Click Fraud-A Dirty Game in the Internet World

If you think your CPC (cost per click) is increasing unneccessarily and the conversion rates are still the same or even worse, it is time to wake up from your slumber and find out the reason for this. Your business may be suffering from the internet disease called 'Click Fraud'. In internet language, click fraud is an illegal practice where people click on the ad links appearing next to search results so that the advertisers have to pay for the clicks. It is but obvious that the common man wouldn't do something like this simply because he/she doesn't have the time or reason to do so. It is done by some frustrated and dirty minded business people whose only interest is to harm their competitors who are doing well business wise or getting high rankings in major search engines. In fact the search engines also generate a great revenue, posting sponsored ad links on other Web sites and splitting the fees generated by user clicks. This fraud can be done in many ways ranging from clicking repeatedly on an ad link manually or using automated bots. It is something like eating away someone else' cake. So, the mischievous competitors adopt this desperate measure to make a dent in your pocket. But, here it is the advertisers who are to be blamed. They should take all the required steps to not only identify such fraudulent people, but also report about them. Though the search engines claim that they are taking strict action against click fraud experts, there are many innocent people who are still being fleeced off their hard earned money as a result of this Click Fraud.

Site Maps: Acting as Guides to your Site For the Search Engines

Consider your website as a tourist spot that you would want people to visit. And consider the search engines to be the tourists who want to have a great time visiting your site, not missing out the important landmarks there and then tell others about what a great place your site is by indexing it. The question arises who will act as the tour guide to provide all the important information as well as routes to your tourist place? If you ask me, I would say-The Site Map of your website can perform this role perfectly.

Basically, a site map is a page or a collection of pages all linked together that includes links to every other page in your site. If you want the search engines to find all the pages of your site, you need to have a good site map that allows the search engines to spider every single page of your site. What you do is, provide a link to your site map page from your homepage, so that there is no need to provide all the links to different pages of your site from the home page itself. The idea is that more the links on the homepage, more the time taken by search engines to spider your whole site. Also as and when your site grows with passing time, you cannot put all the links on the homepage, otherwise the homepage will look like a cluttered collage of links, confusing the visitors as well as making it difficult and time consuming for the search engines to index your entire site.

Infact site map can be an excellent navigation system for the information hungry visitors and relevant content hungry search engine spiders. Though the most ignored or neglected part of web site building, site maps can be a very valuable tool for getting higher rankings for your site in lesser time.

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Modus Operandi to Combat Spam

Having tough time handling spam mails? Read some of the techniques given below to combat the menace created by spams.

Filtering out certain keywords-If you carefully go through the trash emails in your email debris, you will be able to identify some common features of spam mails. Like most of them having subject lines that propogate, advertise, or promote a product or service. What you need to do is to make a list of all such dubious keywords and filter out those messages that have these dubious keywords in the subject line. Most email applications have tools to achieve this, so it will not be a big problem.

Making a list of wanted messages/emails-You may also set up a list of all those email addresses from which you want to receive emails. Most email applications have a provision for this too, for e.g. the tools menu in Outlook express that has a option Mail in Messsage Rules.

Installing a Spam checking Software- Well if you don't have the time or energy to do all this, you may go in for an anti-spam software that does the needful for you.

Not giving your email address if participating in online forums and other such things-Be careful while posting regularly on forums, newsgroups or message boards. Don't include your email address in the body of the message as spammers find such places as easy preys. You are actually inviting them to send you a pile of junk emails by doing so.

Using more than one email address-Have different email id's for different purposes. You can use each for a different purpose, like,personal, or business, or discussions, etc. or better still set up a webmail account on Yahoo or Hotmail for any secondary or not so important emails.

Use one or all of these techniques given above to have a life free of spams. Though you may not be able to completely eradicate spamming, but these tips will definitely help you limit and restrict the amount of spam mails you get everyday.

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Article Writing: A Worth Having Web Marketing Tool

If you ask me what the 'I' of 'internet' stands for, I will say 'information'. That's what the World Wide Web is all about. Loads and loads of relevant information. Users surf the net for the information they are looking for. The more information you provide the users, the more effective is your online marketing strategy going to be.

One of the very effective tools for providing this information is writing articles that are related to your products and services. When you start writing articles regularly, you are actually endorsing your own website and products by winning the trust of the people as they definitely like to buy from someone who is an expert in the field. And by writing articles you win their confidence in your knowledge, ability, and expertise in the field concerned. A time comes when people start looking upon you as a father figure or the ultimate authority in a particular domain. If you permit others to republish your articles, you can increase visitor traffic to your site. All you need to do is to provide a resource box along with every article that carries a short description of you as the the author and your website's link. If people like your article, they will definitely visit your website to find out what all you offer. And when other sites publish your article with a backlink to your website, you are improving your link popularity-a factor considered by search engines as very important in determining the ranking of a site.

