I noticed an email today that Yahoo Product Search, the online comparison shopping site for Yahoo!, is now going to offer its merchants the capability to bid on their CPC rates.

Many of the other shopping engines like NexTag, Become, Smarter, Shopzilla, etc. have started offering this service already. It seems a no brainer to me that allowing merchants to pay more money for clicks will be a huge winner for the shopping engine. But hey, that's just me!

Personally, I use the shopping engines to turn an excellent profit for all of my e-commerce client and I love the ability to bid higher in order to get better placement in the shopping engine's rankings. Yahoo was a bit behind on this and I was frankly quite surprised to hear them announce this yesterday. Of course we will all have to wait a little while longer for the full launch of it.

Yes, you can optimize your press releases. The primary goal of any press release is to increase publicity and awareness for you or your business. But you can get a dual benefit when submitting your press releases. If you optimize them for the search engines, and include targeted keyword backlinks that will give you a nice boost to your SEO. Make sure that whatever press release distribution channel you are using allows keyword links. I prefer to use PR Web.

Building links through press releases is a great way to gain authoritative inbound links. The search engines really like them and will usually rank them pretty high too. But I have noticed that there is a sort of time factor involved. What I mean by that is the press release will rank right away but will fade away after a month or so typically. So I am also assuming that the link authority is higher initially and then lessens with time. This makes sense because press releases are supposed to be a timely thing. And the freshness factor should be a factor. Therefore, one needs to submit press releases on a more consistent basis.

There are a couple of other great benefits to submitting optimized press releases. You can actually get direct traffic from a release, especially with those targeted anchor text links. I knew of a client that actually landed a six figure deal from a client who found them through a press release we optimize and submitted for them. The other benefit is that if you continue to do them consistently you can flood the SERPS with positive press! This makes for excellent proactive reputation management. That way if negative press creeps up on you at some point it will be easy to push it down by pointing a few links to your press releases because press releases tend to be trusted and fairly authoritative.

So make sure that you create enough "news worthy" content to submit press releases on a consistent basis.

A US court ruled yesterday that Viacom can get access to data about EVERYONE who has used YouTube including what they watched! Viacom has decent concerns over copyright infringement but for the courts to have made such a blanket judgment on access to so much personal user data is irresponsible!

Plaintiffs seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website. They need the data to compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos. A markedly higher proportion of infringing-video watching may bear on plaintiffs’ vicarious liability claim, and defendants’ substantial non-infringing use defense.

The courts ruling means that Viacom will have access to the users login ID, time the video was watched, the user's IP address, and the unique identifier for the video. The court grants all of this access because it said that is the only way that Viacom can determine how many times their copyrighted material has been used. I say that individual viewing data is not necessary! Viacom should only be granted access to how many times a copyrighted piece of content was viewed, and absolutely no information on the viewer themselves. Unfortunately the courts do not define things as accurately as they should alot of the time.

Fortunately Viacom has put out the following statement:

In a statement, the entertainment giant said it did not ask for nor would it obtain "any personally identifiable information of any user."

And News.com has noted that,

The court's protective order stipulates that data turned over to Viacom by Google must be used for the sole purpose of proving Viacom's claim against Google that YouTube is a hotbed of pirated video content, the sources said. Viacom will not have direct access to the YouTube user data, the source said. Access is restricted to outside counsel and experts.

Whew, glad that is settled. Or is it? It appears as though Viacom will not be able to use personal identifiable data. But won't they still have it? And can't they still use it without telling anyone? I guess its useless unless they would have been able to target individuals like the RIAA lawsuits against illegal downloads of music.

Working at an agency I come across this scenario day in and day out. There is nothing that irritates me more than to see someone put thousands into marketing and then want a website on the cheap! I am not sure how this whole, "I can get a website for less than a $1000" thing all started but it is ridiculous. Having worked with various developers and designers before I know for a fact that maintaining a profitable web development company is VERY difficult to do. In part because of all these cheap, template, web design companies out there.

The Reality

Well I have news for everyone, you get what you pay for. And if you are serious about your online business then you will be wise to invest in a great website. Most "good" design/development firms will start at about $10k and go up into the hundreds of thousands depending on what you want. You especially need to have a great site design if you intend on doing search engine optimization. Having clean code, good CSS, an organized file structure, and the proper hosting among other things, will really help the search engine spiders index your site well.

Now if you are not too concerned with having your site rank and are simply looking for an online business card then going with a nice, simple, templated website or CMS is probably a good idea. But if you are going to start an e-commerce store or represent your company and gather leads then you will want to make sure that you set aside a good sized budget to get that done. Trust me, do it right the first time.

So many times each day, I peruse a client's website and think to myself, "why is this person paying me to drive traffic to their site when no one will buy from it anyways?" People! Please listen here, you need to have an effective design BEFORE you spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to it!!! Think of the opportunity costs lost by spending money to get a new visitor to your site only to have them bail because they find your navigation hard to follow or they feel that you asked too many personal questions in your lead generation form or the checkout process was too long. That visitor could now be possibly so turned off that they may elect to never come back to your site!

And most people are just missing the basics, like using colors that are not conducive to promoting purchases or having bad content with no calls to action. You need to make the process of signing up or making a purchase as easy as possible. This is Internet marketing and Web development 101 here folks! Take some time and money and invest it in a good design and some good content. And that will pay you dividends for years to come. Just because your current design is leaving you profitable does not mean that it is good. You could be missing out on so much more business that you have no idea about. One thing that everyone should have is an easy to find and use feedback section. You will learn more from your visitors by doing this than ANY analytics program could ever provide! I guarantee that you will be surprised from some of the comments that you get.