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SEO Keyword Research Basics



SEO Keyword Research Basics

The first international online marketing tourism conference in Egypt

First international tourism online marketing conference
December 15th - 19th, 2008 in Continental Garden Reef Resort Sharm El-Sheikh
INAUGURAL TOURISM ONLINE MARKETING CONFERENCE IN EGYPT
Recognizing the growing importance of online marketing, leading Middle East tourism organizations are proud to endorse the Electronic Union of Travel Industry (EUOTI) online marketing conference. Speakers represent leading companies such as Google and Microsoft, leading international universities, the UN World Tourism Organization and Canadian e-Tourism Council.

Dr. Bandar Bin Fahd Al-Faheed, President of the Arabic Tourism Organization (ATO) notes the ATO’s care about spreading the E-culture and teaching the E-Industry in Arab Countries and the Middle East. Consequently, the “ATO is sponsoring EUOTI’s International Conferences in the Middle East to support this booming international marketing platform.”
Similarly, Mr. Amr El-Ezaby, President of the Egyptian Tourism Authority “supports EUOTI in its international mission to train those who work in E-Travel and E-Tourism to enhance their performance and increase their sales through the Internet.” As Mr. Mohammad Almehaizae, EUOTI Chairman confirmed, “The union’s main mission is protecting and developing the E-travel industry and providing professional training to those working in the E-field to enhance their performance and increase their productivity.”
E-tourism is increasing even faster than E-commerce and should reach 55% of the E-Commerce Sector during 2008. The phenomenal growth in E-Tourism is due to the growing reliance on the Internet, e-mails, cell phones and recently, Web 2.0 applications such as TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel, and meta-search engines such as Kayak or Sidestep. EUOTI’s International Online Tourism Conference, featuring industry and academic experts, gives Arab and Middle-Eastern operators the chance to learn and take advantage of the latest E-tourism trends.
EUOTI has organized the 15-19 December 2008 conference in conjunction with the world’s leading academic body dedicated to tourism and technology, the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism and tourism (IFITT). Conference attendees will benefit from a range of activities, tailored for both beginners and advanced online marketers, including workshops, panels and presentations.
Pleased to announce that the Electronic Union of Travel Industry EUOTI is launching its FIRST International Congress concerned with the Online travel business in the Sunny City of Sharm El Sheikh-Egypt 15-19/12/08
EUOTI conference will be managed by the international organization of IFITT together with the collaboration of the Arab travel Organization and under the supervision of the League of Arab states and The Egyptian ministry of Tourism authorities
EUOTI conference main objective is to create awareness , educate, and update Travel industry producers and concerned people with the latest E-travel,E-marketing and E-commerce strategies to enable them to achieve best sales and profits with the minimum effort and human power , as recently proofed that around 52% of the world wide E-commerce is covered by the E-travel industry
Conference Bold Line and important Topics:www.euoticonf.com
• Web Development
• Web Designing
• SEM
• SEO
• Online Sales Techniques &E-commerce
• Online Marketing technologies
• Mobile Marketing strategies
• Online Hotel Reservations systems appliance
• Video online Marketing
• Hotel & Restaurants E-Marketing
• Travel Companies business promoting
• Duplicating Investments aspects
• Broadening The Horizon of E-Travel business
EUOTI , herewith extend a sincere invitation to all Travel business concerned individuals , corporations and properties to attend its booming international conference event and to get an official certificate approved from the leading world wide travel organizations of attending this unique in the middle east event , which will take place 15-19/12/08 in Sharm El Sheikh – Egypt

Best Regards
Hossam Darwish
General Manager
Euoti- Electronic Union of travel Industry

Internet Advertising - 11% Increase from Q3 '07, Despite U.S. Economic Woes

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today announced that Internet advertising revenues reached almost $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2007.

For more detailes;

http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab/recent_press_releases/press_release_archive/press_release/572194?o12499

Economic slowdown to boost online advertising

The economic slowdown in the Middle East is expected to boost online advertising in the region as companies elect to use less expensive web ads over costlier traditional media, reported The National. Google, the world's largest internet advertising company, says it is seeing regional demand grow faster as ad buyers look to increase their reach while decreasing spending. Advertising online costs just a fraction of promoting via traditional media. The industry typically uses a 'pay per click' system that only charges advertisers for the users who click on their ads and are redirected to their website.

Source:www.ameinfo.com

Competitive Intelligence for SEO

Competitive Intelligence for SEO

How do the Search Engines Decide How Web Sites Rank? improve your SEO knowledge

How do the Search Engines Decide How Web Sites Rank?
Improve your SEO knowledge by understanding google methods

How do Search Engines Find My Website? improve your SEO knowledge

Improve your SEO knowledge by learning how google works

Facebook Soical Ads Strategy

Facebook Soical Ads Strategy

Building Better Online Banner Ads

Building Better Online Banner Ads

How does the global recession affect Google?

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) --

Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, advanced in Nasdaq trading after reporting profit that topped analysts' estimates, saying customers are still buying Web ads even as the economy slows.

While advertisers of home and auto loans cut back, makers of apparel and appliances kept spending, Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette said. Consumers continue to shop online, he said, with clicks on ads climbing 18 percent, near the previous quarter's 19 percent growth.

The results, combined with better-than-anticipated reports from International Business Machines Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., cheered investors after a decline in technology shares this month. Google showed resilience in a weakening economy, said Mark May, an analyst at Needham & Co. in New York.

``This really shows we need to give them the benefit of the doubt,'' said May, who recommends buying the shares. ``They should be able to weather the storm fairly well.''

Google's third-quarter net income rose 26 percent to $1.35 billion, or $4.24 a share, from $1.07 billion, or $3.38, a year earlier. Leaving out costs such as stock-based compensation, profit was $4.92 a share, beating the $4.75 average estimate of analysts in a Bloomberg survey.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $19.52, or 5.5 percent, to $372.54 on the Nasdaq Stock Market at 4 p.m. New York time, after earlier reaching $378.97. The shares have dropped 46 percent this year.

Advertising Shift

Advertisers are cutting back on TV and print media spending in favor of ads that run alongside search listings. The Internet will account for 8.7 percent of the $284 billion in U.S. ad spending this year, up from 7.2 percent in 2007, according to Barclays Capital.

Excluding revenue passed on to partner sites, Google's sales expanded to $4.04 billion last quarter. Total revenue climbed 31 percent to $5.54 billion.

At least eight analysts had reduced their estimates for Google's third quarter this month after the global credit crisis erupted. That made it easier for the company to beat the average profit estimates yesterday.

``This was exactly the kind of shot in the arm that investors need,'' said Jeff Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. ``People lost a lot of faith in the Internet, but this is exactly what the doctor ordered.''

New Contracts

IBM, based in Armonk, New York, said yesterday it signed $12.7 billion in contracts last quarter, topping the estimate of as much as $11 billion from Cowen & Co. analyst Louis Miscioscia. Winning contracts with the Royal Dutch Navy and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. boosted the total.

AMD reported a narrower third-quarter loss of $67 million, or 11 cents a share, compared with $396 million, or 71 cents, a year earlier as demand grew for graphics chips. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said revenue this quarter will probably be little changed from the previous period.

AMD rose 36 cents, or 8.7 percent, to $4.48 on the New York Stock Exchange. IBM dropped 58 cents to $90.94 after gaining yesterday in late trading.

``Tech is going to continue to be challenged for a period of time,'' Miscioscia, who has a neutral rating on IBM shares, said in an interview. ``To put this in perspective, IBM is up $2 after market, not $10, after falling about $20 since Oct. 1.''

Google handled 63 percent of U.S. online searches in August, double the market share of Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. combined. That dominance has helped the company command higher prices for ads, according to Yahoo, which is awaiting government approval of an agreement to let Google sell some ads on its sites.

Cutting Back

Still, Google has reduced expenses by slowing its hiring rate and spending less on travel and events, said co-founder Sergey Brin.

``We don't know exactly what the future holds. We've taken a conservative approach,'' Brin said in an interview. ``We view this as an opportunity to refine our company and sharpen it.''

Capital expenditures fell to $452 million, down 18 percent from a year earlier, as Google made more efficient use of its computing centers, Brin said. He said he couldn't forecast whether the costs would continue to fall.

