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About a third of the top grossing apps in the Apple App Store are now making their money through the sale of virtual goods within the application after being free to download, according to research done by tech blog GigaOm.

The free-to-play model has so far served as a good way to entice users with free apps and then make money off the sale of virtual goods. Apple finally caved to developers and created a system to allow iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users to make purchases from within apps last fall. The design allows developers to create a free app and then get the user to purchase a very cheap virtual good, such as a better weapon in a game. It then becomes much easier to convert a non-paying user into a paying one.

Freemium applications are making a good bit of money. In January, mobile analytics firm Flurry said that the freemium games it tracked generated revenues of $9 per user per year, on average. In June, that number had risen to $14.66 per user per year. Previously, these games were generating around 99 cents to $1.99 per user per year. 34 of the top 100 apps are free, but make their money through in-app purchases of mostly virtual currencies as well as other premium features, according to GigaOm’s report.

Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all purchases made within applications. That’s the same amount that Facebook, another large host of social games (including Zynga’s Farmville), charges its game partners.

Apple’s App Store now has around 300,000 apps for sale and for free download. And the App Store is growing by around 1,000 apps every day. The Android marketplace, which has applications for phones running on Google’s Android operating system, only has around 113,000 applications according to some metrics.

Score another one for social games developer Zynga, which first brought the freemium model to the forefront as a significant source of revenue for games and other applications. Its games have become insanely popular, and the company is now worth as much as Electronic Arts — one of the largest publishers in the world — by some metrics from its virtual good sales alone.

Next Story: Microsoft and Cisco throw down the gauntlet for living room teleconferencing Previous Story: Nintendo: the gaming landscape has changed forever, but console’s are doing just fine

Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.

Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.

Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.

The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.

On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.

Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.

So now to ponder details,

As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.

The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.

Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.

My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.

This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.

And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.

I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?

Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.

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I frequent many SEO and Web Marketing forums on a daily basis and every so often there is a debate about the SEO industry and ethics. After being involved in a number of these debates, it has become really obvious that the main problems are the facts that no two SEO companies are alike and there is no unified methodology. It's very hard to make statements about the industry as a whole because it's debatable what exactly 'SEO' is. Mix in the fact that most SEO companies keep their methodology and campaign strategies secret and we have a situation where every company is totally different with very different results.

Fact 1 : There is no unified SEO methodology. SEO is actually defined by wikipedia as a process of improving traffic from SERPs to a site. Of course, HOW they do that is the real question and causes the debates.

Fact 2 : The effectiveness of an SEO campaign depends on the site structure, site content, keywords, methodology used, and how popular the site is. A site cannot just rank for any random keyword. SEO is also not voodoo. It is logic, problem solving, and Web marketing mixed together. If your site provides no value to users, it probably won't rank.

Fact 3 : Some 'SEOs' do search engine optimization and some do search engine manipulation. Of course, it is all marketed as SEO. Unethical optimization provides results at any cost and is always short term (usually ends in a banned domain name). Ethical optimization opens up the site to the search engines and provides long term benefits.

Fact 4 : Most SEO companies get paid whether or not your site gets any rankings. Unfortunately, this is the case with the industry. Most SEO companies implement A, B, and C and move on to the next client. Hopefully, the site ranks. If it doesn't, they always have more clients.

Fact 5 : Most SEO companies use both ethical and unethical inbound linking strategies.To maximize profits, it is very common for SEO companies to buy bulk links from India, links on spam/scraper web sites, or sell large directory submission packages. It is also common for SEO companies to place huge amounts of the contract into inbound linking to make up for the poor quality of the site optimization.

I don't think it is fair to characterize the industry as a whole without figuring out what is wrong with it and how SEO companies can overcome it. So how exactly do we determine what is good and bad about the industry? I have now been involved with the Web for over 10 years and, specifically, with the SEO industry for almost 4 years and I've seen the inner workings of major SEO companies and worked with clients who had been burned by their previous SEO campaigns. Combined with numerous Web postings and forum debates talking about the same basic problems, I've compiled a list of the most common issues.

