Another good friend, Brad Geddes, referred to the PPC Hero post (in his great BGTheory blog) and added a clever method for typing trademark symbols.

Both of these posts got me thinking: are there other symbols that advertisers can use in their ads?

Google’s policies seem to explicitly prohibit advertisers from including symbols in ad text. If you do it the wrong way, Google AdWords may display a message like this:

Google policy does not permit excessive or unnecessary punctuation or symbols, or use of nonstandard punctuation, including tildes (~), asterisks (*),and vertical rules (|). Please see our full policy.

The “full policy” hints that it may be possible to include symbols, but the practice is discouraged:

Use standard punctuation and symbols.

• Don’t use repeated, unnecessary, or gimmicky punctuation or symbols.
• Your title may not contain an exclamation point.
• Your entire ad text may only contain one exclamation point in total.
• The use of symbols, numbers, and letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.

But, I reasoned, doesn’t Google necessarily accept “non-standard” symbols in ad text? After all, many non-English languages use characters outside the English-language ASCII character set.

So I tried a few experiments. First I tried inserting bullet points — something I’d seen in other blog posts — and was a little surprised to see that ads like this were accepted:

Cool! Bullets can make an ad really stand out, and it’s very likely that CTR will be higher for such ads.

So I tried a few crazy variations:

Those are “greater than or equal” signs — a bit spiffier than plain-vanilla greater-than signs.

Then I started to think about the fact that there are symbols that look like doubled letters. Like the Number symbol that looks like the letters “No:”

Savvy readers will realize this is like squeezing a few extra characters into an ad.

You can see where all this is going — and I expect to see some pretty zany ads from now on. A few caveats:

1. The easiest way I’ve found to discover and create the full range of available symbols is to fire up Microsoft Word and use the “Insert Symbols” function. Then copy and paste a symbol from the word document to your ad.
2. Not all symbols from all fonts will work. I’ve experimented with the Courier font, and a few — like the smiley face symbol - were outright rejected by AdWords.
3. It’s likely that human editors will eventually reject the ad. But “eventually” could be a looong time.

David Szetel

Like last week, when I received a request for proposal from a ticket reselling company. In their RFP, they said they understood that their business was highly competitive for organic search.

Their competitors are pretty firmly entrenched, plus there are hundreds of similar sites. It would take a large commitment for this company to be able to compete with the big boys. And they were willing, and ready, to spend the money necessary to make it happen, or so they claimed.

They would give the SEO firm three months to achieve results. Their exact words: “…have the budget to do that [compete with the big boys] for the first few months to see if it works out.”

Mind you, this request for proposal was for a Web site that has a Google PageRank of 0. They had virtually no content on their home page, or any other page. And their main content (the tickets that they represent) exists within a frame.

Know what the worst part is? I guarantee you (wow, an SEO guy making a guarantee?) that someone will send this guy a proposal.

That someone will say all the right things and get some of this company’s money. They’ll make this person feel warm and fuzzy about the potential and how great things are going to be. Then, three months from now, that company is going to be out of money and pissed.

Then, as often happens, the entire SEO industry takes a collective reputation hit. We all feel the effects of people taking advantage of situations to earn the quick buck, without giving thought to the ethics of what they’re doing. That’s the one thing I hate about my job.

So, I continue writing au Natural in the hopes that we can bring transparency to the process. To that end, let’s talk about the issue of “time.”

How Long Does it Take for SEO to Show Results?

The answer is, there is no answer.

If a prospective client asked me to answer this question in less than five minutes, I couldn’t. The one exception would be a huge brand whose site just had a few apparent flaws that could send their rankings through the roof with some minor tweaks; that’s the only scenario where you can be confident that things can happen quickly. For most Web sites, we have to look at several factors to make this determination. Even then, it’s truly an estimate/projection/guess.

We don’t know for certain when results will kick in. We don’t own the search engines. SEOs are like public relations companies. We can do the work to help your presence, but we don’t control the rankings.

For a new Web site trying to compete in one of the most competitive areas of SEO, the answer for “how long” might be two years, or more.

In the case of the ticket site, they were behind the competition before they even launched. Their competitors had already been optimizing their sites for years.

To truly compete, the ticket site will have to commit to SEO, however long it takes. Unless this new site has the “next great widget” that will make their ticket services far superior to the others, then there’s little hope of seeing results quickly, certainly not within three months!

