Wow, Google has taken another move to deepen its penetration into online advertising market by acquiring DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash. Just for reference, Google paid $1.65 billion in stock to purchase YouTube late last year.

“Google really wants to get into the display advertising business in a big way, and they don’t have the relationships they need to make it happen,” said Dave Morgan, the chairman of Tacoda, an online advertising network. “But DoubleClick does. It gives them immediate access to those relationships.”

The sale offers Google access to DoubleClick’s advertisement software and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies.

For months, Google has been trying to expand its foothold in online advertising into display ads, the area where DoubleClick is strongest. Google made its name and still generates most of its revenue from search and contextual text ads.

DoubleClick, which was founded in 1996, provides display ads on Web sites like MySpace, The Wall Street Journal and America Online as well as software to help those sites maximize ad revenue. The company also helps ad buyers — advertisers and ad agencies — manage and measure the effectiveness of their rich media, search and other online ads.

DoubleClick has just recently developed a Nasdaq-like exchnage for online ads where Web publishers and advertisers can participate in auctions for ad space.

It is really interesting to see how Google will expand its reach by offering more ad options for advertisers and speculatively more ads to display for Web publishers through existing programs.

If you plan to start a new site, you will stumble upon this problem. Where will you host the content? Besides hosting, choosing a domain name that is nice, cool and proud is something that would at least need a thought.

First of all, if you tried registering a domain name, it is as though all the good names were taken. I dare to say that all one-word dictionary terms were taken. It is quite hard to come up with a word combination that is at least doesn’t sound odd.

But, do all those really matter?

I mean, many website owners want to “stuff” their main keywords into their domain names. Nowadays, when all major keywords have been taken, people started to take “vacation-in-nepal-tibet-and-india.com.” I am sure you have seen some of these. By the way, the domain is just an imaginery domain that I come up in a snap.

Why do they insist on such long and hard-to-remember names? For once, there was (and still is) a myth that getting keyword rich domain will sky-rocket the site to the first page — if not to the top — of the search engine results.

Well, domain name used to be a factor, but nowadays it is overly abused that it makes a very minor effect to rankings. Yes, when I see hyphenated domains, I think “spam!”

So, at least there are two problems about it.

Trust me, you can just forget those kind of domain name. Contrarily if you break that rule, you will get more advantages.

Here are important factors to consider when choosing a domain name:

• Short, easy to remember and easy to spell. Imagine you are going to give away your domain in front of a group, or getting interviewed in local radio or teleseminar. Try to spell out your domain name versus the one I gave as an example above.
• Don’t be afraid to use brand name. I don’t mean you must come up with a clever and sweet name, although that is entirely acceptable. Think about Staples, Google, Yahoo, and others. I personally like OfficeDepot.com because even a complete stranger who never hears about the company knows what it does. Thinking this is impossible to get? Think again. I never purchase a domain that costs more than $10 nowadays. Use some creativity. Nameboy has a tool that generates domain names with combinations of keywords you give.
• Get a .com version of a domain name. When people think of a website, they think of .com. Even if you want to use .net, or .org, buy the .com version and redirect that to your main site. Sometimes people will type websites onto the browser out of their head, and you don’t want to lose visitors that way.
• Plurals and singulars. For the exact same reason as above, you should also get domain names that are plural or singular form of your domain.
• Avoid trademarked names. Avoid troubles. You may have heard stories about people who buy domain names and resell them to companies at higher prices. The thing is, nowadays they prefer to call their lawyers. Play nice.

To summarize, if you can come up with short and clean domain name with your keywords in it, by all means go for it. But, don’t bother about switching your existing site just because it isn’t packed with keywords. The effort is not worth it.

Spend some time to think about a good name, but don’t waste too much! No matter how cool is your domain, chances are the excitement won’t last long. Besides, you have more things to do to develop and grow your site.

Oh, I almost forget. If you want to register multiple domain names or sites, use a domain registrar such as NameCheap, the one I personally use to register all my domains. They allow you to manage all domains under one account. I often pass out free domain offer from my hosting company just for manageability.

