Google Sandbox Explained and Solutions

The ’sandbox’ phenomenon is a mirage to a large number of web users. Does it really exist or not? Some webmasters are of the opinion that the page ranking of a website is decided by a set of mathematical algorithm and that it cannot be altered by an individual policy such as sandbox.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox refers to a temporary cache in the search engine where the domains of the recently registered websites are saved. These domains do not show up in the search engine page result until a time is deemed when the search engines think that they can commence the ranking. It is the time when the websites picks up their ranking by using other methods such as external linking or any advertisement methods. This process of restricting the new websites from search engine pages is accepted in order to avoid the sudden ‘jump’ of the newer websites in the SERP. Usually the websites are kept within the sandbox for two to three months. However there are instances of not showing the websites for more than eight months.

The sandbox feature now explains the reason for your 0 page rank in the initial days of your website irrespective of its procurement of many reciprocal links. It is commonly noticed by the website owners that the page ranking starts from the lowest, almost nil, to a sudden 7 or 8 within a period of three months.

The ’sandbox’ concept has been the most debated by the search engine experts. Some of them accepts the existence of sandbox in search engine and attribute it as the reason for the low page ranking of the newer websites whereas the others are of the opinion that the low page rank is caused because of the natural delay caused by the Google search engines to interpret the credibility of the website before assigning it a page rank.

Another shocking information is that a well-established link may also be put in the custody of sand box if it is identified as a link farm. Many websites that have collected hundreds of links in a brief period of time have realized that their page rank dropped to the lowest all of a sudden and remained there for almost a year or so.

Now comes the most important question. Is there any solution to come out of this choking sand box? In reality, nothing. The only thing you can do is to wait. The hope that your website will show up in one fine morning with flying colors makes your waiting more meaningful. Meanwhile you can concentrate on other popular strategies such as Adwords for popularizing your website. Adwords help your website procure quality links from other sites. It will also find a proper place in the search engine pages of AOL, AskJeeves, Netscape, etc. As it earns more visibility, Google will release the website from the sandbox.

Do not get discouraged by the ’sandbox effect’. Apart from Google, there are Yahoo! and MSN as popular search engines where you can get a decent page ranking from the beginning itself. Keep working on your website. Improve its quality and update the contents focusing on the user side. Do not waste your time worrying about the ‘non-existing’ (?) sandbox.

Article Marketing to Search Engine Marketing

Article marketing is a relatively new means of achieving smooth traffic to a website in an indirect way. On the other hand, search engine marketing follows the straightforward approach of allowing the search engines to trap the websites based on certain criteria. Both search engine marketing and article marketing are found to be good practices for creating effective website traffic. However, there are a few shortcomings in each one.

Article Marketing - Pros

· You can build prospective one-way links to your website. Articles serve as a cause to direct potential visitors to a website. Anyone who is interested to read an article about a particular topic will find the links mentioned in it the most useful. Thus the articles help the website to invite more traffic towards it.

· The quality links contained in an article are search-engine friendly. They attract the search engine spiders mainly because of their attachment to the relevant content. Thus the page rank of your website increases with the help of these articles. There are article directories which host a collection of articles. Search engines easily catch the articles from these directories. It is, therefore, better to supply your articles to many article directories.

· Keyword-rich articles invite search engines towards them. However, the articles that contain excess keywords will be assumed as spam and will be ignored by them.

· Finally, articles help you to improve the reputation of your brand. Most of the users will find the articles useful to them before selecting a product. Therefore, by giving the relevant information to the customers through your articles, you gain more credibility from the customers.

Article submission has been found very effective because of their cost-effective nature. If you are able to identify the right content that describes your product or service and prepare the contents with the correct use of keywords, half of the job is done. As a next step, you will approach the article directories where you can post your articles free of cost, and they can be circulated to hundreds of other article directories after making necessary changes in the content in order to avoid duplication. In this way, articles help you to make your website content-rich in an indirect manner. Thus article marketing is cheaper than search engine marketing.

In order to achieve a proper SEO from the popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for your website, you have to invest a large amount of money for making your website SEO-friendly. If you wish to get better results from Search engine marketing, you have to accept many paid services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

There are no many shortcomings for using article submission strategies for effective web marketing. However, we can say that article submission process is quite slow. It consumes a considerable amount of the author’s time. If they outsource the work, it would become quite expensive.