Now, for sites trying to compete against local keywords, with a very niche product or service offerings, there’s a great chance to see results quickly. Even “quickly” depends upon factors such as domain age, links, and quantity and quality of content. Graphics-heavy Web sites built in frames with virtually no text content have little hope of ranking for anything, ever.

What about companies that have had a Web site for many years, but haven’t given any consideration to SEO? These sites probably already have some good content and natural links to their Web site. All they need is some help structuring things correctly for SEO and gaining more valuable links. Even then, without knowing the competitive nature of the other Web sites in the SERPs, it’s difficult to project.

Bottom Line

SEO is an investment that will show you returns if you’re committed to the process for however long it takes.

There are only 10 “top” positions in the search engines. Chances are, many of those in the top 10 have been doing SEO for a while. To compete with them, you’ll have to do it for a while, too.

Results will come…in time.

Mark Jackson

This is the first of two articles outlining the SEO problems they identified with dynamic Web sites and solutions. I’ll expand on both.

At the very highest level, dealing with large dynamic Web sites requires IT and marketing to collaborate. The person responsible for the technical search engine optimization is an important member of the team. Without the cooperation of technical SEO support staff, your Web site can end up poorly optimized for search engines.

Keyword Research and Deployment

Do your keyword research up front. You need to understand the language potential customers use to find the products or services you offer. You also want to understand related topics that interest these potential customers.

You then want to match up this understanding of the marketplace with the available content you have, or are willing to develop, and design a logical and clean hierarchy around that.

Laura said embedding keywords into your page names (i.e. the URI) is a powerful SEO tactic. In fact, she recommends existing sites embed the most important keywords for each page into their URI (and then 301 redirecting the old page location to the new page location).

Don’t use the same titles and headers for all the pages of your site. That’s another reason to do keyword research. The long tail of keywords enable you to create a different title and header for every page of the site.

Large sites also have issues with pages being found and indexed. Make sure the most important keywords for your site appear in the title and header for the home page.

Robots.txt Files

Matt pointed out that it’s surprising how many sites have problems with their robots.txt file. He provided a tutorial on how robot.txt files work. You can also find good tutorials on the Web.

I’ve seen many sites that have problems with Robots.txt. While it’s a powerful tool for directing the way search engine crawlers see your site, it’s easy to make a mistake. A single mistake can have catastrophic consequences. So use robots.txt, just use the file with great care.

To illustrate how easy it is to make a mistake, we worked with a client a while back that implemented new versions of their site on a staging server separate from the one used for the main site. This allowed them to look at the site live before launching it.

They didn’t want this duplicate site indexed by the search engines, so they implemented a robots.txt as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Experienced readers are already cringing because they know where this is going. Unfortunately, one day during a site update they copied the whole site from the staging server to the live server, including the robots.txt file.

It took 3 weeks before anyone noticed, and that happened because traffic to the site was already crashing. Ouch. Again, use it, but be careful.

Site Maps

The Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, as well as when each URL was last updated, how often it usually changes, and its importance relative to other URLs in the site. The protocol was designed to enable search engines crawl the site more intelligently. In principle, this should help the search engine find all of the pages on your site more easily than crawling it naturally.

Matt had a great point when he told the audience you’re better off letting your site being found naturally by the crawler. He referred to Sitemaps as a “fast track to the supplemental index”.

I couldn’t agree more. We don’t use Sitemaps on our clients’ sites.

The two best solutions for the crawlability problem — lots of pages not being indexed — the following two steps are the best solution:

1. Build an efficient and clean global navigation system on your site. There is no better way to help a crawler find your site than a logical and simple navigation structure. If you do this, the crawler will find its way around.
2. Get third party sites to link to your site. No on-site search engine optimization strategy will work unless you get these links.

Summary

We’ve outlined three key problem areas with sites that have dynamically generated content: information architecture and keyword research; robots.txt files; and the use of Sitemaps.

When search engines don’t index pages on your site, invest your time and energy in site navigation and inbound link development, rather than using Sitemaps protocols.

Author:Searchenginewatch

One often-ignored aspect of landing page testing is coherency. Coherency is an overall sense of your design “hanging together.” It’s a congruity and harmonious consistency in the relation of all landing page parts to the whole.

It’s clear to most Internet surfers within a split second of clicking on a link whether the destination page has coherency. It’s also clear when coherency is lacking. Visitors respond to incoherent pages with a variety of gut reactions, and none of them are flattering. In the extreme, such pages can be experienced as tacky, cheesy, bewildering, or obnoxious. Unfortunately, you’ve probably seen hundreds of examples before.