The credit crisis may cost the Internet ad market $6.7 billion in lost sales through 2010, according to Collins Stewart Plc. Big and small businesses, from General Motors Corp. to Simplexity LLC, are reducing ad spending plans, while some financial companies, such as Wachovia Corp., have disappeared.

Slower Growth?

The reductions will push down growth in U.S. Internet ad spending to less than 20 percent next year for the first time since 2002, said Sandeep Aggarwal, a Collins Stewart analyst in San Francisco. Advertisers will scale back spending on newspapers and broadcast TV networks, his firm said this month.

``Advertisers stay with the Internet because it's the way to reach the key younger demographic and that's what advertisers are really after,'' Timothy Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management LLC, said in an interview from Bedford Hills, New York.

Google, which gets almost all its revenue from Internet searches, is developing ways to advertise with images and video. The company struck a deal this month to show full-length programs from CBS Corp. on its YouTube site, splitting ad revenue with the network.

``The economic situation is so fluid that we're all sort of in uncharted territory,'' Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said yesterday on a conference call. ``We've always been in this for the long term, and we believe that's even more important today than ever.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Crayton Harrison in Dallas at tharrison5@bloomberg.net; Lauren Berry in New York at lberry4@bloomberg.net

Source; www.Bloomberg.com

Google Brain

Look at google brain !!!!
Very nice vedio

What is Viral Marketing ?

This is a nice introductio to Viral Marketing

Case Study: Using Google Trends to Drive Massive Traffic

How to Use Google Trends to Drive Massive Traffic

Behavioural (behavioral) online advertising

By; Dave Chaffey

In the article, we will look at the benefits available from behavioural targeting of online ads through a series of examples of how different advertisers have trialled this relatively new approach.

IntroductionI blame the first Internet ad – the feted ‘banner ad’ on Hotwired in 1994. Since then the ‘banner ad’ label has stuck for a long time. But for me, the simple label ‘banner ad’ has restricted the adoption of Internet advertising. For a start, the phenomenon of ‘banner blindness’ is well known – as users of the Internet, we filter out areas of the screen we recognise as ad rectangles and concentrate on the text – one of the reasons for the growth in Pay Per Click keyword advertising. Furthermore, ‘banner ad’ implies a static ad of fixed format rather like a traditional classified ad. Given these limitations, most media owners, digital marketing agencies and industry bodies now refer to Interactive Advertising which is more suggestive of the range of options for rich media ads, data capture ads and large format ads such as skyscrapers. This brings us to the topic of this WNIM article. Interactive advertising really starts to take advantage of the medium when the advertiser can interact and respond to the web site visitors’ behaviours and characteristics. This is, in a nutshell, is behavioural targeting; the capability to serve an ad, in real time, by recognising the characteristics of a site visitor and then serving a relevant ad.

What is behavioural targeting?Behavioural targeting is all about relevance – dynamically serving relevant content, messaging or ad which matches the interests of a site visitor according to inferences about their characteristics. These inferences are made by anonymously tracking the different types of pages visited by a site user during a single visit to a site or across multiple sessions.



Beyond tracking page visits and repeat visits to a site, behavioural tracking systems can also record events on a site such as completing a registration form or interacting with different types of content like a Flash demo.



Other aspects of the environment used by the visitor can also be determined such as their location, browser and operating system.



Contrast this with more traditional ad targeting on a site where the main method of targeting is according to the content type on a particular area of the site.



For example, traditionally, a hardware manufacturer has been able to book ads to be displayed on the IT channel of a news site, but would not be able to display ads to the same visitor when they are elsewhere on the site. Behavioural targeting enables an advertiser to target ads when that visitor moves elsewhere on the site or returns to the site, thus increasing the frequency or number of impressions served to an individual in the target market. Previous research has shown that at least 3 exposures are required to maximise impact, but often it is difficult to achieve this frequency if an ad is only served in one area of the site.



Behavioural targeting can be used either on a media site to serve ads relevant to visitors or on a destination site to deliver personalised messages about products or promotions. On a media site such as MSN (www.msn.co.uk) behavioural targeting can be used to serve ads according to pages visited in different channels such as Dating, Cars or Money. On a destination site such as Amazon, messages are displayed according to previous books browsed on the site as part of its personalisation capabilities. In this article we focus on behavioural ad targeting on media sites.



The best way to understand the principle is through an example. The FT.com example shows how behavioural targeting can be combined with other targeting based on content (editiorial), geography and demographic targeting (from the profile of customer characteristics).

FT.com launches behavioural targetingIn September 2004, FT.com upgraded its facility for targeting using a behavourial targeting solution from Revenue Sciences.



In this approach, eight segments have been identified for advertisers according to types of content visited. These are Business Education, Institutional Investor, Information Technology, Luxury and Consumer, Management, Personal Finance, Travel, Private Equity.



The new behavioural targeting facility can be combined with editorial targeting, geographic targeting, and demographic targeting.



Netimperative (www.netimperative.com) quoted Shauna Monkman, global head of online sales for FT.com, as saying: ‘The opportunity to target specific groups with the most relevant campaigns is one of the major advantages of online advertising. Not only will it enable our advertisers to target more effectively, but it will also improve the experience for our users, who will be served with more relevant advertisements.’



Companies who have signed up for behavioural campaigns to date include NTT Docomo, IBM and 02.

How well do behavioural targeted ads work?
The aim of behavioural targeting is naturally dependent on the campaign objectives, but generally, dynamic ads do improve ratings of awareness and response. Since behavioural ad targeting is relatively new, most of the effectiveness studies are based on testing built into campaigns rather than analysis across many campaigns. Here we look at two examples.



GlobeandMail.com (2004) reported on research by Dynamic Logic that suggests increased ad awareness and brand favourability.



In the US, iVillage, a portal offering content for women ran a test on behavioural targeting for Snapple meal replacement drinks. Here ads were delivered through behavioural targeting to people who had previously visited the diet and fitness section of the site, but who were reading other sections of iVillage at the time the targeted ad was served.



Behavioural ads were found to be more effective than those simply placed permanently within iVillage's diet and fitness section. According to Dynamic Logic:

76 per cent of consumers who received targeted ads displayed an awareness of them, against 66 per cent among non-targeted consumers.
Thirty-six per cent of targeted readers reported a favourable impression of the brand upon viewing the ad, against 21 per cent in the non-targeted group
Intent-to-purchase based on the ad was 37 per cent for targeted readers against 29 per cent among non-targeted consumers.


iMediaConnection (2004) highlights another example. In this case, a Dallas Mitsubishi car dealer used contextual advertising within the automotive section of DallasNews.com to deliver targeted ads. The newspaper served the same ads, when visitors returned to DallasNews.com even if they were outside the automotive area. The dealer used Tacoda's Systems' Audience Management System targeting capabilities to reach visitors whose prior actions suggested a keen interest in the advertiser's message.



In this case it was reported that the response rate among the target audience was 7.7 percent as compared to the national average of 0.33 percent. These ads played a part in doubling the number of credit applications the dealership received, and increased the number of online searches by 17 percent. The DallasNews.com campaign generated 44 percent of the total phone calls into the dealership, at a time when several other automotive promotions were running in other media.

Real Time OptimisationMany behavourial ad targeting providers describe their services as offering “Real Time optimisation”. Behavourial targeting is by definition Real Time targeting since the technologies used have to identify the viewer and serve an appropriate ad at the time of the visit.



For example, European provider Twin London (www.twinlondon.com) which uses technology licensed from Pointdexter Systems (www.pointdextersystems.com) describe two types of Real Time Optimisation.



First, media optimisation. Here a visitor is identified according to their behavioural or demographic profile and an ad is served according to the segment or profile cluster they best fit into. If the visitor does not match a profile the ad impression is passed backed to the publisher who can then publish other inventory.



Second, placement optimisation. Here the most relevant ad is served for the viewer. Poorly-performing ads can be replaced by the best performing ads and offers for each audience.



Peter Jones of Twin London describes their predictive optimisation engine (POE) as follows:



“POE makes a decision between the time a web page is loaded and an ad is served. It is a fully automated process based on pre-defined optimisation rules based on campaign marketing objectives and deliverables. What this means is that, rather than buying impressions, you are buying viewers based on response profiles, which achieves better targeting, increased response, lower CPA and increased ROI.”



