Verecom Web Design Blog

IT industry testing released the report says the growth rate of Microsoft search engine Bing.com already run ahead of rivals since his launch on May this year.

Microsoft new search engine provides many search services. According to data released by Hitwise showed that, the growth rate of Bing.com reached 25 percent in June. But however, its
U.S. market share is still only 5.25 percent.

This new search engine attracts the close attention of media. Microsoft plan to spend 100 million U.S. dollars to promote Bing.com, and intends to take the territory from Google, the current number one search engine company.

However, Google still remains the dominant position of the U.S. market with 74 percent market share. Yahoo still has the second largest market share of 16%. Ask.com has fourth place with 3.2 percent market share.

Analysts said that, the growth rate of Bing.com is faster than the other three well-known search engine companies. And Microsoft hopes Bing.com can grab more market for online ads.

On Thursday’s stock trading, Microsoft shares fell to 22.44 U.S. dollars. And Google rose 2% to 410.39 U.S. dollars.

Edited By Henry Lu

Nowadays there are so many sales consultants in the market; all of them promised that they can help you start the online business. They can help you to choose the business areas, make very precise products and service segmentations, write the brand story even do the media and public relation for you. Actually all these works are very essential. However if you are lack of traffic this key, all the efforts you put at the beginning will just go in vain.

Then how can we gain the traffic? This is really a puzzling question. I am sure that lots of sales consultants themselves can not really answer this question properly. Although I have been in this industry for so long, I am not able to give a 100% right answer either. But I would like to share some experience I gain through all the failures and lessons. I wish at least I can give some general ideas about this issue:

There is no free traffic in the market

To gain traffic without cost is impossible, if there were, Yahoo would not be able to earn so much. How much sales expense online companies need to prepare for gaining traffic? According to many online business owners’ experience, if the main profit of your company is from online sales then you better prepare 10%-20% of your turnover to boost traffic. If your company just starts the online business and you have no previous turnover to estimate the budget, then you can use another calculation way: if your advertising material is good enough, the website is professional enough and can reach your target group successfully then, every dollar you invest may bring 5-6 times profit. Of course, the greater your sales ability is, the higher is your product price and trade –in rate and lower is the percentage of sale cost in your whole turnover, and better is your adverting effect.

There is no company has the same sales strategy. There are many sales tools you can use. Company should make the choice according to their own budget, target customers, inner capability and business channel. Currently the popular sales tools include:

Traditional sales tool:
• Television
• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Public actives

Online sales tools:
• Online banner
• Text link
• Key word
• Blog / forum
• Traffic exchange / cooperate with other industry

Companies should decide the sales tools according to the percentage of their turnover and the future business plan. If 100% of your orders are from internet then definitely most of advertising budget should put into developing online sales tools. If your business runs mainly through entity market but you also want 1/3 of your future sales can be made through the website, then you should spend 1/3 of your sales budget to the web market. Sometime you can also see many e-companies use entity sales tools such as television advertisement and newspaper advertisement to promote their business; however this should be done when the companies grow into certain scales. They also need to build their brand image in the internet as well.

Normally the biggest question for most online companies is which online sales tools are most effective. Here I will analyse each of them one by one:

1. Online banner
This kind of advertisement has the highest click rate; because they give customers direct visual stimulation and arouse customers’ peep desire. However this kind of advertisement is most expensive. For example, if you want to promote something in large scale on Yahoo, you need to prepare around 15 thousands USD for two weeks online banner. If the preparation does well, making long-term banners will help the company grow steadily. But if the preparation is not enough, the activity you promote is not attractive enough, and then your advertisement expense may just go in vain. There are some key points for you to make online banner: good promotion return rate, precise advertisement and there is incentive factor in your website to attract the orders.

2. text links
On Yahoo home page and four corners of each page, you can see many short sentences attract people to click in. This is text links. Normally text link helps to enhance the impression but the average click rate is lower than Banner. If there is someone talented in word in the company, and he is able to use the limited word to precisely attract people’s attention, then the click rate can also reach very high level. Among all kinds of advertising, the cost of text link is still considered as reasonable. To make an effective text link may cost 10 thousands USD per month.