Low-coherency landing pages affect visitors on an emotional level, and no amount of logic will convince them to linger on them. And that’s a pity, especially when the content is relevant to their needs. But they can’t get past the cognitive dissonance of the inconsistent presentation to even focus on the intended message.

Incoherent and unprofessional pages also give most consumers a low confidence in the product. The visual design of the page is particularly important. This includes consistent color palettes; professional graphics in the same visual style; consistent font sizes, colors, and families; and the amount and layout of the writing.

Coherency is an emergent property of the unified whole. All of the supporting elements that contribute to it must work together. Coherency-related elements should be grouped into a single unified look-and-feel that governs the visual experience of your landing pages.

The need for high coherency is an excellent reason to consider whole-page redesigns (especially in low data rate environments). This allows you to fix all known visual problems in one shot. Often, the details of good coherence have already been formally codified in your company’s visual design brief document. Much of the actual implementation can be encapsulated in Cascading Style Sheets.

Conversely, if fine-granularity test elements (including individual graphics and buttons) are used, the tester can unwittingly decrease the coherency of the landing page. This happens in two primary ways: mixing, and unexpected juxtaposition.

Let’s assume all the elements you decide to test on your original page have significant problems. You spend considerable time writing your test plan document and coming up with better alternatives for each of the original elements, and you succeed. Each of the new elements is in isolation better than its original counterpart. In fact, when they’re all collected together in a coherent new whole, they become even more synergistic and powerful.

Unfortunately, if you’re running a typical multivariate test, the new elements will be mixed and matched at random with other elements that were part of your original design. When this kind of mixing occurs, the new elements may actually suffer by their combination with poor-quality original elements. They’ll be judged by the company they keep, not on their own merits.

In such cases, the new elements will look worse than they really are. They may even seem worse than their original counterparts due to the fact that the mixing produced a wider range of quality differences on the page. In other words, the original design elements may have been mediocre, but they were all roughly equally mediocre. The introduction of a new element into this mix actually brought the quality difference into even sharper contrast, thus making the overall design seem worse.

Unexpected juxtaposition can be another source of decreased coherency. Since all elements are shuffled randomly in the testing process, it’s critical to consider in advance how nearby combinations of elements may appear, and to anticipate potential problems.

For example, let’s assume you have a landing page that includes a call-to-action button, long descriptive text, and a second call-to-action button with different text. Your test plan contains alternatives for the last two elements.

In your brainstorming, you decide that since most people won’t read the long descriptive text, the alternative is to remove it altogether (a reasonable variant to test). You also figure that having a consistent call to action is important for the strength of your messaging, and decide to test a copy of the first call to action as an alternative to the second one (also a reasonable course of action in isolation).

However, based on this test plan, a quarter of your audience will see a version of the page that includes two back-to-back copies of the first call-to-action button (without any intervening text). Most visitors will think that your landing page is broken, or that your Web designer accidentally inserted an extra copy of the button. In either case, they’ll probably have a negative reaction to it.

The removal of the descriptive text and the repetition of the first call to action in the second one will both be penalized. This example was fairly obvious, but this type of test design mistake is common among inexperienced testers.

When you’re writing your test plan and deciding what to test, don’t ignore the strong potential impact of coherency. Remember, the test isn’t just about the individual page elements, but also how well they play together.

By Tim Ash

Yahoo is taking the next step in its “open” strategy with the launch today of BOSS: Build your Own Search Service. The BOSS program will allow third parties to build their own search engine using Yahoo’s index and ranking methodologies as a base.

Building a competitive search engine would require upwards of $300 million in capital investments, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search. Besides the hardware involved, there is a limited pool of talent available that can create the query handling, ranking, indexing and crawling infrastructure. Add to that the need for massive amounts of data to achieve relevance, and it becomes nearly impossible for smaller players to compete.

Yahoo is changing all of that with BOSS, Raghavan said.

“This is a bold direction for any search principal to take,” he said. “We’re expecting this to disrupt the market, and that includes ourselves.”

By disrupting the search engine market, Yahoo hopes to bring more choice to consumers, while also taking away some of Google’s share. Where Search Monkey opened up Yahoo’s SERPs, BOSS opens up Yahoo’s infrastructure and technology, and extends it outside of Yahoo.

Using the BOSS APIs, partners will be able to take Yahoo’s search results and apply their own ranking criteria, creating their own customized search engine. The BOSS API is based on Yahoo’s full index of Web search, news and image search results, as well as spell correction, Raghavan said.

