There are other aspects of PPC campaign beyond keywords and providers that can affect the success of a PPC campaign, including:

• the advertisement’s position on the SERP or website
• the website and advertisement’s content, appearance, and usability
• the product or service’s price and benefits

Each of these factors can greatly contribute to a PPC campaign’s success – or lack thereof.

Placement on the SERP or Site

One of the most attractive aspects of PPC advertising is the ability to place information about a website in a prominent location. Search engines will often display hundreds of thousands or even millions of results for any given search term. Without PPC ad placement, a website’s ad might be so far down in the listings that very few people would ever come across the site. Although prominent placement in the Sponsored Listings is a start, the order of the sites listed in the Sponsored Listings can also play a role in a website’s visibility and ability to attract visitors.

Research shows that the first Sponsored Listing will attract many more clicks than the second listing, and the second listing will generate more clicks than the third. If the ad is displayed in conjunction with a popular keyword that receives a great number of searches, ranking within the Sponsored Listings becomes less important. However, for keywords that generate very few searches, placement can be crucial.

Getting into the top spot can be difficult, especially when the top spot is also desired by big companies or sites with huge advertising budgets. The competition might be willing to pay as much as $2.00 a click or more to be listed in the first spot, which makes competing for the top spot quite expensive. The use of alternate keywords might enable a site to land the top spot without breaking their budget.

Of course, being in the top position in the Sponsored Listings also has its pitfalls. Sometimes a user will click on the top site first, and then return to the search listings to comparison shop or learn more about the product or service. If the user forgets to return to the initial site, the click was wasted.

Content and Presentation

PPC works to increase a website’s volume of traffic, but most website owners are not really seeking visitors, they’re seeking customers. If a company is paying a hosting site for every user who clicks their ad, they will want as many of those users as possible to complete a desired action on the website. This desired action is usually a purchase. However, if a user clicks on a website only to see that the site is poorly designed or hard to use, they will click right on to another site, essentially wasting the company’s advertising dollars. As such, a website should be designed to effectively present the company’s product or service before embarking on a PPC campaign.

A professional, user-friendly site layout and design is crucial, especially on the site’s landing page, which is the first page a user will see after clicking on an advertisement. For instance, links should be clearly marked and take the user exactly where promised. The site’s design should be attractive and make the content easy to identify and read. The company or webmaster’s contact information should be prominently displayed or easily accessible for users who desire to contact the company directly for more information or to get assistance with placing an order.

The site’s content is also very important. Content absolutely must be useful, clear, and appealing to users. The content should explain the site’s purpose, i.e. explain what the company does or sells, inspire confidence in users, and provide useful information to the consumer. In short, the website’s landing page should back up any claims made in the advertisement itself and include persuasive copy that will encourage the visitor to make a purchase.

Quality of content is also important in the PPC ad itself. To be successful in attracting users’ attention, an ad should specifically explain what product or service is being offered. This will not only encourage users who need that specific product or service to click on an ad, but also deter users who are looking for something else from clicking on the advertisement. There’s no point in paying for visitors to view a site if the visitor doesn’t want what the site is selling.

The keywords should be used in both the title and the copy of the advertisement, and the ad’s content should answer a question or solve a problem that the target audience might be facing.

The content of both the ad and the website absolutely must be clean, clear, and concise. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors will greatly damage a site’s credibility. As such, proofreading is of utmost importance. A site’s content and presentation is a mark of professionalism. Content that is riddled with errors, difficult to read, or pointless will cause potential customers to doubt the site’s professionalism and credibility and may cost the website a great deal in terms of both wasted advertising dollars and lost opportunity for sales.

Product Pricing

Today’s Internet users know how to use the Web to find the best possible deal on their purchases. Even if a site has implemented a successful PPC campaign that attracts many visitors to the site, those visitors will not do the site any good if the product is not competitively priced. If a visitor knows they can find a better price on another site, they’ll move on in search of a better deal and the cost of their click will be wasted.

If the price of the product is already competitive, a website must find other ways to set itself apart from the competition. Free shipping, sales and specials, a long history of great customer service and satisfaction, or a no-questions-asked return policy can all distinguish one site from another. Furthermore, these distinguishing factors must be prominently displayed on the site. A free shipping offer will do a site no good if the details of the offer are buried within the site. A site might even choose to list information about their sales, specials, or money-back guarantee in the PPC ad itself.

Pay per click is not a magic bullet. Simply having advertising online doesn’t guarantee more visitors, but PPC advertising will usually increase a website’s visibility. Because of this, websites need to put their best face forward. They want to have the best advertising that they can afford and attract the most number of customers to visit their site. PPC can be a helpful tool for increasing traffic, but doing PPC campaign right will improve traffic that much more.

The first consideration in PPC is correctly utilizing keywords. Many companies, in their drive toward SEO as a marketing scheme, forget that varying keywords is a great way to find more customers. After all, every Internet user is a human being with unique thought patterns. While one user might enter “gold jewelry” into a search engine, another might simply enter, “bling.”

Popular keywords have a lot of competition, and with some of the most popular keywords, gaining a high enough ranking can seem like a Sisyphean event where the company is constantly struggling to gain rank, only to watch their rankings fall or not do that well. By experimenting with other keywords, and varying the keywords used, advertisers can gain access to a varied audience. When numbers start coming in on the effectiveness of various keyword uses, the advertisers can then begin to determine which keywords work best for their company.

