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Online Market Segmentation

The fact is that people like to do business in different ways. There will always be a segment of the population that prefers to walk into a store and make a purchase rather than shop online. However, buying products and services online is taking off. No longer is it just a curiosity, but shopping online is becoming mainstream. As consumers spend more time online, wise marketers are spending more of their advertising budget online. They understand and know who their audience is. Three distinct market groups are emerging: buyers, consumers and surfers. Here's an overview of these groups:

Buyers

Buyers are business professionals who may be executives, engineers, managers, researchers, in fact anyone who spends most of their working day online. This lucrative market segment does not get the attention it deserves. Often these people are responsible for making purchasing decisions that require sourcing supplies, materials and services all under very tight time pressures. What a perfect target for online advertising! Make sure you don't discount these very influential buyers.

Consumers

This category includes the home computer user who routinely checks out commercial online services. This group is a gold mine. They're already receptive to making purchases over the Internet. Marketers only have to make the online shopping experience easier and this market is hooked. No longer will consumers be heading out to the mall for goods and services, they'll be shopping online in droves and loving it.

Surfers

Surfers are the online fun seekers. They use online technology as a form of recreation, to play games, get music and expand their knowledge. They are typically younger and fickle. And these people have short attention spans. They move all over in cyberspace. If something catches their attention, they stick around. If a little bit of boredom sets in, they're off again and surfing elsewhere. This is the most challenging group to market to, but one with a huge potential. Surfers are an impulsive bunch. If a product catches their eye, they'll buy online with no second thoughts. It's a bit like positioning the candy at the check out counter in the supermarket...you have a captive audience who finds it hard to resist temptation.

When planning your advertising strategy consider the three market segments. They are all different, but each one deserves attention. Your bottom line depends on it!

Scott F. Geld is the Director of Marketing for MarketingBlaster.com, a company providing targeted traffic and direct links starting at just $5. For more information visit http://www.MarketingBlaster.com

Reasons To Archive Those Articles

by James D. Brausch

When you send out your newsletter, you need to archive the article on your site. Each article should be on it's own page with an index to the articles on another page. A link to your index of archived articles needs to be on your navigation bar. You can see an example on this site:

http://www.AtHomeBusinessPortal.com/newsletters

Here are some of the reasons you need to do this:

It adds content to your site. The search engines love content. They will send visitors directly to your article pages. Your navigation bar will give those visitors a chance to visit the parts of your site that make you money.
It gives people a reason to bookmark you site and return often.

It gives people an idea of what they will receive if they sign up for your newsletter. A higher percentage of people will sign up if you have an article archive.

At the end of each article, you should have a courtesy notice like the one you see at the end of the articles on the above site. Some people will reuse these articles and include a link to both the author's site... AND your site.

You should also solicit articles from other authors. More authors will submit articles if they know you will be archiving them on your site.

There is a chance that some search engines will eventually ban any site that is low on content. An article archive makes your site a content site is everyone's eyes. It's insurance against such an event.

The author, James D. Brausch, is the coach and webmaster of QuitThatJob.com, a site dedicated to providing step-by- step instructions to start your own profitable Internet business and Quit That Job! For more info, please visit : http://www.QuitThatJob.com

Google blazes trail to Oregon

Google has bought 30 acres of land from the Port Authority of The Dalles, Oregon, for a new technology infrastructure facility, the Web search giant said Thursday

Read the entire story here

Google founders in hunt for Asian talent

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page on Wednesday offered their most detailed glimpse inside the company’s operations since selling shares to the public in August, including the firm’s inability to swiftly hire enough computer engineers abroad to foster innovation.

Among the major challenges, said Eric Schmidt, chief executive of the Silicon Valley-based firm, is managing the transition from being a US company with an international presence to becoming a globally run company headquartered in the United States.

Most of the company’s foreign offices, to date, handle ad sales rather than focusing on research and product development.

Brin said the company’s inability to recruit more top-tier computer scientists and engineers abroad is slowing its plans to make Google available to users of cell phones and other portable devices. Google — which faces stiff competition from search engine competitor Yahoo in Japan — plans to hire more computer engineers in Asia, where wireless technology is ahead of that in the US. ‘‘We are unquestionably not getting the quantity we would like,’’ Brin said, in response to a question about hiring during a multi-hour session with Wall Street analysts. ‘‘The culture and utilisation of mobile in the US is so low compared to other parts of the world that this is not the best place to develop the best products in the mobile space.’’

