PageRank Toolbar from Google:
It returns page ranking rated by Google when you visit a particular website’s page
http://toolbar.google.com

Alexa Toolbar from Alexa.com
It returns the traffic ranking of a particular website you visit
http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi

Alex does not offer toolbar compatible with Firefox. If you use Firefox, please refer to their information page to install 3rd party Alexa toolbarfor Firefox:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=127

Get used to using them in your web browsing. You’ll soon get yourself the power to distinguish good sites from bad ones.

A study held by Stanford University and Poynter Institute confirmed that text is the preferred “entry point” of a webpage for web surfers.

Is it surprising? It may be as many people regard graphic should be more visually appealing than text to normal web surfers.

I’m not surprised, however. Why? There is a much larger experiment on earth that confirms the finding in this research. It is the Google Adwords program.

When Google first launched its Google Adwords program, there was an intense internal debate whether it should go for the format of banner-based advertisement or text-based advertisement. Though with much uncertainty, it decided to go for the text-based one.

And the rest is history. Google becomes the number one online advertising company. Web users are attracted to click on the text-based advertisement showing at the right hand side of the search result page that helps boosting Google’s online revenue. As a frequent web surfer and Google’s search user, I click on those advertisements many times where I’ve found interesting or useful and I guess you have done similar thing as me.

So it confirms that “text” is more important than graphics in your webpage.

Would that conclude Banner Advertisement “dead” in the present finding? Unlikely if you read carefully the research results of the Stanford’s study: Here is the link:
http://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm

Every web master is searching for good content to be put on their websites. Why? It is because content is the life blood of websites. Without good content, web surfers turn away from you to other competing websites. Hence, you lose in the uphill battle with other webmasters competing in the same niche markets you are in.

Small players are playing the hard game to keep this up. But there are no exception to big players.

Google has been putting much effort doing this for the past few years. It has been indexing and digitalizing a lot of scholastic material and books that belong to public domains. Last week, it moved one more step ahead by signing University of California to digitalize and put all its libraries’ books spanning over 10 campuses online.

I’m a bit doubtful whether University of California has the rights to the books hosted in its libraries to be shared with Google. Though Google has spent a lot of effort to gain publishers’ consent to the books they want to get the content listed in Google. (Refer to the news http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3527296)

The lesson learned here is even big player in the Internet is struggling for content. Google truly understands this. It has to put in continuous effort to wider its scope of content to feed the hungry web surfers who are looking for content when they put up the search on Google’s websites.

So the number one principle in getting ranked higher in your everyday search engine tactic is: Build Content.
If you don’t know what public domain is. Refer to the post here:

Get 15 public domain books free of charge

Best Content Building,

Damen

Related news:

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3625571

Today I reviewed what has been published two years ago about how to select and implement the keywords strategies in using Google Adwords program.

I think this guide is still worth to take a look. It is available at

The Maximum Effect, written by Google Team members of Adwords

Best Pay-Per-Click Selling

Damen

Related Topics: The Maximum Effect

It violates the terms of use of Google AdSense program if you try to manipulate their Adsense scripts embedded in your site. However, there is an official guide from Google telling you how to do the split testing without violating their rules. You can view it here: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/08/abcs-of-ab-testing.html

Bear in mind the three fundamental principles of marketing: test, test and test

Best Adsense Advertising,

Damen

Webmasters are trying their best to put up Google’s Adsense advertisements on their website and make people click on any one of them to earn Adsense dollars. Here is a very good demonstration

You can see how clever they setup the format of their content to totally blend into the Google’s Adsense content. People could click on those advertisments accidentally.

I’m neutral to this strategy. Indeed, I have reservation to overdoing this like this website.

If I’m a smart visitor, I think I don’t like to be tricked in clicking those Google’s Adsense advertisement. However, once you realize that you have clicked on any one of those advertising links, you’re too late. The webmaster has already earned the Adsense dollars by your very action. So this strategy actually works.

This is actually created by a website builder software from here.

I have not used this software myself. But if you have tried it, let me know your experience!

Best Adsense Selling,

Damen

Online sellers can now try Google Checkout now here:

Someone call it Google payment or Google wallet

Best Selling Online!

Damen

Finally, Google starts the war in the online-payment market. Its head-on competitor is definitely —– eBay’s Paypal

We should keep an eye on it…. the Google Payment or someone call it Google Wallet

Look at the news here

Best Selling Online,

Damen

There is a new trick to earn money by Google is to join Google’s Adwords program and put up advertising with keywords with low bid. If People click on those advertisements, they are brought to the landing page full of Google’s Adsense advertisement with keywords with higher bid. In this way, the advertiser can earn the advertising dollars by the difference in the bidding price of keywords.

This is called Click Arbitrage.

When I first learnt this strategy, the immediate thought is this is theoretically workable but in the long run, it is going to end in dismay. Google eventually would deal with it.

Search Engine is not stupid and its strategy changes every day. And Google is rich and very profitable. It has a pool of good people working for it. It will exhaust all of its resources to combat people tricking the system. And Click Arbitrage is definitely one of them.

When I read the news here in the Inside Adwords Blog by Google, I think it is already dealing with it. Google is now trying to measure the quality of Google’s advertisers’ landing page to determine the bidding value of the keywords they choose to advertise. If the landing page’s quality is considered to be poor, the advertiser has to pay a higher bidding value for the keywords.

This is not surprising. What surprises me is why not Google simply bans the advertisers who put up a landing page full of Adsense’s advertisements? I guess one of the main reasons is Google does care about their customers – they are their revenue sources. Therefore unless the problem deteriorates, they do not take this final measure.

But God knows, it might happen in future.

My number one principle in doing Search Engine Optimization  is: Don’t do something to trick the search engines because even those strategies work for a while, they won’t work for long. You are going to pay for the price sooner or later.