Luke Hubbard

I was just at a Platform A event tonight in West Hollywood, CA. It was held at the fabulous and brand new SLS hotel. Platform A is a catch all solution, which was created by combining AOL + Advertising.com + Quigo.

Platform A is an improvement as advertisers use one sales team, one management team, and one tech team to help with all their advertising needs. 

On another note, AOL.com has launched a new look and feel to their homepage. I do like the ability to sign-in to your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, AIM, Facebook, and Myspace all from the homepage. I love this idea actually.

Picking a blogging service depends on whether you want to use a custom domain name or not. For instance, LukeHubbard.com is a custom domain name. LukeHubbard.Blogspot.com is not a custom domain because it belongs to Blogspot.

The best blogging services to use with custom domains are:
Wordpress
Typepad

If you don’t care about using a custom domain, which usually requires a monthly or yearly fee, then you can take advantage of one of the many free blogging services including:
Myspace Blogs
Blogger.com
LiveJournal
JournalHome
MuseCrafters
The Diary
Mindsay
Xanga
BlogDrive
Blogagotchi
Diaryland
Weebly
ChoseIt

According to Technorati, a blog search engine, The Huffington Post is the most visited Blog on the Internet. Congrats Arianna!

If you are new to search engine marketing (SEM), you may be asking “Which Search Engine should I launch first?” or “Which search engine will have the best ROI?”

If you’re a relatively small advertiser, meaning you’re not working with an advertising agency, then set-up your accounts in this order: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com. If you are working with an advertising agency, they’ll probably launch all 4 at once and you have nothing to worry about.

Google Adwords
First, sign-up for Google Adwords as it has the easiest system to use. Search engine marketing is extremely complex, but Google has done the best job so far in making it easy for small advertisers to get an account up and running. Adwords has the largest market share of all the search engines and also has the most refined algorithm.

Because Google is the friendliest system to use, and because it has the largest market share, there is more competition for high rankings and possibly higher Cost-per-Clicks (CPCs) for your ads. All in all, don’t let this hinder you from signing up as Google does an excellent job at showing ads to a relevant audience. Some of your keyword CPCs may be slightly higher on Google, but they’ll be to a targeted audience and hopefully provide a solid ROI.

The last reason to launch with Google first is Google’s free Analytics tool and tracking capabilities. For all you numbers geeks out there, you’ll absolutely love drowning yourself in data. Google gives you as little or as much data as you want so have fun digging deep into the numbers for hours on end.

Note that by signing up on Google and staying opted in to their partner search listings, your ads will automatically show on AOL and Ask.com.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Second, launch on Yahoo as it provides solid results and has a user friendly system named “Panama.” Yahoo is second to Google in market share and has also done an excellent job at refining their algorithm to show relevant advertising results. An optimized Yahoo campaign will provide fantastic marketing for your company.

MSN Microsoft Adcenter
You’d think that Microsoft would have dominated the search marketing space by now, but unfortunately their market share has consistently lagged behind Google and Yahoo. MSN will provide you will far less volume that Google and Yahoo, but will usually provide a stronger ROI. The reason is simple; there is less competition on MSN and lower CPCs. Keep in mind that MSN’s system isn’t quite as easy to use as Google or Yahoo. Also, don’t expect to get massive results from this engine as the search volume simply isn’t there.

Ask Sponsored Listings
The last engine to launch is Ask.com. The main reason is simply because if you launch on Google and opt into their partner network, you’ll automatically show on Ask.com. Ask provides a solid experience for consumers, but their advertising platform is not uniform to the other three search engines. A beginner will find the system more difficult to use. Also, the ROI results are often strong, but come in last place compared to the other search engines in general.

On a final note, keep in mind that SEM in general will be your most efficient advertising medium. If you are a small company with limited dollars to spend in advertising, I say go first to SEM.

“Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.”

via Webmaster Guidelines – Webmasters/Site owners Help.

Google is pretty straight forward with their SEO, or search engine optimization, guidelines. When building your website, be sure to spend time learning the basics so your work will show up in search engine results.

As far as web masters are concerned, or anyone else that has the dream of starting a website, there are basically two forms of Domain Parking: monetized and non-monetized

Monetized Domain Parking: This is when someone buys a domain name for the sole purpose of creating some crappy site with advertisements but no original content. Ever misspelled a company name in the URL box and found a basic looking site with random words somewhat related to your topic? Once you click on something, it then takes you to a page of sponsored search results.

The bad news about monetized domain parking is that it incentivizes companies to buy up all the cool domain names or misspells of others’ trademark terms. Ever wonder why so many web companies have stupid names like wazalahoolie or zappaldingalingo? Well, domain parkers are partially to blame for buying up all the cool names and leaving the rest of the world with crap available URLs.

The good news about monetized domain parking is that some of the website actually do provide quality results and lead users in the right direction.  

Non-Monetized Domain Parking: This is when you get to a website and you see the beautiful words “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon.”  My opinion is that if you have the wits to buy a web domain, you should be able to put something on a page other than “come back later.” Get your act together people! Either put up real content or temporarily fwd your domain to LukeHubbard.com …. jk

Check out Google’s Youtube channel. It’s provides lots of informational videos on Google.com and Google Adwords.

YouTube – Google’s Channel.

Also, the channel has fun, viral videos like the one below. It teaches you how to explore  the sky in Google Earth. Pretty unbelievable stuff…

By far, the best web analytics blog on the Internet is by Avinash Kaushik. I highly suggest book marking the blog and checking in everyday to learn something new about web analytics.

Web Analytics Blog | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik.

To gain higher rankings within search engines, it’s a good idea to submit your website to the following two directories. They hold the most weight of all directories as they are two of the oldest and considered legit. 

DMOZ:  ODP – Open Directory Project

Yahoo: Yahoo Directory

Directories are slightly dated in my opinion. They were originally created to help organize content on the Internet and organize information by assigning websites to categories.I think of them as the opposite to search engines since they are intended for users that have a general idea of their interest, but don’t have something specific in mind.  For example, let’s say you have an interest in “science,” then you’d go the yahoo directory and click on the “science” category. You’d then go through sub categories to find something your final destination. 

It’s a good idea, but just didn’t catch on to the scale that “search” did. Search engines took over since they were easier to use and since users that didn’t know exactly what they wanted would simply start with a broad search and then narrow it down as they sorted through the information they found.

Wondering where to go to submit your website to the search engines?

To have your website crawled by the search engine spiders, so that it begins to show up in search engine results, simply go to each of the links below. Each link will ask you to submit your site URL such as http://www.lukehubbard.com

Note that the following three search engines make up over 90% of all search engine traffic. Do NOT get ripped off and pay someone to submit your site to all the thousands of small search engines. If your site is well optimized and offers value, it will begin to show up in those search engines anyway. In fact, if you have a fantastic site, you don’t even need to submit it to the links below as chances are that the search engines will find you anyway. However, if you’re a new site and want to ensure that you’ll get found by the search engine crawlers, then go to each of the links below.

Submit URL to Google

Add site to Yahoo

Submit site to MSN