Hypothetical – Goo or No Goo

Happy Wednesday everyone. I have a pretty simple hypothetical today that has to do with the monopoly of search, Google. I know, define monopoly and they’re not quite there “yet”, but well on their way.

With that being said, we all know how important Google is if you’re doing anything online that involves driving people to your website. But let’s not forget the other search engines out there that make up the rest of the search. There could be a “millionairesearch.com” out there that only millionaires search. (Update, this site really exists! HA) Why would you forget that group of people? You could own that one market and make more money than trying to compete in Google with the 10’s of thousands of other advertisers in your market.

Anyhow, you get my point. So here is the hypothetical for today:

Would you be willing to give up all of your listings in Google, but in exchange, your website listing will appear in the #1 position for all of your keywords in every other search website on the net. This includes Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask, AltaVista and many others.

Basically, you have the chance to be seen by 35-40% of all searchers online or take what Google gives you naturally, plus all other engines.

Would you accept this offer?

LinkWorth Affiliates – Link Wisely

If you participate in our affiliate program, this post should be beneficial to you. It’s how to link with your affiliate code but conceal your affiliate link.

Affiliate links are usually not search engine friendly, so making them a bit more friendly is always beneficial. There are FOUR EASY STEPS to setup your affiliate links and this can work for any affiliate links you might have.

This not only helps you make the links friendly, but if the affiliate link ever changes, it’s as simple as changing one line in your affiliate link file and it’s updated on all of your pages.

**Updated**
Regarding what to name your affiliate file(s), I originally said to name it unique to your own site. After thinking further, I realized that a lot of webmasters want to completely hide who they’re working with from the search engines. If this is something that is a concern for you, here are two additional steps to add:

• Name your affiliate file with common words found on all sites. Example names: file.php, html.php, page.php, add.php

  Or make it even tougher and use their names: google.php, search.php, yahoo.php, googlebot.php

• Now prevent search bots from following your links. Use the rel=”nofollow” when linking to your affiliate file. For example, if you name your affiliate file “google.php”, link to the file like this:

  Affiliate

  You can also use your robots.txt file to block them from reading your affiliate file(s).

  Disallow: /path/to/google.php

Of course, the last two steps are only necessary if you want to disguise who you’re affiliated with. I am seeing more and more affiliate links in the SERP’s ranked really well, so if you don’t need to hide things, shoot for being ranked. Having your affiliate link ranked well translates into more money in your pocket!

**Updated Again**
Muhammad added a JavaScript technique of setting up your affiliate links I thought was worthy of a read.

Better Late Than Never – A Late Night Hypothetical

Today’s hypothetical has to do with flying and being invisible.

You are awarded with either the ability to fly or the ability to be invisible when you want. Of course, this is a hypothetical, so they don’t come without a catch.

If you choose the ability to fly, you also will become horribly afraid of heights and getting more than 10 feet above the ground will give you an instant stomach ache that only goes away when you’re back on the ground. It’s something that you’ll never get over and will often cause violent nauseous episodes.

If you choose the ability to be invisible, the minute you become invisible, you also lose the ability to see anything. All other senses still work, but as soon as others are unable to see you, you cannot see anything.

Which would you choose?

Et tu, AdSense?

We’re all aware that Google AdSense “matches ads to your site’s content” right? (At least in theory.)

And I think it’s safe to assume that we know how Google feels about paid links, right? Ahem…

Well, that’s precisely why I think the subject of this post is so ironic.

Early on there were countless instances where Google would display AdSense ads that were completely off-topic to the publisher’s site. I remember reading all of the grumbles and growls about it…especially a couple years back. Now, though, I think they do a pretty good job of sending targeted ads to the right places, wouldn’t you agree?

Keeping this in mind, I was doing some research for a client today and I came across a post on Search Engine Land that caught my eye. It wasn’t the title of the post that caught my eye nor was it the author. (Although I have MASSIVE amounts of respect for Barry…just stay with me.) No, what caught my eye were the AdSense ads being displayed a couple paragraphs under the title.

