Every owner of a website on planet Earth knows that getting a constant flow of traffic is the key to making money online. The world wide web attracts such a massive number of buyers that regardless of what you sell, you will make some really good money when you have lots of traffic.
Internet marketers are constantly coming up with newer ways to expand their reach across the Internet because no website can survive without enough specific traffic. In their quest to obtain more of the elusive traffic, the website marketers have come up with some rather creative ways to bring in greater amounts of traffic in a short period of time and with little effort.
My email inbox has been flooded with sales letters promoting some automated software or seldom used secret that promises an explosion of website visitors within 30 days. The disturbing part of all this is that it goes against the teaching of our early years; that nothing good comes easy and there is no quick path to building a successful business. As a result of these promises of abundant website traffic and exploding sales figures, many have abandoned those time tested methods of attracting real targeted website visitors that are prepared to take some kind of action. Keep in mind that website traffic isn't something that you can just get, but visitors will come to your website when you have something to provide, enticing them to click on your link.
Too many people are cashing in on a person's desire to get to the top without much effort by offering some really useless website marketing techniques that could actually kill their search engine rankings. The fact is that these are nothing more than 'Marketing Fads', that may produce some huge results in the beginning, but when the newness wears off their effectiveness will fade away forever just like the telephone booth.
Remember when pop-ups and pop-under advertising came out years ago? This was the hottest marketing tool since the time of placing fliers on cars in parking lots. However, when people around the world started using pop-ups to promote their websites there were windows popping up every time you visited and exited a website. Internet users worldwide got so sick of all those pop-up windows that someone invented pop-up killer software. The search engines even started penalizing websites that were using pop-up scripts and soon after that method of website promotion faded away.
I will attempt to identify and explain some of these useless website promotion techniques that should be avoided at all cost. Using some of these bad website marketing techniques could certainly kill your search engine rankings
Automatic Search Engine Submission Services
These free search engine submission websites allow you to put in your URL, keywords and a description of your website. You then click Submit believing that your website is on its way to being indexed on thousands of search engines. Not so! First of all, the major search engines require manual submission by hand and even implement coding script to prevent auto submission. Secondly, when you click on that Submit button you have no idea where your website link will end up going. Your website link could be automatically posted to illegal or international directory websites that are nothing but a colony of spam links. If Google crawls your website and finds out that you have links to your website coming from other websites with rotten content, then your website will pay the price in low rankings.
There is absolutely no substitute for manually forwarding your websites to the search engines. You will have complete control over where your link is going, and the search engines will automatically crawl your website to get your title and description.
Auto Submission to Directories and FFA sites
You may have seen those places that claim you can blast your website to over 2 million websites and directories. As a general rule, please stay away from anyone that uses the word 'Blast' because this is just another way of saying Spam. It sounds like you are literally placing your link on millions of other websites and getting tons of instant backlinks to your website. Those FFA or Free For All websites are nothing but a link farm containing links from sites with bad or irrelevant content. The search engines won't ever see your website as being respectable enough to rank high in the search results if it is affiliated with that type of environment.
Lead Generation Software
I once got an email that said, "Héllo Webmaster, My name is John. I have been searching the Internet for some business opportunities and came across your website. I just wanted to know if you are still in business today. Please email me at this_email@emailaddress.com and let me know. Thank you."
I replied to the person giving them more information about one of our websites. That particular email was forgotten until I got a few other emails with the same content from different names and email addresses. This matter sparked my curiosity and prompted me to do some further investigation to find out why these emails turned up so frequently.
I discovered that this was the work of lead generation software that extracts website links and email addresses from the Internet for any category. You just type the keyword in the search box and the software literally pulls in millions of email addresses. The software even allows you to email all those addresses. On the surface it appears to be the perfect way to put your website link in front of millions of people in the same industry as you.
This has the look and smell of spam, but because the one sending the email does not attempt to sell you anything, it's not quite spam. This marketing technique is not very effective because the email is generic, impersonal and did not give the reader a reason to respond. Your emails should speak to a person's needs and not just at them. Readers respond to emails if you find a way to reach their interests, giving them a reason to take action.
