The Cost Of Click Fraud

One of the biggest threats to the continued growth of Search Advertising is the increasing plague of click fraud. Although there are varying forms of click fraud, most people define it as any click generated, and paid for, where the intent is to drain the advertiser's budget. Advertisers know some clicks are more qualified than others, and not every visitor from their PPC campaigns will convert to a customer. But, they have a right to expect that the traffic they are paying for is coming from people at least marginally interested in their products or services.

What Motivates Click Fraud?

Why does click fraud exist? What motivates people to deceive the system by sending PPC advertisers bogus traffic? The short answer (as usual) is money.

Many Pay Per Click Advertising networks are partially, (or in some cases totally), dependent on affiliate sites to generate traffic for their advertisers. These networks syndicate their customer's ads so they will appear on the sites of their affiliates. Every time someone clicks on an ad the PPC Network and the affiliate site share the revenue. The more clicks the affiliate site generates, the more money it makes. While the vast majority of affiliates are legitimate trustworthy sites, others are in the business of exploiting loopholes in the system to line their pockets with real money by generating fake clicks. Often times the weapon of choice used by these rogue sites to cheat the system is a software script that automatically clicks on PPC ads.

Another variation of click fraud uses a more personal touch to steal advertiser's money. In the hyper-competitive world of Pay Per Click Advertising the battle for premium positioning at an affordable cost can cause companies to use less than ethical techniques to gain an edge. Companies can drive up their competitor's marketing costs by clicking on their Pay Per Click ads. If their competitor's marketing costs get too high they may lower the bids on their keywords, or stop bidding on the word altogether. Either way, the cost for the word goes down, giving the fraudulent company an opportunity to increase their ranking on the page at a lower cost.

The Search Engine's Response To Click Fraud.

All the Pay Per Click Search engines have systems in place to detect click fraud, and screen questionable clicks. One example of how they do this is by keying in on the IP address where the click originated from. If they see too many clicks coming form the same IP in a short period of time they will often screen the traffic.

The Search Engines are in a unique position when it comes to Click Fraud. On the one hand they benefit from it. The amount of revenue attributed to Click Fraud varies depending on who you ask, but everyone agrees that if illegitimate clicks were completely eliminated, all the major Search Engines would suffer a significant hit to their revenues and stock prices. However, the Search Engines also realize that the long term health of the industry depends on establishing trust with their advertiser base. Going forward we can expect to see Search Engines deploy increasingly sophisticated methods to eliminate fraud, and corresponding responses from the dark side of the Search Advertising industry.

Decreasing The Amount Of Click Fraud For Your Campaigns.

While it's impossible to completely eliminate fraudulent traffic, there are some things you can do to increase the percentage of good traffic from your investment in Pay per Click Advertising.

As a rule of thumb, the more a Pay Per Click Ad network depends on affiliates for its traffic, the more susceptible it will be to fraud. The reason why the overall traffic quality is better on Google, Yahoo and Lycos is that each of these sites has their own branded destination where consumers go to search. If you advertise on these sites you know where your ads will appear (although even these bigger sites use affiliates to varying degrees). Once you venture into the second tier Pay Per Click networks however you'll find that almost all of their traffic is generated through partner sites. Companies like Kanoodle, Enhance etc...don't own sites where people go to search the web. Nearly all their traffic is generated through their affiliates which makes it more difficult to control fraud.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately, click fraud is a necessary evil of Pay Per Click Advertising, at least for now. However, as with most aspects of PPC Advertising everything eventually boils down to conversions and profits. If your campaigns are generating enough quality traffic to meet your conversion metrics you should continue to invest in the campaign, even if some of the clicks are fake. If your traffic is riddled with too many automated clicks it will eventually become obvious in your conversion numbers, and you should stop the campaign and put your money into pay Per Click networks that control more of their own traffic.

About the Author
Stan Hauser is a leading expert in effective Pay Per Click Advertising strategies, and the creator of http://www.pay-per-click-advertising-guide.com

8 Tips for Starting and Maintaining a Successful Online Forum

Nothing promotes a business online better than staying in touch with prospects. The more interactive the continued contact, the more of a relationship that is built with a potential client.

This business principle of continued contact and business relationship building has given rise to the popularity of online business forums, and of course, "theme-related" online forums. Online forums quickly establish empathy, set forum owners up as "experts" in the eyes of visitors, and serve as a promotional vehicle for other products and services that forum owners seek to sell.

While online forums are popular and the perfect method of relationship building, starting a forum and maintaining one can be challenging, especially in the beginning when members can be "few" and "far between". The challenge for most new forum owners is to get beyond the initial start up phase and move onto a phase where the forum members themselves promote the forum simply by posting.

