What we think about “Inbound Links” that these help in generating massive traffic to websites in some what true. In a recent post at the official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google has come up with pros and cons of Inbound Links. Know more of it, while going through what Google has to say on this:

“Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance. Other signals include things like our analysis of your site’s content, its relevance to a geographic location, etc. As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank, (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.

How do these signals factor into ranking?

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?

Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We’ve compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.

Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general

• Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.
  
  
  
  If you’re interested in blogging, see our Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/) for specific tips for bloggers (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70950&topic=15260).




• Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.




• Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.

Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

For more actionable ideas, see one of my favorite interviews with Matt Cutts for no-cost tips to help increase your traffic. It’s a great primer for webmasters. (Even before this post, I forwarded the URL to many of my friends.

Pursue business development opportunities

Use Webmaster Tools for “Links > Pages with external links” to learn about others interested in your site. Expand the web community by figuring out who links to you and how they’re linking. You may have new audiences or demographics you didn’t realize were interested in your niche. For instance, if the webmasters for example.com noticed external links coming from art schools, they may start to engage with the art community — receiving new feedback and promoting their site and ideas.

Of course, be responsible when pursuing possible opportunities in this space. Don’t engage in mass link-begging; no one likes form letters, and few webmasters of quality sites are likely to respond positively to such solicitations. In general, many of the business development techniques that are successful in human relationships can also be reflected online for your site.” – Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead.

adCenter Blog has officially announced that they will be soon coming out with an update, much to the delight of webmasters all over the world. The announcement was as follows :

“All of these improvements have been made with you in mind, and now, with the Fall Upgrade, we are happy to give you more. Here’s a sneak peek into some of the improvements we are making this fall to…

• Give you more control and flexibility to manage the delivery of your ads and keywords
• Provide you with clearer, more accessible editorial information to help improve your productivity
• Help you boost the performance of your Content Ads (note: U.S. customers only)”

You can obtain more information about the program here.

The announcement has initiated a lot of discussion on the adCenter Community.

In a recent post at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Jason Morrison of Search Quality Team at Google tells how to control comment spam:

“So, you’ve set up a forum on your site for the first time, or enabled comments on your blog. You carefully craft a post or two, click the submit button, and wait with bated breath for comments to come in.

And they do come in. Perhaps you get a friendly note from a fellow blogger, a pressing update from an MMORPG guild member, or a reminder from your Aunt Millie about dinner on Thursday.But then you get something else.Something… disturbing. Offers for deals that are too good to be true, bizarre logorrhean gibberish, and explicit images you certainly don’t want Aunt Millie to see.You are now buried in a deluge of dreaded comment spam. Comment spam is bad stuff all around.It’s bad for you, because it adds to your workload. It’s bad for your users, who want to find information on your site and certainly aren’t interested in dodgy links and unrelated content.It’s bad for the web as a whole, since it discourages people from opening up their sites for user-contributed content and joining conversations on existing forums.

So what can you, as a webmaster, do about it?

A quick disclaimer: the list below is a good start, but not exhaustive. There are so many different blog, forum, and bulletin board systems out there that we can’t possibly provide detailed instructions for each, so the points below are general enough to make sense on most systems.

Make sure your commenters are real people

• Add a CAPTCHA.
  CAPTCHAs require users to read a bit of obfuscated text and type it back in to prove they’re a human being and not an automated script. If your blog or forum system doesn’t have CAPTCHAs built in you may be able to find a plugin like Recaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/), a project which also helps digitize old books.CAPTCHAs are not foolproof but they make life a little more difficult for spammers. You can read more about the many different types of CAPTCHAS, but keep in mind that just adding a simple one can be fairly effective.
• Block suspicious behavior. Many forums allow you to set time limits between posts, and you can often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and other activity more common to bots than human beings.

Use automatic filtering systems

• Block obviously inappropriate comments by adding words to a blacklist. Spammers obfuscate words in their comments so this isn’t a very scalable solution, but it can keep blatant spam at bay.
• Use built-in features or plugins that delete or mark comments as spam for you. Spammers use automated methods to besmirch your site, so why not use an automated system to defend yourself? Comprehensive systems like Akismet, which has plugins for many blogs and forum systems and TypePad AntiSpam, which is open-source and compatible with Akismet, are easy to install and do most of the work for you.
• Try using Bayesian filtering options, if available. Training the system to recognize spam may require some effort on your part, but this technique has been used successfully to fight email spam.