To conclude, we can say that article marketing is cheaper and effective if used wisely, but it gives slow results. Same is the case with organic search engine marketing. However, if you want immediate results, go for the paid search engine marketing services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

Article Marketing to Search Engine Marketing

Article marketing is a relatively new means of achieving smooth traffic to a website in an indirect way. On the other hand, search engine marketing follows the straightforward approach of allowing the search engines to trap the websites based on certain criteria. Both search engine marketing and article marketing are found to be good practices for creating effective website traffic. However, there are a few shortcomings in each one.

Article Marketing - Pros

· You can build prospective one-way links to your website. Articles serve as a cause to direct potential visitors to a website. Anyone who is interested to read an article about a particular topic will find the links mentioned in it the most useful. Thus the articles help the website to invite more traffic towards it.

· The quality links contained in an article are search-engine friendly. They attract the search engine spiders mainly because of their attachment to the relevant content. Thus the page rank of your website increases with the help of these articles. There are article directories which host a collection of articles. Search engines easily catch the articles from these directories. It is, therefore, better to supply your articles to many article directories.

· Keyword-rich articles invite search engines towards them. However, the articles that contain excess keywords will be assumed as spam and will be ignored by them.

· Finally, articles help you to improve the reputation of your brand. Most of the users will find the articles useful to them before selecting a product. Therefore, by giving the relevant information to the customers through your articles, you gain more credibility from the customers.

Article submission has been found very effective because of their cost-effective nature. If you are able to identify the right content that describes your product or service and prepare the contents with the correct use of keywords, half of the job is done. As a next step, you will approach the article directories where you can post your articles free of cost, and they can be circulated to hundreds of other article directories after making necessary changes in the content in order to avoid duplication. In this way, articles help you to make your website content-rich in an indirect manner. Thus article marketing is cheaper than search engine marketing.

In order to achieve a proper SEO from the popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo! for your website, you have to invest a large amount of money for making your website SEO-friendly. If you wish to get better results from Search engine marketing, you have to accept many paid services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

There are no many shortcomings for using article submission strategies for effective web marketing. However, we can say that article submission process is quite slow. It consumes a considerable amount of the author’s time. If they outsource the work, it would become quite expensive.

To conclude, we can say that article marketing is cheaper and effective if used wisely, but it gives slow results. Same is the case with organic search engine marketing. However, if you want immediate results, go for the paid search engine marketing services such as the pay-per-click advertisements.

Google Sandbox Explained and Solutions

The ’sandbox’ phenomenon is a mirage to a large number of web users. Does it really exist or not? Some webmasters are of the opinion that the page ranking of a website is decided by a set of mathematical algorithm and that it cannot be altered by an individual policy such as sandbox.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox refers to a temporary cache in the search engine where the domains of the recently registered websites are saved. These domains do not show up in the search engine page result until a time is deemed when the search engines think that they can commence the ranking. It is the time when the websites picks up their ranking by using other methods such as external linking or any advertisement methods. This process of restricting the new websites from search engine pages is accepted in order to avoid the sudden ‘jump’ of the newer websites in the SERP. Usually the websites are kept within the sandbox for two to three months. However there are instances of not showing the websites for more than eight months.

The sandbox feature now explains the reason for your 0 page rank in the initial days of your website irrespective of its procurement of many reciprocal links. It is commonly noticed by the website owners that the page ranking starts from the lowest, almost nil, to a sudden 7 or 8 within a period of three months.

The ’sandbox’ concept has been the most debated by the search engine experts. Some of them accepts the existence of sandbox in search engine and attribute it as the reason for the low page ranking of the newer websites whereas the others are of the opinion that the low page rank is caused because of the natural delay caused by the Google search engines to interpret the credibility of the website before assigning it a page rank.

Another shocking information is that a well-established link may also be put in the custody of sand box if it is identified as a link farm. Many websites that have collected hundreds of links in a brief period of time have realized that their page rank dropped to the lowest all of a sudden and remained there for almost a year or so.

Now comes the most important question. Is there any solution to come out of this choking sand box? In reality, nothing. The only thing you can do is to wait. The hope that your website will show up in one fine morning with flying colors makes your waiting more meaningful. Meanwhile you can concentrate on other popular strategies such as Adwords for popularizing your website. Adwords help your website procure quality links from other sites. It will also find a proper place in the search engine pages of AOL, AskJeeves, Netscape, etc. As it earns more visibility, Google will release the website from the sandbox.

Do not get discouraged by the ’sandbox effect’. Apart from Google, there are Yahoo! and MSN as popular search engines where you can get a decent page ranking from the beginning itself. Keep working on your website. Improve its quality and update the contents focusing on the user side. Do not waste your time worrying about the ‘non-existing’ (?) sandbox.

