| LED Digest 1806: To PayPal or not to PayPal? SEO Accreditation |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ May 20, 2004 Issue #1806 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== To PayPal or not to PayPal ==-- ~ John Smart "PayPal or Credit Card. What experiences do you have...?" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Credible SEOs and SEMs ==-- ~ Aaron Wall "I am one person who is absolutely thrilled that there is no official accredidation." ~ Richard Stubbings "Ask the potential SEO if they do any work for your competitors." --== The Demise of Email? ==-- ~ Tom Aman "I have joined and left dozens of groups without any difficulty." ~ Michael Coley "It seems like Yahoo Groups is on autopilot." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Froogle ==-- ~ Lorelle Smith --== Yahoo Site Match ==-- ~ Steve Pronger ~ Janet Attard ======= NEW ====================================== From: John Smart Subject: To Pay-Pal or not to Pay-Pal A lot of our clients are e-Commerce clients, selling everything from religious jewelry to custom golf clubs to magazine subscriptions to hoists for removable car roofs. Tickets range from just a couple of dollars all the way to several thousand dollars. A question we are often asked is "Should I use PayPal or credit cards?" There is no definitive answer to this question. One has to look at the factors involved. First there is cost. Using Authorize.net we found you had to be bringing in about US$1200 per month to make it worth doing based solely on transaction amounts. But then there is customer security -- let's face it Amazon doesn't offer PayPal payments. If Amazon thought sales would increase and/or profits would increase, they would be there, I am certain of that. But I cannot really look at others. I look at myself. I shop online a fair bit, and I have no problem using my credit card when I can see that the site is secure, and I can find a physical address for them. I haven't ever set up a PayPal account for myself. One of our companies sells online and only accepts PayPal -- it seems to work well with that target audience (www.mousestuff.com). This all leads back to the question I get asked by clients -- PayPal or Credit Card. What experiences do you have moving from one to the other, or taking both? John Smart, Technical Director, InternetDesign.com - "A Human Touch in a Digital World" ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Aaron Wall Subject: Credible SEOs > Where can I find an industry standard or required > credentials that I can use to validate a potential SEO? > Is there a published list of "Who's Who" among credible > SEO's who meet an industry standard? - Clint Whitsett, LED 1804 MarketingSherpa made a buyers guide to SEO. Just because a site is or is not listed in there does not guarantee how good you will be served by their services. Also there is SEMPO, SEO Pros, SEO Consultants and a few other sites that aim to group likeminded SEO's. I am listed in none of those sources, but it does not mean I am bad or that they are all good. I think the Marketing Sherpa report gives reviews by various clients. That is what it really comes down to in any business is how happy are the clients and what type of return are they seeing. Often times the testimonials on websites will not match real people or their real views. If you call past clients and get their current take on a firm then that might be the best bet to find out who is right for you. There is no way to be absolutely sure what will happen with your site until someone works on it. > Is there a formal SEO organization who's responsibility > it is to maintain the integrity of the industry and protect > unwitting customers from fraudulent activities? A suppose you can call the Better Business Bureau if something bad happens, but usually the buyer is at least partially resposible for their own demise. I made a funny website of things to look out for that I would not recommend others use ( http://www.blackhatseo.com ), but there is no official organization. If there was it would hold too much power. A person like me would find it hard to compete as the entry cost would most likely be some bogus high level to prevent competition. I am one person who is absolutely thrilled that there is no official accredidation. SEO primarily consists of -- 1.) social networking and understanding the social nature of the web 2.) the ability to quickly respond to change 3.) the ability to analyze data sets 4.) the ability to create ideas worth spreading 5.) general intelligence You can test some of those ideas, but some of them you can not. Some of the best SEOs may not know a lick about search engines but still be good based on their skills at social networking and their idea to create better ideas which want to spread naturally. > If the goal is to get the attention of the BIG search engines who's > criteria seem to be ever changing, maybe we should ask them to > present a set of standards by which an SEO can be measured...? The lack of specific clarity in what is good and what is bad allows the search engines to receive many benefits. 1.) They can change their algorithms and not worry if they are going to be offending or hurting people following the "official" guidelines. 2.) They can keep their algorithm more secret (and thus maintain higher relevancy) 3.) A lack of clarity in knowing what is right or wrong makes you less likely to want to do things which are aggressive / near the limits. 4.) A lack of clarity in knowing what is right or wrong will make you more likely to spend money on their highly trackable pay per click ads vice giving money to some "sketchy" SEO firm. 5.) I am sure there are a ton more, but those were just a few examples. aaron wall http://www.seobook.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Richard Stubbings Subject: Credible SEOs Whilst I agree with Chris Nielsen. There is one point he has failed to mention. Ask the potential SEO if they do any work for your competitors. No SEO can fairly work for two companies and try and increase the search positioning for the same keywords for 2 different web sites. Richard Stubbings Kulture Shock http://www.kultureshock.co.uk ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Email demise > ... I did not realize that to join a group at Yahoogroups > was as permanent as marriage. In fact, unsubscribe@yahoogroups > was just finger exercise... Any suggestions? - Stu Langley, LED 1805 I don't understand why you would be having a problem. I also don't understand why you would be sending email to unsubscribe@yahoogroups. http://Yahooogroups.com redirects you to http://groups.yahoo.com/, the more usual URL. I have joined and left dozens of groups without any difficulty. It is just a matter of logging in, going to the group in which you are no longer interested, then clicking "Edit my Membership" to get to the page that lets you set your preferences for that group, then clicking the "Leave Group" button at the bottom of that page. Repeat the process for each group you want to leave. To accomplish the same thing all at once, select "My Groups" then select the "Edit My Groups" link. The page that comes up gives you the option of editing your preferences for any group, including leaving more than one group with a single click. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com amant, cyberspyder.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Michael Coley Subject: Email demise I'm the publisher of a group on Yahoo Groups and I've heard the exact same thing from many current and former group members. I get dozens of emails every week from people who: 1) Can't unsubscribe 2) Have unsubscribed but continue to get the newsletters 3) Are current members who do not receive their newsletters (but who don't show any bounce messages in the Moderator interface) I've tried in vain to contact anyone at Yahoo Groups. I've never received a single response. If anyone has a solution to any of these problems or knows how to contact a real person at Yahoo Groups, please let the rest of us know. Speaking of a lack of response, I've had one Yahoo Group administrator who sends me several invitations per week to two of her groups. I've emailed her saying that I'm not interested and asking her to stop. I've reported her to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it The invitations continue. It seems like Yahoo Groups is on autopilot. Google has a new group / mailing list feature ( http://groups-beta.google.com/ ). Perhaps it's time to switch. Michael Coley ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Lorelle Smith Subject: Froogle > And if so, can I feed to a specific spot > on one of those pages (e.g.: > therapeutic-grade.com/cgi-bin/ez... - Tom Anson, LED 1800 I have good news for Tom. After he posted about his Froogle problems last week, I realized I had the same concern. So I emailed Froogle to ask. The folks at Froogle say putting the # kind of link at the end to take visitors to a specific area on the page is just fine. Of course, you do need to use the complete URL, but I'm sure it doesn't matter whether "cgi-bin" is in the URL. If it did, you'd hear back from Froogle after the first upload, which is going to be on a trial basis anyway. When you sent your email to Froogle, Tom, did you get an autoresponder email back with a note saying to wait 3-5 days? If not, your email probably just didn't go through. I emailed them on Wed. the 12th and heard back on Tues. the 18th. Hope this helps, Lorelle Smith http://www.keywordsmith.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: Yahoo Site Match > Has anyone tried Yahoo Site Match? Do you get a > lot of traffic, and does that traffic deliver high value leads? > You can submit a page for just US$50 and then pay 15 > cents per click. - Dave Roberts, LED 1804 But that 15 cents does not guarantee you any sort of ranking. We all paid inclusion fees to Inktomi, FAST and Alta Vista. And that was good value - your URLs were automatically indexed every 48 hours for an annual fee per URL. There were NO per-click fees. Yahoo is just making a grab for income that will hurt your average small business webmaster, but now that they own Inktomi etc what choice do we have? Personally I hope the scheme fails miserably. Yahoo claim that their new spider will get around to your site anyway, and they have a free submission option at: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/ (click the free submission link - you need to be registered) Will Site Match sites rank better than those submitted for free or found by Yahoo's spider? Yahoo say no, but like Dave I'd like to see some feedback from users. Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Janet Attard Subject: Yahoo Site Match > One of those clients suffered a dramatic loss of business > over the last two months and traffic logs show that most > of that loss was due to losing ALL Yahoo traffic, - Mike Banks Valentine, LED 1805 One of our sites has had the same problem. And it had done well for a month or so after Yahoo switched to its own search engines. But then every URL that was listed with the old Inktomi virtually disappeared from organic search results. The problem, one source told me was that Yahoo saw "duplicate content" because we had a couple of misspellings of the domain pointed to the main domain. So the main domain was penalized. (Any URL searched for usually shows up at or near the end of organic search results). That's true even for a couple of pages we tried listing with SiteMatch. These same search terms usually show up somewhere in the one to three spots on Google. Meanwhile some really spammy sites show up in the top results, and hundreds of sites that point to one of the our sites show up in the first pages of the search results. But the site, itself, is buried at the end of the organic search results. Janet Attard http://www.businessknowhow.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. 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