We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Adtoll looks like a very promising publisning and advertising network. Ad Toll is based in Australia and has a loyal following of international websites.

They offer video ads, square buttons, Leaderboard, Skyscraper, full banner ads and text link ads. The nice thing about this network is the amount of stats you can see for each publisher, and a detailed rate card for each ad opportunity.

This service is similar to AdBrite, but with more transparency and very simple targeting options. It is easy to keep adult/gambling/pills off your site, which is extremely important to me.

The ad code generation process is straightforward and easy to use, with multiple display options including the ability to disable the “served by” ad text.

One thing that is strange is the ad cost, there seems to only be one option to charge weekly. It would be nice to have a more defined CPM or even CPC with the advertising.

From their ad site:

4 years of online advertising experience adtoll identified the need for a reliable and feature rich Ad Management service. AdToll is a trustworthy service that allows web site owners to generate revenue through advertising. AdToll is the link between Publishers who want to sell ads on their web sites and Advertisers who want to buy ads.

The people involved in the development and operations teams of AdToll have a diverse range of qualifications and skills including Business Management, Engineering, Marketing, Human Resource Management, Information Technology and Law. The AdToll team is dedicated to providing the best service available and to assist customers to achieve their goals.

Ad Toll Mission Statement: To be the first choice Ad Management service for web site owners and to provide a healthy return on investment for Advertisers and Publishers.

This is an ad network i will definintely test.

Below is an example of and ad toll banner ad:

Jonathan Simon posted the questions and answers he received while at Las Vegas Pubcon 2007 on Google Groups.

The search engine optimization crowd grilled the engineer on several pressing online marketing questions and he provides useful advice to improve your rankings and reduce stress.

Scrapers

If your content is being scraped, it is a nuisance, but not the end of the world. however if they outrank you, send a spam report to Google or file a DMCA take down notice.

PPC vs. SEO

Google recommends that if you’re already getting a lot of visibility with PPC, you should still make your site search-engine friendly to get natural rankings. Jonathan recommends maintaining a crawler friendly site to guarantee maximum exposure from all online avenues.

SEO focus for Large Sites

If you have a mammoth website, focus on SEO for the entire site, not just core pages.

Reputation Monitoring

To be updated of mentions of your company, subscribe to Google Alerts or to an RSS feed of Google’ blogsearch or technorati to monitor usage of your particular search phrase or brand.

Additional questions and answers are provided at Google Groups.

Left or right? No, this is not a political discussion but a serious usability question. Customers are used to seeing the checkout button on the right side of the screen, and crutchfield.com moved the buy not button to the left. Is it a good idea to buck convention and try something new to stimulate your electronics shoppers?

In this case no, the risk of shopping cart abandonment is to large. It is ok to test some website elements such as color or font style, but not something that is literally the foundation of your business. If people cant find the payment button bad things will happen to your online business.

Read what Future Now has to say about this unorthodox e-commerce setup.

From the Crutchfield customer service department: As a token of our thanks, we’d like to offer a you free shipping code on your next order, regardless of how much you spend. Just place your order within the next 90 days, and be sure to use your individual Customer ID: #00000-29817172 for a rebate. Enter the promo code when you order online, or give it to your Sales Advisor if you order by phone.

Crutchfield coupon: #00000-29817172

For electronics free shipping details, click here: www.crutchfield.com/freeshipping.

Risk Magazine — the finance industry magazine focused on risk management — presented, this month, its Equity Derivatives House of the Year award for 2008 to Societe Generale, the beleaguered bank that just lost 4.9 billion dollars to a rogue stock trader. Jerome Kerviel bet $73 billion using equity derivatives.

This is by far the best corporate award since Fortune Magazine gave Enron its Most Innovative Company in America award in February 2001 for the sixth consecutive year, just before Enron imploded and went bankrupt.

More from pmarca.

Serious controversy in SEO land. Google is handing out manual penalties by the truckload, and fellow SEO’s are steamed. SEO’s are like soldiers on the front line, we always get hit first and take unrelenting punishment for pushing the line forward.

Ok Google, we understand that you hate paid links and have waged a battle against text link ads and now paid reviews. The problem that the search engine optimization field has is the unfairness with which we are treated – there definitely is a double standard as we are the most visible crowd online.

Some people go way over the line and spam by placing sitewide footer links, paid links with a greater than 15% ratio, 50% sponsored posts, or scraped duplicate content. The SEO field has savvy users, and people know (even if they refuse to admin) if they are whit, gray or black hat optimizers. Don’t throw the white hats and into the same ditch as the cloaking and spamming crowd, I promise we want to work with you, not against you.

Michael asks the question

Matt, why is this? What is it about these people that you interact with on a regular basis that leads you to trust the decision making process of anonymous Yahoo employees over theirs?

