Google Yahoo search advertising deal

What may have been, or (little chances) still may be a very useful deal for PPC management companies, the search advertising deal between Google and Yahoo is on the verge of a collapse, Wall street journal reports. With the source of information still unconfirmed, I still have my fingers crossed.

What the deal means to you, as a Google Adwords advertiser

If you use Google Adwords (or you use a company that manages your pay per click ads via Adwords), this could have meant opening doors to a new genre of audience. With most people (some say upto 80%) using Google to search, the way I see it, people who're less internet savvy, or "couldn't care less which search engine they use" use Yahoo. With my personal ad campaigns, I've always seen a higher conversion rate with Yahoo, be it the hotel industry, gaming, education or social sites. I reckon the reason for that is a different, not a very avid online user (no offense to anyone).

With this Google Yahoo ad deal, your Adwords ads would've showed up on Yahoo. Yahoo and Google would've shared the revenue in undisclosed percentages.

For people like me, who've never bothered to start a Yahoo Publisher account (as most often I rank pretty well on Yahoo organically), this would've meant a larger, "different" and varied audience from regions where Google might not be as popular as Yahoo - places like China, Taiwan, India, Phillipines, and some middle eastern countries in later stages. In early stages the deal takes mostly US users into account.

Up Selling Point: Broad tail keyphrases on Yahoo yield no ads, and on Google they do. With this deal, Yahoo monetises all that traffic and Google Adwords users get more clicks and conversions. (for me, broad tail keywords always convert more than generic ones)

Google-Yahoo ad deal specs

• Negotiations started in June 2008
• Google Adwords ads to appear on Yahoo
• Yahoo to have control of how many ads to take
• Google, Yahoo to share ad revenue
• Yahoo estimated additional earnings of 250 to 800 million dollars.
• Google explains the deal to its users - here
• Yahoo will enable Yahoo messenger and Google Talk interoperability.
  

6 essentials for a web site - a quick checklist

With millions of sites out there in every niche and genre, it's important to remember a few basic web site rules to make sure your clients/users are getting the most out of your site and it's serving its purpose - be it getting leads, online sales or ad revenue.

Here's a quick checklist of 6 things your site must have:

1. Calls to action - I rate this #1. Calls to action are multiple series of steps that drive your users to do something you want them to. A site without calls to action is like an expensive magazine advertisement without your contact details.

Most successful websites are those that tell users what to do next. If you're selling a service or product, then a description of the service/product followed by "Click here for more information" or "Click here to buy this product" will get you multiple times conversion than just a little "Contact us" link in some corner.

Sounds simple, but surprisingly, "Calls to action" are something that most websites forget to pay attention to.

2. Multicolored designs - The other day I happened to be at a web design workshop where 5 web sites were shown on a massive projector screen to about 500 people and they were asked to rate the sites from 1 to 10 based on their liking of the design. 4 were uni-colored (use of one predominant color) and one was multi-colored (a mix of several colours). Predictably, the multicolored site won.

You've got to remember that sites based on one predominant color will look good to people who love that color. So make sure that your site has a good multicolored theme on a white background. Compare my latest Party Mania design to that of Michael Magill.




3. Navigation regulation- Make sure your users follow the hierarchy of links you want them to. Drop down menus were a rage when they first came in for the same reason. A website, unlike any other medium gives you complete control of what you want your users to see when - make use of that. If you want a user to first know that you're a Google certified company and then go to your PPC page, then name your page "Google certified PPC management" and then give a link saying "View packages". This way a user definitely knows you're Google certified.

Plus, make sure every page on your website is mentioned on your sitemap. Although not very popular today, some users and almost all search engines still use sitemaps.

4. Page coding - Make sure your web pages have well defined title tags, meta tags and alt tags. Most important are "title tags". In less than 8 words define what a page is about. Make sure you use keywords that you think people will search for. Duplicate title tags are a major mistake that websites make. Meta tags are not so much in use with top search engines but you must use them anyway for a few that do and for directories. Alt tags define images and with image searches becoming widely used, use alt tags to define images.

5. Grab those users' details - Another one that I see highly ignored on most websites. Ask users for their contact details by offering some free stuff. Anyone who's come to your website and really liked it will be happy to stay updated with new products/service or news. This is undoubtedly the best way to increase your usership. A simple form asking people to "subscribe to your mailing list" for your next blog, new products, service enhancements or news will do wonders. Give your users multiple ways to stay in touch with you. RSS, contact forms, mailing lists, blogs are a few.

6. Content - Ultimately it all boils down to content. If people love what they see/read on your site, they'll take your seriously. Needless to say, make sure the spellings are immaculate, tenses, grammar are all perfect and target your content to your audience. A site catering to the UK wouldn't do very well with words like "color" or "favor". Get your content written by language experts, make sure it's concise and to the point. At the same time, make sure you use keywords that people will be searching for within your content to help search engines relate your site to those keywords.

