New internally developed software allows Web-Op to promote site and brand recognition on Twitter and other social mediums. Fused with current online marketing strategies it provides the ultimate in online media presence. This new marketing strategy covers all online sectors including organic search, pay-per-click, social media, and bad press. Providing an optimum balance between automation and human involvement is our goal.

Social mediums such as Twitter are packed full of opportunity. The problem is it would cost far too much attention to hand manage a marketing campaign. The common solution is to say, “Follow us on Twitter!” and periodically post updates to a Twitter account. This isn’t effective. Our solution provides incentive for interested users to opt in though keyword targeting and friendly conversation. The video shows a more detailed view.

Another strategy is through improving organic search and indexing. Organic search rankings can be frustrating for all. The keys to improvement are having a steady and strategic linking campaign while carefully monitoring the changes over long and short periods. Our time proven solution for search provides sustainable long term growth. Malicious or slanderous online press can be buried with higher rankings and the promotion of positive press.

Our strategy also includes pay-per-click campaigns managed in detail with constant tracking and split testing to maximize gains and performance.

Through our re-tooled reporting system businesses can see growth as it happens in an online statistics monitor as well as detailed monthly reporting from the experts. Our engineers have worked hard on streamlining the process to allow for such transparency.

About Web-Optimize

Web-Optimize, LLC is a leader in internet marketing campaign management and software development for both new and established businesses. Our industry expertise and forward looking strategies help businesses grow and gain positive recognition. We deliver hand crafted solutions to businesses to maximise return on investment. Unlike traditional SEO’s, our services are well documented and transparent with solid results. Web-Optimize is based in Mesa, AZ. For additonal information, please visit web-optimize.com or call 1 (866) 937-7082.

A frequent theme for these titles was, about 80 percent of the way through the game, your character’s love interest ceases to be an adorable 20-pixel-high maiden, and turns into a screen-filling ball of evil spells and tumors which must be dispatched to move forward.

What does it have to do with the Internet?  A lot.

Often times, you’re the one responsible for your beloved website turning into a similar screen-filling ball of evil.

The tumors tend to come from poorly imagined scope.  What started as a dispatch system for employees grew a login for external contractors.  Then direct sales emerges.  Finance demands to be grafted in.  Within a few years, the original software is barely there beneath the addons.

Now, it’s normal for software to evolve and grow.  However, if allowed to grow randomly, you find yourself wrestling with limitations which made sense in one context, as they become unwieldly.  Perhaps, for example, your order system was product-based.  Each order has one item, one payment method, etc.  Works great until you realize people want to add a split payment.  Or two items on one order.  Soon, you’re making dozens of exceptions to keep the monster alive.

When do you draw the line?

Can you now succinctly define what you need– in terms of data storage or workflow — and does it differ largely from the decisions you made when the site began?

• Are you doing the same job multiple times to keep different parts of the site in synch?
• Have you passed on desirable enhancements to the site since they can’t fit the established layout and data structure?
• Are everyday operations done primarily as “special cases” bolted on later?
• Have you been forced to “hunt down” specialized hosting or developers to keep the site operational?  PHP 4 is dead, yet many people are tied to apps which bomb in 5 or 6.

Slaying the beast can be hard.  You have to fight your locked-in work processes.  But sometimes you can’t move on until you do.

You’ve picked an industry. You want a website. But you have no meaningful value to add.

Problem 1: The Same Old Concept.

The obvious signs of no-added-value sites appear when the site gets specced out:

Developer: “What should we do about X?”
Client: “Copy successful site Y.”

Repeat 40 times, and I wonder if he has any real plans. Copying a working model makes sense, especially when trying to make a site usable, or as a resolution for vague specs. Why invent the basic behavior of a shopping cart when Amazon and Newegg wrote the book on them already?

However, when the entire summary of your site is a competitor’s with a new header, did you give anyone– Google or a person– a reason to show up?

Problem 2: The Same Offers.

Even with no fresh thoughts on design, a good site can do good business. In such a world, you’re making the website’s mechanism a sideshow, not the main draw. For many areas– consumer commerce, for example, such a minor weight can be a fair goal. Nobody goes to a store for the unique way you shop, but a familiar process will help to keep focus on the special products and offers which make the page appealing.