3. Key word
This is one of the hottest sales tools in recent years. But I have some different opinions: if you own an e-market, or you own various products, key word will be a very good sales tool. But if you don’t have that much products or you wish to build up new brand or promote diverse brands, then the effect of keyword may disappoint you. If you provide unified services such as selling boxes, moving, fixing computers and so on, keyword will be the cheapest sales tools for you.

If these 3 sale tools don’t fit your budget or business types, you can use some hard but very cheap way to do sales.

1. Blog: Set up a blog and reveal your professional areas in your Blog. At the same time you can post your ideas on others Blogs or communicate with others through Blogs to build up your reputation graduately.

2. Forum: Be a frequent visitor to forum. Discuss the issues in your fields, and let yourself be the topic people discuss about.

3. Cooperate with other industry: Exchange the banner with other websites which have similar traffics or exchange the printed ventures to give to each other’s customers. It also includes provide other small sites or Blogs your banner for them to help boost your traffic. If the deal is done, then you can pay them certain amount of hire charge. It is not difficult to set the system, but the biggest difficulties may be finding the partners to cooperate.

These 3 sale tools are much cheaper than the former tools, but they consume lots of time and efforts. If you have lots of time, it can also be a good way to challenge yourself.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Now blog has become more and more important in online sales. Many companies and online business owners have achieved great success through using the blog well. There are uncountable examples you can hear about that.

Then, what are the good things blog can bring to sales? Actually blog can fulfill all the following purposes AT ONCE.

1. Improve search engine ranking
If you use the key words, hyperlinks skillfully, and update the articles regularly, then surely you can increase the media exposure on some main search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, and ultimately improve your ranking.

2. Save sales cost
You can reduce your expense on traditional sales methods, like making advertisement, finding sponsors.

3. More closer to the potential clients
One of the most essential things for the future growing of the company is to locate the potential customers who are not easy to access. However, a dynamic, opened, and rich blog can reach the potential clients using the method, which is irreplaceable for the other tools, easily.

4. Be the evidence for company to use in making sales decision
Blog can receive customers’ responses and market information at the first moment and help the company to make the right business decision based on highly accurate information.

5. Grow brand loyalty among your customers
Blog can help the clients and business mates to know the company movements; this is the best way to allow the clients to keep their motivation to communicate with the company.

6. Grow your volunteer promoters
Every reader visit your blog are doing this by his own will. They are willing to interact with your business and grain more information from your blog. This powerful method of communication can grow a group of people who are willing to promote your company and your products.

7. More effective marketing survey and product testing tools:
One of the reasons why blog became more and more popular in online business is that it can change marketing survey and products testing tools into one-to-one interacted communication.

On your blog, you can not only post the articles introduce your products and business, but also your reflections, the stories of the company, the sharing of your administration experience, even the reviews of the movie you like.

You don’t need to worry about that your blog is not “commercial” enough, the benefit it will bring to you can be more than the “practical reasons” we mentioned before: it helps you to expand your society circle, let you have chance to learn from your seniors and even built your company image and create the company culture…

When blog truly enter into your life, when no matter you open the computer, firstly you will check blog traffic and new comments then we can say an important seed of online sales has truly been put into your heart, and this small seed may grow into a big tree with great fruit in the future.

Edited By Vicky Yin

Actually it is really an old topic about how to use Blog to earn money. There are so many experts discussed about it and they even published books to give the solutions. However I still want to share some my own experience and wish it will give some helps.

Recently I saw a blog value list which is made by a blog observing survey. In this list, blog value is estimated by three indexes, link value, advertising value and article value. In my point of view, using these three indexes to estimate blog value is very precise. Now I will try to explain these three indexes one by one:

Blog article value index

Most new blogs in the first year are still unknown to the web users; if their traffic can reach 1 millions pv then it is already good enough. However, with this traffic, it is still very far away from entering the advertising market. The possible income for blogs in this stage is article license fee. If the articles in the blogs can be purchased by MSN or other bigger websites, the blogs will not just earn money but also let more target people know their blogs. The writers may also have the chance to be invited to open their own columns and sell the articles.

