Google

I’ve seen adverts around for iMode recently, with no idea what it was. Well I found out last night by coincidence after looking around Google Sitemaps. Well sort of. Although I didn’t look at the details it seems like some sort of alternative to WAP. What interested me more was cHTML, iMode’s equivalent of WML.

cHTML, or Compact HTML, is basically what WML should have been. Instead of completely new tags and new way of looking at things it’s just a subset of HTML that makes sense for mobile devices. There are a few extensions to normal HTML but these aren’t required and are very simple anyway (like using tel: in a link the same way you’d use mailto:).

Of course I don’t really have any sites that would make sense in a mobile world…

Just search for imode chtml for loads of bits of info.

Well it seems Google just updated it’s pagerank database. And to my eternal joy I’ve gained across the board. Every site/page is either higher than before or at least the same (in fact it’s only the few PR5 pages I have that haven’t gone up).

The most notable is Luliriisi’s (Julia’s site) increase from no PR to PR4. :)

Whether I’ll notice an increase in traffic is yet to be seen however. We can but hope :)

I’m experimenting with a CPM site-targetted campaign on Google Adwords and so far the results are promising. I have two campaigns advertising the same site one with a max CPC of 20¢ and the other with a max CPM of $2.00 targetted to a single site.

So far the CPC campaign is producing more traffic, but it’s costing me on average 18¢ per click whereas the CPM campaign is only costing me 4¢ per click.

I think because of my very selective targetting I’ve managed to find a site that has visitors looking for what I’m advertising, but not offering competition (hence a higher CTR and lower effective CPC).

An image ad for Adventure Quest (an RPG) keeps appearing at the top of my blog in the Google spot. But, it doesn’t show the “Ads by Google” link. It also has a little cross in the top right hand corner that makes the ad disappear…

If you didn’t know, Google can do clever unit conversions. Example conversions include:

1 mile in km 4 weeks in days 4.9 lightyears in au

You can even use compound units:

55 mph in m/s 20 N/(m^2) in Pascals

In fact you can use arbitrary compound units. The silliest I managed to find is:

2 great gross speed of light in bakers dozen furlongs per year

A great gross is 12 gross (a gross is 144). A bakers dozen is 13. A furlong is 220 yards.

I spend a couple of days away from the internet and things happen!

Google now allow you to split a page into sections with the idea that Adsense ads are only targetted to the text in that section. A couple of comments is all you need: <! -- google_ad_section_start --> <! -- google_ad_section_end -->

Apparently Google only take this as a suggestion but in some situations it could help. Of course sticking to one topic per page is better nearly all the time anyway.

Well I got the email last night announcing the anticipated change to Google Adwords inactive keyword policy (but couldn’t check my account since my computer was too slow). This morning when I logged in, half was good and half was bad. I only have two campaigns running. My important is using the budget advertiser and is unaffected. My not-so-important one had every single keyword (that had actually had a view) disabled. And as I said it’s not-so-important - I’m not preared to pay more than $0.05 per click (they wanted $1 for one keyword).

According to the Google Toolbar in FireFox www.oliverbrown.me.uk now has a PageRank of 5.

My conclusion is that tags are a good way to get links to your blog since a quick search on Google for oliverbrown.me.uk returns mainly sites indexing tags in some way.

So if you aren’t using them already (and apparently two thirds of blogs aren’t) then get using them!

A quick search on Technorati for “ppc” reveals lots of cool information I didn’t know about.

MSN, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! have all either recently released a competitor to Google Adsense or about to and Google are about to considerably change their keyword state algorithm. You will soon be able to keep badly performing keywords active by simply bidding higher (meaning if you “pay” $50.00 per click you can rank number one - even if you get no clicks).

The only thing left to wonder is if the competitors will offer a Google Adwords type program to web publishers too.

The Marketing Microscope Search engine optimization and Online marketing

Google have put a load of satellite images of the moon along with data of various moon landings to provide us with Google Moon.