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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A new feature is available at Google's Webmasters Tools. The new recently launched interface contains a "Significance" column, which compares the frequency of a keyword on the web to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your website.
When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword. Why and when is this helpful? Sometimes, some of your URL's are hacked. Other malicious users hack your content, keywords and URL's for their benefit. In this case, you will start noticing your site appearing in search results for terms totally unrelated to it (for example, "Viagra" or "casino"). Then this feature will help you find those keywords, identify the pages that contain them and erase any hacked content quickly.
The "Significance" feature is relevant when you re-implement your site on a new technology framework, as well.
And of course, the "Significance" column will show you how relevant is your website on the internet. If your website's most popular keywords match the web's most popular keywords, then you are there! If not, well, this feature will help you make a change. It will lead it to become more popular.
Google has updated its SafeSearch feature. SafeSearch is a feature that allows parents and teachers to have full control over their children's search safety.
By selecting a number of criteria elements, people can filter the search engine's results, avoiding their children from stumble with sexually explicit content.
What Google has recently updated was the possibility for users to lock the filtering level for "Strict". Now when users do this, only they can change the level by introducing their password. By doing this, Google promises that people who shouldn't see XXX content won't see it, although they say the system is not 100% accurate.
The other thing they updated is the status view. Now colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked:
If these colored balls are not seen, it is easy and quick to re-lock, by getting in the Google user's account.
We think this feature is not just good to block adult content from children, but it has also an added value. Thinking in SEO terms, searches done with the SafeSearch activated are done in a reduced web room. This means searches will be more accurate (always they are not explicitly XXX), throwing out all the junk stuff.
This feature could improve traffic for non-adult related websites and improve the users experience.
Now see this video to learn how to lock SafeSearch:
"There are no websites, no news websites or blog websites, anywhere in the world, making any serious money". That's what News Corp. magnate Rupert Murdoch recently said in an interview with Sky News.
We think that it is serious money what you get from your websites. It is serious money at least for you, who put all your energies in your enterprise. However, Murdoch is a heavy shark and his decisions have a serious impact on the industry. So when he says he will block Google from free search content from his websites, we should pay attention.
And that's exactly what he said. He said he is willing to block Google's searches for his websites' content. “I think we will. We do it already, with The Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story, but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.”
Mr. Murdoch believes Google "steal" content from his websites and that readers should pay for content. “It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. They’re very happy to pay for it when they buy a newspaper, and I think when they read it elsewhere they’re going to have to pay. Not huge sums. You’d be surprised how much can be done, how cheaply, into the average home.”
Now, Murdoch having saying these things, it looks like he is'nt looking at the numbers. Look, for example, what Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research at Experian Hitwise, says:
"In fact, on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com's traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days."
Look at his charts:
Murdoch's defenders say social media websites like Facebook and Twitter could increase visits to news sites instead of Google. However, the distance is quite big and Google seems to absolutely dominate the market. So, shouldn's he be more moderate with his declarations? Or maybe he has strength enough to overcome Google? What do you think?
If in addition to FT Packages you are using Google AdWords, you may have noticed they re-designed the interface for Conversion Tracking.
Now Conversions, Webpages and Code are three separated tabs that allow you to see the details of the Conversion data.
Conversions
As you are tracking conversion actions, you may want to view all the details of them.
In this tab you have two main columns to see all of these details. The "Tracking Status" column shows whether those actions are being tracked properly. There you can see if a conversion has ever been recorded, if it has recently stopped recording, or if it's working just fine.
The "Value" column displays the accumulated value of the conversion actions. You assign a certain value to each action, so the details displayed here are based on that value.
In addition, you can use the "New Conversion" button to set up the conversion actions to be tracked. These conversion actions can also be imported from Google Analytics.
Webpages
Knowing which of your website pages are converting is vital for your campaign. So the Google staff has added this function so that you can see it clearly.
The new interface offers the same three columns you see under the Conversions tab (Tracking Status, Value, Conversions per click).
This shows you a breakdown of the number of conversions per page on your site. By this way you can identify which pages are performing as you expected and which not. This means you can also see which pages are poorly performing and which ones are highly efficient.
Code
As you may have full control over your campaigns, this tab allows you to grab the tracking code for each conversion.
Moreover you can change the value of an action, which aids in ROI calculations.
You can read Google’s explanations on the new interface here.
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.
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