Simply say, if the blogs has won some reputation in their specific field, the profit from making the lecture, opening the column, publishing the books even the consultant’s fee should be counted as the blog article value. I believe this is the most realistic way to get real profit for normal blogs.

Blog link value index

In my Opinion, blogs suppose to receive highest rewards in this part but the reality is blogs always earn the least in this item among all. If blogs develop very well and are recognized by SEO company by high Page Rank value and great traffic (these two items have to time together to have high SEO effect), then they may be willing to pay to the blogs to link with their blog keywords. Although it is better than none, this income is still much lower than web master’s expectation.

In recent years, Google search engine do gives Blog product higher rank, and some well managed blogs start to have the chance to earn more though selling SEO product, even writing praise articles. For example, the blog which has good page rank post an article praising certain product, when users search this key word they may see this article, and then accept the product because they agree with the article.

This product has combined the article value, advertising value and link value, but the key point is about link value. Without considering the moral issue, this is the very unique product blogs can provide; therefore it supposes to bring more income to blogs.

Blog advertising value:

Even the blogs are developed very well, but it is still very hard to enter the “advertiser- media agent- media” value chain. The reason is very simple but also very critical, because blogs still cannot be counted as streamline media.

Therefore the most difficult part for blogs in creating its value is to let the advertiser buy the banner advertisement directly. Most of the blogs cannot get enough advertisements at the beginning; it may take them few years to really enter the mainstream value chain if they keep striving.

How to enter the mainstream value chain? Actually I cannot tell the answer. The only two clues I know so far are 1. Change to web media site through blog and then enter the mainstream 2. Find good salesmen.

In mainstream value chain, when people mentioned about blogs, naturally they get the impression of an unknown small website with BSP service. A single blog cannot avoid to be underestimated in this situation. Therefore, most webmasters have to introduce their websites as “the web media established based on blog”, or it will be very difficult for them to take the second step. The fact that blog sounds very “cheap” in mainstream value chain, is something really sad.

Then you need to find salesmen who are very familiar with the traditional mainstream value chain and let him use the way which is acceptable for traditional mainstream value chain to introduce the websites and present the powerful advertising effectiveness data , then the websites may have chance to enter the mainstream advertising market.

But it is difficult for a single blog get a salesman. If there are capable salesmen who don’t willing to under the rule of certain companies but wanting to set their own business, they can try to contact some top blogs, and form an assembly, then directly sell the advertisement to the advertisers and agencies. Surely this will be a good business and benefit both sides.

Last but not the least, there is one thing I have to mention, blogs still have to balance these three value indexes. The intensive information blogs have to lower down their page rank index. Because these blogs are very familiar with the characteristics of internet, they always have very good page rank, and the articles on this kind of blogs are very enough to be recognized by the web users in this certain field, their article value will also be very high, but this doesn’t means they will have same advertising value.

Edited By Vicky Yin

We have discussed both Alexa and Aro last time; in the final part of these articles we talk about Google trends. Google trends is a user friendly tool provided by Google, and is quite similar to Alexa. First go to Google Trends Website www.google.com/trends and on the search bar type the websites you want to compare, and use the comma to separate the website.

The above Pic is the result of two famous portal website: www.yahoo.com and www.aol.com. Goodle trend use the Daily Unique Visitors to compare the traffic volume of each website.

On the first part of these articles, we mentioned that Alexa has the difficulty of compare the traffic volume of website’s sub-domain for different regions. Google trends overcomes this problem by the “regions selection” function box on the top-right corner. By selecting the region on this box you can get the traffic data on the particular country, the pic below shows the traffic volume of these two website on Unite States.

We can also use the Time period option to view the recent traffic volume. Google trends can provide the absolute traffic volume and user can use it together with Alexa to get much better traffic detail of website.

