Internet Marketing Blog

As recently reported by C|Net News.com, Yahoo! and Microsoft have adopted Google’s sitemap protocol. This will eventually prove to be a boon to website owners / managers since it removes some of the obstacles to using the indexing tools.

The website indexing protocols allow you to tell search engines about the pages on the website that you would like indexed. Instead of waiting for them to find all pages by spidering your site, they can download the list of pages. This makes it easier on the search engines since they don’t have to follow convoluted links to deep content, and it helps webmasters by enabling faster and more complete indexing. This is particularly advantageous to large sites and those with substantial ecommerce catalogs that have a difficult time getting all pages adequately indexed.

Rumors abound about the difficult of using current tools to create and maintain the index files, but the combined forces of the big three search engines will help drive improvements in the technology and supporting tools.

We have just started out first campaign within Amazon’s Clickriver service. The program is still in beta, so you’ll need to apply for access.

Amazon’s Clickriver looks and feels a lot like AdWords. Campaigns contain ads (an unfortunate name for what is really an ad group) which contain keywords and creatives (ads). Clickriver creatives have the same general size constraints as ads in AdWords. Keyword matching options are the same as AdWords. You can run ads / creatives against each other as in AdWords. With the exception already noted, the Clickriver terminology for everything is virtually identical that of AdWords.

What about Clickriver is different? Most importantly, your ads will only show on Amazon.com. Also, you won’t find the incredibly rich feature set that makes AdWords so versatile and powerful: no dayparting, ad rotation options, budget allocation options, and so on. One annoyance is that negative keywords must be applied at a keyword level, not ads (think ad groups) or campaigns. This may sound insignificant if you don’t recognize the power of negative keywords and consider how this design decision can be a real maintenance headache.

Overall we are left with a good impression of the Clickriver beta, and we look forward to seeing how it performs in the weeks and months to come.

Business.com recently undertook a significant redesign of their PPC program. They have abandoned the old points-based system for a straight bid-for-position model. Other significant improvements include:

• Users now have complete control of their campaigns and can make changes quickly and easily.
• Better organization of keywords into groups.
• Support for negative keywords.

The biggest negative of this program is the same one that plagues the soon-to-be-replaced Yahoo system: bid for position encourages bid inflation and the volatility that often comes with uninformed participants. We hope that Business.com will eventually combine the bid with the CTR or other success metrics to create more stability and to reward more effective advertisers.

There are some simple SEO “tricks” that can garner higher ranking with minimal effort, and that you can employ yourself rather than paying an SEO firm. The success of these SEO techniques is — however — predicated upon a number of other factors such as proper site structure (see our SEO site analyses) and use of the most appropriate keywords (we also provide keyword research services).

• Write more content.
• Use keywords in your titles tags.
• Use keyword-rich headings.
• Make sure users don’t need JavaScript to view all of your content.
• Put keywords in image ALT text.

Content is critical for SEO, so if you don’t have any, the other techniques aren’t going to help much. It is also the most time-consuming of the techniques listed here.

Speaking of copywriting, good SEO copy does not sound like a parrot repeating your keywords. It should be written for real humans, not just search engines. Likewise good page titles and headings use your keywords, but in ways that are not displeasing to people.