SEO builds an asset where advertising is an expense.

Most people don’t like expenses, but they do like investing in assets that deliver long term dividends.

Advertising is a quick fix. It’s an expense that (hopefully) delivers results, but it’s all over when you stop spending money.

SEO is an investment in a future asset since the work helps generate long-term ‘income producing’ free traffic for many months and sometimes even years. It builds your brand, your authority and your position in the eyes of the public and most importantly it gives you a steady stream of free traffic. As a bonus it also improves the value of your business – in the business re-sale market, the business that can demonstrate a steady stream of visitors can also demand a higher price for their business.

So no matter which way you view it – it’s definitely a good long term asset – paying not only dividends but also adding to the value of the business long term.

Hope that gives you some more food for thought.

Rudy…

I’ve found the same dealing with several indian companies over the last year. Very time consuming to deal with, only give you ‘exactly’ what you want, don’t read between the lines, can’t think for themselves and certainly have no idea about business or what’s needed to make a site customer friendly.

Mind you they are not all like that, but in my experience 4/5 have been.

http://authoritylabs.com/blog/omg-target-really/

Speaking at the annual AIMIA V21 conference, the CEO of AusRegistry International Adrian Kinderis said that the global governing body for domain names has flagged late June as the starting date for a migration from the traditional .com system to branded domain names (ie. flights.qantas).

“The rush is on for brands to capitalise on the biggest change to the internet in its history,” Kinderis said. “The Top Level Domain program opens the floodgates for brands to create a far more intuitive, trusted internet namespace. It will allow domain names to shift from brand.com to .anybrand, giving marketers the opportunity to own their own authentic slice of internet ‘real estate’.”

According to Kinderis, with 70% of the market, the .com space is saturated, making it hard for brands to have an easily searchable, intuitive domain name. The new system supports more intuitive navigation, higher brand recall and efficiency of message, according to Kinderis. He also said that there would be scope for more efficient brand protection.

“The major challenges for digital marketers today are brand protection and ensuring that audiences can easily find the genuine, trusted content they’re looking for online. In the current environment, marketers are forced to compromise and invest heavily in activities such as search engine optimisation to protect a term or phrase that is integral to their business. Now they have the opportunity to own .brand and ensure their ‘home on the internet’ is authentic and easy for customers to find.”

Trademark protection is a major issue that can be addressed by the new system according to Kinderis. “For example, in the banking industry, ANZ could now say its customers, unless it ends in .anz, it’s not us,” he said adding that brands such as Canon, Deloitte and Hitachi had already signaled their intent to apply.

Many advertisers are concerned about the average position of their ads. Though this metric can be useful, it’s easy to misinterpret. This blog post is intended to help advertisers better understand the average position metric, its uses, and its limitations.

To begin with, it’s important to understand that there are two interpretations of the phrase “ad position.” The “page position” refers to the location on the page, such as “top ad 2” or “right-hand side ad 1.” The “auction position” is the rank of the ad in the auction that determines the order of the ads on the page. The critical point is that the reported average position metric is based on auction position, not page position.

(click for full-size image)

Example showing page with top and right-hand side ads

(click for full-size image)

Example showing page with only right-hand side ads

This means that an ad in auction position 1 will always be the first ad shown on the page, but it can occur in two possible page positions: as the first ad above the search results or as the first ad on the right-hand side when there are no ads above the search results. This distinction is important, since, on average, ads that appear above the search results tend to get substantially more clicks than ads that appear on the right-hand side. The difference between page and auction position can lead to some seemingly paradoxical outcomes.

An ad with a larger average position may perform better than an ad with a smaller average position

If you bid on a keyword that many other advertisers are bidding on, you may end up in a relatively low position on the page due to the competition from other bidders. However, the very fact that many people are bidding on that keyword suggests that it will perform well, even when your ad is placed lower on the page. On the other hand, if you bid on a keyword that no one else is bidding on, you may end up in position 1 by default but end up with few clicks. What matters is how the keyword performs in terms of clicks and cost, not where it ends up on the page.

Increasing a bid may improve page position but not auction position

Suppose your ad always appears in position 1 on the right-hand side, and there are no “top ads” above the search results. You now increase your bid. If your ad quality is high enough, the bid increase can move it to a page position above the search results. This improved page position will typically produce more clicks, but there will be no change in the average position metric, since the ad’s auction position hasn’t changed: it’s 1 in each case.

A bid increase may move your average position lower on the page

When you increase your bid, your ad will generally show up on the first page in more auctions, particularly when using broad match. Since you weren’t bidding enough to appear in those auctions originally, your ad will tend to come in at the bottom of the first page in those new auctions.

For example, think of a situation where you’re bidding on vegan dog food (broad match), and your ad consistently appears at auction position 1 when the user enters vegan dog food, but your bid is too low for the ad to show (on the first page) when the user enters dog food. Now you increase your bid and start showing up in auction position 7 for dog food queries. If there are the same number of queries for dog food and vegan dog food, your average position will be (1+7)/2 = 4. So by increasing your bid, you’ve moved your average position metric from 1 to 4—even though your ad never appeared in position 4!