There are three levels to the BOSS program. The first is a self-service API, which will be available to partners who want to build their own search engine using Yahoo results as a base. Examples could include social, vertical, or visual search engines. The second is an API program for academics, dubbed BOSS University. Yahoo is partnering with the computer science departments of several top universities to allow them to use the BOSS program in their research.

Yahoo will also offer partners the BOSS Mashup Framework, a software library that provides tools for data joins and other tasks. It will also offer some ready-made SERP templates, which partners will be able to customize for themselves. Since Yahoo is not in control of the way partners rank results, it has made it clear that these BOSS results are not allowed to be attributed to Yahoo.

The third tier is BOSS Custom, a program where Yahoo will work with a very limited set of partners to customize their integration of Yahoo’s results into their own search engines. These partners will generally fit into two main categories, Raghavan said. The first includes companies with their own ranking and/or presentation methodologies, such as semantic search engine Hakia. Hakia is using Yahoo’s results, to which it applies its own “secret sauce,” he said. Hakia is not replacing its own indexing process completely, but rather using BOSS to accelerate the process.

The other category of partner includes companies with proprietary data, such as user profiles or behavior, that can be used to affect search results. One such company is Me.dium, a browser toolbar that lets users connect with each other and find related sites recommended based on other users’ surfing habits. Me.dium will use Yahoo’s BOSS data to create a social search engine that will rank results based on what its users say is important.

At launch, all reordering of search results must be done by the partner. Over time, Yahoo expects to begin offering “knobs” that will allow partners to dial up or down certain criteria in the results, such as favoring recent results, or results from blogs, Raghavan said.

Eventually, Yahoo expects to monetize the program by requiring partners to show Yahoo ads alongside their results, in which partners will share the revenue generated. Yahoo is holding off on doing so at launch to allow time to monitor the quality of traffic coming in from BOSS partners, to ensure that advertisers would not be hurt by having their ads displayed in that manner, Raghavan said.

It is quite difficult to select a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Vendor, especially in
a large city like New york.

One of the main reasons is because each vendor has different service offering and
quite often it’s like comparing apples with oranges.
This SEO article will offer you tips on some crucial aspects of Search Engine
Optimization and helps understand how you can compare services of different
search engine optimization companies.
After reading this SEO article you can ask the right questions to SEO search engine
optimization companiesand their answers will help you select a vendor who
matches your needs.
The following topics will be covered:

• How to shortlist SEO companies.

• 10 tips on comparing SEO search engine optimization companies.

How to shortlist SEO companies.

Use Google, Yahoo, MSN to search for SEO companies using  targeted local keywords like
Web Solutions in New York, Search Engine Optimization in New York, New York SEO Companies,
New York SEO services, New York Search Engine Optimization Services, New York Web Solutions,
etc. Do not restrict your self to just organic rankings, but
look at paid listings also.

There is a popular misconception that all good SEO  -search engine optimization
companies will rank on first page of Google. Many SEO companies get
credit links from the bottom of their client website
which can get them on first page of Google. But
they might not be able to use the same strategy for
your website. So it’s not necessarily true that only
companies ranking naturally on Google’s first page
are good. It might take you some time getting used
to this concept, but once you consider this, it will
open up your mind to lot of potentially good
search engine optimization companies.

You should ideally shortlist 3 to 5 search engine optimization companies
(by looking at the information available on their website). However if you have
more time, you can expand this list to cover 10 search engine optimization companies.
Make sure to have atleast one local company in the shortlist. Although we at Eagle
SEO New York believe that geographical boundaries are not a limitation to successful SEO,
we also strongly believe that all things being equal, a local company should always be selected.

Section II: 10 Tips to compare a SEO Vendor

Once you have short listed these companies, start using the tips given below to
finalize a vendor.

Tip 1:- Check if the vendor provides Web 2.0 and/or Social Media
Optimization?

There is a lot of hype surrounding Web 2.0
and Social Media Optimization. Some of it is
true while remaining is…. well Hype!
However, Blogs, RSS Feeds, Social book
marking have now become an important part
of overall SEO strategy. Why? Google rolled
out Universal search in May 2007. This has
drastically changed Google’s search results
interface as it now includes results from more
information sources like News, Videos, Google
Maps.

It might be easier to create a video
about your products/ service and rank this video in Google rather than rank
your web page. In short, just ask your SEO vendor what Web 2.0 and Social
media optimization techniques they use and whether you will get all of these
services.

