Online Marketing Trends

As you might know I run a shop in wich I am selling my collection of Madonna merchandise and rare items. I am implementing several techniques to increase results from search engines. What surprises me is that Google Image Search brings a lot of traffic to my site, even more than Google ‘regular’ search.

In the overview below you see a list of visits from sites that link to Madonna shop. You’ll see that only search engines and Wikipedia are part of the top 10. This is because my Link Partner network still has to be expanded and is less easy than getting traffic from search engines.

Since I enabled the option Enhanced Image Search in  Google Webmaster Tools, traffic from Google Image Search has increased and now go beyond the amount of traffic from regular Google results. This means that there is a lot of search traffic waiting for you.

So if you sell products, make sure the name of your product images are constructed correctly and that you assigned an alt-tag with descriptive information.

Google has released her own version of Internet Explorer 7 - with integrated Google Toolbar. Google is one of the first companies to distribute an enhanced IE7 with the IE7 Administration Kit.

Google now provides the ability to create a custom Seach Enging through Google Co-op. A simple configuration screen lets you customize your search engine; just enter the words that your search engine will search for or the sites that can be searched. Of course only your friends’ sites will be searched

You even have the ability to let others help maintain your search engine. by selecting either “Anyone may volunteer to contribute to this search engine.” or “Only people I invite may contribute to this search engine.”

Try out my search engine

Read the Google Co-op blog.

See Google Co-op at JumpUp.com

A few months ago my site Madonna shop was launched and of course I’m using WebTrends to analyze visitbehavior and to watch and optimize the purchase funnel.

Yesterday I noticed that my site got indexed September 29th in Google Images and it has generated a nice amount of traffic since. Over 8% of this months’ total visits saw my site because of searching for something Madonna related at Google Images. That’s good free publicity

Are you trying to create a Google Sitemaps XML file from your Microsoft Content Management Server 2002/SP1?

Then be sure to try out the sample published by Steven Mostinckx. If you don’t want to compile the code yourself, download the compiled version here: GoogleSitemaps.exe (16 KB)

It’s really easy to run this application; start a command prompt and paste:

GoogleSitemaps.exe “/channels/mysite” “c:/temp/GoogleSitemaps.xml” http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.yoursite.com/ /empty/

(the parameters are: 
-startpath
-path+name xml result
-xmlns
-domain
-skipchannels)

You should have installed MCMS on your machine ofcourse.

Thanks to my colleague Jasper for the hint!

The Dutch Minister for Integration and Immigration Rita Verdonk is the victim of a Google bomb.

A couple of weblogs have persued people to make postings and publish articles with the word “vreemdelingenhaat” linked to Rita Verdonks’ personal profile on the Dutch government site. By doing this, they influence the PageRank (currently scores 5) of her personal profile and so it scores highest in Googles’ search results with this particular word.

By doing this the initiators want to make clear they are not behind the deportation of the girl Taïda Pasic, who has been living in the Netherlands without permission.

Today a new service has been launched in the Netherlands; Bob The Butler. This callcenter will search Google for you to find answers on any question you have.

Bob The Butler promises they only have real Google-experts who can efficiently help you. Their service can be handy when a computer with internet is not available to you ie. when you are in a train, traffic jam or you are having your Starbucks. Their service is based on a per-minute fee of 80 eurocents.

I just came accross this very clever way of advertising on Google Earth; just paint your roof… or rent a roof

“it looks like advertisers have realized that with Google’s online satellite pics on Google Maps, there is a completely untapped space for more eyes to see their logos. And though this (probably fake) pic is of a Target store, why not lease out your own rooftop?”

Apparently Google’sAdsense Site Targeting has been a little bit less relevant last week.According to Robyn Google has pushed a lot of advertisements from Ford to blogs.

While car enthusiasts and automobile sites may be happy to display a highly-relevant ad featuring the Ford Explorer, many online sites> not directly publishing auto-related content are up-in-arms that Ford was allowed to purchase a large chunk of advertising on blogs this week.

http://sleepyblogger.com/2005/12/googles-advertising-faux-pas.html

Aaron from SEObook.com writes about the advertisements:

By Google delivering those damn Explorer ads that are so far off target they are teaching site visitors to ignore the ads, and may be costing themselves and publishers a lot more than they realize. If people learn to ignore textual ads then funding good content production is much harder. If people can’t afford to make good content then Google is going to be full of garbage.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001429.shtml

Meanwhile, the Google Adsense blog has published an “refresher” about Site Targeting:

Some of you have asked, “How is an ad for an off-road vehicle targeted to my pages about hiking?” Excellent question! Contextual targeting, or targeting the text on your site (the primary targeting mechanism of AdSense), is only one form of targeting. With the launch of the site targeting program, advertisers can select sites that are relevant to their prospective visitors, thereby targeting an audience, not just content. So although the ad campaign may not be targeted directly to your site’s content, it will be relevant to the specific or general interests of your readers. AdSense has always been, and will always remain, a targeted advertising system — we’re just implementing new targeting approaches to help you monetize.

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2005/12/site-targeting-refresher.html

Ever wanted to start a blog?
Ever wanted to start 2 blogs ?
Ever wanted to start 10.000 blogs ?

It’s almost bizarre but VooDooBlogger helps you auto-creating blogs to generate traffic to your Adsense advertisements.

NOT ONLY CAN YOU MASS CREATE UNIQUE BLOG ACCOUNTS THAT LAST, BUT YOU ARE ALSO ABLE TO GO BACK AT ANY TIME AND MASS POST TO ALL BLOGS YOU HAVE CREATED, OR EVEN MASS POST TO SMALLER BLOG CLUSTERS THAT YOU HAVE CREATED!

This kind of software is being used by people wo want be a fast millionaire by copying content from other sites/blogs and post it to their blogs. With manu blogs containing (parts) of the same content, chances increase that one or more of them will display in the search results of search engines. Most of the traffic that was supposed to go to the authors’ site will visit one of the VooDooBlogger created blogs and a percentage of them will click on the Adsense link.

End result, you have a brand new domain, and it has within seconds, more high quality backlinks than an easy 98% of your competitors! *You’ll dominate MSN within a day or two, you’ll take over Yahoo within a week or two, and you’ll rule Google when they do their next dance…. It just doesn’t get any better than that!

http://www.voodooblogger.com/