We Do Search Engine Optimization.

We all love search engine conferences and online marketing events. Many of the search engine conferences offer a discount and I have compiled them below:

Search Conference Discounts:

March 17-20
SES Search Engine Strategies NY
New York NY
10% off Discount Code: 10SMS

April 15-17
AdTech San Francisco
20% off Discount Code: BRSFD or BRSFZ9

April 22-23
SMX Social – Search Marketing Expo
Long Beach California
$75 off Discount Code: BRSFSD

May 19-20
PPC Summit – Pay Per Click Marketing
San Francisco, California
10% off Discount Code: SMS10

June 3-4
Ad Tech Miami, Florida
20% off Discount Code: BRMISD

June 3-4
SMX Advanced – Search Marketing Expo
Seattle Washington
$75 off Discount Code: SMX75SMS

July 24-25
SMX Local & Mobile – Search Marketing Expo
San Francisco, California
$75 off Discount Code: SMX75SMS

August 5-6
Ad Tech Chicago Illinois
20% off Discount Code: BRCHSD

August 10-12
Affiliate Summit East
Boston Massachusetts
10% off Discount Code: CONFGUIDE10

August 18-21
SES Search Engine Strategies
San Jose California
10% off Discount Code: 10SMS

October 6-8
SMX East search marketing expo
New York
$75 off Discount Code: SMX75SMS

November 3-6
Ad Tech
New York
20% off Discount Code: BRNYSD

Note, a lot of these search engine optimization conferences have a number in the discount code signifying the percentage discount. Who’s to stop you from trying a different number to see if you can get a greater discount?

The search engine optimization field came of age when savvy SEO’s read Google’s backrub patents and figured out it was all about the links. Back in the early days of early millennia Google, all you needed to do was spam acquire some links and you could easily get on Google’s front page.
Now, forget links its all about data – specifically connected data that creates your online identity. Every time you create a product review, add friends to your myspace page, create job connections on linkedin and update your blogspot blog you are contributing to your known identity, and this is infinitely valuable.

Berners-Lee says data on the Web is the new links, and Websites should stop keeping it to themselves:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

In fact, a lot of the value of many websites is the links out.

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.”

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” . . . So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.”

Read the transcript from this conversation.

The data standards are called Friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) and XHTML Friends Network (XFN). Google created OpenSocial to provide developers access to social graph data (the map of connections between friends) but so far major social websites such as Facebook.com are not part of the group.

It can be frustrating to deal with search engines and their keyword bidding rules. Here is an overview of paid search ad trademark policies.

Google:
Allows trademarks as trigger keywords, but trademarks in the visible ad text is not allowed. So you can add trademarked keywords, but you cannot write ads using these keywords.

Yahoo and MSN:
Do not allow trademarks as trigger keywords nor in the ad’s display text. So all of you hoping to get residual traffic from ipods, nikes and porsches are out of luck.

The exceptions are if you are a reseller, an information site (but not a pure affiliate site), providing product reviews (this is how pricegrabber.com gets away with so much), or providing dictionary terms (answers.com).

So these are the search engine marketing rules you must follow to play in the pay per click arenas of the big 3 search engines.

The European Union really has it in for Microsoft and has just fined them $1.35 billion euros, bringing the total amount of Microsoft fines in Europe to approximately 1.7 billion E or $2.55 billion dollars. This is a staggering amount, which equates to about $2.75 per european citizen. This is only about 2 weeks of MS operating profit, but still it is a huge amount.

Personally I am torn over this decision – while I dislike Microsoft corp with a passion, Neelie Kroes the EU antitrust chief may be overstepping her authority.

Thanks for TechCrunch for the image and inspiration for this post. Microsoft may be feeling like the rich husband of an overspending wife who continues to use him as her personal ATM machine.

Get a coupon for the Search Engine Strategies SEO conference in New York. I have been to previous SES conferences and they have been worthwhile events. When attending conferences I find the most important indicator of quality is the individual speaker. A qualified search engine optimization expert can make any panel topic interesting and informative. When attending Search Engine Strategies, choose learning sessions based on the speaker and you will get a lot of value out of this SEO conterence.

Search Engine Strategies New York
Conference: March 17-20, 2008 | Training: March 21 | Hilton New York

SES New York 10% discount code: 10SMS

1 Day Left to
Save $150!
Early Bird pricing expires soon.
Register for SES today

Secure your pass at the early bird rate. SES New York is the number one networking opportunity globally in the Search Engine Marketing Industry which is no surprise as it is the largest Industry event of the year. Search Engine Strategies is known for bringing together the brightest players and biggest names from Digital and Search for a week of networking, spirited discussion and learning.