Track Online Phone Sales to your PPC Keyword Bid

E-commerce sites now can use an efficient way to track their online phone orders right back to the original keyword query posted by the visitor into a search engine. It proves to be highly supportive in their PPC management.

A good example is KeywordRadar.com whose exclusive domain is to help small business owners ascertain from where their most profitable traffic comes from on the Internet - is it from a keyword or from a banner ad? So when website visitors purchase products via any website’s displayed toll free number or local number an exclusive tracking code is attached to the buy order. It is mechanized by Keyword Radar’s unique code that is placed at the bottom of tracked order page.

This is an innovation unavailable till now. Online marketers, till now, relied on their call center executives to interview customers on how did they locate the company. It will also prove beneficial to website owners who also run associate programs to push sales of their products. Tracking technology will make the associate program more conducive to associate promoters who now need not be apprehensive on losing commission for a visitor referred by them.

The tracking technology can ensure associate codes to confirm that traffic and sales begot by associates is comprehensively credited back to the associate. Thereby, E-commerce site owners now have a competent way to track how their most profitable phone order customers logged at their website.

Such data can be highly beneficial in their pay per click management as in one flash of a tracking summary sales report, one can decipher which keyword or traffic source resulted in most sales.

Prudent site owners can use the data to generate more traffic from profitable sources and relegate to corner those campaigns, which resulted in losses from non-profitable traffic sources.

Online videos – a new tool to raise online shoppers satisfaction

Customer satisfaction levels for Internet sites have stayed at lower levels despite colossal amounts invested in devising customer friendly technologies. ForeSee Results, a consulting and research firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich, surveyed 20,000 online shoppers to come up with the conclusion that customers expectations are higher and keep on increasing than the promises made and delivered by Internet shopping.

According to the ForeSee survey only five sites received scores higher than 80 out of 100, with no site scoring more than 85. In descending order they were Netflix, QVC .com, Amazon, Barnes &Noble and Drs. Foster & Smith. Similar scores were scored last year when only five sites exceeded 80 and no site scored higher than 85. According to Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee, though individual sites have improved on their scores but the overall numbers have remained stagnant. He further added that the E-commerce companies, which did not made continuous efforts to shore up things saw gradual drop in their scores.

A decade ago online merchants and investors anticipated Internet stores to be inexpensive and hence far more profitable than offline stores and this new dimension has given a new life to them.

Future belongs to companies that can innovate like QVC whose sales staff thrusts the site’s merchandise with hi-tech and smart video presentations. QVC.com, with merchandise sales of over $1 billion in 2006, has from last five years has let visitors watch live feed of its network’s broadcast. As a new innovation QVC.com has made archives of all shows available online and soon it will make online videos from recent shows constituting individual products from its stock. In opinion of Bob Myers, senior vice president of QVC.com websites, video salesmanship is highly persuasive to the customer when integrated with detailed product information, customer review and multiple photographs. He cites an example where a customer had problems determining the size of the handbag from the height of model holding it. To make amends, with in two weeks, QVC introduced a new system that showed the bags with women of there different heights resulting in 10% increase in response from women who saw the photographs as against women who did not see them. Yet Myers consider video a particularly decisive element to garnering sales as e-commerce began with television commerce. Therefore, the site that can hold and entertain customer will lead in future. Similarly Drs. Foster and Smith, anticipating videos as a big move, in commerce, has also considered putting some of its product on video to offer 360 degree and hassle free view to its customers. Mr. Gordon Magee, head of Internet marketing at Drs. Foster and Smith says that company will rely on its vendors to make the video who will then send it as a code to put it on the site. According to Mr. Magee, company should maintain its customers satisfaction levels till it fulfills basic needs like pricing on website to be reflective of catalogue prices.

Despite passive customer satisfaction levels, customer service spending among websites has increased many folds. The survey by Forrester Research reflects that online retailers will spend 32% more on customer service than last year, which is double the expected increase.

Some like Lala.com, the online barter service for CDs and DVDs, have designed comprehensive customer service system on low budgets improving their overall customer satisfaction levels. Mired with shortage of service staff Lala.com started online discussion boards to garner sense of community among its customers. Soon customers were helping each other with problems and a veritable customer service team took shape. In view of Mr. Anselm Baird-Smith, cofounder Lala.com, the company has designated some volunteers as guides who help customers with their problems and feel loyalty to the community. Lala.com experiment has been a huge success.