Pointdexter Systems worked with a US ISP to place ads on media sites according to whether the visitor profile suggested they had potential for Narrowband, Broadband, Premium services or other membership options and the type of offer they would be most likely to respond to, e.g. anti-virus control, music content, etc.



Using this approach reduced CPA by 59% in comparison to historical data and a control group maintained throughout the campaign. Through proving the returns the ISP also increased paid media spending by 10 times and rolled the program out its internal media properties.



In a European test, MSN Spain used Real-Time Targeting from Touch Clarity. Speaking at the London E-metrics summit 2004 (www.emetrics.org), Louise Brown, portal business manager at MSN described how Real Time Optimisation service Touch Clarity (www.touchclarity.com) was used to maximise sign-up to paid service MSN8 on msn.es.



Customers profiles are built in real-time based on observed behaviour based on:

Frequency and recency of visits
Previous channel and product interest
Browser type, screen resolution, time of day and IP address.


Different creative propositions were presented to different users to maximise sign-up, for example, shared browsing, Encarta or Free Trial.



Again real time, behavioural targeting gave significantly better results. Product sales achieved through Real Time targeting increased 45% compared to the control group.

The future for Behavioural Targeting
Currently, there are many successful test campaigns being reported and these campaigns are being rolled-out more widely.



A key issue for the future of this approach is Trust. If customers realise they are being tracked across different sites (often the most powerful data) and their data sold then this may result in a privacy outcry like that faced by Doubleclick a few years ago. For this reason, some providers of behavioural targeting such as Revenue Science have placed an emphasis on trust and they warrant that no customer is tracked across sites and that the customer details will not be sold on.



Other providers such as Tacoda Systems have sought to take advantage of the more detailed understanding of customer behaviour by analysis across a network of US publisher sites and use this to target more closely. Tacoda has launched Audience Match which will give advertisers the ability to target text ads based on specific demographics. This service is similar to Google and Overture's Pay Per Click advertising, but instead of bidding for keywords, advertisers will compete for specific demographic information or audience clusters. Tacoda, of course realises the importance of Privacy and stresses that it does not collect personal information and allows concerned users to opt-out of cookies used for tracking in Audience Match.



So, we are definitely at the early adopter phase with this new technique and there is a lot of potential for modelling visitor behaviour in more sophisticated ways. Also we may see behavioural ad targeting techniques more widely applied to destination sites, once lower-cost packaged versions become available.

Ad body opposes Google-Yahoo alliance

A trade association representing many of the biggest consumer advertisers in the US on Sunday came out against a controversial search advertising alliance between Yahoo and Google.

The intervention by the Association of National Advertisers, made in a complaint to US anti-trust regulators, represents the first broad attack on the alliance, which was announced in May.

The deal with Google played a central role in Yahoo’s successful effort to fend off Microsoft’s takeover advances earlier this year. Staying independent and trying to boost its search revenues by outsourcing part of the advertising to Google would yield more for shareholders than an outright acquisition at the price Microsoft was suggesting, Yahoo’s board decided.

Although the alliance does not need official antitrust clearance, the two companies said they would delay implementing it for 100 days to allow the Department of Justice to study it. The voluntary delay was designed to reduce the risk that regulators would decide later on to challenge the relationship, which links the two biggest search advertising companies, as anti-competitive.

The ANA now written to the justice department with a list of objections to the partnership, according to a statement posted on the association’s website yesterday.

While it did not release the full text, the ANA said that its letter ”notes that a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90 per cent of search advertising inventory and states ANA’s concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising”.

While some individual advertisers have hinted publicly at their own concerns, the trade association’s letter represents the first broad attack on the deal from a highly influential group of consumer companies.

The ANA’s board includes representatives from giant advertisers like General Motors, Wal-Mart and Anheuser-Busch. Bob Liodice, ANA’s president, said the submission to anti-trust regulators had been made after an analysis that included ”input from the board’s members”, as well as discussion with Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo said on Sunday it was “disappointed with the ANA board’s position”. It said prices would be determined by advertiser demand-driven auctions, and the deal would help drive a “more robust” marketplace for Yahoo’s advertisers.

Google could not immediately be reached for comment.

Source; Financial Times

Amazon.com case study.

From Dave Chaffey's website
Amazon E-commerce strategy case study prepared for E-business, Internet Marketing and E-commerce lecturers and students for readers of my Internet Marketing and E-business books॥