Backlink Generating Software
Google loves websites that have lots of quality backlinks, considering such links votes on the importance of those sites. Somebody got this crazy idea to automate the link building that Google loves, hoping to get huge numbers of valuable links and move to the top of the search engine results. Google has now gotten smart and has found to way to detect how you are getting your backlinks and even the speed at which you are getting them. So, if you are still buying links or using software to get instant backlinks, then chances are Google will find out and penalize your website. Nothing can substitute for writing valuable content that will automatically attract quality backlinks.
Automated Article Submission and Article Spinning
Writing high quality articles is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Again, someone invented a way to automate this process as well. They came out with article submission software that they claim will automatically send your written articles to hundreds or even thousands of dírectories. There is even software that will take one written article, spin the title and words around, and send them to more directories. This software sells like hotcakes because people don't want to do the labor intensive work of writing their own articles and sending them manually to article dírectories.
The real, authentic article directories that can syndicate your articles are getting smart and have installed a special code that disallows auto submission of articles. They have also installed a special script that can detect articles that have been spun off from the original. Most of them manually approve articles before they are published in their directory and can easily detect duplicate and spinned content.
Conclusion
Widespread use of these automated website marketing techniques has taken away the need to apply really genuine website promotion that gets real results and replaced it with push-button marketing. You may see some quick and positive results, but only for a short period of time. Treat your website like an infant; give it lots of attention, feed it some healthy content, protect it from dangerous spam activity and let it grow naturally over time.
Wednesday 29 December 2010
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Why Amazon, Google and Facebook Will Drive More Online Sales for Businesses
A couple weeks ago, Amazon launched a new feature that lets users tap into their Facebook network. Users can find recommendations from friends, see upcoming birthdays and their friends' wishlists, find gift ideas based on Facebook profiles or get purchase ideas from profiles based on friends with similar interests. This has the potential to be very powerful, and might in fact be indicative of how social media will drive e-commerce going forward.
"Numerous studies have shown that a friend's recommendations have the most weight with shoppers, and the Amazon Facebook connection places the users friends right inside the buying cycle," notes HypeBot's Bruce Houghton.
The Amazon/Facebook integration itself is huge, simply because Amazon is an e-commerce giant. You might say it's THE e-commerce giant, but the implications of Facebook and social media in general on e-commerce will be broader than the enormous, but still limited network of Facebook users. Facebook may not always reign supreme in social media, but for now, it's the poster child with its half a billion users and counting. Amazon's integration will show the masses what is possible, and others will follow suit.
Recommendations can indeed be very powerful, but social media will continue to drive e-commerce for other reasons as well. "Social commerce is moving beyond just recommendations and reviews," says Jeff Bennett, CEO of Swaptree.com. "With the web now enabling social connections through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, a new movement of collaborative consumption is forming and is fostering personal connections in a way that has not previously occurred with traditional point and click transactions."
Facebook ironically (given all of the privacy concerns voiced throughout the media this year) may add a trust factor to e-commerce sites. "According to Facebook, three times more visitors will login to their Facebook account on an e-commerce site than would create an account/register. That’s significant," says SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls. "Visitors don't like creating accounts everywhere. They forget how to login and don't like sharing personal details unless they are willing to trust the site."
In the future, Facebook's own role in all of this may increase dramatically through advertising. It's already playing a huge role on Facebook's site. The more users share, the better Facebook can target ads to them. Facebook's ads already target you based on your activity, like what's in your profile. The "open graph" which lets you "like" stuff all over the web will only continue to fuel this.
One day, while the company will not acknowledge this, they could send these highly targeted ads to you all over the web with an AdSense-like platform. Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, has not indicated that they intend to do this, but it seems like such an obvious move. If user's are already logging into other sites using their Facebook accounts, bringing other Facebook information to them, why wouldn't they consider doing this? Such a scenario would obviously compete with Google's AdSense, and it's no secret that the competition between these two companies is already heating up. Whether Facebook goes that route or not, the competition is there.
Google has a lot of data about you too. In fact, the Wall Street Journal just published an article looking at a document the company compiled in 2008, which mentions some interesting things about what Google could do with some of that data.