Although each forum is individual and personal, a few general guidelines should be followed or at least kept in mind when starting and maintaining an online forum. These are as follows:

The Forum Software

Take care when choosing the type of forum and forum script or software that will be used. The forum should be easy to access, easy to use, and come with "visitor-
friendly" features. All visitors should be made to feel welcome and find the navigability of the forum, user friendly. Forum scripts and software, specially "free" varieties, may be overburdened with ads from the parent company and lead to a poor experience for visitors.

Some recommendations:

http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.vbulletin.com/

Some of the Hosted Forum providers:

http://www.netfreehost.com/phpbb/
http://www.phpbbweb.com/

Interesting Forum Topics

The forum should have a good number of interesting and focused topics. The content should reflect the interests of the target audience, and every care should be made to have well-written and informative content that is updated regularly. This not only helps attract new members, it keeps older members from losing interest and defecting to other forums.

Search Engine Friendly

The forum should be Search Engine friendly. High activity forums, like popular blogs, provide a great reason for Search Engines to visit them frequently as they are brimming with fresh content all the time. Dynamic urls, session ids, etc. used by most forum software can be very detrimental to the forum health from Search Engine point of view.

When selecting forum software, check if they are Search Engine friendly. Open source software like phpbb, have mods (modifications) developed by third party sources, to enhance the forum in many ways.

Here's a great mod for phpbb to make it Search Engine friendly:

http://www.able2know.com/forum­s/about15132.html

Forum Rules

The forum needs to have a clear list of rules, a disclaimer, and most of all, good solid moderation. Visitors will quickly become frustrated with forums that have no clear guidelines, or feature rude, obnoxious, or overbearing members. Good manners are required as much online as offline.

Initial Promotion

Promotion, especially in the early days, will take considerable time and effort. Forums can be difficult to start (members generally are "shy" when there are only a few present), and the more posts that take place, the more individuals will join.

This is a "snowball" effect of forums, so marketing must be done consistently, day in and day out, until the forum becomes more self-sustaining.


Forum Owner

The owner of the forum should take an active interest in the forum and SHOW this interest by contributing regularly. Above all else, people join forums where they feel they will learn from the owner of the forum, and if the owner is never present, they quickly lose interest in the forum.

Target

The forum should be targeted, yet diverse, encouraging older members to contribute, without making newer members feel uncomfortable. Cliques can form in forums, and this type of behavior should be discouraged by the owner and moderators. Every effort should be made to answer questions or comments by all members as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

Forum Hosting

As with all other Internet related ventures, care needs to be given as to hosting and maintenance of the forum. A forum that is always experiencing "downtime", will lose members quickly, and a forum that has many coding mistakes will quickly frustrate visitors. As with Web sites, "cheap" providers of hosting and maintenance are not always "better".

http://www.flashwebhost.com
http://www.phpbbweb.com

All in all, online forums can be a great way to generate income, develop a good reputation among clients, and provide entertainment and instruction for many individuals. Like with everything else, however, they take marketing savvy, and a great deal of time and attention to detail. The old saying, "You only reap what you sow" really applies to the world of online forums.

Abiut the Author:
Vishal P. Rao is the editor of
http://www.home-based-business­-opportunities.com - A website
dedicated to opportunities, ideas and resources for starting
a home based business. He is also the owner of the
http://www.work-at-home-forum.­com - an online community of
folks who work at home.

LSI and Link Popularity

When Paypal's official Web site no longer ranked #1 in Google on a search for "paypal," it was obvious that Google had become more aggressive in penalizing sites with "unnatural" backlink anchor text. Although the high-profile Paypal example has since been rectified, thousands of webmasters are suffering the consequences of not ranking for even their official company name, let alone their top keywords. It is important for search engine optimizers to understand both how anchor text penalties are being applied and how LSI ensures that anchor text variance will not dilute a link popularity building campaign.

Anchor Text Penalties

In the past year, webmasters have found that the aggressive link popularity building tactics that work well in search engines such as Yahoo! do not fare well in Google. Google has implemented several features to filter out sites that appear to have an unnatural backlink structure; one of these features seems to be specifically penalizing sites with unnatural backlink anchor text.

It has always been an SEO best practice to use descriptive anchor text in both external and internal links. But search engine optimizers have often focused on a single keyword phrase when choosing anchor text, especially if their topic has one keyword that receives vastly more traffic than any secondary keywords. Since good links are hard to come by, they do not want to "waste" any of those backlinks with anchor text that does not contain their main keyword.