I recommend students studying Amazon in my books checkout the latest Amazon revenue and business strategies from their SEC filings. The annual filings to give a great summary of eBay business and revenue models.
E-consultancy also has a useful news feed which I use to update my Amazon case study. This gives summaries of acquisitions, new technologies or revenue growth.
SEC is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which is a government agency for which companies have to submit an open evaluation of their business models and marketplace conditions.
2008 Update on Amazon logistics
Some interesting figures on the site loads and fulfillment that Amazon needs to manage from my friends at Internet retailing:
"Amazon.com has finished its 13th Christmas season and the results are the best ever season, with its busiest day being December 10. On that day, Amazon customers ordered more than 5.4 million items, which is 62.5 items per second.
Amazon Worldwide 2007 (Including results for the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan and Canada) shipped more than 99 percent of orders in time to meet holiday deadlines worldwide and on the peak day this season, Amazon's worldwide fulfilment network shipped over 3.9 million units to over 200 countries.
Amazon.co.uk received orders for over 950,000 items on its busiest day in the run up to Christmas this year – at a rate of 11 orders per second – exceeding all previous sales records. At its busiest, Amazon.co.uk shipped over 700,000 units in one 24 hour period, which represents 375 tonnes of goods. That means that on average, a delivery truck was leaving an Amazon.co.uk distribution centre once every seven minutes."
Amazon Case Study Context
Why a case study on Amazon? Surely everyone knows about who Amazon are and what they do? Yes, well that’s maybe true, but this case goes beyond the surface to review some of the ‘insider secrets’ of Amazon’s success.
Like eBay, Amazon.com was born in 1995. The name reflected the vision of Jeff Bezos, to produce a large scale phenomenon like the Amazon river. This ambition has proved justified since just 8 years later, Amazon passed the $5 billion sales mark – it took Wal-Mart 20 years to achieve this.
By 2008 Amazon was a global brand with other 76 million active customers accounts and order fulfillment to more than 200 countries. Despite this volume of sales, at December 31, 2007 Amazon employed approximately 17,000 full-time and part-time employees.
In September 2007, it launched Amazon MP3, a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.1 million songs from more than 270,000 artists.
Amazon Vision & strategy
In their 2008 SEC filing, Amazon describe the vision of their business as to:
“Relentlessly focus on customer experience by offering our customers low prices, convenience, and a wide selection of merchandise.”
The vision is to offer Earth’s biggest selection and to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. Consider how these core marketing messages summarising the Amazon online value proposition are communicated both on-site and through offline communications.
Of course, achieving customer loyalty and repeat purchases has been key to Amazon’s success. Many dot-coms failed because they succeeded in achieving awareness, but not loyalty. Amazon achieved both. In their SEC filing they stress how they seek to achieve this. They say:
"We work to earn repeat purchases by providing easy-to-use functionality, fast and reliable fulfillment, timely customer service, feature rich content, and a trusted transaction environment.
Key features of our websites include editorial and customer reviews; manufacturer product information; Web pages tailored to individual preferences, such as recommendations and notifications; 1-Click® technology; secure payment systems; image uploads; searching on our websites as well as the Internet; browsing; and the ability to view selected interior pages and citations, and search the entire contents of many of the books we offer with our “Look Inside the Book” and “Search Inside the Book” features. Our community of online customers also creates feature-rich content, including product reviews, online recommendation lists, wish lists, buying guides, and wedding and baby registries."
In practice, as is the practice for many online retailers, the lowest prices are for the most popular products, with less popular products commanding higher prices and a greater margin for Amazon.
Free shipping offers are used to encourage increase in basket size since customers have to spend over a certain amount to receive free shipping. The level at which free-shipping is set is critical to profitability and Amazon has changed it as competition has changed and for promotional reasons.
Amazon communicate the fulfillment promise in several ways including presentation of latest inventory availability information, delivery date estimates, and options for expedited delivery, as well as delivery shipment notifications and update facilities.
This focus on customer has translated to excellence in service with the 2004 American Customer Satisfaction Index giving Amazon.com a score of 88 which was at the time, the highest customer satisfaction score ever recorded in any service industry, online or offline.
Round (2004) notes that Amazon focuses on customer satisfaction metrics. Each site is closely monitored with standard service availability monitoring (for example, using Keynote or Mercury Interactive) site availability and download speed. Interestingly it also monitors per minute site revenue upper/lower bounds – Round describes an alarm system rather like a power plant where if revenue on a site falls below $10,000 per minute, alarms go off! There are also internal performance service-level-agreements for web services where T% of the time, different pages must return in X seconds.
Amazon Customers
Amazon defines what it refers to as three consumer sets customers, seller customers and developer customers.
There are over 76 million customer accounts, but just 1.3 million active seller customers in it’s marketplaces and Amazon is seeking to increase this. Amazon is unusual for a retailer in that it identifies “developer customers” who use its Amazon Web Services, which provides access to technology infrastructure such as hosting that developers can use to develop their own web services.
Members are also encouraged to join a loyalty programme, Amazon Prime, a fee-based membership program in which members receive free or discounted express shipping, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan.
Competition
In its SEC (2005) filing Amazon describes the environment for our products and services as ‘intensely competitive’. It views its main current and potential competitors as:
1) physical-world retailers, catalog retailers, publishers, vendors, distributors and manufacturers of our products, many of which possess significant brand awareness, sales volume, and customer bases, and some of which currently sell, or may sell, products or services through the Internet, mail order, or direct marketing;
(2) Other online E-commerce sites;
(3) A number of indirect competitors, including media companies, Web portals, comparison shopping websites, and Web search engines, either directly or in collaboration with other retailers; and
(4) Companies that provide e-commerce services, including website development; third-party fulfillment and customer-service.
It believes the main competitive factors in its market segments include "selection, price, availability, convenience, information, discovery, brand recognition, personalized services, accessibility, customer service, reliability, speed of fulfillment, ease of use, and ability to adapt to changing conditions, as well as our customers’ overall experience and trust in transactions with us and facilitated by us on behalf of third-party sellers".
For services offered to business and individual sellers, additional competitive factors include the quality of our services and tools, their ability to generate sales for third parties we serve, and the speed of performance for our services.
From Auctions to marketplaces
Amazon auctions (known as zShops) were launched in March 1999, in large part as a response to the success of eBay. They were promoted heavily from the home page, category pages and individual product pages. Despite this, a year after its launch it had only achieved a 3.2% share of the online auction compared to 58% for eBay and it only declined from this point.
Today, competitive prices of products are available through third-party sellers in the ‘Amazon Marketplace’ which are integrated within the standard product listings. The strategy to offer such an auction facility was initially driven by the need to compete with eBay, but now the strategy has been adjusted such that Amazon describe it as part of the approach of low-pricing.
Although it might be thought that Amazon would lose out on enabling its merchants to sell products at lower prices, in fact Amazon makes greater margin on these sales since merchants are charged a commission on each sale and it is the merchant who bears the cost of storing inventory and fulfilling the product to customers. As with eBay, Amazon is just facilitating the exchange of bits and bytes between buyers and sellers without the need to distribute physical products.
How ‘The Culture of Metrics’ started
A common theme in Amazon’s development is the drive to use a measured approach to all aspects of the business, beyond the finance. Marcus (2004) describes an occasion at a corporate ‘boot-camp’ in January 1997 when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos ‘saw the light’. ‘At Amazon, we will have a Culture of Metrics’, he said while addressing his senior staff. He went on to explain how web-based business gave Amazon an ‘amazing window into human behaviour’. Marcus says: ‘Gone were the fuzzy approximations of focus groups, the anecdotal fudging and smoke blowing from the marketing department.
A company like Amazon could (and did) record every move a visitor made, every last click and twitch of the mouse. As the data piled up into virtual heaps, hummocks and mountain ranges, you could draw all sorts of conclusions about their chimerical nature, the consumer. In this sense, Amazon was not merely a store, but an immense repository of facts. All we needed were the right equations to plug into them’.
James Marcus then goes on to give a fascinating insight into a breakout group discussion of how Amazon could better use measures to improve its performance. Marcus was in the Bezos group, brainstorming customer-centric metrics. Marcus (2004) summarises the dialogue, led by Bezos:
"First, we figure out which things we’d like to measure on the site", he said.
"For example, let’s say we want a metric for customer enjoyment. How could we calculate that?"
"There was silence. Then somebody ventured: "How much time each customer spends on the site?"
"Not specific enough", Jeff said.
"How about the average number of minutes each customer spends on the site per session" someone else suggested. "If that goes up, they’re having a blast".
"But how do we factor in purchase?" I [Marcus] said feeling proud of myself.
"Is that a measure of enjoyment"?
"I think we need to consider frequency of visits, too", said a dark-haired woman I didn’t recognise.
“Lot of folks are still accessing the web with those creepy-crawly modems. Four short visits from them might be just as good as one visit from a guy with a T-1. Maybe better’.
"Good point", Jeff said. "And anyway, enjoyment is just the start. In the end, we should be measuring customer ecstasy"
It is interesting that Amazon was having this debate in about the elements of RFM analysis (described in Chapter 6 of Internet Marketing), 1997, after already having achieved $16 million of revenue in the previous year. Of course, this is a miniscule amount compared with today’s billions of dollar turnover. The important point was that this was the start of a focus on metrics which can be seen through the description of Matt Pounds work later in this case study.
From human to software-based recommendations
Amazon has developed internal tools to support this ‘Culture of Metrics’. Marcus (2004) describes how the ‘Creator Metrics’ tool shows content creators how well their product listings and product copy are working. For each content editor such as Marcus, it retrieves all recently posted documents including articles, interviews, booklists and features. For each one it then gives a conversion rate to sale plus the number of page views, adds (added to basket) and repels (content requested, but the back button then used). In time, the work of editorial reviewers such as Marcus was marginalised since Amazon found that the majority of visitors used the search tools rather than read editorial and they responded to the personalised recommendations as the matching technology improved (Marcus likens early recommendations techniques to ‘going shopping with the village idiot’).
Experimentation and testing at Amazon
The ‘Culture of Metrics’ also led to a test-driven approach to improving results at Amazon. Matt Round, speaking at E-metrics 2004 when he was director of personalisation at Amazon describes the philosophy as ‘Data Trumps Intuitions’. He explained how Amazon used to have a lot of arguments about which content and promotion should go on the all important home page or category pages. He described how every category VP wanted top-center and how the Friday meetings about placements for next week were getting ‘too long, too loud, and lacked performance data’.
But today ‘automation replaces intuitions’ and real-time experimentation tests are always run to answer these questions since actual consumer behaviour is the best way to decide upon tactics.