It wasn’t until after I had wiped the tears of laughter from my eyes that I was able to take that screenshot.

What’s so funny about it, you ask? If you’re aware of the whole Google Mini link debate you’ll know what I mean.

Basically, in return for purchasing the Google Mini search appliance you are rewarded with a link to your site. Now, let’s piece that together real quick: you buy something from Google and they link to your site. Sounds like a paid link, right?

Of course it does. It is.

But that’s old news and I’ve already heard Google’s defense that these links don’t pass juice blah, blah, blah.

The true irony to me is that Google’s own product seems to be “turning the knife” on Google itself here. I mean, right smack-dab in the middle of a blog post about paid links is an AdSense ad for the Google Mini…which doubles as Google’s own paid link product! Giggle.

I guess maybe Google is doing too good of a job at matching AdSense with relevant content, huh?!

LinkWorth Participates in Local Career Fairs

The beginning of the year is always a great time to start things off right! Maybe its a few extra pounds from the holidays you need to get rid of. Or it could be you have decided to stop spending extra money here and there and begin saving for your child’s college education with the best experts at Trilogy Education Services. Moreover, it could be that you have decided you need a career change. You want to do something that makes you happy and this is the year you intend on pursuing that dream! Well, LinkWorth might actually be able to help you out.

In the next couple of months, we are going to be participating in a few local job fairs. On January 30th , LinkWorth will be at the Tarrant County College Southeast Campus. We will be there from 9-2PM. February 5th, LinkWorth will be exhibiting at University of North Texas from 10-2PM. Last but not least, February 19th, we will be over at the University of North Texas Dallas campus from 2-5PM. If you think you might be a good fit for our company and want to see what we have to offer, come stop by at one of these job fairs.

We would love to see you there!

The Ultimate Up-sell – When Is It Too Much?

If you offer a multitude of products and/or services online, it’s always beneficial to up-sell or cross-sell your customer. It provides an extra benefit to the customer and it adds to the companies sales. But when is it too much?

This idea hit me while on Dell.com looking at their computers. The great part about Dell is you can build, or customize your computer to exactly what you want. What I think is not so great about Dell is all of the up-selling they throw at you while doing so.

I decided to see just how far Dell would take customizing a single computer. I wanted to select every option and the most expensive of each option. I was presented with 173 options while building a single computer. What did a $1,200 computer end up costing with all of the up-selling? $45,784!

See Entire List (pdf)

I think up-selling is a wise choice for any business that is building a shopping cart, but I think there is a cut off point when it becomes too much. When putting together an order process, you typically want to make it as quick and painless as possible and your sales will greatly increase. Too many options gives the customer too many chances of getting frustrated, confused or changing their mind.

In my case, I planned on purchasing a computer and never did.

Hypothetical – White Hat or Black Hat

It’s Wednesday and time for another hypothetical. This week I figured we would bring it back to our industry. It’s something that everyone in our industry is up against at one time or another, but let’s see which direction you go.

You come up with a new idea that you think will do really well online. A website is put together, product developed and you’re now at the point of promoting your new site and product. You’re faced with two options:

1. Black Hat Techniques – You can apply a few black hat techniques you know are against the search engine terms but the techniques guarantee you’ll be put in the number one spot for all of your search terms for a minimum of 3 months. The problem is, your site can be dropped out of sight at any moment after the 3 month mark.

   or

2. White Hat Techniques – You go strictly white hat and stay so far away from anything shady, other white hats look at your site and think you’re the cleanest webmaster on the block. The only guarantee is you’ll be in the top 20 for a few of your search terms after 6 months of hard work. The problem is, 50% of the sites ranking higher than you are using black hat techniques and you’ll never be able to out rank them and the other 50% are large corporations and wikipedia that will always be ranked higher.

Which way do you turn and why?

