PROMISE MEDIA

Search engines are great when they bring free audience to a site through organic search results. But some search spiders are simply terrible.

They are terrible because they come from a product that doesn’t provide any audience.

They are especially terrible when they pour through a site, consume vast amounts of bandwidth and come back again for more, ever hungry.

SEO might stand for not just Search Engine Optimization but also Search Engine Opposition.

Obviously every site wants to attract the most audience possible from Google, Bing and other good search engines.

But sometimes blocking search engines is a good thing. (more…)

Link baiting is an online term for a practice that has long been followed in offline media.

It is a series of tactics that try to encourage Web site visitors to click on a link. It also is a form of “link building,” the term that describes ways of increasing the number of links to a Web site from other sites.

“On a meta-level, I think of ‘linkbait’ as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” says Matt Cutts, a Google engineer and well-known blogger. (more…)

Web site development matters to marketing, advertising and profit because of several important ways that users experience the site.

I’m often surprised at how many sites are built by competent developers who have great technical skills but limited marketing and advertising skills.

At the same time, marketing and advertising professionals aren’t involved in the site development because they don’t have the technical skills to ask the right questions or provide insightful guidance.

It should be up to the manager to bridge that gap, but managers often don’t see the connection between technology on the one hand and marketing and advertising on the other. (more…)

Anyone can write anything on the Internet via blogging, but the writing matters only if people find the blog, think it’s interesting and come back for more.

Otherwise, it’s only writing as a hobby for yourself and not as a business for an audience.

Quality, quantity, frequency and distribution are four traits that divide unknown blogs from popular ones.

Let’s see what each trait means for blogging. (more…)

One of the simplest ways of managing a Google AdWords campaign is creating a spreadsheet that maps the three most important elements of the campaign.

Those three elements are the keywords being sponsored, the ads that target those keywords and the landing pages that are linked within the ads.

The reason why this is so important is because you can tell at a glance if the keyword being sponsored is represented by the ad and the landing page.

If it does show up in the ad and landing page, it is much more likely to result in a click on the ad and less lucky to result in a bounce when the visitor reaches the landing page. (more…)

An analytics bounce rate like the one above should show a steady decline.

Bounce rate is an excellent way to measure the quality of a Web site from a product and user point of view.

It measures the number of times someone comes to the site from an external source, views one page and leaves again without clicking on any other pages.

Bounce rate is a common measure in online audience software such as Google Analytics. It can be found in GA at the site level by going to / Audience / Overview. It can be found at the page level by going to / Content / Site Content / All Pages.

The analytics bounce rate suggests that the page didn’t have relevant content and so the visitor left again or that it did have relevant content but didn’t give the visitor a good reason to hang around.

Either way, it’s a lost opportunity to drive page views, repeat visits, ad revenue and other valuable conversions. (more…)