August 2005 Archives
Since Yahoo announced the launch of their alternative to Adsense some people are reporting an increase in payouts from Adsense.
Are we on the verge of a content advertising war?
A lot of SEO experts talk about the top strategies to success and building links is always cited as one of them.
One area of link building that will not cost you anything except time is directory submission.
You can take a two-pronged approach to this:
- Regional
- Topic
Maybe it's that time of year or maybe there's simply a lot of activity in the big bad world of search engines.
In either case this week seems to be the week for ad networks.
Yahoo has just launched a beta of its ad network. At present only US publishers may participate, but you can expect that to broaden within a few months.
MSN, on the other hand, is talking of launching its own version this autumn.
Although the technology employed by Google may not be available to its competitors they are able to watch and learn. Initial reactions to the features being offered seems to be quite positive.
Whether they will be able to attract the advertisers and publishers in sufficient numbers is another story, as I already mentioned in relation to Ask Jeeves' recent announcement.
The other side to these developments that is yet to be explored is the search engines motivation. Contextual ads and similar offerings must be working for Google for the others to be so interested. The alternative explanation is that search engine companies are losing ad revenue if they cannot offer it.
What remains to be seen is whether or not Google's competitors will be able to compete in the Geo-specific targetting area as effectively as G.
Although the US market maybe the biggest that does not make it the most lucrative.
Related stories:
MSN Keywords Coming October
Knowing which search engine or directory feeds which portal etc., is very useful.
For the last few years there have been a number of such charts online.
Try this one
Ask Jeeves are to launch a new advertising network which will allow advertisers "to more effectively purchase, manage and optimize campaigns on Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) and its advertising syndication network"
Continue reading Ask Jeeves to launch new advertising network.
The Open Directory is the biggest human edited directory and is also the most important. Although it is not without its issues, it is very important to get your site listed there as so many other directories "feed" off it.
If you are thinking of submitting to DMOZ then you need to bear a number of things in mind:
It is human edited, so your link has to be accepted by someone before it will appear.
The editors are all volunteers who edit the directory in their free time, so you should be patient.
There's a very nice article that sums it all up here
If you give your website an overhaul pages may move, be deleted or be replaced. Although a person viewing your site may not be aware of your site's internal structure it can be very important.
If you moved house you would tell the post office where to send your mail, wouldn't you?
Your website should be no different.
The problem:
For example, one of the sites I'm involved with underwent a complete overhaul a couple of years ago and the pages moved from being named somepage.html to somepage.php, while in other cases we removed pages completely.
We knew that Google had indexed those pages, plus there were other inbound links from other sites that we could not control. The problem we faced was how to change the pages without losing any of the traffic.
The solution
If your site is hosted on linux, then you can use Apache's mod_rewrite via a few lines in a .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
Redirect somefilename.html http://www.yoursite.com/somenewfile.php
If you are moving all your pages from .html to .php you can use a regular expression to match
If you need to find out more have a look at some of these links:
