| LED Digest 1856: SEO, Usability and ROI |
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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 ................................................ August 17, 2004 Issue #1856 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== The Future of SEO ==-- ~ Kevin Jackson "Here is my golden formula..." ~ Pat McCarthy "We track every penny we spend on PPC, and what ROI each keyword delivers on each engine." --== The Oldest of the Old School? ==-- ~ Malcolm Bailey "Sorry but you were beaten at least by a couple of months..." ~ Philip Scriver "One would need to look at much more than registering of dot com names..." ~ Lee Roberts "Pizzahut.com was purchased on December 7, 1993 and made their first sale [that month]." ~ James Brausch "I do believe you can claim to be the oldest .com still in continuous existence." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Custom URL Error Pages for Browsers? ==-- ~ Jim Gatton ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Kevin Jackson Subject: Future of SEO I do SEO work for fun: other media agencies hire me as a consultant to help on high profile sites because I'm good at it. It's bad for my business, which is more specialized in web development services for Associations, and SEO consulting splits my focus and reduces my effectiveness in building our main source of business. Thus wading into this discussion is counter-productive but I love stirring up trouble :>. > The term "search-engine friendly" has a much wider meaning > than being "Google friendly" or "Yahoo friendly" or "Overture > friendly." After people click on a link to your Web site... how > easy are you making it for people to form a mental model > of your site? - Shari Thurow, LED 1854 This is a critically important point that cannot be re-enforced enough. Here is my golden formula, as I have encountered it for several years as an SEO consultant on high profile sites, and all-round repair vendor on smaller ones, including the creation of a Content Management System that was built with SEO in mind. Good SEO = Good Website Usability = Good business ROI. There's no simpler way to put it. Any organization that is serious about their website ROI should be looking at the whole thing as an integrated package, not a gaggle of different vendors around the same table. It drives me crazy to sit at a board room table with a VP of this, a manager of that, the website designers, website architects, webmasters, programmers, and ad agency executives, and trying to explain the simple logic of the above. The sheer dollar value of the person-hours at that table is staggering, yet all the agendas represented sometimes make for frustrating meetings with little progress. What a waste of time and money! If you are responsible for the proper implementation of a website, whether you are hiring the vendor, or you are the vendor yourself, it is essential that this formula is applied from the very beginning of any project. If you aren't doing this, you can bet your competitors are, and guess who's going to get the last laugh. Cheers Kevin Jackson Biz-Zone Internet Group Inc. http://www.biz-zone.com kevin, biz-zone.com ------- new post - same topic --------- From: Pat McCarthy Subject: Future of SEO > That is a loss of more than 500 surfers a day. Allegedly. > I would notice that. The only difference was my credit card > was pulled from PPC. - Charles Bennett, LED 1853 While I can't say whether or not Charles Bennett was experiencing click fraud, there should be no correlation to him cutting his PPC spending and having sales increase BECAUSE of that action, unless he cut his spending while optimizing his PPC campaign to higher-converting keywords. I'm not sure how well you're tracking your sales Charles, but I'd guess that your increase in sales was due to other factors or traffic sources. We should definitely fight against click fraud and make all PPC companies be accountable, but I felt Charles was implying that spending money with a large PPC company was a total fraud and waste of money. For most companies, that definitely does not appear to be the case. We track every PPC ad we place with campaigns that for our web analytics software, as well as keeping close tabs on the reports provided by the PPC engines. We track every penny we spend on PPC, and what ROI each keyword delivers on each engine. So, if we did as Charles and cut our PPC dramatically, I can guarantee our sales would not increase. While we may be experiencing some minute amount of click fraud, the click through numbers provided by Google and Overture are in an acceptable range of what our analytics application reports. I'd guess that click fraud is more prevalent in certain industries or keywords, which means that the best advice for people using PPC engines is to watch the reports on both sides closely, and to report any signs of click fraud to the PPC engines immediately. Pat McCarthy Palo Alto Software http://www.paloalto.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Malcolm Bailey Subject: The Oldest of the Old School? > So now, who knows of anyone that has been around since > before October 1994? Can I claim to be the oldest pure play? - Brad Waller, LED 1855 Hi Brad, On news.com today... http://news.com.com/E-commerce+turns+10... Sorry but you were beaten at least by a couple of months, and they were taking secure payments! Still 10 years is pretty good going! Mal Bailey ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Philip Scriver Subject: Old school One would need to look at much more than registering of dot com names. I operated a business on-line through my ISP which had (and I think still has) those things called tilda's ~ http://www.btinternet.com/~englishwander/. It still shows up as for a long time I updated it but now I no longer use bt I have no access to update it (and they don't seem to have removed the site)! It wasn't until 1999 / 2000 that I registered my own dot com. The following archive site helps you locate pages "WayBack" http://www.archive.org/ Regards Philip Scriver Explore Britain http://xplorebritain.com philip, xplorebritain.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Lee Roberts Subject: Old school Pizzahut.com was purchased on December 7, 1993 and made their first sale in December of 1993. I hope this helps. Sincerely, Lee Roberts, President/CEO Rose Rock Design, Inc. http://www.roserockdesign.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: James Brausch Subject: Old school > Can I claim to be the oldest pure play? - Brad Waller, LED 1855 Hi Brad, No; I was around quite a long time before you. I was offering my commercial services as a .Net before you made your entrance. If you recall, you were threatening me with a lawsuit in about 1995 for distributing Usenet to my network (Liberty.Net at the time). You claimed to own parts of the Usenet. My involvement with the Internet goes back to at least the late 80s / early 90s. If you count Usenet... to the early 80s. I remember the green card Usenet spam (often credited as the first spam... But I also remember spam before that infamous one). I remember the creation of the world wide web (nothing but Gopher on top of FTP before then). I remember when the 1200 baud modems were introduced that made the Unix shell accounts seem like they were screaming fast when compared to the old 300 baud modems. I remember when they started charging for domain registrations. It's nice to remember the old days, but someone had to create this thing we now take for granted. There were lots of us busy doing that when you came on-board. May Jon Postel rest in peace (one of the true inventors of this thing we call the Internet). Lots of us were selling things. BTW, no hard feelings Brad. Those were interesting times and lots of people did odd things like that as we were all scrambling to make up the rules in the true wild west of the old Internet. I do have to credit you with being one of the first to commercialize the Internet. There was massive hostility to anything commercial on the Internet by most of those who created it back then. You were one of the pioneers selling things on the Internet long before SSL even existed. Kudos for that! I do believe you can claim to be the oldest .com still in continuous existence. Even the early .com and .net ISPs have since been gobbled up by latecomers and the names changed. I just tried to go to netcom.com and got a 404 (I know they pre-dated you). I can't remember any others selling anything other than defense contracts back in 1994. The rest of us were selling some form of access to the Internet. Some were .com ISPs, but I can't think of any that are still around. James Brausch http://www.targetblaster.com ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Jim Gatton Subject: Designating your own landing page for URL errors Occasionally (a couple of times a day?) my fingers run slower than my brain and I type an error into the address bar of my browser (I.E.6.0), hit enter and wind up being redirected to some scummy page run by SearchWebNow. Naturally that company insists that the program would only have installed if I approved it (yeah, right) and they won't tell me how to get rid of it. Spybot Search and Destroy doesn't touch it. So, is it a browser plug-in? Is there any way that I can get rid of it and designate my own page, or Google, or Wild Dogs from the Yukon, anything but this sneak as my landing page when I type an error in the address bar? Thanks. Jim Gatton castleblade.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The ideal marriage is not one in which two people marry to be happy, but to make each other happy." - Roy L. Smith, 1886 |