Make your settings a bit stricter

• Nofollow untrusted links. Many systems have a setting to add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the links in comments, or do so by default. This may discourage some types of spam, but it’s definitely not the only measure you should take.
• Consider requiring users to create accounts before they can post a comment. This adds steps to the user experience and may discourage some casual visitors from posting comments, but may keep the signal-to-noise ratio higher as well.
• Change your settings so that comments need to be approved before they show up on your site. This is a great tactic if you want to hold comments to a high standard, don’t expect a lot of comments, or have a small, personal site. You may be able to allow employees or trusted users to approve posts themselves, spreading the workload.
• Think about disabling some types of comments. For example, you may want to disable comments on very old posts that are unlikely to get legitimate comments. On blogs you can often disable trackbacks and pingbacks, which are very cool features but can be major avenues for automated spam.

Keep your site up-to-date

Take the time to keep your software up-to-date and pay special attention to important security updates. Some spammers take advantage of security holes in older versions of blogs, bulletin boards, and other content management systems. Check the Quick Security Checklist for additional measures.

You may need to strike a balance on which tactics you choose to implement depending on your blog or bulletin board software, your user base, and your level of experience. Opening up a site for comments without any protection is a big risk, whether you have a small personal blog or a huge site with thousands of users. Also, if your forum has been completely filled with thousands of spam posts and doesn’t even show up in Google searches, you may want to submit a reconsideration request after you clear out the bad content and take measures to prevent further spam.

As a long-time blogger and web developer myself, I can tell you that a little time spent setting up measures like these up front can save you a ton of time and effort later. I’m new to the Webmaster Central team, originally from Cleveland. I’m very excited to help fellow webmasters, and have a passion for usability and search quality (I’ve even done a bit of academic research on the topic). Please share your tips on preventing comment and forum spam in the comments below, and as always you’re welcome to ask questions in our discussion group.”

Quite interesting!

Now, I would like to add:

Option 1: Many blogs have options, that restrict certain users from commenting on articles. You can also stop coming comments, as well as you can disable the comments on old posts.

Option 2: Keep in mind that the people who comment should have a captcha.

Option 3: Use an automatic filtering system. You have the option: Akismet.

Option 4: Ask the user for Name and Email for posting comments on the forums.

Option 5: Spam Karma will help in stopping those spam comments. It Is Free, so hurry! Install it!

According to the MSN Virtual Earth Blog, Ask.com has thrown out its mapping platform for Ask Maps and is now using Microsoft Virtual Earth as its new platform.

Ask.com is using Microsoft Virtual Earth for Ask Maps, Ask City (search for Businesses, Events and Movies per US City) and their Web Search including the Bird’s Eye view. The new integration is as of now visible in the United States only. However, speculations are that other countries such as Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK that are still running the Ask Maps in the Beta phase will be reverting to the new platform very soon.

Ask Maps:

Business Search (City):

Smart Answers (Web Search):

Smart Answers – Movies (Web Search):

Bird’s Eye View:

Google and Yahoo! have encountered a new hurdle in their dominance of the Search Engine world. A European Union Privacy Panel has asked Google and Yahoo! to follow the European Data Protection Rules and shed all collected user data in six months. The fact that both these Search Engines are based outside Europe hasn’t made any difference to the panel report

According to Associated Press, Google was the very first Search Engine to reduce its user data storage period to 18 months. Followed by Yahoo! and AOL, who currently have the lowest data storage time period of a mere 12 months. Still, the EU insists that time period should be cut down to 6 months arguing that, it doesn’t see any need of data retention beyond six months. European Union’s executive branch called the EU Commission is in the process of redrafting data-protection rules for 27 nations alliance. Though the EU Privacy Panel has no jurisdiction, still it insists that if these search engines use any private user data which can comprise of IP addresses and Cookies of a European user, the case would fall under EU rules and regulations. This report can definitely mean possible stricter privacy policies.

According to the EU Privacy Panel report, “If personal data is stored, the retention period should be no longer than necessary for the specific purposes of the processing. Therefore, after the end of a search session, personal data should be deleted and continued storage needs an adequate justification."

