Internet marketing requires a more subtle approach

If you look through various magazines and TV channels you’ll see advertising at its most base level. These forms of advertising are aimed at those who watch TV incessantly, and read magazines about celebrities, diet tips and what they should be wearing.

This is hard sell advertising, perfected over decades. Internet advertising on the other hand is very different, and the use of hard sell advertising online does not work. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is the intellect of the audience. Internet users are more savvy than the target TV watching market, and they know when someone is trying to sell them something.

Adverts that are blatantly adverts will be ignored, almost without thought, due to something known as ‘ad blindness’. Since the Internet first started, websites and marketers have used it to try and sell products. One of the most common forms of advertising is the (more…)

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Google Street View images to be updated annually

There’s good news for those people who have been caught on Google’s Street View images in places they shouldn’t have been (as has happened more than you’d think). Google has revealed that it plans to update the images on an annual basis in order to cope with the changes found in towns in cities.

Now you can expect to have your latest extension to your home, or your new car in your driveway, proudly captured on Google Street View.

The timing of Google announcing this could have been better however as it’s coming under close scrutiny by EU regulators who are (more…)

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Everton’s Landon Donovan praises Facebook campaign

Landon Donovan has hailed a Facebook campaign that has been started by fans in order to keep the player on Merseyside. Internet marketing takes many forms, and Facebook is one of those forms due to its ability to reach a huge number of people.

Landon Donovan is the captain of the United States team, and a teammate of David Beckham at LA Galaxy. As the US season has finished Donovan has signed a short term loan deal with Everton in order to keep himself fresh for the World Cup, this summer.

However, Donovan has made such an impact at Goodison Park since arriving last month that fans have started a Facebook campaign in order to help keep him around in Liverpool. Internet marketing such as this is very common of late as Facebook has already been responsible for the Christmas Number One and has been used for many other viral campaigns, such as the ‘anti’ marketing tactics employed by a dating website.

Donovan’s Facebook campaign has already secured the support of (more…)

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I have enough links!

Does this sound like you? Are you of the opinion that your website has enough links, so you don’t need to engage in any link building strategies and you don’t need any linkbait content?

Well that’s fine then, you don’t need to read on. Sounds like you’ve got the perfect number of links and your website will be fine, riding high at the top of the search engines forever.

You certainly don’t need to know about the PageRank ice caps melting over at Google HQ. What’s that? You do? Oh ok, allow me to explain.

Your website may have hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of links. That’s great, sounds like you’ve got a really strong website and you’ve done well with it. However, just as the sea levels are rising because of the melting ice caps (and the general effect of global warming) the link levels required to stay afloat in the online world are also rising.

You may have thousands of links, but so do your competitors. Everyone is engaged in link building exercises, which means that the number of links required to stay ahead is (more…)

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Always monitor your SEO tweaks

Performing search engine optimisation for WordPress is a joy. The system has been built with such loving care and with so many features and plugins available that you can do just about anything you want to in terms of SEO, quickly and easily.

Sometimes however you can go too far, and can make SEO tweaks that actually cost you rankings. When this happens it’s important to identify the problem and rectify it quickly.

For example, the WordPress plugin All In One SEO offers many wonderful options for customising the way Google indexes your website and blog. One of the features it offers is a ‘noindex’ for categories. This means that Google, and the other search engines that obey the noindex rule, won’t index the content on the category pages. This would be done to prevent (more…)

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Why Google loves search engine optimisation

Some people believe that search engine optimisation is, at its very basic level, at odds with Google and that Google doesn’t like websites that have SEO performed on them. SEO is seen by some as ‘cheating’ the system, as though its sole purpose was to con Google into thinking that a website should be ranked for a certain keyword, when in actual fact it shouldn’t.

There was a time when this belief was correct. SEO was something of a dark art, practised by warlocks of the Internet (often in basements) and used very questionable practices indeed. However, these days those techniques no longer work (at least not in the long term) and SEO has had to go legit.

In fact, SEO has more than gone legit – it follows Google’s advice and code of practice to the letter, and without SEO Google couldn’t do the job it does so well.

Let’s give you some background.

Google makes money. Google makes a lot of money. Google in fact makes more money than (more…)

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Chinese students responsible for Google hack?

Students are well known for their pranks, but usually the average student joke extends no further than the ‘commandeering’ of alcohol or the ‘relocation’ of road signs and police cones. Chinese students however could well have gone a few stages further with their pranks, as they’re having the finger pointed at them for the hack on Google that saw email boxes for known activists being accessed.

The ‘finger’ in question belongs to US computer security experts, who believe they have traced the origin of the hack into Google’s infrastructure all the way to the Jiaotong University, in Shanghai and Shandong Province’s Lanxiang Vocational School.

Jiaotong University is well known within China for having the best computer science programmes – the sort of establishment where individuals with the ability to hack into computer systems would be (more…)

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SEO reasons to become a Google News Publisher

Applying to become a Google News Publisher is something that every website that offers good quality news content should do. However, becoming accepted as a Google News Publisher isn’t easy because Google has certain requirements that you must meet before you can become accepted. These requirements are both technical and content based, which is why many websites find that they’re attempts to become publishers for Google News fail.

But why do websites try in the first place? What are the benefits to becoming a Google News Publisher?

Here are just a few reasons that you should read the guidelines on becoming a Google News Publisher and seriously consider writing content for your website in order to apply:

Increased Traffic
When your content is listed within Google News you will receive increased traffic from people looking for (more…)