However, when you’re drawing primarily on the site’s offers, you really need a big pull. A lot of “I’m in the X business” people run dry here. Many small sellers are enamored with drop shipped goods, for example. While it gets you moving in a hurry and cheaply, all your wares are sold by a hundred other firms. All you can do is under-sell everyone else.

Another weak offer: selling leads off to a third-party company. You lose control of prices and selections available, and your informational offers are usually narrow. It’s not possible to do instant quotes, for example, when the third-party may not honor your price. With such problems, there’s nothing about your offer more compelling than a direct visit to the third party.

Problem 3: No new information being packaged.

A big focus for many sites comes in selling corporate knowledge, not goods. Your value comes from combining and refining loose data. At first view, the site’s model is an easy sale: A single site replaces a hundred searches, or provides a wide presence for local brands in an industry lacking major ones.

However, the combiner site has a huge risk: selling. While the site looks good on paper, they collapse if a simple question cannot be answered: Why will people pay for a link on a major page instead of working for rankings on their own?

New combiners have the hardest time– as power varies with size. A listing showing 1 plumber in a town of 2,000,000? Nobody wants such a weak resource, either as a visitor or an advertiser.

Also hazardous is being second in the market. Now you have to answer “Why appear on your page, not the site who’s been online since 1997 and has PageRank 8?”

In sum, combiner-based models face a double version of “where’s added value?”– visitors and advertisers are both asking.

Web success goes beyond SEO and design and code. A billion-dollar SEO and design job will fail when your site’s plan includes no new value for Google or a user.

One of the worst examples of a confused, ineffective marketing message has been gracing our tv screens from the fine people at Kmart. I truly feel sorry for the poor shlubs trying to craft any marketing message for Kmart.

Kmart Christmas Commercial

There’s smart, and there’s Kmart smart

This tag line presents itself as a dichotomy between two states of being:

• smart
• not smart (Kmart smart)

I don’t generally like throwing other marketers under the bus, as many of my sites are guilty of similar sins, but this doesn’t seem to be a particularly effective marketing message. I can empathize with whatever agency is responsible however as Kmart gives them little to work with. Wal-Mart has the value proposition angle on lockdown. Target is the trendier, cooler cousin. Kmart is the last refuge of the blue haired stuck in a fleeting era when spinning blue lights had the same effect as Pavlov’s bell. That being said there are a couple of fundamental flaws in their approach.

1. K-Slogan doesn’t speak directly to the consumer – Kmart has opted to emote a vague feeling that kmart shoppers might be something other than smart (hopefully smart-er but we’re hazy on that).
2. K-Slogan doesn’t evoke an emotional response. What is marketing other than encouraging consumers that they NEED your product, that they NEED to get off their asses and pick up the phone or rush out to the store? It may qualify as advertising, but it certainly isn’t marketing. No one is jumping off their sofas running to their local Kmart thinking, “I will not be one of those merely smart people goddammit! I will be one of those other than smart people or die trying!!!”
3. K-Slogan falls in the “differentiation” bin without clarifying how it is better – clearly differentiating your brand from others is useful, but it does so in a non specific way. As a result it fails to elicit a positive response.

Best Buy Christmas Commercial

Best Buy on the other hand does nearly everything well. The most recent slogan I’ve heard is Buyer Be Happy. This slogan implies that shopping at best buy will make me happy – as opposed to something other than “merely smart”. Best Buy’s slogan is a play on the latin caveat emptor – buyer beware and has one other significant factor in its favor – an excellent name. In combination, the name and slogan elicit the feeling that Best Buy shoppers will get a great deal and end up happy – effectively mitigating the empty feeling many of us experience upon leaving a big box: Cognitive Dissonance (buyer’s remorse).

SEO

Obviously, at Web-Op, we tend to think of search as fairly important. However, even sites which have been well designed often fall apart when you arrive at the shopping cart. While much of this can be explained because carts are often taken as “packaged” system, too complex to re-tool, it’s just as often policy decisions or the refusal to add easily-obtainable addons.

• Pretty URLs. Nobody likes standard shopping cart URLs. They generally mirror the internal structure of the cart’s programming.

  http://yourstore.com/cart/product.php?product=2005 is ugly, and ignores keyword-ranking opportunities.

