Getting people to click on paid advertisements is crucial for Internet search companies and in that department Google just jumped further ahead of its main competitor, Yahoo.

The number of clicks on Mountain View-based Google’s Web site increased nearly 20 percent in April compared with a year ago, according to several analysts who Thursday cited data from the research firm comScore.

That was Google’s biggest such increase since November, when comScore said its ad-click count rose 27 percent, according to a report by UBS Investment Research.

Clicks on Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, which already is far behind Google in ad clicks, fell 4 percent in April.

Google shares rose $14.76, or 2.6 percent, to $583 at the close of trading. Yahoo’s stock price fell 9 cents, or 0.3 percent, to close at $27.07.

A Google spokesman said the company doesn’t comment on comScore figures, and Yahoo executives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Analysts tend to be cautious about comScore data, which they say doesn’t track all Internet searches and sometimes can be misleading. Last month, for example, Google reported ad revenue to the federal government that turned out to be much higher than what analysts relying on comScore data had predicted.

Still, comScore generally remains highly regarded. Just two weeks ago, it drew great attention when it found Google had become the nation’s most popular Web site by surpassing Yahoo

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By: Mandeep

“Robots.txt” is a regular text file. By defining a few rules in this text file, you can instruct robots to not crawl and index certain files, directories within your site, or at all.It resides in the root directory of a website. This file stands alone and you cannot know its contents by looking at a standard webpage on that site. Using a robots.txt file gives you a search engine robots point of view.

Creating your “robots.txt” file:

Make sure it’s name i.e “robots.txt” & must be uploaded to the root accessible directory of your site.

1) Here’s a basic “robots.txt”:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

A USERAGENT line to identify the crawler in question followed by one or more
DISALLOW: lines to disallow it from crawling certain parts of your site.

2)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/
Disallow: /tutorials/blank.htm

It disallows all search engines and robots from crawling select directories and pages.

3)
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

If you do not want Google’s Image bot to crawl your site’s images and making them searchable online,to save bandwidth the above declaration will do the same.

4)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /privatedir/

This is interesting- here we declare that crawlers in general should not crawl any parts of our site, EXCEPT for Google, which is allowed to crawl the entire site apart from /cgi-bin/ and /privatedir/. So the rules of specificity apply, not inheritance.

5)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

This is the preferred way to disallow all crawlers from your site EXCEPT Google.

An alternative to “robots.txt” is to use the robots meta tag when your web host prohibits you from uploading “robots.txt” to the root directory, or you simply wish to restrict crawlers from a few select pages on your site.

The “robots” meta tag should be added between the HEAD section of your page in question as:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

Some Of Examples are as:

1) <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

This disallows both indexing and following of links by a crawler on that specific page.

2)
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

Stop all robots from indexing a page on your site, but still follow the links on the page.

3)
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

This allows indexing of the page, but instructs the crawler not to follow outgoing links.

4)
<meta name="robots" content="none">

This is a shorthand way of declaring don’t index nor follow links on page.

5)
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,follow" />

Allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Googles bots from indexing the page

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By: Mandeep

There are two main forms of SEM that can be used, they are Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). People are often unsure as to which type of SEM to choose when promoting their business.

When you purchase visitors or “clicks” from a search engine, this is called “pay-per-click” (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising allows you to quickly get top search engine placement by “bidding” (paying) for keywords related to your product or service.

“Organic” or “Natural” search engine optimization (SEO) is accomplished by optimizing your web pages and by increasing your “link popularity” by acquiring or paying for links that point to your web site. This gives you high rankings at the Search Engines for your chosen search terms.

Pay-Per-Click Advantages:

• Fast to implement & in most cases the web site does not need to be changed at all.
• Highly targeted traffic on your search terms on the major search engines.
• You can often start seeing results within hours of activating a campaign.
• You only pay for users that click through your listing and arrive at your site.
• You can pick which keywords to bid on and no limit to the number of keywords.
• Complete control of budget – decide how much you want to bid for a keyword. You can rank highly for any keyword if your budget is large enough.
• The results can be tracked allowing continual improvements.
• Complete control of what text the listing shows – as long as it meets the engines copy and relevancy specifications.
• It is possible to target specific countries and regions.
• This is an immediate start and stoppage activity.
• Easy to implement and measure.

Disadvantages:

• PPC costs ongoing and increase over time – once you stop spending, your adverts stop showing.
• Quality score rules for landing pages are making it more difficult or expensive to gain a good position on PPC.
• Visitors may perceive less credibility than organic listings.
• Click fraud, while the PPC search engines constantly battle against this it does happen.
• An expertise is required to efficiently run a cost effective campaign.
• Only certain engines accept PPC advertising.

Search Engine Optimisation Advantages:

• Changes in search engine algorithms can wipe out good SEO position.
• SEO costs decrease over time.Visitors from search engine results do not cost you a penny.
• Usually users prefer to click on organic search results than “Sponsored Results”.
• Improvements to your website made from a search engine perspective usually result in a more user-friendly website.
• The rankings a web site achieves through SEO can continue for a long time after the work has been done.
• A well optimised website can appear across multiple search engines and search markets, at no extra cost.
• Over the long term SEO can be more cost effective than PPC.
• Visitors are more likely to trust a site they find in the rankings.

Disadvantages:

• Website need changes according to requirements.
• Will take time to see results. It can take months for your listings to move up the rankings.
• An ongoing process rather than ‘quick fix’.
• Search engines do not index forms or content inside forms.
• Limitation on number of keywords to optimise for.
• Can be difficult to implement for dynamic web sites.

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