In a statement, Yahoo! spokeswoman Kelley Benander said, “The company is committed to striking the right balance between protecting user privacy, providing the most compelling online experience, meeting our legal obligations and preventing fraud."

To enhance user trust and experience, Google Analytics has recently enabled sharing of Google Analytical Data. The improvement is primarily directed towards providing transparency, choice and improved product experience. This feature will not affect a user’s account in any ways, without the approval of the user for individual product and services.

Google Analytics Data Sharing Program

The user will be able to have full control over the sharing of data with Google as per his preferences. To enable sharing of data, a user has to visit the ‘Edit Account and Data Settings’ page from within the account. The collected data will be used by Google to further enhance Google Analytics and to develop more powerful features and services for the user to choose from. This will further improve user experience and help him monitor and tweak his website performance accordingly. However, only those users who will opt to share their data with Google will be able to take advantage of the future upgrades and services based on this data. This would include the upcoming ‘industry benchmarking’ and an enhanced version of ‘AdWords Conversion Optimizer’.

This new data sharing service will only be available for Google products and services. Furthermore, a user can also opt to be an ‘anonymous participant’. In such a case, Google will remove all information that can be used to identify the user’s website. The collected data, anonymous or otherwise will not affect natural search results, ad quality score or ad placements in any ways.

Benchmarking is an additional Google Analytics service that compares a user’s website statistics against another user of the same category. Although this service is currently in the Beta phase, still it provides variety of comparing vectors. Such as, site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site and New Visits data which Google compares with other participating websites. This service is quite beneficial as it allows a user to request for a statistical analysis of the website and can further improve his own website accordingly. It would take up to two weeks for the data to appear since it would be categorized and collected for the user report.

How to enable industry benchmarking

1. Log into your account (You’ll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page).

2. Click the "More data sharing options" link within the yellow box.

3. Select the second check-box to specify that you want to share your data “Anonymously” with Google products and the benchmarking service.

Conversion Optimizer:

It is a tool optionally available within the AdWords. This feature automatically adjusts the user’s bid to maximize conversions at the minimum price possible. This feature is already available to AdWords Conversion Tracking users and relies on a website’s conversion data to operate. Google is planning to release this feature to Google Analytics users as well, provided they participate in the data sharing program.

In order to use Google’s industrial benchmarking service and other conversion-based features, a user has to be a participant in the data sharing program. When a user opts in for the program, Google tracks back data from up to a month before the opt-in date. However, when the user opts-out of the program the data sharing activities cease immediately. The data collected during the participation period will not be removed after a user opts out. However, this hardly makes a difference because when the user isn’t participating in the program, then neither his data is being collected nor is he availing any of the features that come with the data sharing program.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.

According Webmaster world, Google is allowing other Webmasters (who could also be your competitors) to damage your site and destroy its online credibility. It is a harsh reality that these days many Webmasters deploy dirty trade tricks to defame a competitive website. This is also known as ‘Google Bowling’. Some of the most common deceitful tactics employed these days are:

1. Spam: A competing Webmaster can use scam script that will leave your site’s URL in thousands of blog comments and forums. This would make the Google spiders believe that you are spamming those sites. This will greatly affect your ranking and credibility as well.

2. Banning a Domain in Social Media: Many competitors create multiple accounts in social media sites and use those accounts to repeatedly submit your content. This continued process of submission results in a Flag or ban from the media site, as the Webmaster thinks that you are promoting your site through unfair means.

3. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content doesn’t usually escape Google’s filters, and thus only original version is ranked. However, the search engines aren’t able to distinguish as to which website  was the publisher of the original content. Thus, taking advantage of this drawback a competitor can cleverly monitor your site via RSS feeds and the moment new content is put up on your site, he can rip it off and post an identical content as the original. This could severely hamper your site rankings, as Google considers duplicate content as an indicator for spam sites.

4. Denial of service (DOS) attack: Although it is very easy to prosecute the perpetrator of this crime, still it is one of the widely used online sabotage technique. With this method, a competitor overwhelms your server with external communication requests, till the time the server is forced to reset,  or it can no more serve pages to legitimate visitors. This sort of an attack can severely disrupt an ongoing promotional campaign, when the server shuts down in the middle of it, and drives away the traffic from the website.