  However, most carts now include powerful extensions, either in the box or as a 10-minute install, to convert that URL into the cleaner, keyword-rich, http://yourstore.com/cart/new-shiny-widget-2005.html. The fact you can still find many shops– even new ones– with the standard URL just suggests laziness or fear the pretty-URL system may have unexpected problems.

• Distinct Product Content. It seems so easy to have a cart with 100,000 products. You can often siphon the product data directly from a vendor catalog or data feed, and why wouldn’t you want to stock everything, especially if it’s items which can be drop-shipped? If it sells once, it’s profitable. The problem is content. If your product listings have the same information as everyone else, hot off that easy-to-access feed, there’s no reason for you to rank over anyone else’s page. Such problems even appear at the inside-the-site level, as your text for the 3, 6, and 24-pack versions of a product read nearly identically to Google. With primarily duplicate content, why even bother deeply spidering?

  If you can’t provide something distinct to say about each product, chances are it doesn’t belong in your catalog, or can be presented in a different way. Don’t do 100 pages for “Cardinals uniform: #00″ to “Cardinals uniform: #99″. Do one page and make the number selectable, and you’ll enjoy superior rankings.

• Sensible Heirarchy Depth. Once your product range hits a certain size, you have to start thinking about how to organize it into a heirarchy. However, one thing often ignored is the further the products are, in clicks, from the well-promoted pages of the sites, the less they’ll be spidered and the worse they’re likely to rank. It’s a balancing act– are you going to need too many clicks to find any product, or are you going to end up with pages stuffed with 500 products per category, and overwhelming visitors?

Usability

Once the customer arrives on site, you have to provide a compelling experience if he is expected to buy. I don’t here mean an all-singing, all-dancing, 3D Flash shopping experience, but rather a shopping experience which leaves them with no questions unanswered.

• Good photos. Often, selling is a matter of providing the right photos. Some of the most common problems with photos are:
  • Too small photo. If you can’t see critical measurements and proportions, the picture is too small. A common related problem is the picture which shows a huge item, but isn’t large or clear enough to display minor but key details: connectors, model numbers, or serial numbers when relevant. Best practices include several photos, or photos with a zoom and pan facillity. A standout here is Newegg.com, whose photo viewer allows you to inspect individual components on circuit boards.
  • Stock Photo. I’ve seen photos where the model number says you’re getting A, and the photo says you’re getting B. If you don’t have the vendor’s catalog memorized, who knows what to expect? In addition, the stock photo can often be mediocre or uninformative– a customer who is visiting you looking for more information may keep shopping til they reach the seller whose photos finally answer their question.
• Sensible Option Grids. Often, stores provide the wrong choices– or the wrong type of choices– for their products. Checkboxes (seperate optional choices) are often mistaken for radio buttons (mandatory choice of one from several options), and needless options are added but must be acknowledged. It’s worth the effort to regularly review product lines and make sure you’re not retaining options which are no longer relevant or merely add confusion. In extreme cases, it may be simpler to break products down into common models, purchased with one click, and custom orders, with more choices or even directions to call in to order.
• Browse by meaningful categories. It’s a fundamental question: where is the product I want? While many users will simply resort to search, it’s a fairly hostile option for customers who want to compare several products, or check for an alternative in the field. Grouping by newest arrival or some other internal construct is guaranteed failure– who will know what to expect? Only your employees. Shop by brand only works if the product lines are already narrow. You really need to have enough categories, in a meaningful structure. Think about how your products work together, or how they’re organized by customers.

Trust

Lastly, your cart needs to build trust. In most cases, it’s not so much generating anything new, as much as avoiding the temptation to do things which will undermine trust.

• No gimmick pricing. Nobody likes it when you play games with them. The most common game is the shipping price one. You can either take a $5 item and slap $15 of shipping charges on it, or you can make promises of free shipping knowing that they don’t apply to most orders, or worse yet, are basically a teaser– free shipping if you’re willing to wait three months.

  Other pricing gimmicks include “$10 off if you’ll sign up for a $200-per-year, difficult-to-cancel savings club”, and “Free add-on, if you’re willing to spend as much as the addon costs in postage.” They do worse than simply looking suspicious. You have to add extra checkout steps to support them, basically forcing the customer to pass through a gauntlet of distrust in order to buy anything. Who’s going to follow through?

