I was reading through the terms and conditions of some affiliate programs the other night. During this I noticed that if you’re an affiliate on the H Samuel or Ernest Jones programs you’re not supposed to be targeting misspellings of the brands . Why strong highstreet brands such as H Samuel and Ernest Jones should really have to worry about aspect of their brand online is beyond me. If you’re an affiliate you shouldn’t be attempting to rank for phrases such as:

• H Smauel
• H Samuels
• H Samul
• H Samel
• Ernst Jones
• Ernet Jonew
• Enrest Jonew

Over the last couple of years I’ve noticed a wee trend emerging at Google. In the run up to christmas they seem to mess about with their algorithm. This could be completely normal and just the way that the dice fall on the Search Engine craps table or these dice could be loaded in favour of the house.

But god I wish I could

Over the last couple of months a couple of clients, or their internal representatives known as account managers, have been saying things that get on my nerves. Some of these have kinda got to me. Its got the stage where I’ve been wishing I could just say this or just say that to them. In an attempt to awaken them from inaction, torpor of just crass stupidity

I love doing real conversion focussed copywriting. Its one of my small pleasures. Was one of the biggest eye openers when I moved away from writing copy to drive traffic through natural search to writing copy to drive traffic that also converts. The first day that someone started talking about financial targets for a website just about had me running a mile – they wanted to make money not positions! One of the biggest choices you have to make is for the psychological make up of the product/service you are to rank/sell online.

Web traffic analysis is a good place to start understanding how your website is being discovered and used. It will tell you where your website traffic is coming from and what it does when it reaches your website. Getting the correct analytics package, the software that gives you the statistics which you analyse, for your web site is the first step on the path to understanding your web site traffic.

OK the first stage on any Internet Marketing strategy – and don’t leave this up to your agency – is to know what you want to achieve. Before you know what you want you need to know what you have – you need to know where you are before you can plan how to get to somewhere. And in Internet Marketing knowing how to guage the performance of your campaign(s) is centrally important.