It's Hump Day
Posted On: 2008-02-21
Well at least it is where you guys are as I write this so the first thing I want to talk about is kind of appropriate. If you can remember as far back as the day before yesterday let me remind you that my column that day dealt with finding hooks to hang your marketing message on and in one of today's online newspapers here in Australia there's the perfect hook for anyone who can do a little creative marketing.
Under a headline of ‘Row Over G Spot Nears Climax' is a report on some research that has just been published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. It seems that for years there has been some controversy over whether or not the G spot actually exists and now there is some definitive research that shows that maybe it does and maybe it doesn't.
How's that for making an unequivocal statement? To be fair to the researchers things are a little inconclusive because it seems that some women have a G spot and some women don't. Women who may have a G spot are those who experience vaginal orgasms and those women who don't experience a vaginal orgasm are those who don't have a G spot.
Now think about the interest you can arouse in your surfers with a story like that and then think about where you can take those surfers with a headline like that.
Windows Vista
If you're one of those who have upgraded to Windows Vista then you will be interested in this story. Microsoft has recently released Service Pack 1 for automatic download but unfortunately they didn't get it right. There have been quite a few reports of problems with the download and some people have even lost all the files on their hard drive so Microsoft have turned the automatic download off till they have found the source of the problem.
Automatic downloads have always made me feel uneasy; you just never know what you're actually getting and this isn't the first time that Microsoft have totally screwed up peoples' computers by releasing an update that hadn't been thoroughly tested first.
At this stage in the life of a new operating system I would usually beginning to think about upgrading but that's not even on the radar for us. In fact our computer shop is still selling new machines with Windows XP and there are few people who want a new computer with Vista installed on it.
Things still take time
Sometimes it's hard to believe that some things still take time to appear in the search engines. We can usually get a new mainstream site indexed for the first time within a week to 10 days and that's a vast improvement on what it was like even just a year or two ago but for some people even that is too long and they seem to expect things to appear instantly.
Last week Google came in for some serious accusations of censorship when people weren't able to find a fairly controversial photo of an Egyptian soccer player on Google Images a day after the photo appeared in several newspapers. The story hit a number of blogs and finally got to the point where Matt Cutts had to respond on behalf of Google and the explanation was simple. Google wasn't censoring the image at all; they just hadn't indexed it yet because nothing happens instantly even though some people might wish that it would.
So if you're new to search engine optimisation and search engine marketing don't fall into the trap of thinking that you're site has been penalized simply because it's not showing up in Google the day after it went live on the Net. Just remember, even in today's world of instant communications there is nothing instant about getting listed in Google.
Video ads
While we're talking about Google I should also mention that last week Google began testing video ads on some search results pages. I haven't seen any when I've been doing searches but others have spotted them.
It's going to be interesting to see how users interact with those search engine results pages where the video ads are appearing. There's no doubt that the impact of the old type of Adwords ads was losing it's attraction for surfers and that was really apparent where Google's new Universal Search was returning videos in the organic search. So only time will tell if video ads get the surfers clicking again or not.
You've also got to wonder what the return will be like for those businesses that are using the new video ads to try and sell their products. I expect that there will be a lot clicks from people who really aren't all that interested in buying and, while that will still work for Google, it's not going to do much for the advertisers.
I also wonder if Google will ever allow adult marketers to use video ads.
And that's it for me today; I'm off to catch up on all those things I didn't get done yesterday.