Marketing Strategy

The Most Common Ways to Break a Google AdSense Ad

When your website marketing strategy has ad revenue as the end goal, you have to expect that the game isn’t going to be as easy as you at first think it will be. Ad revenue is a very thin margin even in the best of scenarios. It takes volume to make it grow. And countless website owners have gotten frustrated or impatient with their ad revenue and gotten themselves in trouble by trying some dumb trick or another rather than engage a professional digital marketing agency.

Here’s a list to avoid being a statistic and having Google ban you:

Excessive keyword stuffing

Number-one with a bullet, people still try this nonsense today. Google already knew it would happen when they launched way back in 1997. These sites get found and blacklisted sometimes within minutes of posting! Trust us, Google knows when a search term is repeated just to pull in a search engine and focus an ad. That is why they are Google.

Altering the results of an ad click

This is an unexpected one, but lately some site owners have attempted to monkey with the ad click results in ways like framing the ad target site or redirecting it. Huge violation of TOS, and it’s happening more as AJAX methods get more sophisticated.

Colour masking

It is true that Google allows you to customize the colours of an ad unit to your taste, either making it stand out in contrast of blend in for aesthetics. Some site owners get cocky and set things like the ad unit’s text or link colours to the webpage background colour, or set it into a CSS div with the alpha set to transparency and then using absolute positioning to have different content behind it… There’s a million ways to pull little tricks to hide an ad, and they all spell “TOS violation” and get you banned.

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Did You Know About These SEO Quirks?

According to SEO Perth Experts, a post that wins the prize for the most technically detailed SEO advice ever is this one; Search Engine Land shares these discoveries about punctuation quirks.

Honestly never heard of most of these. Dashes vs. underscores, pipe characters, using only lowercase… How did it take this long to be discovered?

To explain about the underscores part regarding “Google was written for nerds by nerds” – Computers have always had a problem with the space character in the name of anything, because the space is how we tell the computer that a new name is starting. This is especially a problem in the early days of computing, in programming languages, and general file system tinkering. So there evolved work-arounds to keep it human-readable: One of them was called “camel case” where you write all one word using interspersed capitals (WordWideWeb), another was alternating upper-and-lower case (worldWIDEweb), one was using underscores for spaces (world_wide_web) and so on. Underscores became the dominant convention, so you’d want to avoid underscores unless you want them taken literally. Now memorize all that and bewilder your bar mates with this trivia!

6 Things to Think About When Preparing a New Website

Remember the late 1990s when blinking images were thought to be the best thing for any website? Well fast forward to today and that shouldn’t even be on your want list. You and your web designer need to sit down and hash out what your website is going to look like before they start building your site. If you are wondering what you need to do to prepare to get your website off the ground, you’re at the right place. Let’s look at 6 tips & strategies you need to think about.

  • Who will be in charge? Who is going to make the development and design decisions? This can be a group of people or it can be just one person. If it’s a team one person, still needs to be handle the final approval. Otherwise, it can become quite chaotic as reworks are ordered by individuals in the group.
  • What’s your niche? What do you sell? What’s your product or service? You need to be very specific. If you sell air conditioners to residential customers, then your need to focus on that market with what you say in your content and the images you show. Don’t show a beach when you sell air conditioners – it sends a confusing message to your visitors.
  • Who is your target market? It is important that you stay on target. You need to be specific. Back to our example. If you sell air conditioners then your target market will be homeowners and let’s say they have homes that are 25 years or newer and the age of the homeowner is between 30 and 50. So when you write about your services make sure this is the market you are talking to.

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Is Your Social Media Plan Killing Your SEO?

By now, we should all know that about half your SEO traffic-attraction strategy should be based upon getting good links. And the way to a good link is to make social media love you. But what could go wrong with that plan? SteamFeed troubleshoots your social media strategy. And some of those bullet points are going to hurt – producing fresh, ready-made content for your website rather than rehashing somebody else’s stale leftovers is likely something we see on a daily basis, isn’t it?