Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog

 

2.16.2008

New Orleans - February 2008 - AAJ Education Seminar for Truck Accident Lawyers

Last week, I made a trip down to the AAJ Education Seminar, "Litigating Truck Collisions". It was a great seminar with lots of lawyers who were enthusiastic about making truck accident cases a bigger part of their practice. I spoke with several attorneys who were interested in improving their website's visibility for truck accident search phrases. Check out the photos from my trip at the Page 1 Photo Station.

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2.09.2008

SEO For Minor Geographic Keywords - Blogging

Search engine optimization for small geo-graphic names doesn't usually make sense for site-wide search engine optimization. You have to pick your battles and focus your website's search engine optimization on the more competitive phrases that are most likely to give you a return on investment. Having said that, repeat exposure across all the suburb names and smaller cities in outlying areas does have significant value. If you try to optimize your website for all of the geographic terms that you want to target, the keyword density becomes muddied from a search engine's standpoint.

Here's an example of BAD optimization of a home page meta tag:
meta name="keywords" content="new jersey personal injury lawyer, new jersey personal injury attorney, new jersey lawyer, new jersey personal injury, new jersey certified trial attorneys, expert trial attorneys, expert lawyers, south jersey, camden, chester, croydon, cherry hill, Audubon, palmyra, Moorestown, evesham, Voorhees, attorney, attonie, attorney, lawyer, lawer, layer"

Instead, use blogging to inject instances of your minor locale names into your website. Here's an example of a legal blog entry that does this:
Dog Bite Lawsuit - Hammonton

Today, I received a call from a single mom who lives in Hammonton, New Jersey. Her daughter was attacked by a neighbor's dog. The dog was a bull terrier. According to the mother, the dog has a history of aggressive behavior, and the owner had been warned by police to keep the animal on a leash or indoors at all times. Unfortunately, the owner was careless and let the dog out to go to the bathroom without a leash. The daughter was playing in the front yard of her grandmother's house when the dog attacked her, badly mauling her face and neck. Amazingly, the girl survived, but suffered terrible injuries that will require reconstructive surgery. The single mother's income is not sufficient to cover the overwhelming medical expense of treating her daughter's injuries. She has hired me to help her in securing compensation for medical expenses and for her daughter's pain and suffering. Sadly, this is a story that is all too common in dog bite litigation.

Notice that I included Hammonton twice in the blog entry and linked it to a website's internal pages. When Google sees this content, it will then begin to consider your website for the minor geo-targeted searches. This approach is truly effective when you blog regularly, and allows us, your search engine optimization company to focus the site-wide search engine optimization on the more lucrative keyword searches like "New Jersey" or "Philadelphia".

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2.03.2008

The Current Truth About Click Fraud

You may have heard of click fraud as a deterrent from using pay-per-click advertising. Click fraud is defined by Google in terms of invalid clicks. What is an invalid click? According to Google:
Invalid click activity consists of any clicks or impressions that may artificially inflate an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings, and for which we decide not to charge the advertiser.

Of course, just because Google doesn't discover that a click is fraudulent in nature doesn't mean that it's valid. Google has been at odds with click fraud prevention company Click Forensics over the trends in click fraud. Google says that click fraud is down and that they are working furiously to keep advertisers' Google Adwords return on investment up.

WebProNews quoted Click Forensics in its recent article about click fraud:
"The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That's up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007."

It should be noted that Click Forensics has a vested interest in this report. If more people are scared about click fraud, they see more clients.

You'll notice the above quote references Google AdSense and content networks. These are different from the standard Google Adwords pay-per-click program. Google Adwords is highly effective at identifying click fraud because these ads only appear on Google's website. When you engage the content network advertising program with Google, there is more inherent risk because your ads will now display on other people's websites, which Google has very little ability to monitor and control. This makes content network pay-per-click campaigns more susceptible to click fraud.

Some web marketing companies use click fraud as a scare tactic to sell SEO and directory listings. While click fraud is a real problem, it shouldn't be a factor in deciding whether or not to launch a pay-per-click advertising campaign.

To use a crude analogy, you wouldn't elect not to buy a house just because you saw some houses burning down in a wild fire on television. Pay-per-click can be a very effective web marketing strategy. It just needs to be established properly and managed carefully. You'll never be able to completely eliminate click fraud, and even beyond fraud, some people will click on your ads just to see what there is to see without ever having intended on "buying". It's unavoidable. The best way to combat the negative effects of "invalid clicks" is to use a web marketing company that can maximize your overall return on investment such that the comparative loss from invalid clicks is nominal.

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2.01.2008

Microsoft Makes Another Big Bid for Yahoo!

Thursday night, Microsoft made another move to buy Yahoo! inc. They made a similar move last year, but it seems more likely that Microsoft will successfully take over Yahoo this time around. Last year, Yahoo shirked the hostile takeover bid with the promise of better performance in the coming year. That turnaround never happened, and Yahoo's present situation makes the takeover a little more appetizing. Yahoo! stock price shot up 54% in premarket trading today, and CEO, co-founder Jerry Yang could stand to make a handsome sum from the sale of his stock if the deal goes through. The same goes for other Yahoo! stock holders who earned $10.40 per share. Microsoft stock actually went down 4.3%.



This takeover would make Microsoft a formidable #2 competitor to Google in the war to dominate the Internet search market, but Google still holds twice as much of the search market share over Microsoft and Yahoo! combined. You can read more about this on Yahoo! News of all places.

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