This update is part and parcel of Google’s “caffeine” modification, which returns data that’s 50% fresher than what was yielded in past searches. This increase in the volume of fresh data rendered is now made possible by Google’s switch to processing data in “pieces” rather than in “layers”, which was standard practice prior to the update.

Schizophrenic Algorithms

It might not come as much of a shock, but each year Google changes its algorithm anywhere between 350 and 500 times. What often happens as a result of these changes is that people who get too focused on exact ranking factors see their site drop when Google releases these algorithmic tweaks.

Minor Quakes From The May Day Update

On the face of it, the May Day modification is simply a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. That said, it has still had its effects on some websites. For some it has resulted in a decrease in traffic volume, even though their pages are still getting indexed. After the update the pages seem to not rank as high as they did before, and this is where the stress comes from.

Google’s changes seem to be primarily affecting “long-tail” traffic stemming from the longer search terms that more sophisticated searchers use. When you calculate the net effect of those searchers per site, it adds up fairly quickly, given that long-tail searches convert at a higher rate.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, such as e-commerce sites. Pages of this nature usually don’t have many inbound links, and the links they do have are usually buried within the site. Chances are also very high that these types of sites don’t have substantial amounts of unique content.

The Importance Of Unique Product Descriptions

An important observation to make is that it’s beneficial to keep unique product descriptions for anything you’re selling on your site. To date, the sites that only use a manufacturer’s generic product copy could suffer the most from the May Day update, experiencing a heavy loss in direct traffic to their product pages.

Provide The Freshest Content Yet

Products aside, having relevant content that addresses the search terms that you’re trying to rank for is always a good idea, and the main search keyword is just the start; Google looks for synonyms, uniqueness and strength of the linking profile.
***Looking for original content? Check out our friends at www.constant-content.com

What Is Google Trying To Achieve with This Update?

The goal of the May Day update is to universally improve search quality and user experience. Google has openly stated its intent to ensure when you search for something, you’re provided with the highest quality content on a per search basis. Basically Google trying to make search more helpful and weed out any content duplication, as well as minimizing the impact of what it considers to be lower quality websites.

What Types Of Websites Are Being Affected By This Update?

The hardest hit by the Google Algorithm change are auto-generated pages and content farms. As already mentioned, the May Day update is basically engineered to improve search quality.

This is a good reminder for affiliates that you should always be providing the highest quality content for your consumers. A recommended tactic is to provide content not available anywhere else, and ensure that it’s helpful; also,  avoid scraped, generic and low quality content whenever you can.

How Can You Determine If Your Site Is Affected By This Update?

The best way is to check on your own around the time between April 28th-May 3rd. This is when a lot of sites notice a loss of 5-15% of their normal long-tail traffic. Furthermore, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may have seen a drop in these statistics as well.

Check to see if the change is in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic. A drop in traffic to your bigger terms probably is not a May Day effect, but drops in search referrals could be. Also, if your index or crawl stats changed suddenly, this could indicate you were hit by the update.

To be certain, check any links to your child pages across the site; these pages may have suffered a May Day relevance drop. If you don’t have unique content, even on your less important pages, you may have seen a dip.

In part two of this five part series we will cover in more detail what factors cause the site to be affected, and in subsequent articles we will discuss what improvements can be made and what you can do to minimize the impact of this algorithm change.

***This article is the first in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

The EU Court of Justice (Europe’s highest legal authority) ruled that companies using competitors’ names as Internet advertising keywords are not infringing European trademark laws. It further allowed that customers of Google’s paid-for Adwords service may choose whichever words they want, within reason, without infringing trademark law.

You can read more details about the case and its effects here:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=B1FB02FD-1A64-67EA-E4153A0926DAC5EF

A similar ruling was also recently handed down in a Canadian BC (British Columbia) Court:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5104/135/

The decision means the Courts are taking a more laissez-faire approach to the issue, allowing advertisers to duke it out in the PCC world, but ultimately putting the onus on consumers to an independent and informed choice about the ads they click on and the products they buy online.

