Though, when you make a mistake with your PPC campaign it can cost you a great deal. If you are new to the game you may forget to do several important things. For one, you may not remember to place a cap on your daily bids. Even PPC veterans with high traffic campaigns sometimes have lapses in judgment that result in untargeted clicks which do not convert.

Monitoring your click-through-rates (CTR) and conversion data is a necessity once your campaign gets established, after which you can adjust your things accordingly. This is where PPC bid management comes into play.

If you use an automated bid management system which both analyzes your conversion data and CTR you can reduce the amount of time and effort you need to dedicate to your campaigns. This means that you can react much quicker to campaign fluctuations because they are identified sooner. But when looking for a good automated system you need to remember that often times you get what you pay for.

As a pay per click advertiser you need to consider four things when choosing a bid management system:

1. The number of keywords you are currently bidding on.
2. The size of your budget.
3. Is the system going to do a better job managing your budget across all your campaigns?
4. The number of campaign that are currently being managed.

If you take all these into consideration you can probably find a very good automated bid manager on the market. One such system is Acquisio Search. Acquisio Search is a custom pay per click software system that is capable of monitoring your keywords, flagging those that need to be paused, and automatically emailing you about keywords that have poor Quality Scores.

If you are still a PPC rookie then you probably have a much smaller number of active campaigns. Shoemoney Tools or BidMax offer more affordable solutions. Both of these tools are well suited for running a smaller campaign and are intuitive in how they function, making them perfect for someone new to PPC.

As much help as a PPC tool is they are still not as useful as regular, hands-on maintenance. Software can only interpret data in certain ways, requiring a human to properly understand the numbers and information. Constant scrutiny is required in order to get the best possible performance from your PPC campaign. Still, as your campaign becomes bigger and the scale or budgets increase, an automated bidding system becomes an invaluable tool for PPC advertisers.

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PPC Management Software and Tips

It is obviously important because we see how more and more each day search is turning into something more personal as search engines seek ways to improve the relevance of search results. What this means is that we (SEOs) should encourage clients to improve their online network and to start seriously considering or putting more effort in the social media efforts.

Here are a few tips on what you should immediately do to get the most of Google Social Search (remember this may be in experimental mode now but you want to reap the benefits even before it’s fully released):

Get a Google Account and update your public Google profile – Add links to your facebook, twitter, myspace, jaiku, blog, flickr, and whatever other links you want to appear when contacts (hopefully your clients or the friends of your friends, who can turn into clients) search for terms that appear as content in those links.

Get more active in social network sites – Been neglecting your social site accounts? Start adding friends and posting updates WITH KEYWORDS. Don’t get spammy but think of real updates where you can insert a keyword or two. Oh and don’t forget to set your profile on public.

Get reviewed - Find ways to get reviewed by real people on industry-specific sites or even on their websites. Remember the real aim for many clients is conversion and not just traffic. For this word of mouth is still the best way to go. In search terms social search and reviews from people in your social circle is still equivalent to word of mouth. The more people review your site/product/service the more chances you get to appear on the social search results of their contacts.

Hope you find this helpful. Happy Halloween everyone!

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Social Search and SEO

So what is Google Social Search exactly and how does it work?

Google Social Search is simply a way to see “relevant web content written by people in your social circle”. You can view the content from people in your social circle by joining the experiment here and viewing the results listed under the new category, “Results from people in your social circle”, found at the bottom of Google’s SERPs.

There are three ways in which Google determines the people that belong to your social circle: your public Google profile, Google chat buddies, and Google Reader Subscriptions. If you haven’t tweaked your Google profile it would be a good idea to add all your other websites, blogs, and social site accounts in the profile so that Google can add your contacts in these site to your social circle. Note though that since Google includes both your implicit social circle (people directly connected to you) and your extended social circle (people connected to you via your contacts) you might see results from people you do not know or do not necessarily wish to follow.

When Google has determined the list of people in your social circle it then uses its regular search algorithm to fetch results for you whenever you search for anything via Google but this time adds results from your social circle WHEN RELEVANT. So do not expect to see the “Results from people in your social circle” each time you make a query.

PRIVACY AND CONTROL ISSUES

Not surprisingly one of the biggest issues people will be even more concerned about when it comes to social search engines (not just Google’s) is the privacy issue. The good thing about Google Social Search is that it will only index and list PUBLIC content. What this means is that you have control over what will appear in your friends search results. If you are not comfortable about your content appearing in social search results then make sure your social site account profile is not ticked as public. Furthermore if you don’t want friends of friends to see your online content then specify that you only want direct friends to be able to see your content. You can do this on facebook and most other social sites. As for your blog and other sites just make sure you don’t publish anything you don’t want to make public! And remember delete all links in your public Google profile that you don’t want to make public.

When it comes to screening the content YOU see you also have control. You can simply remove a “friend” if you are getting results from someone you do not know.

