Comcast, the largest cable provider in the nation, is currently in talks with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL regarding which of the three giants will provide search functions and advertising for the company’s website as Google’s current 3 year contract comes to a close. Under their current contract with Google the companies website received 17 million unique visitors in the month of February alone. (more…)
When talk in the blogosphere turns to advertising, many bloggers start to get a little sanctimonious. Blogging isn’t about making money, blogging is about integrity, quality writing, and community. I’m the last person who would argue that blogging isn’t about those things. It’s one of the biggest things to hit human communication since the smoke signal. But, be that as it may, a big part of why blogs are so popular is the money that can be made by placing ads on them. Steven Hodson has posted a list he made on his blog of the top 100 ranked blogs in technorati and whether or not they use advertising. (more…)
I’d like to talk a little bit about SEO guarantees and what I see as the problems inherent in them. First of all, for the most part these guarantees are utterly useless. An SEO company will give a customer a guarantee of say top ranking on 20 search terms. Then present the customer with a list of 200 or so keywords. These lists include great terms like Cheap Web Hosting, Quality Web Hosting, etc. But these are only keywords, these are not the 20 top ranking terms. The top ranking ones are more likely to be something like ‘affordable blog webhosting in Scottsdale Arizona’ or some such useless term which is obviously ranked number one because no one has ever searched such a useless term before. Paying for top ranking of useless terms is a total waste of time. (more…)