Welcome to the FullTraffic Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.
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After a one-year stop, Google will re-launch next week its Webmaster Chat between webmasters and Google experts.
The event will take place on Friday, November 13th, at 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco). It is named by Google the "Holiday Webmaster Webinar". Its meeting number is 574 659 815 and the password is "webmaster".
Google considers the holiday season an important period of time for online business, so they want you to be prepared for it.
The Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools.
Their presentation will be followed by a Q&A sessions - webmasters will be allowed to ask questions and they will follow the answers in real time.
You can access this online meeting both through your computer and your iPdone. Follow this instructions:
Google usually issues this kind of events to enhance webmasters' search and SEO experience. The better you understand Google's logic, the better the performance of your website will be.
The last webex was held on October 2008, after which it came the long pause that will come to an end next week.
If you join this kind of events, you may find a way to exploit even more FT's campaigns for your website. These campaigns are vital for the performance of your venture, and Google's knowledge is an advantage to understand the online world.
Google has created a shopping cart software for online retailers called Google Commerce Search. It is now on the air and you can start using it (see the video below).
This new product is aimed both to online sellers and online buyers, who will enjoy an upgraded shopping experience, Google promises.
The feature uses Google's search technology and it is adapted to e-commerce websites. That makes it a feature aimed at improving online shopping websites' search and usability.
When we say it includes Google's search technology, it means it includes spellcheck, stemming, and synonym matching. If the potential buyer does not remember the exact name of the product, he can type whatever he remembers and Google Commerce Search will suggest him/her the right and complete information.
The feature is integrated with Google Analytics by default, so retailers can track the incoming traffic to their website/products.
Google Commerce Search is also highly customizable, so after the retailer uploads his/her products, they can decide how to display the information. They can even highlight special offers and products, and connect related products so that searching become easier for customers. The result is a Google-hosted shopping cart.
In their announcement, Google explains that visitors spend an average of just 8 seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, "so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers".
In addition, Google Commerce Search is hosted in the cloud, "meaning it lives online, so e-commerce sites can get up and running quickly".
Google has strategically launched this new feature a couple of months before the holidays season, when commerce in general and e-commerce in particular rises and even traffic peaks are experienced.
The cost of the service depends on how many products/SKUs in the retailer’s data feed, and how searches are done on the retailer’s store.
So if you are an online retailer, you can now use this new Google feature and buy a FT Package. By doing the latter, you will drive lots of potential customers to your online store and then provide them with a comfortable and fast shopping experience. The result could be an important increase on your sells.
Here at FullTraffic we try to continuously improve our service. Hope you are already enjoying, but we want to give you more! So here are some upgrades we've made recently.
Visitors Details
As a customer, you can see now the details of each hit you get. This includes:
Country
State
City
IP
Date and Time
These details will let you know your visitors much better. This means you can improve the performance of your Website and even maximize future campaigns. Every cent you invest will pay you much more!
Change URL
Changes occur, right? You may have wanted to drive traffic to your Website "X", but you suddenly changed your mind and you wanted to derive that traffic to your Website "Y". Or you closed one Website and you opened a new one. Or you simply changed your Website's URL.
Now our service includes easy URL changing, so that hits that are being sent to one URL can be sent to another instead. Once the campaign is on "delivering" status, you can insert the new URL you want the traffic to be delivered to.
Just go to your "Live Stats" and get into the active campaign. Once there, you will see the link “Change URL”. Follow the instructions.
Details for QUICK PPC
If you buy a QUICK PPC service you will be able to see the details of every click:
Country
State
City
IP
Referrer URL
Date and Time
These details will let you know everything about the performance of your Website, its content and each one of its pages.
When you get these details, you can focus your next campaign on where you certainly know it pays.
We want to provide you accuracy and full exploitation of your investment.
New Country / Category Campaigns
We offer now a new kind of campaigns: Country and Category Targeted Visitors.
In this new campaign you can select one Country and one Category to say us where you want the hits from.
These hits are delivered in the form of High Quality "Pop-Ins" (embedded windows to the publisher Website). The visitors are 95% IP UNIQUE and most campaigns will complete within 10-20 days. Delivery rate may reach 100,000 daily visitors, depending on your request.
