A web agency weblog

Text Link Ads (aff), my favorite broker for selling and buying text links, just launched Feedvertising, a service for including text advertisements in your feeds.

It’s working just with Wordpress based sites for now but Patrick Gavin and company have already promised many other platforms being supported soon. There are many guys asking for Drupal already, I’m one of those.

I guess Feedvertising will work better for those offering full articles instead of teasers in their feeds, one more reason for offering full content to your subscribers.

I’ll let you know how it works for me when I have them working for a while in my sites.

Good news today: FeedBurner Email is already available. A free service that allows your readers to subscribe using just email.

Quite useful for those users not familiar with a feed reader.

Hi there. Tracking visitors in your site is very important for creating a succesful website.

Google recently launched Google Analytics, a free tool for reviewing your site’s statistics. As a Google Adwords user I’ve been using Google Analytics during the last weeks and really like how the Google boys have improved the product (based in Urchin, company adquired by Google some time ago) .

Google Analytics have had so much demand that they had to stop accepting more users.

Today I accessed my account and it was enabled for 5 profiles, so I started adding some of my other domains and I noticed something that I think wasn’t there before, a little confusion about the position of the Javascript code.

Some weeks ago when I created the profile for ventanazul.com I read:

Please verify that the tracking code is installed correctly by viewing your page source. The code should appear between the head and /head tags, and should follow after any meta tags in that section.

Ok, I did it that way and my reports started working some hours later.

Today I’m reading:

Copy and paste the code segment into the bottom of your content, immediately before the /body tag (the one at the bottom) of each page you are planning to track.

The funny thing is that both alternatives are currently appearing in Google Analytics help pages, I think putting the code at the bottom of the page is the right way, let’s imagine a visitor entering a page and leaving before the page finishes loading, with Google’s code in the head this user could be considered in the reports. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve also noted a big difference in the number of visits between Webalizer, Awstats and Google Analytics, the first two show almost 10 times more visits than Google, does anybody know how each one is defining one visit?

Comparing the performance of some of my sites in Google Analytics is going to be really interesting, specially when adding some Adwords campaign to the mix. What do you think?

I was just wandering around MSN Search Beta and decided to look for some of my urls. I was glad to see them, together with some of my Overture ads.

Even if I already know what Overture offers, I decided to click on their Advertise with Us link to see if they offered something interesting.

I just got this:

Do you think is fair that Microsoft does this?

They say you have to upgrade to Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator … 4.00!! Are they crazy or what? Where am I going to get Netscape 4.0? And why would I want to do that if I already got Firefox?

I just can guess that Microsoft is so afraid of Firefox, that they don’t want their advertisers using it, even if they pay.

What do you think?

UK based Salmonbones has started an interesting SEO contest: The site that ranks first in Google on January 1, 2005 for the keyword Seraphim Proudleduck will earn £1000 (that is about US$ 1800).

It’s a very good opportunity to test some SEO techniques, ethic techniques of course, and see if two and a half months are enough for getting the job done.

I’ve created the Seraphim Proudleduck blog specially for this contest, there I will discuss about my, hopefully, progress page rank in Google, and will tell you the story of a duck, the Seraphim Proudleduck.

If you want to help me in the contest just link to the Seraphim Proudleduck blog using this url:

http://www.my-seraphim-proudleduck.info/index.php

If you want something fancier you can use the following button:

with this code:

<img src="http://www.my-seraphim-proudleduck.info/duckbutton.gif" 
alt="Seraphim Proudleduck" width="88" height="20" />

pointing to that same url.

See you around!

Writing effective ads for PPC campaigns is an art by itself, as many SEO and SEM related topics are.

Guys getting the first positions using Adwords or Overture get my respect, they are doing something right. Some minutes ago I found this on top of a search for “reseller linux hosting” -highly competitive terms in which I intend to compete- in Yahoo:

“Linux Reseller Hosting PHP 7, MySQL, Red Hat, SSL, E-commerce, 10 sites included, fast … “

Wow!, PHP 7, they are not only doing a good job with their PPC campaign, they are also using a very advanced version of PHP !

See to believe.

Many of you may already know this, for those who doesn’t, here is a very interesting chart about the relationships between the main search engines and directories in the net (Flash required).

Who has not read about Google Adwords or Overture? , two of the most recognized PPC (pay per click) systems on the Web.

Yesterday I decided to start a very modest campaign for Ventanazul using Google Adwords.

I am not trying to get lots of new customers, just wanted to have a better knowledge about Adwords and PPC in general.

Adequate selection and use of keywords, analyzing return of investment (ROI) and increased traffic, are some of the important issues to be considered in a good PPC campaign.

Signing up with Google Adwords is easy, in fact you start by creating a campaign, ad group and ad. You only have to supply your email and select a password to be able to do this. If you want to activate the campaign, then you’ll have to provide billing information. Once you have done so your ads start showing.

My first ad focused in our web hosting services, a highly competitive business with more than 82000 searches for that term, according to Overture, at least I got that for today Sunday.

I tried to include every keyword I had in mind and could see many impressions in a short span of time, this could seem a good thing for a newbie but later you will realize that some clicks obtained from broad searches are not necessarily focused in your target audience.

After reviewing Google’s optimizing tips and some interesting points explained in a Webmaster World’s post, I started using exact matches, including my keywords between brackets to get impressions only for people using those exact keywords.

I also used negative keywords for words such as “free” or “cheap” and reduced the number of keywords.

Finally, I used geographical targetting, I wouldn’t like to pay for an accidental click by a japanase girl who can’t understand a word of what my site is offering (not at problem with japanese girls, they are beautiful, just a silly example, you know what I mean).

This resulted in less impressions but I expect the clicks will be from people more interested in our services.

I have not followed Google’s suggestions about cost per click (CPC), yes, I am being very cheap with my CPC, between 5 and 10 cents to start with, but remember: It’s just a test, I will use a higher CPC in a few days to see if there is noticeable differences.

I am reading many posts and asking questions in SEO related resources such as SEO Chat or Search Engine Roundtable. Webmasters World Search Engine promotion forums contain excellent posts by highly professional guys too.

You will have to keep monitoring your Google Adwords campaigns to see how well they perform, writing good copy in that little space is a great challenge by itself and Dr. Nielsen has some good comments about it.

What is great about PPC is that you can see results almost in real time and make the needed corrections, being able to control how much you want to spend is a plus too.

Every business and campaign has different needs, what worked one time won’t work later, but there are some general guidelines to be followed. Of course, don’t forget to read all of the Google documentation and terms of services to avoid your account or ads being cancelled.

I wll be commenting more about my little testing campaign in a few days, in the meantime, I would really like to know your comments about Google Adwords.

Well, lunch is calling, see you later!