SEO Earnings

Links are the core of your search engine optimization campaign. Quality authority and trust-building links are tough to get. Here we outline 35 methods you can use to attract links to your website.... Thinking about Getting an IT Degree? Certificates & Degrees in IT from Accredited Online Colleges! Request Free Information!

With Search Engine Strategies starting this week, we get a sneak peek from Vice President Larry Cornett on his panel on how searchers interact with search engines on Wednesday at 1 - 2:15 p.m. Also you'll find a glimpse of where the entire Yahoo! Search team will be throughout the show. Be sure to check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog for more details on other Yahoo! speakers at the event. We hope to see you there. Yahoo! Search Blog team Yahoo! Search Blog (YSB): Can you give us a sneak peek into what you plan to talk about at the show? Larry Cornett (LC): I will be on a panel at SES entitled "Search User Behavior Update." The title of my talk for that panel is "Thinking Beyond the Search Results Page." What I mean by that is most of us in the Search industry have historically been focused on the performance of the search results page, referrals and conversion. We need to step back to consider what people are really trying to accomplish in the real world, which extends well beyond the Web and into their daily lives. I plan on sharing what we at Yahoo! Search do to better understand our users and how they experience Search end-to-end within the context of their larger tasks. This includes the great work done by our Customer Insights and Metrics & Analysis teams, which ranges from ethnographic field studies to eye-tracking research. We are really interested in helping users more easily craft better searches and get straight to the answers they are looking for. YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Search today? LC: First, we have continued to focus on our mission to help get users from "to do" to "done" as quickly and as safe as possible when they use Yahoo! Search. That includes continuing to advance the great Search Assist technology that we recently launched and SearchScan a feature launched in May 2008 that helps protect users from viruses, spyware and spam. Second, we've added a really exciting new development platform called SearchMonkey which allows publishers, site owners and developers to leverage structured data to enhance the functionality, appearance and usefulness of search results in our Search experience. We are continuing to evolve the Monkey and work with publishers and developers to bring more enhanced results to our users from sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and LinkedIn. It's a great way for users to more quickly find the information they need to complete their real world tasks. And recently we've launched Yahoo! Search BOSS, which is a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. We are continuing to work with startups and developers like Me.dium, Hakia, Daylife, and Cluuz to bring entirely new search experiences to life. YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in Search today? LC: Well, of course I am a little biased, but I have to say that both Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Yahoo! Search BOSS are two of the biggest innovations in the Search landscape today. We are encouraging and enabling innovation on a whole new scale. But, there are a number of other companies doing very interesting things in the Search space as well. Yahoo! Search Speaker Schedule Monday, August 18th Universal & Blended Search 9:45 - 11 a.m. Cris Pierry, Senior Director of Product Management Semantic Search -- How will it change our lives? 11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Amit Kumar, Director Product Management Tuesday, August 19th Shopping Search Tactics 11 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. Greg Hintz, General Manager, Yahoo! Shopping Wednesday, August 20th Searcher Behavior Research Update 1 - 2:15 p.m. Larry Cornett, Vice President, User Experience and Design Thursday, August 21st Organic Listings Forum 1:30 - 2:30 p.m. Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager

Would you buy from someone you couldn t contact Most people wouldn t. It makes you wonder why so many businesses on the web hide their contact information. If you want to increase your conversions you need to stop hiding and start making it easy for your customers to reach you.... Villanova University Six Sigma & IT Certificate Programs 100% Online programs in Six Sigma, IS Security, CISSP Prep, Business Analysis, Proj. Mgmt. and more!

When you visit the AdSense Setup tab in your account, you'll notice a new "AdSense for feeds" option. This means you can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds, allowing you to increase the reach of your content while earning revenue. Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.At this point, you may either be thinking, "great!" or "umm...what's a feed?" For those of you in the second category, feeds allow your content to be delivered and subscribed to on the Web, often as headlines, summaries or articles. FeedBurner also has a nifty tutorial that you might find useful.And here are a few more reasons to try AdSense for feeds:

• Receive higher CPMs and maintain a positive user experience by displaying ads specifically optimized for RSS feeds.
• View detailed stats on your feed audience, distribution, and more through FeedBurner when you set up your feeds with AdSense.
• Manage monetization for your feeds through the same account that you use to manage other AdSense properties.

