Sunday, December 28, 2008

If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both startups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo 360, is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. It is difficult to search much deeper than your friends’ names. You need to go to an advanced profile search page to filter through their interests, activities, or other profile categories, for instance. And forget about searching your news feed.

Yet social search done right could become very valuable for Facebook. And it would be even more valuable for Google. (They already know how to make money from search). It is also an opportunity for Microsoft Live Search, but they are not really inspiring much confidence so far. So let’s set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of any Google-Facebook deal or partnership (given Microsoft’s investment in Facebook), and let’s imagine how the two could help each other.

Even if Facebook/Microsoft figures out social search, it is more useful on Google, which is where most of us do our searching. To get a glimpse at what this might look like, you can try Sidestripe, which is both an add-on widget for Google search and a Facebook app. Sidestripe is like Glue for search (Glue is a browser add-on that shows you whether anyone in your social networks has expressed interest in the book, movie, restaurant, product, or other things mentioned on whatever page you happen to be browsing). Similarly, sidestripe indexes all your friends on Facebook and parts of their profiles (where they work, their interests, etc). When you do a search on Google, a box with Sidestripe results appears after the third natural result, giving you a sense of whether any of your friends might be experts on the topic. For instance, when I do a search for “Google” it turns up Facebook friends who work at Google or are somehow affiliated with Google, and looks like this:

A search for “biking” turns up friends who are interested in biking. You can also add your own knowledge to any search result, and it will appear as a subsequent result (although it does not let you add links, which I consider a major bug). Or if you still can’t find what you are looking for from either Google or Sidestripe, you can ask all of your friends a question from inside the Sidestripe box on Google about the topic you are trying to learn about and that question shows up in all of your friends’ feeds. Any answers then become indexed and searchable.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/28/the-future-of-social-search-or-why-google-should-buy-facebook/

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

The Definitive List (75+) of Link Building Techniques in 2008

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-definitive-list-75-of-link-building-techniques-in-2008.html

Monday, December 15, 2008

Thursday, December 11, 2008

How To Create a Negative Keyword List

http://www.searchengineguide.com/diana-adams/negative-keyword-lists.php

Google Expands AdSense For Domains - Enough Already

http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-adsense-for-domains-enough-already-15812.php

SMS for Google Chat

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/really-new-in-labs-this-time-sms-text.html

Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?

http://searchengineland.com/bounce-rate-as-a-ranking-factor-15643.php

More Yahoo Search Image Ads; Promotional Ads

http://searchengineland.com/more-yahoo-search-image-ads-promotional-ads-15750.php

9 Myths Of Landing Page Quality Score

http://searchengineland.com/9-myths-of-landing-page-quality-score-15744.php

Google SearchWiki To Get Off Button, Might Get Used As Ranking Signal

http://searchengineland.com/google-may-use-searchwiki-for-ranking-purposes-15777.php

Google Land Yahoo Land Microsoft Land Columns Land Marketing Land Searching Land Ask, AOL & More Lands Newsletters & Feeds Conferences

http://searchengineland.com/google-ads-for-hard-alcohol-and-liqueurs-now-allowed-15756.php

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Increase Google Adsense Income with Simple but Effective Tweaks

Written by Amit Agarwal on Thursday, August 30, 2007 Text Size

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As an experienced Adsense publisher, you know tons of Adsense Optimization tricks that will yeild maximum advertising revenue.

To quickly recap, you know by heart that wide rectangles perform better than banner formats, that Google Ad colors should blend with page background color, that section targeting serves more relevant ads, that border-less Ads convert best, that split testing helps you shortlist the best ad formats, that Google CSE is much better than Adsense for Search.. the list goes on and on.

But what’s the next step when you have experimented with all these Adsense tweaks but the CTRs and eCPM figures are stationary or aren’t moving north as you would like them to? Well, the simple solution is – some more optimization.

1. Turn Low Performing Units into Image Only Ads

Say you have a skyscraper in your sidebar or a leaderboard at the bottom of the page. It may exhibit a very poor CTR because it’s so out of sight and visitors often tend to miss the ad unit completely.

In that case, an alternative is to use Image Only Ads for that using – Image ads are generally CPM ads so you will generate revenue each time the ad makes an impression. Image ads are also effective in places where the visitors are Adsense publishers themselves and less likely to be interested in clicking your ads.

Use Google Adsense Sandbox to see image and Flash ads that are likely to appear on your web pages for visitors from different countries across the world.

2. Harness the Comments Section of Your Blog

When people read a blog, they’ll will first read / scan the main article and then they’ll jump to the comments section.

If they have a question or need more information about the product / service mentioned in the blog post, they’ll either leave a comment or will leave the site search for more resources.

That’s why an ad unit placed in the comment section would immensely help. The visitor is in a mood to search for extra information and the Adsense unit in the comments could have an ad for a product that might appeal to the visitor. The best place for place an ad unit their is immediately under the comment textarea box.

3. Don’t Use Adsense At All

Some Adsense publishers are shy of placing ads in prominent and visible locations on their site thinking that that ads might turn away visitors. So they will put ads in some corner hoping that visitors will still find them.

Think from the perspective of Adwords advertisers who are renting space on your blog with the hope of getting prospective customers. Why would they be willing to invest in your site (by buying ads) when they are not getting the expected returns. If you want advertisers to bid on your site, it is advisable that you place ads above the page fold else don’t use Adsene at all.

4. Sell Your Website to Adsense Advertisers using Channels

You can use Adsense channels to convince potential advertisers as to why they should advertise on your site.

When you create a custom channel in Adsense, edit the channel settings and allow Targeting. Then type a marketing pitch – tell your advertisers about your site, where the ads will appear and why should they advertise on your site. Believe me, this works.

5. When Nothing Works, Put One at the Top

Thanks to tabbed browsers like Firefox, IE or Opera – a horizontal ad unit placed at the top of your web page can perform quite well because visitors often notice the areas near the browser tabs.

Whether they are planning to exit your web page by pushing the close button of the current tab or cycling to another browser tab, chances are high that your ad near the tab bar will get noticed. See implementations at Statcounter and Digital Point forums.

6. Avoid Using Common Blog Words

As far as possible, do not use the common jargon like “feeds”, “RSS”, “blog”, “XML”, etc as that might result in RSS and blog related ads even when your website belongs to a different niche.

You can again use section targeting to suggest Adsense bots to ignore the blocks of text that have irrelevant words.

7. Pick Only High Paying Adsense Referrals

Adsense for Referrals can be a good source of revenue if you spend some time picking the best products that may be relevant to your audience. For instance, I pick products related to Software, Video and Internet for this blog and allow Adsense to pick the best product automatically.

Adsense referral payments can vary from few cents to couple of dollars. For example, a newsletter signup may fetch you 5 cents while if someone signs up for Lulu, you may get $10.

I recommend using referral products that give a high return – the conversion ratio may be low but the since the gain per conversion is very high, you will have more revenue overall. One conversion for a high paying referral is much better than several small referrals put together. You can also considering highlighting referrals with a custom FONT tag.

Any Questions ?

If you have any questions / concerns related to Adsense, please post them in the Online Monetization forums.