PPC advertisers should also concentrate on finding host companies that provide the highest visibility to the most numbers of people. After all, the advertiser is paying only for clicks. If someone sees an ad, they might remember the name of the company in the future, but the company isn’t paying for that publicity. Again, Google and Yahoo! are the two largest search engines in the United States and the world. If a company wants to advertise to the most numbers of people, they start at the top and work their way down to identify which PPC providers will generate the most visitors and success.

Pay per click, or PPC, is a type of advertising that compliments SEO practices quite well. Pay per click is an advertising method used on advertising networks, websites, blogs, and search engines in which an advertiser only pays for an ad’s placement when a user clicks on the ad to visit the advertiser’s website. Ads are displayed based on the keywords input by the user in a search engine, or according to the content of a website on a content page such as a website or blog. In a typical PPC campaign, an advertiser will bid on specific keywords or keyword phrases that they expect potential visitors to their site might enter in a search engine when searching for information, a product, or a service. On a search engine, the advertiser’s ad will be displayed as a “Sponsored Result” or “Sponsored Ad” near the organic results on the SERP. If the PPC ad is used on a website or blog, the ad’s placement will be determined by the webmaster.

PPC is a very popular method of advertising online right now. Search engines love this type of advertising because PPC can bring in large dollars, and advertisers like that PPC can be cost-effective and cost-controlled.

A PPC advertisement is an online ad that is linked to the advertiser’s website. Sometimes these ads are banner advertising:

Other PPC ads are text based. Google’s PPC program, AdWords, uses text-based advertising that looks a little like this:

Of course, these are just two examples. There are also ads that appear in columns, there are JavaScript and Flash-based ads, there are small ads, larger ads, and ads displayed in just about any way one could imagine to grab the attention of customers.

In 2007, Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo! Search Marketing were the largest PPC network operators. The minimum click price, known as the Costs Per Click (CPC), varies from operator to operator, but can start as low as $.01 per click. Of course, more popular search terms on more popular sites and search engines can cost considerably more. The fluctuations of CPC will be explored in greater detail in the section on Bidding.

The appeal of pay per click is that it allows advertisers to reach a large audience but pay proportionally for the opportunity. The advertiser pays the hosting site or company a set amount for each click that the advertiser’s ad receives. If one or 1,000 people see the ad but don’t click, then the advertiser doesn’t owe the hosting site anything. If every 1,000 viewers who see the ad click on the ad, then the advertising company will pay the hosting site a set amount for each click the ad received.

Let’s say SolidGoldWidgets.com wants to take out PPC advertising on a particular website. They realize that a number of potential customers that visit the site, WidgetsGalore.com, would probably also be interested in what they have to sell on SolidGoldWidgets.com. To set up a PPC campaign, SolidGoldWidgets.com begins by making an agreement with the hosting site. The PPC campaign terms state that SolidGoldWidgets.com will pay the hosting site, WidgetsGalore.com, a set CPC, which is the amount of money SolidGoldWidgets.com will pay WidgetsGalore.com for each click their ad receives. In this case, SolidGoldWidgets pays WidgetsGalore the bargain basement price of 1¢ for each click. The next month, the ad receives 500 clicks. SolidGoldWidgets.com will then pay WidgetsGalore.com $5, or 500 multiplied by 1¢.

Most of the large search engines do their own PPC publishing, or control the advertising themselves. Google uses the popular PPC program AdWords for advertisers, which produces text-based ads that rely on keywords. Google then uses their own search technology to fit the ads on a SERP with keywords for which the user has searched. For example, if a user searches for “denim jackets,” the advertising will relate to denim jackets as well. AdWords also allows outside users to post these PPC ads on their own websites, and then receives money for each one that the page’s visitors click. Yahoo!, Ask, and Windows Live all have their own PPC plans as well, and each of these companies is their own publisher.

Bidding

The first step in creating a PPC ad campaign is the bidding process. Basically, this process involves placing a bid on specific keywords under which an advertisement will appear. The amount that’s bid is dependent on a lot of factors, including:

• The keyword itself - Popular keywords often cost more than less popular keywords.
• The number of visitors to the hosting website – If a hosting site, such as Google, generates a high volume of traffic, the host site’s PPC rates will usually be higher than the rates of less popular sites.
• • The amount of money the advertiser is willing to spend on PPC – Advertisers typically set a budget before bidding and will select a hosting site and specific keywords based on their budget.

Because not everyone searches for the same keywords, most companies would do well to expand the number of keywords under which they advertise. By concentrating advertising dollars on a single, costly keyword, the company may be losing out on revenue from less popular keywords. Since these less popular keywords cost less, an advertiser can gain increased visibility on a tight budget by changing their PPC advertising strategy.

If SolidGoldWidgets.com wanted to place bids on keywords, they’d first want to determine which keywords are most popular. The first thing their advertising professionals would want to do is search the online marketplace to see who else is in competition. Perhaps most of the competition uses the keywords “solid gold,” meaning that ad rates for these keywords cost more. SolidGoldWidgets.com may proceed to advertise under several keywords, or concentrate on other keywords that are less popular. Perhaps “widgets” is less popular overall, so the company has the opportunity to gain greater visibility in this keyword.

