The good people at Cash Keywords have launched a new tool called Adsense Accelerator.  It runs on your desktop and helps you find the best keywords based on bid prices, bid quality and traffic levels.  It has a prepopulated list of keywords organized by different industries and also lets you do search for any keyword you like. 

I was part of the beta test and was surprised at similar it is to my private tools.  I don’t know of any other publicly available tool that provides this many features.  To make it even better they are offering a lifetime discounted rate of $37/month to all listeners of GoodKarma.  To get this discounted rate just go here http://www.adsenseaccelerator.com/goodroi  To learn more about this tool you can listen to my interview with them in the podcast archive.

I just saw a great ad during a morning tv show.  The ad was for Xtra-Pine cleaner.  It is a teaser to visit their site www.cleaninghunk.com.  For all the ladies & my gay friends go enjoy some nice eyecandy.  For all the men reading this you should also visit it and see a good viral site.

Now that just about everybody has gained access to MSN Adcenter, MSN is offering “invites” to make sure you tell your friends how great it is.  Here is a quick snip from the email they sent: 

“In addition to an invitation into the pilot, your nominees will receive a special offer to join our complimentary campaign set-up service called QuickLaunch”

If you have yet to try MSN Adcenter here are some words of wisdom:

• You are too late for the bargains, the bids were undervalued months ago when there was few people bidding.  Now that there are alot of people in the program there are few bargains.
• MSN seemed to have trouble applying their rules and conditions evenly.  In other words it was easy to break their ad rules.  They are have become much better at stopping rule breakers.
• Quicklaunch is helpful if you have no experience in PPC.  If you have some experience you will probably be happier to do your own setup.
• MSN charges a $5 account setup fee.  I don’t like people charging me money just so I can buy ads from them.  Google did the same thing with Adwords.
• The demographics capability is cool but I am not sure just how correct the information
• MSN has a very distinct type of user, run your ad campaigns accordingly

If you are concerned about linking to a possibly “bad neighborhood” that has relevant and helpful content for your site users, there are solutions.  You can of course use the nofollow tag (which Captain Sprite is a big fan of).  However there is some evidence that the engines are still following these links. 

What is a paranoid webmaster to do?

Make it too hard for the search engine robots to follow your link.  You can do this by using javascript or redirecting the user through a directory that is blocked with your robots.txt.  Thus placing the link out of the current reach of the engines.  This way you can link to anywhere on the Internet and not have to worry about triggering an penalty for linking to bad places.  That is at least until you get a hand review.  But hey you were only linking to good content that just happened to be in a bad neighborhood. Right?

p.s. be careful that your redirect solution is not exploited by others (in other words keep an eye on your log file for weird referrals hint hint)

We’ll be chatting with the industry veteran Daniel Boberg, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances for Yahoo! Search Marketing about search engine optimization. 

I’m sure you’re curious so tune in and listen at 4pm (Eastern Time).

Personalized search is here and you shouldn’t be worried.  The search engines have been experimenting with personalizing the search results for each individual users for several years.  Google has been making the most public progress.  If you sign in for GMail or some of there other offerings, they will keep you logged in until you actively sign-out and track your usage and behavior.  Then they will start customizing your search results based on it. 

For example, if you are a plumber and you often search for plumbing supplies on Google, and then you search for seals, you should see mostly sites of seals for hoses and pipes and not sites about the new baby seal at the local zoo listed in the search results. 

Why am I not very worried?  Reason #1 - This technology is still being built and nothing is finalized.  So it is a bit early to be worried.  Reason #2 - In theory this will help drive more relevant users to your site.  If you sell rubber hoses and seals, you do not want kids looking for baby seals on your site.  Reason #3 - If you do get better targeted users with higher conversion rates, it could help you to increase the ad rates on your website. 

Don’t worry be happy.

After reading SugarRae’s Polling via MSN IM: Real or Fake I decided to have some fun. Here are some eBay ads that were on Google.  Can you find the fake ones?

Lies
Whatever you’re looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

Hurt Me
Whatever you’re looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

Read the rest of this entry »

Several years ago people would find a search that they ranked #1 in Google and then link to that Google serp.  The logic being that the googlebot would follow the link and then realize that a mighty and powerful site like Google is linking to your site and thus pass huge link popularity to you.  This “sorta” worked back then.  It really does not work now.  The reason is that the specific page needs inbound links to be able to pass outbound link popularity.  Since you will probably be the only site linking in to that Google serp, it really doesn’t have any link power to pass along.  Also you will form a reciprocal link exchange which is not as valuable as a one-way link pointing to you. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Christine was a member of the founding Board of Directors of SEMPO.  She serves as the Associate Editor for e-marketing-news and is the Chairman of the Dallas-Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association.  She is also a regular speaker at Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld Conferences, High Rankings Seminars, (to name a few).   This lady knows her Internet Marketing so tune in at 4pm Eastern Time (9pm GMT).

It appears that Google is testing the concept of adding a Google Base search box in their serps.  Below is a screen capture of what Google is showing for the keyword “homes for sale”.  Since they are already showing three paid listings on top of the organic search results it is interesting they would take away even more page real estate to add a search box for real estate listings in Google Base.  If they keep this up it will not matter if you rank #1 since no organic search results will be above the fold.  Google Base is still free so it wouldn’t be adding revenue.  The tests I did returned pages that are already in their standard search index.  I don’t really see a good reason for this, unless Google is laying down the groundwork for more specialized searching (after all you can only expect so much relevance when you have a single user input box) Good luck Google with your beta test.  Questions, comments?  Speak up.

Technorati Tags: google base, google beta, google serps