An average is not always the best way to summarize a distribution of positions

The seemingly paradoxical effect described in the last example can even appear with exact match, since differences in bids and budgets among advertisers lead to considerable variation in auction participation. You should think about “position” as being a distribution of outcomes—sometimes you’re in one position, sometimes another. The “average position” is one way to summarize this distribution, but it isn’t necessarily the best way.

It’s important to keep in mind that average position measures your position in the auction, not your position on the page.

Examining bids, clicks, and costs

One very helpful tool for examining the relationship among these metrics is Bid Simulator. The Bid Simulator shows you an estimate of the “click-cost curve”—a simulation based on historical data of how much you would have had to bid, and how much it could have cost, to acquire some target number of clicks in the previous week. If you combine the click-cost curve with your value of clicks, you can find a bid that maximizes your overall profit. It also shows you an estimate of the number of top and RHS impressions an ad could have received, a metric that tends to be more meaningful for measuring ad exposure than average position.

Some advertisers have asked how clicks from different positions tend to convert. In general, we’ve found that conversion rates don’t vary much with the position of the ad on the page. An ad in a more prominent position on the page will tend to get both more clicks and more conversions than an ad in a lower position, but the conversion rate (conversions/clicks) will tend to be about the same for the two positions.

In summary, average position is a popular metric, but don’t rely on it alone as a measure of performance. The metrics that really matter are clicks, costs, and conversions.

original article – http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/understanding-average-position-metric.html

Google is the holy grail for most of us marketers,  and we try all sorts of tactics to get our client sites listed high in search results by getting people to like us with a facebook like or link to our story or even rate us or review us.  Just do anything so there are muliple mentions and links pointing back to our sites.

And things like getting a facebook like gives us more credibility and a higher standing with Google, which in turn gives us a better chance of being number one in our search terms.

But I think – at least from a marketing perspective, Google has just trumped the facebook like concept by introducing their plus one (+1).

Starting in the USA, anyone doing a google search will see a little logo next to each of their search results, and if you like a site you can click on the icon (+1) to increase this number and show your support.

The higher the number, the better they rank.

I think it’s easy to predict that many people will now start to focus on the google +1 symbol into every aspect of their sites and this will become the new standard in everything, from reviews to blogs to web sites and everything internet within a very short time.

Here’s a quick video that explains it.

What started as a bit of social fun with friends yesterday can now become a full time job.

Feel like getting $50,000pa to play with facebook or twitter all day long?

See this video.

So because apple don’t want you to do it, it won’t be something you can just download from the app store.  You need to get around their strict screening rules.

What you need to do is ‘jailbreak’ your iphone and install a non-apple approved app called mywi.  Mywi turns your iphone into a wifi hub (with wep security) so your iPad recognises it as a wifi connection (you don’t even need bluetooth on).  Your iphone then uses 3G.  It also gives you an upload and download counter live on screen so you can see how much data is being transferred.

It takes about 5 minutes to do both, you don’t lose anything and it works flawlessly.

Apple don’t want you to do this because they won’t make extra money selling a 3G version but more importantly they won’t get a cut from all the monthly contracts people sign to get 3G to their iPad.

Jailbreak sounds bad but it works like this:

Basically Apple have a strangle hold over their app store.  They dictate who or what gets accepted.  This is good in that they control quality, security and reliabiity.  It’s bad because there are some things that apple purposefully ‘dumb down’ in order to give them more revenue potential down the track – something ‘extra’ they can offer in a future release.

The Canon 5D camera did the same thing (brilliant camera that can do so much more than the manufacturer allowed, so someone made new firmware to give people access to these other features) but that’s another story.

So what someone did was create an app called Cydia.  Cydia sits on your iPhone and behaves exactly like the app store, only it lets you buy apps that have not been approved by apple.  Obviously you can’t get Cydia from the app store either.

So you have to get the Cydia app onto your iPhone through a back door and this is called jailbreaking your iPhone.

There is a danger here.  From what I’ve heard there have only been 2 instances of a virus reported on an iphone.  And they were both jailbroken.  The temptation is to get impressed at all the new things you can now do and start downloaing and installing all these new apps.  I wouldn’t do that, but the temptation is there.

The bottom line is that you can always reformat your phone and take it back to vanilla iphone firmware and reconnect to your itunes and get all your apps and music back.

All I’m saying is that there is always a risk of dying in surgery, even with the best of intentions and the best doctors.

So having cleared all the formalities and disclaimers…

If you’re still interested here’s what you do…

Presuming you keep your iphone connected to itunes and you have the latest update of your iphone software (3,13) go to this link.  At the bottom of the page, click on the download link for PC or Mac.  Install the program on your computer and upgrade your iphone.  That’s the jailbreak part. You’ll now find an app called cydia on your phone.  Go there and look up mywi and download it to your phone.  There’s a free trial period or you can buy it for $10 (I bought it).  That’s it.  Then just go to your iPad and check wifi in the area and you’ll see your iphone.  Connect to it and bobs your uncle.

http://www.redmondpie.com/download-spirit-for-iphone-3.1.3-ipad-3.2-ipod-touch-3g-9140718/http://www.redmondpie.com/download-spirit-for-iphone-3.1.3-ipad-3.2-ipod-touch-3g-9140718/

So one more time.  It worked for me (and heaps of others), but you take your own risks.

Enjoy…