Atlanta Web Design – DoubleDome Web Technologies

1. Hundreds of thousands of businesses advertise on Google AdWords but 80% of Google’s US revenue comes from about 1.5% of the advertisers (large companies such as Amazon, eBay, BizRate, etc., source: SEMrush).

2. The overall industry average click fraud rate in Q2 was 12.7%. That’s down from 13.8% for Q1 2009 and from the 16.2% rate reported for Q2 2008. (source: ClickForensics)Click fraud is a type of Internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

3. The paid clicks in Q2/2009 were up 15 percent year-over-year, but down 2 percent from the first quarter. (source: Google Q2/2009 earnings summary)

Twitter is launching the first phase of a two-part effort to monetize the microblog, according to co-founder Biz Stone. The first step, which should begin in about a week, will educate both individual users and larger marketing concerns about available tools and services. For the second step, which probably will be in the fall, Twitter will certify businesses to use the services, or it could try to monetize the information it garners from users.

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We are busy working on our improved crawler and plan to ramp up its workload as we move toward the goal of putting it into full production. As a result, webmasters may begin seeing an increased amount of traffic from the new bot on their sites.

NEW YORK U.S. retail e-commerce sales (excluding travel) will total nearly $132 billion in 2009, down about 0.4 percent from 2008. Assuming the recession ends this year, as many economists have predicted, eMarketer forecasts that online sales will begin to rebound in 2010 and hit full stride in 2011.

Web research has become a priority for value shoppers in today’s recession. Currently, 86 percent of Web users are shoppers who browse, research and compare products on the Internet, but they do not necessarily buy online. Often ignored, store sales influenced by online research are three times higher than e-commerce sales.

Many consumers opt to buy online for convenience, price and broad product selection. About 81 percent of Web shoppers are also online buyers. Web consumers who refrain from buying online often get hung up on security and privacy concerns or the inability to touch and feel products. Web retailers are adding new content and features to lower these hurdles.

Great summation of Google on-page and off-page optimization factors by Axandra.

Google specifies the position of a website in its search results by on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are all factors that can be found on your web pages:

Did you optimize the web page for the targeted keyword?
Can search engines find all pages of your website through the links on your website?
Is the HTML code of your web pages error free so that search engine spiders can easily parse your pages?
Does your robots.txt file allow search engine spiders to visit your web pages?
Are your web pages free of all spam elements (no hidden text, no sneaky redirects, no keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc.?
Off-page factors are the factors that cannot be found on your web pages:

How many websites link to your site?
Are these links from related high quality pages?
Do social bookmark websites link to your site?
Do the links to your website include the keywords for which you want to be ranked highly?