Edited By Henry Lu

Now we will talk about Aro (Access Rating Online). If we use the simplest way to describe Aro, we can say it is Nilson rating report in IT industry. Aro is very similar with Nilsom ratering report. Firstly, Aro gets information about age ratio and distribution in certain area. through national telephone census, and then it recruits the participants who are willing to be observed, through portal sites and news websites. The participants will be asked to install the detect ion software.

After that it will collect information about daily Internet behaviour of the samples and calculate the websites traffic in this area by statistic theory. In IT industry, we use the term of “Access Rate” to replace the term of “audience rate” in TV industry.

Access Rate=the percentage of unique visitors of certain website every month among the total number of Internet users

For example, we assume that the number of Internet users in this area is 10 millions; the Access Rate of certain websites is 4% that means the number of visitors for this website is: 10 million times 4% which is 0.4 million visitors.

From this prospective, we can find that:

1. The statistic data of Aro is macro-statistic data, to the website which is too small (Access Rate is less than 1%), the analytical data from Aro is void. And normally, it is also difficult to find the websites who’s Access Rate are less than 1% in Aro searching database.

2. To the middle or large scale websites, Aro can provide more accurate analytical data. For example, we can find the Access Rating ranking for all the IT websites, but this ranking is for all the Internet users in this area and the information about consuming capability of the visitors should be the focus in the point of view of advertising.

3. Aro is the product of InsightXploer Limited, currently Aro information is not available for general users, and clients have to pay for the database to get the data transfer service. To the web masters of new websites who won’t be able to purchase analytical information, this is really a big problem. Hope in the future, Aro can provide special offer for the new websites or open some parts of the database. And next time, we will talk about Google Trend, this is another method of statistic analysis and it is more precise than Alexa data ranks. See you next time. 

Edited By Vicky Yin

Besides their own back stage system, most of the web masters are using Google Analytics as an important analytic tool to detect their website traffic. Through Google analytics report, the web master can quickly find out:

The data about the web visitors, this data packet includes:

The most important: The numbers of unique visitors. From the perspective of marketing (include advertisement and sales), the number of unique visitors who really browser your website is the most solid and critical data for you website. Because even if one people click your website twenty thousand times it doesn’t means your website has twenty thousand visitors. Actually Web Reach is build up through unique visitors.

The second important: Page views. The reason why this data is important is because, currently, web advertisement is charged by CPM. For example, when CPM=40, if the website has been viewed 1000 times, in other words, the advertisement is also viewed 1000 times, then the advertiser should pay the website 40 dollars.

The web masters can think in this way: if the Page Views of the website for one month is ten million, and CPM for one advertisement is 40 dollars, then if this page is sold out for one month, the income from advertisements will be 400 thousands. If we put three pages for advertisement in the website, then the income of advertisement for all these three pages in this month will be 1,200 thousands. Of course, this is just an ideal number in mathematics view, if the website can sell the advertisements simply rely on traffics then the webmasters of XXX analytic or fortune telling website had already become millionaires.

How the visitors find your website?

1. Type the link directly
2. Through search engine
3. Though click the link on other websites

The best ratio of the numbers of visitors using these three methods respectively is 3:4:3

As Google Analytics is the best tool for you to know the data of your own website, which tool is the best to analyse the competitor websites for the web masters and advertisement agency? Currently there are a few good choices: Alexa, ARO and Google Trend.

Alexa:

Alexa has become a basic tool for nearly all the web masters, I will not explain too much about how to use Alexa. I will directly point out the blind spots of Alexa.

1. Alexa data is very easy to be manipulated: Through installing Alexa tool bar, Alexa can detect states of the web users and then estimate the number of online user through statistical inference. But the sample number is not defined strictly. The effect is that the bigger the website is, more precise the data Alexa can provide. However, on the contrary, the smaller the website is, the data is less representative. Therefore, to Web Reach, the data from Alexa can only be used as suggestion reference value but not the absolute reference value.