Budgeting

Each company needs to calculate how much advertising money is available to spend on a PPC campaign. The bidding process is a way to negotiate on the keyword rates. Small businesses, however, will probably see much less “bidding” going on in the bidding process if they cannot pay for many ads. The great thing about many publishers is that they allow their advertisers to set a cap on the amount of advertising for which they’ll pay. This can help these web companies, especially small ones, budget effectively and manage advertising costs.

Most companies will welcome, encourage, and even create buzz marketing to promote new product offerings. Buzz marketing is so popular within some sectors that this marketing technique can even lead to trouble. One example is the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, a very small, independent cartoon movie intended for adults. In Boston, a marketing company was hired by the movie studio to generate buzz for the movie, which they did by leaving LED light boards all over the city displaying one of the movie’s prominent characters, a two-dimensional cartoon creature from the moon named Err. However, when these light boards were discovered, they were thought to be bombs, and traffic in Boston was shut down for hours as police tried to figure out what these strange light boards were all about.

In the minds of the marketing company employees, these light boards were a way to generate buzz about a new movie and ultimately get people to see the movie to see what the light boards were all about. Police didn’t feel the same way, and the movie studio agreed later to pay the city millions for the mistakes made by the marketing company. However, this example shows how willing modern companies are to generate buzz on their product offerings. Buzz is a way to get people to discuss a product or company around the water cooler. Buzz is something that piques people’s interests. Buzz is a fairly useful tool, assuming that buzz can be generated safely.

Marketing is a vital part of keeping an online business up and running. Without visitors, a site is nothing, so attracting new visitors is the most important marketing goal. Other websites may want to concentrate on getting better customers rather than just more customers, especially websites that cater to a specific or niche group. One way to do this is to use the power of search engines to gain new users and increase the website’s popularity.

One of the side effects of faster Internet connections and more user interaction is viral marketing, a kind of marketing scheme that’s popular with large marketing firms and youth-oriented brands. Viral marketing tends to appeal to the youth market, but can branch out beyond that in some cases. Imagine that a high school student finds a web video that she thinks her friends would like. She sends this link to five friends. Those five friends send the link to five more friends, and so on. Pretty soon, thousands of people have seen this video in only a short amount of time. The link has spread almost like a virus, quickly and efficiently reaching a large group of people.

Viral marketing is, in essence, an electronic version of word of mouth advertising. This type of marketing uses existing social networks like email, Facebook, MySpace, newsgroups, message boards, and other communication systems to spread a specific message. Generally the idea is to increase awareness of a specific idea, brand, or product.

The term was coined to describe Hotmail. Before Microsoft bought Hotmail, the owners of this company decided that the best way to expand the message about their product was to let their users to this for them. Each Hotmail email sent out by a user contained a small ad at the bottom encouraging others to sign up for free Hotmail accounts. Since these messages were being sent by the thousands, this became a great advertising ploy to support the free email service. The message spread quickly, much like a virus. Now this is a commonplace practice among free email services.

Viral marketing can manifest itself in many different ways. First, viral marketing can be based on link or article sharing, where users simply forward email articles to their friends. Viral marketing can also be word-of-mouth, where the advertised company offers free products or services to some users who will hopefully spread that message to others. A viral marketing campaign can be a video posted on YouTube or a website that provides funny and interesting content with the intention of getting attention and getting people to talk to their friends. Some people may not want to mess with viral marketing, since success is volatile, and will choose instead to rely on proven methods of marketing like online advertising. Others might dabble and see if they have success.

Viral marketing is attractive because costs are low, and returns are high. The point is to create content or a message that people will want to pass along. An advertisement like the ads people see online everyday is not worth passing along. A funny or interesting web video, picture, or article, on the other hand, is worth passing along. The point of successful viral marketing is to create something that benefits the reader. When creating viral marketing campaigns, remember to keep the reader’s interests at heart.

Another Web 2.0 opportunity comes through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. These sites allow their users to interact with each other in many ways, either by sharing pictures, joining groups, sending private messages, and using other constantly-evolving applications. Networking sites are free, used by a lot of different people, and allow websites to market themselves or their product as they see fit. These sites can direct a lot of traffic through advertising, but free use of these sites is no guarantee for traffic, because the social networking audience is notoriously fickle.

Both Facebook and MySpace have begun finding ways to become friendlier to marketers. Newscorp, the company that owns FOX, also owns MySpace, a testament to how powerful the business world finds these Web 2.0 applications. Both Facebook and MySpace are allowing more and more targeted advertising to their users. Facebook in particular has begun a very specific method of marketing by picking up keywords and demographics information within the profile of various users, then targeting advertising to those keywords.

The individual marketer can use these applications to gain exposure and promote their products, websites, or ideas. Some companies have begun advertising and organizing people online. One example is Pepsi, which uses applications Facebook users can add to their profile page to promote Pepsi products through a game. Other potential marketing areas include creating groups and finding potential customers by identifying who those potential customers are and catering to their needs based on the information they already have online.