• Accurate Inventory. If you lie to me, even a lie of ommission, then call me back and say “it’s back-ordered three months”, do you really believe I’ll wait it out? No, I’m going to find another vendor. All you’ve earned by not giving me correct inventory data is a credit card processing fee. Full-featured carts generally have inventory built-in, so you can easily give yourself a buffer by setting the product to sell out when there’s like 5 left on the shelf for call-in orders. However, the practice I generally see is “put 10,000 of everything in stock, we’ll handle sellouts when they happen”. Real professional.
• Accept payments the way customers want to make them. While many small shops like PayPal for its simple qualifications and easy integration into the site, it can often be a liability. Many customers feel they may need a PayPal account to buy something, and having to find the secret route to make a payment without is more effort than they want to take. Supporting normal payment methods first– with PayPal, Google Checkout, and mailing banknotes in an unmarked envelope as backups– gives you the look of a full-sized company, not someone selling from your garage.
• Fair Return Policies. Most ecommerce is by mail, so customers tend to be especially wary about how they can get out of a purchase which goes bad. Your return policy should be based on a fair understanding of the product being sold, and how it’s likely to be tested and used. If you’re going to have to wait 21 days for the manufacturer to get back with “It’s clearly defective, send it back”, that 7-day return policy is not generous. Moreover, it should be prominent– link it on every page of the site if you want. You can never be too up-front with your policies, and a decent cart will make it easy to put in the template.

In most cases, it doesn’t take huge technical skills to get the most out of shopping carts. A few new features and strong, sensible policies are really the key to shopping cart success.

]]> http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/making-carts-work/feed/ 0 http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/premium-domains-potential-waste-of-money/ http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/premium-domains-potential-waste-of-money/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:55:40 +0000 jack http://web-optimize.com/blog/?p=100 If you’re starting a web presence from scratch, there’s a significant chance you’re about to waste $5,000.

Many businesses are keen on the concept of the “premium” domain name– in particular, short, generic names. Why not be “loan.com” instead of “SmithMortgageCompany.com”, or “roses.com” for your nursery? Even long after the domain market peaked with the multi-million dollar sales of names like business.com, people are still paying four, five, and six figure prices for attractive sounding names.

The problem is, like many Internet-based profit plans, it’s based on dated logic.


The keyword-domain business model seems to be designed around the old layout of browsers. On Internet Explorer 6 and below, there is no “search” box by default, so there was hope someone would type “Used Toyota” in the address box instead, and arrive at usedtoyota.com.

However, newer browsers not only provide a prominent search box, but in some cases, it’s the dominant navigation system. Consider Google Chrome’s “unified” box which offers search as a prominent option for any text enterred, or almost any modern browser redirecting a faulty URL to your preferred search engine.

In either case, odds are, users are going to end up at a search engine, not at your very expensive keyword.com name, so you end up no further ahead than if you had a low-value name.

Okay, still not convinced? Fair enough. I know a lot of people find a strong marketing appeal in being able to say “we’re keyword.com”. However, in most cases, that won’t work with your branding. If you’ve built any sort of off-line presence, people are likely going to search for the brand they know offline, not some cute name you’ve chosen online. An interesting example: the computer-parts manufacturer Unicomp put their online presence behind pckeyboard.com, instead of unicomp.com; with just a parking page at the latter domain, it’s actually damaging their brand. Customers may give up and assume they’re out of business if their own brand name doesn’t resolve.

The other huge risk of a domain-centric web presence is the lack of retargetability. Look ahead a few years. You built a famous brand at companya.com. Then you merge and have to re-brand as companyb.com. While it may be trivial to redirect the traffic, it’s now a problematic business aspect– you’re forever having to service the old name, or forced to make comical and expensive “We’ve changed our name” marketing messages instead of “Buy our products” ones.

If you had built around search business, instead of a branded name, traffic will follow the redirect naturally. Your customers, may, in the end, never really think of your domain name- or possibly even your brand itself. In general, they’re more looking for the site they remember, or the offer they remember, from searches.

