Google Sitemaps: The Newest Way To Monitor and Manage Your Domains In Google

The purpose of the Google Sitemaps project is enabling webmasters to inform and direct the Google spiders through their website. Sitemaps provide crawlers with information about the website’s structure as well as data about its pages, which leads to, according to Google, an improved indexing process.

Google Sitemaps is a great way to analyze whether Google has indexed all your pages on all of your domains. Furthermore you can monitor the Page Rank on all of your domain and see all the search terms in Google that resulted in traffic to your domain pages. In Sitemaps you can now also see what your position is on the search results for terms you received clicks from.

I will have future articles on Google's latest creation in the very near future as I start to test using sitemaps for several of my domains. Sitemaps has the possibility to be a major development in the way Search Engine Marketing professionals address managing and updating their sites within Google's search engine.

Check out Google Sitemaps for yourself(it's still in beta)

Click Fraud Less Than Expected, Monitoring Firm Says

Click fraud comes in two major forms: competitive and network. The former is when a competitor clicks on a business's ad to drive up the cost of the advertisement, and the latter is when a third-party site hosting the ad manufactures phony clicks in order to get more money from the search engine.

Click fraud has become a hot topic and a fear of many online advertisers because of the popularity of the pay-per-click advertising model and the already increasing prices due to competition.

Click fraud Index is a company that monitors click fraud and they discovered in their research that click fraud numbers thought to be 20% to 35% were greatly exaggerated. The average click-fraud rate across search-advertising industries is 13.7 percent, which is substantially less than the industry-expected 20 percent to 35 percent. The firm also reported that click fraud was far less on tier one search providers, such as Yahoo and Google, than on tier two or tier three providers. The first category had a rate of 12.1 percent, while the remaining two were 21.3 percent and 29.8 percent, respectively.


Read the full article: http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/186700511

Politics and Cartoons? The New Wave of Campaign Viral Marketing

Yes you are reading the title correct, the newest craze right now in political advertising is spoofing your opponent in an online cartoon. Cartoon viral campaign ads have really taken off in the past couple years due in part to the widespread popularity of a spoof cartoon in the last political election called "Jib Jab". This form of marketing creates a buzz, and often gets picked up by local media. Additionally, the cost of cartoon viral marketing is very cheap once the masses find out about them and start emailing them to their friends.


Read the full article and watch some of the cartoons here: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,70707-0.html?tw=wn_index_24

Podcast Advertising On The Rise

A new report out by PQ Media forecasts a huge growth in alternative media most notably Rss Feeds, Blogs, and Podcasts. According to PQ Media podcast advertising will grow to over $327 million annually in advertising by 2010, while blog advertising will rise to $300 million within the same time frame. Additionally total spending on user-generated online media is expected to grow to over $750 million by 2010.

"Blog, podcast and RSS advertising are being driven by some of the same factors boosting the growth of the overall alternative media sector: continued audience fragmentation, the perceived ineffectiveness of traditional advertising, and the elusive but coveted 18- to 34-year-old demographic," says Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media. "Blog, podcast and RSS advertising have demonstrated an ability to reach younger demographics as well as influentials, and the media tend to be highly engaging. These are attractive trends to brand marketers that are focused on return on investment."

Read the full article http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9146.asp