Sites like YouTube and Flickr are popular, there’s no doubt about that. They’re also a joy to use. By going to YouTube, a user can experience a kind of “YouTube time rot” where they continue to keep watching videos from users all over the world. YouTube’s tagging system ensures that every time a user watches a video YouTube will suggest similar videos to the user immediately following the clip. Some people find that after what seems like only a short time, they’ve wasted hours watching streaming videos on YouTube.

This kind of devotion to a web program like YouTube is something that marketers have been trying to fully harness for years. Some have succeeded and some have failed, but the general popularity of these sites suggests that a marketer’s efforts could be rewarded with a little work. Some marketers use YouTube to post videos promoting their products. One successful example was a company that manufactures blenders. They would periodically post videos of their blenders blending up non-food objects, displaying the power of the blender motors. For instance, they might blend a box of chocolates or a stuffed animal for Valentine’s Day. People began to watch these videos and followed their progression. The blender manufacturer, on the other hand, enjoyed great exposure at a very low price, for only the price of a camera, a computer, and some software.

YouTube videos can now host ads in their margins, so affiliate marketers can use the site to further their affiliate marketing exposure. Users of sites like Flickr can also gain valuable exposure at a low cost. Many photographers use the site, which allows people to post their pictures online to gain exposure. Companies can use this method to gain exposure by posting interesting photos that anyone can access.

The word “blog” is a shortened form of the phrase “web log.” A blog is a website that uses an array of time-stamped and categorized “posts”, generally placed in date order, to allow users to read a wide variety of articles and other informational posts. Most Internet users are probably already familiar with many blogs already, or have at least heard about them. Google’s official blog is a free blog maintained by a free blogging site called Blogger, owned by Google, and is one of the most-read blogs on the Web. Clearly, just because a blog is simple and free to create doesn’t mean that blog can’t generate visitors.

Commercial blogs have also begun to drive traffic recently. Some companies use blogs to generate word-of-mouth marketing or so-called “buzz marketing” for a particular product or product line. Some companies have official blogs where they can post pictures, press releases, and news updates about their company. Google is one example of a company that has such a following that people will visit their official blog in droves just to read about what the company is up to these days.
Blogging contains a lot of marketing potential. Popular blogs that aren’t on free sites can post ads on their blog in order to generate revenue, and this is a popular technique for affiliate marketers to drive traffic. Blogs can also market specific products and contribute links for the purpose of increasing page rank. Since blogs are so dependent on content and the most-viewed blogs online are quite rich with good content, producing a blog that has good content is essential to success. This, of course, requires some time, effort, and possibly money. In the end, though, blogs can be a great way to gain exposure.

The popularity of wikis has grown enormously as more and more users realize the great potential of Wikis to bring people together and get them to communicate. The most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia, is not the only wiki, but just one site that is harnessing wiki software in a large way. Wikis are actually software applications accessible online that allow multiple users to read articles about specific topics. The wiki also allows users to change and edit those articles, assuming they are given permission to do so. In Wikipedia, nearly everyone has permission to edit articles.

So what makes wikis so popular? First, they are fairly simple to set up and maintain. Second, they provide a very simple way to put information online that is easy to read, searchable, and fun for the user. Small or not-for-profit software companies will use wikis to put documentation online, such as articles that explain how the software works and how to fix potential problems. When multiple users of the software get together on a single wiki, they eventually produce many, useful articles that anyone can access and benefit from.

The current problem is that nobody has been able to figure out how to make wikis work in the business or marketing sector, though many have tried. Currently, users of wikis are mostly partial to wikis that are mostly knowledge-sharing like Wikipedia. However, this doesn’t mean that, in the future, a highly successful commercial-type wiki couldn’t come along and change the climate of wikis altogether.

Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Backflip allow registered users to store all of their bookmarks in one location online, which allows them to access their bookmarks from any place that has Internet access, regardless of the web browser they use. These sites also add customization and interactivity to this feature where users can post and make comments about popular links on the site. These sites are popular because users can customize and control their online experience by storing any of the many websites they see in a day, all in one place. Users also love this technology because they can share their bookmarks with others.

Websites can cater to this market by making linking to various articles easy to do. For example, if a user were to read an interesting article on the New York Times website, he or she can easily save the link to the social bookmarking site of choice. The more people who bookmark the same link, the more popular the link becomes. An article’s popularity can bring in significant traffic to a site. If a website includes articles and other updated content, learning the ins and outs of social bookmarking sites can add value to the quest for website visitors. Catering to these sites is free and can potentially bring in a lot of traffic.

Some Web marketers will use social bookmarking to increase visibility within search engines, but also within the social bookmarking site itself. Imagine that a webmaster posted an interesting article on his site. People visit this article frequently and mark the link to that article in their social bookmarking accounts. Now search engines will know that his website is well linked and well respected.

Also, because of the popularity of that article, people who visit that social bookmarking site will also come across the article while using the social bookmarking site, making the link even more popular. Social bookmarking can have a profound snowball effect on traffic, which is why social bookmarking is a marketing favorite. Unfortunately, marketers have very little control over this process. They can’t make people mark a site, they can only entice them. This is why being mindful of having good, useable content is still important.

