WebSite Design & SEO - San Diego

AdSense is an ad serving application run by Google Inc. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering (also owned by Google). In Q1 2010, Google earned US$2.04 billion ($8.16 billion annualized), or 30% of total revenue, through AdSense.

Google uses its Internet search technology to serve advertisements based on website content, the user's geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted advertisement system may enroll through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the advertisements are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the advertisements is often relevant to the website.

Many websites use AdSense to monetize their content. AdSense has been particularly important for delivering advertising revenue to small websites that do not have the resources for developing advertising sales programs and sales people. To fill a website with advertisements that are relevant to the topics discussed, webmasters implement a brief script on the websites' pages. Websites that are content-rich have been very successful with this advertising program, as noted in a number of publisher case studies on the AdSense website.

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AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product and main source of revenue. Google's total advertising revenues were USD$21 billion in 2008. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

Pay-Per-Click advertisements (PPC): Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they will pay per click. When a user searches Google's search engine on www.google.com or the relevant local/national google server (e.g. www.google.co.uk for The United Kingdom), ads (also known as creatives by Google) for relevant words are shown as "sponsored links" on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results.

The ordering of the paid-for listings depends on other advertisers' bids (PPC) and the "quality score" of all ads shown for a given search. The quality score is calculated by historical click-through rates, relevance of an advertiser's ad text and keywords, an advertiser's account history, and other relevance factors as determined by Google. The quality score is also used by Google to set the minimum bids for an advertiser's keywords. The minimum bid takes into consideration the quality of the landing page as well, which includes the relevancy and originality of content, navigability, and transparency into the nature of the business. Though Google has released a list of full guidelines for sites, the precise formula and meaning of relevance and its definition is in part secret to Google and the parameters used can change dynamically.

The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads is a generalized second-price auction. This is claimed to have the property that the participants do not necessarily fare best when they truthfully reveal any private information asked for by the auction mechanism (in this case, the value of the keyword to them, in the form of a "truthful" bid).

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Blogger is a blog storage service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com.

Is blog optimization part of search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are web site content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. Blogs are really no different than web sites.

If you can optimize a document and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by a search engine, it's part of search marketing in my book. As such, marketers should be aware of how these kinds of channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

I sincerely believe using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines. These are applications for a blog besides the common use as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company.

Blogs are no silver bullet though and require working hard and smart - especially smart. However the payoff can be significant.

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1. Create Multiple Calendars - Whether you are managing direct reports, training team members and staff, or balancing your personal and business calendars, the Google Calendar helps you to organize more efficiently by using color coded calendars. You can maintain separate calendars for personal, business, team and family engagements. These calendars can all interface into one so you can see the big picture.
2. Use Event Invites - Schedule team meetings, events and one-on-one coaching. Send Invites for family events, conference calls and parties and collect RSVP.
3. Track Team Performance - Follow goals and objectives of your team members and staff.
4. Online/Offline Visibility - Print and view your Calendar in a variety of formats (agenda, daily, weekly, monthly)
5. Determine, Decide & Delegate - Determine what needs to be done. Decide who will do it. Delegate activities. Assign tasks to team members, staff and participants for team meeting preparation.
6. Share the Responsibility - Google has superiority in this area. You can transfer calendar ownership and grant or deny permission rights to allow others to manage and update information. If you are part of an organization and want to schedule meetings, collect RSVPs and arrange meeting locations.
7. Generate Task Lists - Tasks will show up on your calendar by due date. You can satisfyingly check off the items you accomplish.
8. Publicize Your Calendar - Embed your calendar into your web site and visitors can see your upcoming events. See my public Google Calendar.

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Google Checkout is an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. Users store their credit or debit card and shipping information in their Google Account, so that they can purchase at participating stores at the click of a button. Google Checkout also offers fraud protection, as well a unified page for tracking purchases and their status.

We've found the Click Through Rate (CTR) increases in most cases when Google shows your ads with the "Google Checkout" icon underneath. We believe this happens because these users may feel safe seeing a recognisable brand. In general We believe its a good idea if all websites if practical to have at least three main payments options (Google Checkout, Amazon Payments and PayPal) because if someone wants to buy a product from you they will feel safe if they use a popular brand name.

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Google Maps (formerly Google Local) is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free (for non-commercial use), that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a route planner for traveling by foot, car, or public transport and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. Google Maps is "a way of organizing the world's information geographically".

