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Tyler Townsend, a digital media manager who plans online advertising for travel clients at Ypartnership, an agency in Orlando, had $150,000 to spend on behalf of a Caribbean island’s visitors bureau. And this client did not care about branding — it wanted action.

So Mr. Townsend, who once might have made a simple buy on a site like Yahoo, created a complex campaign, which ran in March. He bought ads on Budget Travel, and he bought out Lonely Planet’s home page for a week. He used custom ad networks that included travel-themed sites, and another that would put the ads only on high-end sites.

Last year, Mr. Townsend said, many clients were happy to spend money just to raise awareness. Since January, however, “everyone’s retail-oriented. They want as many clicks for the dollar as possible,” he said.

So far, the threat of a recession has not slowed the migration of ad dollars to the Internet — as Google’s strong results showed on Thursday, when it reported a 30 percent jump in net income for its first quarter. But as Mr. Townsend’s campaign suggests, the slowing economy might be changing where those ad dollars are being spent.

Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.

Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising. (Yahoo will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.)

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AOL’s data leak. Project Beacon’s fallout. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about your privacy online, so it’s understandable why Ask would be proactive in letting users control their data with a new program called “AskEraser”. When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries. (One reader notes it’s only for future queries) It’s good news and gives you immediate gratification for your privacy concerns. That’s all good, if you use Ask.com for you searching.

The problem is most people don’t. A September Comscore report showed Ask was responsible for about 4.7% of all search traffic in July, which declined to 4.5% in August.

The move to privacy is simply not going to make a difference to their business. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have existing privacy plans in place since March, deleting personal information within at most 18 months (13 for Yahoo). Ask announced an 18 month policy in July. For years these companies succeeded with lackluster privacy promises.

The press loves to run stories about the hidden privacy concerns caused by data collected online, but consumers have taken an “out of sight out of mind” approach. DoubleClick has logged user data based on IPs and cookies for years, with only an obscure opt-out option that makes Beacon look pro-privacy. It’s only going to be worse when Google’s search and analytics data is married with DoubleClick’s on site advertising information. Only when Facebook was upfront about what they were doing with user data, did people revolt. However, none of these invasions are affecting market share, nor have caused anyone I know to leave Google or Facebook.

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Microsoft has announced the introduction of mobile display advertising on MSN Mobile, starting today.

MSN Mobile customers in the United States will see banner and text ad placements that “conform to the U.S. mobile advertising guidelines provided by the Mobile Marketing Association to deliver a more consistent and engaging experience for consumers.” Launch partners include Paramount Pictures and Jaguar.

The tech behind Microsoft’s rollout of mobile advertising comes from the acquisition of ScreenTonic and through Microsoft’s Advertiser & Publisher Solutions Group. Microsoft has previously offered mobile display advertising in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and the U.K, but todays move is the first time the company has offered these sort of ads in the United States. There was no word as to whether this would be part of a wider rollout to other Microsoft ad serving partners such as Facebook.

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At Google, the algorithm rules. Don’t question the algorithm. It knows what you want better than you do. That goes for advertisers as well. Case in point: Google is dropping a feature on AdSense that places an “Advertise on this site” link in the ads that Google spreads across the Web.

You’d think: Who better to pick which sites to advertise on than the advertiser himself? A clever marketer comes across a site whose readers he want to reach, clicks the link and buys a run of ads. What could be easier? But no, apparently when an advertiser picks which sites to advertise on, those ads don’t get clicked on as much as ads picked by the AdSense computers. Humans rely too much on messy intuition. Computers measure response rates and tweak accordingly.

Hey, the numbers don’t lie. Is it really any wonder that Google has no use for us humans or our pesky choices.

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StumbleUpon, a fun Web discovery service, is getting a new feature, SearchReviews:

“We’re really excited about this announcement. We’ve been hearing great feedback from you about our SearchReviews feature that has been in beta, and allows you to see StumbleUpon ratings layered on your searches on the major engines - Google, Yahoo, Ask & more. This feature helps you discover great websites whether you are pressing the Stumble button or searching the web. Today we are officially launching SearchReviews for both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and announcing some really cool enhancements. ”

by Gail Sober

Many of the so called search engine optimization experts strongly suggest only trading links with other sites that have a high page rank. While this itself is probably a great suggestion if you are only focusing on building your sites page rank.

But what about traffic?