The increased competition between Google and Facebook will also likely drive online purchasing. Leena Rao at TechCrunch speculates that Google Checkout could get a huge injection of usage from several elements, such as Google's newfound interest in social gaming (one of the major areas where the company appears to be going after Facebook). Another (while still theoretical at this point) concept she mentions would have Google letting businesses and customers engage in direct transactions from Place Pages, which Google has also been putting an increased amount of focus on lately.
It doesn't seem incredibly far-fetched does it? And let's not forget the Places API, which lets developers tap into Google's Places data for their own apps. On top of all of that, Google is reportedly acquiring Jambool, which owns Social Gold, a social payment product. Social Gold lets developers put payments into their apps.
It seems like the competition between Facebook and Google might be a big win for e-commerce as a whole. Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat thinks a deep Amazon/Facebook partnership could "help corner Google in the e-commerce market." The e-commerce angle to this whole battle might be one that is widely overlooked. We're not talking just virtual goods here. We're talking the sales of merchandise.
Some consumers will continue to express concerns about privacy with regards to how businesses tap into their Faceboook or other social data, but that discussion really won't be much different than the basic discussion around Facebook's Open Graph as a whole. Facebook doesn't get your buying history. Sites don't get your Facebook info. Facebook provides your Facebook info while you're on other sites. That can add a lot of convenience to your shopping experience. That can help businesses drive sales.
"Numerous studies have shown that a friend's recommendations have the most weight with shoppers, and the Amazon Facebook connection places the users friends right inside the buying cycle," notes HypeBot's Bruce Houghton.
The Amazon/Facebook integration itself is huge, simply because Amazon is an e-commerce giant. You might say it's THE e-commerce giant, but the implications of Facebook and social media in general on e-commerce will be broader than the enormous, but still limited network of Facebook users. Facebook may not always reign supreme in social media, but for now, it's the poster child with its half a billion users and counting. Amazon's integration will show the masses what is possible, and others will follow suit.
Recommendations can indeed be very powerful, but social media will continue to drive e-commerce for other reasons as well. "Social commerce is moving beyond just recommendations and reviews," says Jeff Bennett, CEO of Swaptree.com. "With the web now enabling social connections through Facebook, Twitter and other sites, a new movement of collaborative consumption is forming and is fostering personal connections in a way that has not previously occurred with traditional point and click transactions."
Facebook ironically (given all of the privacy concerns voiced throughout the media this year) may add a trust factor to e-commerce sites. "According to Facebook, three times more visitors will login to their Facebook account on an e-commerce site than would create an account/register. That’s significant," says SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls. "Visitors don't like creating accounts everywhere. They forget how to login and don't like sharing personal details unless they are willing to trust the site."
In the future, Facebook's own role in all of this may increase dramatically through advertising. It's already playing a huge role on Facebook's site. The more users share, the better Facebook can target ads to them. Facebook's ads already target you based on your activity, like what's in your profile. The "open graph" which lets you "like" stuff all over the web will only continue to fuel this.
One day, while the company will not acknowledge this, they could send these highly targeted ads to you all over the web with an AdSense-like platform. Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, has not indicated that they intend to do this, but it seems like such an obvious move. If user's are already logging into other sites using their Facebook accounts, bringing other Facebook information to them, why wouldn't they consider doing this? Such a scenario would obviously compete with Google's AdSense, and it's no secret that the competition between these two companies is already heating up. Whether Facebook goes that route or not, the competition is there.
Google has a lot of data about you too. In fact, the Wall Street Journal just published an article looking at a document the company compiled in 2008, which mentions some interesting things about what Google could do with some of that data.
The increased competition between Google and Facebook will also likely drive online purchasing. Leena Rao at TechCrunch speculates that Google Checkout could get a huge injection of usage from several elements, such as Google's newfound interest in social gaming (one of the major areas where the company appears to be going after Facebook). Another (while still theoretical at this point) concept she mentions would have Google letting businesses and customers engage in direct transactions from Place Pages, which Google has also been putting an increased amount of focus on lately.
