Software as a Service Continues its High Growth Trajectory in Asia - Springboard Research - July 23 2007

Market Expected to Grow 83% in 2007 as Awareness and Adoption Rates Increase Significantly

Singapore – July 23, 2007 – Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT Market Research industry, today announced the results of its latest research on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market in Asia (excluding Japan). Springboard’s data shows significant growth in awareness and adoption of SaaS across the region with the market increasing 92.5% in 2006 to reach a market size of US$154 million. Springboard forecasts that the SaaS market in Asia will reach US$1.16 billion by 2010, with a compound annual growth rate of 66%, to comprise 15% of the enterprise software application market.

Springboard recorded a substantial increase in SaaS awareness in the last year, with awareness among those surveyed (385 organizations) increasing from 41% in 2006, to 75% in 2007. This increase in awareness also led to a rise in adoption, with 46% of those enterprises surveyed replying that they were using some form of SaaS in their organizations (compared to 29% in 2006). Springboard also observed that the primary reason for adoption shifted from price to other factors that included ease of use, ease of implementation, and lower maintenance.

“We saw significant increases across the board for SaaS through our research, which proves that SaaS has market momentum for the long run,” said Dane Anderson, CEO & Executive Vice President for Research at Springboard Research. “It is a very dynamic time for SaaS in Asia with pure-play vendors like Salesforce.com, Netsuite, and WebEx gaining increased traction in Asia, together with smaller SaaS firms making moves into the region. Round that out with the large players in the industry like SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft becoming more aggressive with SaaS, and the market for the rest of 2007 and 2008 is going to be very interesting,” Anderson added.

Springboard found that although customer relationship management (CRM) remains the largest SaaS application segment by revenue in Asia, representing 45% of total SaaS revenue in 2006, data shows that organizations are aware of and use many different types of SaaS applications. Springboard also found satisfaction levels with SaaS applications ran very high, with all application segments scoring between a 7 to 8 on a 10-point scale.

“SaaS is definitely going beyond CRM, which is the area it has been associated with in the past,” said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, Research Manager for Springboard Research. “With all segments of SaaS growing, we are seeing applications across the board being adopted by enterprises in the region and more importantly, we are seeing enterprises being very happy with the SaaS applications they are using. This bodes well for the market, not only the small to medium businesses that have been the mainstay for SaaS vendors, but also those large enterprises looking at SaaS for non-critical applications;” added Pandey.

Springboard also saw the competitive landscape in Asia Pacific is beginning to change. Even though the regional SaaS market is still dominated by the top 5 vendors – Salesforce.com, WebEx, RightNow Technologies, Oracle and NetSuite – several other vendors, especially local players, are beginning to make their presence felt in the region. Vendors like Australia-based Saasu (accounting applications), Aussiepay (payroll application), Singapore-based JustLogin (collaboration), China-based 800CRM (CRM on-demand) and India-based Adrenalin eSystems (payroll/employee management) are gaining popularity in the local markets.

Salesforce.com Heats up Enterprise CRM with Salesforce Summer '07, Based on World's First Platform-as-a-Service - July 16 2007 - SF Investor Website

With Apex Code live to customers, the era of platform-as-a-service begins New standard for the "IT-ready" on-demand platform combines multi-tenant programming language, multi-instance development environment, and intelligent workflow Salesforce.com positioned in Leaders Quadrant in SFA Magic Quadrant 2007 (1); establishes new milestones as the industry's most customized, integrated, and adopted enterprise CRM
MELBOURNE, Australia, July 16, 2007 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- salesforce.com Summer '07 Launch Event -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the release of Salesforce Summer '07, for the first time delivering Apex Code to salesforce.com customers and unleashing the power of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to the industry.

Salesforce Summer '07 is the 23rd generation of the world's most popular on-demand CRM application and delivers a completely customizable CRM application and Platform and a number of industry "firsts" to the enterprise on-demand market.

Salesforce.com customers continue to establish major milestones for the on-demand industry with the power of PaaS. Salesforce.com customers have created more than 125,000 custom applications and objects, completed 30,000 AppExchange installs and produced almost 100 million daily transactions -- proving that salesforce.com is the most customized, integrated and adopted on-demand application and platform on the market today.

"Salesforce.com and Software-as-a-Service revolutionized CRM. Now Platform-as-a-Service and Apex Code stand to revolutionize how customers build and deploy apps," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Customers can write code that runs on our servers -- it's programming without software. Better yet, it's The End of Software."