Another thing you should remember when it comes to the privacy issue is that people Googling will not automatically see your content they first have to be logged in to their Google account, be connected to you in some way for you to be included in their social circle, and they have to search for something relevant to your public content. Furthermore, your list of buddies/friends will NOT be listed publicly. You will only see results from these friends but even you will not see a complete list of their buddies.

Next I will be doing a short post on why social search is important in SEO.

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Google Social Search

According to Ms Ohye some of the best practices you should adopt include:

Keeping the article body intact – Don’t break the article body. Place ads and other stuff on the sidebar or at the bottom of the article but not in between paragraphs!

Put dates between title and body – This makes it easier for Google to determine recentness of your articles. This is also really useful in terms of usability. One of my pet peeves is having to look for the date/time stamp when reading online articles/posts, especially when reading older articles because I want to be sure I know how old or new an article is when citing that article.

Smart Titles – Titles matter so think about your titles really hard. It matters in SEO so make sure you squeeze in your most important keyword(s) in there. It also matters to readers so make sure it is both informative and catchy.

Separate original content from press releases – As mentioned in my previous post, Ranking in Google News, “opinions, editorials, satire, press-releases and subscriptions are not eligible to lead [story] clusters” so make sure you separate them and give them their own section/page. Of course you should place the original articles on the main landing page and not the other way around.

Publish informative unique content – When it comes to publishing, whether internet publishing or in whatever form, we will never tire of reminding everybody – Content is still and always be king!

The use of unique permanent URLs with at least 3 digits - This helps Google determine that the page contains an article and is not a static HTML page. This has roots in the traditional way news sites/publishers choose their URLs. However, if your pages does not have this kind of URL you may skip this and simply do the next tip.

Submit a news sitemap – News sitemaps are beneficial because it will make it easier for the news crawler to find your article and re-crawl that same article to look for updates (re-crawl happens in 12 hours). Aside from this it contains the meta-data (i.e. keywords, publication date) needed by Google to help them determine not only relevancy of your article to their story clusters/categories but also determine the other ranking factors without having to rely on Google’s extractor.

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Google News Rank Boosters

One of the most significant difference in the ranking factors between Google News and Google Web is that pagerank is not as important in Google News. The reason for this is that due to the nature of news stories what is most important is of course the freshness and relevance of the content.

In Google News the robots crawl and find news articles in a matter of minutes and then comeback to check for updates approximately 12 hours later. What this means is that the number of back links is rightfully not deemed to be that important since there will be very few, if any, back links generated within that timeframe.

So what are the things you can do for your news articles to rank well in Google News?

1. Pick a story that you know is of interest to a wide audience. The reason for this is that Google News ranks news articles in two ways. First is the story ranking wherein they group together stories and figure out which stories are of greater interest. Obviously bigger stories will rank better than small stories (even if written and optimized well) since the articles belonging to the “big story cluster” will, along with the other articles on that cluster appear on the top of the Google News page. Second ranking method used is individual ranking of articles within each cluster. Note that bigger stories will mean more competition for the top spot in that story cluster. This is where the other ranking factors will kick in.

2. Make sure you pay attention to the top four factors Google News consider to be important.

a. Freshness – Articles should be recent, substantial, original and focused on the topic. According to Google opinions, editorials,satire, press-releases and subscription s are not eligible to lead clusters so stay away from these type of articles(unless it’s is what you really do).

b. Citations – Get other news sites to cite your article. To get cited what you really need to do is be among the first to report breaking news. So be fast to publish stories. Remember though, links/citations matter but there’s no need to horde a huge number of links for Google News.

c. Local/personal relevancy – Local sources are given more credit/weight since their stories are more likely to be accurate (first-hand information is better than second-hand info) and published first (since other news sites will hear the news after they they’ve already published the story).

d. Trusted sources – No need to worry about having to be CNN in order to be considered a “trusted source” because Google news considers trusted sources for each edition and section. What that means is that while TMZ will not be a trusted source for business news it will definitely be a trusted source for entertainment news (gossip) and while WallStreetJournal may be a trusted source for business news in the US it will not weigh as much for the business news section in New Delhi, India. So what you need to do is become a trusted source in your niche, whether it be a topical news site or local news site.

Source: News Search SEO Video by Maile Ohye, Google Developer Programs Tech Lead

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Ranking in Google News

This new development has created quite a stir in the SEO world since it will affect SEO as we know it being a change not simply in user-interface (UI) or a simple addition of search options but in the actual algorithm that runs Google’s search engine. What this means is that we have been (and if you haven’t been doing this yet) should be keeping tabs on how your websites are doing not only in Google’s SERPs but also Google Caffeine’s SERPs. This is important because you want to be able to figure out what Caffeine’s algorithm focuses on and adjust your SEO efforts according ly. This actually means playing around with endless keywords since, as mentioned earlier; the change is not in the UI so that at first glance you might not notice much difference. Furthermore, lots of search results do not vary that greatly, which I interpret to mean that Google still uses pretty much the same factors and places emphasis on old SEO staple like keywords, domain age, etc. However, there are some surprises. Afterall, it is in the way the compute and look and process these factors that will be different.

