The Internet Marketer

*Warning* AdWords ‘phishing’ continues

Please be aware that I’m still regularly hearing reports of people who have received AdWords ‘phishing’ emails.

These appear to be genuine communications from Google asking you to renew your AdWords account or update your AdWords payment details, but are in fact scams cleverly designed to steal your credit card details.

You can identify the bogus emails by carefully rolling your mouse over the link in the email to view the popup tooltip; then carefully examine the domain details.

The phishing emails typically link to a Chinese domain which is dot cn (i.e. .cn) rather than the domain it appears to be. The example pictured below is from a phishing email and clearly shows the domain to be .cn rather than the .com domain it should be.

Please be vigilant and under no circumstances enter your credit card details. If you do, then contact your bank immediately to freeze your credit card.

If you receive a phishing email, forward it to phishing@google.com so the folks at Google can do something about stopping these thieves.

If you are in doubt about your AdWords account’s status you can check it online. Once your AdWords account is established, the only time you should have to re-enter payment details is when your credit card expires.

If in doubt, don’t click.

Posted in AdWords, Alerts, Tales from the trenches | No Comments »

Is W3C non-compliance costing you online sales?

It is easy to take for granted the amazingly sophisticated technologies that brings us the internet. The internet’s success stems from “ancient” technical standards including those by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that you could easily think are just not relevant in a modern commercial internet.

But with the growing realisation that online success starts with a quality sales-focussed website, these standards are not only relevant, but can provide a competitive edge for your website.

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Posted in Organic search, Website Analysis | No Comments »

Are the White Pages turning Yellow?

It’s the marketing version of a moral dilemma for me - Should the White Pages carry overt advertising ?

I thought I understood the service boundaries which define the telephone directory services brands Yellow Pages and White Pages. Fundamentally I know which book to reach for in a given information scenario. Well I thought I did…

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The Holographic website - A search disaster

Recently I stumbled over a holographic website.

It looked like it was there, but it was really just a ghost, or at least that’s what Google thinks.

As I usually do, I quickly review sites for attendees from my “Tune your website for Sales” presentations, and on this occasion the business had found they just didn’t seem to rank in any searches.

At the time we discussed the popularity of their relatively common business name, and I assumed that it was a typical case of organic competition. What a surprise I got !

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Posted in Organic search, Tales from the trenches, Website Analysis | No Comments »

Analytics. Free but high value

In David A Utter’s Webpro News article Google Analytics Eats The Internet he makes reference to a study they conducted on Alexa’s global top 500 “…and found that 161 out of these 500 websites are using Google Analytics, which is 32.2%. ”

It is true that people don’t value things that are free, but with this sort of data surely the skeptics will sit up and take notice…

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‘Quality Score’ now monitors load time

I note with interest that Google is now assessing a landing page’s page load time as a contributing factor to its quality score.

Your AdWords campaign’s landing page’s quality score can influence your ad position and even your minimum bid.

In recent times other quality score influencing factors have emerged to become a quite sophisticated indicator of Google’s interpretation of the quality of your paid search campaign.

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Communication. What to do before your sitemap disappears.

I had an interesting experience recently when Google Webmasters Tools failed site’s verification.

So what’s new you ask ?

On further investigation the website’s sitemap and robots.txt had disappeared too.  Arrghh ! Then when I tried to FTP into the site and this failed as well I new something was really amiss.

The long and short of it is that the client’s IT guy decided that the site should be moved to another web host… The tool he used to migrate the website must have assumed that websites only consist of html & jpg files and didn’t copy the sitemap, the webmaster authentication files, and robots.txt

I must admit that a webmaster verification file may look a lot like a corrupted file name in the heat of the moment so I’d be wary about it too if I didn’t know what it was about.

Next time GoogleBot visited the site it couldn’t find the sitemap registered for the domain and threw up an error. In the meantime Google Webmasters Tool was baying about site verification.

Its not the first time my work has been mangled by over-enthusiastic web developers &/or IT guys, but I have to confess to being pretty low key about it all

There was no permanent damage in this case, and on reflection the sitemap etc would have needed to be missing for quite some time before was some rnkaing ramifications.

I guess the lesson is that websites ARE becoming more sophisticated environments and there are several parties who should be consulted before adhoc changes are undertaken…

The other lesson here is to not assume.

As they say, to ASSUME is to make an ASS out of U and ME.

Posted in Tales from the trenches | No Comments »

Does SEO tweaking attract Spam ?

One of the dark consequences of a successfully ranking website appears to be that it not only attracts the attention of prospective clients but also exposes the website to spammers as well.

In our experience business sites previously untroubled by spam, find themselves receiving unwanted Spam attention after receiving a dose of SEM.

Before you leap into the fray with that accusational tone - no we haven’t listed the sites in spammy directories or undertaken anything remotely blackhat, grotesque or underhanded.

The sites in question have had some SEO tweaking; been registered with Google, Yahoo and Live’s WebMasters Tools or equivalent and are now running an AdWords paid search campaign.

Suddenly they become spamming targets.  I guess it does force the Webmaster to take steps to prevent email addresses from being harvested off the site…

If you’ve got a thought on why this may be the case I’d love to hear from you.

Posted in Tales from the trenches | No Comments »

Truelocal to be ‘re-launched’

I note with some interest that News Limited’s Australian online local business directory truelocal is reinventing its marketing campaign as reported in today’s BandT Today

The article says:

Online search directory truelocal.com.au is to be relaunched and ad agency BMF has been selected as the agency to manage the process. After using agencies on a project-by project basis, owner News Digital Media has decided to assign the account to BMF. 

The agency picked up the business without a pitch. Louise Brockbank, general manager of marketing and channel sales at TrueLocal, said: “Although TrueLocal is already Australia’s fastest growing online business directory, we are aiming to gain significant market share.

“With BMF, we look forward to deepening our engagement and connection with our consumers and advertisers.”

BMF CEO Matthew Melhuish said: “Our media neutral approach to campaign development is a perfect fit for a brand and business that likes to play in so many diverse media environments and channels.”

Posted in In the news | No Comments »

If your keywords don’t hit the target, neither will your sales results

The success of your internet marketing campaign starts with identifying the optimal keywords to match your sales objectives. Sadly, I routinely encounter websites targeting wrong keywords.

If your keywords miss the target, so will your website; loosing sales and profit for your business.

I’ll try to be really calm and not vent about some Search Engine Optimisers who provide all care but no responsibility services based on keywords clients provide them with no consultation.

I imagine the conversation goes something like: “…yes Mr Client, we optimised your site for <insert obscure keyword here> and it ranks #1 in Google…”

That’s because no-one searches for those keywords, so what’s the point of being at the top of Google ?
If there’s no searches there’s no sales either !

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Posted in Organic search | No Comments »