What do you think about the ruling? Drop a comment and let us know!

If You Build For Quality, The Conversions Will Come.

This is probably the biggest topic in affiliate marketing today. Affiliates have to change the way they think about their business. Gone are the days where you could tack up a flimsy download button-crazy landing page stuffed with slimmer than trim content, and still make bang for your buck.

Nowadays, the game has changed. The role of the landing page has morphed. It’s become the final step in a much larger process watched over carefully by Google’s quality administrators, instead of the be-all and end-all of the online sales funnel that it used to be. The landing page is now just one critical component in a much larger structure that’s driven by the need to provide consumers real value.

Affiliate marketing’s new gold standard involves building out rich, relevant content sites around highly-targeted landing pages that are designed for the sole purpose of closing the sale. The new industry buzzword is “pre-sell”, rather than “hard-sell”. Today’ s affiliate has to do the legwork. They have to run as much value-selling up front through their site, so that when the consumer gets to the landing page they’ve already inspired them with an unmistakable commitment to the highest standard of customer service.

Build Topic-Related Sites With Authentic Content.

The art of the pre-sell is about loading up the front end of your sales funnel with original, useful content and trust building elements that aren’t directly related to the product you’re selling. The content you offer is directly related to the larger problem or need your customer has, and the product becomes the natural solution to that problem rather than the focus of your site. In other words the product becomes an adjunct or aside to the primary goal, which is to provide the consumer with the best solution, i.e., the perfect answer to their search query.<

Creating a site with a Home Page, Features Page, Contact Info, Testimonials, and an authentic Blog is necessary and best way to tackle this pre-sell method. It's also the key to staying alive in the affiliate game. The content on this type of site has to have true value. It has to be relevant to the solution your product provides, and give the customer precisely what they're looking for when they go from one of your PPC ads to your site or product landing page.

Say No To Black Hat.

Shady landing pages don’t last as long as they used to. The industry has definitely tightened its chops. And since Quality Score doesn’t allow you to start fresh with every new campaign or new content type – any bad history you’ve made follows you to your next destination. Having bad history also means you’ll pay a positioning and cost-per-click penalty foe stepping outside the lines.

So needless to say it literally pays to do it right from the very start. If your paid search advertising is opportunistic and inconsistent, or attempts to mislead or deceive users, you’re business will suffer in the end.

Build Your AdWords Accounts Sequentially.

When starting a brand new account, you should build sequentially. First add keywords and ad groups with a tight and narrow focus to your landing pages and give them enough time to earn a good Quality Score (6 at least) while giving the account some history of good performance.

It’s speculative to suggest the ‘right’ size or period of time, but a few weeks with keywords numbering in the dozens or low hundreds seems to work. Equally important is amassing click histories in the hundreds or even thousands – enough data for Google to truly evaluate your performance.

Conserve Your Top Performing URLs.

This one might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but after a little explaining you’ll see why it makes sense. While the precise impact of the historical CTR of a target URL is unknown, it makes sense that Google would give you the benefit of the doubt with any URL that produces consistently strong Quality results.

With this point in mind, you might want to lean on the conservative side with how you use those ‘big ticket’ target URLs. It’s a bit like what a coach goes through in sports when he has to decide how many minutes his star players should play. He doesn’t want to burn out his franchise go-to-guys before they get a chance to win the game, but at the same time he wants his best players on the floor as much as possible to give his team the greatest chance of winning. It’s a balancing act – and the same goes for your PPC campaigns.

Try to give your big URLs a rest in situations where you’re working with unknown performance variables, such as new PPC ads. Google tends to give less leeway with new niches and keywords i your text ads than with historically proven ads, so you don’t want any potentially poor performing campaigns hurting your QS on a landing page that is a proven winner. Try to use your best performing URLs as an anchor for your continued success.

What do you think about the way affiliate marketing is changing? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and let’s get the discussion rolling!

