Google’s debut of the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center closely follows the arrival of a similar service from Yahoo.

Click fraud persists in plaguing advertisers and the search advertising companies that sell ad space. High-profile lawsuits have happened as a result of businesspeople contending not enough is being done to keep their budgets from being tapped with illicit clicks.

With trust occupying an important part of any online advertising product, Google and its competitors have to work hard to stay ahead of the various grifters, thieves, and assorted criminals who would loot their ad clients. They haven’t always been very communicative about their work, claiming that the bad guys would profit from information about anti-click fraud efforts.

That position hasn’t satisfied advertisers nor the many third party companies that attempt to track click fraud independently of the search companies. Google and others generally refuse to give up information on their anti-fraud efforts, citing the benefit of such transparency to those who would game the system.

Room for improvement in discussing the click fraud issue has existed for some time. Yahoo opened a Traffic Quality center last week, and now Google has followed suit.

Much of the information Google presents in its Ad Traffic Quality pages has been seen before. Google claims it proactively finds all but about .02 percent of what turn out to be invalid clicks.
Advertisers who find and report invalid clicks can be reimbursed by Google after those clicks have been confirmed invalid.

Google suggested a way advertisers can help themselves against click fraud. “Advertisers should have a working definition of ROI that is trackable. For advertisers that are not selling products directly online, try to define some intermediate step (e.g. filling out a form) as a proxy for a conversion,” they said.

Another section of the Traffic Quality center focuses on some of the technical discussions on click fraud. It includes articles by Google staffers about click fraud, and references to official and unofficial blogs by Google and by people like Matt Cutts and Shuman Ghosemajumder, both noteworthy Googlers on the topic of click fraud.

by David A. Utter

Web design focuses on appearance and aesthetics. SEO focuses on text quality and quantity.

Web designers don’t really like to clutter their designs with text. They prefer to see the images stand out on their own. SEOs on the other hand don’t like images that much. Sure, an image can be optimized for the search engines by adding relevant alt attributes and titles, but this is not enough for a site to be properly optimized. Page copy still plays the most important role in website optimization for SEO.

As a business owner you are caught in the middle of this conflict. For your website to convert you need both design and optimization. There is no middle way. You cannot have a little bit of this and a little bit of that and still be competitive. You cannot have just one of the two either. Without optimization your site is invisible to the search engines, hence to your potential customers. On the other hand, without a good design your site, although not invisible, will get nothing but hits. Web users are picky and if they find nothing of interest on your site they will just surf to the next site.

When you pay for web design don’t automatically assume that by paying thousands of dollars on a layout you’ll be a hit on the Web. The Web is a highly competitive place. There are already thousands entrepreneurs who, just like you, invest in design and hope to become the new “it.” Without online marketing (SEO being an important part of the discipline) all these entrepreneurs will remain in the shadow, with their beautiful websites closed to the world.

SEO is the key to that virtual door you need to open for your customers. It is important that you consider this tool when you first conceive your site. Web design and SEO don’t need to be enemies. There are enough professional agencies that employ both web designers and SEOs who work together to develop a good business website, a site that is SEO ready, accessible and readable with any browser. You just need to take your time, research and send a few inquiries. Then balancing content with visual appearance shouldn’t be such a difficult task. Aside graphics and artwork you have to choose proper font types, in a readable size, with colors that harmonize with the layout of the site and so on. If your site is not SEO ready from the first stage of the project you’ll face additional costs after you launch. SEO ready means a site that is properly coded (errors in the HTML code might stop some search bots from crawling and indexing your site correctly), with good navigability and good internal linking structure.

On the other hand, SEO and appearance are not the only traits of a good site. Brand conscious companies should look at the broader picture … instead of debating what is better online entrepreneurs should ask themselves what works best to convert visitors into clients.

Studies show that an over optimized page might hurt the user-experience of people with disabilities. For example, many SEOs stuff the image alt attributes and their alternative titles with keywords. Blind and other visually impaired people who use screen readers to access the Web and read the pages cannot see the images and, instead of listening to a relevant image description, they\’ll hear… nonsense.

Usability and accessibility are equally important as design and optimization. Strangely enough images are better for usability. They give focus to the design and when properly optimized they provide for less cluttered website content. The problems appear when the images slow down the loading times, but with the use of CSS loading times should not be a big concern.

As search engines prefer fast loading sites it is easy top understand why good coding and optimization are so important. Poor coding raises many other problems aside loading times and might increase costs when you need website updates, especially when your website administrator is not the one who created your site.

It is a fact that links have always been a vital part in the Internet navigational process. Depending on the links and also on the content of the site that the link leads to, Internet users decide on the worthiness of coming back to that site or not.

One cannot fail to notice the latest trends imposed by web 2.0 - the emergence of a new writing genre designed to cater for the new needs and tastes of internet users and also the transformation process that search engines undergo.