The drawback to this approach is that it can be interpreted as unnatural by a search engine. A site with organic, passively-obtained backlinks will have a wide variety of backlink anchor text variations such as: "official site title," "keyword," "keyword synonym," "www.thesite.com" and even "click here." If the vast majority of a site's backlink anchor text is simply "keyword," it is obvious to an algorithm that the link popularity was not obtained organically.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Basics

Let's now touch upon the myth I mentioned before, that if a backlink's anchor text does not contain your Web site's main keyword, its power is wasted. The concept of latent semantic indexing, which may be more fully implemented by major search engines in the near future, will prove this myth to be false.

Latent semantic indexing can help overcome the "vocabulary mismatch" problem when a human uses a search engine. Individual words do not always provide reliable evidence about the conceptual meaning of a document. For instance, a Web page that is highly relevant to the term "laptop" may never use the term "notebook," however it is clear to a human being that "notebook" is often used as a synonym for "laptop."

While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the mathematics behind LSI, its implications for search algorithms are simple. LSI can use statistical techniques to create a semantic analysis for any given query topic. In practice, this means that a page can be considered relevant for a particular keyword, even if it does not contain that keyword. For instance, a page that is considered relevant for "laptop" can also be considered relevant for "notebook" even if it does not contain the word "notebook," if LSI determines that "notebook" is semantically related to "laptop."

The principle can be applied to backlinks as well. Backlinks with anchor text that do not contain your Web site's main keyword, but instead contain a synonym or related word, may still be giving your site a bonus for the main keyword.

Link Popularity Building Best Practice: Vary Your Anchor Text

The recent increase in penalties given to sites with unnatural backlink anchor text, along with the possible implementation of LSI, should give webmasters motivation to vary their backlink anchor text heavily. Rather than seeking to only obtain links using their main keyword, webmasters should include synonyms, variations and related words. Certainly no single keyword variation should be used the majority of the time; rather, the text of all links should vary widely, just as they would if the links were obtained passively. This will ensure a site's improvement in the SERPs, without drawing a penalty flag.

About the Author
Andy Hagans is a search engine optimization consultant who specializes in link popularity building and risk management. Visit http://www.andyhagans.com for more information. See http://www.andyhagans.com/link-building.php for more information on Mr. Hagans' link building services.

Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning

It's no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an important part of any complete search engine positioning strategy. You've undoubtedly received numerous emails touting the benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Provided that the sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitely help you in your quest for higher rankings, however, establishing quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide added weïght and many of the tactics used in developing these links have built-in relevancy.

There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weïght, as they aren't reciprocated (the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is that they don't have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to insure that the search engines don't see the links pages. You have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their links from your site if warranted. With non-reciprocal links, however, you don't have to be as concerned since you're not linking to them.

These are far from the only benefits of non-reciprocal link building but they are two of the most beneficial for your site and for you as its webmaster. But how do you get something for nothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange for no links back? Keep in mind the acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you're not going to get something for nothing but it's well worth the "something" you'll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine positioning campaign... but how do you do it? There are a number of tactics that will work. Below are a few of the more successful:

Write Good Content

It's shocking, but some people will actually link to your site because it is a valuable resource that their visitors may find interesting or useful. The search engines initially gave incoming links value based on the belief that sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because they found the content useful. Believe it or not this practice still exists today.

If you have a quality site with great content, preferably updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link to you. It's also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to your site either through direct contact or by posting a page on your site, which provides images and/or link details. If you get even one link out of your efforts it was worth the 5 or so minutes it should take to put up the page.

Directory Listings

If you're willing to invest a bit of time and monëy, directory listings are probably the easiest way to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that your site has some value to it and is not offensive, most directories will list it although there is usually a "review fee" involved.

There are the well know directories such as the Yahoo! Directory. You may find, however, that the price tag for a guaranteed review from Yahoo! at $299 is a bit more than you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another "major player" in the directory world is the Open Directory Project (or DMOZ) , but you may find that with volunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed, if at all.

Fortunately there are many "secondary" directories and there are also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can provide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directory listings can in many ways be considered more valuable in that the link to your site is entirely relevant. You should also get some quality targeted traffïc from your listing provided that the directory itself ranks well.

How much you should pay for a specific listing is debatable depending on the industry, the value of the link, etc. However, in the majority of cases, topical directory listings are usually somewhere around $30-$100/yr . If your link will be placed on a page with a good PageRank and with fewer than 50 or so other sites it is worth considering.