No matter how you look at it, it’s inexorable. The thirst for MORE is always THERE, looming, chomping away silently at the back of your brain. And it’s the skilled marketer’s profession to tap into that state of mind and set your conversion neurons on fire.

Go Play In That Traffic

Our innate desire to acquire also applies to the analysis of your website traffic. It’s The Third Law Of The Dynamic Internets. Online marketers are constantly striving to drive more traffic to their sites. You might call it an obsession. Make no bones about it, driving more and more web traffic is definitely an awesome obsession to have. It’s also a necessary one if you want to attain any measure of online success. To prosper online, you straight up have to be able to draw the big crowds.

Get Your Full Monty On

The other half of the money equation is Quality. The traffic that hits your site or sales page has to be grade-A targeted in order to max out the odds of clinching each sale. Actually getting people to your site is the job of your emails, videos, and PPC and content network ads. Once they arrive, however, your site has to deliver on the message you’ve supplied.

You can create this “site stickiness” with streamlined design, succinct and compelling copy, and an efficient site architecture that divinely radiates trust and quality. To get his site luster, it should be planned out and executed to the hilt from day one, not just thrown together pell mell. Why? When it comes to making money on the Web, you simply can’t afford to leave your visitors in the dark.

Mind The Conversion Gap

Think of it this way. Say you get a thousand visitors to your site per day. Not bad, right? But how many of them found what they were looking for? Was the site and product/service what they wanted? Did it inspire them to take action? Did they buy something or leave you an email address for lead generation? Or did they just drop into the abyss of cyberspace, never to be seen or heard from again?

Aye, that’s the crux. You have to drive the traffic AND close the sale. If you only do the former, you’ll walk away vacant handed pushing a cart full of broken dreams.

“Hey Man, You Got a Drizzle In Your Speed Boat”

If a boat has a hole in it, it takes on water. More and more water. Until it sinks. The bigger the hole, the faster it goes down. If your site has holes in it, your business goes under. It’s elementary. It might not fail right away, but eventually it will tank L-A-R-G-E. Solution? It’s not rocket surgery. Fill the holes already.

This brand of fix is easier than you think. First identify where the ship is taking on H2O. Where should you look? One of the most common places to find leaks is in the disconnect between the ad the visitor clicked on, and what they actually found when they landed all boggle-eyed onto your site. Tons of affiliate sites serve up campaigns like this, where the ad message and the offer or site content don’t match. They’re conversion path is riddled with gaps in the sales funnel, like someone took a Tommy Gun and shot up the hull. (Leaking money like a tanker).

The affiliates who own these type of sites typically build their ship for No.1 rankings on a favorite-flavor keyword, then, when they actually lock up the number one spot, they panic because it’s not earning the money they expected. In a wild knee-jerk response, they start chasing more search terms to grab more and more traffic. They’ve missed the point. What they should’ve done first and foremost is find the leaks before its too late.

YO YO! SHARK ALERT!!!

While sales might increase by continuing to drive larger volumes of traffic, it’s totally unsustainable for individual affiliates in the long term. Competition for top page rank combined with rising bid prices make it difficult to maintain as a viable strategy. To solve the problem, you should really be focused on improving bounce and abandonment rates and then worry about any secondary tweaks you want to make.

A Full Shock Of Downloads

The best way to increase sales is to audit your site and test to see how it actually works. Scout where the gaps are at, then close them up good and tight. Along with some spinal-tapping SEO work (meta-tags, title tags, keyword selection and density), you should also scan your entire site with the following points in mind:

• Make the navigation clear
• Include prominent, can’t-miss, compelling calls-to-action
• Include a company profile page
• Make the checkout process easy to navigate
• Make the offers clear and prominent
• Provide and promote SAFE online transactions
• Offer added benefits such as subscriptions to newsletters

Let’s go back to our previous example for a minute. Say you have a 1000 visitors a day and out of those you make 10 sales. Just by fixing the gaps in your site you can easily add 10-20 sales a day, depending how much like Swiss Cheese your sales process is, all without dropping a red penny on bids.