2. The problem to compare the local website with foreign one: For example, the business news website IBTimes(www.ibtimes.com) has the Australia sub-domain (au.ibtimes.com), and if we compare the traffic between au.ibtimes.com and its Australia competitor The Age(www.theage.com.au), it will say au.ibtimes.com has the greater traffic then its competitor in Australia. But actually it is not true. www.theage.com.au has lots more traffic than au.ibtimes.com in Australia. That is because Alexa treats all the traffic source for au.ibtimes.com as same as its parent domain www.ibtimes.com. Hence the Alexa cannot provide reliable comparison if webmaster want to compare the traffic data with the foreign website with sub-domain.

The shortage of Alexa can be fulfilled by the other analytic tool: ARO(Acess Rating Online) and on the next part, we will discuss the details of ARO and Google Trend.

Edited By Vicky Yin

After we learned how to be a good student in the eyes of teacher and started to find the favour of Mr. Search Engine then the next thing we must really consider about is what kind of keyword you want to use to let the web users find you.

Defining keywords for your website requires originality and brainstorming. The one interested about doing SEO for their websites needs some reverse thinking: what kind of keywords your target group will use to search the website they want to find. If you can use these keywords to optimise your website then the one visit your website will be the visitors your really aim to target.

Actually SEO means optimise all the pages in whole website and let every page of the thousands which is using different keyword to gain good rank (As good as possible, but not always first). For example, let us say there is one website has ten thousands pages. If each page can bring 1 traffic per day, then in one day, this website can has ten thousands traffics.

How to find keyword for SEO

Actually analysing keyword is a very hard and long term work. The right way of SEO is to keep increasing the web page, which also means to keep finding the effective keyword. It looks very simple to find the proper and effective keywords, but actually even the SEO expert sometime can not get in door. There are some simple skills which will help you find the suitable keywords.

1. Who, what, when and where: no matter what kind of website you are making, the basic information it provide should include: who, what, when and where. for example, using Italian restaurant (what) in Newtown (where) as keyword .First of all, you can start to analyse the keyword from these elements and see whether there is any keyword you can use inside of these 4 Ws.

2. Brand and model: if your website provides various products, especial 3C products, then don’t forget to consider the brand and model as the keyword. For example, normally, the one sale the mobile may think “mobile phone”, “cell phone”, or this kind of keyword should be the main keyword for their website, but actually it is wrong.

Most of the internet users will use the keywords like “mobile phone” as main keywords when they just want to check what kind of mobiles is popular. When they found the mobile they are interested in bigger website, they will focus on this mobile’s brand and model to do further research. And search volume of this kind of keywords can be accumulated in a very astonishing level; it can be 10 times more than that of the keyword like “mobile phone”. At the same time, normally, users will search brand +model; the chance for this kind of user to purchase the product is much high than the one just generally check the information of mobile. Therefore the more specific the keyword is, the higher the search accuracy is, and, the higher chance for this deal to be done.

3. After you list down all the keywords you can think about, the next step is to observe your competitors. You have to see what kind of titles you competitors have listed down, you may find some keyword you neglect, and it can be a good reminder for you. This is a method really save lots of time.

4. Use keyword advertisement: if you have permission to use keyword advertisement, you will find that normally there will be a tool which can suggest keyword for you on keyword advertisement. Under this tool, you can find many related keywords. This is also a sound way.

5. Use web traffic analytic: please add traffic analytic tool on your website, it can help you to know through which keyword the visitors find your website. Always you can find many keywords you neglect but really help people to find your website. If you find the traffic volume of these keywords is not bad and rank is not in front, then you can enhance this keyword to let it has better rank. However this method needs long term operation and observation. Although it may take long time, the keywords you find are always the keywords you can never think about by yourself.

6. Write the article diligently: this point is related to the third point, when you write the article, there will be more words in your website and have the chance to be searched through search engine. Only when you accumulate more articles, you will know more deeply that which keyword has been neglect.

7. Connect with the “hot” keyword: this is the most advanced method. When you are reading the newspaper or watching TV or listening to radio, you can find many popular topic people really interested at this period. You can use some of these popular issues to create your own keyword. For example, recently the news about poisoned milk in China is very hot. If you are a soybean milk products, you can use poisoned milk as a keyword, and in your website, you can post the article about the benefit of the soybean milk, how to use soybean milk to replace milk to make coffee, and so on. Of course this may requires certain level of professional knowledge, but normally this kind of “hot” keywords has terribly great volume. It may just last a while; but if you can successfully get a good rank using these keywords, it can bring great traffics in very short period of time for you website.

