Online spending grew to £1.752bn in the first half of 2009, while TV spending decreased 16.1% to £1.639bn in United Kingdom according BBC News. For the first time in the history online advertising overtakes TV and it makes internet is the biggest marketing medium in UK. Internet advertising spending increased 4.6% for the first half of the 2009 and it made internet the only marketing medium with grew this year.

This is how people predicted Future of Advertising in 1885

Analyst Ian Maude of Enders Analysis commented on this situation: “TV maintains its role as the big daddy of display advertising, but the main driver of Internet advertising in the U.K. has been search and particularly Google Inc” (source Wall Street Journal).
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 Just year ago I used to wake up and check performances of my websites, sometimes it was an hour long process to check trackbacks, buzz on Technorati, RSS submissions, Google Analytics, and website backend for comments, submissions, and recent activity. Now it just… who Tweeted me?  

 It is sad but people don’t link your site from their blogs, websites, and social profiles. Almost entire web community moved to Twitter and people prefer to Tweet favorite links, good articles, viral stuff etc. Amount of incoming links dropped dramatically especially in blogoshphere, Darren Rowse mentioned that amount of inbound links dropped dramatically. Even annoying individuals who used to comment and link everyone to make friends moved to Twitter and now they Tweet every website and user they can find.
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Importance of image optimization was explained a lot of times by many web marketing experts (Example: Search Engine Watch, Web Analytics World, or SEOBook) but most webmasters still ignore basic rules to optimize images and attract get traffic from image searches like Google Images, Yahoo! Image Search, or Bing Images. Honestly, I wasn’t a big fan of image optimization for search engines because I was just lazy to tag (add “alt” tag) and write descriptions for each image. In August I decided to test how image optimization can improve my traffic. I spend all day applying image optimization and SEO strategies to images in my library. This week I took all data and it kind of impressed me.

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 I remember 10-15 years ago my dad called me to announce a “great news”, he was a 1 000 000 visitor to some website and now he wait when people call, email, or mail him information on how to receive a prize. I was just laughing at him… Yes, 15 years ago people used to click banners, submit forms, and follow sponsored links. Today it is hard to trick users and make them believe in online offers and promotions. It is almost impossible to convict people to click ads even when banner or link has perfect match with your design, niche, or content. According John Chow, Google AdSense used to be a perfect tool to make money several years ago. Average earnings from Google AdSense was about $5-8 for 1000 impressions. Today earnings dropped to less than a dollar for 1000 impressions. It means, that you can get 1-3 clicks if 1000 people will visit your page. Easy to guess, only $100 for 100k visitors and $1000 for million visitors. 99.9% websites and blogs don’t have 1 000 000 traffic in a year.

 I still meet a lot of people who believes that they can make a fortune with Google AdSense but all their efforts end with desperate jumps from AdSense to Yahoo Ads, from Yahoo ads to AdBrite, from AdBrite to Bidvertiser etc. Capturing leads, selling stuff, and professional use of affiliate programs is the only way to make money online and monetise your website.

How website look:

How reader see it:

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 Splog is a spam blog which steal content from other blogs, in many cases they never refer to original source and take a full credit for a story or content. There are three major types of splogs: splog made to generate traffic and make money from affiliate & pay-per-click programs (Google AdWords, AdBrite, Yahoo Ads, Bidvertiser etc), splogs to generate traffic and redirect users to other websites and services, splogs to fill content with different links for SEO purposes.

Recently I discovered that several blog posts I wrote appeared on some other blog. It was obvious that my best & the most popular posts were picked by hand and copied word to word. I was lucky to discover that guy information was listed on Whois when I checked his domain, can you imagine! This jackass never put privacy on his 100% illegal site. So, I emailed him:

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 Today another person asked me how to get YouTube video on Google Search, make optimization, and improve rankings. It actually suprised me because I had the same question in the past. YouTube is another website and Google treat YouTube like any other site. Some people are saying that Google prefers to rank YouTube better because YouTube is part of Google network… it is not true. In fact, Google does not give any preferences to it’s own sites, for example, search for a keyword ”translator” and you’ll see that Yahoo Text Translator appears higher than Google Translator. YouTube rank high on Google (and other search engines) becasuse it is the best video sharing network and one of the most popular site in the world with billions content pages.

Snippets to different 2 chicks 1 cup reactions in Google search results.
 As you see, it is not only YouTube videos but also other networks as well.

 Google treat YouTube videos the same way like any other popular video sharing sites (Veoh, MetaCafe, Revver etc). It creates snippet with video preview for popular videos or regular result preview for less popular videos. It is automatic process and if your video is popular enough it will appear in search results for related keywords. I would say even more, authors of popular and viral videos almost never use any search engine optimization to gain success.
Read more to find how to optimize YouTube Video

 Duplicate content issues is the biggest problem for most shopping websites. The problem comes with manufacturer description, most owners of shopping sites simply copy and paste product descriptions which was provided by supplier, manufactures, or host of affiliate network. Word to word description appears on multiple sites across the web and cause collective punishment from search engines.

 Here how Google, Yahoo, and Bing work with content… their algorithms is created to find original source of unique content and avoid appearance of a websites which steal content and violate copyright laws. When 1000’s shopping networks and sites use the same manufacturer description it moves all of them into omitted results. Often only one site remain in Google, Yahoo, or Bing index as content source.

 Example:

 Description from Amazon and Target websites for wooden hangers appears in 172 other websites and networks. As result, Google index only 13 of them and moved other 159 networks into omitted results with 0 chance to appear in search index when people search for wooden hangers, cheap wooden hangers, affordable wooden hangers, large wooden hangers ets…
Read more to find how to avoid duplicate content

In 2006 company hired me to promote their website. Their site was banned from Google index because someone submitted them in 20 000 fake “search engines” and spammy directories. It is regular penalty for spamming Google index and submitting links in “link farms”.  We worked more than 2 month without any success and decided to contact Google support or customer service directly. It was almost impossible to find email, contact information, or submission form on Google site.

Browsing Google Help Center we finally came to submission form where people can ask a question or share feedback. I wrote short email to explain and apologise on behalf of the company for “black hat” SEO. Moreover, I explained mistakes, gave examples of bad websites and link farms who linked my client. Also, we wrote a little bit about company and people who work there. Next day we received letter from Google which was saying: “sandbox doesn’t exist”, “we never discriminate any publisher”, “your site disappeared because of Google technical issues”. The same day site appeared back on Google with 96 indexed pages, in less than an hour Google index another 250 pages. Week later entire website with 360 pages was listed and ranked well on Google.
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 John Biggs wrote informative post on Crunch Gear comparing financial situation and traffic to Woot shopping site. He pointed that in October and November traffic to Woot dropped after collapse of sock markets but it became to recover after government stimulus packages and signs of financial stability. Take a look:

 
Image source: Crunch Gear

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 Boston Globe published AP press release which state that Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is drafting a bill that would impose broad new rules on Web sites and advertisers. He is trying to protect consumers and ensure what type of information companies collect when people go online and browse websites.

 Key points of upcomming bill:

•  Websites will need to get user approval if they share information outside advertising network.
•  Opt-in rule will be applied to websites which collect social security numbers, medial information, and other information.
•  Disclosure of information websites collect from visitors.
•  Regulation on who can access personal information.

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