It doesn't seem incredibly far-fetched does it? And let's not forget the Places API, which lets developers tap into Google's Places data for their own apps. On top of all of that, Google is reportedly acquiring Jambool, which owns Social Gold, a social payment product. Social Gold lets developers put payments into their apps.
It seems like the competition between Facebook and Google might be a big win for e-commerce as a whole. Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat thinks a deep Amazon/Facebook partnership could "help corner Google in the e-commerce market." The e-commerce angle to this whole battle might be one that is widely overlooked. We're not talking just virtual goods here. We're talking the sales of merchandise.
Some consumers will continue to express concerns about privacy with regards to how businesses tap into their Faceboook or other social data, but that discussion really won't be much different than the basic discussion around Facebook's Open Graph as a whole. Facebook doesn't get your buying history. Sites don't get your Facebook info. Facebook provides your Facebook info while you're on other sites. That can add a lot of convenience to your shopping experience. That can help businesses drive sales.
Monday 2 August 2010
Google Adds Page Load Time Metrics to Chrome
The Web Timing draft specification presents a standard set of metrics for measuring web page load time across browsers. We’re happy to announce that in Chrome 6, web developers can now access these new metrics under window.webkitPerformance.
Measuring web page load time is a notoriously tricky but important endeavor. One of the most common challenges is simply getting a true start time. Historically, the earliest a web page could reliably begin measurement is when the browser begins to parse an HTML document.
Unfortunately, that is too late to include a significant portion of the time web surfers spend waiting for the page: much of the time is spent fetching the page from the web server. To address this shortcoming, some clever web developers work around the problem by storing the navigation start time in a cookie during the previous page’s onbeforeunload handler. However, this doesn’t work for the critical first page load which likely has a cold cache.
Web Timing now gives developers the ability to measure the true page load time by including the time to request, generate, and receive the HTML document. The timeline below illustrates the metrics it provides. The vertical line labeled "Legacy navigation started" is the earliest time a web page can reliably measure without Web Timing. In this case, instead of a misleading 80ms load time, it is now possible to see that the user actually experienced a 274ms time. Including this missing phase will make your measurements appear to increase. It’s not because pages are getting slower – we’re just getting a better view on where the time is actually being spent.
Measuring web page load time is a notoriously tricky but important endeavor. One of the most common challenges is simply getting a true start time. Historically, the earliest a web page could reliably begin measurement is when the browser begins to parse an HTML document.
Unfortunately, that is too late to include a significant portion of the time web surfers spend waiting for the page: much of the time is spent fetching the page from the web server. To address this shortcoming, some clever web developers work around the problem by storing the navigation start time in a cookie during the previous page’s onbeforeunload handler. However, this doesn’t work for the critical first page load which likely has a cold cache.
Web Timing now gives developers the ability to measure the true page load time by including the time to request, generate, and receive the HTML document. The timeline below illustrates the metrics it provides. The vertical line labeled "Legacy navigation started" is the earliest time a web page can reliably measure without Web Timing. In this case, instead of a misleading 80ms load time, it is now possible to see that the user actually experienced a 274ms time. Including this missing phase will make your measurements appear to increase. It’s not because pages are getting slower – we’re just getting a better view on where the time is actually being spent.
Across other browsers: Web Timing metrics are under window.msPerformance in the third platform preview of Internet Explorer 9 and work is underway to add window.mozPerformance to Firefox. The specification is still being finalized, so expect slight changes before the browser prefixes are dropped.
Sunday 1 August 2010
IT Team Confirms Facebook "Leak" Not Much of a Story
Facebook has put a lot of people on edge about privacy in recent months, and while some of it may be legitimate concern, a lot of the discussion is simply getting blown out of proportion.
You've probably read about the infamous "leaked" list of user names this week, that a security researcher shared in a torrent. A bunch of companies have reportedly been downloading the info leading to some unnecessary paranoia. Our own IT department took a look at that torrent, and there's really nothing to get freaked out about. It just contains data that's already public (170,879,858 URLs by our count), as the "leaker" Ron Bowes told BBC News.
