Google Generation

Google and Yahoo! also offer something called contextual advertising. This form of advertising uses yet another algorithm to place an organization’s ads on partner Web sites that have similar content. Using contextual advertising allows an organization’s payper- click (PPC) advertisements to show up on thousands of smaller sites. Yahoo! calls its contextual advertising program Content Match. If an organization opts in for this service, its PPC ads will show up on major Yahoo! partnership sites such as CNN.com as well as many smaller sites. Google calls its contextual program AdSense, and it will show PPC ad on Google, AOL.com, ask.com, shopping.com, and thousands of smaller sites.

What these ads mean is that if, for example, a nonprofit that helps the elderly has a Web site
and an advertiser dealing with the elderly has signed up for contextual ads, their PPC advertisement may appear on the first nonprofit’s Web site. When researching PPC strategies for nonprofits, Google Grants need to be taken into consideration because the program rules may change the direction of a PPC plan.

Google Grants can help nonprofits pay for Google AdWords advertising. The program is designed to help organizations extend their public service messages to the global audience, in an effort to make a greater impact on the world . Grant recipients receive at least three months of advertising through Google AdWords, with a per-month spending cap of $10,000.

Sheryl Sandberg, Google vice president of global online sales and operations, said, “When we thought about what we could give back, what we obviously do is search and advertising, and it would be a great opportunity for us to refer people interested in the topics that these non-profits work on.

This section focuses on pay-perclick , sometimes called paid search. About 40 to 50 percent of all search queries now return paid ads. By far the most profitable and fastest growing source of revenue for search engines is advertising. Google presents normal organic results in a main list and paid listings on the side as sponsored links. Companies choose a keyword, or multiple keywords, associated with their product or service. They then bid on what they are willing to pay when a searcher clicks on a link .

Welcome to the secret formula of SEO: The Search Engine Ranking Algorithm. Each search engine has its own proprietary algorithm to sift through a multitude of factors and determine page rank. Some of these factors include keyword repetition, page titles, inbound links, and even the age of the site. Each search engine also will change its algorithm from time to time, often without so much as a friendly warning .

They guard these proprietary algorithms because if people knew exactly how the algorithms worked, they would take advantage of that knowledge to ensure the site they were promoting ranked first. The little bits of algorithm that people figure out themselves often get so abused that the search engines eventually devalue them. Good HTML titles, good body copy, great content, ensuring that your site doesn’t have blocks to crawling—these have worked for nearly a decade. Grappone and Couzin noted that Sullivan did not mention anything about trying to figure out the elusive algorithm.Some of these methods include keyword stuffing, in which one repeats the content of the meta tags over and over.

Keyword stuffing is designed to make the search engine crawler rank a Web site higher based on the specific meta tag keywords that are being repeated. Duplicate content is another spam technique designed to trick a search crawler into ran king a Web site higher than a more relevant Web site. Another spamdexing technique is the use of a link farm, a page of links that is created only to artificially boost a linking strategy, so that a page ranks higher in search results.Penalties for such techniques will differ among the different search engines, but they can include delisting of a Web site from the search engines. If a Web site is delisted, an organization will have to explain to the search engines what happened, and it could take months to fix the problem. Noted that the purpose of a search engine is to find, index, and serve content to a user looking to find something. If an organization approaches the creation of a Web site in the same manner a search engine approaches serving content,then the goals will naturally align.