Start looking for the Keyword Planner in your AdWords account.

The Keyword Planner is powerful, you can now really estimate activity

1. Choose options before you start search for keywords, estimate your own list, multiply your keywords.
2. Choose targeting for estimates not only at the national level but get estimates at the state and city level.
3. Set your average cost per click with a slider and set a daily budget to see results.

But that’s not all, you can do more:

1. Pick over a list of keyword suggestions.
2. Set the match type of keywords to target.
3. Cull out keywords as you go.
4. Download your new list as a .csv or an AdWords Editor import file.

I am just starting now to run the Keyword Planner through its paces in client accounts and so far I am finding the suggestions for my specific needs an excellent starting point. I am still carefully reviewing keywords on load, but there are some variations that I feel are pretty good additions to my client accounts.

What I like is the speed. I created a new list of phrase matched targeted keywords that look like they could really generate some sales with a few clicks and in under 10 minutes. As I try the tool out more this week, I’ll let you know additional thoughts.

For now, look in the tools section of the AdWords accounts you manage to see if you find the the Keyword Planner there. For the accounts I am managing, the tool seems to be appearing in accounts that are about 90 days old or younger. My older accounts do not have the tool appearing yet in the drop down menu.

AuthorRank passes SEO juice.

This past year Google really pushed AuthorRank as a way to verify authors and help to build credibility of content. It all starts with a personal Google+ page, a tie-in to your website, and then tagging of your content you may write around the web. When properly done, you will see a face next to an article and SEO juice flows from links to the owner’s website, to the Google+ page, and pushes results higher in personalize and organic placement. It is a real boon for writers such as myself.

Google understood that there are many businesses where this benefit of authority of content would be valuable, especially for big companies/brands. So it quietly rolled out rel=”publisher” in addition to rel=”author”. For brands and companies the ability to tie together a website, blog, Google+ Business page using the publisher tag makes terrific sense.

However, Google has already stated that it won’t be putting a face or brand icon next to any of these results, at least not for right now. With Google really pushing AuthorRank, I would expect them to do the same with BrandRank, but more judiciously and most likely not this year. I just don’t think that they want to dilute what is happening with AuthorRank yet, but I feel that BrandRank  will come in the relatively near future.

In the meantime, I would strongly recommend that you position yourself early and start working to develop BrandRank if it is meaningful for your business. Preferentially use AuthorRank if it makes sense to your business or BrandRank if you are a medium to large business.

“For business owners:

• Be wary of an SEO or reputation management service that promises to generate reviews for your business. We’ve seen companies make up fake glowing testimonies — and we’ll take them down.
• We don’t take down negative reviews for simply being negative for anyone, regardless of any other relationships with Google. Instead, we encourage you to utilize the owner response functionality to respond to the review and address the user’s concerns.
• If a third party claims that they know how to remove reviews from Google, don’t believe them. Google does not work with any third party reputation management companies and we certainly don’t remove reviews unless they violate our guidelines.
• Don’t set up a computer or tablet device in your place of business for customers to leave reviews on site. Consider sending a reminder e-mail so customers can review on their own time.
• Remember, we don’t allow you to give customers free gifts or discounts for leaving reviews.” Read the full disclosure for business owners and SEO on this Google page.

Based on what I see, it appears that Google is not only scanning for fake reviews, but actively and aggressively targeting Local Pages that use them, but interesting enough appears to be tracking the IP address. Take a careful look at the section that says don’t put a tablet or computer in your place of business – that means IP tracking.

Additionally Google has turned to crowd sourcing to catch the offenders. If you know a competitor is doing this or suddenly has tons of reviews magically you can report them to Google for review.

“If you see a review that violates our policy guidelines, you can report the review to us by clicking on the gray flag icon next to the review in question. You’ll be taken to a form where you can tell us why you’re flagging that review. Please note that we won’t follow up with you individually, but we do review every piece of content that is flagged.”

