This Christmas is going to be a very predictable one in terms of search keywords for one simple reason - it’s the first time we have been able to look back at last years keywords using Google Trends.

Imagine if you knew what was about to become a Google Hot Trend 365 days in advance and could prepare accordingly. How many of you have spent all year preparing for this years keywords? I bet the answer is zero.

Below are the terms that could hit Googles Hot Trends list in 2008. Some of them are UK only terms so probably won’t make the list because it’s US biased, they will still send lots of traffic though.

Christmas Eve:
santa tracker, santa radar, norad.com, norad santa tracker, santa norad
walmart holiday hours
santatracker.com
stores open on christmas
where is santa claus, santa locator

Christmas Day:
Restaurants open on Christmas
itunes.com (for people who got an iPod as a present)
www.zune.net/setup (for people who got a Zune as a present)
cooking prime rib
how to cook a turkey
how to carve a turkey

Boxing day:
turkey soup recipe
leftover turkey recipe
turkey curry recipe

Lycos, the search engine once worth $5.4 billion, has resorted to finding advertisers by searching Google for related keywords.

The email below was sent after somebody searched for “buy a iphone” on Google and found a site of mine on page 5 of the results.

Lycos.co.uk are offering 1 company the chance to appear in the Number 1 Sponsored Link on the right handside of every page on a 12 month tenancy, with unlimited clicks. The keyword IPHONES costs £475. All keywords work on a broad match unless the additional keywords are sold separately. (broad match - every keyword that contains your choosen keyword)

* You can choose any keywords of your choice, if available.

If any keywords are of interest, you can contact me on 0845 020 4337 or via
email.

Kind Regards
Linsay Weller
Adrac Ltd

IP: 82.71.96.158
Referer 1: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=buy+a+iphone&start=40&sa=N

Would Google ever do this?

For those of you still to buy your Christmas gifts then we have a great offer for you. Until Midnight tomorrow Empire Direct has 10% off all products.

Until midnight on Friday 19th December we are offering 10% off all In Stock products. There are no product category exclusions and no minimum order value. The only stipulation is that the item be in stock.

This is a big opportunity for anybody with an affiliate site, voucher code site or popular blog. Write about the sale, add your affiliate link and profit.

Feelunique.com has come up with a fantastic offline campaign to promote their website - advertising it on peoples eyelids.

We’ve covered offline marketing before but this is a first and has potential to get a lot of coverage at very little cost.

With the credit crunch continuing to bite why not try an alternative way of making money by renting out your eyelids as advertising space.

feelunique.com is offering people the chance to earn 10 pence per wink in return for displaying the company’s logo on their eyelid space.

People who sign up to star in the campaign will have the feelunique.com logo temporarily transferred onto their eyelid and will be paid on a Pay Per Wink (PPW) basis - up to a total of £100 per model.

Amy Rebours of feelunique.com says:”We all take notice when we’re being winked at so what better way to advertise feelunique.com than on people’s eyelids. It’s a genuine marketing first, which encourages people to spread a feel-good winking moment and earn some much-needed extra income in the process.”

Blogstorm is around 18 months old and I wanted to post some details on how 2008 has been.

We started in June 2007 and now have just over 4000 RSS readers. In terms of traffic 2008 has seen the blog get over 1.1 million page views from 776,887 unique visitors.

The traffic this year isn’t actually very high when you consider in just 6 months of 2007 we got 823,000 page views and 569,000 unique visitors. The difference is easy to explain - in 2007 it was possible to get a blog onto the front page of Digg whenever you wanted. In 2008 it isn’t.

The most popular post was this one with 106,000 page views, even without a Digg front page.

Have a good Christmas & thanks for reading!

Via Mel & The Guardian comes news that the British public (or at least the 1,636 people with enough spare time to fill in the online survey) isn’t aware of search engine optimisation as a marketing tactic.

Nearly 1 in 4 Britons (24%) believe that the order of the search listings they use cannot be influenced by the publishers of websites listed, whilst a similar proportion (22%) suspect that results are ordered entirely according to how much has been paid by the websites listed. 1 in 5 consumers (19%) have no idea at all how results are compiled, and 5% believe that search listings are arranged completely at random like a lottery.

Now I don’t want to be controversial here but let’s examine the facts.

22% of people think results are ordered according to how much the sites have paid to be listed. I can see how when you search for “car insurance” that could reasonably be the case - lots of sites would happily pay to be featured in those results.

But what about when you search for “green widgets with blue add ons” do these people seriously think the resulting websites have paid to be listed for this query?