So, awaken the sleeping writer in you that has been lying dormant till now. Identify your business' core profit making area and start writing articles related to it. If you have sound knowledge about your business, putting thoughts on paper shouldn't be very difficult. Even if you feel you fall short of ideas, what's the good old Web for? Go ahead and search for the stuff you are looking for, and I bet you will never again complain of not finding good, quality, and relevant content. Gather data, brainstorm ideas, add in your personal touch to it and a good, meaty article is ready.

http://www.segnant.com/

Press Release: A Great Web Marketing Strategy

It is sad that press release is often the most ignored and neglected web marketing strategy. Webmasters have not been able to understand and tap the varied benefits of press releases in marketing their products and services online. A press release is a story related to your business, company, or organization that may catch the attention of the targeted public or visitors. It's a story that is objective, interesting, newsworthy; and at the same time not promotional or advertisement driven. It may be in the form of an interview also, but not always. When we say newsworthy, what we mean is not just harping about your products and services, but offering some news like a new product developed by your company, or winning a major contract, or any recognition received, or entering into partnership with some other company, or sponsoring some event, etc.

Benefits of Press Release

1. Expect fast and wide coverage if your press release is newsworthy and is liked by the media distributers. Generally, a good press release shows results within 24 hours of submission.
2. One component that transforms leads into clients or customers is reliability. In case your press release is picked up and published by some well known media outlet, your readers will start associating your company's name with reliability and trustworthiness.
3. There cannot be a better way of ongoing endorsement, publicity, promotion, or advertisement than press releases. Regularly writing and archiving your press releases will increase chances of people finding you out and linking to you. In fact the search engines also get a chance to spider your release when it is published on other sites. Not only this, you may become the apple of journalists' eyes by getting contacted by them for more similar releases.
4. Last but not the least, you are adding up more and more relevant content to your site with press releases. And more content means better visibility for the visitors, clients, and journalists. This also means more food for the content hungry search engines.

Submitting a press release is no big deal either. If you have good money and no time to spare, you may submit your press release to the numerous services that charge fees for submitting your releases, like PRNewsWire and MarketWire. But those who want to submit to free services can submit their releases to PRWeb.com, an excellent free press release submission service yielding very good results. And if you donate a small amount to them, you get increased coverage with statistics that is a great help to measure your press release's effectiveness. There may be many more free press release submission services online. All you need to do is search on the net and make a list of all such services.

So get up and get going! Try it out and see the difference it makes to your marketing campaign. I'm sure after using this strategy, you are going to regret the time lost till now by not indulging in it before.

http://www.segnant.com/

Discussion Forums: Excellent Platform to Learn the Secrets of SEO

Who say's there is nothing like a free ride in this world? Go to the discussion forums and get a wealth of the best and latest information on what's happening where and how. If you have the desire to learn, time to participate, and the right attitude, you can learn till infinity. Discussion forums act as a very valuable tool in SEO too. Anyone who wants to gain expertise in this field without attending a paid course, should regularly go to these discussion forums to learn as much as they want about SEO. These forums cover topics in every imaginable area and domain of SEO and contain posts by SEO experts themselves or even novices and newcomers.Whoever may be the participant, it is you the reader who gains the most out of this knowledge. Don't consider discussion forums as pedantic and lecturing from some high headed fellows. They are really a potful of precious information that can be used by you in optimizing the pages of your own or somebody else's website. Some of the worth it SEO discussion forums are:

http://SearchEngineForums.com
http://IhelpYouServices.com/forums/
http://SearchEngineForums.com
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com

There may be many more like these, but going through them alone would also benefit you a lot in improving your SEO strategies.There is no end to how much one can learn. All you need to do is to find out the opportunities to learn something. Remember the saying that if you are thirsty, you need to fetch a glass of water, the glass will not walk or come to you to quench your thirst.

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Wiki: A Collaborative Software

Have you ever seen a public or office bulletin board? Well, that's exactly what a wiki is . It is a website which acts like a bulletin board where a user is allowed to create and edit the pages. It is a Hawaiian term meaning 'quick'. It can also be defined as a group comunication mechanism and a platform which has exposed the web visitors and users to millions of new words and content. But not all wikis are open to every visitor to edit or create pages. Some of them have restrictions over who can edit the pages.

wiki versus blog

If you understand the difference between individual and group presentation, you will easily understand the difference between a blog and a wiki. A blog is published by one individual, whereas a wiki is a collaborative software where groups of people design and publish the work in an easy and inexpensive way.

wiki versus email

Now you might say what is unique in a wiki as even emailing a word file around too is a way of collaborating on content or projects. The difference is that in wiki, once the changes are made to a document, everybody gets to see the same page as edited by the last user. There is also a facility to restore the earlier versions of the pages as you can store and keep the history of every change that has been made to the document till the present day.