5. Kicked out of Adsense: Since Google Adsense is one of the primary sources of income for most Webmasters, an attack that could ban a site owner from Adsense would be a crippling blow. A competitor could initiate a click attack campaign. By repeatedly clicking on the advertisements on your website, a saboteur could easily trigger a flag at Google that the clicks received are illegitimate. Google would assume, that it is you doing so as to increase your payout and will ban you (often this ban comes without any warning).

These are just some of the ways by which a competitor can sabotage your Google ratings and either put you at the bottom of the SERPs or entirely kick you out of the online business.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.

According to a recent announcement, Yahoo! Inc has stepped up its efforts towards the sales of graphical and premium advertisements by revealing the details of its new Advertising Management Platform or AMP. The project that is still in the developmental stages will enable Yahoo’s publishing partners to place advertisements on their own sites, as well as on Yahoo!. Advertisers will also have the opportunity to advertise on the websites that are rapidly associating themselves with Yahoo’s growing network. They will be able to focus their advertisements by demographic and geographic targeting and user’s online behavior.

The fiery competition between Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and AOL is the reason behind this latest development. Since the recent acquisition of DoubleClick by Google, it is widely believed that Google would try to make headway in the online marketing arena which as of now, is being dominated by Yahoo!.  However, Yahoo! has to deliver AMP on time to be successful, unlike its last big project ‘Panama’ which was marred by long delays

The AMP program is mainly aimed at the following sections of online marketing:

Advertisers:

AMP would provide enhancements to advertisers towards ad-relevance and performance of online media. Main features being:

1. Enable advertisers to target users from multiple sites and networks.

2. Provide control and simplicity to advertisers for their business relationships with publishers and managing their return on investment (ROI).

Agencies:

AMP will greatly simplify online advertising, allowing media planners, creative users and account managers and agencies to accelerate the development of value-added services. Main features being:

1. Will facilitate buyers to use their desktops and applications, and will have broader access to broader inventory. Creative users can also design in their favorite creative tools.

2. Will enable account managers to analyze cross-publisher campaign performance data in existing analytics tools as well as offline campaign data, allowing them to make smarter recommendations on media mix and marketing ROI (return on investments).

Ad Networks:

Ad networks will be able to connect to advertisers, publishers, agencies and other ad networks with an easy to use interface. Main features being:

1. Ad networks will have comprehensive access to demand and supply statistics in all inventories, and would also be provided with tools, specifically built for ad-networks to manage and grow their business.

2. To innovate in a transparent marketplace through the use of an open set of Application Programming Interface (API).

Publishers:

AMP is designed to increase revenue by targeting accelerating premium brands and performance-based advertising. Main features being:

1. Advertisers will be able to perform ad selection and inventory management that are designed keeping in mind the value and relevancy of the advertisement to the user
.
2. Advertisers will be able to manage their own private networks.

3. Will enable advertisers and publishers to link together and benefit from greater user reach and advertiser demand.

4. AMP will be able to augment or replace an advertiser’s ad management system according to the parts and platforms that are most relevant to the advertiser.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.

SMX or search marketing expo which is going to be held from April 22nd to April 23rd 2007  is intended for experienced online search marketers keen on learning the power of user engagement. The expo would include high level sessions aimed at refining the marketers to the  continually growing world of online searches. This event would be a collection of affluent members of search marketing who would be able to share and learn in their native language of online marketing.

The event has been organized by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief and Sphinn.com founder Danny Sullivan who has been intensely covering online activities and search marketing for a long time. He has also been organizing events and seminars for marketers as well. His events are renowned throughout the online community for the level of expertise provided to the participants.

There is also the prospect of one on one interactions with speakers, vendors and industry experts, besides the valuable information that will be departed to the participants.

This event is specially useful for the following:

1. Brand Marketer.
2. New agency media specialists.
3. Full service agency media buyers and planners.
4. SEM (Search engine marketing) managers.
5. PR (Public Relations) professionals.
6. Chief Marketing Officers.

