Popular screen resolution

See the chart below for the popular display resolution people are using. Note that around 1/5 of internet population are still using 800x600 and more and more people are using 1024x768. However, webmaster should understand his/her target audiences to decide a right resolution to use for the his/her website.

For example, if your audiences are people with low technical background in developing countries, you might want to target for 800x600. However, if your target is the design guru or technology pioneer, you should adjust your site for a higher resolution. Use the web statistics available for your site to know your audiences.

I have obtained the information from the following site: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Browser Statistics: Firefox is getting more popular

When you design a webpage, you should not only optimize it for Internet Explorer. Although it is still the most popular web browser, Firefox is getting more and more popular, especially in Europe, and amongst the techie and Macintosh users.

Check out the statistics below, which I obtained from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, you can see the total market share of Internet Explorer has decreased while the market share of Firefox has increased. The share of Internet Explorer has dropped from 85% in 2002 to below 60% in 2006.

Actually, when looking at the browser used to surf my blog (see chart below, results are in %, up to Nov 2006), it shows a similar trend. You might find an even higher percentage of people using Firefox here as many of my visitors (like you) are techie or e-marketers which are the population more likely to use Firefox.

FireFox has tabbed browsers, advanced bookmark manager system, live bookmarks, and higher security. It is small, fast and easy to use. Moreover, Firefox blocks pop-up and is not Active-X friendly, so spyware and adware will not be installed automatically when you visited certain website. These might lead to its growing popularity while IE is more vulnerable to various security concerns.

Click the download icon on the right panel to download FireFox with Google Toolbar. You will love Firefox once you tried it! It is a much better browser than IE. Try it for a week and be sure to share your experience with me!

Using Google Toolbar with FireFox gives you the following advantages:

1) Enhanced search box - give you suggestions, spelling correction and search history as your type
2) Safe Browsing - Give you warning for webpage that might be unsafe to browse

3) SpellCheck - Check your spelling whenever you type in web forms

4) Autofill - Automatically fill out forms for faster online shopping

5) Subscribe RSS feed with just one click

6) PageRank Display - tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing. I would say this is a very useful feature for e-marketers. You should always check the Pagerank for your site.

Many more features for you to discover. A tool should not be missed. I personally love it! If you are not using it now, try it out today!

Where to report spam violation (link techniques to fool search engines)?

If you spot unethical spam techniques on website (whether it is your competitor or not), you can report to search engines directly using the following email address/website:

Search Engine Contact:
ask.com reportviolations@askjeeves.com
Open directory staff@dmoz.org
Google www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
MSN support.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx
Yahoo! add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

Be sure to include the followings in your spam report:

1. The search term and the inappropriate URL associated with it
2. The suspected spam technique used being used back up with the evidence to support your belief
3. State why do you think this spam is preventing searchers to locate the best search result.

Search engines receive many violation reports everyday and will investigate each claim seriously and act quickly to penalize or ban true violators.

Good linkages are important for your page rank too!

Wondering why some pages are very well optimized (with lots of keywords) and still not rank as high as the other pages that has less keywords?

The answer might lie here.. the pages which rank high might have a lot of good links (will define good below) to its pages. Many search marketing experts claims that as little as 25 high-quality links to a site can increase its ranking in search engine significantly. However, links from 25 non-related sites will not help to rank a page any higher.

Google places a very heavy weight in link popularity. Others, might not weight it as strong as Google, still place an important weight for links in their ranking algorithms.

So does that mean you just need to work on getting as much links as possible, and you can rank high? Well... It depends...

We need to look at the followings:
1) Link Quantity
2) Link Quality
3) Anchor Text
4) Link Relevancy

Link Quantity
- Usually, page got more links should rank higher. However, not all links created equal. We still need to look at the quality. If the quality is the same, we will look at quantity. For example, if my site has 10 grade A links and yours has 5 grade A links, mine will rank higher than yours.

Link Quality
- It concerns about where your links are from. If your links are from a very popular site (a site with lots of links to it), this linkage is a good linkage.However, when comparing links from 2 sites with the same high popularity, one link is 1 of 5 available links from the popular site A and the other link is 1 of the 50 available links from the popular site B, of course the link from site B will be seen as of higher quality.

Anchor Text
- Anchor text is very important to search engines as it is the text a visitor clicks and to follow a link. It is one of the key page ranking factor in the search engine algorithms. Page search queries tend to return the linked page that have variants of the queried terms in anchor text.