How Many Mistakes Can a Marketer Make?

Here’s a list of the most common mistakes affiliates make when they create their websites and sales pages:

• No profile or bio page (this offers the visitor reassurance)
• Site doesn’t display correctly in Internet Explorer or Firefox (always check your site in both browsers)
• No privacy page
• No testimonials or reviews
• No trust badges or security seals
• No customer service contact info
• Confusing terms of service
• A lack of call to action
• Underwhelming sales copy
• Badly designed contact forms
• Poorly designed landing pages
• Unrelated or inappropriate images or stock photos
• Lack of a subscription strategy

Fixing any one of the above listed glitches will help you cut down on your bounce and abandonment rates, and immediately juice up your online revenue. If you have the mettle to repair them all, you’ll come out of it all with a rawkin’ e-com juggernaut and a bank account stacked to the brim.

Bing Gains Momentum

Recent data suggests that Bing has around 28% market share, making it a slice of the pie that’s unwise to ignore. With its recent acquisition of Yahoo! Search you can expect this percentage will continue to grow. So, if you’re having problems getting listed or staying listed with Google, Bing is an eminently viable place to look as a revenue-producing alternative.

The Search World According To Bing

As far as Bing is concerned, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO… it benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.”

That being said, the majority of the standards laid out by Bing pertaining to SEO are straight up basic. For example, things like using unique titles and meta-descriptions, consistent data structure, and an XML sitemap are key.

The Myth Of “Meta-Descriptions Nevermore”

If you hear someone talking smack about how Bing search engines don’t bother to spider meta-descriptions, be sure to chew on a grain of salt while you listen. This will protect you from their seriously antiquated conjecture.

While there was in fact a time a few years back when the major search engines started disregarding meta-description tags due to search engine spamming, recent algorithms have improved for identifying tags that don’t sync with their respective page content, making proper meta-tag insertion important again. The lesson? USE META-DESCRIPTIONS.

BTW! The biggest mistake to avoid with your meta-tags is using the same one for every page. That just screams duplicate content. The best thing to do is create a unique tag for each page, or else don’t use meta-tags at all. The same goes meta-descriptions on Google.

Quick Tips For Advertising On Bing

The rules on Bing seem less stringent compared to Google, especially in the manual review category. Bing doesn’t yet have the heavy policing standards, making it an opportune time for affiliates to start incorporating it into their marketing campaigns.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for Bing campaigns:
*Make sure each page has at least 350 words on it, not including typical page elements such as menus and titles
*Use inbound links with keyword rich anchor text

*Put keywords in your URLs
*Building quality outbound links to reputable sites (e.g., merchant site)
*Microsoft also offers the Bing Webmaster Center where you can troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. There’s also this document “Bing – New Features Relevant to Webmasters” (PDF)

Bing is definitely a legitimate contender. If you’re getting pinched on Google, it might be time to diversify.

The Power Of The Niche

First up, niche sites work really well with AdSense because they draw targeted consumers; people who are interested in that specific niche and its related content.

Digital products such as registry cleaner review sites are great examples of this type of niche strategy. When all the content is focused on a single problem, solution, product or subject, it makes a significant difference to your conversion process. The symmetry between content and advertisement makes the initial click and then the purchase a much more intuitive decision for the consumer to make.

Google’s AdSense code displays ads relevant to the content you’ve built into your sales pages. Since the viewers that visit the site are already there for a very specific reason (to read about the topic addressed in your content), the correlated ads they see generate higher click-through rates than ones on less targeted sites.

Basically, niche sites are the best way to get that close correlation between site content and the ads that get displayed.

One Keyword Only, Please

This is something a lot of beginner affiliates don’t know about. Many assume that optimizing their pages for multiple keywords is the best way to go. Evidence, however, suggests the contrary.

Keywords are one of the primary factors that determine what AdSense ads get displayed on your pages. It’s been shown that if you isolate and optimize for a single keyword, the chance that AdSense will deliver ads relevant to your pages is much higher than if you use multiple keywords. If you target too lots of keywords on the same page, you risk getting displaying that aren’t relevant to your content, and therefore losing clicks.

