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Internet gambling is increasing in terms of the amount being spent and the number of people involved.

THE comforts of home and anonymity are luring growing numbers to internet gambling, say academics at Southern Cross University after undertaking Australia's biggest study into the latest betting trend.

All the evidence suggests that internet gambling is increasing in terms of the amount being spent and the number of people involved, and it doesn't look like slowing down, said Sally Gainsbury from the university's Centre for Gambling Education & Research.

A report she published last week with researchers from Sydney University surveyed 6682 internet gamblers to learn more about their behaviour.

The attractions of internet gambling include not having to leave the house or drive anywhere, 24-hour availability, convenience, lack of crowds and unpleasant people.

The main perceived disadvantages of internet gambling were that it is too convenient and that it is easier to spend more money at home where there are no limits applied to credit card use.

The study also showed that internet gamblers participate in a greater variety of gambling formats and are more frequently involved in gambling.

"This could indicate that consumers are adding internet gambling to an existing repertoire of gambling, or conversely, that internet gambling is facilitating a higher frequency of gambling given the high accessibility and convenience of this medium," Ms Gainsbury said. "It is likely that both causal pathways exist".

Understanding the impact of this new mode of gambling on existing and new players was an important contribution to the appropriate regulation of the activity, Ms Gainsbury said.

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Internet gambling burgeoning: study

The Internet Society, a nonprofit that operates the .org registry and funds Internet standards development work, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a gala event in Geneva next month.

ISOC is dedicated to the idea that the Internet should be a decentralised platform for innovation that is open to all people around the globe. ISOC sponsors the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards-setting body, as well as the Internet Architecture Board, which provides technical advice to policymakers. With 120 corporate members, 100 chapters and nearly 60,000 individual members, ISOC is a powerful advocate for transparent, self-governing process for developing the technical underpinnings of the Internet.

We spoke with Lynn St. Amour (pictured), president and CEO of ISOC, about the group's biggest successes over the last 20 years and the challenges it faces in the future. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

The date of incorporation was in early January 1992. It basically came out of work that Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn [inventors of the Internet Protocol] were doing to create a charter statement for the organization.

We're having a year-long celebration. On our website, we have a feature called "The Wishing Tree" where we are collecting people's wishes for the Internet. We're also launching an Internet Hall of Fame at the INET conference in April. We'll be announcing three categories of winners. One category is pioneers, who are the people who were there at the dawn of the Internet. Another one is for global connectors, those people who have done extraordinary things to bring the Internet to other communities, in some cases developing countries and in other cases new applications. Then we have a third category that is innovators. We'll be making the announcement of our first inductees at the global INET conference in Geneva, where we will have a gala awards dinner. Global INET will be a celebration, where we have past trustees and luminaries such as Leonard Kleinrock coming to speak. We also have Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf. INET is April 23 to 24. The gala is the 23rd.

We're stronger than we've ever been. We are very happy to continue supporting the IETF in a way that's given them autonomy for all of their activities. We're able to do that because ISOC bid to run the .org registry 10 years ago. The Public Interest Registry (PIR) is the supporting entity for ISOC to run .org. The .org income allows us to do an awful lot more in terms of development activities around the world. We do a lot with Internet exchange points and grants, where $5,000 or $10,000 can make a tremendous difference in a whole community. We're financially stable. This year our budget is $35 million, with 80 percent from PIR and .org registrations across the world. The rest is from our members, various IETF events and other grants. We have offices in 14 countries, with our two main offices being in Geneva and just outside Washington, D.C., in Virginia. We will have 80 employees at the end of this year.

One is our support for the IETF and enabling the IETF to maintain its culture, processes and autonomy. I think that's been a great partnership, and it's one of the things we are most proud of. Another is our policy activities. In virtually every significant body that has to do with Internet policy, we are either a member or we have special standing that allows us access to meetings and presentations. That's really come along in the last four to five years. We're extremely happy and proud of that. Lastly, the Internet is successful because of its distributed nature. We're trying to mirror that in our organisation. Five or six years ago, we launched our first regional bureau. Now we have five regional bureaus in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia Pacific and North America. This allows us to build our staff and build much stronger relationships with all the regional players, whether they are policymakers or large, commercial companies. Our third major accomplishment would be our ability to distribute our engagement to a broad global reach.

Scale. There are over 260 countries in the world, and a lot of policy activity going on. Our ability to help people understand the Internet environment in a way that they can establish policy and regulate that environment in a way that's best for their citizens and best for the Internet is a pretty daunting task. We'd like to be more proactive, but often we find ourselves trying to step in and explain why we believe something is inappropriate.

ISOC is a major contributor to the IETF. Do you think the IETF is as relevant as it once was? Vendors tell me regularly that they are frustrated with the slow pace at which the IETF is able to create RFCs.

The IETF has always been the premier standards body for the Internet, and I think that is still true. As the Internet has grown, the number of applications has grown and the complexity of the environment has grown. It does take longer to develop and test a standard. I believe strongly that the IETF way of developing standards is the most appropriate. There is no other comparable body where you can openly debate and deliver standards.

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Happy 20th anniversary Internet Society!

