and local search sites, from Superpages.com, to Citysearch, to Google Maps. Each one resonates with a different local audience, and their listings also show up within the core search engine results, maximizing your Web site’s exposure.

Conversation Marketing
Ian Lurie offers a step-by-step guide to creating a “great” 404 not found page, including how to build it (via HTML or a Web page editor), upload it and get your server to point to it–whether via Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) or the open-source Apache server.

He also lists the three components a quality 404 page must have, including a clear statement that the visitor is in the wrong place, advice to help get them back on track (via either links, a search box, etc.), and an option to contact the Webmaster.

What a 404 error page shouldn’t do is automatically redirect a user to the homepage, a Flash page or tedious registration form, or worse–another Web site! Learn more.

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin - Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts - Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker - Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator - Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps - Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 - A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag - Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs - keeps slugs from becoming too long Continue Reading »

The New York Times
Display advertising may suffer as the economy slows. Mixed results from the likes of Yahoo and Time Warner indicate that online publishers may be getting less money for the ad space they sell. More and more advertisers are opting for automated targeting and delivery through cheaper advertising networks instead of buying directly from expensive publishers like Yahoo. And the cost continues to go down, dropping 23% from March to April, according to PubMatic, a technology firm that runs an online pricing index. The drop was even steeper among large Web publishers, falling 52%, according to the firm.

If those figures are accurate, the rest of 2008 will be painful for big media firms whose online services depend mostly on display advertising. That lengthy list includes Yahoo, AOL, Viacom, News Corp., The New York Times Co., Disney, CBS, NBC-Universal, CNET, and many others. As Sanford C. Bernstein & Company analyst Jeffrey Lindsay says: “The weakest form (of online advertising), the one that’s most susceptible to a downturn - and this is what we’re seeing - is display advertising,”

Lindsay added that recession fears might actually be a boost to some media companies, such as those depending on automated advertising systems like search. “In a moderate or even quite severe downturn, online advertising actually improves, because people switch their advertising budgets out of traditional advertising formats - TV, radio and print - and move more online because it’s got higher performance, it’s cheaper and it’s more measurable,” he said.

Google passed Yahoo in its share of monthly visitors in the United States for the first time this April, buoyed by growth in search and YouTube videos, according to ComScore statistics released Thursday.

However, underscoring the variability of this sort of measurement, which extrapolates overall data from the usage of a “panel” of users at home and work, ComScore rival Nielsen Online released its own data as well with some different results. Although it also showed Google as No. 1 in terms of unique users, it said Google passed Yahoo way back in January 2007.

ComScore said Google sites had 141.1 million unique visitors in April, a tad ahead of Yahoo’s 140.6 million. Microsoft was in third at 121.2 million, with AOL at 111.3 million.

Nielsen’s data showed Google at 128.2 million, Microsoft at 122.1 million, and Yahoo at 117.1 million.

Nielsen also provides information on time spent at the sites, though. There, Yahoo leads its rivals with 3 hours and 9 minutes per month, but AOL owner Time Warner leads Yahoo at 3 hours 40 minutes per month.

Microsoft’s usage was 2 hours and 17 minutes, and Google was 1 hour and 47 minutes, Nielsen said.

Stephen Shankland

Despite earlier speculation that the online ad space may be spared the effects of a downturn, the fallout from the soft economy appears to have reached the online advertising industry, dragging down monetization rates across many segments.

According to the May edition of the PubMatic AdPrice Index, publisher monetization across the board has dropped by 23% during the past month. The reason? The growth in online advertising is slackening, causing ad network payouts to fall.

The index shows that eCPMs for large Web sites (more than 100 million page views per month) dropped 52%, from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April. Medium Web sites (1 million to 100 million page views per month) were nearly flat, with monetization dropping from 34 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Small Web sites managed to weather the storm, increasing monetization from $1.17 in March to $1.29 in April. Continue Reading »

E-Commerce Times
Peter Hamilton lists some guidelines for creating and promoting online video–and makes the case for why clips may be the best link bait ever.

But we’re not talking about your standard UGC, or even semi-professional company interview. Hamilton says that the quality of the video counts — from niche-specific how-to videos, to footage of the annual charity softball game. “The quality of content will directly impact the rest of the campaign, just as the quality of written content attracts links,” he says.

Factors like image resolution and audio clarity are non-negotiables for video link bait–because if viewers can’t understand the dialogue or have trouble making out the images, they won’t watch (or share). “Though amateurs have produced some of the highest-viewed online videos on YouTube and other posting sites, the audio and image quality is always such that the message is clear,” Hamilton says.

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BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine weighs in on Google’s YouTube dilemma. Whereas AdWords and AdSense “are both simple, easily automated, and can scale to just about infinity,” Fine points out that ads on YouTube cannot be automated as easily. And while just about anyone can afford to create and run an AdWords campaign without a salesforce, YouTube ads cost more and usually require the use of an ad agency, thus limiting its customer pool to larger advertisers.

Fine says there’s now a greater feeling of urgency inside the Googleplex that the online video giant needs to start contributing to the company’s bottom line. But Tim Armstrong, Google’s top U.S. ad-sales executive, says the company made huge strides at YouTube in the last quarter. “It takes longer to bring in a YouTube dollar than it does to bring in a search dollar,” Armstrong says. “Can you make [that process] more efficient? We think ‘yes’…we’re making nice progress.”

The need for automation is a big problem, says Dave Morgan, founder of the ad network Tacoda (now owned by AOL). He points out that display ads are the most successful ad format for video, but these still require a human sales force. Meanwhile, YouTube execs point out that one of their key new ad formats, the overlay-which places ads over a portion of clips without disrupting the video-has been available for less than a year. In the end, Fine finds few answers to his question of whether YouTube can grow to AdSense-like proportions.

San Jose Mercury News
The “R” word may be looming over America’s economy, but Internet commerce continues to grow apace, and Google’s chief economist and several analysts, speaking at a forum on the state of the Web economy, believe it will continue to defy broader economic trends. During the conference, Ed Garrubbo, chairman of the Electronic Retailing Association, reported that while the overall economy tanked, online sales jumped 17% in the first quarter of this year. Meanwhile, e-commerce has grown 22% in the past two years.

“The lesson here is that the economic slowdown is not an Internet slowdown,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “The Internet is looking pretty strong compared to other sectors.” Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech think tank, predicted that e-commerce would continue to grow as high-speed connections proliferate and e-commerce technologies improve. “The absolute growth has been steady now for several years. The Internet economy is almost counter-recessional,” Atkinson said.

Garrubbo cited data from Forrester Research, which said that more than two thirds of all Internet users have bought products online; 53% of all computer and hardware sales take place online along with 30% of sales of toys, video products and auto parts. In fact, Garrubbo said that the looming recession may actually contribute to e-commerce growth.