Link Relevancy
- Since words can have different meaning, it is not enough for anchor text to use similar words. The links you get have to be contextually relevant to your site. Search engine will look at the words around the anchor text, words on the entire page and the entire page being linked from. By doing this, search engines can return pages which are more relevant and useful from a search query.

Some Don'ts or Things to beware of:
Don't try to fool search engines by doing the following stupid link tricks. You can jeopadize your site ranking by doing so:

1) Blog Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated blogs with your URL to impress search engine (increase one way links)

2) Guest Book Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated Guest books to increase one way links

3) Link Farms - Do not try to artificially build link popularity by fabricating sites that have have many links to the sites you want to boost traffic. Do not post your site in link farms nor set up numerous sites just to contain thousands of your URL be crawled by search engines. Search engines will penalize your site if found. Your competitors or anyone can report your trick to search engines (see the next post).

4) Hidden links - Do not load up hidden links on high ranking pages to the pages you want to boost traffic

5) Link E-mail spam - Do not use a software to spam different webmasters requesting links from their sites

6) Fake two way links - Many site will link to yours if you agree to put their links on your page. However, some try to trick you and other webmasters by utilizing links cannot be detected by search engine. By doing this, not only you are not getting the reciprocal linkages, but only your "partner" is getting credit from you for the more valuable one way link.

The best image host for your blog, website or e-bay store!

Need to host images for your blog, your website or your e-bay store? Seriously, I have tried many different image hosts until I found this one: Allyoucanupload.com. Personally, I think this one is the best!!!

The upload time is fast and it is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is to select your file and click the "upload" button. You can then copy the html code generated (the one appropriate for your use) and paste it in your webpage or blog. See the image below for the 8 different html codes the site will generate to fit your different needs.



For the more than 10 image hosts I have tried, this one is the best - the easiest and the quickest way to host and post images.

Click on the logo below and check it out:

Some very interesting Blog statistics from comScore's study

Recently, I came across a very interesting study done by comScore. Below are some statistics you might find useful or interesting to know.

Quoting from the comScore study:
1) Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women (hey.. so my blog has a potential to be popular - mine is a tech blog authored by a woman! :) )

Check out the statistics below:



2) Compared to an average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections.

Check out the statistics below:






(mmm... oh well, for this one, I think it does apply to me. See, I am young, and connected to the web on hgh speed internet. Still need some more time to be wealthy though...)

3) Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online.
(For this one, I think it is just a corelation but not a cause and effect! Personally, I browse a lot of pages and shop online a lot before I became a blogger! I bought books, cosmetics, threatre tickets online way before I became a blogger!)

4) Blogspot.com (Blogger.com), was launched in 1999 by Pyra Labs, and now owned by Google, is the most popular blog host. (Now you know why I switched my blog here!) Believe it or not, once I host my blog with blogspot.com, the traffic to my blog increased. I kept track of the blog traffic using statcounter, a very good free web statistics software. Check it out and see if it is good for your use (The free version has some limitations). See below for the traffic distribution for different blog hosts:



For more interesting blog statistics, click here to see the full study.

Constantcontact.com is a easy to use web based software for your e-mail marketing needs. It manages subscribers (both unsubscribe and new subscription), bounce-back, lists all wrong e-mail addresses, gives me open rate and also click thru rate for individual articles in my e-newsletter.

See below for an example of the summary statistics generated by constantcontact.com:

Below is an example of bounce-back details provided by constantcontact.com for a particular e-mail campaign:

Is constantcontact.com right for you?

Benefits of using Constantcontact.com:

Subscriber lists:
Constantcontact.com is a very easy to use tool. I can easily divide my subscribers into different groups to send them different versions of my e-newsletter, based on their interests, customer status or geographics area. When new subscribers want to sign up for my e-newsletter, they will be prompt to subscribe to one of the available groups that fits their interests.

Design template:
Constantcontact.com offers many different easy-to-use e-mail marketing template. You can also further customize it to fit your needs. In my case, I have customized a template to abide by my company's branding requirements and to create an unique e-newsletter design.

Pricing:
Pricing of the tool is very reasonable. Be sure to check it out at www.constantcontact.com. I like the fact that I only have to pay a fixed monthly fee based on my list size. You are entitled for discounts if you prepay for 6 months or a year. You can send as many e-mail campaigns as you want with no limitation/ extra costs. For many other e-mail marketing services, they charge you based on the number of e-mail you sent. Although the cost per email will be cheaper if you are sending out more email, the later is harder for me to plan my annual e-mail marketing budget as the cost is not fixed but based on number of e-mail I sent.