There are plenty of brands that define the Web 2.0 movement: Google, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Wikipedia, YouTube. Each of these brands is different in their approach. For example, Wikipedia remains a not-for-profit company that doesn’t allow advertising on the site. Google, on the other hand, is huge, publically traded company that has redefined online advertising for nearly everyone who operates a business online.

Marketing using Web 2.0 methods is relatively new, but enterprising marketers have been finding ways to use Web 2.0 to their advantage. Remember that there are no hard and fast rules—yet. Marketers may find new and innovative ways to use these technologies that aren’t listed here, especially if they keep their eyes and minds open for ways to gain traffic, market, and optimize for search engines.

When the term “Web 2.0” was coined, the emphasis of the term wasn’t the Internet or even existing movements on the Internet, but more the software used online that would eventually drive the Web 2.0 movement. Without software, there would be no Web 2.0. New and innovative software is crucial for the development of more and better Web applications and new ideas that will draw in the interest of the Internet crowd and provide a fun, user-friendly, and social experience for anyone who wants to try.

So how does software really drive Web 2.0? All users generally see online is a Web browser of some kind, like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla’s Firefox, and they use that browser to access information from all over the world. Users may download files and use those files locally but, for the most part, all they ever see are websites. Think about how the Web must operate on the other end, though, to see how innovative software is essential to Web 2.0. When users access information online, they are actually taking a peek at various servers, or large storage computers, all over the world.

Those servers have to do many things. They have to host, or store the websites that people visit. So if a user goes to yahoo.com, he or she is accessing information from Yahoo!’s servers through browser software. On those servers, and other servers that help run the Internet, is software that does the true dirty work of the Internet, and that software is changing.

For example, more than a decade ago, a website would probably post an HTML document as their website and each page had to be created as an individual entity. Today a website can use a database system to create various database files as well as a shell in which to place that information. This means the information can be saved once and placed onto any website by accessing the database. Software improvements will continue to increase the amount of functions available online for both Web companies and users.

One of the reasons that Web 2.0 is considerably improving the experience for the user is that the emphasis of Web 2.0 is making content highly accessible. Also, Web 2.0 is encouraging sharing among users, further solidifying the social nature of these new Web applications.

What Web marketers have discovered over the years is that people are highly reluctant to pay for information online. The strong popularity of music and video piracy is a testament to this. An entire generation has grown up on the idea that music, movies, and TV shows should be free and openly available to anyone. The Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA) begs to differ. This was the organization that began suing people, including children and grandmothers, for downloading music for free off of the Internet.

Why do people who pirate music matter? In essence, piracy is one of the best current examples of open access and sharing available online. There would be no piracy of copyrighted material possible if people weren’t sharing with each other. There are no websites that host pirated files for others to download. They would be immediately sued and their websites would be taken down. However, by decentralizing the process and creating software that allows easy access and sharing to others’ files, pirating files has become the greatest triumph of sharing online.

Sharing isn’t just for pirates, however. New software protocols like BitTorrent, and the software created to handle these software types, has allowed users to directly share files with one another over great distances. BitTorrent allows users to stop and start downloads at their own pace as well as set the speed of their downloads. Though BitTorrent files are most often used for pirating music and video files, they have also been used by nonprofit groups to transfer files. Since the files are shared directly from user to user, the nonprofit doesn’t have to pay a lot of money to buy a server to store the files, or pay the cost of bandwidth so that many people can visit that site and access those files.

Sharing and open access is spilling into other areas of the online world. For example, the site Hulu recently went live. This site works much like YouTube in that people can visit this site and stream video files. The difference is that Hulu was created as a partnership between the NBC and FOX networks and both companies have put official clips and episodes of popular TV series on the site. Users can watch their favorite TV shows whenever they want and the site is supported by the ad revenue generated by the visitors who go to that site. The shows are freely open and can be accessed by anyone, though the website is supported by ads.

Some Web experts suspect that open access and sharing will improve in the future to include more than just pirated copyrighted material. Hulu is one example of major copyright holders understanding the wants of Web users. When they provide open access to their TV shows online, they can generate ad revenue and users will always know that the files they watch will be quality and complete. If those files are primarily pirated, though, the networks generate no money off of these shows. In the future, record companies, software companies, and more may start using this model to distribute and advertise their products.

One element of Web 2.0 applications is their use of folksonomy to help categorize information. Folksonomy ultimately helps save money for the developer when users control the content they read, and also increases accountability. With more users online with greater control, those users will keep incorrect information in check in the interest of accuracy and fairness. Websites like YouTube and Wikipedia are heavily dependent on social control. In fact, the vast majority of content on these two websites is based on social control. Users are the ones who upload the content. Users will also tag and categorize the content so the data can easily be found by other users. When other users spot errors, obscene material, or information that is otherwise objectionable, the user has immediate control over the content and can change the problem information instantly without having to wait for a human editor. As a particular application grows more popular, the accuracy will presumably increase as more people correct mistakes within the content they read.

Cost Effectiveness

As the capability of Web software increases, the cost of running a Web application or other website online has actually dropped in comparison. As software becomes more effective and disk space becomes cheaper, the possibilities online will only continue to expand. Moore’s Law was a principle created by Intel co-founder Gordon E Moore in the sixties. Moore’s Law stated that the capability of electronics will continue to grow at almost exponential rates, doubling every two years. When Moore wrote his influential paper, he was actually discussing the capability of transistors, but this law has been applied to many aspects of electronics, most notably hard disk space. Anyone who pays attention to computer technology has probably noticed that computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, and the amount of storage on those computers is getting larger and larger. Moore’s Law describes this increase in storage space and also tells us that, in the future, this trend is likely to continue.