Tip 2:- Does the service cover Press Release Distribution?
Online Press Release distribution is a good way to generate
links. Also companies like PR Web have a syndication network
and their press releases are picked up by other websites
through RSS feeds. Press releases are a great way to get
exposure in Google and Yahoo news. They are also effective
in countering negative publicity about your company. Hence,
it’s important to ask your SEO vendor whether they provide
press release distribution.

Tip 3:- Ask if your website will be optimized for Local search?
Local search includes not only submission to important
local directories like Google Maps or Yahoo Local but
also other smaller ones like Citysearch, Ask City and
Local.com. You also need to have a listing in Online
Yellow page directories. Having presence in these
local search engines and Yellow pages websites will
get you local traffic and can also get you wider
exposure because of Google Universal search interface.

Tip 4:- Does the service include link building?
Many SEO search engine optimization companies do not include link building as part of
their service offering and offer it as an add-on service.
While this is fine, what is wrong on their part is not to
inform this to you as a client. So while a SEO vendor
might charge you $2000 for SEO, link buying may cost you
an additional $1500. This will significantly increase your
budget. So ask your SEO vendor whether the service
includes link building or not. If not, how much extra
would you need to spend on link building.

Tip 5:- Request a few case studies and references
There are some genuine reasons (for SEO search engine optimization companies) not
to display Case Studies on their website. But there is
really no excuse for not giving out case studies of actual results for other
companies when requested. It is very important that you ask for few
client case studies and references. Either call or email
these references and make sure there are not any
discrepancies. Ask those references how was their
overall experience working with the SEO vendor.

Tip 6:- Confirm who will make changes to your website? You or the SEO
vendor?

This is a debatable area. Many SEO search engine optimization companies come in as consultants and give you
a report of what changes need to be done on your website. Ask them who will
implement the changes on your website. If the changes are simple in nature
(like working on html pages) then some SEO companies will include this work
within the quoted SEO price. On the other hand if the changes are extensive
and require either programming or database changes, most SEO companies
might either work with your existing development company or give you a quote
for implementing the changes. In either case, make sure whether the SEO
company will make changes to the site. If not, then how much extra will they
charge?

Tip 7:- Request few sample client reports and ask them what is their
reporting frequency?

It’s generally a good practice
to ask what types of reports
you can expect and what would
be the frequency of these
reports. If you are still not
sure, ask the vendor to show
you some sample reports (to
get an idea of what to expect).
Many SEO search engine optimization companies remove
client name and other sensitive
data and show you examples of
reports.

Tip 8:- Check how much time (or man hours) they will spend on your
project?

Asking how much time they would spend on your
project will give you a quick estimate of what their
hourly rates are. This will help you compare hourly
rates with other search engine optimization companies and also give you a
benchmark for any additional work.

Tip 9:- Clarify what kind of support you will get.

It’s very rare in SEO industry to
get face to face meetings with
your SEO (Unless the SEO vendor is
local or your SEO budget is in
hundreds of thousands of dollars).
However, ask your vendor what
kind of support you will get.
Email, Chat and telephone calls
are the three major forms of
support. Although not all clients might get chat or telephone support. For email
support, ask them what is the average response time to a customer question. It
should not be more than 24 hours.

Tip 10:- Negotiating Payment Terms / Frequency and
Discounts?

Do not pay full payment upfront. Payment should be made in
at least two installments. Check out the frequency of
payment. Also check if they offer monthly installments.
Discounts are sometimes possible if you are committing for a
longer time or have multiple projects. In either case, ask
them for a discount. If you don’t ask they will not tell.

Section III: Conclusion

We hope this helps you in comparing a good SEO vendor. If you have any comments
or feedback about this white paper, do write to us on seo @ E-agle.com
About Eagle SEO New York Inc
Eagle SEO New York Inc is a New York based Search Marketing Agency which specializes in
Search Engine Optimization . . Eagle SEO New York has been featured in PC Magazine as well as Laptop magazine.
With 150 people, Eagle SEO New York is one of the largest Search Marketing Companies in
the world with over 10 years experience in Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per
Click and Affiliate Marketing Services. Eagle SEO New York has executed more than 3000
successful Search Marketing projects, has over 500 clients in US.
Our teams in US and Israel work for Clients of all sizes: from small, innovative
startups to public companies. Eagle SEO New York also works with small and large agencies
and offers them Private Label Search Marketing Services.

Contact us at:

646-PEOPLE-2
Website: http://www.e-agle.com
E-mail: SEO @ E-agle.com