Let’s be realistic here for a minute. Where do you expect your site to show up in the search engines? The number one spot? Top ten? First page of the results? Your chances of winning the lottery are probably better, especially for highly competitive keywords.

Just to take a look at what you are up against, I did a few quick searches for some popular keywords.

home business - about 2,930,000,000 home based business - about 618,000,000 make money - about 269,000,000 ebay - about 798,000,000 work from home - about 2,090,000,000

As you can see, you are up against a lot of other webmasters who have the same desire as you… achieving top search engine results for their keywords. This is some very stiff competition to say the very least. Many of the search engine optimization experts own or manage hundreds and even thousands of websites in their networks which they can use to easily manipulate a new websites page rank by pointing links at it as well as a number of other methods which many of us just do not have the resources available to compete with them.

Now, what happens if and when you do hit the Google Lottery and land that top spot on the search engines? I’ll tell you and I speak from experience. Your page is now under severe scrutiny. Unethical webmasters are directly copying your page and resubmitting as their own. Ethical webmasters are using a variety of tools to completely pick apart and analyze your page to see what they can do to take your spot. And the cycle continues.

While the top page results on the search engines can definitely send some traffic your way, what kind of traffic would you receive if you turned the focus of your efforts away from trading links with only search engine optimization in mind and instead concentrated on getting as much exposure for your site as possible? You could easily start seeing the traffic to your site from these link exchanges outperform anything you could realistically expect to achieve from mediocre search engine placement.

Another overlooked aspect of this strategy is that while you are exchanging links with as many other sites as possible now and even though many of these sites will have low page rank now, what about six months from now or even one or two years from now. You can expect that many of these other sites will have their page rank increased over time and now those pr1 and pr2 sites you started out linking to could now be pr3, pr4 and pr5 and lucky you, you have hundreds or thousands of these linked to you. And the best part of it all is, it is a permanent and low maintainance traffic source. You are not in a cycle of competition as you are in the search engines trying to not only get a top spot but to keep that top spot once you’ve gotten it.

Maybe you are not ready to completely give up on your search engine efforts but can see the possibilities in what I’ve described above. What should you do? Why not just give it a try and compare the results? Domain names are cheap, set up a second site and only use the method above and then compare your traffic logs for the two sites and see which one is providing more traffic and sales.

When looking for sites to exchange links with, obviously you would want to start with sites that compliment your sites services or products. As an example, if you sold ladies hats then you might want to start looking for trades with sites that sold ladies purses, shoes or belts. While that is a good place to start, do not overlook the fact that any link from any site is a possible sale for you. Just because someone is at a site looking at tractors or pet supplies doesn’t mean that they may not be interested in your product or service so don’t hesitate to initiate trades with sites of all types.

The final part of this is … follow through. One thing I have noticed in my ten plus years in internet marketing is that everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move and this is especially true in link exchanges. You offer to trade links with someone and they reply with a link and tell you to add your link first. Make the first move! You will get much further asking rather than waiting to be asked.

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by Christopher Angus

People ask me on a daily basis how to do a couple of quick fixes which will make their site appear higher in the search results. The type of people that ask me are usually people who have been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) themselves but have not had any great success. This article is for people just starting to do SEO or for people who have been doing it for a long time. The tips are easy to implement and anyone who knows a bit about HTML and SEO will be able make the changes easily. This article will out line a number of “Quick Fixes” which will make your site move up the search results almost immediately.

1. Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your content with your keywords appearing in them.
2. Use Alt Tags in your website; make sure that they include your keywords too.
3. Create fresh content as frequently as possible.
4. Don’t let your keyword density exceed 15%.
5. Make sure you don’t have a slow loading site.
6. No duplicate content, always keep your text original.
7. Make sure your navigation is text based and your site is easy to navigate
8. Have many RELEVANT backlinks to your website.
9. Backlinks should include anchor text that is varied.
10. Don’t link to banned sites or “bad neighbourhoods”
11. Don’t use too much script, make sure your site is content rich.
12. Don’t ever use Frames or Flash.

These tips are suggested for websites that are established already and have some history. New sites should be optimised as they are build and as they are new it will take a while for the search engines to show them in their results. Therefore, any changes made will not have any effect on a new site with no history or backlinks.

It requires great patience to do SEO effectively; the most important factor in SEO is building a good number of backlinks to your site. The backlinks should be from many different sources and be related to your industry in some why. Also, use your keywords in your anchor text - this will make a huge difference.