Problem 1: Responsibility for Results

It's no secret that the vast majority of SEO companies take no responsibility for results. It is a fact that no SEO company can guarantee results (and if they do, they are lying to you). It is also a fact that the client is taking a risk by spending money with an SEO company that basically says 'We'll do what we can'. SEO companies simply guarantee they'll do the work to 'optimize' the site, but without full disclosure of their methodology, what exactly is the client paying for? No other industry sells a product with no guarantees and no specific list of work that will be completed. Of course, SEO work is basically the sales of information and keeping the specifics of a methodology is important, but the combination of secrecy and no responsibility for results really makes SEO campaigns risky. So, how can an SEO company reduce the risk for the client and provide the best grade of service?

Answer 1: Incentive Based Pricing

The only real way to reduce the financial risk of the client is to share the risk. Through incentive-based pricing, the SEO company can charge a certain percentage of the total contract (say 70%) to cover their intellectual property and time while placing the rest of the contract price (remaining 30%) in incentives for success. Of course, incentives and their percentage of the contract would be totally relative depending on the campaign. This first step into sharing in the risk provides both reassurance to the client that the company believes in its methodology and places some of the financial burden of the campaign on the SEO company. At the moment, however, very few SEO companies are willing to share in the risk and charge the same price whether the client gets top rankings or no rankings at all (or possibly even lower rankings).

Problem 2: Unethical Optimization

Unfortunately, unethical (or blackhat) optimization is still very prominent on the Web. It's also unfortunate that 'SEO' has been mistakenly confused with 'Blackhat SEO'. This is still the biggest problem for SEO companies. Saying that all SEO companies deal in blackhat optimization is like saying everyone who emails is a spammer. Blackhat optimization is not optimization at all...it is search engine manipulation. Because there is so much money tied to top rankings, there will always be a market for unethical SEO and search engine spam. Until companies realize what is ethical and unethical and stop supporting those blackhat SEO companies, they will continue to thrive. This makes the industry as a whole look bad and does not reflect the ethics of good SEO companies. Blackhat provides fast, short term results, but is never a good option in the long run.

Answer 2: Ethical Optimization

There is no quick and easy solution to blackhat optimization's stain on the SEO industry. I would suggest that all marketing departments research optimization techniques and educate themselves on what techniques are unethical. No SEO company is going to say they do unethical optimization. It's also not a good idea to immediately trust a company or product based simply on their rankings. Unethical optimization DOES provide rankings...just not for the long run.

It would also be helpful if the major search engines would be more open and accessible to SEO companies. Currently, the major search engines and SEO companies do not deal with each other and have formed a sort of love-hate relationship. Because of this, many ethical SEOs have slowly moved into dark territory. Ethical optimization seeks to make sites more easily accessible to the engines and help to improve the engine's search results. The problem is that the search engines mainly clump all SEO companies together the same way as uninformed users do: search engine manipulation. This is just not the case. Search engines do not want to reveal what they consider unethical because it would basically be providing a list of holes in their algorithms that blackhat SEOs would be able to manipulate further, but a defined list of 'what not to do' would provide a definitive list for businesses looking for an SEO company.

Basic Rules of Ethical Optimization

Any campaign that does not abide by the following rules is dealing in unethical optimization techniques and should be avoided.

1.) What the user sees and what the search engine sees should be exactly the same. Do not hide anything.

2.) Your keywords (and the resulting optimization) should exactly reflect the content of the page.Keywords should always reflect what your site is about.

3.) Do not build out pages exclusively for search engines. The site should always cater to both audiences (users and search engines). Catering to only users is why optimization is necessary. Catering only to search engines is optimization gone too far into blackhat.

4.) Do not participate in manipulative inbound linking schemes like link farms, bulk links, triangle linking, or any other unethical manipulation of your Google PageRank or link authority. Inbound links should be relevant to the content of your site and you should always know who is linking to you and where your links come from.

Problem 3: Assembly Line / Software SEO

With the growth of the SEO industry has also come the automation of SEO. The absolute first thing any prospective SEO client should know is that all effective SEO campaigns are custom. There is no checklist of items that will work exactly the same on every site. If the SEO company claims there is, then they are not doing full optimization and the campaign is minimal. A good optimization campaign optimizes the site architecture, text content, and code of the site. Assembly line SEO does not take into consideration the unique needs/design of the site and may even deal in blackhat optimization. SEO software especially should be looked at closely. There are really only two things SEO software could do that would work for any site: doorway pages (showing engines one thing and users a different thing; which is unethical) or a system of pages build exclusively for search engines (often called info or information pages and linked in an out of the way part of the page). Doorway pages are 100% unethical and info pages are deep in the gray area. Neither of those two methods address the architecture of the site, proper keyword analysis, or effective text content. The following links are examples of automated SEO software freely available on the Web. All links contain 'nofollow' to prevent the sites from getting inbound link credit from our site. These sites are NOT recommended by TreeHouse SEM.

