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September 13, 2006 | Phil Leitch: The Click Worth $69.16

According to theproguy, the most expensive Google AdWord is ‘school loan consolidation,’ followed closely by ‘college loan consolidation.’ In fact, as of yesterday, a good chunk of the top-50 Google AdWords are related to the consolidation of loans of one type or another. Not really too much of a surprise as I’m sure the loan consolidation market is not only very competitive, but very lucrative. They can likely afford to pay close to $70 for qualified leads, it isn’t like they’re selling donuts.

September 01, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Old Words Equal Search Success

Jakob Nielson’s latest Alertbox is a good reminder that, despite our most valiant efforts to name and position products, you must speak the language of users to achieve online success.

August 25, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Crazy Egg Launches to Let You Track User Clicks

Crazy Egg has been hovering just below the radar for a few months now and finally opened to the public earlier this week. Crazy Egg is another in a growing array of online tools meant to help you understand better how people are using your site. They accomplish this by showing you where users are clicking on your page. They aren’t the only site offering this type of feature, Google Analytics has a similar feature, but they do allow more leeway when configuring your tests, as well as a few options for viewing the collected data.

August 17, 2006 | Dean Froslie: Online Press Releases Continue To Evolve

Several public relations thought leaders have encouraged a broader view of the press release, since consumers increasingly have access to the same information as the media. This trend is continuing, as ClickZ News recently reported on two new services designed to ensure online press releases are discovered, read and acted upon.

June 22, 2006 | Greg Ness: What It Mean$ To Be #1

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is too often given less attention than it deserves in website design. That’s unfortunate because time invested up front on optimizing a site for search engines can have a tremendous payback. That is made abundantly clear in this post from ProBlogger. The story relates how a site that popped up #1 on Google organic rankings for a certain search term was getting approximately 30,000 visits per day. When they dropped to being the #2 ranked site, their visits went from 30,000/day down to 12,000/day—a 60 percent decrease! Just think what a difference that could make in sales.

June 16, 2006 | Dean Froslie: New York Times Focuses on Search Engine Optimization

It hardly seems possible that, until recently, Google was not indexing the New York Times. But as Search Engine Watch reports, the Times is making a serious effort to optimize its site and build traffic. According to Marshall Simmonds, the newspaper’s vice president of enterprise search, the Times had previously relied on the strength of its brand to generate search rankings.

March 23, 2006 | Phil Leitch: How Web Sites Are Indexed

So you’ve just launched the new Web site that your team worked on for months and you do a quick Google search for a few of your keywords and you’re nowhere to be seen. How can this be? You did everything right. You researched SEO and carefully selected keywords and optimized your copy. Your pages validate. You even have a blog as part of you site. What went wrong? The answer is that you’ve done nothing wrong. Other than a common misconception many people make by thinking that search engines magically know everything about their site the moment it goes live. It’s an understandable misconception, after all most search engines aren’t exactly open about how their magic formulas work.

So, using Google as an example I’m going to try explaining how Web pages are indexed.

February 10, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Tools for Considering New Media

In McLuhan for Managers (Viking Canada, 2003) Derrick de Kerkckhove and Mark Federman don’t provide “seven habits of successful companies” or a new strategy for business success. They offer four questions that were originally asked in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media.

This ultimately makes de Kerkckhove and Federman’s book a far more timeless work. It provides a mechanism to step outside the current mindset and ask, “What haven’t we noticed lately?” Granted, the questions address media; but modes of communication are fundamental forces in the businesses and marketing. In McLuhan’s words, the “medium is the message” that our customers and employees are responding to.

October 14, 2005 | Greg Ness: Many Companies Are Leaving Money On The Table

According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, the total number of searches in August on all the major search engines exceeded 5 billion! These monthly figures keep climbing at a torrid pace. Getting a high ranking on popular search engines can translate into a great deal of additional visits to your Web site, and this can ultimately have a big effect on sales.

Another iProspect study also indicates the importance of ranking high in search engine placement. It demonstrates how quickly people drop out of the search process beyond the first few pages. Based on the study results, here are the cumulative totals regarding the average search depth by a person using a major search engine:

- Searcher only viewed the first few entries: 22.6%
- Searcher stopped after the first page: 41.2%
- Searcher stopped after the first two pages: 67.0%
- Searcher stopped after the first three pages: 81.7%

If a company doesn’t show up on the first two pages of a search, only 1/3 of the people who are looking for information will find them via the search engine. Other studies have shown that appearing on the first three search pages of Google alone can increase unique visitors to a company’s Web site 10-fold and result in double the sales!

September 23, 2005 | Greg Ness: PPC, SEO and Pay-Per-Call Are All Increasing In Effectiveness and Usage

ClickZ reports about a new study by Marketing Sherpa that is truly impressive. Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Call are showing dramatic rises in usage and effectiveness. This was a large study with 3,271 marketers responding.

As the study indicated, SEO spending increased 177 percent over the last 12 months. The story reports that among both B2B and B2C marketers, there were impressive gains in effectiveness for SEO, PPC and Pay-Per Call campaigns. Pay-Per-Call had the largest 12-month gain with 43 percent of marketers rating their campaigns as “very effective.”

Other items of note: