I was browsing the net today, as you do, and I came across an online marketing company that has link building listed as part of the formula to improve site conversions. This reminded me of the 298537634 (slight exaggeration) articles I have read that say link building is dead.

So who is right? Is the company I found online seriously outdated or are they making extra money by offering this additional feature to their unwitting clients? If it is the latter, well, kudos to them (If they can pull it off successfully – long term).

*This view is by no means shared by anyone else at Clicks2Customers and is solely the opinion of me.*

If they are just seriously outdated, well then some market researchers need a new job. But there is also the fact that they may have found a magic solution to make link building work properly. I mean, I started out at this company as a link builder, unless it is a one way link (they put your link on their site only) it’s pretty pointless.

I can see it working from an SEO perspective because it would improve the page rank (hopefully)…but I’m not sure why it would improve conversions. Unless of course by conversions they mean clicks to the site…but the company advertising link building is all about ROI so I assume it’s about making money and not just about the clicks. Then again we go back to the SEO point; their natural search listing could improve, so the site could indeed get more conversions. Sigh.

I was tempted to give them a call and find out what they had to say…but I did some more research into the link building matter instead. It seems link building is a big “yes”. Maybe I was thinking of reciprocal linking.

Either way, I found a really nice site. I specifically liked this post, they had some very good pointers. You could actually apply some of those principles to a lot of marketing practices. Or even everyday life. But that’s another story, and I think this post is finished.

Isn’t it great when you find funny little things like that that you could apply to so many different parts of life? I love this industry.

As a Clicks2Customers German speaking employee I want to set my main blogging focus on the German, Austrian and Swiss online, Web 2.0 market. In my first post I want to write about the most discussed and most controversial social networking platform on the German speaking market, StudiVZ.net.

The StudiVZ network was founded in October 2005 by the two German students Ehssan Dariani und Dennis Bemmann.
StudiVZ is a network especially created for university students. It allows it members to register profiles in the categories student, graduate and university employee. Especially in 2006 StudiVZ grew massively in the number of registered members. In August 2007 StudiVZ claimed to welcome the 4^th million member.

Since January 2007 after many problems with the former StudiVZ management the company was sold to the “Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck” a huge German publisher which owns newspapers and magazines all over the world. There were never officially selling figured published but a spokesperson told the German magazine “Focus” a selling price “higher than 50 million but less than 100 million Euros.”

In the meanwhile StudiVZ employ 140 people and have launched a similar service especially designed for pupils called SchülerVZ.net. Besides this networks StudiVZ is trying to grow in different European markets. StudiVZ launched its service also in French, Spanish, Italian and Polish.

In my further posts I want to focus on the business model of StudiVZ, and also on the problems and scandals mainly produced by the former StudiVZ management and the lessons Facebook can learn from them.

One of the stories that recently grabbed my attention was an article on PlentyOfFish.com. This free dating site almost epithomises the internet business model of the future: user generated content made possible by online advertising. I say almost, because the site is not quite ‘2.0′. In fact, it is a very basic dating site, and is hardly more than a user forum. But it is free, and according to this article it could be worth a billion dollars (by today’s optimistic valuations). It’s revenue all comes from advertising, mainly Adsense.

Adsense (or content targeting on Adwords) has never really been the prime focus for most PPC marketers. On forums such as Webmasterworld people invariably report mixed results from content targeting (more so than from search). Common complaints are low CTRs, low ROIs and high levels of click fraud. Nevertheless, Google reportedly makes 40% of its revenue through this channel and it is now allowing advertisers to hand-pick the sites on which they want their ads to appear, rather than rely on Google contextual algorithms.

So for some people, contextual advertising is obviously worth their while. As an advertiser, why would you want to consider contextual targeting and would you want to hand-pick the sites you want to advertise on?

I would argue that Google generally does a good job at matching your ads to content. ‘Relevancy’ is the cornerstone of Google’s success (not to mention revenue) so they are motivated to make sure you get quality traffic. But Google is also fighting a continuous battle with fraudsters who are incentivised to defraud the system because they share in the Adsense revenue. Advertiser can now exclude sites from their content targeting if they find that the traffic originating from them is of questionable quality, but there can be so many of them that is costly and time-consuming to weed them out.

Site-targeting eliminates that problem because it is an ‘opt-in’ rather than an ‘opt-out’ approach. You can choose to only advertise on site you trust. The trick is still to identify the right sites and I think the PlentyofFish example demonstrates that nicely. Advertisers like the site because people on a dating site are inherently searching for something (in this case, love). This makes the site very different from for instance a site like facebook, which is more used for entertainment and social interaction. Understanding the mindset of visitors and targeting ’searching’ visitors is key to running a site targeted campaign. The problem with site-targeting though is that competition for premium sites will soar, as will advertising costs.

But given the dynamics of the web there will be not be a shortage of new content and new customers anytime soon. All the more reason to get more familiar with contextual advertising.

One of the recurring tasks of the ongoing work of running a website is managing your 404 Errors. And a rather important task this is too, because it does tell the search engines how well looked after a site is.

On Google, you can use the “site:” operator to find all your site URLs in their index -

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.africanpridehotels.com

however, it does not show you which URLs are broken. Yahoo! have taken this one step further by allowing you to do the following, using the same operator:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.africanpridehotels.com

What Yahoo! provides you with here is a TSV list of your pages in their index and more importantly, they list the pages that are not found at the bottom of that list - therefore your latest list of 404 URLs that need your attention!

This list of URLs can be added to your .htaccess file with rules for 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) Redirection and that way you ensure the that your site audience, including crawlers, spiders and bots are able to find ALL of your content!

Thanks to Yahoo! for providing a full list in a standardized & downloadable format.