All you have to do is make sure you choose the right keyword for your niche through the research and ongoing testing.

Coordinate Your Ads With Your Site Content

Using colors in your ads that match the colors of the content on your website has proven to work very well through AdSense. Maybe it’s because the human eye associates common colors with common ideas and patterns. Whatever the reason, design continuity is an important part of campaign optimization.

Design continuity includes things like using blue for all the clickable links on your AdSense blocks. Blue is the universal link color and gets instant recognition with viewers. It communicates without equivocation, “hey you, this is a link.”

Also, the “open air” display format (no borders around the AdSense ads) has proven to generate better click-throughs. This one is a bit of a mystery as to why, but the numbers don’t lie. If you want to see for yourself, try testing the open air format for 100 unique visitors to your website, then record the click-through rate and the average amount generated per click.

After the initial testing phase, change just one variable of your AdSense block. You can try swapping out the color of the font in the headline as ann example. Again, wait until you get 100 unique visitors with the new headline and then gage your click-through rate for that color variate. If click traction spikes, stand pat with the with the new header color and switch up another single variable for your next test.

Continue testing this way to keep improving your campaign performance.

Place Your Ads Above the Fold

This tip works every time. Setup an AdSense block above the fold. Why? Internet users are notoriously impatient. They want to see what they’re looking for as soon as they hit the page. Placing ads above the fold is an absolute must for getting your ads noticed and generating the high-volume clicks affiliate marketers need.

Also, digital heat maps have shown that the human eye tends to be naturally attracted to the top left side of a web page. Place an adsense block in that spot and see how it performs.

Proper Ad Spec Selection

The medium rectangle format [300 pixels X 250 pixels] is the most popular. Other affiliates swear by the [468 pixel X 60 pixel] format . Want to be sure? Test both. See which one does best for you.

Monitor Your Account Closely

Keep a keen eye on your ads and how they’re performing. This is probably the most critical activity in maximizing your AdSense ads. You should also know that your AdSense account is a great resource, you just need to dig a little deeper to get the most out it.

For example, The Channels feature is pretty solid. It lets you know what’s happening on which pages of your site. All you have to do is set up different channels for different pages so that you track what pages are generating the clicks. This works best for small sites designed specifically for AdSense.

Google Vs. Bing

We came across a great comparison study about Bing vs. Google on Raven SEO Tools, http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/1617/bing-vs-google-a-comparison-study, written by Lee Smith-Bryan. Lee’s comparison study breaks down Bing and Google’s search engines into several categories, both technical and theoretical, and measures them against one another in a practical and insightful way. We recommend you read it and other articles like it to get a better idea of how the major search engines will affect the way you build out your SEO campaigns in the future.

The Google vs. Bing discussion is definitely heating up right now… SMX Advanced (http://searchmarketingexpo.com/advanced/) Seattle June 2010 even has it as one of its lecture topics, so it’s gotta be hot… Other big name search engines you’ll want to look into are of course MSN and Yahoo!

International Focus

If you’re on the ball and expanding your campaigns globally into markets like Europe, Search Engine War Blog out of the UK (http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/) is a great resource on search engine competition.

The #1 Controversial SEO Topic Of The Month

If you want to get into the really controversial stuff, have a look at what’s going on with Google and the Chinese government. The debate couldn’t get any hotter! http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/technology/23google.html

Until next time, bone up on your search engine savvy and get the competitive edge!

]]> http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/03/the-battle-for-search-engine-supremacy/feed/ 1 http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/02/the-art-of-affiliate-marketing-an-image-is-worth-a-thousand-clicks/ http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/02/the-art-of-affiliate-marketing-an-image-is-worth-a-thousand-clicks/#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:08:56 +0000 admin http://blog.revenuewire.com/?p=1045 People talk a lot about how important keywords are to creating successful campaigns, but rarely do you hear the discussion hit upon how critical the images can be to a high-converting affiliate landing page.

