Over the last few months I have had a number of emails and calls from clients and other website owners asking about how to protect their trademarks that are being targeted by competitors in Google paid placement ads.

It seems that a number of organizations have gotten hip to the practice of using brand names (other than their own) as targeted keywords for ad placements.  Generally this is because either the brand name has become common usage for a product or service or simply because the brand is far better known and has much better organic placement in regular search results.

So what can you do if a competitor is targeting your trademark brand in Google searches?

The answer is mixed.   If someone is using your trademark in the actual text of their ad then you can file a trademark complaint with Google here.

However, if someone is simply targeting your trademark as a keyword AND DOES NOT use your trademark in the actual text of their ad, then you essentially have no recourse.   Google Scope of Investigation document states:

“Google is dedicated to providing relevant advertising to our users, advertisers, and publishers alike. Accordingly, our trademark policy aims to provide users with choices relevant to their keywords. At the same time, we investigate trademark violations in ad text, both as a courtesy to the trademark owner and to ensure that ads are clear to users.”

They then provide a list of countries in which their policy of allowing trademarks in targeting keywords applies… they list all but about 8 countries.

In addition, while they do not allow direct ad copy that includes trademarks, they will allow – and I quote – “We do not take any action in situations where an advertisement is being triggered by non-trademarked terms, even though the search query contains a trademarked term.

The example provided shows that you can use the term ‘shoes’ as a keyword for your ad and Google will send you traffic from people searching for  “Nike shoes”

Confused about how this can possibly be legal?

While I am not a lawyer (apologies to my parents), the sense I get is that a direct ad title with a trademark brand is a very black and white area legally.  So Google has no choice but to disallow (if you go through the dance involved in complaining to them).  However, the rest of the issues on targeted keywords without trademark text as well as query strings including trademarks are sufficiently grey that they can afford a legal fight more than you can.

Anyone who has ever attempted to use photoshop to save a document as a pdf has encountered the dreaded conversion limitations of photoshop when it comes to saving a file as a pdf.

Long story short, documents with even the smallest images in photoshop result in tremendously large file sizes in the finished pdf document.   Working your way through the compression options and format selections, you will eventually run into the fact that you can either have a good looking document or a small document… not both.  This article shows you a quick and dirty method for generating a very small sized pdf for your site.

If you search online (even at the adobe website) for techniques to reduce the file size you will see many suggestions to use the ‘reduce file size’ option in acrobat.   Yet starting with a 5mb photoshop file you will be lucky to end up below 3mb after using their suggested technique.   A quick, dirty and efficient alternative is described below.   To use this method, you must have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer.

1. Open your psd document (in my case I am using a document 6mb  (8.5 x 11 Canvas Size at a resoultion of 300dpi).
2. Reduce your resultion to 150dpi (this is for moderate image useage… if you have large, important images you may want to keep it at 300dpi).   This is done via the Alt + CTRL +I command or Image – Image Size menu option.
3. 
4. Next, select File – Save For Web and Devices from the menu options.
5. We will save this file as a gif using high quality options (and preserving transparancy if it exists)
6. 
7. Find this .gif file and right-click.  Select the ‘Convert to Adobe PDF” command.   *Note: this assumes you have adobe acrobat installed on your system.  If you don’t… well then you’re in some trouble…

Using my example, I now have a pdf 142kb in size.   This is a massive size savings and allows me to have a pdf that web surfers can download and print.

There are some downsides to this technique.   First, you cannot preserve text as text for use in acrobat… so you cannot allow electronic editing and the pdf itself is not editable.  To make changes you need to go back to your original psd file to do so and then repeat this technique.

So as long as you do not need the pdf to be electronically edited and submitted and merely need a small, downloadable and printable document for your website you are good to go.

Today Google announced that they have addded site speed as a part of their ranking algorithm.
This has been expected for quite some time and Google states that they are concerned with site speed as an indicator of improved user experience on the web.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs” – Google

It is still unknown exactly how much of a factor site speed will be on your site’s rankings, Google has indicated that it will lag far behind site relevance yet it can still have an effect.. .especially for users with bargain-basement hosting plans on crowded, shared servers.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools Google has suggested to evaluate the speed of your site:

* YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
* WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
* In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

A great article on Smashing Magazine today concerning WordPress Widgets

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/14/5-useful-and-creative-ways-to-use-wordpress-widgets/

More and more people are using WordPress both for blogging and handling their entire website.  This article provides some great resources on using widgets.

This morning I read a fantastic article from Mandy Brown titled In Defence of Readers.  In brief, she discussing the need to shape web pages in a manner that is in tune with the needs of the visitor.

The article provokes some thought.  While the focus of her article is creating an environment that promotes quality reading for visitors we can extend this idea out to promoting quality conversions of targeted traffic.

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Like millions of other small business owners I have had to come to grips with accounting for my time and invoicing my clients efficiently and accurately.

After trying three different time tracking and invoicing systems (and finding all three woefully inadequate) I had finally resigned myself to putting in a substantial amount of time to creating my own system.

And then I stumbled onto freshbooks.

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