Archive: January, 2009

Now it’s time to get into the nuts and bolts, the real chicken and the egg of the matter. When you originally courted the Web with your fancy new website you hopefully did your due diligence before publishing. Hopefully, you or somebody in your pay, conducted keyword research on your type of business and from this investigation came a list of keywords and key phrases. And from this list, you or a professional SEO writer, crafted your site’s content. This is worth a short side trip here – the SEO writer, if he or she is worth their salt, will marry compelling description with the targeted keywords, building an optimized presentation of the material that not only reads well but compels the consumer to complete a transaction. This is how SEO puts the Oh Yeah in optimization.

In a perfectly optimized world, the title tags should not be written until the SEO writer puts the pen down with an accomplished smile. Your visible text should be riddled with the most relevant keyword phrases derived from your keyword research and this title tag business should be like a hummingbird stealing nectar from a flower. If it’s not, your text is faulty and needs to be rewritten until the targeted gems shine like Mister Clean’s head. Notice the similes? They are descriptions around the key phrases.

It’s all about signs – or at least it was in the days before processors. Imagine the shingle that may have hung by the door to your great granddaddy’s establishment – Harry Billings’ Barber and Taxidermy Emporium. You can see the weather-beaten barber’s pole and maybe a rough sketch of a stuffed bloodhound. The point is, your online establishment will similarly play by a set of conventions, especially those having to do with signifiers and signs. Storefront signs roughly equate to your site’s title tags which are regarded by some in the search engine optimization business as being one of the most important factors in reaching the lofty heights of high search engine rankings, and could easily be placed on par by search engines with both the visible text on your site, and the external links pointing to your site.

For a quick and instant impact on where your page ranks, try going to extremes with your title tags – try changing the text to something non-sensible like Sculpin Hinge and see where your rankings go. But if you really nail it, really give some thought to maximizing your exposure in the small geography associated with title tags, your results will grow. Another aspect of title tags to consider is that the words that constitute the title tag appear in the clickable link on the search engine results page, and maximizing your word choice may result in more traffic for your site.

It being said that Google and other search engines are sensitive to maintaining advertiser’s confidence is a start, or a move in the right direction, but at the time of Google’s IPO offering, 95% of their revenue stream came from Pay Per Click advertising. Today, a sense of urgency is quickly developing in all of the legitimate search engine companies as they continue to throw resources and algorithms at the growing problem of click fraud. As just one example, Google has charged entire teams of investigators and R & D with the task of safeguarding their reputation – even going so far as to saying that they are committed to issuing refund checks for cases of verifiable fraud.

But like a virus that can morph into superbugs, the perpetrators of click fraud are evolving their sinister craft by developing new weapons like impression fraud, a method for creating false page impressions for the purpose of wasting a competitor’s advertising budget. Pages and search results are artificially inflated and sold to a competitor so that they back the wrong horse while your client gets sole access to the real results. In order to make the fake impressions seem legitimate, search engine hijackers even sacrifice their own click-through numbers by temporarily suspending their own campaigns during the times of the attacks.

Click Fraud sounds like something that should never be allowed in stilettos, but the reality of the situation is that click fraud is an umbrella term for a myriad of shell games whose sole purpose is to artificially conjure up click rates in a bid to produce more voluptuous Internet marketing invoices for companies ranging from basement start-ups to mega corporations. Many in the industry consider click fraud to be the deadliest poison threatening the Internet’s fledgling advertising models, a threat that has the fantastic minds at Google and Yahoo! shaking with the question of how to put the issue in the dirt.

Let’s be very clear before we go any further on this issue – there are a kaleidoscope of customers who are pleased with the returns from their ads on legitimate search results on Yahoo! or Google. The bag of poison begins to seep though when these same productive and lucrative ads are recycled across the Internet and businesses that only conduct their affairs in North America or Europe suddenly end up getting billed for clicks from outfits in such capitalist heavyweights as Botswana, Mongolia, and Syria. Remember, there’s nothing on the books to say the clicks have to be relevant – a click is a click by any other name, and the bill is still due.