Agenda for the Search Marketing Expo:

April 22nd 2007:

Social Media Marketing Essentials: This session will orient the marketers to the world of social media. Marketers will learn about leading websites, their functionalities and the best available methods for interacting in these virtual super markets.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers: Rand Fishkin (Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz)
                
Link Bait- Vying for Traffic on Social Media Sites: This session would explain link baiting and would provide examples to help marketers craft their own baits.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Brent Csutoras (Online Marketing Specialist, BrentCsutoras.com)
• Jane Copeland (Search Marketing Consultant, SEOmoz).
• Cameron Olthuis (CEO, Factive Media)

The Social  News Sites: The marketers will learn about the workings of the social news websites like, Digg, Reddit etc. and will learn how to attain maximum visibility on these websites.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Neil Patel (CTO, Advantage Consulting Services)
• Chris Winfield (Co-Founder and President, 10e20)

Social Bookmarking & Tagging: This session will be an eye opener for the marketers in the field of social bookmarking and tagging.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Guillaume Bouchard (CEO, NVI)
• Michael Gray (President, Atlas Web Service)
• Neil Patel (CTO, Advantage Consulting Services)

Social Search - The Human Challengers: This session will let the audiences put forward their queries regarding working and developing of new generation search engines. These questions will be answered by representatives from leading social search engines.

Moderators:

• Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)
• Chris Sherman  (Exec.Editor, Search engine Land)

Speakers:

• Jason Calacanis (Founder and CEO, Mahalo)
• Steven Marder  (Co-Founder and CEO, Eurekster)
• Jimmy Wales    (Founder, Wikia Search)

April 23rd 2007:

Effectively Leveraging Social Networking: In this session, marketers will learn to network and participate in an acceptable and effective manner.

Moderators:  Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Barbara Boser (Social Media Director, 3 Dog Media, LLC)
• Cindy Krum    (Senior SEO Analyst, Blue Moon Works)
• Randy Woods (Executive Vice President, non-linear creations)

The Marketer’s role in Search Marketing Management (SMM): This session will spread awareness  amongst the marketers regarding the steps needed to evolve from community observer to community participant and influencer.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land )

Speakers:

• David Berkowitz (Director of Emerging Media and Client Strategy, 360i)
• Rob Key (CEO, Converseon)
• Adam Sherk ( Search and PR Strategist, Define Search Strategies)

Micro Communities: This session will bring attention towards the other smaller online communities which could play a crucial part in the search marketing.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:  Rand Fishkin (Co-Founder and CEO, SEOmoz).

Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers & Answer Sharing: This session will highlight the participation and contribution of online encyclopedias and answer sharing sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers:

• Lise Broer ("Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia)
• Jonathan Hochman (Founder and President, Hochman Consultants)
• Matt McGee (SEO Manager, Marchex)
• Jeff Muendel (Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts)

Wikipedia Clinic: Audiences will be given an interactive live demonstration on how too interact with Wikipedia and also their questions and queries will be answered by Wikipedia experts.

Moderators: Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land)

Speakers: 

• Lise Broer ("Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia)
• Jonathan Hochman (Founder and President, Hochman Consultants)
• Jeff Muendel (Search and Online Marketing Analyst, Netconcepts)         

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.

Holistic Search Marketing:

A business is only as good as its marketing strategy. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is essential for a business to thrive in the online environment. These indicators can be categorized into ‘Online Indicators’ and ‘Offline Indicators.’ A few online indicators can be:

1. Visits: A well structured and maintained website will be visited more often by potential customers. The rates of visits on the web page contribute to the success rate of the online endeavor.
2. Sales Leads: This is essentially the identity or the name of a client who would be interested in the services of the company of whose website the client is visiting. This can also be considered as the first step towards a successful sales process.

After the online work is accomplished, the offline KPI are:

1. Outgoing support e-mails
2. Outgoing support phone calls.
3. Sales Leads.

It is imperative to remember that no matter how intricately a website is designed, the content of the web page would also be the factor of the first and the last impression. The content will determine the fate of the website, whether it will achieve what it was designed for, or whether it would remain like any other website, forgotten and irrelevant. Content of a website is divided into two categories:

1. Internal Content: When a user visits a company page, what he gets to read there is the internal content of that web site. From the company name, to the disclaimer at the bottom of the page. Each and every word is subconsciously scrutinized by the user, and then creates an image of the enterprise, solely on the basis of this first impression. A creative and compelling content can turn an Internet visitor into a qualified sales lead and ultimately a paying client. Even more importantly, the internal context enables the search engine to make the website easily accessible to the search engine user.
2. External Content: Today website content extends beyond the actual site to many other locations. This content should also be managed and controlled as much as possible.  To enhance the link popularity of a website, the external content of that site should be given equal attention as given to the internal content. The external content increases the visibility of the website, as the search engine shows this site more often in their SERPs.