Article Submissions

As you're reading this article you should certainly be able to infer that I personally am a fan of writing articles as a type of non-reciprocal link building. Articles provide perhaps the best of all worlds in that they provide valuable and entirely relevant links and also can be a great source of targeted traffïc.

That said, articles are also the most time consuming of link building efforts. One must consider the time it takes to write the article, find sites to publish it and to submit it to all of these sites. As a tip, when you find sites you wish to submit your article to, add them to a folder in your "Favorites" (or "Bookmarks" for those of us using Firefox). If you decide to publish more articles in the future (and you probably will) it's certainly helpful to start with a list of the places you're submitting to rather than having to find them all again down the road.

When you're writing your article there are a few considerations that you should take into account. One of the biggest benefits of articles as a link building strategy is that the links are relevant because they are about the topic of your site. Why not ensure that your titles and content are written such that they add further weïght for your targeted keywords. If you look at the title of this article "Non-Reciprocal Link Building For Higher Search Engine Positioning" you'll notice that the phrase "search engine positioning" (our main targeted phrase) is present. Additionally, the phrase is repeated periodically in the content area. This adds relevancy to the article and our targeted phrase. If you look in the credits below you'll notice that the anchor text linking to our site is "Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning" (assuming that the site on which you are reading this article allowed for HTML submissions otherwise the link should simply be the http format). This adds additional relevancy tying that phrase to our site.

Because the Beanstalk website is still in the sandbox on Google it is unable to rank for this highly competitive phrase. You may notice, however, that currently the #11 ranking page is one of our articles. This alone should demonstrate that these articles can pick up relevancy. Once Beanstalk is out of the sandbox on Google we will have many highly relevant links that are strong enough to rank #11 on their own. You can do the same provided that you treat writing your articles the same as your content. It must contain your targeted keywords and it must read well.

You are also going to want to search for many related websites to submit to. You can visit the search engines themselves to find related sites (in our case we would run a search such as "search engine positioning articles submit") or you can use a program like PR Prowler to find the links and also ensure a minimum PageRank on the sites you are submitting to.

If you decide to publish more than one article I would further recommend that you add to your list with each submission. Take a few minutes before you submit and find an additional 5+ sites to submit your articles to. You'll find your link popularity and rankings will reward you for it.

Summary

Of course, there are many additional tactics you can use to get non-reciprocal links, including paid links, press releases, etc. However, those noted above are the ones which will produce the most consistently over time and while they can be time consuming, are well worth the effort.

I wish you the very best of luck in developing your non-reciprocal links and in increasing your search engine positioning. It will take time; it will take energy; but done right it can be very rewarding.


About The Author
Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning. He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questïons that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines. To keep informed about what is going on in the SEO world you may also want to visit the newly created SEO blog on the Beanstalk website.

Log File Analysis and SEO

If you own or manage a website, you are probably already aware of the importance of your log files or site statistics. Such data can give you insights about your site's usability, errors in your HTML code, the popularity of your site pages and the type of visitors your site attracts. But did you know it can also highlight the success or failure of your search engine optimization campaign?

There is specific data about your web site that you should be looking at in your log files on a regular basis. Several variables should be examined monthly or even weekly to ensure your site design and page optimization is on the right track:

1. Entry Paths

Most sites can be developed and analysed around the concept of visitor pathways. If, for example, your site is a Business to Business (B2B) site and you service small, medium and large businesses, there should be pathways through your site designed for each class of visitor. An extremely simplified example would be:

Clients coming to the site through an optimized home page:

home page ---> small business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page

home page ---> medium business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page

home page ---> large business page ---> order page ---> order confirmation page

The site entry pages for these pathways are often optimized home pages or optimized content pages. The final page of this route is often the action that you want clients to take on your site (e.g., sign up for your newsletter, buy your products online or contact you for further information). You can easily determine how effective your pathways are by tracking the entry paths on a regular basis via your site stats.

You should have some idea of the main pathways that clients take through your site, both for monitoring the effectiveness of your page optimization and conversions, and for the purpose of subsequent site redesign(s). A good starting point to track the pathways through your site is via the graph or chart called "Entry Paths" in your log files / site statistics.

2. Top Exit Pages

These are pages from which most visitors clïck away from your site. Why is it useful to track these? Because exit pages can tell you:

a. If there is a technical problem with the page that is causing visitors to leave your site. For example, if there are broken links, or the form on the page is not working properly etc.

b. If your site design is breaking the strategic pathway, for example, you may have links to external sites that are inducing clients to clïck away before buying your product or signing up for your newsletter.

c. If there is something on these pages that is encouraging visitors to leave your site. For example, an unprofessional design or confusing layout.