Most innovation at Google flows from the company’s main campus in Mountain View, California, where more than 1,000 computer scientists work on an array of projects that interest them.

But the company’s young founders remain so hands-on that no new product is released without their input and review.

Brin, Page and Schmidt run Google as a triumvirate. They do agree on one thing: a 70/20/10 management model, in which 70 per cent of resources are devoted to improving the core search engine, 20 per cent are designated for products related to search, and 10 per cent are earmarked for pure research

Yahoo releases a Firefox toolbar

Beta than before

SEARCH OUTFIT Yahoo has released a beta tool bar for the Open Source browser Firefox.
The move indicates the increasing popularity for Fireferret, which has been gobbling up small amounts of Internet Explorer’s market share.

It might also mean that Yahoo is following the lead of Google, which has had a search bar installed into the browser for yonks now.

The Yahoo browser does not do much other than look for information on the web, Yahoo or on a particular website. There's also a search history to check previous searches.

It does provides mail notification and alerts for subscribers of Yahoo's email service.

New SEO Software Plan beats Microsoft bCentral's Submit It

ARNHEM, NETHERLANDS, February 10, 2005 – According to WhoIs Source, there are over 48 million active domains on the Internet. With each webmaster jockeying for first position in major search engine indexes, page optimization and web site submission are crucial to keeping Internet businesses online. Recently released by parent company InternetEffect, OptimizeKit is an innovative web based ( www.optimizekit.com ) seo software tool kit that gives webmasters the horsepower to make a strong showing in search engine page ranks. Compared to Microsoft bCentral's SubmitIt, it beats this and other tools on all features.

InternetEffect has been a leading consultant for Internet business since 1996 in the Netherlands. Keesjan Deelstra, owner of InternetEffect and founding father of OptimizeKit says, “Our goal is to provide the business owner with the most sophisticated online software tool for Search Engine Optimization available world wide at the lowest price. To make our consultancy available to small business we made OptimizeKit. It acts both as a database tool to monitor website improvements and as an online consultancy tool.”

OptimizeKit was released in mid January. The program trial is free and the Basic version of the program, with a one-year renewable membership, is available for a return link to the OptimizeKit home page. Geared to work for every business from single proprietorships to corporate marketing professionals and other independent consultancy firms, Pro and Premium versions are affordably priced and complete with a 30-day money back guarantee. Deelstra says, “Search engine marketing gives the best return on investment and conversion rates over advertising and banner advertisements. We’re so sure our customers will love OptimizeKit that we’ve made upgrades easy at all program levels.”

With OptimizeKit, the webmaster can set up a site submission in just 15 minutes. An intuitive control panel takes the user through the search engine optimization process in just a few easy steps. All necessary tools like keyword research, Meta Tag Control, Meta Tag Generator, Keyword Density, and Search Spider Tool make web promotion easy. An SEO Page Analyzer checks the page on 60+ points, then OptimizeKit automatically submits and can resubmit the site to up to 300 search engines. However, the program doesn’t stop there! An extensive knowledge base teaches even the novice how to effectively set up and maintain an optimized web site. In addition, daily updated search engine news feeds keep users at the cutting edge of search engine optimization. After submission, OptimizeKit generates flash charts reports about keyword ranking, link popularity, and site submission that users can export to their desktops in several formats.

OptimizeKit compares itself to the competition (see http://www.optimizekit.com/about_us/why_choose_us.php )
and beats them on almost all features. With a eager staff always looking for improvements and adding new features every month Keesjan Deelstra thinks he can offer the small business owner the best for less.

All that’s left for the user to do is to watch their quality traffic explode. Deelstra says, “OptimizeKit will deliver an average minimum of 50 new targeted customers a day. Even at a 1% conversion rate, OptimizeKit will generate over 182 new sales a year, 15 new sales a month.” To prove the value of OptimizeKit to his customers, Deelstra has infused the OptimizeKit website with a wealth of SEO information that is free to all visitors and made OptimizeKit one of the most affordable programs on the Internet today.
About InternetEffect

InternetEffect, (http://interneteffect.com) based in Arnhem, the Netherlands, is a company fully dedicated to providing its customers with top-notch service to get quality traffic to grow their online businesses. Search engine marketing, ppc management, content and link building campaigns are among the services they provide. Owner Keesjan Deelstra is a Dutch SEO professional and writer of the first Dutch SEO book Search Engine Marketing.

