Advertising

Most Search Engines generate revenue from advertising, some search engines facilitate this advertising on 3rd party sites (we don’t display ads, but wordpress even has easy plugins for publishing these adverts). There’s some guidelines about what you can publish, etc.

The basic model, as I’m sure you are aware is that a Merchant asks a Search Engine to display an advert in some way when a certain phrase or word is searched for and then will pay on each click, or to contextually analyse the page surrounding the advert and deliver the Merchants advert into places where the contextualisation is correct. In this second model, the website displaying the advert gets a portion of the click revenue when an action is performed.

All this works terribly well, and barring some clickfraud skullduggery it’s a model which seems set to continue.

Micropayments

The more astute amongst you will have realised where this is going already.

Forever, Business has been working on a way of acquiring micropayments for web content. But have generally failed to come up with a pain free way of harvesting these from passing Audience who generally feel that web content should be free.

Obviously, Business is doing it the wrong way round, and there’s no alternative for them.

Tips Jar

Imagine, during your general trawling around the web, say from Digg or Fark or B3ta or wherever, you had a low impact mechanism to thank a publisher of some content you liked by dropping a few proper real world coins into their tip jar. All it would take would be about 3 mouse clicks.

Would you do it?

You go to a site, you see something that genuinely interested you written by a small time website owner desperate to make a few bucks here and there from his site.

Would you do it? Would you?

If you do, just make sure you visit a few pages wherever you end up.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-EfRLaZFSU

So, 2008 on average, you were great. Any old idiot could knock up a website and somehow make some money on it. Sarah Beeny may (or may not) have said something which resonates into all corners of the current economy, ‘Gone now are the days when any old imbecile could buy a property that needed nothing doing to it, completely fuck it up and sell it for a 50% profit’. This cuts to the core of the economic re-adjustments that’s going on into the start of 2009.

Any old idiot could buy a URL completely make a mess of it and somehow mostly be ok.

Any old idiot could start a curtain design consultancy and somehow make money.

It’s all based on money that never existed.

Come 2009 any Business will be looking at it’s assets and trying to wring every last ounce of value out of it. There’s no such thing as an over-performing website, all websites, whatever they do, could do better – we’re seeing this with the now aggressive stance Google is taking to it’s primary products, and Google is the most successful website in the world.

There are some disciplines which should flourish in the next year, SEO should be one of them as part of a CRM/PPC push trying to increase engagement and ROI on websites – and not before time. Without trying we’ve found and highlighted some terrible sites and tried to show why they’re cruddy on the few postings we’ve made so far on here.

If ever there was a time to sort the good SEOs from the shit ones, 2009 feels like it will be it.

Happy & Prosperous New Year to you, it will be neither prosperous nor happy – Good Luck

SEO-001

There were pretty much no surprises. People search for shit, they don’t conceive anything they type might be stored or that they are tracked as an individually identifiable user so they drop their guard. ho hum.

Anyway, the interesting thing to know is that AOL search is a white label of Google. AOL add a shitload of crud to the SERP which makes it ugly and the algorithm used is a bit ‘safer’ than the live Google algorithm but generally, AOL Search is Google.

Because the SERP click through metrics were released we can work out which ranking gets which traffic, this is really useful. It’s improbable that Google would ever release this kind of information. AOL shouldn’t have done and people got sacked for doing it… but hey, their loss.

AOL Ranking Click Through graph

So we can see that the first ranking on a SERP, according to the harvested dataset gets clicked on by 42.3% of the people who see it, second place gets 11.92% etc.

Some things to know and think about:

• Who’s clicking on the PPC Adverts? Anyone?
• AOL SERPs pages are maxo pimpo compared go Google, the fold is in a completely different place
• Other stuff I can’t be bothered to type

SEO-001

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage

Background:

Yahoo! spent a lot of money on:

a). Rivals.com – a sporty site type thing, not really my cup of tea – but gotta love those spammy footers huh
b). IndexTools – a brilliant analytics product

And they MUST have some kind of corporate traffic reporting anyway, for ads n stuff…. So you gotta ask yourself:

Why has Rivals.com implemented Google Analytics?

<script type=”text/javascript”><!– var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”)); // –></script><script type=”text/javascript”><!– var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-3966162-2″);pageTracker._setDomainName(“rivals.com”);pageTracker._initData();pageTracker._trackPageview(); // –></script>

Apart from everything, this phrase springs to mind:

(5M pageview cap per month for non AdWords advertisers.) 

SEO-001