Forums are back!....and making big bucks.

You may think chatrooms and forums are a thing of the past but think again. With the big boom in social networking in the past year and web 2.0 in the near future, forums may make a comeback. A blog post I recently read gave four reasons why forums may be the way to go to create a website that pays. The post first pointed out that forums work best for hobby related websites, where visitors already share a since of camaraderie. In addition to creating value and relevant content that keeps visitors coming back forums have the following advantages...

• Allows interaction of visitors between each other


• Increases retention of traffic therefore relying less on search engines


• Increase new traffic from search engines from long tail search key terms


• Allows better feedback from your visitors & interaction to get suggestions to improve or offer new services to safeguard its long term future.

So if you have a website based around people who love to congregate, such as pet products, sports, or even a restaurant, creating a forum may be the way to increase traffic.

For more information on how to draw traffic to your website get ahold of me at evan@cornerstonelocal.com

Local Search Language: The Diversity of Search Behavior

The sheer number of local search sites operating today is astounding. Why are there so many? The answer lies within consumer search behavior trends and search engines' ability to translate so many different ways of asking for the same things. Every consumer has their own search language and trying to get a local listing ranked for all of these, or even a few different semantics is very tough. Think of it as one person typing in English (the consumer) for a Spanish speaking person (the web crawler) to read, comprehend and rank accordingly. So while one web crawler might read your English keyword and translate it perfectly to be ranked highly in the SERP( define), another web crawler may not even comprehend or rank the keyword.

It is the search marketers job to expand the number of keywords and track the behavior of the listing to figure out what search engines are ranking the listing and which ones are not. The abundance of search engines, each with its own language makes the search marketers ability to get the ad listed in good rank in every search engine near impossible. It would be the same as having to learn Spanish, German, Swahili, French, and Chinese all at once and then having them change next month.

Does anyone know of an easy way to track where your local listing might be in several different search engines? Rather than just endless searching.

New Search Marketing Ad Software

Fast Search & Transfer unveiled on Monday a platform that will allow media companies, online classifieds and others to serve private-label, contextually relevant ads on their Web sites without having to turn to Google. The product, named AdMomentum, is sold as a software license and allows online advertisers to be able to build search-driven monetization solutions themselves. Local.com is one of the first customers to purchase the software and will be working to gain as much traffic as possible to pay off the licensing fees, instead of using a revenue sharing strategy. We will see in the future if this product is able to keep speed with the updates that Google and Yahoo continue to release.

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