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Google Advertising Tools

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

e-commerce strategies and web site optimisation

If you want to make money out of your web site, Google Advertising Tools is the best guidance manual I have come across for a long time. Ignore the title: it’s not just about Google. Harold Davis deals with all the routes you can go down to generate income from pages you put on line. The advice is clearly coming from someone who knows all the systems as a practitioner. He covers good web design principles, how to understand search engines, website optimisation, and e-Commerce in general, as well as the detail of hitching your web wagon to Google’s star via its AdSense and AdWords programs.

Google Advertising I’ve no way of knowing what income he generates from his own sites, but everything he says in this book rings true to me, and I have been working at e-Commerce reasonably well for the last ten years or so. I liked the fact that he lists both the positives and negatives of the strategies he describes. For instance, after telling you how to get recognised by search engines, he provides a long list of tricks and sharp practices which you should avoid, because they are likely to get you black listed.

It should be said that there’s very little HTML coding and no graphic design strategy on offer here. This is to do with e-Commerce policy and good web design practices.

But of course because Google’s AdSense program is the biggest and most successful of the advertising programs, he does go through this extensively. He shows you how to sign up, how to choose the options that will work best for your site, and how to tweak everything to get the best results. He even goes into the fine details of such things as customising the colour of the ads which will appear on your pages, and filtering out competitive ads.

I was glad he explained how to interpret all the report data which Google provides every day, because I’ve never got round to working out what it all means. [I have usually been too busy checking the daily earnings.]

Next comes Google advertising viewed the other way round – in what’s called the AdWords program. This is a scheme of paying small amounts for adverts which are served up to people who search on certain key words. You choose the words, and the ads are therefore highly targeted at the people you wish to reach.

Google plays quite fairly with both its AdSense and AdWords customers in these matters. For instance, you can filter out any unwanted ads from your own pages, or indicate any sites on which you don’t want your adverts to appear.

The AdWords process can become quite complex, particularly for people running several advertising campaigns simultaneously. At this point Davis brings in the advantages of the Google application program interface (API). This is a set of tools which allows those with the programming skills to develop software which interacts directly with the AdWords server – thus allowing them to more easily manage their multiple accounts.

So – he takes the e-commerce possibilities in advertising from a fairly simple (but profitable) start, through to a quite sophisticated level. In fact he doesn’t even shy away from devoting a whole chapter to making money from ‘adult’ material en route.

I liked his explanations because they were clear and easy to understand. Everything is spelled out in simple steps, and there’s a screenshot illustrate almost every stage of the processes he describes. All this, and there are lots of web resources and services listed as well, just waiting to be followed up. In fact I have started doing exactly that today.

© Roy Johnson 2006

Google Advertising Tools   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Google Advertising Tools   Buy the book at Amazon US


Harold Davis, Google Advertising Tools, Sebastopol: CA, 2006, pp.353, ISBN: 0596101082


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Filed Under: e-Commerce Tagged With: Business, e-Commerce, Google, Google Advertising Tools, Publishing, Technology

Google Hacks

June 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

one hundred industrial-strength tips and tools

This has got nothing to do with hacking in the normal sense. It’s a book about improving your Web search skills using the world’s best search engine. Google is the ultimate research tool – a formidable search engine that now indexes more than eight billion web pages, in more than 30 languages, conducting more than 150 million searches a day. The more you know about Google, the better you are at pulling data off the Web. This book is a collection of real-world, tested solutions to practical problems. It offers a variety of interesting ways to mine the information at Google, and helps you have fun while doing it.

Google HacksTara Calishan shows you how to make the most of Google’s basic services; how to access image collections and newsgroups; looking for phone numbers and news stories; multi-language searches; and maximising the rankings of your own web pages. Google is not case sensitive; there’s a limit of ten words; you can’t use the asterisk for wildcards on letters, but you can use it for complete words.

There’s advice on how to improve your search results using slang terms. You can search by page title, URL, link, filetype, date, language, and even pages which are stored in cache. Even more miraculously, you can enter details of a page at Google and have them translated into any number of foreign languages.

Google also now includes its own special services – images, news, groups, and catalogues. Just type one of these words instead of www in the address.

The second part of the book offers a detailed technical account of how to merge Google into your own site. This will appeal to programmers. Once you’ve got this set up you can then indulge a whole variety of customisations, games, personalised searches, and even pranks.

I found all the scripting quite a struggle, but then suddenly the last part of the book is a wonderfully clear and persuasive section about raising the rankings of your own pages. How to choose meta tag terms; where to position your best material; and if you want to get really complicated, how the page rank algorithm works.

There is then a really good checklist of advice about making your site more efficient by simplifying and shrinking pages. For any serious web masters, the book is worth it for this part alone.

All these advanced search strategies make this an invaluable resource for librarians, information engineers, and any serious researchers. No wonder the first printing sold out immediately.

The new third edition has been completely reorganized and offers many new searches, along with coverage of Gmail, Google Desktop, Google Site Search, and tips on using Google AdWords.

© Roy Johnson 2005

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


Tara Calishan and Rael Dornfest, Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools, 3rd edn, Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly, 2003, pp.576, ISBN 0596527063


Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: Data retrieval, Google, Information design, Research, Technology

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