This information is very important for website owners. I know of several who have been approached by firms selling these exact review services. They are stating that they set up individual Google email and Yahoo accounts just for your review creation, work to mask the IP address and then create a glowing supposedly untraceable review. Be wary of these types of services, is it worth being banned from Google+ Local pages to try to scam Google?

My son is my assistant and when he returned to college three hours north of us we needed a way to stay in touch with tasking and to effectively manage files we both work on. Plus we found out that his cell phone doesn’t work great up in the mountainous Frostburg area. In preparation for him leaving we tried all types of applications to stay in touch. We settled on the ease of use of Outlook.com and Skype.

For over a year Microsoft has promised to include Skype in its set of online tools. Right now Skype is available in Outlook.com in the UK and the recent announcement states that Skype will be available for USA users in summer 2013.  When it’s available you’ll need to download a browser plug-in, but one will be available for Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox.

To access the new feature you’ll simply click an new icon near a contact, in an instant message, or in an email. This new integration will make Outlook.com a terrific tool for business and personal use. I’ll let you know when I see this appear in my own account, but for now, just know it is coming and something to definitely consider checking out.

Here are a few tidbits that you may not have been aware of in regards to location specific placement on Google.com.

Local Placement in the 7-Pack

1. When you check the placement for your site, if you see a map next to your listing then Google is delivering location specific results which may be different than non-location specific results. The map is the key! But Google will only now show seven results in this local grouping. Not ten sites as it used to do so.

2. If when you do a search for your site and you are not in this 7-pack group, take a look at your website, about us page, and all your social media to review and assure that you are adding location specific keywords to help tag your site with the geographic information needed to place in this important grouping.

3. When Google has more than seven sites that it may want to show in the 7-pack, it will show results based in closest proximity to where it can identify that the end user is located. Additionally I have found that Google will “rack and stack” these listings based on the number of reviews. If your competitors are located nearby to you and they have more reviews that you, your listing may never show in the 7-pack.

4. You can’t place in the 7-pack if you are not geographically appropriate to the search query and end user. This is the biggest misunderstanding point for website owners. If you are located in Columbus, you cannot place in the 7-pack for Cincinnati – you do not have a local space and will never be able to get there. This is a big issue for national selling services. Google simply will not show your results in these location specific searches but rather local businesses.

For more in-depth information you will want to check out this great article at SiteProNews by Tina Courtney-Brown.

1. Have a website, domain, be crawable, don’t hide or lock down important content.

Seems like a no-brainer here right? But you would be surprised at the number of people who still don’t have their own domain, are using free services for their website, or hide their best content behind a wall trying to get email addresses to read their best content. Don’t do that!

Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.

2. Include the right words on the page and especially in query type phrases.

You’d think that this would be common sense, but this is easily overlooked. I’ve seen sites include their important keywords in images (that are not readable by the Googlebot) or forget to include top phrases completely on the home page which is their most important page for Google.

3. Think not about link building but rather creating converting or compelling content.

This is a hard one for many people to grasp. Google wants to spider content that actually provides value to your readers not just a brochure of your services. Sites that invest in creating shareable content that is more than a listing of services will receive better rankings.

Now here’s an interesting note from the video, Matt says don’t just invest in search placement widen your reach consider other avenues including paid advertising, billboard, and other ways to get your message out to your audience. Broaden your marketing plan for a wider appeal.

4. Craft your Meta title and Meta description carefully.

These two source code tags are top real estate for websites. Special attention should be paid to create great tags that are more than a listing of keywords and that entice visitors to click in. The Meta description will appear as your snippet in Google.com. Make sure it works to entice readers to click in to your site.

5. Use all the free webmaster resources.

Google has some great and free tools to use to understand what is happening with your website. Make sure you are using the Google Webmaster Control Panel and Google Analytics to know what is happening on your website.

Put the pieces together to help your team be effective.

As an incredibly strong scheduler of my own time, it makes it very difficult for me sometimes to understand that not everyone else’s lives revolve around Outlook.

