Bill Gates to leave Microsoft

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is leaving his day-to-day post at Microsoft in two years to work full-time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Click here to read the FULL ARTICLE

Visit our newly updated website!

From: www.TheSeoTeam.com

The SEO Team is proud to announce the revealing of it’s new website and featured services to better serve you.

 TheSeoTeam is now offering complete Web-Design, Web-Design reconstruction, Business Logo Design, Search Engine Optimization and Conversion Consulting (SEM). Feel free to stop by www.theseoteam.com  and give us your opinion on what you like or would like to see added to our featured products. Our goal is to serve your needs by helping you grow your business into a profitable one.

Thank you,

TheSeoTeam.com

7 Steps for Lifting Website ROI

Here are seven important tips to help you optimize your site for the biggest return.  

By David Heidenreich  |  More by this Author

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9766.asp

1. Change your mind. Your mind set that is. Old habits die hard, but it's time to shake up your advertising mix.  Remember that your site is where the conversation truly begins, and you need to control it. How about shifting some of your traditional media budget into the web development and online marketing buckets to test the impact? Or shoot a TV ad that allows the web team to leverage the video assets on the site to promote a product? Think differently. Revamp your structure, and find ways to shift resources to benefit your site. 
2. Know what you are doing. Start with web objectives. As with any marketing endeavor, your approach must be rooted in sound strategy. If your website is about conversion and sales, your tactics will be different than if your site is about building brand loyalty and long-term relationships. Take a moment to prioritize the objectives of your website, and then work from there.     
3. Mix and match. It's time to select the tactics that will help you achieve your goals. Evaluate technologies that correspond well with your objectives. If you can't do it all, focus on what will make an immediate impact. There is a wealth of possibilities, from video and podcasting to consumer-generated content and gaming. Brainstorm, and then go with what's realistic given your budget and resources.
4. Hire a chef. Your "chef" is an online editor, someone who can manage the content and flow of your site, be savvy enough to leverage back-end technologies and tools, and whose primary focus is marketing. He/she should be a writer at heart, and have the creative vision needed to showcase your brand online.
5. Pin up a calendar. Establish a living, breathing calendar that outlines content rotation, promotional efforts, product launches, and public relations initiatives. Keep content fresh, enticing, and action-oriented. It's cyclical in nature, meaning you should be evaluating a campaign that just finished, launching a new campaign, and planning a future campaign based on lessons learned-all at the same time.
6. Give 'em a bullhorn. This is scary, but it's time to embrace the customer and give them a voice on your site by facilitating consumer-generated content. Ratings, comments, blogs, wikis, surveys, polls, and discussion boards are only some of the possibilities. Consumers want transparency, and the credibility you gain will far outreach the negative comments they post. If you don't believe me, when was the last time you bought a book on Amazon.com without checking out the reader reviews? Consumers trust their peers more than they trust standard marketing fluff. 
7. Wear out your measuring cup. Everyone touts the web as the most measurable advertising medium, but how often do you actually look at the numbers? It's time to invest in the right analytical technologies and plan for regular reviews of your site traffic.Get a thorough understanding of the click-paths and stop-off points that foster brand-interaction. Determine how people meander through your site and how you can improve that process. There are a variety of tools to help you optimize your site and sales process if — and that's a big "if –" you invest your time and efforts into actionable analytics.

This whole change is part of a basic belief that media fragmentation and the use of broadband are altering customer behavior. Leaders are recognizing a shift, and they're running to embrace it by upgrading their ability to deliver a richer experience. The early adopters are already out there, and the business benefits are becoming clearer– increased brand interaction and customer loyalty, which lead to improved revenue. 

It's time to consider how you can cook the perfect online meal to feed your media-hungry customers. But beware! Don't ponder your menu too long because your competition is struggling with the same questions and may develop the right recipe to steal your customers before you have a chance to get your entrée out of the kitchen.

David Heidenreich is Ripple Effects Interactive's executive vice president of strategy and marketing. Read full bio. 

Did you Know?

Did You Know…
According to the Chicago Manual of Style, one should never write .Www. (www with a capital W) just to honor the beginning of a sentence.

Did you Know?

Did You Know…
According to the Chicago Manual of Style, one should never write .Www. (www with a capital W) just to honor the beginning of a sentence.

Did You Know?

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson sent the first electronic message, now known as e-mail, using the @ symbol to indicate the location or institution of the e-mail recipient. Tomlinson, using a Model 33 Teletype device, understood that he needed to use a symbol that would not appear in anyone's name so that there was no confusion. The logical choice for Tomlinson was the "at sign," both because it was unlikely to appear in anyone's name and also because it represented the word "at," as in a particular user is sitting @ this specific computer

Cost Per Click Up More Than 25% Last Year

According to a study conducted by MarketingSherpa and released in eMarketer's "Search Marketing: Players and Problems" report, the overall cost per click (CPC) rose from an average of $1.29 in 2004 to $1.61 (a 24.8% increase) in 2005 on Google AdWords. Yahoo! experienced a similar jump with its average CPC rising from $1.03 to $1.34 (a 30.1% increase) in that same time span. The interesting thing to note is that the average CPC on a shopping search engine grew at a much faster pace than it did on traditional search engines. In 2004, the average CPC on a shopping search engine was $1.87. That number jumped to $2.56 (a 36.9% increase) in 2005.