So what does storage space have to do with Web applications? As storage space becomes cheaper to have and maintain, while also getting smaller in size, more companies can rely on Web applications that take up a lot of space. Take, for example, Wikipedia, a site that has literally millions of entries from people all over the world. Wikipedia also stores image, video, and audio files uploaded by users of the program. Fifteen years ago, storing all of this information on a computer would have been too costly for a nonprofit organization, but today this kind of storage space is much cheaper, making Wikipedia a possibility.

Web 2.0 isn’t any one set of software programs or popular websites. Web 2.0 is actually a term coined by software experts to describe the next generation of software and web interfaces based online. As more and more users end up online, the web has changed to reflect the needs and wants of more people. The old generation of web applications reflected the types of people that were generally online, generally people who were already good with computers. In Web 2.0, the emphasis is more about being social and more user friendly. There are actually several hallmarks that indicate Web 2.0 applications. Here are a few characteristics that are part of the Web 2.0 movement:

User Control

The old model of the Internet suggested that only those who placed website online controlled the content of those sites. A person could only control a website if they owned and had direct control the content, design, and maintenance of that website. The new, Web 2.0 model of the Internet states that websites will have more accurate and more informative content if the users are able to control the content or at least organization of that website. Several examples of popular sites online show this. Wikipedia, a nonprofit project, allows any user to control the contents of the site. Flickr, a popular photo sharing site, allows users to upload their own photos, tag them, and describe them as they see fit.

By allowing users to control the categories and tags that exist for each piece of content on a website, websites are utilizing something called “folksonomy”. Folksonomy is a term that describes what happens when users categorize their own materials rather than relying on someone else or a computer program to do this for them. Imagine that a user uploads a photo to a photo sharing site and makes the picture public so that anyone can access the photograph. The user also wants to tag the photograph with a descriptive term that lets people know the contents of the photo they are about to see. If the image was a picture of the Alamo, for example, the user might use tags like “Alamo,” “San Antonio,” or “landmark” to describe the photo. This personalization is what’s known as folksonomy. By allowing users to self-categorize content, a website can exist with a smaller budget and provide a greater range of services to users, a win-win for everyone.

Social Interaction

Social interaction is one of the elements that make Web 2.0 applications exciting, fun, and easy for the user. Social interaction means keeping in touch with friends online or meeting new people from around the world. In the old model of the Internet, every user was an island who went about his or her business online without having much interaction with other users. Certainly some tools could be used for communication with others like chatting and message boards, but there weren’t many other options to communicate with other web users. Web 2.0 applications make virtually everything social. The photos users post online; and their favorite links, videos, and books, and movies can be up for discussion with anyone.

Social interaction, along with social control, is part of what makes Web 2.0 applications so exciting. When users can come together and make necessary changes, discuss their favorite topics, and communicate the things they have in common, this creates a Web that is no longer a cold and desolate place devoid of other human life .With social interaction, the Web experience can be truly personal and social. A regular Web surfer can share their favorite videos with the world, and the people that see the video can comment. They can begin a lively dialogue with each other or let the comments go without response. Either way, these web applications are making communicating with other Web users easier than before.

Wide-scale use of the Internet is a fairly new phenomenon in today’s society, but already the technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Today’s Internet is quite different from the one surfed just fifteen short years ago. Today there’s much more content, customization, and use of broadband connections. What seemed nearly impossible fifteen years ago is now being realized because of emerging technology that allows people all over the world to stream videos, view pictures, customize their homepages, and see only the news stories they want.

New technologies that allow for this customization and change on the Web are often referred to as Web 2.0. There is no specific idea or set of technologies that is considered “Web 2.0.” The terms is meant to indicate a broad range of movements within the web community to online applications and websites that are customizable, user-friendly, and provide far more function that previously thought possible. The term “Web 2.0” has often been thought of as a useless buzz word by some cynics within the industry; however, this term is loosely used in this chapter to describe the exciting, new possibilities that are available online, both for the marketer and the average user.

For those readers with limited experience in website creation, here’s a recap:

1. Design the page or buy a design from somebody else. This is relatively simple to do. If you are good with computers and design, you can probably do this yourself in your favorite software or using your favorite online editing program. If not, you can buy design, and sometimes have designs for free, by downloading them from online. This would be the absolute easiest way for a beginner to get online. Just go to your favorite search engine and type “Web template” or “free website template” or something similar. Then you can find companies who sell good designs.
2. Get your content together. This part is crucial. The content of your site is the site’s lifeblood. Without content, why would anyone visit? You should always design to accommodate content, not the other way around, so start writing. Write articles, index pages, introduction pages, product descriptions and whatever else will appear on the site. For some, this is the hardest part. If you want to do this easy, you can always outsource, or hire someone else to do the writing for you. This is good if you’re not a particularly good writer yourself or if you can’t be bothered to work on the project yourself.
3. Make a tree. One of the hardest parts about getting a site together is determining how the “tree structure” or the basic shape and outline of your website will look. If you look at websites in terms of how individual pages link to each other, you’ll see a sort of diagram of links within a site. Here’s one example of a link tree:














4. Put the whole website together:

   
   If you’re building a website using special software like an HTML editor, now is the time to create a whole website, not just a Web page. The reason you create a site before the site “goes live,” or is posted online, is so that you can work out the kinks within the pages. No matter how much planning you do, these problems will pop up once the site goes online, so creating and testing the site before going online is crucial.