"Salesforce.com's architecture allows us to easily accommodate the different needs and personalities of our many businesses and markets while still operating with our standard, One DuPont SAP transaction engine. This is a powerful combination," said Robert R. Ridout, vice president, DuPont Information Technology (IT) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of DuPont.

Salesforce Summer '07 comes at a watershed moment for the on-demand industry -- on-demand has now moved to the mainstream. Summer '07 is salesforce.com's third release this year, maintaining a pace of innovation unmatched by any competitor. Recently, Gartner placed salesforce.com in the Leaders Quadrant in its Magic Quadrant for sales force automation.

Salesforce.com believes this accomplishment marks a maturity of the SaaS industry and an acknowledgement of its role in revolutionizing the software landscape.

"With Summer '07, salesforce.com has not only demonstrated the power of SaaS for the enterprise, but more importantly, the power of PaaS," said Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research. "Apex Code and industry defining features like intelligent work flow and multi-instance development environment provide clarity to enterprise CIOs by enabling them to focus on innovation, not infrastructure."

Summer '07 -- Delivering Platform-as-a-Service and Apex Code to Customers

With the release of Salesforce Summer '07, salesforce.com customers will be able to experience the power of programming free from the burdens of software with Apex Code and PaaS. For the first time, customers will be able to use Apex Code to write any application and leverage the scalability, reliability, and availability of running it directly on salesforce.com's industry-leading PaaS.
All applications written with Apex Code are 100 percent multi-tenant, ensuring that they are automatically upgraded at the same time as the Salesforce service.
"We are very excited to get our hands on Apex Code and develop entirely new on-demand applications so that our entire company can go on-demand. We are confident that the new applications we build with Apex Code will further enhance the success we've achieved with salesforce.com to date," said Mike Epner, Vice President, Worldwide Services and Support, Borland.

Summer '07 comes at a time when customers and partners are integrating salesforce.com's on-demand applications more deeply into their business infrastructure than ever before. In fact, customers have performed more than 125,000 customizations to their Salesforce instances, showcasing the ease and power of adapting Salesforce to each customer's unique business processes.

During salesforce.com's first quarter, more than 50 percent of the 5.4 billion transactions (page views or API calls through Salesforce or AppExchange applications) on the company's industry-leading Salesforce service were handled through the Salesforce Web Services API, demonstrating its extensive use and integration with external Web services, enterprise mash-ups and sophisticated business process and workflow applications.

Apex Code is a Java-like development language that is secure, easy and fast, and will be immediately familiar to any Java programmer. Anything built using Apex Code can be made available as a Web service and is accessible via SOAP and XML standards. More than 1,200 members of the Salesforce Developer Network have had access to Apex Code since January in a developer preview to build prototype applications and provide feedback on the code.

Leading the Industry by Delivering "IT Ready" Firsts

Apex Code provides enterprise developers and IT departments the ability to program completely custom applications for their on-demand platform. In addition, the multi-instance development environment and intelligent workflow features available in Summer '07 give enterprise business users the ability to completely customize their application.

Salesforce.com is the only company that is delivering the flexible complexity that enterprises need with its unique PaaS model. Salesforce.com continues to be the clear standard for on-demand in the enterprise by delivering a number of on-demand "firsts" including:

-- First "IT Ready" On-Demand Multi-Instance Development Environment -- Salesforce Sandbox, introduced with the Winter '06 release, allows companies to create a duplicate copy of their Salesforce development environment with one click. This popular feature ensures that testing, training and development scenarios can be run without interrupting the production use of the application.

In response to requests from the salesforce.com community, salesforce.com is delivering the capability for customers to deploy multiple Salesforce Sandboxes with Summer '07. Enterprise customers can now have separate environments for testing, development and training to achieve a true enterprise development environment.

-- First "IT Ready" On-Demand Intelligent Workflow -- While most on-demand competitors are just starting to incorporate rudimentary workflow into their solutions, salesforce.com is releasing Enterprise Intelligent Workflow. With the availability of Intelligent Workflow, customers can now create complex rules and approvals by adding formulas in workflow. Now anything from complex case assignment rules to sophisticated price discount approvals can be completely customized to fit each individual customer's business needs.

Industry Leading User Experience: Collaboration, Efficiency and Empowerment

Salesforce.com has always delivered an industry-leading user experience that has driven strong adoption of its CRM applications. Summer '07 continues to provide innovative ease of use and powerful customization tools to let developers, users and customers take their user interfaces and experiences to the next level.