Link Popularity: Keeping in mind that the Internet is essentially an intricate web, we must focus on the importance of link popularity in the case of a commercial website. Link popularity can be defined as the quality and quantity of other web sites that link to a particular website. The advantages of linking a site to another or multiple quality websites are:

1. The visitors on the other websites will be repeatedly informed of the website that is linked with the current one. If the parent site is linked to a good quality web site, then the chances of visits by users are greatly enhanced. And again, a good link always increases the prospects of a visitor turning into a client.
2. Secondly, the search engines analyze and rate the websites on link popularity parameters. Where, a website with links to high rated web pages, will have chance of higher visibility on the search engines and will be highlighted in the search results more frequently.

Another effective method of successful search management is to keep track of the website statistics. In other words, a constant monitoring of the website is always recommended, due to the rapid changing Internet trends.

The process of monitoring has three crucial elements:

1. Page-Views: Keeps the website owner informed about the number of visitations on the website. This greatly helps in the progress analysis of the site. Furthermore, necessary changes can me amended as per the results shown to enhance the site performance and popularity.
2. Referral Keywords: It is essential to know what words or phrases were used by the user to search for the website. Once this information is obtained, the site owner can then make the necessary changes in the internal and external content of the website (if required). This would help in the ratings and popularity of the website.

Pay-Per Clicks (PPC):

The Pay per Click or PPC is considered to be as one of the most lucrative methods of earning via the Internet. As the name suggests, an advertiser gets paid every time a user clicks on the advertisement posted on any website. The PPC is based primarily on the basis of ‘Keywords’, where an advertiser bids on the keywords that a user might use on a search engine. When the user inputs the predicted keyword in his search, the page that has the relevant content would show the advertisement. This sort of advertisements is known as ‘Sponsored Links’. The PPC methodology is one of the most prominent practices that benefit both the advertiser and the user alike.  

Advantages of the Pay per Click feature:

1. Cost Effective with instant results: Because the advertiser gets only when his banner is clicked, so he pays only when he earns. Unlike conventional advertising practices, a PPC campaign can be initiated with a small budget, and yet advertisers reap big profits from it. As soon as the campaign is commenced, the advertisements go online within a day or two and start reflecting on the web sites and the SERP. Thus, providing results and feedback almost instantaneously. It can also be turned on and off based on time of day and the company’s ability to deliver products.
2. Keyword Oriented: In order to reduce the amount of invalid or unnecessary clicks and reducing the cost incurred, the web site owner should use keywords and phrases relevant to his products or services. This helps tremendously in creating better-targeted advertisements, as the PPC is entirely keyword specific. Apart from the cost advantage, PPC also helps in boosting the page rank among the major search engines.
3. Analysis of Consumer Online Behavioral Patterns:  With the usage of PPC services an advertiser not only gains financial success, but also gets an insight into the mindset and the behavioral patterns of the online consumers. An entrepreneur, by the means of PPC can understand the needs of consumers or clients in a certain region. Also, with this new data, he then can analyze his business strategies, make appropriate changes (if need be) and reach out to more potential consumers/clients.
4. Generating Product/Service Awareness: PPC advertising is an excellent means of promoting new products and services. By sustained and targeted PPC campaigns, an advertiser can generate awareness and spread the word about the products and services that he is offering. Adding to this, he can also target specific regions reach out to those users, who would indeed be interested in the company’s services.
5. Developing Link Popularity: PPC also helps develop link popularity by letting other site owners know that your sites exists. They need to know about your site before they can link to it.

Therefore PPC provides an entrepreneur with monetary as well as strategic advantages and help him take his business to new heights. Earning more profits, with the least amount of investment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gerry Grant CEO/Founder Search-Optimization.com, an Orange County Internet Marketing Company, has been actively involved in search engine marketing since 1994. Gerry writes for SOMReport, My Entertainment News, DataGrant Venture Capital News and Buy a Car Review.