Internet Marketing Blog

We have updated our online marketing glossary, implementing a new database back end and adding new terms. The change from a single static page makes the glossary more user friendly and makes it easier for us to manage entries. We look forward to expanding this resource with additional terms, and we welcome your suggestions.

Take a look at the new glossary.

Almost everyone on the Internet uses multiple online resources that each require passwords. Creating and remembering various passwords can be inconvenient at best, particularly if security policies require minimum lengths, special characters, and the absence of common words. In general, the more secure your passwords, the harder they are to remember. Ema9$ne@;P2 is much harder to remember than MyDogSpot.

Password vaults are software applications that provide secure storage for passwords and related information. Access to the data requires entry of a single password (optionally a key disk), effectively making it possible for you only need one single password to gain access to all of your resources. By shifting your memory requirements to the password vault, it allows you to create much more secure login credentials for things like your network, your bank, your email, etc.
If you use a password vault, it is critically important that the password you use to access it is secure since, in effect, it is the key to all of the other information. This means that your password(s) should be at least 8 characters long, use a variety of symbols (letters, numbers, and punctuation), and avoid easy to guess information like words in the dictionary, your address, etc.

Isn’t there an inherent risk in storing login information for multiple resources in one location? Yes. However, a password vault makes it easy to create and use stronger passwords for all of your logins, thus your overall security may be much greater since individual account logins may be much more secure.

While I cannot vouch for its security, I like KeePass for a number of reasons:

• It’s open source. In addition to the nice fact that it’s free, this also means that many smart people have looked at its security, and also that an active development community would theoretically jump on any problems.
• It generates strong passwords for you with any combination of allowable characters.
• You can store lots of other information in it as well as usernames and passwords.
• Credentials can be organized into any number and depth of categories.
• It provides double-click copying of usernames and passwords onto the clipboard for pasting into whatever login screen you need, thus eliminating typing errors.

If you have experience with similar tools, I would love to read your comments.

Click fraud occurs when someone clicks on your PPC ads in order to incur charges with no intent of doing business with you. Occasional clicks of this sort incur little additional cost and are very hard to differentiate from legitimate users. The real problems occur when systematic attempts are made to deplete your advertising budget through “manufactured” clicks.

Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and other advertising programs typically try to detect blatant click fraud and will not charge you for it. The simplest form of detection is to ignore multiple ad clicks from the same computer on the same day. More sophisticated techniques may try to find patterns of behavior that indicate click fraud.

Some fraud will always make it past the search engines’ detection schemes, so it is good to keep an eye out for indications of illegitimate clicks. Here are some behaviors that may indicate click fraud:

• Sudden changes in click counts that are then sustained at a higher or lower level.
• Intermittent high click counts, spikes in otherwise consistent click rates over time.
• Higher CTR on content ads which typically don’t perform as well as search ads.
• Significant differences in very similar terms, such as four times as many clicks on “Seattle car dealer” as “Seattle car dealers”.
• Sudden jumps in CTR for a particular keyword.

To report suspected click fraud for AdWords, visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6432. Yahoo requires you to contact support from within your account management console. For either vendor, you’ll need excellent documentation of unsual behavior if you hope to have your account credited.

There are various techniques for determining the source of leads. Although it may seem like the easiest method, asking the customer is one of the worst. Some people will know how they first heard of your company, product, or service. Others won’t remember at all. Most will provide incomplete or incorrect information.

The most common error made by customers who find your website on a search engine is to confuse natural listings with PPC advertisements. Usually they assume that they clicked on a free search engine result instead of an ad, almost never the other way around. This can have a huge impact on the perceived value of search engine advertising, diminishing its apparent effectiveness and return on investment. It can also inflate the effectiveness of search engine ranking, which can result in missed opportunities for SEO improvement and long-term ad cost reductions.

Typical website analytics tools provide aggregate views of where users come from, such as what search engine sends visitors to your site, or how many come from paid listings versus natural search engine results. However, this data is typically not associated with actual sales. This means that you know where people come from, but you may get little or not insight into which sources deserve more or less investment.

The best way to analyze lead sources is to implement a tracking code that you can collect from prospective customers. For online sources, it’s relatively straightforward to include Javascript or server-side code that detects the source and discreetly displays a corresponding code on the web page. If a user fills out an online form, the code can be sent along with their information, and if they contact you over the phone you can ask for the code explicitly.

As part of an SEO project, I wanted to use Excel to evaluate keyword densities of various text. Excel doens’t offer a built-in function for counting words in a string, but I found this one online:

=LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,” “,”"))+1

A1 contains the text in question.

This works by comparing the length text before and after removing the spaces between words. This will treat hyphenated words as single words. A similar replacement comparison technique can be used to count the number of times a keyword appears in text. Dividing the number of keywords by the number of words in the text provides the keyword density. In Excel:

Is your site listed in Google Local? If it’s not, you can submit it here: http://www.google.com/local/add. Once you fill out the proper online forms, Google will send you a confirmation postcard to verify the street address. This postcard will contain a PIN that you will enter at the above page to verify the listing information. It will take up to 6 weeks for verified listings to appear in the Google Local results.

A recent article at WebProNews summarizes forthcoming SEMPO research into Search Engine Marketing spending by SEM firms. It comes as no surprise that 95% of firms surveyed advertises with Google AdWords, significantly more than the still-respectable 60% who advertise with Yahoo! Search Precision Match (formerly Overture). There is parity between the two rivals’ content networks with about 46% participating in Google AdSense and Yahoo! Search Content Match. (I wonder how much overlap there is in that 46%?)

Total spending on search advertising is quoted as being around $5.75 billion. It is not clear if this represents total spending or just the direct cost of ad fees (PPC and CPM costs excluding management).

Stay tuned for more details.

The following Firefox extensions are incredibly useful for all kinds of web-related work:

• ColorZilla - Investigate and copy colors, check coordinates, and zoom.
• Googlebar - Search various Google properties, within a domain, examine the cache, and more.
• Greasemonkey - Customize other people’s websites with ready-made or custom plugins.
• SessionSaver - Save tab sets and histories across restarts and crashes.
• Web Developer Toolbar - Provides an extensive set of powerful tools for website development and maintenance.
• Xinha - Use a WISYWIG editor to easily create HTML in any standard text box.

Know of other great Firefox extensions? Please let us know.

SEOMoz offers a useful tool for assessing the difficulty of achieving a high ranking on a particular keyword. It examines both on-page factors (keyword density, title and alt tags, etc.) and in-bound links, providing a slew of details and an overall “difficulty score”. While we primarily use our internal techniques and tools, we occasionally look for tools like this that offer additional capabilities and insight.
Note that the Keyword Difficulty Tool requires Google and Yahoo API codes. Links are provided to the appropriate registration pages.

There are many free directory services that serve as online yellow pages. Most of these accept free business listings. Here is a list of leading directory services with links to their submission pages:

• Google Local
• Yahoo Local
• SuperPages
• MyPages
• YellowPages.com

You can find many more directories at the Internet Search Engine Database.