Ultimately, any search in Google has the potential to be a local search. Thousands of searchers a day use this form to tell Google where they are located and what city they want search results to be pulled from. The "Remember this location" check box tells Google that you want all of your searches to start from that zip code or city. Obviously, having a business in that location makes being found online much easier for the thousands of local consumers who search for products and services everyday. Your website needs to be recognized as a business in your local community by Google and Yahoo and MSN.

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Google Local Business Center gives you the power to drive local customers to your business and has now changed to become Google Places. Basically Google has amalgamated the functionality of Google Places which was launched nine months ago with the immediacy and analytics power of Google Local Business Center in order to help local business to get more customers through their doors free of charge.

Google knows that most people are searching for local businesses and services when they search online. Having your local business website indexed and ranked into Google for search phrases that will bring you new customers can tremendously impact the profitability of your business.

Ultimately, any search in Google has the potential to be a local search. Thousands of searchers a day use this form to tell Google where they are located and what city they want search results to be pulled from. The "Remember this location" check box tells Google that you want all of your searches to start from that zip code or city. Obviously, having a business in that location makes being found online much easier for the thousands of local consumers who search for products and services everyday. Your website needs to be recognized as a business in your local community by Google and Yahoo and MSN.

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Google Webmaster Tools is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters [Duh?]. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. It has tools that let the webmasters:

• Submit and check a sitemap
• Check and set the crawl rate, and view statistics about how Googlebot accesses a particular site
• Generate and check a robots.txt file
• List internal and external pages that link to the site
• See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page[s]), and the click through rates of such listings
• View statistics about how Google indexes the site, and if it found any errors while doing it
• Set a preferred domain (e.g. prefer wikipedia.org over www.wikipedia.org or vice versa), which determines how the site url is displayed in SERPs

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Ajax (shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. The use of Ajax techniques has led to an increase in interactive or dynamic interfaces on web pages. Data is usually retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name, the use of XML is not actually required, nor do the requests need to be asynchronous.

Like DHTML and LAMP, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a group of technologies. Ajax uses a combination of HTML and CSS to mark up and style information. The DOM is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display, and to allow the user to interact with the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads.

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JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. However, its use in applications outside web pages is also significant.

JavaScript and the Java programming language both use syntaxes influenced by that of C syntax, and JavaScript copies many Java names and naming conventions; but the two languages are otherwise unrelated and have very different semantics. The key design principles within JavaScript are taken from the Self and Scheme programming languages.

For example, we use JavaScript to manipilate CSS to Show and Hide these little boxes.

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jQuery is a new kind of JavaScript Library. jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

jQuery UI features low-level effect and interaction API's (like drag and drop) as well as full-featured and highly configurable ready-to-use widgets. Supports IE 6.0+, FF 2+, Safari 3.1+, Opera 9.0+ and Chrome 1.0.

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MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework designed for the intermediate to advanced JavaScript developer. It allows you to write powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code with its elegant, well documented, and coherent API. MooTools code respects strict standards and doesn't throw any warnings. It's extensively documented and has meaningful variable names: a joy to browse and a snap to understand.

For example, look at the rotating photos at the top of this page. This is done with MooTools and the NoobSlide plugin (Nerds name their software, be kind!). There are many more effects available with MooTools, and best of all, MooTools is a FREE JavaScript framework. All you pay for is the short amount of time it takes us to install and configure your effect, usually only an hour!

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MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. MySQL is officially pronounced "My S-Q-L", but is often pronounced "My Sequel". It is named for original developer Michael Widenius's daughter "My".

The MySQL development project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License [FREE], as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Sun Microsystems, a subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Members of the MySQL community have created several forks such as Drizzle and MariaDB. Both forks were in progress before the Oracle acquisition (Drizzle was announced 8 months before the Sun acquisition).

Free-software projects that require a full-featured database management system often use MySQL. Such projects include (for example) WordPress, Joomla!, phpBB, Drupal and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook.

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PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.

Enough Nerd Speak, PHP is free software that functions from the server-side, in other words, before the page is shown to the user. Usually, PHP is used to interface with a database - usually mySQL.

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• Google Places
• Yahoo Local
• Windows Live Local
• AOL Local
• Best of the Web Local
• Online Yellow Pages

• SuperPages
• Big Book
• InfoSpace YP
• 411.com
• Switchboard.com
• Yahoo Yellow Pages
• AnyWho
• MagicYellow
• YP.com
• True Local
• Local.com
• MapQuest
• Dogpile
• WebCrawler
• MetaCrawler
• WebFetch
• Metrobot
• DMOZ

• Yelp
• Merchants Circle
• Judy's Book
• MojoPages