Myspace & Facebook aren’t cutting it….but Email is???

November 28th, 2008

Ok, so you have all been on Facebook and have been asked to be a ninja, a zombie, have had a mojito passed to you, have been stalked and have gawked at many of your ‘”friends” status updates.  Those same people have also been on Myspace and have been asked “Why am I not in your Top 8?”

Buying ads on these two social sites seemed to be the end all in reaching coveted demographics, (see 18-30) but, advertisers are realizing that the ROI is just not worth the investment.  To put it more bluntly, “Marketers don’t care about teenagers sharing photographs with one another,” Cone tells Marketing Daily. And while companies can post their own products or marketing-oriented profiles on these sites, site users “are likely to turn off” if they see too much marketing on these kinds of channels, which they consider vehicles for personal communications, he adds.

“The same applies to text messaging,” Cone notes. “The channel can be used for marketing, but it’s not advisable.”

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Google’s SEO Starter Guide

November 13th, 2008

Here is a quick heads-up for anyone looking to refresh their SEO skills.  Point your browser to Google’s Webmaster Central blog and download their SEO starter guide.  In traditional Google style, the guide is writen in a very straight forward and easy to read way.  There are a few great tips in there so it’s worth devoting a few minutes to.

Spam Drops by 75 Percent

November 13th, 2008

You may not have noticed it but your spam filter has had a lot less work to do in the last couple days.  McColo Corp, an internet service provider located in northern California, has been identified as one of the largest senders of spam worldwide.  Starting last Tuesday many internet providers have started unplugging McColo, resulting in an overall drop in spam by roughly 75%!  Spamcop.net reports they are seeing a drop in spam from 40 emails per second to 10.

Spam recorded by SpamCop

Media and Beyond: Week of 11/10/08

November 12th, 2008

Every month this column will be dedicated to Media.  Essentially we will cover interesting banners, websites, new media and generally all things SITELAB media related.

So with out further ado here is the SITELAB banner of the month (BOM) created here at the ‘LAB, for our wonderful clients over at Hot Spring Spas.  This banner totally outperformed expectations and really opened up a a whole new demographic for Hot Spring.  Very exciting stuff indeed!

You’re probably wondering what is Dia de los Muertos, well if you really want to know more click here, I am not a history teacher.  We have got too stay on track here people!  Overall it’s been a good week for media for all of our clients.  If you have any questions media related then leave a reply below and I’ll get back to you.

Thanks for stopping by, till next time I’ll leave you with this, enjoy.

How Long is the Long Tail?

November 11th, 2008

Answer: If the most popular search terms where measured in one inch, the tail would be 221 miles!

SEO is one of our strong points here at SiteLab and we love reading about search data. Hitwise posted a great blog article which really helps put the amount of search data into perspective.

Here are some of the key takeaway metrics from the article:

  • The top 18 searches make up 3.25% of all searches
  • The top 100 make up 8.9%
  • The top 1,000 make up 10.6%
  • The top 10,000 make up ONLY 18.5%

To really help put things in perspective, this is a chart of the top 10,000 search terms.

The top 10,000 searches out of 14 million

And this chart zooms in on the top 100 terms.

Top 100 search terms out of 14 million

As you can see, it appears that the “head” ends around the 18th term, Bank of America, giving way for the very long tail.  In fact, calling it the tail is somewhat missleading considering the vast majority of searches make up the tail.

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