Bryan

$4.7 Billion Spent for Preferred Placement on Search Engines

What a stunning report from Media Research. This just proves that the SEO and SEM industries are more popular than ever.

Bryan 

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

$4.7 Billion Spent for Preferred Placement on Search Engines

According to a report released recently by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), advertisers in the U.S. and Canada spent $5.75 billion on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in 2005, a 44 percent increase over 2004 spending.

The report projects that SEM spending in North America will reach $11 billion in 2010. (The annual totals include payments to search engines and search-related media companies, search engine marketing agencies and in-house expenditures in support of such programs. The programs include paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization and search engine marketing technology platforms.)

Paid placement in 2005 accounted for 83 percent or $4.7 billion of the total. Organic SEO accounted for approximately 11 percent of overall spending, paid inclusion accounted for just 4 percen, and SEM technologies accounted for less than 2 percent of overall spending.

SEMPO Research Committee Co-chair, Gord Hotchkiss, said "… Future growth will be fueled by an increased search presence from major advertisers and new monetization strategies from the major engines…"

Additionally, the recently released comScore MediaMetrix qSearch analysis showed that Americans conducted 5.15 billion searches online during November 2005, up 9 percent from November 2004, with Google maintaining its lead in the U.S. search market with 39.8 percent of all the searches submitted.

Share of Online Searches Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
	Nov 2004%	Nov 2005%	Point Change+/-
Total Internet Population	100	100	0
Google Sites	34.6	39.8	+5.2
Yahoo! Sites	32.0	29.5	-2.5
MSN-Microsoft Sites	16.0	14.2	-1.8
Time Warner Network	9.1	8.7	-0.4
Ask Jeeves	5.5	6.5	+1.0
Source: comScore qSearch, November 2005

For further analysis and additional data, download The State of Search Engine Marketing 2005.

Did You Know…

The word phishing comes from the analogy that Internet scammers are using e-mail lures to fish for passwords and financial data from the

sea of
Internet users. The term was coined in 1996 by hackers who were stealing AOL Internet accounts by scamming passwords from unsuspecting AOL users. Since hackers have a tendency to replacing "f" with "ph" the term phishing was derived.

Web Joins TV, Radio as Dominant Pure Reach Vehicle

 OPA Study Says Online No. 2 At-Home Medium

By Abbey Klaassen

Published: June 06, 2006

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — There's an awful lot of interaction between various media, confirmed one of the latest studies about how people use media in an average day. And as a pure reach vehicle, the Web is emerging as a dominant player.

About 20% of all Web usage occurs while viewing TV or immediately before or after.

Top at-work medium
In fact, the Web ranks as the top at-work medium (followed by radio) and the second greatest reach vehicle at home, after TV. Even then, the link between TV and the Web is striking: About 20% of all Web usage occurs while viewing TV or immediately before or after.

The results of the study, just released by the Online Publishers Association, jibes with the industry trend that has interactive and digital experts sitting side by side with those that create and buy media for more traditional advertising.

Observational study
In terms of both reach and duration, TV indexed the highest, followed by radio, which was closely trailed by online. The data is from an observational study of how people use media: Conducted by Ball State University, the study's researchers followed 350 adults on average for 13 hours, about 80% of the waking day. Pam Horan, president of the OPA, said diary or telephone polls tend to undercount the use of media, which is why her association commissioned the observational study.

Today the Web reaches just over 60% of people for about two hours a day; 10 years ago it reached 10% for less than an hour. TV, by contrast, reaches 90% of people for more than four hours.

Creating media plans
The study will help advertisers understand how to create better media plans — especially video strategies, said Dan Goodman, senior partner at Ogilvy Interactive, New York, who said he is advocating a more integrated approach.

"When interactive becomes such a pervasive part of a daily experience, it's more the norm than the exception, so why isolate it?" he asked.

The study also said, perhaps understandably, that dominant Web users skew more affluent than dominant TV users. Additionally, Web users spend more — $5,000 more annually at the retail level. Perhaps less expected, the Web showed fewer variations in use by age and gender than other media, suggesting it's not just a youth medium.

The OPA is hoping the study convinces advertisers to bring their online ad spending into parity with the time people spend online.

Dollars spent vs. time consumed
"That's the gestalt of this whole thing," said Pam Horan, OPA president. "Veronis Suhler Stevenson numbers said 8% of ad dollars are going to the Web but 17% of time is dedicated to that."

Additionally, she said, "we wanted to understand the value of the Web audiences. … They're delivering a valuable audience and if we compare it to TV, you may even have a more valuable audience."