5. Upload the site to a host.

   
   Now is the time when you put the site online for anyone to see. First, you have to have a host, a company that provides the server space and technology that will actually host the site and the people who will eventually visit the site. Most hosts will provide simple and basic tools to upload the site directly online. Otherwise you can use an FTP—file transfer protocol—program to move the files from your computer to the servers on which the public will be able to access your site.




6. Promote the site:

   
   Next you’ll want to find ways to promote the site. This portion depends entirely on your search engine marketing scheme, so the techniques you use are up to you. You’ll be reading about many of these throughout the book.

Almost everyone has seen a website that was packed with too many images and information. The page has so many colorful images laid out that the visitor must scroll down for what seems like days in order to get to the bottom of the page. All of this information seems to be displayed without any organization whatsoever. Other sites don’t any design at all.

Websites, much like women’s skirts, should be long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting. The visitor’s first scan of a website should tell them a few pieces of crucial information. First, they should know who runs the page and what the page is all about. They should know where they can go to find answers to their question and how to contact the company, if need be.

If the user doesn’t know the answers to these questions, the site has too little design and content. If the user is bombarded by many images without organization, and links that don’t seem to go anywhere specifically, the site has the opposite problem: too much design.

Considering All Users

Another common website mistake is forgetting that there are many kinds of users out there who surf the Web. Not everyone has a high speed Internet connection. Not everyone has a fast, new computer possible of processing a large amount of data. There are people with disabilities who surf the Web, users who can’t, or don’t, want to use Web complimentary programs like Adobe Reader, Flash, and JavaScript. There are users who have small monitors, surf the Web from their mobile phones, or go online from a public location like the library. Each of these users is a potential customer and valued visitor that must be considered.

Bandwidth is an important area to consider. There are many different kinds of Internet service that users can get in their homes and businesses. Some users are able to afford and get the high speed connections that come with DSL and cable. DSL, however, can be problematic for rural users because of the limitations of the phone lines used to transmit data. Cable TV may not be available in all areas, and is still fairly costly. This is why many people still rely on dial-up access to get online. Dial-up goes through traditional phone lines, is much slower, and means that users can’t take or make phone calls while they’re online, unless the household has two separate phone lines. Dial-up users don’t appreciate having to wait for days in order for Flash animation, large pictures, sound files, or JavaScript applications to load. If a page is too slow, these users can probably find a page elsewhere that loads much more quickly.

Some visitors may also have disabilities. A deaf person may not have a problem with a site, unless the site depends heavily on sound files. A blind person, however, may run into big problems if a webmaster has not taken blindness into consideration when designing the site. Those who are blind or have poor vision usually rely on screen reader software, which read web pages aloud, in order to surf the Web.

Screen readers can only read text. They can’t read text that appears in pictures or Flash animations. For that reason, webmasters should be sure to use as much text as possible in their sites, and use alt text for every single image on the page, no matter how small or trivial the image may seem. Alt text gives users with disabilities a text description of what the picture is, which can be read by screen readers.

Minding Fold Lines

The term “fold line” comes from the world of newspapers, but applies similarly to websites. Traditional-sized newspapers are long and generally come folded in half. When a paper is displayed on the racks, the first thing passers-bys see is the upper half of the first page. Everyone who picks up a paper will see information on this top half, but not everyone will take the time to see the bottom half. Newspapers know this, so they put their most important information on the top half of the paper, above the fold line.

Web pages work the same way. If a user is just scanning a page, they won’t take the time to see what’s at the bottom. For that reason, web site design dictates that the most valuable information in each page should be displayed on the top part of the page. The “fold line” in web design refers not to an actual fold, but to the place on the page where the page is cut off and the user must scroll down in order to see the rest of the page.

This fold line can change dramatically as a result of the different kinds of computer monitors that people use. Again, most people who surf the Web still use older, smaller monitors. Since newer, larger monitors like widescreen or LCD monitors are much more expensive, their use is not particularly widespread. Because of this, pages should be designed with smaller screens in mind. A larger screen will display more information, but be sure and keep the most important things at the very, very top. Some web editor programs will allow web designers to see the fold line for different sizes and resolutions of a computer screen.

Here’s another important note about scrolling. Users, in general, hate to scroll. They don’t like to scroll down very much, but they most certainly hate scrolling to the side. Side scrolling is easily avoidable by makings some easy design choices and is a great way to keep customers happy with the look and feel of a site. The more websites can avoid scrolling, the better.

If a user can’t get around a site easily, that user has absolutely no reason to stay. Poor navigation will reduce the number of visitors pretty severely and frustrate the users who do stay. Navigation is the system that the visitor uses to get from one place to the next on a website. Some examples of navigation structures are in-text links, left or right column navigation, top navigation, tabbed navigation, and even Flash navigation.