-- Salesforce Mobile User Interface -- With the Summer '07 release, Salesforce Mobile is debuting an entirely new search-based user interface, enabling users to find the information they need quickly and easily. The new user interface is completely streamlined with a search box on the main screen. From here users can search for contacts, accounts, opportunities and much more. The results are delivered in an easy to navigate list, grouped by category, from which a user can select the correct solution. In addition, users can now access reports for the first time through Salesforce Mobile.

-- Rich-Content Solutions -- Now, companies using the solution knowledge base in Salesforce Service & Support can illustrate complex solutions easily with diagrams, pictures and other rich-content by creating solutions using HTML to make solutions and services easier to find and understand than ever before.

-- Custom Report Wizard -- Previously, users were able to create custom reports using a standard report wizard which enabled them to achieve true insight into their business programs. Now, users can create completely customized report wizards to make creating reports an easy and streamlined process.

-- On-Demand Collaborative Customer Portal -- The Salesforce Customer Portal delivers the latest Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to enable companies to offer their customers a branded 24x7 self-service portal. The Salesforce Customer Portal enables companies to personalize the portal for different users, roles and companies and easily customize the portal with their brand. For customer service departments, the new self-service portal will use the knowledgebase to suggest solutions to customers and leverages the power of collaborative communities to also deliver customer driven solutions.

"It took us less than a week to customize, brand, and fully deploy the Salesforce Customer Portal," said Mark Silber of QUALCOMM Incorporated. "Salesforce Service & Support gives our IT department the ability to react quickly to changes driven by the business and to revise the app in minutes-not days or weeks-using easy point-and-click capabilities. This allows us to deliver a whole new standard of customer service."

Availability

Salesforce Summer '07 is currently scheduled to be available in August to customers through salesforce.com's multi-tenant, on-demand model. The Salesforce Customer Portal will be available for an additional fee starting at $5 per user, per month, per portal. Multiple Sandboxes are available at an additional fee for Unlimited and Enterprise Edition customers. Apex Code is available for Unlimited Edition customers at no additional charge.

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Salesforce.com - Success On- Demand World Tour 2007 - Register Now

Looking to drive your business success to a whole new level? Join salesforce.com and a select group of industry experts in the areas of sales, marketing and IT to understand how businesses of all sizes have overcome familiar challenges to achieve sustained success. Ways to kick your business into the next gear...

:: Increase sales productivity and close more deals

:: Improve sales pipeline visibility and forecast accuracy

:: Integrate sales and marketing for effective lead management

:: Achieve a real-time 360 degree view of your business to gain actionable intelligence

:: Transforming a CIO into a Chief Innovation Officer

As the global leader in on-demand customer relationship management, salesforce.com is all about success. Find out what that means by speaking 1:1 with experts, trying the latest interactive demos, test driving new applications, and tapping into the success of some of our 32,300 customers.
It's a day filled with innovation, information, and interaction - plus plenty of ways to get all your questions answered!

AGENDA

2:00pm - 2:30pm Registration & Networking

2:30pm - 2:40pm Experiencing Success On-Demand

2:40pm - 3:30pm John Buchanan - Australia World Cup Cricket Coach

3:30pm - 3:45pm Coffee Break

3:45pm - 5:15pm Breakout Sessions:

SALES - MARKETING - ITCustomer speakers include:

:: Lend Lease

:: Sqware Peg

:: Langdon Ingredients

:: Fleet Partners

:: JB Global

:: Applied BioSystems

:: Okere

:: Western Bulldogs

:: Intel/HP

5:15pm - 7:00pm Cocktail Party

GUEST KEYNOTE SPEAKER

John Buchanan - Coach of Australia's winning World Cup Cricket TeamJohn was the coach of the most successful Australian cricket team in history, culminating in this year's World Cup win. Since 1999, he employed a coaching style that was recognised as being vastly different to those used by coaches for generations. John will discuss how differentiated leadership and performance management can be combined to create successful teams

Melbourne - July 17 2007 Event Details:

2-7pm Crowne Promenade Hotel, 8 Whiteman Street, Southbank

To Register for the Melbourne Event, July 17 2007, Click Here

Sydney - July 19 2007 Event Details:

2-7pm Sydney Hilton Hotel, 488 George Street, Sydney

To Register for the Sydney Event, July 19 2007, Click Here

Opening the floodgates - July 3 - Australian IT

Mahesh Sharma July 03, 2007

THE trickle of users to hosted software - or Software as a Service (SaaS) - could be set to become a flood. The sector is poised to break its banks in the small business arena and move into the enterprise space.