It may sound a bit fragile. After all, a domain is a “bought” thing– generally difficult to dislodge– so it’s a more “solid base” for a company’s presence. However, an impressive presence doesn’t correlate to impressive sales. Just consider where you shop: Amazon did fairly well selling books considering its biggest competitor owns books.com (which they don’t even use in any significant marketing). Newegg.com does very well considering they don’t have computers.com. Travel.com draws less than 10% of the volume of Expedia or Orbitz.

Don’t eschew the keyword-domain concept as a whole, however. Having the extra keywords can help your pages rank. However, widgets.com at $200,000 isn’t necessary for it. “AcmeWidgetFirm.com” will do pretty well too, for $10. It’s all only a small piece of a bigger task– one of SEO and overall selling, not merely hoping to be the first place clumsy typists land.

]]> http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/premium-domains-potential-waste-of-money/feed/ 0 http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/sensible-cms-decisions/ http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/sensible-cms-decisions/#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:51:24 +0000 jack http://web-optimize.com/blog/?p=94 Whether you have a canned blog install or you’re developing a completely custom content management system, many website owners don’t really consider the consequences of their policy decisions. By making smart choices, both users and search engines can do better.

Limit Control
The “ultimate” in features for content management systems are packages like DotNetNuke or Joomla which allow a free-form editing of almost any content unit on any page.

However, it’s a “power tool” situation– the tool which makes it easy to do complex tasks, can be a tool which makes it easy to shoot your foot off. Full what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors are particularly notorious for it– by allowing users to manually style parts of the site, they often generate bulky code, with needless styling options, and encourage abusing HTML elements which are key for structure for styling. Ever seen an entire page as a header? I have.

Why does it matter if you misuse HTML? Search and performance. A poor page structure appears spammy, or alternatively just hard for search engines to identify key content. Moreover, a page heavy with mountains of extra tags will load slowly for both real visitors and search engine spiders.

What’s the alternative? Instead of an overarching CMS package, you may want to consider a “silo” package– a mini-blog which can only generate news entries in a controlled, consistent, and attractive formatting, as an example.

Pick Standard Conventions
People expect certain conventions. For example, news sites generally put the the freshest stories at the top. Some people think “I’ve got this one world-beater story, and it belongs on the top all the time.” Big risk. You’re wasting the most valuable space on the page. If you aren’t making it clear in seconds that new content exists- many visitors will leave. In the worst case, your freshest news will be on page 2, where few visitors will find it. You’ll look out-of-date.

Similarly, don’t play games with layout. Some people think that disguising the ads near content helps click-through rates. Yeah, except the people who click through don’t come back.

Finally, even though most CMS systems make it easy to go for a sprawling site, think heirarchy. Are you dividing everything so fine that you have only two sentences per topic? Rein in the divisions then. If you’ve got 85 different main topics, add some greater groupings to keep things tidy. Even inherently complicated sites (i. e. Amazon, WebMD) tend to offer some sort of teired navigation, instead of 75,000 option menus.

Don’t Get Too Dependent on Extensions
If you have 160 extensions for your CMS in play, you are probably trying to shoehorn the system into tasks it wasn’t meant to perform. You may be better served by a custom, or simply different, CMS, which meets the exact needs.

The risk of extensions is in the external developers. Some will change their product, or abandon it entirely. Do you want to have to choose between “fix critical security bug in new version” or “keep my extensions?” Or worse, if you get caught between two mutually incompatible extensions.

Keep Some Static Content
Half the time, doing everything in the CMS is actually harder. Some “moving parts” may not be ideal for a CMS based around fixed page content, for example. If you want a fancy contact menu, or forum, it ends up adding dozens of modules and coping with their limits, not just taking the right tool from outside the CMS.

However, the other argument is safety. If your entire site is on the CMS, if it breaks or is compromised, everything’s going to get ruined. A hybrid approach– keeping a CMS for news, and a static site for fixed content– is more robust.

Don’t Get Paranoid
A content-management system can be a wonderful boon both for ease of maintenance, and for producing quality pages which rank and navigate well. You just have to think as you use it.

