» The search engine marketing dictionary
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A term traditionally used to describe the top portion of a newspaper. In email or web marketing it means the area of content viewable prior to scrolling. Some people also define above the fold as an ad location at the very top of the screen, but due to banner blindness typical ad locations do not perform as well as ads that are well integrated into content. If ads look like content they typically perform much better.
See Also: Google AdSense heat map - shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
A link which shows the full URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.
Example absolute link
<a href="http://bm-media.co.uk/folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>
Example relative link
<a href="../folder/filename.html">Cool Stuff</a>
Microsoft's cost per click ad network. While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft's limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.
See also:
AdCenter - sign up for an account
Microsoft AdLabs - view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.
Google's contextual advertising network. Publishers large and small may automatically publish relevant advertisements near their content and share the profits from those ad clicks with Google.
AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.
AdSense ad auction formats include
- cost per click - advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
- CPM - advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.
AdSense ad formats include
- text
- graphic
- animated graphics
- videos
In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on
- how niche their site is
- how commercially oriented their site is
- the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical
It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.
Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following
- AdSense
- affiliate marketing
- direct ad sales
- selling your own products and services
- a mixture of the above
See also:
Google AdSense program - sign up as an ad publisher
Google AdWords - buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.
Google's advertisement and link auction network. Most of Google's ads are keyword targeted and sold on a cost per click basis in an auction which factors in ad clickthrough rate as well as max bid. Google is looking into expanding their ad network to include video ads, demographic targeting, affiliate ads, radio ads, and traditional print ads.
AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.
See also:
Google AdWords - sign up for an advertiser account
Google Advertising Professional Program - program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
Google AdWords Learning Center - text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section.
AdWords Keyword Tool - shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates.
Google Traffic Estimator - estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.
Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other's affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.
Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).
Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of
- algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
- manual review; and,
- implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.
See also:
Commission Junction - probably the large affiliate network
Linkshare - another large affiliate network
Performics - another large affiliate network
Azoogle Ads - ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
CPA Empire - similar to AzoogleAds
Amazon Associates - Amazon's affiliate program
Clickbank - an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information
Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.
Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.
See also:
Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data - mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.
Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.
See also
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Example usage
<img src="http://www.bm-media.co.uk/images/whammy.gif" height="140" width="120" alt="Press Your Luck Whammy." />
See also
See also:
See also:
Amazon.com - official site
Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.
See also:
Google Analytics - Google's free analytics program
Conversion Ruler - a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
ClickTracks - downloadable and web based analytics software
Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.
Example of anchor text:
<a href="http://www.bm-media.co.uk">Search Engine Optimisation</a>
Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.
See also:
Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
[audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
See also:
See also:
Ask Sponsored Listings - Ask syndicates AdWords ads, but also sells internal pay per click ads as well
Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.
Example potential topical authorities:
- the largest brands in your field
- the top blogger talking about your subject
- the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic
See also:
Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
Jon Klienberg's Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
See also:
If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API.
A few popular bid management tools are
- Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
- BidRank
- KeywordMax
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