IT resources:
Another good thing about using web based service is that you do not need to invest more into your server or IT equipment to accomodate the hardware/bandwidth requirements for sending out huge number of emails at a time. If you purchase an e-mail marketing software and installed it in-house, you might need to subscribe for additional bandwidth for your server, new computer/server and using a specific platform required. Lots of headache there. With a web based service, you do not have to worry about these.

Advanced html editor:
Constantcontact.com is so easy to use and you don't need to be a seasoned html programmer to create a professional e-mail campaign. Of course, it will be beneficial to know a little bit of html. You would need to go to the html advanced editor to edit the following info in your e-mail campaign done in constantcontact.com.

1) If you want to change the "Subscribe now/Join us" heading, text and button, you would need to go to the advanced editor to change the codes there. In my case, I need to change it into French, so I need to go into the advanced editor to modify it.

Limitations in using Constantcontact.com:

Some text cannot be changed:
1) There are 2 lines that cannot be changed, even in the advanced editor. It is a bit inconvenience for me as those lines are in English and I cannot change them into French in my French e-newsletter. I have contacted constantcontact.com and they have told me those 2 lines are hard coded in the software and cannot be altered.
These 2 lines are:
i) "To no longer receive our emails, click to unsubscribe." This line appears in the beginning of your e-mail.
ii) " This email was sent to myemail@email.com, by
yourcompany@email.com." This line appears at the end of your email.

Spam control:
Some ISPs / IT department in different companies have blacklisted anything sent from a constantcontact.com account. Their users have reported too many spam from the constantcontact domain. Although yours might not be a spam, your client requested to have information sent to them. Since the ISP has bloacked the domain, your email will not be received. If you can, ask your customer to submit a non-generic email address (e.g. do not use info@, sales@). These generic email will sometimes be blocked by the e-mail marketing software itself.


Graphics of your e-mail campaign got altered by web based e-mail host:
If your email campaign is targeted to non-business audiences, and the majority of which are using hotmail, gmail, yahoo type of accounts, constantcontact.com might not be an ideal tool to use. I have tried to send e-mail campaign to hotmail and gmail, the layout of my e-newsletter got altered, the graphics are not showing the way it suppose to be.

In my case it is not a big problem as my company is only dealing with business users and most of them do not use a web based e-mail address. However, if yours is a B2C business, you might want to double check if constantcontact.com is an ideal tool for you. Sign up for a free trial, create a test campaign and send to your hotmail/gmail/yahoo (any web based e-mail account) account, you will see if the software will alter your e-mail design layout.

Search Engine Optimization - Meta tags and title

Amongst page title, meta description, meta keywords, page title is the most important. However, the other two shouldn't be ignored also so never forget to put these in your website!

Page Title:

Page title tells the search engine what your page is about. Moreover, the title of your page will appear on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). Many sites put "Welcome to ABC's company website!". This tells the search engine nothing but your company name and definitely not beneficial to the searchability of your site. Since the text in the beginning are always the most important, if you really need to put your company name in the page title, please try to put it at the end. I would avoid words like "ABC company homepage" or "Welcome" but put in important and relevant keywords (should also appear in your body text of your page) that you page is about.

Put as much keywords (don't repeat keywords too much, as search engine will discard your keywords if they appear too often) as you can in your page title. Make sure these keywords are highly relevant to your website's content. One thing to keep in mind, don't exceed 65 characters for your page title. This is a maximum limit most search engine can truncate to.

Meta Description:

Although less search engines are utilizing the meta description on the SERP, some are still showing the meta description under the title in the SERP and that's why you should not be missing the meta description in your webpages. You can control what is the description of your site to be shown to the web surfers by using a meta description (for those search engines which are still utilizing the information) . Remember to place the important keywords together at the beginning of your meta description.

Nowadays, most serach engine uses the 200 characters appear near the keyword in your web page in the Snippet (The description of your site show to the web surfer on the SERP under your page title). Yahoo still utilizes the Meta description. Please do keep in mind, Google's snippet is shorter, around 100-150 characters long. Whereas Yahoo allows longer snippet with 150-200 characters. However, to design one that fits all, be precise and keep your meta description/ important idea around your keyword in your body text at around 150 characters.

Meta Keywords:

Many search engines are no longer utilizing the meta keyword tag, but yes, a few still do. When you put in the keyword tag, do not put in more than 20 keywords or key phrases separated by a comma. Make sure these keywords are relevant and descriptive of what your site is talking about.

Ok, I got the traffic, what's next?