AdSense for feeds is currently enabled in all languages supported by AdSense for content.Want to learn more about what feeds are and how to get started with AdSense for feeds? Visit our Help Center and watch our introductory video from Product Manager Steve Olechowski: To set up AdSense for feeds now, sign in and visit the AdSense Setup page of your account, or apply for an AdSense account. Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing

Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:

1. Allowed Sites setupThe Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
2. Invalid clicksIt's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.

Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Tips for Making the Most of SES San Jose; And the Link Love Award Winner is...You; Online Olympic Traffic Soars; and more.

The opening ceremony has come and gone and the 2008 Summer Olympics are well underway. Every day moments of achievement, defeat and disappointment are captured and if you're lucky, you witness them first hand. If you're not so lucky, don't fret, Yahoo! Image Search has just rolled out a new image carousel to make finding those history-making moments easier. Now when you do a search on Yahoo! Image Search for Olympics-related content, you will see a carousel of some of the freshest, most comprehensive photos from Yahoo! Sports coverage of the Olympics. The carousel images will appear above the regular search results, with arrows in the right hand corner to make toggling through the images easy. So, if you want to peruse images of Michael Phelps as he makes Olympics history or view photos of Yang Wei, who just brought home the gold medal for China in Men's Gymnastics, here's what you'll see: Accessing the photo carousel is simple. To get the latest of Olympics photos, search 'Olympics' and you might get a glimpse of the intensity between Brazil and Latvia in the women's basketball games or catch the concentration at the Shunyi Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Park. You can also hone in on more specific photos. Try a search for a particular athlete, i.e. 'Roger Federer' or your sport of preference, like 'Olympics diving.' And, to get photos of a featured event, search it in conjunction with Olympics, like 'Olympics opening ceremony.' And don't forget the Yahoo! Shortcuts for Olympics-related information. To get a real-time snapshot of what's going on at this year's games, try one of the following:

• Olympics Medal Count: To get a quick overview of the ranking in this year's games, simply search 'medal count.' And, if you're more interested in your team, just add your country before the search, 'USA medal count'
• Game Updates: For a first-hand look at who's leading a specific game, do a quick search like 'Olympics swimming'
• Athlete Stats: To learn the latest on a specific athlete, search their name and Olympics. Tough to keep up on how your favorite Indian American gymnast is doing? Search 'Raj Bhavsar Olympics'
• Olympics Results: For a real-time overview of the games, search 'Olympics results'
• Olympics Schedule: To keep up with what's when, search 'Olympics schedule'

Give 'em a try and enjoy the games. Happy Olympics! Yahoo! Search Blog team

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Search Ad Tools Help Manage Complexity; Real-Time Analytics with Woopra; Yahoo Adds Speed, Smarts, and Languages to Safari Plug-In, Inquisitor; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Content? Content. Content!; Proper SEO and the Robots.txt File; Dynamic Keyword Insertion: Friend or Foe?; and more.

We've heard your feedback about the availability of video units, so we've expanded the languages and geographies where they're supported. We've added French, German, and Spanish to our list of supported languages, and also Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico to the list of supported countries. To help you determine whether you'll be able to use video units, consider these two questions:

1. Do you have an English, French, German, Japanese, or Spanish-language AdSense account?
2. Are you located in one of the following countries?Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, United States

If you answered 'yes' to both questions, then video units are available to you. Sign in to your AdSense account and visit your AdSense Setup tab to get started. After linking your YouTube and AdSense accounts, you'll be able to customize and embed the video player into your website, and choose between having videos automatically targeted to your content or manually selecting content categories and content providers. Companion and text overlay ads will appear with your videos, and you'll generate earnings for valid clicks and impressions on those ads.You can find more information about video units in our Help Center, and as always, please feel free to leave us a comment with your video unit feedback. We'll be sure to keep you posted if video units become available in any additional countries or languages.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

A few months back we announced the acquisition of Inquisitor software, which helped to extend our query suggestion features, similar to Yahoo!'s Search Assist, to the Mac community. We've been quietly working on enhancements since, and today we're rolling out a new look, a few performance improvements and we're also going global. To start with we tapped into the Yahoo! Search infrastructure, using the recently announced Yahoo! Search BOSS, our open search web services platform, in order to speed up the search results delivered in Inquisitor. You should notice a significant improvement in the speed of your query results in Yahoo! Search. We also gave Inquisitor a little facelift with a new, refined, yet simple home page (inquisitorx.com) and a cleaner user interface of the Inquisitor client. You can now also utilize Inquisitor in different languages, eight to be exact, including Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Great design will continue to be a pillar of Inquisitor. We hope you enjoy these changes, and as always, let us know what you think in the comments below. Ariel Seidman Director of Product Management Yahoo! Search

