Search Engine Placement

Many SEO only companies tell their clients to stay away from pay per click campaigns because of “rampant click fraud”. (For you newbies out there; click fraud is when competitors keep clicking on your sponsored ads in hope of driving up your your costs).

While click fraud is real, Google, Yahoo, & MSN, have many precautions in place to protect their multi billion dollar pay per click revenues (If your not happy you won’t be using their services). In fact, most surveys have determined that only about about 5% of all Adwords advertisers have received fraudulent clicks.

For you to determine your plan of action you should first look at your pay per click budget. There are several ways to monitor click fraud on your own but the cost alone may offset the actual fraud.

1. Monitor your CTR (Click Through Rate). If you see a sudden, unexplainable increase in your CTR this may be possible click fraud.
2. Sudden drops in conversion rates (Not tracking conversions or sign ups? Shame on you!) Let us help you: Contact us
3. Suspicious IP addresses: Check your Google analytics reports for recurring clicks from an IP address

If you believe you have found possible click fraud keep detailed notes and contact the support staff for your search engine. They will review your reports and can credit your account for the fraudulent clicks.

Lastly, just remember that few companies suffer from click fraud. Don’t be afraid to test out a sponsored search engine placement services because some one knew someone that didn’t have success with PPC. Pay per click campaigns can be a great way to supplement your natural search engine optimization efforts and provide quicker results.

So it’s official…we’ve made the transition in to our new office in the Flat Iron Building of downtown Asheville. This comes just in time to enjoy our new space during Bele Chere, the annual street festival in Asheville. In just a few days, the streets of downtown Asheville will be packed with musicians, vendors, and tourists and we’ll be able to enjoy the activities from above.

At the end of this month we’ll be relocating to our new and bigger office in the Flat Iron Building in downtown Asheville! With a coffee shop downstairs from us and a sunset bar upstairs it won’t be difficult to entertain our clients that come to visit.

The Flat Iron building in downtown Asheville is host of several techical and IT related companies like Scullytown.com (web designers). Visit us our Asheville marketing firm today!

Is your Wordpress blog plagued with comment spam?! That’s okay…you’re not alone. Many websites use Wordpress blogs to quickly publish announcements and new content without having to open a text-editor or call their webmaster. Unfortunately, even more spammers try to plaster these blogs with spam comments containing links to pornography, gambling, and pharmacuetical websites.

One way to deal with the flood of comment spam is to simply ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Or “mark all as spam” and be done with it. But what about the actual people reading your blogposts and leaving legitimate comments? It’s not fair to them and you definitely don’t want to alienate your readers.

Fortunately, Wordpress blogs come with the comment spam blocker Akismet built in and ready to go. Most casual Wordpress bloggers aren’t even aware that this is available to them though. There are just a few simple steps to setting it up and being done with comment spam in minutes:

1. Sign up with Wordpress.com and receive your unique API key.
   
2. Go to the ‘Plugins’ tab in your Wordpress control panel.
3. Activate the Akismet plugin.
4. Paste your new Wordpress API key in the field provided.

That’s it! Welcome to spam free blogging!

With Google setting up a 600 million dollar datacenter in nearby Lenoir, Asheville is sure to see significant growth in its tech and internet marketing sectors. At just over an hour away, I’m willing to bet we’ll see a growing community of techies walking the streets of Asheville. What does this mean for search marketing in Asheville? Probably not much except that we may see a slight shuffle in Google’s search engine results once the datacenter is up and running.