In my opinion, in order for you to get leads from your website, you need 2 things:

1) Traffic
2) Compelling content

Yes, you have done all you can to improve your web site's searchability, buying paid inclusion ad to generate tons of traffic to your website. If you do not have content, people will still leave your site in no time and you still have no new customer, no conversion.

You need compelling content to keep people on your site, to look for information, and hopefully they will request more info from you, sign up for your e-newsletter or to make a purchase on your e-commerce site.
Avoid wasting the traffic generated, before doing SEO or paid inclusion and improving your site's organic searchability, you should better your site content first. (Once searchers found that your site has nothing interested them, they will not click on your site later on even you have updated your content!)

Put aside e-commerce here (I will talk about it in another post), by saying compelling content, I mean the followings:

1) Professional attractive web layout - clean and consistent layout, not too busy, easy to read- attractive graphics- easy navigation- simple and easy to use user interface - good site ergonomics
2) Create positive client experience - with multimedia, full of useful features, easy to use
3) Relevant content - Imagine yourself go to a website after clicking on a sponsor link or a result on SERP but found no relevant content when you get there, will you leave the site immediately?
4) Just-enough information - short and precise. Depends on the industry and products (especially for expensive business products which usually requires longer decision process), sometimes too much details on the website is no good. People will be overwhelm by the info and get frustrated as they cannot comprehend. Provide just-enough information to generate interest in your products and to encourage people to contact you for more information. (However, for e-commerce site, you need to put enough info there so people knows the product enough to be confident to purchase from you.)
5) Quick loading - If your site takes forever to load, who has the patience to wait and browse?

Using web analytics tool, like WebTrends (I use WebTrends before and now using SurfStatsLive for my company's site and the Free Statcounter for this blog), keep track of on average, how many pages a visitor visits (Total # of page viewed/ Total # of visits). You can know how "sticky" your site is and can make plan to improve your site (or keep on doing what is working).

Yes, always need to improve the stickiness of your page. You want your visitors to stay on your page longer to look for info and at the end to convert them into a customer.

Organic ranking Vs Paid inclusion

I would say, organic ranking (result ranked by search engine itself) and paid inclusion are both very important. They compliment each other to give you the maximum traffic you can get for your website.

Statistically, more than 70% of the web surfers would click on an organic search result on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and less than 30 % would click on a paid advertisement/ sponsored link. If your organic optimization is done very well, at least 80% of your traffic would be from organic search and less than 20 % would be from paid inclusion ad. My company's web traffic report shows similar statistics.

Try all ways you can to improve your organic searchability. After that, do a good research on keywords and then launch a paid inclusion campaign. Afterall, you just need to pay for all the clicks you get. You can also limit the number of clicks you want for a specified period. Trust me, the cost per lead from search engine marketing (SEM) is much cheaper than other traditional marketing methods. Moreover, SEM gives me much more qualified leads - in this case, web users search for us and are interested in our products. I don't need to go out to introduce my company and products, they come and knock on my door themselves. Which one do you think is better?

Of course, to succeed, you need to use good keywords and compelling Ads and site/page descriptions. So web surfers can locate your site, and would think your site is relevant to their search, so would click on your link for more information.

Know what your competitors are doing!

To beat your competitors, you need to know who they are and what they are doing.

First of all, I would go online and identify a few main competitors for my company (other than the ones I already know). I would type in some keywords (the most important for your business or the one you have bid heavily on), and see who is ranking high in different search engines and is also serving the area my company has business in.

Then, I will use the following tools to keep track of what my main competitors are doing:

1) Alexa.com - A free and very easy to use site to track the traffic of competitors' website. Are they doing better or worse? If they are doing better, try to investigate why. What they have done and you didn't or what you have done wrong. Try to find out what kind of optimization they have done.

2) Watchthatpage.com - I use this to monitor any updates on my competitors' website. Some people would use it to monitor price drop or increase in their competitors' sites. It is a free, very easy to use automated tool. You just have to open a free account and register every single page you would like to monitor on the site. Since changes on my competitors' sites are not frequent, I have scheduled the tool to send changes/updates to my email address once every Thursday. A very useful tool!

3) Archive.org - This free site brings you back to the older version of a website, before it is updated. You type in the website address and then choose from any archive date they have available to view the old version of the site. Very useful if you want to check what your competitors have on their sites a few weeks ago, before their recent updates.

4) Marketleap.com - This free site provide you with the following tool:
i) Link Popularity Check - Checks how many one way links your site
has from other sites.
ii) Search Engine Saturation - Checks the number of pages a given
search engine has in its index for your website domain.
iii) Keyword verification tool - Checks to see if your site is in the top
three pages of a search engine result for a specific keyword.

