Search Marketing

I’m not sure of the likelihood of the ideas I discuss in this post actually happening, hence the word RUMORS in the title. These ideas are based on facts and technology that’s already been patented, but in the end we never really know what Google is going to do. Since releasing the Glass earlier this year to a select group of Explorers, Google has been working to improve it and make it part of everyday life for the masses in the future.

Let’s start with the latest news regarding the Glass. As of right now, Google Glass has no way of cataloging physical objects, aside from a user telling it to take a picture of something that catches their interest. Today Google was granted its latest patent, described as “hand gestures to signify what is important.” This technique uses a wearable computing device’s camera to recognize certain hand gestures made in front of objects. If Google implements this patent on the Glass, users would be able to make a heart shape with their hands to “like” what’s in front of them, or frame something with their fingers to select it.

Back in August, Google was awarded a patent for “pay per gaze advertising,” which, through an eye-tracking device, could charge advertisers any time a Glass user physically looked at their ad. It’ll likely take years before Glass has enough of a user base for pay-per-gaze to be profitable, but rumor has it that Google has already been creating add-ons to this technology. What if they could charge advertisers based not only on gazes, but also reactions or emotions?

Last month I read a rumor that I dubbed “pay-per-reaction marketing.” In addition to gazes, Google could measure the level of a user’s pupil dilation and thus gauge his/her emotional response. Let’s say you gaze at an ad through the Glass– the advertiser would be charged. But if the ad brings out some sort of emotion and your pupils dilate- the advertiser would be charged even more.

I’m not at all sure how likely or how soon we’ll be “hearting” real-world objects on the Glass or if advertisers will someday be charged more for serving up ads with emotional pull. But they’re interesting thoughts, and I’d love to be able to say “I told you so” if Google implements its patents and they come to fruition down the road.

Casey Kurlander

If you want to market a product or service, the internet is the only place where you can get a large audience. All the other forms of marketing and advertising cost a lot of money. Also, there is no guarantee that you would reach the intended group of people. But with the internet, you can target exactly those people who would be interested in using your product or service. One of the best tools that are available for companies that are looking to market through the internet is the pay per click option.

There are a lot of people who think that the pay per click option is very costly and does not give the desired results. But that is not the case.

When done properly, it would generate a lot of traffic to your website and help you in creating awareness of your products and services. When you use a pay per click service, you would be placing ads on websites that see a lot of traffic and are in some way related to your products and services. You would have to pay these websites money based on the number of clicks that are generated by visitors and users.

For a pay per click campaign to be successful, you need to do proper research regarding which websites to place your ads in. It is also necessary to keep a track of the websites in which you have placed the ads so that you would know where you are getting the traffic.

If a particular website is not being effective and is not generating much traffic for you, then you need to take your ads out of that website and place it in another website that has the potential to generate more clicks.

If you have decided on going for a pay per click campaign, you need to have a proper strategy to make it successful. You can always take the help of professional marketing companies that would be able to place your ads in all the right places so that you would be able to generate a steady stream of traffic to your website. Using the right keywords and having the proper landing pages would help you in your quest for more visitors. Once a visitor clicks on your ad and lands on your website, it would be your responsibility to ensure that you keep him interested.

Darin Carter

A question that comes across my desk a lot is “Should I use Subdomains or Folders?”

The Answer has 2 parts, do you want 1 Dominant Domain or Several Domains!

Google, Yahoo and MSN all treat Subdomains as separate websites, so to gain ranking for each subdomain is just as difficult as gaining ranking for several different domain names.

You can look at this different ways. So lets say you have a website that has 3 different areas, the website, the blog for the website and a forum area.

Under 1 domain with several Folders you could use www.mysite.com, www.mysite.com/blog, www.mysite.com/forums and have 1 Super Uber Authoritive Domain!

Using Subdomains you could use www.mysite.com, blog.mysite.com, forums.mysite.com and have 3 times the work but 3 times the benefit!

Here is the straight shot from my thought process. If your trying to do something on a limited budget and don’t have a lot of time use the folder option as this will give you the best benefit in the shortest period of time. From a Search Engine Optimization point of view all links going into the 1 domain name will benefit across the entire site.

If your looking to build something that has more emphasis on a part of the site, example you think or know that your forums will take a strong position first or your interested in building each part of the website piece by piece and have the money and time to spend on each part of your site, you could do better using subdomains and have 3 powerful parts of 1 domain!

Either way it’s a decision you need to make before diving into your endeavor, you don’t want to start with folders and end up with subdomains or vice versa because one way or another you will be doing double work!

Whatever you decide think long and hard, make a decision and go full steam ahead!

Darin Carter

I was contacted today by PatchLog about a new wordpress plugin to help make your life just that much easier.

Ever wanted to hide those long affiliate links on your wordpress blog like John Chow does for better seo but never had the time to do it, or too scared to try to implement it. I know I just haven’t had the time myself!

Well PatchLog decided to write an Affiliate Link WordPress Plugin to do just that! I love it when plugins make my life just that much easier!

“Why hide your affiliate links?

Many bloggers think it’s good to hide the affiliate links, not because they don’t want their visitors to know they are affiliated but because of other reasons like:

* Changing your affiliate links is a lot less work because you have to change in just one place then on hundreds of pages where you use those links

* It hides the ugly part of affiliate codes. People tend to not trust long links with a lot of characters and unknown codes. A nicely formated and clean link is more likely to be clicked then one that contains an affiliate code in it.

* It kind of forces them to click the link instead of just typing the link (without your affiliate code ) in the browser.

* better SEO, the links don’t look like affiliate links, the redirect is done from a html page that has noindex on it so search engines shouldn’t look at it.“

Well PatchLog will now make your life just that much easier. He says it’s compatible with WordPress 2.3 but I am still running WordPress 2.2 and it works for me!

Go Download it today, it may just help your SEO Efforts just that much more!

Darin Carter