1. Google launches AdSense Referrals 2.0

This AdSense feature was rolled out in beta earlier this March and some of you might be familiar with it. The system serves to let site owners publish advertisers’ products on their websites getting paid for action (literally getting the comission from selling somebody’s products). However, according to Inside AdSense blog the updated version has such benefits as:

• Expanded product inventory
• Category and keyword targeting
• Ad unit optimization (with “Pick best performing ads” oprion)
• Better targeting for pages with multiple themes
• Greater compensation for high-quality traffic
• Add your seal of approval

2. Yahoo Updates their Panama PPC Engine

The functions added to Yahoo Panama Paid Search Engine are quite helpful and would be of use to most Yahoo advertisers. Now you can

• move/copy keywords from one campaign to another
• search for keywords with keyword tool
• view competitors’ ads for current keyword
• get ad ideas and best practices ad creation advice

3. Yahoo rotates ads on Yahoo internal pages

It was recently noticed by Loren Baker from SearchEngineJournal that Yahoo seems to test a new way of showing paid search ads on the site’s internal pages. Contextual advertising which is being served in Yahoo Network are rotated with Flash animation. Personally I haven’t seen the ads rotating but have no reason not to trust Loren’s observations!

I think firstly you should watch the video, as you can see it’s from SEOmoz, which is a top ranked SEO Company (based in Seattle). This video demonstrates the fundamentals of the supplemental index and is very helpful (noobs or elite).
Read the rest of this entry »

This week Matt discusses some quick and dirty tactics to get links and market your website, proving that, even on Whiteboard Friday, there’s more to life than Digg.

How should you improve your site to get higher ranks in search engines? It’s obvious that besides the overall site quality you should supply some inbound links from other websites. This point is often pretty hard. However using link baiting will make the process of gaining links if not easier then at least natural.

Creating a Link bait campaign implies creating content on your site to which other sites would like to link to but not because you ask them to. The techniques used for link baiting may vary but all of them use the same principle – you should make the visitor interested and raise desire to link to your content. You could try to the following “hooks”:

• Create some striking news related to your field;
• Form a “Top-10” list or “5 unknown facts about” list;
• Make a valuable informational resource – a report, a list of useful data, etc.
• Create the list of blogs in your niche – potentially they might link back to you;
• Publish a “How To” tutorial;
• Create a useful tool to help professionals in your niche;
• Run some even that would generate attention from news sites, i.e. contest;
• Publish an interview with some prominent person;
• Disagree with an opinion of authority;
• Publish humorous content and jokes;
• Create valuable, informative articles and blog posts!

EBay Inc. has pulled all of its paid search ads from Google Inc.’s AdWords network in the U.S., an eyebrow-raising move likely to be seen in the industry as a sign of deteriorating relations between the two Internet giants.

read more | digg story

Want to learn essential SEO basics? Now you can read it directly from updated Google Webmaster Guidelines. The rules that previously were stated among webmaster guidelines in short now are fully described and explained.

It is that simple – reading the guidelines attentively and implementing all them on your site will help you build a good trustworthy site with high quality content. The problem is a fair portion of these guidelines given by Google is ignored by webmasters for some reason.

The principles you should follow in site design, content and code structure seem to be clear. Though there are specific quality guidelines (frequently talked about in SEO forums and blogs) that Google decided to explain additionally. Let me cite Goolge regarding some of them:

1. hidden text or hidden links

“Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0”

2. cloaking or sneaky redirects

“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.”

3. “doorway” pages created just for search engines

“Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content.”

So from now on even a complete novice at SEO can have a basic idea what should be and what shouldn’t be done to a site in order to rank high in search engines!

Have you ever thought about the amount of efforts Google makes to enhance their search engine? Well, seems like Matt Cutts has already made this analysis for you! In his recent post he’s lined out the 5 things users might not be aware of concerning Google search quality improvements.

Google continues to have a strong focus on search

and just because it’s much harder for press to excite readers with a heading like this then with an article about Google’s new feature it seems like Google becomes more focused on some activities not related to search.

Google makes lots of improvements that most people never notice

sure, it’s hard for users to notice a slight improvement the search engine has made however much time and efforts was spent to make it. Read the rest of this entry »