How to select your keywords for your search engine marketing campaign?

Try using the Google keyword Tool to start off your project. Personally, I would look at the "Keyword popularity" option. You can get the info of how popular a particular keyword is and its search volume.You can select the specific language and the country for your search. You can see the search volume and how competitive a keyword is.

Yahoo keyword tool will be a very useful tool also:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Use this tool to select the perfect keywords for your website:http://www.wordtracker.com/ or http://www.goodkeywords.com/

When you are selecting your keywords, remember:
- Don’t use Jargon, use the keywords the end users use to find your site
- Open to new keyword opportunities
- Monitor your keyword performance and get rid of the under performed keyword choices
- Use plurals instead of singular keywords (if you need to pick one)
- Sometimes, working / bidding on highly competitive keywords will not give you good results (Too many people fighting for it!). Instead, use highly relevant keywords with less search volume. It will still get you qualified lead and you will have a higher possibility of ranking higher in search engine.

For me, I will also go to my competitor's web site and see what keywords they are using. Most of the time, you can go to their website and select to view source from the view menu. Look at what keywords they used in their meta-keywords, meta description and Title. You can also type in those keywords in Google and see if they have bought any keywords in Google AdWord. Do the same for Yahoo and MSN.

We are in the third generation of the search engine marketing era!

Do you know? We are currently in the third generation of the search engine marketing era:

First generation: based on text on the page, including meta-tag and meta-description
Second generation: based on link analysis, e.g. reciprocal linkage
Third generation: vertical and personalize

What does the Third generation means?

Vertical search: It is a specialized search engine that mines data for one narrow niche of the market place. (it is more focus and even more efficient than PPC advertising) A good example would be http://www.kayak.com/ (A vertical search engine specifically for the travel/vacation industry)

Personalize: My Web in Google. Google reshapes your search results based on the followings:

- What you personally do or visit?
- What your friends do or visit?
- What people in a particular group, for example, live in the same country, enjoy the same sport do or visit?
- Content in your email.

Advantage of third generation:

- focus on key vertical for a specific industry
- have great content
- Especially great title and descriptions

Search marketing is going everywhere, anywhere you can type. In the future, maybe you can use it from your phone, PDA etc.

MSN is working very aggressively for search marketing. It is going after demographics, day parting (e.g. you only want clicks during the certain time of the day, only night or only day). When you pay for MSN AdCenter, they will give you the click in the population you want. (as accurately as the data users entered in their MSN passport account).

For the purpose of my company, at this point, I do not see the uses of the third generation search engine. First of all, our industry is very specific and we do not have a vertical search engine. For the personalize part, I think it is more applicable to B2C. Although I cannot use them for my company, I think the third generation search engine era is very powerful, gives online marketers lots of information and they will be able to target a very specified selected group of people!

Want to learn more about e-marketing?

Have been working as an e-marketing professional for a few years now, and seriously I feel so bad about myself of not using blogs and knowing so little about blogs. (I need to keep up on all emerging technology to stay at the top!.. oh well.. at least.. trying...)

That's why I decided to start my own blog. To use this technology and hopefully can exchange ideas with other e-marketing professionals and anyone who is interested in knowing more about internet marketing.

I like internet marketing as it is the type of marketing you can see and measure the results almost instantly after you launch your campaign. You can also change your campaign anytime according to the results. Yes, I like to see result and improve campaign based on data collected. I am a strong believer in data driven marketing. Other traditional marketing channel won't allow you to do this. Direct mailer is much more costly and it is much harder and takes much longer to plan and to see the results.

Anyway, I am going to share the stuff I know about internet marketing in my blog. Please feel free to share your knowledge and exchange ideas here. From there, all of us can learn more about e-marketing and benefit from there.

I want to know more about RSS feed, podcasting, blogs and their applications in a B2B business environment. I am currently doing some research online and see which of these new technologies can be applied to my company's website/ marketing mix, to drive more traffic and increase searchability. Please kindly share your thoughts on these technology here! :)

In return, I will share all I know about e-marketing... about paid inclusion (like Google AdWord), landing pages, reciprocal linkages, search engine friendly design, site map and e-mail marketing etc. I might not be very details in the beginning, but just want to share my experience and findings first to get the discussions started.

I am very excited to have this blog. Hopefully I will get new comments and ideas from different people. Knowledge sharing helps all of us to learn more about this relatively new and exciting field of marketing. Let's use this blog as a learning facilitator!

Sincerely,

June