Why? If you ever heard horror stories about popular sites who forgot to renew their domains, you know what I am talking about. I never had this problem in the past and hopefully in the future. NameCheap sent me a 30-day, and consecutive notices on domains that are going to expire. Moreover, I log in to my account every 30 days. It is an appointment on my calendar. I renew domains that I like regularly. Simple tip to prevent major headache.

Happy domain hunting.

What is SEO? If you ask this question to ten people, you may get 10 different answers. Search engine optimization is a very broad term that actually involves many topics, so to define it clearly in one sentence is next to impossible.

Let’s start by seeing what others who are more in the know say about SEO:

The term used to describe the marketing technique of preparing a website to enhance its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine once a relevant search is undertaken. A number of factors are important when optimising a website, including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process. –Web Search Workshop

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites. –Wikipedia

Try using Google’s define search for tens of other definitions.

For the context of this post series, SEO is not about finding holes in search engines and become number one for the keyword as long as the exploits remain open. Far from that, it is about understanding what elements search engines look for on-page and off-page to determine the relevance of the page to a search term. And then, of course, to comply to the guidelines.

SEO covers topic such as proper web design that focuses on on-page optimization, the structure of content, to choosing the right host, to getting web “spiders” or “crawlers” find the site, and having them rank your page as high as possible in the search engine result pages.

By understanding what elements that matter and making sure we have an optimal representation of pages and their relationships, we can hopefully increase page rankings.

Last but not all, SEO is not about getting search spiders to like your pages, but end up with non-sense content and/or layout that no human visitors can consume. After all, the end-goal is to have visitors raise their hand to want more information from you, or better still, to actually buy your product or service.

So, it is about balancing both. You will see that indeed it is possible to satisfy the search crawlers and at the same time make the pages compelling to human visitors.

It is easy to get offended with such a myriad of information and topics around SEO. I guess that happens to all of us when trying to learn totally new stuff. But, I promise, as you progress, you will notice patterns that will just seem natural. In fact, complying with modern search engines is closer to writing naturally than ever!

The effort should be worth it. Best of all, you can do it for a very low budget or even free, if you have all the time and are not afraid to work and re-work on your existing sites.

Good luck.

Welcome to Search Engine Optimization for Beginners series.

These are (or will be) a series of of blog posts for those who are new to the world of search engine optimization. I write these posts with one goal in mind: to have a centralized and coordinated resources for beginners to get started quickly in the right direction.

Most of the posts will happen in the next few weeks, but this section will always be work in progress.

I think I can safely presume that if you want to know about search engine optimization, you have some experiences with the Internet and using search engines. Perhaps, you have tried to create web pages or a site.

As a blogger, I realize that although I know relatively much about search engine optimization and pay-per-click, my knowledge is still limited and far from complete. This is when participation from you — the readers — are absolutely necessary. Contribution and collective knowledge of us should give more value as a whole.

If you enjoy these posts and want to keep getting updates from me, then make use of the RSS feed.

Let’s get started.

Welcome new readers.

It might be a little confusing on your part that you subscribe to this feed, but there is nothing new updated in this blog for months.

Well, I’ll tell you.

It’s been crazy on my part. No, it’s not that I have been busy and neglected you.

But, it had something to do with my health. If you noticed, since October 2006 I had tremendously reduced the amount of posts I commit to this blog.

Now that I feel better, I think I could start posting again regularly.

Let’s see… My plan in book is to start a newbie series on search engine optimization (SEO), and then pay-per-click, especially AdWords. If you are a savvy marketer, please bear with me here. I have something in store for you too. I noticed some Google AdWords changes that you may want to know about and what my strategies to quickly overcome — not as a workaround — the problem.

In the world of SEO, it always changes faster than for anyone to keep up.

As always, I’ll mix up the regular content with news and other things that matter. Again please bear with me as I complete some beginner stuff because a part of my readers are actually very new to these topics.

If you have questions, feel free to use the contact form or post right away using the comment system.

I hope you like it.