Edited By Vicky Yin

One of the web entrepreneurs shared his e-business experience as follow:

In the past when I was building the website, I did not put any idea of SEO into practice. Until one day I found that my website always ranked top on a lot of popular technology keywords searching page and some professional SEO companies started to discuss about the keywords advertisement with me. Hence I realized the strength of my website in this aspect. This made me start to think back how this website was built up at the first place.

We can use the relationship between teachers and students to explain the idea of SEO. Let us say a newly launched website is like a primary school first year student, what should he do to be a good student in the eyes of the teacher (search engine)?

Generally, teachers expect the students can grow healthily and study hard. In stead of just focusing on doing their own study well in the class, teachers also wish students develop good social relationship and some good characters, like cooperation and unity during the study.

Mr. Search Engine is a teacher who has great concern on his students’ social relationship; he doesn’t want students just concentrate on their own study without paying any attention to his questions or talking to the other students after class. He wishes the students can interact with the others, for example, giving a hand to Tom in Math homework and receiving help from John in Painting class as well. If you can have more interaction with the other students, even with many teachers, then in the eyes of Mr. Search Engine, surely you are good student who is active, open and easy-going.

Of course, if this student just plays with the others all day long, still he will be a “problem” student in the end. Study performance is still a very important part in students’ school assessment. At the same time, Mr. Search Engine is also a teacher who is very good at guiding the students develop their strength according to their own interest. If a student who really loves dodge ball and talk about dodge ball in all his homework. Then the teacher will write “best dodge ball player” in his school assessment.

Therefore we can summarize what kind of students (websites) your teacher, Mr. Search Engine like most:

1. Have good interaction with the other students (outbound links from other websites),

2. Have great passion on develop their own interest and always have new discoveries (unique information and creativity on website).

3. Last but not the least, never try to achieve everything in one day but grow up step by step (WebPages quantity).

Generally, search engine need to put the good website in the front to bring convenience to the users. In the example we just mentioned above, teachers build up their reputation by finding and rising up many good students, and students also receive more attentions because of the high rank teachers give to them. These two parties can promote each other for mutual benefit.

However, some students, although their performances are good, they don’t understand how their teacher’s make the assessment; in the end they missed the chance to be recognized as good students. Therefore, we can understand SEO in this way, the aim of SEO is to help students (websites) understand the assessment standard of the teacher (search engine). In order to evaluate billions of billions students, teachers need certain standards to evaluate the students systematically. In other words, even the students are good, but if they can not do their homework following the standards of the teacher, they might miss the chance to be recognized as good students (get high rank).

Two standards for Search engine evaluation

Then what are the standards of Mr. Search Engine to evaluate all the students? Mainly there are two:

1. Whether the quality and quantity of the research information the students provide are outstanding.

2. Whether the students can receive the agreements from the others in the research he released and they are willing to promote it for him.

The first point is about the information of the website, the quality of the information has to been good, and quantity has to be great as well. We can call it keyword index.

The second point means how many other websites, blogs, etc, have linked with this website. We can call it page rank index.

Time these two indexes (keyword and page rank), if the result your website gets is higher than the others and your teacher recognized that there is no violation, then in the most situations you will get the approval from the teacher to put your website in the front.

In conclusion, if your website wants to win the favours of search engines, then there are four things you have to know:

1. The rule of the keyword index

2. The rule of page rank

3. The methods which search engine might see as cheating

4. The score of the other websites.

Simply say, if the score (keyword index times page rank) you get can be ranked as first thirty among all the competitors, that means you have high possibility to be listed on the first three search pages. But there is one premise, no violation (cheating). If the violation has been found, your might receive punishment according to the situation. In the worst case, search engine might put your website into the blacklist and reject it to be listed in website rank.

Edited By Vicky Yin