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Dragons invest in antiques valuation website

If you watched last night’s episode of Dragon’s Den on BBC 2 you will have seen the website valuemystuffnow.com. The owner of the website, antiques expert Patrick van der Vorst, was seeking £100,000 investment for his online antiques valuation website. In his pitch he mentioned how visitors to his website would upload photographs of their antiques in order to receive a valuation within 48 hours via email.

It sounded like a good idea, but as Duncan Bannatyne and Peter Jones pointed out, with an average order value of around £4.50, a low conversion rate and a reliance on Google Adwords for traffic he was never actually going to make a profit. This was compounded by the fact that every time Patrick spoke of what he needed the investment for he stated ‘Google Adwords’ in order to increase his traffic levels to circa 100,000 uniques per month.

Every time he mentioned this, I shouted at the TV ‘NO!”. This is not the way to increase your traffic levels and, as Peter and Duncan had already identified, you wouldn’t make a profit doing that. Yet still Deborah Meaden kept repeating that they needed to increase their advertising on ‘Pay Per Clicks’ (as she called it).

Value My Stuff Now

Value My Stuff Now

Surprisingly, Deborah and Theo Paphitis (more…)

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Filed under: Content,PPC — Written by Carl posted on August 31, 2010 at 10:32 am

The difference between SEO and PPC

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

No, seriously, why is a raven like a writing desk? Thousands of readers have pondered this question, albeit briefly, in the last hundred and fifty years. Eventually, they give up on the riddle, because it’s impossible to find an answer. Lewis Carroll threw it in the way of his young Alice to further confuse her in her adventures in Wonderland.

To anyone of a logical frame of mind, the real answer is, ‘it’s not.’ Ravens and writing desks are two different things. They may come into contact with each other, but they really aren’t alike at all.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

When it comes to your online plan, PPC is your raven and SEO is your writing desk. The two things really aren’t alike at all. So why do many website owners insist on trying to make them the same thing?

Lots of businesses try to lump their SEO jobs into the general Internet (more…)

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Filed under: PPC,SEO — Written by Cheryl posted on August 13, 2010 at 7:00 am

Adsense indexing your bookmarks?

Most people understand how Google Adsense works. Google Adsense is a money-making program for website owners that allows them to place code on their websites that has been provided by Google in order to display adverts. When someone clicks on one of the adverts, Google and the website owner take a share of the money charged to the Advertiser, who has uploaded the ads via Google Adwords (also known as PPC).

Now – Google determines what adverts go where by indexing the content of the website in question, so that if your website is about dogs, you’ll see adverts relating to dogs. You might see ads for dog baskets, dog insurance and other related dog products, but what you shouldn’t see is ads for mountain bikes from Halfords.

That’s what I saw recently on a website that had nothing to do with mountain bikes. The odd placement of ads was dismissed as simply Google placing random adverts until it had enough time to index the website in question in order to (more…)

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Filed under: Google,PPC — Written by Darren posted on June 3, 2010 at 7:28 am

SEO is important says 95% of businesses

According to a recent survey from the online magazine Practical eCommerce, 95% of online businesses stated that search engine optimisation was an important part of their marketing strategy.

The survey was conducted in April this year, showing an overwhelming usage of SEO within businesses online. 3.1% of those who responded didn’t know whether SEO was important, and one solitary respondent stated that SEO was not important at all – wouldn’t like to be working for them!

82.8% of those who responded said that they have had SEO on their website and that it was optimised for search engines. 11% of the respondents said their website had not been optimised, and 6.3% didn’t know either way. The respondents who supported SEO used words such as ‘imperative’ and ‘essential’ to describe it, but the figures showed a discrepancy between the (more…)

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Filed under: PPC,Research,SEO — Written by Matt posted on May 13, 2010 at 10:17 am

John Prescott advocates Google click fraud

Followers of UK politics are well used to the major parties undertaking ‘dirty tricks campaigns’ in the run up to general elections, but Labour MP John Prescott has gone a stage further in the run up to this year’s election.

Prescott has urged followers of his Twitter to go to Google and to type in terms related to the election so that the Tory party’s Adwords Ads appear, and then to click on them to waste the Conservatives’ Adwords budget.

Clicks on Adwords cost the advertiser every time a click is a made, and once the daily budget is exceeded, the ads will stop appearing. However, clicking on Adwords Ads deliberately to stop a competitor’s ads appearing is click fraud, and Google takes this very seriously. Also, there are measures in place to detect when multiple clicks are coming from the same source, or patterns of clicks are emerging just to use up an advertiser’s budget. It is therefore likely that Labour’s efforts wouldn’t have (more…)

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Filed under: Google,PPC,Twitter — Written by Cheryl posted on April 9, 2010 at 10:08 am

Facebook beats Google in traffic war

According to research released by Hitwise, the analyst charged with looking at all things Internet based, Facebook has finally eclipsed the unbeatable Google in terms of web traffic in the US. The thinkable happened in the week ending March 13th, and saw Facebook pass Google for visits that week. Facebook amounted 7.97% of all web traffic that week, more than Google’s 7.03%.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has achieved more traffic than Google either, as it hit the top spot on January 1st 2010, Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Eve 2009 – with its users wishing their friends family season’s greetings.

Since the same period last year, Facebook’s share of web traffic has increased by a staggering 185%. Google meanwhile has only enjoyed a paltry increase of 9%.

Does this mean Google’s crown is slipping and Facebook is the new king of the Internet? Does this mean that advertisers should shut down their Google Adwords accounts and start using Facebook’s PPC system? Does it mean Bing will creep up on the blindside and (more…)

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Filed under: Facebook,Google,PPC,Research — Written by Matt posted on March 17, 2010 at 7:22 am

Advertising for an ‘SEO Genius’

When companies advertise for SEO staff they have to decide what they’re looking for. Are they looking for someone who can learn SEO, but has a technical grounding in programming languages, perhaps a graduate? Or, are they looking for someone who knows SEO and has experience of the industry?

Perhaps they’re looking for someone highly skilled in SEO, who has experience of heading up SEO campaigns, introducing new SEO practices and who also follows the industry, keeping abreast of new developments. This last requirement is what a recent job spec we saw advertising for an SEO genius seemed to be looking for.

They appeared to want someone who knew the industry inside out, someone who not only knew SEO, but knew what was coming. The advert asked for someone understood tomorrow’s SEO technologies, not just (more…)

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Filed under: PPC,SEO — Written by Cheryl posted on February 4, 2010 at 8:00 am

Can you guarantee SEO results?

Many SEO companies, or rather Internet marketing companies and websites, claim to be able to get guarantee first page listings for their clients. Some companies even claim to be able to get #1 rankings within 24 hours, or your money back.

This sounds wonderful doesn’t it?

However, as with most things that sound too good to be true, it is. Whenever the word ‘guarantee’ is used in relation to SEO services you should stay well away. Search engine rankings can never be guaranteed, and no ethical SEO company would ever offer guaranteed search engine rankings.

So are they lying when they offer guaranteed rankings?

Often when rankings are guaranteed, they relate to one of two things. Neither of which is any use to you. Here are the two usual cons with ‘guaranteed search engine (more…)

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Filed under: PPC,SEO Advice — Written by Cheryl posted on January 17, 2010 at 8:06 am
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