In your log files / site statistics, the graph or chart called "Top Exit Pages" is the place to learn why visitors are leaving your site.

3. Single Access Pages

These are entry pages that are viewed once before the visitor clicks away from your site. Similar to Top Exit Pages, Single Access Pages can tell you a lot about why people are not staying on your site for long.

Have a close look at the search terms used to find your site. Single Access Pages can often indicate that your target search terms are too broad. For example, you may be getting a lot of traffïc by targeting "printer cartridges" but if you only carry a particular brand of cartridge, then people seeking other brands are not going to find what they truly seek when they arrive at your site so they will leave immediately. This can be resolved by narrowing down your search terms to be more targeted and focused on your niche products and services, for example, by changing "printer cartridges" to "HP printer cartridges" and so on.

To see what pages of your site are viewed once, look for the graph or chart called "Single Access Pages" in your log files / site statistics.

4. Most Requested Page(s) and Top Entry Pages.

Tracking these pages is key to measuring the success of your SEO campaign. If your optimization is effective, the Top Entry Pages and Most Requested Pages should be those that you have optimized for target keywords. The Top Entry Pages are particularly relevant as you consider the pathways through your site. Do the most popular entry pages have any relationship to the start pages for your plotted visitor pathways? Or are visitors entering and navigating your site via ways you didn't intend? You can use this information to continually tweak your page optimization to guide visitors to the right pathways.

To see your most requested pages, look for the graph or chart titled "Most Requested Pages" in your log files / site statistics. Also look for "Top Entry Pages".

5. Page Refreshes

Why are visitors refreshing pages on your site? Are the pages not loading properly? The "Page Refreshes" variable is another one to monitor on a monthly basis via your site stats to ensure that there are not site usability issues for visitors.

6. Referring Domains and Referring URLs

Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming from sites that are linked to yours? Are blog authors or forum members talking about your site? Referring Domains will tell you what sites are linking to yours, while Referring URLs will list the actual pages where the links are located. These can be little gold mines because you can often find valuable sources of traffïc via links to your site that you didn't even know existed.

In terms of an SEO campaign, these links can all add to your site's overall link popularity, an important factor in the ranking algorithms of many search engines, particularly Google. Monitoring these metrics can tell you if your site requires a link-building campaign or help you measure the effectiveness of various online and offline advertising campaigns.

In your log files / site statistics, Look for the graph or chart titled "Referring Domains" and "Referring URLs".

7. Search Engine Referrals

How many of your visitors are coming directly from search engines? What percentage of overall traffïc does this represent? This is a good variable to track to help you keep up with how many search engines are listing your site (both frëe submission and paid submissions), how much traffïc they bring and whether to renew your paid submissions. It can also tell you whether you need to increase the number of search engines your site is submitted to in order to build on your link popularity. As a very rough guide, you should be receiving at least 30 percent of your site traffïc via search engine referrals.

To see search engine referrals, look for a chart or graph called "Search Engines" within your site statistics.

8. Search Phrases

This topic is related to search engine referrals generally, but gives added insight into what terms you were actually found for in the search engines. Do these terms match what your site was optimized for? Are there any surprising terms that you might want to develop site content for? Some log file analysis programs will even break down what specific phrases your site was found for in which particular search engines. The more detailed the data you have, the more closely you can tweak your optimization campaign to your precise market.

To see the search phrases your site was found for, look for "Search Phrases" or "Search Phrases by "Search Engine".

9. Landing pages for PCC Campaigns, etc.

If you run a pay-per-click campaign or dedicate specific pages to advertising product specials, you may use special landing pages or tracking ids to monitor your traffïc and conversions. Your site logs can help you track these by showing you how many visitors they each had and what they did after they visited those pages.

10. Metric values that show a radical change from developing trends

Any site metrics that show a dramatic change from one month to the next could pin-point a problem with your site or with your optimization campaign. For example, if your search engine referrals have dropped dramatically, it could indicate that you have been penalized in a search engine (or more than one). Noticing changing trends early gives you the chance to investigate problem areas and make adjustments if necessary.

Please note that all log file analysis and site statistics programs are different and use slightly different terms to describe the metrics listed above. If you're confused, ask your site admin or hostïng provider to highlight these for you. Remember, your log files are gold mines filled with nuggets of information about your optimized web site. If you keep digging on a regular basis, you'll eventually strike it rich with success.

About The Author
Article by Kalena and Jerry Jordan. As well as running their own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena and Jerry Jordan manage Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.