Booted Google blogger writes again

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - Mark Jen is trying to turn lemons into lemonade. The former product manager for Google Inc. has restarted his Weblog and, to take advantage of the publicity surrounding his firing, has added advertising to it.

Suggesting there are apparently no hard feelings, or that he just wants to keep getting checks from Google's account, Jen's become an affiliate of the Google-owned AdSense network. It serves advertisements keyed to a Web page's subject. All of the ads on Jen's blog are, not surprisingly, for Weblog software and related products. "Don't worry, all proceeds will be going to charity (," Jen wrote. Read his Web log.

In the first post to the blog since his firing almost two weeks ago, Jen said, "I want to thank those in the community that have been so supportive." The Web log also drew critics who faulted him for criticizing internal company matters. "I have been trying to get hired at Google for two years," wrote JWFBean. "I can't believe the opportunity you wasted by being a little too verbose."

Why Optimize Your Site For Search Engines?

Sometimes a search engine optimization company will miss that glaring question posed by potential clients and assume the benefits of search engine optimization are obvious to everyone. While shelling out a couple thousand on an SEO campaign is common sense to some, others may find it hard to part with the cash unless they know it is an investment in their business that is sure to bring a good return.

Search engines account for a huge portion of traffic to web sites. Data varies depending on what sources you read, but the bottom line is that search engines are used millions of times each day by consumers searching for goods and services. And having your business displayed at the top of search results is essential if you want to do any business from the major search engines. Nine in every ten users will find what they're looking for in the top 10 results and won't go to page 2.

It's obvious that people can make a lot of money from online sales, but how you advertise your products has a large bearing on what kind of profit you make. If you buy advertising space on Google AdWords or other services that charge per click, you may only shell out 10 cents for every visitor to your site - But what if it takes 100 clicks to make one sale? If your products only sell for $10 a piece, then there is no profit being made. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns will also never stop costing you money. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, can be very affordable over months and years.

Many SEO and Internet Marketing companies will say that ongoing maintenance is needed to reach and keep top search engine rankings. While this is true, be careful how the company says they do it. There is an affordable way and then there's a way to pad the pockets of the "experts." For more on this issue, read my other article entitled "What Constitutes a Complete and Effective SEO Campaign?" In short, the affordable way will involve an intense content optimization followed by work to raise link popularity. This link popularity development should be the bulk of any ongoing maintenance. A couple times a year keyword research should be done again and the content should be looked at. Search trends can sometimes fluctuate so you want to make sure your content is still aimed at the right audience.

What is affordable and what isn't varies greatly from company to company, industry to industry. In the bed and breakfast industry, $30 per month may be enough to keep a top 5 ranking on Google if the market is not very competitive. A web site competing for a top spot in a database administration field may be looking at several hundred a week if not more. The bottom line is, if you pick the right Search Engine Optimization company, your return on investment from an SEO campaign can be over 1000%.

While there are other ways to advertise a web site (No, search engine optimization is not the be-all and end-all of online advertising) very few can match the wide targeted audience and affordability that search engines provide.

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Google Extends More Gmail Invites

Google Extends More Gmail Invites
By Nate Mook, BetaNews

February 7, 2005, 10:49 AM

Google's Gmail service may be preparing to leave its beta auspices for the first time since launching in April 2004. Some account holders of the search giant's Web mail have been granted the ability to invite 50 friends to the free service, indicating Google is preparing for an expansion.

Previously, each Gmail beta user was given only a handful of invitations to pass along. Google has been slowly ramping up its Gmail efforts as competition heats up from rivals MSN and Yahoo, which followed Google's strategy to attract customers by removing storage limitations. In November, Gmail was opened so users could retrieve mail using an external client such as Outlook.

Something has happened to Google!