Use the drop-down menus to choose among 73 Countries and 34 Categories!
Know Everything Quickly and Easily
We have notably upgraded our Frequently Asked Questions section, so that you can find all the answers to your questions easily and quickly.
First, you can now access the FAQ's directly from our homepage. Scroll down until you see the "Quick Answers" section. When you click on one question or one answer, you will be driven directly to that answer within our FAQ's section. There you can see other answered questions.
Second, if you have already a FT account and you need a specific answer, go to our "Contact Us" section, where you can access our Ticket Support System. You can add a ticket with your message and the system will take you to the answers directly related to your question. You can e-mail us, chat with us and/or call us. Our Support Team will be pleased to help you.
Third, you will find much more FAQ's than before. We want to be sure that you know exactly what you are investing your money on.
YouTube Views
We are working on a new product: YouTube Views. This new product will drive real traffic to your videos on YouTube.
As you know, the more views you get on YouTube, the more your video becomes popular, and you get a better position in the organic search results.
Now Google Maps' "MyLocation" is not exclusively available to mobile users but also to desktop users. This feature does exactly what you would think: marks your current location.
However, you've got to be using a compatible browser. If you haven't upgraded to Firefox 3.5 or Chrome 2.0 (or any browser installed with the current version of Google Gears), then do it before you try to use the feature, because without any of them it won't work properly.
Then when you load Google Maps, look for a teeny tiny new box between the zoom in/out bar and the compass circle. Click that box and you'll be prompted to give permission to share your location.
Up until now, desktop's MyLocation do not display the famous blue circle that uses in the mobile version to find your specific location. This means that while it says to you the area where you are, it cannot tell the specific point where you are.
Google uses nearby wifi points to determine location, but it may not be able to provide one every time.
As you know, social media is one of the best ways to strengthen and support your SEO campaign at FullTraffic. And as you know StumbleUpon, though being an excellent tool to share your work (over 8 million users), was the forgotten lady these days, when Facebook and especially Twitter attract all of the attention.
From our point of view, StumbleUpon shared part of the guilt, since it was quite separate from those services. However, the situation has lastly changed, since StumbleUpon launched Su.pr, which integrates the three services.
This new tool that shortens URLs and also enables the submission of links to StumbleUpon while also offering the option to simultaneous update Twitter and Facebook.
SU's official blog explains how it works:
All you have to do is type your message, enter the URL of the site you'd like to share with your friends and followers, hit post and the message is posted along with the shortened URL. In addition to this simple syndication method, we provide you with tools to identify the best times to post, schedule future posts and see real-time results on clicks, tweets and traffic associated with your posts.
Like other URL shortening services, you can see how many times the link has been clicked on, which is highly valuable.
Especially useful is the bookmarklet that you can use to make the process of submitting to three different social networks at the same time even easier.
Last month we informed you about the opposite trend Facebook and MySpace experience - for the first time, Mark Zuckerberg's social network had overtaken MySpace in the local U.S. market, after overtaking it in the global scenario.
Now we see the economic consequences of it. Beyond the management changes and staff reduction of 30%, the advertising is going towards Facebook. In June's post we said MySpace had still a more robust range of advertising options than Facebook and that advertisers had not find a good way to invest more on Facebook than in MySpace.
However, the reality one month later is different. Social Media appears to be an unsteady landscape tied directly to the popularity, trendiness, and momentum of any given network at any given moment in time.
According to eMarketer, US ads spending at MySpace will fall 15% to $495 million in 2009 from $585 million in 2008, while Facebook will grow from $210 million in 2008 to $230 million in 2009.
It is also expected that Facebook surpass MySpace revenues by 2011. According to Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst, "Facebook, once a distant second to MySpace, has outperformed its rival in nearly every measure of usage-and is on track to surpass MySpace in ad spending by 2011".
In general, she predicted a nice future for social networking and their ads potential: "The expected rebound in spending will come as more companies focus on creating and implementing an overall social marketing strategy. And it is a clear indication that the experimental phase of social network marketing is finally drawing to an end".