]]> http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/sensible-cms-decisions/feed/ 0 http://web-optimize.com/blog/google/google-chrome-no-need-for-open-search/ http://web-optimize.com/blog/google/google-chrome-no-need-for-open-search/#comments Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:52:09 +0000 Ryan Underdown http://web-optimize.com/blog/?p=70 I’m a big fan of Google Chrome. While working on one of our travel websites located at Hawaii Tours I stumbled onto this gem. Not only does Chrome automatically suggest using a site’s Open Search engine when typing in the same domain you are on in the search bar – now apparently Google can identify standard search features such as search.php and serve them up in the same way. The site in question has no open search xml file and chrome still gives the option to use search.php. Check out the screenshot below:



You can verify for yourself that I never got around to making an open search xml file by trying the following link: http://hawaiitours.com/opensearch_desc.xml – which of course doesn’t exist and never has. If you want to check if Google has found your site’s search feature and included it just visit your domain and start typing the domain name sans www.

I’m personally not sure whether or not I think this is a good idea. I could see several potential problems where a site had several search features and it could be a bug as opposed to a feature. I suspect that simply adding an open search meta tag would resolve it.

]]> http://web-optimize.com/blog/google/google-chrome-no-need-for-open-search/feed/ 0 http://web-optimize.com/blog/adwords/does-pay-per-click-help-organic-rankings/ http://web-optimize.com/blog/adwords/does-pay-per-click-help-organic-rankings/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:57:20 +0000 Ryan Underdown http://web-optimize.com/blog/?p=20 For a while now webmasters have wondered why PPC spending generally mirrored a slight bump in rankings. Mounting evidence suggests Google is following closely the visitors to your site (think google toolbar, google analytics, doubleclick etc). As a result, buying traffic via pay per click can have an impact on organic rankings albeit indirectly.

PPC spending generally mirrors a slight bump in rankings

Over the years I’ve read countless webmasterworld/digital point threads questioning whether buying adwords contributed to organic search engine ranking success. I was skeptical that Google would so blatantly provide a pay for play way for website owners to buy their way to the top. Indeed it would be a disservice to their clients if their was a direct correlation between the two as smaller, interesting competitors in the search space would be crowded out by multinational corporations. An indirect, traffic-related metric however makes sense to this SEO as organic traffic is at least as good an indicator of noteworthiness as an editorially given third-party link. So is Google juicing adwords advertisers?

In November of 2008, QuadsZilla of SeoBlackHat stumbled onto an interesting correlation between bounce rate and Google traffic.  In January of this year Rae Hoffman (aka sugarrae) wrote an interesting case study that confirms something most of us in the search game have believed for a while: Google is paying attention to traffic as a trust factor. This should come as no surprise to search engine marketers. Google rose to prominence by incorporating third party links into its algorithm. With the recent threat posed by sites like twitter and friendfeed – and their ability to shake up the interwebs with the stream of real time data provided by their userbase – it has become necessary for Google to augment their algorithm.

Relying solely on links is what causes Google to be monolithic and slow in noticing new trends. Indexing the web every second isn’t feasible – despite Larry Page’s recent musings. Traffic on the other hand is extremely easy for Google to gauge. Google can track visitors from a variety of platforms: Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, DoubleClick, Adwords and more. While Google doesn’t have much in terms of real time offerings at the moment – it does have the tools in place to utilize traffic volume as a component of their search engine algorithm. Don’t believe me? Try buying keywords to pages that have a decent bounce rate, time on site etc. Follow your keyword rankings and find out for your self.

(PS After reading this think how using a 3rd party hosted ppc management company like Reach Local becomes less and less attractive as Google pays more and more attention to traffic)

]]> http://web-optimize.com/blog/adwords/does-pay-per-click-help-organic-rankings/feed/ 0 http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/quality-of-traffic-matters/ http://web-optimize.com/blog/seo/quality-of-traffic-matters/#comments Fri, 14 Sep 2007 18:39:15 +0000 admin http://web-optimize.com/blog/?p=16 If you’re looking at the website of a SEO company, it’s probably not the only way you’ve considered building traffic. No doubt, you’ve been bombarded with spam from people eager to show you how to get “50,000 hits on your site every month for $100″ or similar promotions.

While it might, at first, sound appealing to be able to say, “I’m getting 50,000 visitors per month to my site”, it’s the quality of visitors that matter far more than the number.

