Wow, I was stunned when I received this email yesterday….

Comparison Shopping Engines, like Yahoo and Shopping.com among others, are all starting to adopt a bidding option. They are all finally starting to realize that they can make more money this way because people are willing to pay more for clicks that they know will convert at a certain rate. So although Yahoo will not be offering product level bidding just yet, I would imagine that once they iron out all the kinks with the category level bidding that they will open the bidding to the product level.

Initially I was completely against this, probably because I was so good at optimizing my feeds for natural placement. But after playing around with the bidding functions at all the major shopping engines I am a big fan. The shopping engines are so closed with their ranking algos and no one can really understand them, the same goes with their combination of bidding and ranking algo. So because of the closed and unknown ranking factors with the shopping engines, having a known (bidding) strategy as an option is really nice. For instance I can see, through Google analytics ecommerce tracking, that each visit from say NexTag is worth $12.71. And if my overhead is 70%, this means that I can bid pretty high for clicks and still maintain a profit.

I was really surprised to see Yahoo! showing improvements to their Product Search. Rumor on the street has had it that they have all but completely abandoned investing in improving this segment of their business. And I was JUST thinking to myself the other day, as I noticed a transaction that came from Yahoo Product Search, that I wished they offered product level bidding! Now I just have to wait for them to make it fully available. If you are listening Yahoo!, hurry up!

You have heard me talk about not diluting your keywords previously. The idea being that if you target too many keywords in a given page then you will dilute the strength of any one of those keywords. And the same thing goes with keywords in the title tag, you should only use two keywords and minimize the other characters. Just look at my homepage title tag:

<title>Organic SEO Consultant | Professional SEO Consultant</title>

As of today I am ranking #1 & 2 for Organic SEO Consultant and #1 for Professional SEO Consultant if that tells you anything!

Well the same holds true for your URLs, you should not have too many words in them. In fact Matt Cutts has noted that any more than 5 words in a URL starts to dilute the weight.

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

So I would advise against using more than 3-5 words in your URLs. It all really boils down to not being greedy. If you try to keyword stuff Google will not like it and they have added measures over the years to combat keyword stuffing. And to boot, there has been recent study that shows short URLs get clicked on twice as much as long URLs! And there you have it, a double whammy, Google does not like long URLs and neither do users.

I read, over at the Red Fly Marketing Blog, that you can get a $100 advertising credit on Facebook courtesy of Visa. As part of a Visa promotion, they are offering Facebook users a $100 credit to try out the Facebook advertising platform. All you need to do is to add the Visa Business Network App and you get a coupon code and instruction on how to add the credit to your account.

Now I have never advertised on Facebook or MySpace before, but I would imagine that the conversions are pretty bad. I don’t think that many people would be looking at or clicking on any banner ads. People are just too engaged in their social networks. I know that I completely tune out all ads when I am on MySpace. But, anyways, this is a good chance to test the waters!

I sphunn across a wonderful new site, well new to me, called SEOname. The site seems to have a blackhat vibe to it but claims that it does not promote blackhat techniques but that it provides awareness in hopes that the exploits will someday be patched. But back to the tools! My favorite is the “Rank” tab which contains a bucket of tools that include a Fake PageRank Checker, Alexa Rank Checker, Google PageRank Checker, Ranking Checker, Multi-Site Google PR/Alexa Rank Checker, and more. Wow, and that is only from one of the tabs on their site. They also have a slew of tools under Header/Tag Tools, Keyword Tools, Link Tools, and Source Code tools.

I want to also give SEOname some props on their development skills. I like their text resizing and fluid width buttons, along with their RSS button, at the top right of the site. It shows some great functionality.

And you gotta love their statement on CSS and 2.0 design at the bottom of their site!