Since there are so many ways to get around on a website, there are plenty of opportunities for bad navigation. Mystery meat navigation, a coin termed by the creators of WepPagesThatSuck.com, describes one type of navigation problem. Ideally, whenever a visitor clicks on a link, they should know exactly where that link will take them. The problem is that some people create links that aren’t entirely clear as to their destination.

Problem navigation is navigation that is hard to get around. If a user clicks on a series of pages and ends up on some strange page with no way of getting back to the main menu, the sub menu, or another page, the site in question does not have enough navigation tools. A link should appear to a site’s home page on every page in the site. Ideally, each sub page—for example, “products,” “services,” “contact,” etc.—should be listed on each and every page. Every user should know exactly where they are going and exactly how to get back to where they need to be.

Initial Impression

Many years ago, a dandruff shampoo commercial used the slogan, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” While is advice is true for those meeting someone face to face, this advice also rings true for anyone “meeting” a site for the first time. Websites have a very short window of time in order to impress their visitors. Website owners must think carefully about how to impress visitors, bring them back, and how to encourage the visitors to tell all their friends about the page.

The most important thing any webmaster must remember is to make sure the purpose of the website is apparent. Visitors to a site should know, right away, what the site is about, what they can do at the site, and what sort of information they can find on the site. If a visitor shows up and sees a lot of flashing colors and interesting pictures, but still doesn’t know what the site is for, there is a problem.

Web visitors don’t stick around for long. There are millions, if not billions of sites on the Web that any typical user could surf. Visitors can almost always find another site that will provide what they’re looking for, so webmasters must remember that when building any page, and lay out a plan immediately. A visible logo and text that explains the purpose of the site is essential. Navigation tools should be clearly labeled so that visitors know what else they can find on the page. Websites only have a minute or two to impress their visitors. Start early and impress often.

Pesky Elements

There are some design elements that just don’t belong on a web page. More often than not, these elements annoy rather than help. Annoying a visitor is not a good way to make a first impression and is not the way to get a repeat visitor, either.

Sound can be especially annoying to visitors. If a sound starts automatically, visitors are left with the option of either hearing this endlessly looped and annoying sound file, or trying to turn the music off. Some pages don’t even give users the option to turn the sound off, which can make a visitor really frustrated. No business needs automatically loaded sound files, generally, so avoid them at all costs.

Flash and JavaScript files can also be annoying to visitors. Some Flash pages can be awkward and hard to use, especially for older or inexperienced web browsers. Some Flash sites rely heavily on mystery meat navigation, leaving visitors frustrated because they’re never sure where they’re going when they click on a link. Similarly, JavaScript can make web browsers vulnerable to viruses and spam, so many users turn all JavaScript content off for this reason. If a site is based in Flash and JavaScript, without alternative options, that site is almost certainly alienating potential customers.

Some of these elements, especially the multimedia elements, take a long time to load. While those users with high speed Internet connections may not mind, there are still millions of people who rely on dial-up service who do mind. JavaScript, Flash, sound files, and large images dramatically increase the sizes of these pages, increasing the load times dramatically. The best solution is the make sure pages load quickly for everyone. This ensures that visitors with lower-speed connections will feel welcomed.

Testing is an absolutely crucial part of any website launch. Without testing, the website could be full of bugs and problems that prevent visitors from using or wanting to come back to the site. The purpose of testing a website is to work out all the bugs within the code of the page before the general public sees them. After all, the public has no incentive to be understanding about the problems in a page. They just want to use a website that works properly.

Testing is also way to determine which design elements work best for SEO purposes. Since there are no hard and fast rules for increasing page ranking, testing different methods is a great way to figure out which techniques work best. One way to do a controlled test is to do split testing. This involves testing two different versions of a page to see which does better in terms of rank. The idea is to find the elements that draw the most traffic. The experiment can be constructe4d to test one set of elements at a time to get more precise results. For example, a Webmaster can test only meta tags or HTML tags to get a better understanding of the role these elements play in increasing traffic.

Website Structures

Content may seem like the most important aspect of SEO. After all, the content of a page is what holds the page’s keywords and links. The design and other choices related to the page don’t seem like they should matter. However, the structures within a page are just as important to the contents of the page for several reasons. First, excellent content is nothing if a web user can’t find or easily read that information. Second, these users won’t want to continue to visit a page that doesn’t give them the information they need, even if the site has excellent content. Content is nothing without a system to convey this information to readers.

Some amateur web designers can easily spot poorly designed sites. Sometimes finding good design is identifying bad design, or the old cliché “I know it when I see it.” If there is a bad site, even new designers can spot bad design. One website devoted to poorly designed sites is WebPagesThatSuck.com. On this site, users can find links to the most poorly designed sites on the Web. Good design, however, is a little harder to determine. In this section, several important practices that webmasters must remember when developing a website are outlined.

Some of these elements are measured by search engine spider programs. Changing a website’s design and structures will not only improve the usability for the site’s visitors, these techniques will also increase ranking with search engines. While the exact way this works is a secret, providing the best site results is the goal of the search engine, so improving the general look and feel of a site can accomplish the goal of more visitors.