Pro-SEO

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format.

The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page.

It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast.

The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed.

It is the first time that Adobe has allowed dynamic adverts into its PDF (Portable Document Format) files.

Dynamic adverts can be changed for particular audiences or rotated to make sure that a particular user never sees the same advertisement twice.

Labels: Advertising, yahoo

When Yahoo! serve the ads that are displayed on the search results they use something called the "quality index" to determine what adverts will be shown. The lower your quality index score the less chance there is of your advert being displayed.

An ad’s quality index is a relative measure of how relevant it is to users. In determining your quality index, The system takes into account your ad’s click-through rate compared to its average position in search results, as well as to that of other ads displayed at the same time, other keywords in your ad group, and other relevance factors.

So what can you do to improve your yahoo! quality index, Improve your adverts performance and increase sales?

Use relevant keywords — Make sure the keywords in your ad group are highly relevant to the ads in the same ad group.

Include your keyword in your ad text — You can use the Insert Keyword feature to help you do this automatically.

Take advantage of excluded keywords — Use this feature to block certain searches that you think may not be relevant. By doing this you will save money as well as increase CTR.

Use ad testing — You may have noticed that when you create an ad in an Ad Group, you are prompted to create another one. You should do this in all of your ad groups, because when you create more than one ad, the system will test the ads automatically. Ads that perform better then begin to appear more frequently in search results.

Gather intelligence — Almost all’s fair in love and advertising, so you shouldn’t feel shy about spying on your competitors. And by spying, we mean searching for their products or services so you can look at their ads.

Offer specials — Consider including special offers in your ad copy. Limited-time offers, free shipping, two-for-ones, free gifts, contests and so forth can be very effective. Remember, it’s not just about your ad, it’s also about the value that users think you can deliver.

Labels: Advertising, yahoo

I have always enjoyed reading SEO and internet related predictions that seem to pop up at the end of each year. It's like seeing into the future, All be it an imaginary future. So i figured it would be fun if i attempt to make a few predictions of my own. I have a few in mind but I'm hoping that more will come to me as i write this.

1. Yahoo Will Acquire A Video site - Since Yahoo were in talks with youtube just before Google closed the deal i think they will actively be looking to purchase an online video site such as dailymotion or metacafe.
2. RSS Will Explode - With IE7 (and vista) offering easy RSS feed functionality to microsoft users and the increase in online feed-reader-portal-sites such as netvibes i predict that a lot more people will start using RSS feeds to receive content. Up to now RSS was only really used by internet savvy people and was slightly out of the reach of regular users.
3. A Drop In Traffic Will See Digg Sold - Digg seems to be living in a bubble, But it's becoming apparent that it will soon start running into problems. I predict that a huge drop (50%+) in traffic will push digg to sell and i predict the buyer will either be Fox, Yahoo or Netscape.
4. MySpace Will Start Dying - 2007 will see the beginning of the end of myspace. It has ridden on i's "coolness" for too long and it will start being quite "un-cool" as more and more people realise it's full of slow loading, bloated pages, that contain utter shit
5. "MOZ" Will Announce A New Directory - Something needs to be done with dmoz, And i think what they will decide to do is focus on building a new directory for the web 2.0 era which will use tags instead of categories.
6. NASA World Wind:1 - Google Earth:0 - NASA World Wind will case big waves and it will be the "earth" application of 2007, Which will see Google Earth slip away. No doubt google wont take this laying down though.
7. Remember The Zune? - Late 2007 will see Microsoft declare the Zune a failure and they will announced that it's to be discontinued in 2008
8. Microsoft Pagerank - Microsoft will release their own version of googles pagerank which will be displayed in IE via a bar (That's all we need, But i can see it happening)

Labels: 2007, dmoz, google, internet, yahoo