Jack Schofield comments:

Of course, if you started compiling a list of things that lots of Brits don’t understand, you’d be busy for some time. It’s also not clear that understanding how search engines work has much practical value if you just want to find sites, rather than promote them. However, if I ran a search engine, I’d be looking for ways to make it clearer that organic results, unlike sponsored links, are not paid for.

I’m not quite sure how search engines can make it any clearer. One set of results is labelled “Sponsored Links” and the other set isn’t.

There are lot’s of different ways to spell Neilson and every time I seem to get it wrong, probably like most of the UK population. Take a look at the results below when I was trying to find Neilson Holidays website.

Notice how Google takes me (incorrectly) to the web statistics company.

The frustrating thing about my searches was that Neilson didn’t have one PPC ad showing for these misspellings to direct me to their website. The funny thing is they are bidding on the correct spelling despite ranking number one in the natural search results.

Lesson: Always bid on misspellings of your brand name.

A survey from Forrester shows that search results are the 3rd most trusted online information source, behind only email from friends and consumer reviews.

The findings are significant because they show that although people might not trust a corporate blog or news article in the mainstream media, they trust it a lot more if they found it at the top of Googles search results.

So if you are looking to gain trust in your brand the best way to do it is to start an SEO campaign and add consumer reviews to your product pages.

Wikipedia does give a bit of a paradox to the results. Only 33% of people trust the site and yet it’s at the top of probably 90% of search results. Do people trust Wikipedia articles more if they find them via Google?

This post was written by Quova, they sent it as a press release but I thought it was interesting enough to publish on the blog.

The 2008 Edition of the CyberSource Online Fraud Report highlights that out of 318 online sellers surveyed an average 1.4 % of their orders are lost to online fraud, often resulting from buyers who used credit card numbers later identified as stolen. The report estimates that in 2007 $3.6 billion in online revenues were lost in this way.

Though geolocation is just one of the risk monitoring tools used (the average e-merchant online uses at least four tools), it provides an important line of defense. The foundation for geolocation is the Internet protocol (IP) address - a numeric string assigned to every device attached to the Internet. When individual surfs the Web, their computer sends out this IP address to every Web site visited. Geolocation can provide much more than a geographic location. Many providers supply up to 30 data fields including country, region, state, city, ZIP code and Time zone for each IP address that can help to further determine if users really are where they say they are.

Equipped with this information, e-merchants can use geolocation to flag suspect transactions and address them individually.

Five key Ways to Detect Fraud using Geolocation include

Check for anonymous proxy servers and other location-masking systems

• While not all proxy servers are bad, the use of an anonymous proxy that hides or masks a unique IP address can be a fraud indicator. Lists of anonymous proxies that are abusing the system are provided by a select few geolocation vendors (including Quova) that notify the e-merchant when an order comes from one of the proxy servers

Check the distance between actual and expected user locations

• It’s a general rule of thumb that shoppers will be logging on the Internet within close proximity to their billing or shipping addresses. Many Quova customers report that orders coming from 500 miles or more away from the expected location have a higher probability of being fraudulent. With geolocation, e-merchants can elect to decline, or flag for review, orders falling X miles or more away from the shipping or billing address

Use domain information to assess risk

• With access to domain information gathered from the shopper’s ISP, it can be easier to determine whether an order should be declined, accepted or flagged. An e-merchant can track user sessions and know that the customer frequently connects from work and from home.

Build user profiles

• Once a profile is built, e-merchants can look for changes & differences between the observed behaviors they see online and what they have on file. Geolocation provides a simple way for merchants to expand their user profiles behind the scenes by assuming that most valid orders will follow the same pattern. If several different domain extensions or ISPs are used in one day, chance are those orders may be fraudulent.

Use time-zone information to track the transaction velocity

• If a user is connecting to a Web site in relatively short periods of time and the log-ins are more then 1,000 miles away from each other, this is a major red flag for an online merchant. For each shopper, e-merchants can use geolocation data to enable business rules that
  1) request the current local time at the shopper’s location;
  2) alert them to potential “time-zone hopping” within a short period of time, where the same account is accessed from multiple geographic locations; and
  3) alert them to orders placed at times of the day that aren’t consistent with previous orders stored in the user’s profile.

It’s not unusual for a Web site to keep track of user behavior, such as pages they have clicked on and the products they purchase. This is called behavioral targeting and due to the customer’s computer never being accessed, geolocation does not infringe on personal privacy. In a nutshell, geolocation is just one of many things you can check in the fraud cycle and protects both the consumer and the merchant from criminal activity.