When people are willing to promise you specific quantities of traffic, your first question should be “how can they do that?” Although we may know, for example, that 500,000 searches per month are made for a given keyword, real customers do not come in neat boxes of 1,000 users that can be blindly pointed to your site. When you see guaranteed traffic packages, it usually comes from one of a few sources:

• Malware. A classic symptom of undesirable software installed on your PC is when the browser starts popping up windows you didn’t ask for. Those windows don’t choose their destinations for fun. If you have an army of compromised computers opening whatever pages you order them to, it’s easy to ensure that your site gets 50,000 hits this month.
• Automaton Users. A similar story to malware, but with user cooperation. I’ve seen programs where they’ll basically pay users to leave their PCs on a special homepage, which uses browser-scripting to shuffle from one paying customer’s site to another. No matter how compelling your content is, it’s unlikely a user will be willing to turn off the automatic cycling”and his 10 cents per hour credit”to read it, assuming the sponsored browser window doesn’t turn into background noise altogether.
• Sham sites. It looks like a search engine, or legitimate directory, but the results have been partially, or completely stacked, to ensure that users end up at the sites that paid for their position. There’s nothing wrong with paid directories in and of themselves”Yahoo! is a shining example of how one can be a legitimate and trustworthy resource, and many of them represent strong B2B presences”but there’s a thin line which seperates “legitimate resource” from hall-of-mirrors scam. And “Hall of Mirrors” here is more than a cute metaphor: I’ve seen sites where “Page 2″ of the results are almost complete duplicates of “Page 1″! They’re serious about moving people to those links.
• Domain parking and forwarding. This is, in a sense, a cut over the sham site, in that it doesn’t promise to be anything but a dead site. There’s a little more integrity there. However, the user who typed in the dead site’s address probably wasn’t looking for you.

What do all these traffic sources have in common? Two things:

First, they’re going to be fountains of poor-quality traffic. If the user didn’t even want to go to your page, the odds are extremely high he’ll bounce. Meanwhile, “sham” search engines and directories have a motivation to ensure every user clicks something, even if it’s not a really useful site for his needs. The sham-search may consider your site relevant enough to promote, but the customer probably won’t.

Second, they have terrible reputations. Nobody wants to be associated with spyware or attempts to decieve users. Users may do more than bounce- they’ll remember who was associated with their frustration.

Still, many people will respond to the siren-song of guaranteed traffic, believing “even if a handful of those 50,000 visitors explore my site, I’ve gotten business I didn’t have.” Wrong. You’d be astonished how low click-through rates can be with low-quality traffic. I can quote statistics from a site using one of these programmes: over 80,000 visits to their front page in one month, and less than 50 visits to all the other public pages combined. The click-through rate, overall, was approximately one-twentieth of a percent. Notice I’m not saying “conversion rate”, or “sales rate”, just “rate of visiting a page other than the site’s front page!”

Basically, it’s a rehash of the old “pay-per-impression” advertising model, except instead of paying for uninterested customers to ignore your banner, you’re paying for uninterested customers to ignore your entire home page, plus the additional hosting expenses associated with the extra “junk” traffic.

Moreover, it diverts your web budget from places it will do good. $100 might buy you 50,000 low-quality clicks from a guaranteed-traffic service, or 1,000 hits on a smartly-targeted pay-per-click advertisement campaign which lets you choose, to a much greater extent, who you’re paying to bring to the site. Once you consider the conversion rate of advertising clients, versus the guaranteed-traffic client, the advertisements become an undeniable bargain.

You might be tempted to say “Isn’t SEO very much the same as a sham site or parked domain” fooling customers into clicking on your site?”. The answer is a resounding no. Ethical” and productive” search optimization is about attracting customers for the services you’re actually offering. The visitors SEO produces are customers who already were interested in what you’re selling. Optimization ensures that they know you’re offering it. That’s a far cry from the world of bought traffic, which would merrily hand out the same site to viewers actually seeking information about European vacations, reptile care, and new video cards.

After all this invective, I must admit that there is a potential narrow niche for bought traffic: if your site actually benefits from impressions above all else- such as a site swimming in pay-per-impression advertising- then, by all means, shovel those low-quality clicks on. Just don’t be unsurprised as advertisers grow increasingly sophisticated and wonder why 500,000 views of their banner produce zero clicks.

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