Marcus (2004) also notes that Amazon has a culture of experiments of which A/B tests are key components. Examples where A/B tests are used include new home page design, moving features around the page, different algorithms for recommendations, changing search relevance rankings. These involve testing a new treatment against a previous control for a limited time of a few days or a week. The system will randomly show one or more treatments to visitors and measure a range of parameters such as units sold and revenue by category (and total), session time, session length, etc. The new features will usually be launched if the desired metrics are statistically significantly better. Statistical tests are a challenge though as distributions are not normal (they have a large mass at zero for example of no purchase) There are other challenges since multiple A/B tests are running every day and A/B tests may overlap and so conflict. There are also longer-term effects where some features are ‘cool’ for the first two weeks and the opposite effect where changing navigation may degrade performance temporarily. Amazon also finds that as its users evolve in their online experience the way they act online has changed. This means that Amazon has to constantly test and evolve its features.
Amazon.com Technology
It follows that the Amazon technology infrastructure must readily support this culture of experimentation and this can be difficult to achieved with standardised content management. Amazon has achieved its competitive advantage through developing its technology internally and with a significant investment in this which may not be available to other organisations without the right focus on the online channels.
As Amazon explains in SEC (2005) ‘using primarily our own proprietary technologies, as well as technology licensed from third parties, we have implemented numerous features and functionality that simplify and improve the customer shopping experience, enable third parties to sell on our platform, and facilitate our fulfillment and customer service operations. Our current strategy is to focus our development efforts on continuous innovation by creating and enhancing the specialized, proprietary software that is unique to our business, and to license or acquire commercially-developed technology for other applications where available and appropriate. We continually invest in several areas of technology, including our seller platform; A9.com, our wholly-owned subsidiary focused on search technology on www.A9.com and other Amazon sites; web services; and digital initiatives.’
Round (2004) describes the technology approach as ‘distributed development and deployment’. Pages such as the home page have a number of content ‘pods’ or ‘slots’ which call web services for features. This makes it relatively easy to change the content in these pods and even change the location of the pods on-screen. Amazon uses a flowable or fluid page design unlike many sites which enables it to make the most of real-estate on-screen.
Technology also supports more standard e-retail facilities. SEC (2005) states: ‘We use a set of applications for accepting and validating customer orders, placing and tracking orders with suppliers, managing and assigning inventory to customer orders, and ensuring proper shipment of products to customers. Our transaction-processing systems handle millions of items, a number of different status inquiries, multiple shipping addresses, gift-wrapping requests, and multiple shipment methods. These systems allow the customer to choose whether to receive single or several shipments based on availability and to track the progress of each order. These applications also manage the process of accepting, authorizing, and charging customer credit cards.’
Data Driven Automation
Round (2004) said that ‘Data is king at Amazon’. He gave many examples of data driven automation including customer channel preferences; managing the way content is displayed to different user types such as new releases and top-sellers, merchandising and recommendation (showing related products and promotions) and also advertising through paid search (automatic ad generation and bidding).
The automated search advertising and bidding system for paid search has had a big impact at Amazon. Sponsored links initially done by humans, but this was unsustainable due to range of products at Amazon. The automated programme generates keywords, writes ad creative, determines best landing page, manages bids, measure conversion rates, profit per converted visitor and updates bids. Again the problem of volume is there, Matt Round described how the book ‘How to Make Love Like a Porn Star’ by Jenna Jameson received tens of thousands of clicks from pornography-related searches, but few actually purchased the book. So the update cycle must be quick to avoid large losses.
There is also an automated email measurement and optimization system. The campaign calendar used to be manually managed with relatively weak measurement and it was costly to schedule and use. A new system:
Automatically optimizes content to improve customer experience
Avoids sending an e-mail campaign that has low clickthrough or high unsubscribe rate
Includes inbox management (avoid sending multiple emails/week)
Has growing library of automated email programs covering new releases and recommendations
But there are challenges if promotions are too successful if inventory isn’t available.
Your Recommendations
Customers Who Bought X…, also bought Y is Amazon’s signature feature. Round (2004) describes how Amazon relies on acquiring and then crunching a massive amount of data. Every purchase, every page viewed and every search is recorded. So there are now to new version, customers who shopped for X also shopped for… and Customers who searched for X also bought… They also have a system codenamed ‘Goldbox’ which is a cross-sell and awareness raising tool. Items are discounted to encourage purchases in new categories!
I have a more detailed article on Amazon personalisation / recommendation system
He also describes the challenge of techniques for sifting patterns from noise (sensitivity filtering) and clothing and toy catalogues change frequently so recommendations become out of date. The main challenges though are the massive data size arising from millions of customers, millions of items and recommendations made in real time.
Amazon Partnership strategy
As Amazon grew, its share price growth enabled partnership or acquisition with a range of companies in different sectors. Marcus (2004) describes how Amazon partnered with Drugstore.com (pharmacy), Living.com (furniture), Pets.com (pet supplies), Wineshopper.com (wines), HomeGrocer.com (groceries), Sothebys.com (auctions) and Kozmo.com (urban home delivery). In most cases, Amazon purchased an equity stake in these partners, so that it would share in their prosperity. It also charged them fees for placements on the Amazon site to promote and drive traffic to their sites. Similarly, Amazon charged publishers for prime-position to promote books on its site which caused an initial hue-and-cry, but this abated when it was realised that paying for prominent placements was widespread in traditional booksellers and supermarkets. Many of these new online companies failed in 1999 and 2000, but Amazon had covered the potential for growth and was not pulled down by these partners, even though for some such as Pets.com it had an investment of 50%.
Analysts sometimes refer to ‘Amazoning a sector’ meaning that one company becomes dominant in an online sector such as book retail such that it becomes very difficult for others to achieve market share. In addition to developing, communicating and delivering a very strong proposition, Amazon has been able to consolidate its strength in different sectors through its partnership arrangements and through using technology to facilitate product promotion and distribution via these partnerships. The Amazon retail platform enables other retailers to sell products online using the Amazon user interface and infrastructure through their ‘Syndicated Stores’ programme.
For example, in the UK, Waterstones (www.waterstones.co.uk) is one of the largest traditional bookstores. It found competition with online so expensive and challenging, that eventually it entered a partnership arrangement where Amazon markets and distributes its books online in return for a commission online. Similarly, in the US, Borders a large book retailer uses the Amazon merchant platform for distributing its products.
Toy retailer Toys R’ Us have a similar arrangement. Such partnerships help Amazon extends its reach into the customer-base of other suppliers, and of course, customers who buy in one category such as books can be encouraged to purchase into other areas such as clothing or electronics.
Another form of partnership referred to above is the Amazon Marketplace which enables Amazon customers and other retailers to sell their new and used books and other goods alongside the regular retail listings. A similar partnership approach is the Amazon ‘Merchants@’ program which enables third party merchants (typically larger than those who sell via the Amazon Marketplace) to sell their products via Amazon. Amazon earn fees either through fixed fees or sales commissions per-unit. This arrangement can help customers who get a wider choice of products from a range of suppliers with the convenience of purchasing them through a single checkout process.
Finally, Amazon has also facilitated formation of partnerships with smaller companies through its affiliates programme. Internet legend records that Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon was chatting to someone at a cocktail party who wanted to sell books about divorce via her web site. Subsequently, Amazon.com launched its Associates Program in July 1996 and it is still going strong. Googling http://www.google.com/search?q=www.amazon.com+-site%3Awww.amazon.com for sites that link to the US site, shows over 4 million pages, many of which will be affiliates. Amazon does not use an affiliate network which would take commissions from sale, but thanks to the strength of its brand has developed its own affiliate programme. Amazon has created a tiered performance-based incentives to encourage affiliates to sell more Amazon products.
Amazon Marketing communications
In their SEC filings Amazon state that the aims of their communications strategy are (unsurprisingly) to:
Increase customer traffic to our websites
Create awareness of our products and services
Promote repeat purchases
Develop incremental product and service revenue opportunities
Strengthen and broaden the Amazon.com brand name.
Amazon also believe that their most effective marketing communications are a consequence of their focus on continuously improving the customer experience. This then creates word-of-mouth promotion which is effective in acquiring new customers and may also encourage repeat customer visits.
As well as this Marcus (2004) describes how Amazon used the personalisation enabled through technology to reach out to a difficult to reach market which Bezos originally called ‘the hard middle’. Bezos’s view was that it was easy to reach 10 people (you called them on the phone) or the ten million people who bought the most popular products (you placed a superbowl ad), but more difficult to reach those in between. The search facilities in the search engine and on the Amazon site, together with its product recommendation features meant that Amazon could connect its products with the interests of these people.
Online advertising techniques include paid search marketing, interactive ads on portals, e-mail campaigns and search engine optimisation. These are automated as far as possible as described earlier in the case study. As previously mentioned, the affiliate programme is also important in driving visitors to Amazon and Amazon offers a wide range of methods of linking to its site to help improve conversion.
For example, affiliates can use straight text links leading direct to a product page and they also offer a range of dynamic banners which feature different content such as books about Internet marketing or a search box. Amazon also use cooperative advertising arrangements, better known as ‘contra-deals’ with some vendors and other third parties. For example, a print advertisement in 2005 for a particular product such as a wireless router with a free wireless laptop card promotion will feature a specific Amazon URL in the ad. In product fulfilment packs, Amazon may include a leaflet for a non-competing online company such as Figleaves.com (lingerie) or Expedia (travel). In return, Amazon leaflets may be included in customer communications from the partner brands.
Our Associates program directs customers to our websites by enabling independent websites to make millions of products available to their audiences with fulfillment performed by us or third parties. We pay commissions to hundreds of thousands of participants in our Associates program when their customer referrals result in product sales.
In addition, we offer everyday free shipping options worldwide and recently announced Amazon.com Prime in the U.S., our first membership program in which members receive free two-day shipping and discounted overnight shipping. Although marketing expenses do not include the costs of our free shipping or promotional offers, we view such offers as effective marketing tools.
Sources: Internet Retailer (2003), Marcus (2004), Round (2004), SEC (2005)
Internet Retailer (2003) The New Wal-Mart? Internet Retailer, Paul Demery.
Marcus, J. (2004) Amazonia. Five years at the epicentre of the dot-com juggernaut, The New Press, New York, NY.
Round, M. (2004) Presentation to E-metrics, London, May 2005. www.emetrics.org.
SEC (2005) United States Securities And Exchange Commission submission Form 10-K from Amazon. For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2004