An analyst predicts 40 per cent compound annual growth for the market
The large software vendors are preparing to offer their own enterprise SasS offerings after largely leaving the market to upstarts such as Salesforce.com.

The concept has come a long way since the early days and the, as yet, unfulfilled promises of applications service providers.

Today's fast broadband and the emergence of Web 2.0 technology finally allows companies to access a product with full functionality, while completely managed and hosted remotely by a SaaS provider.

The majority of SaaS activity is taking place in the customer relationship management market.
Indeed, SaaS applications are expected to generate $25 million, or 25 per cent of the local CRM market this year. This is almost double last year's figures of $15 million and 15 per cent of the market, according to analyst Frost and Sullivan.

Further, the analyst predicts 40 per cent compound annual growth for the market, which if sustained will involve growth to $51.2 million in 2009, or 35 per cent of the overall Australian CRM market.

With most of this business is being driven by small and medium businesses, companies at the top end of town are only now beginning to ask how SaaS can help their business.
To date, it has been hard to look into the local SaaS market without touching on the work of Salesforce.com.

The company has only been in Australia for three years, but Frost and Sullivan says that last year it controlled 50 per cent of the local hosted CRM market.

Salesforce.com Asia-Pacific and Japan sales vice-president sales Jeremy Cooper says 40 per cent of its local customer base is relatively new, having signed on in the past year. The new users are spread evenly across the small and medium business and enterprise markets, he says.
"Initially, our focus was on small to medium companies and being able to deliver an enterprise-class CRM solution that they previously couldn't afford, or didn't have the capacity to manage.
"In the past year we've started to see that section of the market becoming a strong validation point for the enterprise end of the market."

According to Frost and Sullivan estimates, the number-two SaaS product locally is NetSuite, distributed in Australia and New Zealand by NetReturn.

It had about 20 per cent of the SaaS CRM market last year.

NetReturn managing director Andrew Birch says it's different from similar CRM offerings because it provides a hosted solution for the whole business, not just CRM.

"ERP, CRM and e-commerce are fundamentally integrated on one database, so it's all the same data from start to finish.

"You can follow a customer from when you send out an email for a marketing campaign, all the way through to when you invoice and collect the catch."

NetReturn says its success has come from the mid-market, a segment that Gartner predicts will drive the take-up of other SaaS systems, such as e-commerce.

Frost and Sullivan consulting director Andrew Milroy says the ability to service demands other than CRM will become a key factor not only for small and medium businesses, but for the entire SaaS market.

It is this move outside the restricted CRM space, he says, that will leave traditional heavyweight such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft positioned to capitalise when SaaS takes off in larger enterprises.

"The difference between Oracle and SAP, and Salesforce.com, is that they can offer the full suite of tools compared with Salesfore. com's CRM system."

Oracle Asia-Pacific CRM vice-president Simon Banks says more than 50 per cent of Oracle's installed customer base is in the mid-market, and it is aiming to take advantage of this network to move customers to its on-demand system.

"We're talking to all of Oracle's partners about on-demand to reduce the cost of implementation and drive up business value. It is very specifically where SMBs thrive."

A similar strategy is being employed by Microsoft as it looks to deliver its Software Plus Service product.

Microsoft Australia online services strategy head Harvey Sanchez says it involves providing new ways for businesses to control and access information. "Businesses like being able to control the ways they run and configure their software, and they want more of that."

Sanchez gives the example of Microsoft's CRM product, which would involve customer management records being hosted by Microsoft, while customers were still able to access this off-premises via mobile devices, or on-premises by way of a full-featured client.

SAP, meanwhile, announced its arrival in the SaaS mid-market earlier this year when it unveiled its A1S hosted business suite.

This offering comes with all the enterprise applications but doesn't offer the features and configuration options of the high-end All-in-One product.

The suite is set to be officially launched only in the first quarter of next year, and then only offshore. An Australian release is expected at the end of next year.

One problem with these mid-market systems is that they are largely providing only simple business features and functions with low or no levels of customisation.

Such a model won't easily translate to the top end of the market, where businesses have more complex and specific demands. At this level the real value for SaaS providers is expected to be in servicing these more complex systems.

Gartner, for example, predicts that until 2010, less than 15 per cent of complex business processes will be delivered using SaaS as the core application system.

Oracle says it remains equally committed to the small and medium business and enterprise markets, but its focus on using SaaS to service specific user communities is best suited to the top end of town.

