o’neill media

One of my favorite new features from the Yahoo Panama relaunch is the quality score. In working with Adwords for so long, I kind of felt like I was in a black box when writing new ads. The ads would get distribution for a few days in some campaigns then slowly tail off if the CTR wasn’t high enough, Yahoo gave us a good gauge in to how well your ads were stacking up in comparison to others. On some terms I’m sure a 0.6% CTR might actually be good, whereas a low-traffic highly targeted term, you should be looking at something between 4% - 10%.

So Google announced one more goody for us today. In particular google announced a quality score that will be in our accounts by the end of the week. I hope it works fairly similar to Yahoo, but anything will be an improvement into peering into the black box of quality score.

9 out of 10 people have had horrible experiences with Google’s Content Network, primarily due to the MFA sites out there. There are some great ad buys to make on the content network if the buying process was more effective. I actually tried on a number of occasions to do individual site buys on the network and the CPM pricing they had was insane. So it’s great to see Google’s announcement today that they are allowing CPC purchases on individual sites. This will make them much more competitive against the upstarts like Adbrite that can really provide a solid ROI when used correctly. Sign up for the Beta list for this program now and reap the rewards before it gets saturated.

ecommerce-guide.com has reported on an open-source live help solution for online stores called Shine Live Help that I have never heard of before. It’s cool to see some decent open-source software hit the slow moving ecommerce arena. If you really want some good free help software for an e-store put a meebo me widget on your pages. This will give the user instant access to talk to you without the need for a pop-up.

The problem there is they lose their chat when moving from page to page, but its a much better solution to connect with your customers.

Over the past week or so I’ve been in search of the perfect web analytics program to do one simple task. Calculate my ROI on my ad campaigns. I have to say that it is appaulling how bad these web analytics companies are, and how much one needs to spend to get some decent results. Some of the Programs I have been testing are Click Tracks, KeywordMax, NetTracker, IndexTools and probably 5 - 10 more that I had the unfortunate necessity to test. The difference between these solutions is extremely minor. And none look like they have had a serious upgrade since the dot com bubble.

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Today Google announced that any payments processed through Google checkout will be free until the end of the year. This is great news, I’ve always thought that the payment processing industry was a scam, and glad to see that Google is taking it on. Especially for online stores, when transaction processors bear little of the risk, but charge large fees anyway. As Google checkout becomes more ubiquitous I hope to see a push transaction processing fees in the near future. Some people may say that they don’t Google knowing all about their online business, which is probably true, but at the end of the day if they can push down inherent problems within the processing space, it is all the better. I have had problems integrating Checkout in the past, but am definitely stepping up the implementation so we can take advantage of this offer.

The one thing Google needs to do is make the process a bit more full-featured. For instance merchants should be able to enter transactions directly into the Google Checkout admin. If you are looking into a main processor I can say from experience that ChargeNational is one of the Worst Companies I have ever dealt with. If you want to work with a great transaction processor, call PayJunction, they have awesome software.

I hadn’t heard about Jellyfish.com until a few weeks ago, and apparently they have been garnering a ton of press since they launched with an affiliate-based comparison shopping company that gives people cash-back on their shopping. This concept by itself is not new, Yub.com has been doing it for years (and probably many others). But the presentation of this data is what I believe is outstanding. Jellyfish has a handle on what motivates shoppers, and they have injected that with nitroglycerin.

I have been meaning to write on this company since I heard about them, but then I read on Techcrunch that they upped the ante on shopping with the release of Smack Shopping, which allows users to see the price drop for an item, and can buy at these discounted prices at any time, but if they wait too long the inventory will run out. It is pretty much a dutch-auction for the Internet days, and generates interest much like a site like LuxuryLink does but with a way that is much more fun. Jellyfish is a genius in UI design, and able to take past concepts that may not have worked well online, and make them interesting. Can’t wait to see what they do next.

There has been a lot of talk lately about MFA or Made-for-Adsense sites. Google has taken a particularly hard stance on small players that are playing the arbitrage game and are adding little to-zero value to the end-user. Bigger sites like about.com and bizrate.com have long-ago mastered the game of MFA. I was surprised today to find that smaller players within the comparison shopping world are doing MFA. I was looking for luggage for a recent trip and did a search on MSN and was happy to see a comparison shopping engine show up, with a decent position.

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A new comparison shopping site TheFind.com launched today as an all-encompassing shopping search site. The Company has garnered a bit of buzz, with an interesting write-up at GigaOm and Comparison Engines. Although I like the principle, it’s really been done already, and with better technology (see ShopWiki). The real question here is, do consumers really care. If I search for a PSP on a couple sites, shopzilla, the lowest price I was able to get was $130 (15 results), shopping.com it was $115 (24 results) and on TheFind there were 10,427 results from 98 stores. I noticed one deal for “Sony PSP - System - Value Pack” from Shop4Tech (but when you go to the actual site the item was sold out).

But the real value these comparison services provide is that they have actual people indexing these products together. Is a Sony PSP - System - Value Pack a Sony PSP or some add-ons that come with a PSP? Being relevant in comparison shopping is more than crawling a bunch of sites and handing users useless information. The value-add for comaprison shopping engines is the data matching they have done and the attribute filtering they allow on their categories. Here’s a comparison of mp3 Players attribute filtering from TheFind and PriceGrabber.

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This has been done a thousand times, but I don’t think people have really documented how to make wordpress as SEO friendly as possible. There are still a few unkown plugins out there that really make life easier. So below is my list of many, maybe something will be useful there:

1. Subster Rejunevation: This plugin turns all of your categories into subdomains, which I hear over-and-over again is great for SEO, don’t know why, but I’ll take the professionals word for it, can’t hurt, so cool plugin nonetheless

2. Sitemap Generator: Sitemaps are great for letting search engines index your content, and this little plugin does all the work for you
3. Statcounter: It’s a free javascript-based statistics counter for your website, if you want something more detailed try google analytics

4. Akismet: Stops comment spam on your site, this little plugin does the trick

5. CG-Inbetween: Allows you to place your google adsense anywhere on your site quickly and easily. Before this plugin, I couldn’t figure out how to put adsense inbetween posts

6. Count inbound links: This plugin uses the MSN API to count your backlinks, and tracks them over time

Other plugins to check out (not necessarily SEO related): Ultimate Tag Warrior (couldn’t get this one to work in the 2 minutes I had with it, but looks cool), Send to a Friend Plugin and Print this plugin.

Another upgrade you should consider with your blog is to change your permalink structure to /%postname%/ under options > permalinks. This provides a nice, clean permalink for your blog posts.

One of the most important aspects of traffic building is having a well-designed site, problem is a well-designed site is expensive. Open Source comes to the rescue for this one, BIG TIME. Thanks to the great blogging software I am using (wordpress) and the community they have, I am able to get an amazingly well designed site (IMHO) in seconds. After you download wordpress check out their templates page. There are hundreds of free templates that people have created that you could use to make a professional looking site. I want to thank aNieto2k and Qwilm! Chris Pearson for my amazingly awesome theme. I think that for any SEO / traffic-building campaign, if you have a lame site don’t even try to do anything else, you are wasting your time. It doesn’t have to be the best site in the world, but if you like it and it reflects your personality, then use it.

After you get your template, but a quick logo together (yeah mine sucks) but hey I’m not a designer, and I did it for free with Fireworks, it’s fine for me for now, but will probably be re-visiting that later.