Tab writes "Sometime in mid to late November, many web sites no longer appeared in the search engine rankings when their owners used the search terms that they considered most important, or had most commonly found them under. There were some cries that the sites targeted were almost exclusively English language, or e-commerce, because Google wanted to drive the e-commerce sites to buy Adwords, boosting their revenues, and making their IPO more attractive. Quite honestly, if reports of Google's existing revenues are even close to accurate, they are not too worried. That doesn't mean I would buy the stock, just that there is no way Google would sacrifice integrity of results for a short term financial windfall. Search engines whose results decline in quality quickly fade from popularity. Altavista went through 3 bad months, and they never recovered..... Read more"

It's estimated that there are over 100 million searches per day run through Google, directly or through its partners. Thus, Google has become the main source of referrers for most businesses online. Naturally, many people have seen this as an opportunity, and have become professionals at finding ways to abuse Google's algorithms, and thereby generating undeserved high search engine rankings for web sites that are largely irrelevant to a query.

Webmasters and SEO experts have been making statements for a long time that Google was packed with irrelevant results as a result of 'Google Bombing' and assorted techniques designed to drive the link popularity of a web site through the roof, and thus get sites to the top of the search engines; regardless of the quality of the site. The people at Google actually listened to all the complaints, and did something about it: They made some algorithmic updates to the search engine. A new filter was put in place to try and target the most heavily spammed areas of the Internet. The filter was not without flaws. People quickly set out to test the new filters, and found that it could be defeated by entering what is called an exclusionary term. Exclusionary terms are when you search for something that is more specific. For example, if you wanted to search for only vegetables that were not green, you would type "vegetables -green" into the search box. To defeat the algorithm, you had to use a term like -abczxy2wyfjs in other words, something nobody would ever include on a web page. When you used a garbage term, you received search results, unfiltered; in other words, search results that may contain your missing web site, but also all the spam sites. From a practical point of view, this discovery was meaningless. How many members of the general public will actually search this way? It doesn't really matter anyhow, Google fixed the glitch in December.

The reality is the new filter may have hurt a lot of web site's search engine position, and in attempting to improve overall search results, the filter eliminated a lot of good, decent quality web sites at the worst possible time of year; the Christmas shopping season.

It may have been bad timing, and that may have been a mistake, but the rationalization behind the update is logical. Resulting search results have been mixed. On topic web sites that feature particular terms, like "software", "drugs", and other similar terms which are often spammed have been hurt, but only for a search query that includes that key term; overall they continue to perform well. Obviously the filter on these commonly spammed words is deliberate: the people at Google are trying to improve the quality of its results. Unfortunately, the a byproduct of this is that Google is making itself less relevant as a resource on the Internet. This at a time when not only is a contemplated IPO arriving quickly, but their competition is heating up considerably; On one side, Yahoo! is soon to replace Google with the results of combining and improving on the collective resources of Inktomi, FAST (Alltheweb.com), and Altavista. If you take the best elements of all three engines, there's no question which will have more accurate results. On the other side, Microsoft will unleash its new monster search engine (MSE) on MSN later this year. The people in Redmond have been hard at it for a while now; It should be interesting.

Therefore, the question for Google becomes what to do about it? It's a real mess. Google's integrity is on the line. Google doesn't want to become another footnote in Internet History. They want to help power the web.

What about you? What should you be doing to your web site to help compensate for these changes. There's strength in good solid content, and proper optimization. The proper use of your key terms within your entire web site will get noticed, just like it always has. However, overuse (spam), or misuse, (inadvertent or not), will also be picked up. Word density and the text on internal links may also play a role. Only on images that link will the alt tags be analyzed; don't stuff these with repetitive terms.

One search trick that is of interest relates to geographical terms. If you enter a place name, and then a keyword; ie. Sonoma Winery you get web sites discussing about a subject, However, if you search for a keyword, followed by a place name; i.e. Florist Victoria, you get florists in Victoria. This change may herald the start of Google's experiments with geo-locational search abilities.

Naturally, people are very suspicious of the latest Google update. This is the way it is in life with any major change. This is just Google's way of policing the web, and trying to ensure relevant search results. But like many new policing schemes, things often go too far at first.

The best thing we can recommend is: honesty. Don't try and spam the search engines, because they are constantly searching for spammers. Focus on good content, and the proper optimization of your site. Occasionally, an algorithm update will have adverse side effects. The search engines don't want that any more than you do. If you were not spamming, and you were affected, you can bet that lots of other people were too. The search engines know this and are constantly working to fix it.