Everyday Google indexes hundreds of thousands of images. Over the years it has probably earmarked billions of images for search purposes. Every time someone searches for an image, it’s an opportunity to put your product or service front and center. If your images can be found easily based on targeted keywords, you’ll probably see a jump in traffic to your site as well as an increase in your conversion rates.

An Image Is Worth a Thousand Clicks
Depending on the search query a person enters, Google will display a number of indexed images that show up in thumbnail format above the regular “text only” search results. These images are linked to corresponding web pages. If the prospect clicks on the image they get directed to the web page that houses the image. It’s easy math. With the added traffic from a properly search-optimized image, you can expect to see more people clicking-through to your page and your conversions should rise.

Making Sure Your Images Are Searchable
For example if you have a website or landing page promoting ParetoLogic’s RegCure, it’s extra good business to have an image from your website that’s listed directly above the regular SERPS. It provides added traction and a boost in traffic and sales. It’s also pretty easy to do. So how do you go about doing it? A little HTML fidgeting, a keen eye, and your set.

Let’s take a closer look…

Choose a File Name that Contains Your Top Keywords
The file name “RegCure-registry-cleaner.jpg” would be a logical start for your RegCure product. Make sure to separate the words out with hyphens to get better traction from the spiders.

Use a Descriptive Image Alt Attribute Text
For your alt attribute text, drop in the same keywords you’ve used for the file name. Just like that. For RegCure, your Image Alt Attribute could be “RegCure registry cleaner.” Here’s how it would look in your HTML coding:

<img src=”RegCure-registry-cleaner.jpg” alt=”RegCure registry cleaner”>

Use The Same Keywords For Your Image Title Attribute
Just like with your Image Alt Attribute, use the same descriptive keyword text for your Image Title Attribute as well. Here’s the HTML:

<img src=”RegCure-registry-cleaner.jpg” alt=”RegCure registry cleaner” title=”RegCure registry cleaner”>

Add Keywords to The Textual Content Around Your Image
Any written content on the page that appears before and after your image gets spidered and analyzed for keyword relevance. That means this text effects the position that your image appears in on the search page. Use the same words “RegCure registry cleaner” again in any text above or below the image for maximum search engine pickup.

Provide Large Image Sizes
Google seems to love big images. So much so that you can bet the bigger the image, the easier it will be to get it atop the regular results page. Include the Width and Height attributes in your image tag HTML to indicate to the  search engines the size of your image. Here’s how it will look in your code:

<img src=”Regcure-registry-cleaner.jpg” alt=”RegCure registry cleaner” title=”RegCure registry cleaner” width=”600″ height=”400″>

Pick Images That Arrest The Eye
If you display ugly or awkward images that no one wants to click on, the previous steps will all be nullified. So use images that grab the eye and make people want to click on them. Magnetic images, bright colors, sleek design, attractive faces, stylish fonts, and graphical elements that speak to the person’s search query will all inspire more clicks.

Try these steps our and see what results you get!

]]> http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2010/02/the-art-of-affiliate-marketing-an-image-is-worth-a-thousand-clicks/feed/ 0 http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2009/08/building-up-your-page-rank-techniques/ http://blog.revenuewire.com/index.php/2009/08/building-up-your-page-rank-techniques/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:18:50 +0000 Brenden http://blog.revenuewire.com/?p=448 Interested In Beefing Up Your Page Rank Techniques? You might dig this article by CT Moore of ReveNews on sculpting your page rank using the NoFollow Tag. The article has some good pointers and sheds light on where to put the NoFollow tag now that Google has changed its policy on “link juice dams”. Read full the article here: Sculpting Page Rank with the NoFollow Tag .

Until about a year ago, it was actually being used to sculpt Page Rank (PR). Even though you can’t use it to outright sculpt PR anymore, it still plays a role in your on-page SEO. Not only can it help you avoid being penalized by Google for a violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, it can also be used to kind of “shore up” the PR you’ve already managed to build.