I’ve found that there are types like me who are strong on the details and their are other who are strong on the creative side instead. Finding the balance to help those who work for you to be effective and enjoy their job with you is crucial for business growth.

I’ve found that not every great creative person is a good match for my business. There may be some terrific writers out there, but if they can’t make a deadline so your business gets paid they may not be the best match for your needs. On the other hand others who are highly creative but can be worked with to perform within somewhat flexible guidelines may be strong business partners in the long run.

This is what I’ve found. There are some things that you as a business owner can be flexible with and other things that you simply cannot be flexible with.

Maybe you can be flexible about when a contractor sends their invoice to you.

But maybe you can’t be flexible about a contractor missing a client’s deadline.

Maybe you can be flexible about the time of day a project is turned in.

But maybe you can’t be flexible when other people are waiting to work on this same project.

Working with others is a balance. By trying to create an environment where others that work with you have a degree of input and you yourself show flexibility for their needs, you develop loyalty and trust. It can be a win-win for workers and bosses.

McCord Web Services is a Bing Ads Accredited Professional Company and Google AdWords Certified Partner.

As a Google AdWords Certified Partner, I make my living managing Google AdWords accounts. I work in a wide and diverse sectors of business. I’ve been managing Google AdWords for over nine years and so can speak on this issue authoritatively.

When I have a client who turns AdWords on and off regularly sometimes just for days and other times for long periods, I have to say that it is very difficult to effectively manage a program and generate a return on investment for the client.

Turning your AdWords account off for the weekend or when you go on vacation is not necessarily a bad thing, but I prefer to instead move a client’s budget setting down versus pausing the program. When an account has been on and off and on and off, this is what I see.

1. Google does not know how to serve the program as history is spotty. In many cases managing a program like this will require the same amount of time in the first month (typically 8 hours of more of management for about 5 ad groups) when it has been restarted as it is like creating an account history all over again.

2. Conversions will not start back up again at the level they were at before the account was stopped. It can sometimes take two or three weeks once an account has been off for conversions to start rolling again.
3. In many cases page placement and cost per click will be significantly different than when the account had previously been running. As AdWords is an auction when you move out of the auction and then move back in after a month or two break, the auction prices may all have changed – higher or lower.

I prefer instead to take a great performing program that needs to be paused to a low level budget to keep placement than to totally turn a program off. It can cost so much more for your account manager to bring around a stale account than to move to a maintenance mode.

Cross Linking

This question comes up a fair amount when we have business owners who have multiple website – “Should I link and cross link my various web properties?” First, most website owners would simply do this without thought and there is no reason why you should not if you have one or two website properties. In fact, it makes perfect sense to do so and you may actually get some backlink benefits from doing this.

There are however some situations where doing so will be a negative for your organic placement. Here are when you should be careful doing so.

1. If you have several websites but you do not reveal that you own the properties and you are actually trying to appear as if you were different businesses, I would not cross link the sites.
2. If the content is the same on the web properties, I would not cross link the sites.
3. If the businesses are totally different, say one is to sell dog toys and the other is to provide web consulting. I would not cross link the sites.
4. If you have created many, many, keyword domains and you are trying to use cross linking these multiple sites for organic placement improvement. I would not cross link the sites. You may have been able to do so before and received a benefit, but not Google is identifying sites using this tactic as link spam and is actively penalizing their organic placement on Google.com.

The bottom-line is that if you do not check to see if your prospective domain has been used to deliver spam, you may get burned. Matt even recommends checking the webmaster control panel tied to that domain and website to look for messages from Google.

If you see all kinds of spammy and questionable links pointing to and from this domain, it is by far better to start with a fresh unused domain. Even if a website is new with all new files, the Google algorithm behind the scenes may be penalizing this domain and you’d never know until you simply could not get placement when you started to use it.

The last two domain purchase I was involved with for transfers only, were both over $10,000 for the purchase. I doubt either site owner had investigated the domain and how they had been used before money exchanged hands. Be careful and when in doubt don’t put your money down go with a new domain.