Have an Internet Business Idea? Read this

by A Sandhu - CEO, Modulus Systems

Introduction:

We get ideas when we're inspired, when we see things functioning around us. The most primitive, yet most effective business ideas involve improving an existing competitor's product or service. Because then you don't need to worry if it'll work. It's already working. In such cases you only rely on your ability to create a better, more advanced product or service and then perhaps the finance and expertise to market and distribute it, not chance.

But when you're struck by that one innovative, out of the world yet simple, never tried before idea, you need to answer a few questions to find out whether it's really sustainable, executable and profitable.


1. Is there a need in the market or is there a void? There being a demand in the market is one thing, but there being a complete void in the market is another. The greatest businesses are based on voids. A void that your product will fulfil. Something people always wanted, whether consciously or sub-consciously but it never existed. Good ideas make use of market demand, but best ideas make use of market voids. This means your customers might not always know that they need your service until they know about it.

Eg:
a. PeopleForever.org - We've conceptualised this website to fill a similar void. An emotional outlet that's so desperately required. People pay their condolences on someone's demise on newspapers' comments sections. The rest who feel the need to express, don't let it out at all. Where should they? PeopleForever.org aims to fill the void here. When you feel like letting your heart out, letting the world know how you felt about Ishmeet Singh (deceased Indian singer), where do you go? You come to PeopleForever, write about Ishmeet, pay condolences to his family, get encyclopedic information about his life and get in touch with people like you who loved him.


2. Do you have the finance to develop your product or service to marketable standards? Without a great product/service and a good budget to develop and market it, you'll only expose your great idea, probably to be picked up by your competitors, who might be able to develop and market it better than you. Wait till you get the finance, leave no stones unturned to develop it to the highest standards and once that is done, make sure your clientèle knows where to find your product or service.

3. Does your idea have the ability to generate cash? A lot of it? What is your revenue model? You might have a great idea for people interested in "squid recipes". It might be something that most people interested in squid recipes will want to buy. But will that ever make you enough money to sustain the production costs, salaries etc? Maybe not. However, an innovative idea that applies to millions of Italian food lovers, might be financially more viable.

When talking about online businesses, it's very important that the revenue model is decided and very carefully gauged. If you have a web site, you'll either sell a product or advertising space on it, or a service via it. Your revenue generation will depend on your product/service's price competitiveness, profit margin, ability to convert onlookers into customers, your web site's easy navigation and design.

If your revenue model is advertising only, then you will need to generate a lot of traffic to break even. Will your site ever be able to generate enough traffic to pay back the development costs, marketing and ongoing salaries? It should be calculated before-hand how many visitors will the site attract in the best case scenario; what'll make them come back? what does it mean financially. Is it all worth investing so much time, money and effort?

Note: An online business idea with advertising as the only revenue model requires much greater conviction and innovation compared to e-commerce based sites. In the latter's case, if you have a good margin to be made off your sales, then you can afford expensive pay per click advertising campaigns and work to improve your conversion rates, whereas an advertising revenue dependent site has to cover that in terms of bringing out a compelling innovative idea and generating user stickiness.

Make sure you've done your market research and again, have the money to market the idea to generate the quantity of sales you're looking for to make profit. There's nothing worse than investing months in developing a website based on "what you think is" a innovative idea and finding out that a top-class web site exists, doing exactly what you want to. Market research is imperative.

Once you know you've discovered a treasure chest (great idea), make sure you don't let it pass lightly. Make the most of it, explore every venue and give it your 100%.

If you're an online entrepreneur or have a great startup idea, the following sites may be of interest.
1. tradevibes.com
2. younoodle.com
3. killerstartups.com
4. crunchbase.com

Have I missed something? Feel free to comment.

5 things you never knew about SEO/SEM

1. Your success in SEO is directly proportional to language skills of your optimization expert. When building links: negotiating your anchor texts, text surrounding your link and the position of your link on another web site are aspects that define how much value (or link juice) its going to bring in for your website. A well defined and well negotiated link can be manifold more effective than "just any text linking to your site from anywhere".

2. Your rankings are only as high as the number of man hours put into your search engine marketing and optimization, under of course good management. A well optimized web site that ranks in top 10 on Google for highly competitive keywords has very uniform:

a. Incoming links from industry related websites - These links are generated by expert SEOs because of their connections in the industry and secondly because of their research, which leads them to websites that your competitors are linked from.

b. Incoming links from general authoritative websites like ezinearticles.com, bbc.com, wikipedia.org, associatedcontent.com etc. This obviously constitutes of writing hundreds of thousands of very high quality articles and submitting them to these highly authoritative sites. A point to note here is: If you start writing articles for a new website, you won't get as many views as a writer who has previously submitted hundreds of articles and one who holds an expert author status with these websites. So get hold of a company that has a good reputation of authoritative content building and start off asap. This is where your competitors are usually not looking.

c. Internal optimisation which includes keyword density, meta tags, title tags etc of your website's various pages. This again requires studying in dept whats working in your industry in which search engine and whats not. For example - Google doesn't give much importance to meta tags at all, whereas Yahoo or MSN do.

So you see, there's a lot of time that needs to be spent on your site's SEO. Imagine recruiting a person in UK or US to do this. He/she will probably do the same thing as an expert Indian optimiser, only costing you 3 times as much. Therefore you should know clearly what part of your SEO to outsource and what not.