MAC Carpet to participate in Domotex Hannover 2009

MACCarpet - the leading manufacturer of tufted printed carpets and rugs – announced lately that it will participate in the 20th Domotex Hannover, that will take place during 17-20 January 2009 in Hannover, Germany.



With 45,000 visitors from the retail trade and skilled crafts, as well as architects and interior designers, plus 1,350 exhibitors from some 60 countries, DOMOTEX HANNOVER 2009 will reaffirm its status as the world's leading event for the flooring trade.

In 2008, Domotex Hannover set new records, with 1,442 exhibitors (2007: 1,336) occupying some 97,083 square meters of display space (up from 91,757 square meters in 2007). Never before had so many exhibitors - from over 60 different nations - appeared at this global showcase for carpets, textile and resilient floor coverings plus laminate and parquet flooring; never before had they booked so much display space. Their exhibits expressively highlighted tomorrow's trends, featuring new materials and creative designs, including the latest colors and patterns.

MAC Carpet will exhibit in Domotex Hannover 2009 the amazing ability to produce a large variety of tufted custom printed floors for different applications including indoor, outdoor, bathroom, kitchen, children, and car. In addition to rugs, mats, runners, wall to wall carpets, artificial grass and advertising floor panels. In its home country MAC Carpet figures as one of Egypt's top exporters, with more than 80% of its total production going to some 107 countries and retails at many world class retailers like Wal-Mart, IKEA, Tesco and others. The company corporate headquarters and main manufacturing facilities are located in Tenth-of- Ramadan City, the largest industrial estate in the Middle East. In total, its annual production capacity 58 million square meters employing more than 5,800 peopleFor more information about MAC Carpet;Website: http://www.maccarpet.com/about.htm

Email: info@maccarpet.com

emarketing@maccarpet.com

Seven Steps to Successful SEO - Emarketing Egypt

Seven Steps to Successful SEO

Learn SEO from E-marketing Egypt

This is very good articel about SEO
For all egyptian and arabs who want to learn more about SEO

YOU CAN FIND THIS ARTICEL AT SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL WEBSITE

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love
Author; Richard Burckhardt

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem - you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog - reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Richard V. Burckhardt, also known as The Web Optimist, is an SEO trainer based in Palm Springs, CA with over 10 years experience in search engine optimization, web development and marketing.

Thank you very much

Google in Egypt - Nikesh Arora - Egypt interview

Email Marketing - No not spam let E-marketing Egypt help you

Let me help you to launch your email marketing campaign by the below good articel;

Email Marketing - No not spam
At its core, Email Marketing is a tool for customer relationship management (CRM).Its Purpose: To build virtual relationships with existing and potential customers.Its Benefit: Maximise the retention and value of these customers, which should ultimately lead to greater profitability.

What is email marketing?

Simply put, Email Marketing is a form of direct marketing which utilises electronic means to deliver commercial messages to an audience. It is one of the oldest and yet still one of the most powerful of all eMarketing tactics. The power comes from the fact that it is:
extremely cost effective and has a low cost per contact
highly targeted
customisable
completely measurable
Email Marketing's main strength is that it takes advantage of a customer's most prolific touch point with the Internet… their inbox.
Although spam mail has done a great deal to discredit the Email Marketing industry, the benefits are still apparent and substantiated by the fact that in February, 2006, a JupiterResearch report concluded that spending on Email Marketing will rise from $885 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion in 2010.
Email Marketing - A Step By Step Guide
A successful email campaign requires careful attention - from planning to execution and evaluation of the campaign. There are certain best practices and steps to follow which will ensure the success of an email campaign:
Step 1 - Strategic Planning
The first part of any email campaign should involve planning around the goals you will need to achieve.
There are roughly 2 types of commercial emails you can send:
Promotional emails are more direct and are geared at enticing the user to take action through purchase or sign up
Retention based emails usually take the form of a newsletter and may include promotional messages but ultimately should contain information of value to create a long term relationship with the reader
A successful email campaign is most likely to be the one geared at retaining and creating a long term relationship with the reader.

Step 2 - List Building and Management
Running a successful email campaign requires that your business has a genuine opt-in database. This means that you need to have the user's permission to communicate with them or you risk having your mail regarded as spam or unsolicited (bulk) email.
Emails regarded as spam can have dire consequences for your organisation as not only will your reputation be in jeopardy, but legal action may be pursued in many parts of the world.
An effective, best practice Email Marketing campaign requires an in-house list cultivated over time. This list should contain people who are prospects, customers or potential evangelists of your business, who have explicitly given their permission to hear from you. You can use the website and subscription campaigns as well as the newsletter itself (e.g. send to a friend function) to build lists. An equally important feature is the unsubscribe function. A reader needs to know how they can easily opt-out of your email communication should they need to.

Step 3 - Creative Execution
Email content that your readers will value is vital to ensuring the success of an Email Marketing campaign. Valuable content is informative and progressive and should address the problems and needs of readers. It's all about what they want to hear more than what you want to say to them. The reader determines what value your content provides, not the publisher.

Step 4 - Design
The design of a mailer is sometimes an area that has the least amount of thought put into it. This is usually due to the lack of understanding some designers have of usability. The common problems are the:
length of the email
disorganised structure of information
readability of text
Interactive emails are best constructed with lightweight HTML capability allowing the email to open quickly in order to grab the user's attention before he/she moves on. The structure must allow people to scan and navigate the email without too much complication. The length of paragraphs, emphasis through bolding and colours as well as sectioning information with bullets and borders all contribute to a well structured email.
Any good designer will test their email on a variety of current, most-used email clients. (E.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, Lotus Notes, Eudora etc). This process is called platform testing and ensures that the email will display correctly in as many email clients as possible. Sometimes it is not possible to ensure exact consistency on every email client; however the variations can be minimised through following best international practice and staying abreast of new developments in email clients.

Step 5 - Newsletter Components
Within every newsletter, there are a number of components that will aid the reader to orientate and better accept and react to your newsletter over time. Consistency is key in some areas while others can be refreshed although remaining within the style and tone of the communication. The most prevalent components are as follows:
Subject Lines are essential! They aid the reader in identifying the newsletter and enticing them to open it. It is important to avoid promotional words like "free", "win" and "buy now" due to these being flagged as potential spam by email spam filters. Using the name and edition of the newsletter in the subject line aids in maintaining consistency and also helps readers filter them from their inbox.
"To"," from" and "reply" fields are also opportunities to build the relationship through creating a perception of familiarity. In other words, the reader needs to perceive that the newsletter is somewhat unique for them and sent personally by the publisher. Using a personalised company email address (e.g. mailto:rob@quirk.biz) for the "reply" field creates familiarity and builds trust with the reader. The "from" address should also include the organisation's name. A meaningless "from" address which the reader cannot identify only serves to confuse the origin of the newsletter.
Personalisation should be standard practice with emails. However, some companies still start the newsletter with a greeting like "Dear Valued Guest". This can be acceptable as a default greeting; however, using their first name or surname can create a perception of a more personal email. This can be taken further if the customers give you a preference regarding the content they like the most. The text and images in the email can be tailored to match preferences and interests upon delivery.