As much as I hate to admit it, a Yahoo directory editor is an unbiased reviewer, and likely has a good understanding of quality websites. Also, they have no personal financial interest in the decision, other than they want to perform well so they can keep their job.

Also, kudos to matt cutts for expressing sincere concern and helping individuals who have been penalized. I have worked with people who were in the Google penalty box and it is not a pleasant situation.

The bottom line is that if SEO’s are going to be held to stricter editorial standards, we need a better line of communication with the Google webspam team and reinclusion team.

I don’t really consider this a war unlike some people but all I ask is for a better way than shooting first and making bloggers come begging for mercy.

Are you addicted to E-bay and love getting great deals on the largest online auction site? Well a service from cniper.com lets you automatically bid on ending auctions to give you the best deal.

Most Ebay power users have multiple auctions running at the same time, and this allows these users to relax and take care of business besides watching auctions that are about to close.

From Cniper:

Cniper bids on an eBay auction in the last few seconds for you, so you don’t have to keep track of exactly when the auction is ending. If you’re new to eBay, you might think you should bid early on auctions. But there are a lot of reasons to wait until the last second to place your bid (the main reason being that the later you bid, the less time you give others to bid the auction up).

Just pre-load your eBay bid into Cniper and let it fire the bid off in the last few seconds of the auction. That way, you don’t have to wait around for the eBay auction to end so you can bid at the last second. We’ll do it for you, for free!

Checkout Cniper.com and their free ebay sniping service. Bidding on multiple live auctions has never been so easy.

E-commerce website optimizers rejoice – now Google tells us what products people are shopping for! Using the Google Trends tool, we can see comparison search data for all products. Google does not give specific numbers, only an approximate range so we need to extrapolate the data using other analytics tools.

The data comes from Google Checkout, so it uses actual purchase information to generate the reports, not just keyword searches

See a comparison between the keyword search for iPod and Zune:

The data clearly shows that the Microsoft Zune had some serious buzz during the holiday shopping season.

Go play and have fun researching retail keywords at Google Checkout trends labs.

Marketing Sherpa is the real deal. I have been dealing with them since 2001 when they first included me in one of their SEO publications. Their publications are used in the marketing departments of the Dow Jones, WSJ, GE, Oracle and probably most of the fortune 500 companies.

Read what Seth Godin has to say about Marketing Sherpa:

“This book is astonishing and you should read it. It’s astonishing because it will tell you very obvious things that you don’t know, didn’t realize and weren’t taking action on. As the person who invented the term Landing Page in 1995 (right after Al Gore invented the internet) I can tell you that we’ve waited a long, long time for this sort of common sense, hands on, verified info. The bad news is that you are now out of excuses.”

Read their Search Engine Optimization buyers guide and the buyers guide to landing pages. Tune up your website with eye tracking studies and measure results and ROI with analytics testing and web stats reports.

Netpaths has been included in the SEO buyers guide and is honored to share space in this first rate publishing company.

You can get a special with this limited time offer.

It is still mid January and already MSN Live search has a front runner in the category of most confusing advertisement. MSN is trying to use viral videos to promote their pay per click online advertising program AdCenter and they have created several promotional videos to help get the word out. Unfortunately the videos look like they were made by renegade art students trying to show how cool they were for creating a video that has nothing to do with the product they are trying to promote.

The art students succeeded in creating videos that will not only confuse viewers but likely dissuade them from trying adcenter PPC. The videos are morbid, bland and uninspiring.

Microsoft live search PPC take it away:

Dance Video: Microsoft – context matters
Funeral Video: Microsoft- context matters
Art Video: Microsoft – Context mattersIf you still feel like trying Microsoft AdCenter after watching these online videos be my guest.

You can also read more about the adcenter videos from a microsoft employed blogger. See more comments about the adcenter videos here, here and here. Sorry MSN Live Adcenter Search team, these ads just don’t speak to me. Please let me know if any independent ad agency approves and compliments these videos.

Another thing that annoys me about Microsoft are the links it adds to the default embed code. I stripped them out of this post, but it is just another example of MS trying to force itself into my computer/blog with things I don’t want.

Blah Blah tech has created a great wordpress plugin that lets you connect with users of other social networks. Most online marketers are members of multiple online content sharing networks and tend to read a lot of SEO blogs. Using the Socialize Me plugin lets visitors interact with you similar to mybloglog.com

From SocializeMe:

with Socialize Me! those visitors to your ‘blog will see a simple message when they arrive: “Hi, thanks for the visit! Wayne’s on StumbleUpon, too!” with a link to your profile.

With the Socialize Me! Plugin for WordPress you can connect with people on services like: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Pownce, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace and many, many more.

get the plugin