A newly released eyetracking study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows that online banner blindness is worsening. Nielsen says that banner ads (indicated by green outlines in his heat maps below) didn’t even receive light focus from skimmers, scanners and readers—and neither did non-ad content in the same areas.

Nielsen concludes, much to his own dismay, that the best way to get people to look at your ads is to make them look like actual content—much like advertising in magazines and newspapers masquerades as editorial content (gotta look for that tiny little ‘advertisement’ notice at the top). That doesn’t mean, however, a 300×300 AdSense block as the first thing in your blog’s text will trick people into think that it’s content and clicking on it. That’s just annoying.

Another study that was released recently cautions against making advertisements annoying, obnoxious or offensive. As obvious as this sounds, remember that a lot of companies (*cough* ASK *cough*) need this reminder. And a vivid reminder it is. In the study, commissioned by Streetblimps and conducted by Opinion Research Corp.

So yes, Ask’s ads may have had us all talking—but according to this survey, they also would have prevented 90% of American adults from purchasing a product associated with them. Even if you didn’t find the Ask commercials offensive, you have to admit that they’re annoying. And 70% would remember the commercial—and the bad taste it left in their mouths. A novel commercial isn’t enough to succeed.

The bottom line: don’t go for the flashy and annoying ads—make them look like content. For your biggest ad purchases, work with webmasters to integrate your ads into their design—use their site’s colors and fonts, tinker with placement, etc. It just might pay off.

Source: marketingpilgrim.com

Although most professional search engine optimizers agree that the green PageRank display has little to do with the actual performance of a website in Google and other search engines, many webmasters still focus on websites with a high PageRank when it comes to link building and website promotion.

How to fake the PageRank of a website

The PageRank of a web page can be faked with a combination of a 301 redirect and cloaking. It works like this:

* When a search engine spiders visits a web page URL, the server redirects the spider to a web page with high PageRank.

* Google assigns the high PageRank to the page with the redirection because it thinks that the pages are identical.

* When a human web surfer visits the web page URL, the server does not redirect the surfer. That means that the web surfer sees the web page of the faker and the Google toolbar displays the PageRank of the redirected URL.

To web surfers, it looks as if the web page has a very high PageRank although it hasn't. Note that this method doesn't increase the rankings of the page in any way. It just influences the PageRank display in Google's toolbar. Google doesn't like cloaking at all so you risk the rankings of your website if you use the method above.

How to check if a website has a faked PageRank

If you think that a web page might have a faked PageRank then you can do the following simple check:

* Search Google for "info:domain.com" (without the quotation marks, replace domain.com with the domain that you want to check).

* If there are no results or if the returned URLs don't match the original URL then it's likely that the PageRank has been faked. If Google returns only one URL for the query and if the URL is the same as the checked URL then the PageRank is okay.

What about the PageRank of your own website?

The green pixels in Google's toolbar are not important. It's important that your website has high rankings for keywords that convert to sales. Website promotion is about getting leads and sales. It's not about getting green pixels.

Don't focus on the PageRank display in Google's toolbar but try to get good rankings for keywords that are relevant to your website. High rankings for relevant keywords that convert to sales are much better than having a lot of green pixels.

Source: Axandra Newsletter