Interesting Article on Advertising....

Relying less on print

The majority (92%) of advertisers are using Internet advertising in their media campaigns
followed by print advertising at 88 percent, according to a new LinkedIn Research
Network/Harris Poll.

At the same time, less than half are using radio advertising (46%), television advertising
(46%) and mobile advertising (39%). The Harris poll found there is a regional difference
as advertisers in the South are more likely to use radio advertising (57%) and television
advertising (56%) while those in the West are least likely to use both (39% each).

Among those advertisers who are using each of these types of media, there is a difference
in the level of usage since last year. Three-quarters of those who use Internet
advertising (74%) say they are incorporating it more often while 69 percent of those who
use mobile advertising are using it more often compared to a year ago. Unsurprisingly, the
largest drop is with print advertising as half (49%) of those who use it are using it less
often compared to a year ago while 41 percent are using it the same amount.

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Yahoo buys Xoopit - A photosharing program

Choosing your Meta-Keywords

Introduction

This article assumes you already know what a 'meta-tag keyword' is and know a little about their importance to search engines. In this article I will attempt to explain the art of choosing the most appropriate and best performing keywords for your web pages.

As you should already know keywords contained within your websites' meta tags are extremely important in allowing search engines to determine the content of your web pages. In order to make sure that these keywords are bringing your site up within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving visitors to your site, the most important factors in determining your keywords are:

Relevance.
Choosing keywords that people actually search for.
Choosing keywords without too much competition.
Relevance
All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content within the page they describe. Adding keywords to your site just because they are commonly searched for words is not recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are looking for other information, but it may well get your site black-listed from search engine rankings.

Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually interested in the products and services your website offers. At the end of the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors who actually have an interest in your website than it is to attract more visitors who leave immediately.

Choosing Keywords people search for
Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is best not to be too specific.

For example, I once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it was new to science so I named it, wrote a paper on it and had it published. I didn't ever build a web page dedicated to it, but if I had the most used keyword and most relevant word would have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani). You might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as one of my most important keywords? However, that would (at least to start with) have been wrong. No one else has ever heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that anyone would ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a quick check shows that during Dec 2004 there wasn't a single search for this term within a particular, popular search engine.

I would therefore need to be more generic with my choice of keywords. The fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases such as 'fossil', 'trace fossil' or 'worm trace fossil' may be more successful.

There are several tools available that allow you to check the number of times a particular word or phrase has been searched for. It is important to choose keywords that are regularly searched for and these tools can help in this decision. It is also worth including common mis-spellings of your most relevant keywords as your competitors may not have thought of this when choosing their keywords.

Choosing keywords without too much competition
The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very generic keywords is your best bet as they are often searched for. However, if you get too generic in your choice of keywords then you will be competing with many more websites for the top spots in the SERPS. If we go back to our fossil example we can see what I mean. A quick search in Google brings up the following numbers of results:

Trypanites fosteryeomani ? 1 result (something I once wrote in a forum!)
Jurassic Worm Trace Fossil ? 4,320 results
Trace Fossil ? 407,000 results
Fossil ? 9,120,000 results
As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results we get. It can be seen then that choosing the best keywords is a matter of balancing the number of times the keywords are searched for against the number of other sites competing for rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those that are searched for often but have few competing sites (assuming the keywords are relevant to your content).

I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic and specific keywords relating to your web page and using key-phrases is a useful way of achieving this. In this way the entire key-phrase can be specific to your particular page, but the individual words within it are fairly generic.

e.g. Affordable Website Design Wales (4 generic keywords to create a specific key-phrase)

To Summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website. Your keywords need to be highly relevant to the content of your page and specific enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some generic keywords that are often searched for. As always, the single most important factor is relevancy and good content to go with the keywords.

Using Blogs for SEO

Why Start A Blog?

I knew about blogging and blogs for years before I actually started my first blog... So this begs the question... "Why did it take me over 4 years to start my 1st blog?"

Well, why would I want a blog? After all, blogs are just for geeks, self opinionated left or right wing zealots pushing some obscure political agenda, teenage school kids waffling on about their zits and boyfriends or technical journals full of terms and jargon only a rocket scientist could understand.

And I never bothered with blogs or the development of the "blogosphere" again.

Then something changed the way I viewed blogging about July 2004. I was introduced to using a blog as a tool for SEO - Search Engine Optimization. In the crudest form it was almost spamming, but done properly, it will get your website pages spidered almost immediately and indexed in less than a week.

Blog and Ping

The crude method involved first setting up both a blogger (.blogspot) blog and a free myYahoo page. You add the RSS or Atom link from your blog to your myYahoo page, so that your blog feeds into your myYahoo website.

You then write a page into your blog with links to webpages that you want Google and Yahoo to find and index. After posting your new blog entry, you then ping your myYahoo page to tell it that there's a new entry at your blog. Then you go to Yahoo, open your myYahoo page, and the blog headline should be there.

The assumption is that Yahoo would spider all feeds going into it's myYahoo pages and because Google owns Blogger.com they would spider all new blog entries at Blogger.com ... and in fact this is indeed what happens. Start a blog, add entry's to it every day, and in less than a week it will be spidered as soon almost as you post to it. But you must post daily.