Being Creative With Google Search Operators

A while back this little trick was being passed around how to search for free tunes through Google. A year and a half later, people have really taken the power of Google search to a whole new level. I was shown a site where you just enter a song or artist and it does the complicated query for you and spits out the Google results. After a little more digging around, I found several pretty cool sites for finding music, video and other files that Google knows about.

• Musgle – Free music search that requires a song or artist submission and Google tells you where to find it.
• G2P – (Google to Person) After a first search, a top frame remains with a search field and drop down options to narrow your search down. In the bottom frame you’ll see the Google results.
• Search Hacker – this tool uses the Google Coop search to display results. Once you enter your search, it will then provide a list of extensions to narrow your search. You click that extension and it shows the results you’re looking for.
• Papaiti – a MP3 search tool. Enter a song and the artist, then search. You can enter one or both. Results are displayed in an iframe.
• Tyoogle – is a very unique name, almost confusing. The home page is also a bit confusing, but that might be the whole point. Right above the search box you’ll see two links “searchtype” and “advanced”. Searchtype will let you pick what type of search and advanced will let you select the file types you’re looking for. When you’re ready to go, click the shocking button labeled “Die in a Fire” and you’ll get the Google results. For a new search you’ll need to go back to the start page.
• Index of – Another Google coop powered tool that applies the same type of operators as the others. Plug in your search term in the left sidebar, pick the file type and search. The results will display in an iframe in the main body.

Now this is where I say this post is purely for educational purposes. Always be careful downloading files and consider using something like Tor for a little protection. Almost like putting a nofollow on your downloads. 🙂

This does illustrate the power of Google’s search and the fact you need to be sure and hide those directories if you run Apache. Especially if you have files stored you do not want to share, or bandwidth to lose. If you want to hide your directory listings, two easy steps:

• Options -indexes – place this in your .htaccess file.
• Blank index.html – place an empty html file inside the directory to hide. This method requires a blank html in all directories to conceal.

*Free admission for Entrepreneur Expo*

On Friday, February 8th, LinkWorth will be exhibiting in the Entrepreneur Expo at the Fort Worth Convention Center. It’s one of our first trade shows/expos to be involved in locally. We hope all goes well and are able to introduce LinkWorth to some local businesses around here. For any of you that live in the DFW region,(or if you simply want to fly down here for the expo and grace us with your presence) we have free admission tickets that we can give you so you don’t have to pay at the door. Email one of us or comment on the blog and we will get you taken care of.

Facebook Social Ads – Not So Great

In case you haven’t been around lately, social networks have been the craze lately and everything that comes out now has some sort of social spin to it. So, if you own a business, it’s imperative that you try to reach out to maximum number of people on social media with the help of the Marketing Heaven. Realizing networks like Facebook are full of millions of people, it would only make sense that advertising in their network would be a great thing. I’m here to disagree.

I setup an ad with Facebook’s “Social Ads” on November 26th to see how it would perform. Not knowing what to expect, I started off slow with a low CPC (cost per click). I cautiously watched, day to day, and was shocked at what I was seeing. I slowly kept increasing my CPC up to $5.00 per click. Impressions were increasing and clicks were nowhere to be found. I decided to hold off and just let it ride on the $5.00 per click.

As of today, here are the stats:

1. Impressions: 147,258
2. # of Clicks : 11
3. CTR (%) : .01

Some may say, “You aren’t doing something right”. This might be right, but it’s not like I’ve never worked with online advertising before. I’ve tweaked, read information, moved bids and several other things. I think it comes down to something that I’ve thought for quite some time now; social networks are not that great of a place for small businesses to advertise. Looking for a little reassurance, I found this from someone who is fairly knowledgeable in the online space. I usually don’t buy into much he says, but I think he hit the nail on the head with this one. I think promotional products like a Custom Towel can be a more cost-effective way to convert visitors to loyal customers.

Have a better result with social ads? Let us know.