"SaaS has its history in small and medium businesses, but the larger companies are interested in the simplicity of the systems," Banks says. "Specific user communities can't be deployed from on-premises systems, but there's a huge demand in the big organisations for this type of capability.

"The high-end companies are finding the hybrid systems very popular," he says.
One issue that providers and users are grappling with is working across on-premise and hosted systems, and the problems of transferring information between the two.

In the early days of SaaS, this required separate databases for each segment, but SAP says it holds an advantage because its on-demand solution is built from the same code base as its on-premises product.

SAP says this allows a client to seamlessly transfer information from an in-house systems when it wants to take up the on-demand option. "With our solution you literally take your on-demand system and we can basically port that to an on-premises solution for you."

Transferring information is also a key issue in the security aspects of SaaS.

Gartner says company concern over the handling of its information offsite will hold back SaaS uptake by as much as 20 per cent through to 2011.

Legal experts have said the enterprise companies, especially in the financial services sector, could be liable to incur penalties if their information was exposed because of overseas privacy laws.

In response to concerns from local clients, Oracle, for example, says it plans to expand its data centres outside the US to avoid complications with laws such as the PATRIOT Act.

Aside from these issues, businesses are increasingly looking to the SaaS model as a cheap and flexible way to augment their existing on-premises systems, and even replace them.

Google's Webmaster Guidelines - 4 July 2007 - NetRegistry

NetRegistry News 4 July 2007

This month we wanted to publish a list of best practises to ensure your website is optimised for the search engines. However there is no better advice for building a fully search engine optimised website than that which is offered by Google themselves, so it seems appropriate to republish that advice in full. Even if your website has been online for a while, or you are a web designer building many sites, these guidelines are still a valuable reminder of how to build an optimised website.

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites.

• Design, content, and technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
• Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
• Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
• If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
  

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
• If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at

http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

• Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
• If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

Choosing The Right Keywords With Google AdWords - 4 July 2007 - NetRegistry

By Gareth Parkin


Choosing The Right Keywords With Google AdWords

Any advertiser knows that before you can sell anything, you must first define and then reach your target audience. When it comes to Google AdWords, reaching your target audience is all about choosing the right keywords to display in the advertisements you create. Increasing traffic to your web site is pointless if the people that visit your site are not the type of people who will buy your product or use your services. With that in mind, here are some tips for choosing effective keywords.

Know your Target Audience

The first and most important step of any advertising campaign is knowing who you're trying to reach. What is your target audience searching for, and what search terms are they using?

Match Keywords to your Audience

Once you've defined your target audience, the next step is brainstorming a list of keywords that relate to the service or product you're selling. The key is being specific with your keyword choices-remember that your aim is to optimise traffic, not maximize it. Choosing general keywords is pointless, because you'll end up paying for clicks from people who are not actually interested in buying your products. Optimising traffic means targeting people who will not only click on your ad, but will also buy what you're selling.

Let's say, for example, you operate an online business that sells fancy-dress costumes. Choosing the keyword “clothes” might generate a lot of traffic to your site-from people looking for clothing for everyday wear. They won't be buying your costumes, but you're paying every time they click on your advertisement. Create a highly-specific advertisement that includes keywords such as “costumes” and include more specific words depending on the time of year-such as “Halloween” for example, and you'll be more likely to generate clicks from people who want your products.

Keep it Short and Simple

Google AdWords allows you to choose an unlimited number of keywords to match your advertisements to, but less is always more. Choosing too many keywords can be just as injurious to your advertising campaign as choosing keywords which are too general. Keep your initial campaign to between ten and twenty keywords for maximum benefit.

Along the same lines, you should be thinking simplicity when it comes to writing your ad copy. You only have a couple of lines of text to work with, so every word counts. Your advertisement text should be designed to pique the interest of your target audience-you can't tell them everything about your products in one or two short lines, so you must make them want to find out more by visiting your site.

Experiment with Keywords

Google provides you with a number of tools to determine how effective your chosen keywords are. You should be monitoring your keywords regularly to determine which ones are working best at generating the web site traffic you want, so you can eliminate the ones that aren't generating clicks.

Among the tools you can use is the Google Keyword tool. This is particularly useful if you're not sure which keywords will generate the traffic you want. The keyword tool allows you to enter words you choose then find more words that are related to the ones you entered. You can then go ahead and choose the keywords that are good matches to your advertisement, and add them to your keyword list with a single click.