Come view support during the Stompernet SMARTS launch.

Very soon Stomper net is creating a new SEO training program.

Read more about the search marketing training program called SMARTS here. search engine optimization launch is imminent!

Pay per click management and PPC bidding is most effective when the process is automated. The goal is to have the most relevant ad appear for each keyword search. It is impractical to create a unique ad for each keyword phrase variation, so we use a technique called Dynamic Keyword Insertion. DKI allows us to insert the exact keyword phrase used in the search query into our ad.

Keywords targeted and that triggered the ad were in BOLD in the ad. You can see that not only is the keyphrase in the title of the ad is bold, as well as the keyword in the ad copy and the display URL is also bold. This increases your ads CTR and will improve your Quality Score in Google, resulting in a lower CPC.

The standard format for dynamically inserting your keyword: {keyword:yourdefaulttext}

Additional variations allow the use of capitalization to dynamically inserted keywords:

keyword – No capitalization, all word(s) are in lower case
• Keyword – The first word is capitalized
• KeyWord – Every word is capitalized
• KEYword – Every letter in first word is capitalized
• KEYWord -Every letter in the first word AND the first letter of the second
• KEYWORD – Every letter is capitalized

Read more about PPC tricks and maximizing pay per click advertising at Redfly.

Click fraud is up – way up. As much as 1/3 of all clicks could be fradulent according to Click Forensics. The ongoing pay per click tracking provided by ClickForensics.com shows click fraud increased 15% in 2007.

The industry-wide average click fraud rate for the entire year went up 15 percent, ending the year with 16.6 percent of all clicks on Web ads being fraudulent. The click fraud rate for search engine ad networks alone, including Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network, grew even more. That was up 47 percent in the fourth quarter, ending the year with a 28.3 percent click fraud rate.

Hopefully Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are diligently working to reduce worthless clicks and start providing more transparent data to ppc ad buyers. I have a program that helps guard against illicit clicks, but the major search engines should be doing more self policing.

Below is a heatmap showing global locations of clickfraud.

The biggest sources of click fraud are India (4.3 percent), Germany (3.9 percent), and South Korea (3.7 percent). These 3 countries represent over half of all fradulent advertising clicks.

More about PPC click fraud from TechCrunch. See the paid search report on click fraud here.

Unfortunately the Microsoft adCenter Affiliate Program has come to an ignominious end. MS has cancelled this lucrative program and swept the rug out from all its loyal affiliate marketers who have diligently helped raise awareness for this affiliate offer. Should we be surprised at Microsoft’s behavior?

Their press release:

Microsoft adCenter Affiliate Program to Close February 29, 2008
Thank you for your participation in the adCenter Affiliate program. Unfortunately, the adCenter offer will no longer be available after February 29th, 2008.

Any banner or text ads that you currently have placed and are receiving traffic will still be eligible for payout through February 29th. However, any traffic after this date will no longer be eligible for the coupon or commission payout. As of today, February 20th, no new marketing material will be available to current affiliates and new affiliates will not be able to sign up for the offer.

Final commission payout for any activity through the end of February will be processed and paid out in the month of March as usual. Please be sure to remove all marketing materials associated with this offer from placement by February 29th as you will no longer receive credit for this activity.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but hope that you will take advantage of other offers available within the Microsoft Affiliate Network including Windows Live OneCare and Windows Live Toolbar. You can find more information about these programs by logging into the Affiliate Account Center and selecting Offers from the left-hand side navigation.

Thank you for your participation in the Microsoft Affiliate Network. Please let us know if you have questions.

M Witt
Affiliate Manager
Microsoft Affiliate Network
_________________________
Fax: 313.447.2398
affiliates@microsoftaffiliates.net

Open Sesame – Open ads the company formerly known as PHPAdsNew now has renamed itself openx. Along with 20 million dollars in fiancing and former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller has joined as chairman of Openx.org.
Open X is the most popular adserver solution online with 30,000 publishers using the software on 100,000 sites in 140 different countries and in 20 languages.

Personally I find the ad server backend interface to be extremely clumsy and non intuitive – it has remained virtually unchanged since I first used it in 2001.

I’m willing to bet (We’re not investors) that the administrative interface for banner ad management will be improved in version 3.0. The current openads version is 2.4.4

One immediate benefit from the $20 mil is a nice redesign, there are colored balloons in the header that presents an image of a kids birthday party.