Broadly speaking, users go from page to page selecting only the most important information or just the information that is easier to spot; they need to be able to make a quick assessment of the page content, get the information they are seeking and go to another page.

Usually, web authors employ hypertext links to create or reinforce concepts: a list of related links can serve as the focus of a site. The problem posed by links has little to do with the web but is rather related to the concept of hypertext. A collection of links does not have the same effect on the reader and is not as legible as conventional linear text.

In the case of linear text, readers have to work harder in seek of needed information. Links also become a technical problem, because most web pages have a certain rank on search engines due to links. Links are to be used as a reinforcement of, not a substitute for content.

What is worth mentioning when tackling the link issue is that designers are supposed to use relevant link labels, give consistent click ability cues and also differentiate links that have been clicked from those that haven’t.

1. Use relevant link description
Users’ confusion must be avoided at all costs. In this respect, they should be able to look at every link and be able to predict to some extent the destination or the website they are about to visit. A negative example in this case is using the label - Click here-, which is rather confusing and does not provide any kind of information about the link destination.

Another relevant case is that of embedded links — when employing embedded links, the link text should accurately designate the link’s direction. Users have a certain tendency towards ignoring the text surrounding embedded links; consequently, it is recommended that you should not create embedded links that use the surrounding text in order to provide hints about the link’s destination.

2. Be aware that textual links
do have certain main characteristics like: underlining and color.
The second trait is not as important as the first one, i.e. underline can be eliminated in some cases like the one when an area functionality is absolutely obvious - for instance, we could think of a site menu where everybody expects a content summary as a presentation.

Thus, you should provide users with sufficient clickability cues. Trying to put the cursor over different parts of the page is time consuming and not quite “affordable” with a view to gain more traffic. At the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that there area certain clickability expectancies regarding different regions of a web page; for instance, items on the center, left, right side have a high probability of being links.

3. Use different colors for visited and unvisited links
Links that were clicked must differentiate one way or another from the ones that were not; the best way of doing that is the color contrast; links are supposed to stand out on the computer screen as much as possible; in this respect, bright, vivid colors are preferable - links should differentiate from linear text in any case.

Conversely, links that were already clicked should employ a rather pale and “washed” color. The effect of using different colors but both at the same level of chromatic intensity might result in a failure to establish a concrete content relationship between those links, users won’t be able to tell visited from non-visited links.

Even though some compromises would be acceptable (like using other colors), using blue for text is an exception. Blue is a color with the most notable perceived affordance of clickability.

4. Colors for text are to be avoided
It is recommended that colors should be used for hyperlinks only. Nevertheless, there are generally recognized and allowed colors for certain words such as red for “error” or green for “ok”. Technically speaking, when referring to document colors, it is advisable that you specify all of the colors (BGCOLOR, TEXT, LINK, VLINK, ALINK), to ensure an enjoyable and legible composition. Find out more about choosing the right colors for your web site.

The main reason reinforcing this idea is that some users may have certain colors set as default, so if you don’t specify all the colors of a document, they may end up with an illegible document. In addition, even when using a background image, you should still specify BGCOLOR, because the user may not have the image loading on.

5. Don’t use “special effects” when the cursor hovers over a link
As previously clarified, underlined text is the most obvious hint that the user deals with a hyperlink. Still, there are some particular cases when you might not employ underlined text for hyperlinks without major loss in usability. For instance, you could indicate clickability only when the user hovers over a link - let’s say that a text gets underlined only after being hovered, as a sign of clickability.

Nevertheless, using bold effects is not advisable due to the prospect that the text might realign. On the contrary, other effects like link titles could prove quite successful in creating a useful website (in terms of navigational usability). Not until recently, users had a lot of trouble because they weren’t aware of the direction of certain links. In order to respond to the users’ needs, some browsers included in their features a slight preview of the link direction. The effect of this inclusion was a notable reduction in users’ disorientation. Therefore, you shouldn’t miss them when providing a hyperlink; also, they are quite easy to add.

6. Ensure that the text is big enough and that the links are not too close together
Internet users should reach a certain destination voluntarily, not because of the fact that due to link size they missed to click on the link they wanted. This rule might be skipped in the case of legal information in which people are not so interested. At the same time, this advice should be given due consideration in case some of the people targeted belong to the third age.

7. Be sure to make important content accessible from more than one link
Setting several ways to access the same information will certainly help users to find what they need. Different users might attempt different ways to find information, depending on their own interpretations of a problem and on the layout of a page. Some users find important links easily when they have a certain label, while others may recognize the link best with an alternative name. Read more about how can you gain site accessibility.

8. Employ text links rather than image links
By and large and as mentioned before, text links do have a greater perceived affordance of clickability. Text links usually have a faster download speed, are preferred by users, and should change colors after being selected.