3. The greatest web design on the planet is nothing without "calls to action". Guess why facebook.com is now the #1 website for social networking? Its because as soon as you login, the site tells you what your friends or connections have been doing. This makes you curious and you click on their profiles to know more. Then you come back to your homepage and you're given more interesting trivia. These are called "calls to action", that prompt you to explore more and stay on that website, thus making the site successful.

Believe it or not, your site is constantly tracked by Google with respect to industry benchmarks. You may have noticed the same industry benchmarking on Google Analytics. If your site is not able to retain users (which needs you to give appropriate calls to action), you're going down the rankings gradually.

4. When you let your users write the content for you, you rank higher on Search Engines. Wikipedia - Who is it written by? The owner? No, its written by the users and today it is one of the world's most used websites.

We performed an experiment to see whats more important - Incoming links or a site's content. Guess what we found? It was the site's content which was most important. One of our experimental sites called "delhi-university.in" today gets over 2000 uniques a day, ranks #2 for keyphrase "delhi university" worldwide and all it does it, posts new user content on the homepage, which because of its popularity is now every few seconds. Google crawlers visit frequently and the site gets over a thousand visits from broad tail keywords. It started with just one incoming link from our homepage. Beat that!

5. Every link is valuable. Most webmasters think NO FOLLOW links aren't valuable. Well get this - the site mentioned in the above paragraph was only linked to by Wikipedia with, as we all know - a "no follow" anchor, but from a highly relevant page. It still appeared on Google.co.in at #8 for that key phrase. In fact if your take any competitive market and analyse the incoming links of the top rankers, you'll see their participation on hundreds of forums with relevant anchor text and no follow links. Do they not count at all? They do and a massive deal at that.

Overview

Search engine marketing (SEM) and Search engine optimisation (SEO) are expensive processes, but the benefit of your site ranking on top of Google is potentially millions of users.

1. Get your site up there.

2. Mind your pocket while you do that. Outsource!

3. Once there, make sure your users help you stay there. Get them writing and discussing on your site.

4. Be viral. Get your users to help you get more users!

Modulus Systems in India is on top of SEO/SEM with over 100 clients from the UK and US. Why do you think they chose this company? Only because its worth outsourcing your link building and authoritative content writing to India. You pay one third the price and never sacrifice on the quality of SEO consultants.

Have an experience with outsourcing? Comment below.

Reset CSS - Thats how you create browser independent web design

If you're a web designer, you probably know what browser compatibility testing means. With Mozilla Firefox, Opera and other browsers holding a 14% share of the web browser market (and increasing), creating designs just for Microsoft Internet Explorer is not enough. Well, even if you did, which version of IE are we talking about? Exactly!

Once in a blue moon we come across sites that look amazing on IE, but very misaligned on Opera or Firefox and vice versa.

Anybody heard of Reset Stylesheets?

Reset stylesheets are normal .css files that can be used on html pages to neutralise the browser's rendering of tags. The default styling of HTML tags is removed and you literally start from scratch. A normal .css file is then used to re-define all HTML elements that you want to use on the web page.

Note: tags like input, a, textarea etc still work as normal. In other words, it doesn't change the function of tags. So on a page thats been reset using reset css, you won't see any difference between H1 and H2 text, but an A tag will continue to link.

Yahoo have created and adopted what they call YUI base CSS. Its supported by all A grade browsers covering 96% of their users.

How to use Reset style sheets?

To use, you link it in the page's header like any other stylesheet. Then, when you create your stylesheet, you can choose how each element should look. For example, you can switch the BOLD on and define what the padding, spacing, size etc will be.

If you want to try out a Reset stylesheet, I'd recommend you go and try Yahoo's YUI base CSS.

There are however, advantages and disadvantages of using Reset CSS.

Advantages of using Reset CSS

1. Helps designers create designs that look same or very similar on all browsers.

2. The designer is in control of exactly how everything should look. You can customise every aspect of HTML elements.

3. Helps professional designers save time. No need to re-write CSS for every new design. Once you've recreated HTML elements the way you like them, adding advanced CSS functions and re-creating perfect HTML pages becomes easier for all your new designs.

In brief: Your HTML page becomes a clean slate and you can do whatever you want with it.

Disadvantages of using Reset Stylesheets

1. The complete removal of all HTML tags produces a lot of work to start with. Every element needs to be defined in your new CSS. This may take some getting used to.

2. The imperfect solution: As Yahoo puts it: "It works for 96% of our users". So this still isn't the 100% solution. Using Reset CSS will definitely help your site look very stable and uniform across most browsers, but you still might have to carry out cross browser testing afterall.

Our overall point of view

There are people who love Reset CSS and there are those who don't. I don't recommend this for beginners, but if a job calls for it, we use Reset css here at Modulus Systems.

Most of the time, you'll be okay using normal css and get away with a little bit of cross-browser testing. If you do plan to create a site that actively uses ajax, javascript or any other form of on-screen processing, Reset css might be a good idea.