http://doorwaypagemaker.com/ - Doorway page system; UNETHICAL

http://www.doorway-wizard.com/ - Doorway page system; UNETHICAL

Answer 3: Custom Campaign and Assessment

'SEO Software' may be cheap and affordable, but you get what you pay for. Any campaign that is going to slap on additional pages are simply sell you links is NOT an effective SEO campaign. Any SEO effort that simply has you add a few 'optimized' pages to your site is not going to be optimal. If you wanted to convert a street car into a race car, you don't simply add racing strips to it. Don't think that dumping a few pages on your site targeted to some random keywords is the same as a real SEO campaign.

If your SEO company will not sit down and talk about the layout, architecture, and aim of your site, then it is not providing a top-end service. Remember that the vast majority of 'SEO software' either is for building doorway/landing pages or simply providing you with data about your site (data that is already free to everyone on the Web). Good SEO campaigns take into account both the user and the search engines...not one or the other. An SEO company should have a commanding understanding of user experience and search engine optimization and use these in combination to create a campaign that will provide the best ROI. The end goal should always be leads/sales. Bringing in piles of non-targeted traffic often leads to extremely high turn over rates and very low lead conversion.

Conclusion

Do your research. Find out what you want from an optimization campaign and then ask the right questions. Make sure that the sales representative you talk to knows what they are selling. If they do not, they are definitely not the person to get information from. A lot of SEO companies use hard sale tactics and the reps are less than knowledgeable about what they are selling. Ask the following questions and see what they have to say.

1.) How do you assess keywords? If an SEO company simply optimizes for whatever keywords are sent to them by the client, the SEO campaign starts off on very shaky ground. Keyword analysis should be performed that takes into account the number of searches in all the major search engines and the relative competition for those terms. The site should also be compared to the keywords to see if they support each other.

2.) Do you plan on building out pages specifically to house keywords? Landing pages and doorway pages are not effective long term SEO options. SEO companies like them because they do not have to touch the rest of the site and it's very easy to simply add band aids instead of performing surgery.

3.) Will my SEO campaign also help improve the user experience of the site? Proper architecture and usability goes hand in hand with SEO and helps increase ROI. You should want to bring in new traffic and convert it.

4.) Does my revenue model affect my keyword selection and the optimization as a whole? Any SEO company that does not optimize based on the target audience is NOT providing the most effective campaign. An ecommerce site marketing to comparative shoppers will want to optimize heavily for product names and model numbers. An online magazine wanting to bring in recurring traffic will want to optimize for article topics and specific themes. Local companies will want to optimize for geo-targeted keywords.

5.) I want to optimize my site, but do not want to change any of the existing content or layout...how would you go about this? Any SEO company that says they will simply add on landing pages or hide text is selling blackhat. This goes back to the earlier analogy. You are really saying that you have a car that you want to modify to be very fast, but do not want to modify the engine and the mechanic simply adds racking stripes and charges you full price.

Thank you for reading TreeHouse SEM articles. If you would like to know more about any of these topics, feel free to contact us.

About the Author: Steve comes from a rich Web background where he has worked on the design, development, and marketing aspects of hundreds of Web sites. Formerly from Mississippi where he attended Ole Miss, Steve moved to San Diego to pursue further challenges in the Web marketing arena.

To compete in the rapidly growing marketplace of SEM, Treehouse immediately set itself apart by placing Chief Technology Officer DeVries at the helm, who is one of the most coveted experts in the industry today. DeVries was previously a lead technical consultant at a competing local firm, achieving top rankings for major clients such as Entrepreneur, Vegas.com, Viacom, Workopolis, and Ziff Davis Media. DeVries' experience has brought him much industry attention and placed him in high demand as a speaker at industry events by those looking to pick his brain.

Article Source:

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Devries

Steve Devries - EzineArticles Expert Author

Monday, November 15, 2010

Maximize Site Potential With SEO Site Audit

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