The biggest file is called facebook-urls.txt. The top of the file looks like this (with "xxxxx" representing the unique number associated with the accounts):
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxxx
Eventually, once you get past the dashes, they start looking like this (where the "xxxx" represents people's names):
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxx-xxx-xxx/100001172054083
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx/100000816806409
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx/643427473
"So you could figure out somebody's name from the profile URL, but that's really about it,” our IT manager says. "Anything else, you'd have to actually go to the URL and crawl it."
And of course, these people are already in the Facebook Directory anyway, as Bowes noted. There's no other information.
From the README file included in the torrent, here are the list of all the files:
Filname Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
facebook.rb The script used to generate these files (v1)
facebook.nse The script that will be used for the second pass (v2)
facebook-urls The full URLs to every profile
facebook-names-original All names, including duplicates
facebook-names-unique All names, no duplicates
facebook-names-withcount All names, no duplicates but with a count
facebook-firstnames-withcount All first names (with count)
facebook-lastnames-withcount All last names (with count)
facebook-f.last-withcount All first initial last name (with count)
facebook-first.l-withcount All first name last initial (with count)
Bowes said that collecting the data was in no way irresponsible and likened it to a telephone directory. On top of that, there's not any info to distinguish people with the same names apart from one another.
Facebook has also confirmed that the info in the list was already freely available online, and that "no private data is available or has been compromised."
This article from the Telegraph claims that the torrent contains info like profile pictures, lists of friends, etc. Our team says that's not true and that you'd have to re-crawl the profile URL in order to get that data.
The bottom line is that the info in the torrent is public info, just like any other personal info that is published publicly on the web that's out there for Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other crawler to index. Essentially, all that's really in the torrent is big list of URLs. Whoa!
The companies downloading the torrent for whatever purposes they have in mind, would probably be better served to just look at the directory. Facebook has a lot more users than 170,879,858.
You've probably read about the infamous "leaked" list of user names this week, that a security researcher shared in a torrent. A bunch of companies have reportedly been downloading the info leading to some unnecessary paranoia. Our own IT department took a look at that torrent, and there's really nothing to get freaked out about. It just contains data that's already public (170,879,858 URLs by our count), as the "leaker" Ron Bowes told BBC News.
The biggest file is called facebook-urls.txt. The top of the file looks like this (with "xxxxx" representing the unique number associated with the accounts):
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxx
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/-/xxxxxxxxxx
Eventually, once you get past the dashes, they start looking like this (where the "xxxx" represents people's names):
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxx-xxx-xxx/100001172054083
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx/100000816806409
http://en-us.facebook.com/people/A-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxx-xxxxxx/643427473
"So you could figure out somebody's name from the profile URL, but that's really about it,” our IT manager says. "Anything else, you'd have to actually go to the URL and crawl it."
And of course, these people are already in the Facebook Directory anyway, as Bowes noted. There's no other information.
From the README file included in the torrent, here are the list of all the files:
Filname Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
facebook.rb The script used to generate these files (v1)
facebook.nse The script that will be used for the second pass (v2)
facebook-urls The full URLs to every profile
facebook-names-original All names, including duplicates
facebook-names-unique All names, no duplicates
facebook-names-withcount All names, no duplicates but with a count
facebook-firstnames-withcount All first names (with count)
facebook-lastnames-withcount All last names (with count)
facebook-f.last-withcount All first initial last name (with count)
facebook-first.l-withcount All first name last initial (with count)
Bowes said that collecting the data was in no way irresponsible and likened it to a telephone directory. On top of that, there's not any info to distinguish people with the same names apart from one another.
Facebook has also confirmed that the info in the list was already freely available online, and that "no private data is available or has been compromised."
This article from the Telegraph claims that the torrent contains info like profile pictures, lists of friends, etc. Our team says that's not true and that you'd have to re-crawl the profile URL in order to get that data.
The bottom line is that the info in the torrent is public info, just like any other personal info that is published publicly on the web that's out there for Google, Yahoo, Bing, or any other crawler to index. Essentially, all that's really in the torrent is big list of URLs. Whoa!
The companies downloading the torrent for whatever purposes they have in mind, would probably be better served to just look at the directory. Facebook has a lot more users than 170,879,858.
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