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

Local Search to Grow from $3B to $13B by 2010

The Kelsey Group recently released a new forecast for the global online search market, which includes Internet Yellow Pages, local search and wireless. Based on their research they project the market to increase from the $3.4 billion it brought in last year to nearly $13 billion by 2010. Additionally The Kelsey Group projects a 30.5 percent growth rate over the next four years for the global online search market.

Yellow Pages revenues are forecast to increase by only 1.5 percent to reach $28.4 billion over the same time period. The Kelsey Group does not believe that IYP's will take the market share away from traditional Yellow Pages advertising, but possibly from sources such as classified ads.

Read the full article: http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3585511

Housingmaps.com combines Google's maps and Craiglist's real estate listings

Housingmaps.com is a nifty little website that takes the real estate listings in Craigslist, and overlays them as clickable points on the area related Google map. Housingmaps makes sorting through the apartment or real estate section of craigslist much more efficient, especially if you are looking for an apartment in a specific area. Additionally, Housingmaps displays the price, address, photos, and contact information of a listing from Craigslist while showing the user the exact position on the respective area map.

Hackers have also meshed Google Maps with sites like the photo-sharing service Flickr, Yahoo's traffic notifications, city transit maps and others. This merging of powerful data and programs to create useful daily online programs is a trend that is likely to increase in popularity. At some point I fully expect the larger companies to start merging their services legitimately, but until then there are useful simple sites like Housingmaps.com.
Check out the full article here: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,67514-0.html

A couple important local search statistics

A hot search marketing topic of late seems to focus around local search. Here are some local search statistics... If you are interested in learning more about local search visit us on the web at www.gdmi.net.

Quick Stats
- There are approximately 300 million searches per day for information on the Internet (Nielsen/NetRatings 2005)

- 60% of activity online is one way or another “related to local content” (Google 5/03)- For every one dollar U.S. consumers spend online, another five or six are going to offline purchases that are influenced by online research (MIT Technology Review, April 2005, "E-Commerce Gets Smarter“)

- 97% of Internet users in the U.S. gather shopping information online, and of those consumers 51% explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline” (NPD Group)

Internet users are looking for “Local" businesses”
- 117 million Internet users accounted for over 3.7 billion searches conducted on the Internet in the month of August 2004 (comscore qsearch, 01/2004-4/2004)

- 25% of ALL commercial Internet searches are conducted by users looking for local merchants (Kelsey-Bizrate 2004)- 35% of ALL searches are “local” (DM News)

Note: That means that there are over 300 million local merchant searches per month (Q1 2004)