Step 6 - Deployment
Any good email marketer should be able to ensure an excellent delivery rate. A challenge for email marketers today is getting past the various spam filters on the path to the readers inbox. It is worthwhile to check emails against various spam filters, like Spamassasin, to ensure your legitimate message is not mistakenly picked up by one of them.
Delivering emails at correct and consistent times also contributes to the reader fostering a relationship with your organisation. A good offline example of this relationship is the daily newspaper delivery which arrives at your door at the same time every day, week or month.
Step 7 - Tracking and Reporting
It is crucial to determine the success of your email campaign on the short and long term basis. For this you will need an email tracking system which produces statistics in a user friendly manner. It is important that these statistics are used in a way which improves and refines the email campaign to boost your goals and return on investment (ROI). The following measurables contribute to your understanding of the performance of email campaigns:
Subscriber Growth vs. Decline - Tracking the growth or shrinkage of your database can help you analyse what is or what is not working in a newsletter. A significant or consistent loss in subscribers is a key indication that you are not meeting the needs of your subscribers. A high pass on rate indicates that your list values the content enough to constantly share with others. Splitting the list and testing 2 versions of the newsletter can help determine the cause of high unsubscribe rates. The size of the list however, is not as important as the quality thereof as a high percentage response from your existing newsletter recipients carries more impact than subscriber growth which may still yield low response rates.
Click Through Rates and Conversion - This measures the effectiveness of your email via the links placed therein. When a reader clicks through to a webpage, these can be easily measured as a percentage against number of delivered, opened or sent emails. By analysing these statistics, the email marketer will be able to tell which content or promotion was the most enticing for the reader. Measuring the click throughs and conversion rates will ensure that you are able to track differences and trends the same way over time in order to improve the newsletter content and its impact.
Feedback and Interaction Handling - The feedback from readers is probably the best way to gauge what impression your newsletter is making on them. If you are receiving regular positive feedback, chances are that many of your readers are impressed with the style and content of the newsletter. Evaluating what they are saying about you in other areas on the Internet will also help you get a better picture of the reputation of your brand online.
Split testing - This is one of the most important parts of an Email Marketing Campaign! Split testing across a host of factors like open rates, across different subject lines, different days of the week and times of the day, different copy styles and email length, for example, will enable you to see what is working best for your campaign. In short, there is no alternative to putting a lot of time and energy into testing and fine tuning your email marketing strategy - your open rates will improve and the results are well worth it!
Well there you have it; we now know email marketing is controllable and measurable: making it one of the best means to ensure a return on your investment, by acquiring new customers and new sales.

Source;www.quirk.biz

Start your Viral Marketing let E-marketing Egypt help you

Let me help you to launch your Viral Marketing Campaign by the below good articel;

Viral Marketing uses people's electronic connectivity to increase the velocity of word-of-mouth. People with similar interests, needs and lifestyles tend to pass on and share interesting and entertaining content. When sponsored by a brand, the message builds awareness of a product or service and can provide qualified prospects for the organisation to pursue.
How Does Viral Marketing Work?
If you are familiar with the concept of "word-of-mouth", then Viral Marketing will not be difficult to grasp as it is essentially the same thing. The significant difference in this case is that Viral Marketing utilises electronic means to spread the message. Without a doubt, referrals are still the most powerful marketing weapon available. Viral Marketing harnesses the electronic connectivity of individuals to ensure marketing messages are referred from one person to another.
A classic example of extremely successful Viral Marketing was the campaign for the email service Hotmail. When the company launched, every outgoing message from this platform contained an advertisement for Hotmail and a link to its website at the bottom of the email. As people emailed their friends and colleagues, they were also advertising the service. Recipients could simply click on the link and sign themselves up, and as they continued to email friends from their new account, the message spread within existing social networks and was passed along with little effort from the company. Hotmail went from zero to 30 million users in the first 3 years, today Hotmail has over 280 million users worldwide.
Another example of successful Viral Marketing was Burger King's Subservient Chicken campaign which was launched to promote a range of chicken sandwiches. A website was created that featured a man dressed in a giant chicken suit who responded to the commands typed in by visitors. The tag line - "Have it your way". A lot of people must have thought making the chicken man do the moonwalk or some yoga or even lay an egg was funny because within a week the website had received an astonishing 20 million hits!
Why do Viral Marketing? Viral Marketing is popular because of the:
Ease of executing the campaign
Relatively low costs (compared to direct mail)
High and rapid response rates
The core strength of Viral Marketing is its ability to obtain a large number of interested people at a low cost.
As appealing as it is, Viral Marketing is not always easy to master. In a 2006 Silverpop Email list Growth Survey, Viral Marketing was listed as the top ranked unsuccessful tactic for marketers. However, in the same survey, Viral Marketing was the top ranked tactic being planned by marketers in their next 12 months. This demonstrates the demand marketers have for Viral Marketing as demonstrated by viewer response rates, as well as how easy it is to get a campaign of this nature wrong. The key to running a successful viral campaign lies in the planning, the incentive offered and the knowledge of your target audience.
Types of Viral Marketing There are 2 distinct subsets of Viral Marketing that can be identified:
In-the-Wild Viral Marketing
Controlled Viral Marketing
In-the-Wild Viral Marketing
This type of campaign is defined as a "virus" that is unleashed without further input from the advertiser or marketer. The spread of the message is perpetuated through whichever means the user chooses. The most important aspect is that the user still chooses to send on the message in whichever way they can, the most likely method being via email (e.g. sending a link on to a friend).
When successful, this type of campaign can build tremendous brand equity at a marginal cost. Because the communication takes place directly between consumers, the marketer has to be prepared to let go of their brand so that the message and flow of communications is not restricted.
Controlled Viral Marketing
This type of campaign has more of a direct outcome in that its success is determined by a specific goal, an example of which would be the expansion of a database of qualified leads and prospects (e.g. "Send to a friend" emails). This facilitates future interaction with the prospects, targeting sales growth and brand awareness. Ultimately, the controlled viral campaign should lead to interaction with the newly acquired prospects in a way that adds value to the organisation.

Starting a Viral Marketing Campaign
There are no hard rules when it comes to devising your Viral Marketing campaign, but there are some tips you can follow when planning your efforts:
Focus on your brand and products before the messageWhat makes your brand / product successful and why would people want to pass along your message? Do you have something unique and engaging that the intended market will want to talk about?
Ensure that your website or newsletter is built to allow users to refer it to othersThe message must be easily forwarded and not lose shape or structure in the process.
Give away products, entertainment experiences or services Free goods are powerful attraction factors in Viral Marketing. However, free for the sake of it is not usually successful as the prize needs to be relevant to the audience. This is where it is important to understand the target market's needs, motivations and behaviours to select the relevant incentive.
What appeals is honesty and authenticity There are various different aspects that a Viral Marketing campaign can focus on, depending on the intended target market:
Entertainment factors
Utility functions (offer something the reader can use)
Incentivised actions (instant gratification)
Undercover (seeding the campaign without the user knowing the brand)
Uniqueness (something the reader has never seen before) Whichever aspect you choose, be authentic and truthful. People will only forward something they believe is worthwhile.
Personalise referral emailsWhen your message is forwarded, ensure your technical design can support personalisation in the subject line. (E.g. "John Doe thought that you would love to see this")
Take advantage of other resources Successful viral campaigns use other resources to get the word out. Identifying the resources that the target market utilises (e.g. Social Media websites) and placing the message in these spaces increases the exponential potential of the message.
Track the results & analyse the data It is important that the campaign is tracked according to the objectives set out initially. This can also help tweak the campaign mid-flight in order to improve results.
The beauty of a well executed Viral Marketing campaign lies in the minimal costs and the high success rates - as with all word-of-mouth, if handled properly, it can reap huge rewards.
Coming soon: Chapter 13. What should you expect?
Defined by Wikipedia as advertising on the Internet (who would have thought), Online Advertising is so much more than flashing banners and annoying pop ups

Source;quirk.biz

تسويق إلكتروني - الانترنت والتسويق على ألحان الكيبورد - مقال عن التسويق الالكتروني

تسويق إلكتروني - مقال عن التسويق الالكتروني

بينما تجلس على الشاطئ مستمتعا بالهواء الطلق وسحر الطبيعة الخلابة كل ما عليك فعله هو التركيز لدقائق معدوة والتحديق في شاشة اللاب

توب الخاص والاستماع لألحان نقرات أصابعك على الكيبورد مع إحتساء كوب من الحليب الدافي.
ثم الانتظار لترى نتيجة طرقعات الاصابع على الكيبورد بعد دقائق معدودة!