Even judging from a technical point of view, it is usually easier to place a link’s destination in text, rather than using an image. In many situations, users demonstrated considerable confusion concerning whether or not certain images were clickable.

9. Employ sensible link lengths
Hyper links should be long enough to be understood by users and short enough to minimize wrapping. Generally speaking, it is advisable that links do not have a grater length than one line. As far as this issue is concerned, studies showed that when users scan prose text, links of nine to ten words do have best performance.

10. Try to warn visitors in case they leave the page
It is best for internet users to be able to realize when they are going to leave the site and head for another. Generally, users expect, when given a link, to head for a new page that belongs to the same site. In case this does not happen, they will become confused. So, the bottom line is that, when building a site, people should take into consideration the prospect of giving visitors warnings when they would leave a certain site.

11. Provide links on your website to helpful information
It would improve navigation on your web site, if you were to give hyperlinks to further definitions, explanations or descriptions. So the main purpose of these links would be to clarify certain concepts so that less experienced users can successfully use the web site.

12. The problem posed by reserved characters
This is a rather technical problem: certain characters are reserved and need encoding in a hexadecimal format in order to be used as URLs. Some browsers may show these characters properly anyway, but this is not indicative of the fact that these characters should be used without encoding in any browser.

For instance, spaces are seen as special characters and consequently, they should be encoded. By and large, it is recommended that you should avoid the use of characters that may require encoding. At the same time, another problem that might cause some trouble is that of URL case sensitivity. It is recommended that you make them case sensitive from the beginning to avoid changing them when you move from one server to another.

And…
…don’t forget that this could turn into a major downside for your site if this rule is missed. You should keep in mind that grouping related links in a certain section is of vital importance.

It seems that when visiting a web page, most screen reader users expect at least the main site navigation menu presenting the main sections of the web page before the content of the page.

There is little evidence to support the idea that screen reader users would rather have the content presented first. It is highly desirable however, to present the content of the page before extraneous information, such as advertisements and related links, as well as the page footer.

Who Else Wants To Make Money With Adsense?

Fact number 1: Kids in high school are making thousands of dollars every month with Adsense.

Fact number 2: Housewives, retirees, mom and dads, who are just staying at home and have never made a dime on the internet have created full-time incomes by simply placing Adsense ads on their web site or blog.

These are just some of the “super Adsense earners”. You may have already heard about their story for they are among the few who are on their way to making millions worth of cash just by promoting Adsense sites.

Anyone, any age and gender can become money generating Adsense publishers as long as they what it takes. How does one go about this Internet advertising?

Writing articles for Adsense is the way to do it. Using the right keywords in your articles and having Google ads on a certain site has become the most profitable way of marketing that anybody can get into. No experience and level of education needed. If you are not using this strategy, or may not be aware of it in the first place, chances are you may be losing thousands of dollars worth of extra income and still do not know it yet.

This is one of the many reasons why writing original quality content articles is now the latest in marketing buzz. Content and links. When combined together becomes a really powerful tool to a successful web site and richer individuals. Many internet marketing professionals are already aware of the value of an original quality content and how using keywords can drive targeted traffic into their sites from the search engines.

So why don’t all these web site owners write and submit their own articles if that is what is important?

The simple and understandable answer is that it takes time to write articles, submit them and get targeted traffic to their websites. That is why they get the services of those who can spares sometime to write the articles that would cater to their site purpose but still turn out as a good quality and unique piece of work.

To get into the Adsense marketing business and start earning some good cash, ask yourself. Did you enjoy writing when you were in school? If you answer yes to this question, you already have an initial advantage over most internet marketing business owners that wants to make money online and doing it at home.

With the boom in the Adsense market comes the need for sites to want fresh, quality and original keyword rich content. This way, web site owners can have a steady supply of articles with the proper keywords that they relate to their site contents. The result of this is seen in the sites page rank when indexed by the search engines. Which, in turn, gets moreAdsense ads to show above, below or next to the article on their website with targeted traffic.

What do people have to do?

Write quality and original content, keyword or phrase rich articles with links to your website in the resource box. Then build a website or web page with targeted keyword or phrase rich original content for the targeted traffic that originates from the articles you wrote. Finally, you will have a Google Adsense ads that are targeted to your keyword or phrase rich original content site where visitors will get to visit when they come looking for information.

A win-win situation if you think more about it. A favor for persons looking for quality content and information. For the persons writing the original content articles. And the person with the quality original content rich website. Of course, the search engines and its advertisers are getting targeted traffic and sales but so what? As long as you are getting something in your favor, it does not really matter what the others are getting for themselves.

So who else wants to start earning money with Adsense. You. Everyone. Anybody. Internet marketing has many opportunities wide open for this people. Writing articles and using Adsense for your kind of internet marketing strategy is one sure way of getting a piece of that action and cash.

Better not be left behind the many making millions already.

Search Engine Friendly

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.