Every so often an experienced SEO in our SEO Chat forums makes a post with the goal of answering most of the concerns of those who are new to search engine optimization. Since newbies often ask the same kinds of questions this gives them one thread to turn to and saves time and space. Here s the lowdown from the most recent version of this thread.... Offshore Services Top Ten Online Listings For Offshore Services. Your Search Ends Here.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Oil and Water? SEOs vs. Content Owners; Getting Vertical Search Right: A Sneak Preview; Google Warns on AOL Investment Loss; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion:Link Building with Customers; Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Millenniums; Google to Update Content Network; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Awesome Ad Groups: Small is Good; After the Yahoo Shareholder Meeting; Google Translate Goes Live with Human Translators; and more.

Some SEOs choose to specialize in particular fields. Ronald Herskowitz focuses on the eyes -- literally. In this interview you ll find that even the specialists learn plenty of tricks that can be generalized to many different kinds of web sites....

Last October, we introduced Western Union Quick Cash as a new payment method for a number of countries. We're excited to let you know that we've now expanded this payment method to Bulgaria, Egypt, Lithuania, Morocco, and Taiwan. If you're located in one of these countries, you'll be able to pick up your AdSense payments in cash at your local Western Union agent. This payment method is free, and you'll no longer need to wait for checks to arrive in the mail or to clear at the bank.Please keep in mind that in order to pick up your payment, you'll need to present a government-issued ID that matches your AdSense payee name. If you need to update or correct the payee name listed in your account, please fill out our online form. In addition, we'd like to note that payments by Western Union Quick Cash are only available to individual payee names, but not to businesses.Signing up for payments by Western Union is a quick process - just follow these instructions. For more information about this payment method, including exchange rates and how to pick up your payments, we recommend visiting our Help Center. Posted by Korey Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

If you plan to start a new website commercially or enter a new business niche you d best be prepared to do some research. It s one thing to build a hobby site as a labor of love but if you want to make some money and aren t familiar with the competition you might as well be going into battle blindfolded. So how do you get started ...

Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, from 10am to 2pm PDT. While you won't be able to log in to your account during these hours, the maintenance won't affect your ad targeting or delivery and your earnings will still be tracked in your reports like always.To celebrate the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games, here's the start time of the maintenance in past, present, and future host cities for the Summer Olympics:Montreal - 1pm SaturdayLondon - 6pm SaturdayAthens - 8pm SaturdayBeijing - 1am SundaySydney - 3am SundayWe hope the maintenance period will give you an opportunity to catch a few matches and root for your home country!Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

We often receive questions from new publishers about what these two terms mean, and we'd like to help you understand the difference.Invalid clicks are clicks for which we decide not to charge our AdWords advertisers, since they may artificially drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue. These include extraneous clicks without any value to the advertiser, such as the second click of a double-click. They also include many other types of clicks that we've determined aren't motivated by genuine user interest."Invalid clicks" are often confused with "clicking on your own ads". However, we'd like to stress that invalid clicks are generally any clicks that artificially inflate advertiser cost or publisher revenue, regardless of their source.Click fraud is a subset of invalid clicks that are generated with malicious or fraudulent intent -- in other words, clicks that are intended to drive up advertiser cost or publisher revenue artificially. Sources for these clicks include, but are not limited to:

A publisher clicking on his own ads, or encouraging clicks on his ads

Users or family members clicking to support the site / publisher

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-click services and click-exchanges

Automated clicking tools, robots, or other deceptive software

The same principles above apply to ad impressions and conversions as well. Some sources of invalid impressions include, but are not limited to:

Excessive page refreshes, generated either manually or automatically

Third-party programs with user incentives, such as paid-to-surf or auto-surf programs

Third-party programs for purchasing fixed amounts of traffic, e.g. "$10 for 1,000 page views"

As a reminder, any method that artificially generates clicks, impressions, or conversions is strictly prohibited by our program policies. You can also find more information about these topics in our Invalid Clicks FAQ and our Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center.Updated links to resourcesPosted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team