أحدث عالم الانترنت طفره نوعيه في عالم التسويق وبات من السهل بناء العلامة التجارية عبر قنوات الكترونيه تعمل لمده 24 ساعة يوميا ولمدة 7 أيام أسبوعيا و365 يوما سنويا دون توقف.

يقول فيليب كوتلر:
في العقد القادم ستتم اعادة هندسة التسويق من الالف إلى الياء ... سيخترق خليفة المجتمع الصناعي-اقتصاد المعلومات- ويغير كل أوجه الحياه اليومية تقريبا ...لاتحتاج الشركة الى ملئ فراغ كبير, يمكن ان تكون موجودة في اي مكان ,يمكن ارسال الرسالات واستكمالها في نفس الوقت ويمكن شحن الأشياء مثل الكتب والموسيقى والافلام في شكل بتات (ومضات) bits بدلا من شحنها ككتله.

تغلغل الانترنت في حياتنا بصورة رهيبه فقد انتقل من كونه حاجة كماليه وأضحي حاجة أساسية لا يستطيع البعض العيش بدونه ... ولم تغب هذه الفرصة عن أعين المسوقين الذين يترقبون الفرص المناسبه التي قد تحقق طفرات لتسويق منتجاتهم.
يمتاز التسويق الالكتروني بعدة مميزات فاستخدام الإنترنت في التسويق يتيح عرض المنتجات في العالم كله طوال ساعات اليوم وطوال أيام السنة ولا يحتاج العملاء الوقوف في صفوف للحصول على منتجاتهم ولا يحتاجون لسماع ثرثرة البائعين كما يتميز الاعلان عبر الانترنت بتكلفة اقل بكثير من الاعلان التقليدي ,وتعتمد معظم الشركات من 5: 15% من ميزانياتها الاعلانية للاعلان عبر الانترنت مع تحقيق نتائج تعتبر في كثير من الأحيان تفوق نتائج التسويق التقليدي ولعل أبرز ما يتفوق به التسويق الالكتروني على التقليدي سهولة تصميم تقارير بكل سهولة ويسر توضح عدد مرات مشاهدة الاعلان وعدد النقرات والتوزيع الجغرافي لطبيعة المشاهدين .. فضلا عن امكانية متابعة هذا التقرير لحظة بلحظة أثناء الحملة الاعلانيه على الانترنت ولعل الجدير بالذكر هنا ان الانترنت هو الوسيلة الوحيدة للاعلان التي يستطيع من خلالها العميل مشاهدة الاعلان والتفاعل معه والاستفسار عن المنتج والشراء في نفس الوقت وهو ما يميز التسويق الالكتروني عن نظيره التقليدي حيث ان الاخير يصعب فيه تطبيق هذه العمليه عبر قناة اعلانيه واحده اذ يتطلب في معظم الاحيان وجود عدة قنوات مشتركة مع بعضها لاتمام عملية البيع ,فالعميل الذي يشاهد الاعلان في التلفاز أوالجريده أو يسمعه عبر الراديو يحتاج الى استخدام وسيله اخرى وهي اجراء اتصال تليفوني بالشركة للاستفسار عن المنتج اولتوصيل الطلب للمنزل او ربما يحتاج الى الذهاب لمقر الشركة ليشترى المنتج بنفسه فالعميل في هذه الحالة ينتقل عبر وسائل متعدده من القنوات الترويجية لشراء المنتج .
تنبه الكثير من المسوقين في بعض الدول المتقدمه الى مزايا الانترنت وأهميته كأداه فعالة من أدوات التسويق أما في الدول العربيه فلم تنتبه الكثير من الشركات الى أهمية الانترنت فكثير من الشركات تعتبر انشاء موقع لها على الانترنت شيئ من قبيل "البرستيج" أو لتجاري منافسيها ليس الا... أما أن تستعمل الشركة موقعها الالكتروني لجذب عملاء جدد أولفتح أسواق جديدة فليس في الحسبان بل هو بعيد عن الأذهان!!
تلقى المواقع الاباحيه وغرف الدردشه عوامل الجذب الاكبر لجمهور عريض من الشارع العربي وتليها مواقع الاغاني والرياضه ... وقلما وجدت موقعا تعليميا يلقى قبولا جيدا .. الا ما رحم ربي
وبعض المواقع الاسلامية.
لم تغب هذه المعلومات عن أعين المسوقين فلجأوا الى اقتناص هذه الفرص لتسويق منتجاتهم عبر شبكة الانترنت فراحوا يصولون ويجولون بمنتجاتهم عبر المواقع التي تلقى قبولا وانتشارا كبيرا
ولكن المشكلة التي تواجه معظم من يدعون أنهم يقدمون خدمات التسويق الالكتروني أن كل ما يقدمونه لا يتجازو مظلة الترويج الالكتروني أو البيع الالكتروني المباشر من خلال غرف الدردشة أو الماسنجر الخاص بهم ويحسبون أنهم يحسنون صنعا!!
فكل ما يفعلونه لا يتجاوز وضع بعض البانرات على بعض المواقع الالكترونية أو تسجيل الموقع في بعض محركات البحث والأدلة الالكترونية أو ارسال الالاف من الرسائل البريدية الغير مرغوب فيها spam mailing والتي غالبا تؤدي الى الاضرار بسمعة الشركة والإسائه للصورة الذهنية للمنتج في أعين الكثير من العملاء...
كل ذلك لا يتجاوز أن يكون ترويجا عبر الانترنت ولكنه لا يرقى لمرتبة التسويق الالكتروني
ولكن ... ماهو الفرق بينهما؟
ببساطة... هو أن الترويج من عناصر المزيج التسويقي ونظرا لان بعض العاملين في مجال الاعلان عبر الانترنت لايفرقون بينهما فيقومون بعملية الترويج الالكتروني وهم يحسبون انهم يقدمون خدمة التسويق عبر الانترنت.
في التسويق الالكتروني نجد أن عملية التسويق عبر الانترنت تبدأ بدراسة سلوك المستهلك الالكتروني.. فهل هناك فرق بين المستهلك الالكتروني والمستهلك التقليدي؟!!..بالطبع نعم فالسلوك المتوقع من المستهلك التقليدي يختلف عن المستهلك الالكتروني حتى ولو كان نفس الشخص فانه يظهر سلوكا مختلفا في التسوق عبر الانترنت والتسوق التقليدي!
ثم دراسة الخصائص التسويقية للسلعة والهدف من عملية التسويق ,فهل تحتاج السلعة إلى المعاينه والملامسة قبل الشراء؟ أم أن الهدف من عملية التسويق الالكتروني هو بناء علامة تجارية على الانترنت؟,وما هي القناة الترويجية المناسبة لها؟
فربما تكون البنرات الاعلانيه والحملات البريدية غير مجدية فنلجأ الى استخدام الرسائل القصيرة SMS وربما لا يكون ذلك مجديا فنلجأ الى تهيئة المنتج ليظهر في قمة نتائج محركات البحث وهي عملية معقدة نوعا ما وتسمى ب SEO أي search engine optimization
ولكن لا يكفي الانترنت وحده ولا تكفي الوسائل الرقمية وحدها لتسويق أي منتج ولذا يعتبر خبراء التسويق أن التسويق الالكتروني ماهو الا مكمل للتسويق التقليدي فمع المزايا التي ذكرناها بخصوص التسويق الالكتروني الا انه يشوبه بعض العيوب منها عدم انتشار الوعي بثقافة التسوق عبر الانترنت وصعوبة تسويق بعض المنتجات التي تحتاج إلى الملامسة والمعاينة فضلا عن مشاكل تأخر الشحن والصعوبة التي يلاقيها البعض من التعامل مع أنظمة البيع الالكترونيه.
بقى سؤال يطرح نفسه في الآونة الأخيرة
هل سيتعامل المسوقون مع الانترنت كأداة تقليدية ؟
أم سيهيئون أنفسهم لتعلم فنون العزف على الكيبورد!!!

أحمد ناجي
محلل أعمال
azanagy@yahoo.com