Although ads spending is 3% down this year (recession, remember?), budgets will grow by 13.2% in 2010 and 8.2% in 2011, according to eMarketer.
By now, advertising spending on Facebook and MySpace alone account for 2x the total advertising dollars going to all other networks combined.
"we take care of a website www.goodtea.eu which had the Google page rank value of 2 about a year ago. Since a certain moment in time it has been assigned a value of 0. There were no major changes to the web site. Is there a way to find out why the web site has been assigned a page rank of zero?".
Googler JohnMu, replied to one webmaster saying that he/she should not worry about the last PageRank change because it was likely a "technical quirk":
"You have a nice-looking site :). As far as I can tell, it looks like the change in Toolbar PageRank for your site is only due to some technical quirk and not something that you need to worry about".
JohnMu has then been asked if the PageRank's "Technical Quirk" is somewhat widespread... but up to date he has not answered...
There are some rumors that Google has adjusted their link algorithm to look more at how "relevant" the link is to the page it is linking to.
Authorities postponed up until September the trial of Google executives charged in Italy over the publication of a video on Google's YouTube where a handicapped teen was beaten has been postponed. The case was delayed because an interpreter was ill and will now be resumed in September.
"On trial are Google's senior vice president and chief legal Officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes, senior product marketing manager Arvind Desikan, and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer," BBC News noted. They face up to three years in prison if found guilty.
The case was delayed because an interpreter was ill.
Prosecutors argue that Google did not have adequate content filters or enough staff to monitor it, and one of them (or both) caused the inadequate publication of the video.
An important point of the sue is that the content was uploaded without the consent of all parties involved.
"If the judge rules that videos posted to sites such as YouTube or Dailymotion do need the permission of all those appearing in it before it is posted, it will have a huge impact on social media sites viewable in Italy", said Nick Lockett, a partner with DL Legal, to BBC News.
Google said: "We feel that bringing this case to court is totally wrong. It's akin to prosecuting mail service employees for hate speech letters sent in the post". "As we have repeatedly made clear, our hearts go out to the victim and his family. We are pleased that as a result of our cooperation the bullies in the video have been identified and punished".
The video had been posted to YouTube prior to Google purchasing the company but were made because they had not been taken down.
SEO industry has become extremely competitive due to seven reasons. This includes the additional options with Social Media and the fact that searchers became more Internet literate. This is said by Bruce Clay SEO specialist on this video.
In this video Clay says that links were not important in the early days and that PPC was not nearly as competitive as it is now. In 1996 most users would scan many pages on the search engine result pages, but now they hardly go past page 1.
He thinks that what happened to the SEO industry has brought many improvements, but on the other side searches became more complex and technical. As more and more newcomers become aware of SEO's importance, Bruce thinks that they fail to dig deep into the technical and complex side of SEO and he foresees a big problem with this. We see this as one of the reasons why people pay SEO services, such as Fulltraffic's services.
But you can see this interesting video and take your own conclusions.
Michael Jackson's death has not created a global impact on music industry and traditional journalism only, but it has had its important repercussions on the Internet as well.
Google took a major hit when the news about Michael Jackson's situation broke. The search engine displayed a "We're sorry" to searches trying desperately to find out the fate of the "King of Pop".
It warned users "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".
"It's true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.
3PM Pacific peak of searches for topics related to Michael Jackson
On Twitter, the phrase "Michael Jackson" appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates and according to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing "Michael Jackson" totaled more than 100,000 per hour.
The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at the time of Jackson's death was 72% higher than normal. Other sites with performance problems were Wikipedia, AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo.
In the UK specifically, visits to Jackson's homepage increased 17 fold. The website was the 9th most visited music website in the UK, and the highest ranked artist homepage.
On Thursday 25, 1 in every 1,100 UK Internet visits went to TMZ, the website that originally broke the story. TMZ's website became the 73rd most visited website overall. The site usually ranks somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 in the UK.
As expected, the subject is dominating conversations on Twitter. The service had its busiest every day in the UK on Thursday. Maybe the spike wasn't as huge as may have been expected, but that is probably due to the fact that news broke so late UK time.