This month at conversion conference, I covered a session on the interplay between CRO and SEO. It was great to see a ton of internet marketers thinking about introducing CRO in their SEO process. In the past, SEOs and user experience or conversion scientists didnt play well together. What was good for SEO was not typically great for conversions. But things are changing now, with Googles recent algorithm updates Panda, Above the fold ads and Matt Cutts recent talk on penalizing over optimized websites Googles forcing (for lack of a better work) SEOs to think and merge their optimization efforts with conversion/user experience in mind. Social signals (likes, tweets, +1s) and bounce rates are already part of the ranking algorithm in the months to come I see these becoming more and more important. In this article, Id like to cover 3 tactical methods of driving qualified SEO traffic that converts

Leverage SEM data to help qualify keywords for SEO efforts. Its no longer valuable to go after keywords that have high search volume because its become much tougher to rank for keywords that your site doesnt have a close correlation to, you might spend months to get to the 1st 10 positions only to find out that although the keywords are generating traffic they are not converting. Here are some steps to help you drive qualified traffic

a) Use Google keyword tool to analyze the segment of keywords you want to drive traffic to:

This segment of keywords is your low hanging fruit keywords that are ranking in the Top 10 on search engines and drive a high conversion rate. You can now create multiple segments SERP Position: 2nd Page, SERP Position 3rd Page and concentrate your SEO efforts on these keyword sets.

I would also recommend using this data for your link building initiatives. You can add another layer of information landing page to this grid that will help analyze which keywords to build links for with the target URL. Building links with variation in anchor text for the same landing page is an effective link building strategy.

With Matt Cutts recent talk on Google penalizing sites that are over optimized, its time to remove content elements that were included only to help improve rankings. An over optimized site would not only get your site penalized but its harming conversion rate. Heres an example of an over optimized site. Elements that might be considered as over optimization:

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ROI Driven SEO – 3 Powerful Tips to Effectively Convert Your SEO Traffic

South Korean takes the lead without hitting a single shot during storm-infested Sunday

Colorado Springs, Colo. Hee Kyung Seo has a chance to carve her own special place in history. Not simply as a U.S. Open winner but as a U.S. Open winner who won it without hitting a single shot on the final day.

In a strange, storm-infested tournament that doesn't want to end, Seo did just about everything she could to win her first major except control the weather. She shot a pair of 3-under 68s on Sunday to finish at 3-under 281 for a one-shot lead over her South Korean rival, So Yeon Ryu, who had three holes left when darkness halted play.

Cristie Kerr was another shot back with two holes left.

Seo will sleep on the lead though not as comfortably as she could have after missing a 3-foot par putt on No. 17 and then has a chance to wake up Monday, come to the course, never touch a club and walk away with the trophy and a check for $585,000.

I can sleep very well, so I don't worry about that, she said.

But she couldn't celebrate quite yet.

Rain delayed play for the fourth time in four days this time for 2 hours, 37 minutes and left 28 players still on the course, three of whom still have a shot at the title.

There's Ryu, who shot 69 on her first trip around the course Sunday morning and has at least one decent birdie opportunity the par-5 17th awaiting when play resumes Monday.

Right now, it's kind of breezy out there, she said when she walked off. Tomorrow, it might be good weather and the greens might be soft. So, it's good for me, yeah.

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Seo leads at U.S. Women's Open

The ongoing SEO responsibility of attaining and retaining a productive organic search engine presence requires patience, tenacity, and a focus on every detail that might have an impact. Moderated by Thom Craver (@thomcraver), Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), The Tools of the Trade for SEO panel at SES New York 2012 pulled together more than 40 tools in this whirlwind session.

Michael King (@iPullRank), SEO Manager, Publicis Modem, came up first with his presentation, Tools for Pulling Rank Nearly Every Tool Youll Ever Need EVER. King's presentation provided the comprehensive list of tools for the advanced and aspiring SEO professional to investigate.

Here is a short list of most (certainly not all) of those tools covered:

Some of the tools above were proprietary or built upon functionality inherent to the understanding and administration of available resources. King's perspective: "the ability to code gives you super powers."

Fortunately for conference attendees and Search Engine Watch readers (and writers), King was kind enough to provide his presentation on Slideshare. What was King's most important tool for SEO? His brain. More on that connectivity a bit later in the session.

There actually is a relatively non-Bing, non-Google world online. In Asian markets, Baidu commands as much as 80 percent of the market and only in Japan has Google teamed up to provide a search engine presence.

T.R. Harrington (@netchina),Chief Operating Officer, Darwin Marketing, took the session down a different path overseas but started with a quick poll.

How do you find SEO tools: webinar, reviews, peer recommendations, or by performing a search? The majority of SES New York attendees used peer recommendations or performed searches. According to a SkyRocket survey, 77 perent used peer recommendations to find these types of tools. Bottom line: recommendation.

For keyword research, Baidu Insights is an excellent option with free user demographics. The only drawback? Lack of English UI. Harringtonnoted that for certain brand-based keywords, search results look much more like a branded microsite. Baidu also puts a significant amount of paid search ads in the left-hand side.

For monitoring, Advanced Web Ranking for works well for Baidu. There is also SERP Update Monitoring for Yandex (Russia): Update Analyzer. In China there was also Super Manager for ranking monitoring (unfortunately uncertain about the link reference on this one).

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40+ SEO Tools of the Trade