An open forum for all

In the world of internet and web, where people are looking for more and more relevant and useful content, wiki will turn out to be a great help for groups interested in collaborating on projects and content. Wiki can be very beneficial in not only desiging and managing, but also maintaining the documents that need the inputs from the users all over the globe.

The other side of the coin:wiki abuse

The very features that make wiki a popular and useful internet tool, also make it vulnerable to mischief and abuse by mischief mongers. Since a wiki's links are open for all, if there is no human control or close monitoring, users can simply add their links to take advantage of wiki's network. And the culprit user will savor the benefits of this activity, till the time some other user does not remove that link. The profit hungry website owners deliberately do not want to understand that wiki took shape as a result of a desire to collaborate on content and not as a means to increase your page rank.

One Useful Tip

If you want to find out whether you rivals and competitors are indulging in foul practices to increase their pagerank and position in search engines, all you have to do is search for your competitor's business name+wiki. If you find them there on a wiki spamming ride, you can write a form letter informing the wiki owner with their IP address about their degrading act and keep a check on them.

What's Cooking in Google's Algorithms?

Wake up all you there who think that turning Google's algorithms to your advantage is an easy thing. Think again as Google is trying to counter and combat all the so-called smart webmasters' efforts to manipulate PageRank to suit their own purposes. Google considers PageRank to be one of the most important factors in determining the importance of a web site. Though linking to sites that the webmaster feels are important for his visitors is not wrong; it is only when linking is done purely guided by selfish motive of getting just high rankings and nothing else that Google has to take harsh steps to overcome this foul being played by some webmasters.

The following shake-ups might be cooking in Google's mind:

Considering inbound links within paragraphs more important as genuine and natural links than stand alone links that are a product of link exchange .

Keeping a tab on the the pages to which the links are pointing towards in a website. If all the inbound links are pointing to only one page, it could be taken as an indicator of link exchange and the content of the rest of the site being not very important to attract inbound links. Checking a sample of inbound links to a domain and the reciprocation of the links to the linking domain. The more the level of reciprocation, lesser the PageRank.

Valuing outbound links equally as the inbound links or may be more.

Considering the concentration of outbound links across the website. If out bound links are concentrated on a few pages, againit is taken to be an outcome of link exchange tahn the links that are spread equally throughout the site.

Though we are not sure of what exactly Google is doing or acting, but it is always better to think like a search engine in order to get the best results. It is important to remember that Google is constantly changing and updating its algorithms to keep the manipulative and erring webmasters on their toes.

Google has a reputation to maintain in the internet world and it will do everything possible to continue being regarded as the most popular, objective, and relevant search engine available today. So, it's time for the webmasters to come to terms with the changing times and Google's changing algorithms in order not to be affected or punished by their new rules.

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Misspelled Words could Spell more Traffic for your website

"To Err Is Profitable in Web Marketing"

Have you ever been rewarded for doing something wrong? Did you ever make profit by making mistakes? Well, the fact that the web can accomplish anything rings true here. It is possible to garner more traffic to your website by experimenting with different misspelled words in your keyword selection. This should be followed by the creation of a doorway page on your host containing the selected misspelled words. This doorway page should redirect all the searches to that page to your mainweb site. There will be many times when visitors misspell words in their search for particular information on the web. These spelling mistakes may be purely due to haste and hurried search or ignorance of the spellings on the part of the visitors. Whatever the reason, it is the website owners who stand to gain from this misspelling of the visitors. So taking misspelled words seriously could be beneficial for you because:

1. They bring more targeted traffic to your site
2. They help achieve top rankings on those commonly misspelled words that apply to your website
3. There is little competition against these words and therefore they are easier to optimize for
4. They are cheaper as PPC traffic for them can be bought for far less than for correct keywords

So consider spending some quality time researching for the common mispellings of your top keywords and add them to your list.But to generate maximum target traffic to your website, it is important that you put these misspelled words in palces that are not seenby the user like the meta keyword tag, description tag, noframes area, image alt tag, form option tag, style tag etc. If you have the time and capability to think of all the possible misspellings related to your website, nothing like it. Otherwise, you can use the Wordtracker keyword search tool (http://www.AffiliateClassroom.com/Keywords) to see the most common errors repeating themselves.