So far here are some of my observations  about the new Google search engine:

Speed – Google Caffeine is definitely faster when it comes to fetching results compared to the old Google (see upper right corner of SERPs for fetch time). It takes only 0.13 seconds for Caffeine to fetch results for the search term “SEO Blog” but takes 0.33 seconds for the old Google to do it. This has been consistently approximately the same for other search terms I’ve tried.

Index size – This one varies from search term to search term so I have to say that my tests are still inconclusive.

Emphasis on freshness of results - There seems to be no real difference with both coming up with the latest news headlines in the SERPs when I typed in search terms related to current events. However, there are some instances when Caffeine put a news result on the top spot (example: Louis Vuitton), which isn’t the case for the old Google search. What is notable about this is that for SEOs we should note that this simply means that Google is giving more and more emphasis to freshness of content.

Video/Image results – For some search terms the video results seem to be given less importance while some have climbed up in the SERPs.  When it comes to images lots of times the images, which are placed at the top of Google’s old SERPs have disappeared totally in Caffeine’s SERPs.

If you want to do your own tests you might want to go to Compare Google Caffeine or simply type in search terms at Google Caffeine and the old Google Search Engine. Google welcomes feedback but remember that for now they want to hear about the differences you spot between the two.

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Observations on Google Caffeine

According to mckenzie MSNbot did not follow the Disallow instruction in his robots.txt file. Another user, jiosis, complained that MSNBot ignored the robots tag where he used the NoIndex/NoFollow attribute.

The good news is that Brett Yount says that they are already working on the problem although as of the moment it will be a good idea for everyone to start checking whether pages you want to stay hidden are being indexed by Bing or not. If you encounter the same problem there is no need to fill out a content removal request since, as Brett Yount says, it is a problem on Bing’s side. All you need to do is email Brett Yount at bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line and send an explanation of your problem and any proof (if any) that MSNBot is indeed the one causing the problem. Note that even without any proof (if understood it correctly) they will still look into your problem, however, for expediency’s sake it would be better to provide them with helpful details such as clips of your log file.

As for getting Bing to not index pages using the hash #, I have yet to find a complaint.

And if you are having the opposite problem, which is puzzling over why your site isn’t being indexed by Bing, don’t worry because you are definitely not alone. Bing also has some kinks to iron out in that regard. Head to the Bing community forum to read the numerous complaints and solutions on the indexing issue.

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Bing Ignoring Instructions Not to Index Pages

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as Nick Wingfield of Wall Street Journal put it, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

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Microsoft-Yahoo Tie Search Tie Up

As I have mentioned before the hash is often overlooked, if at all used, by SEOs. A very unfortunate thing because it can not only help solve duplicate content issues but help you consolidate the link juice from all the URLs with duplicate content. How is this possible?

According to Randfish’s whiteboard Friday videos “Complex Content Issues” and “Using the Hash” the power of the hash lies in the fact that search engines ignore anything in the URL after the hash sigh. For example if you have a URL such as www.example.com/#10, instead of indexing the contents of this specific URL it will instead point to and index the contents of www.example.com. This is a very useful thing in SEO because this way you can get search engines to ignore pages whose content you don’t want to be indexed such as those with duplicate content. This is especially important if you have massive duplicates because all the links pointing to URLs with hashes will instead pass the link juice to the main URL, which in our case is www.example.com.

As Rand said some applications of the hash include:

• canonicalization;
• management of affiliate links; and
• ability to show limited content.

Of course with every good thing comes a problem. One potential problem with the use of the # is that for single page version of content broken into sections/chapters using the # will result in suceeding sections not being indexed. For example if we have a tutorial on SEO you can expect that it will be long. To make it easy for those that prefer reading the tutorial as a single page we can chop down the tutorial into sections. Hence we can get the following URLs:

www.tutorial.com (This will probably contain the introduction)
www.tutorial.com/#topic1 (will contain the first topic)
www.tutorial.com/#topic2 (will contain the next topic and so on)

As you can see the good thing about this is that link juice from links to the other  sections of the tutorial will instead be passed on to the main URL, www.tutorial.com. The problem with this is that since the search engines will ignore anything after the # it will NOT index the content of all the sections with the hash in their URLs. In essence only the introduction’s content (or whatever is in www.tutorial.com) will be indexed. As Rand pointed out though this shouldn’t be a real problem IF all your target keywords are already found in the introduction, which will of course require conciseness and good keyword selection on your part.

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The Power of the Hash # in SEO