Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Social Media

How to Write Effective Meta Tags for a Website: Importance of Advance Meta Tags

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 4 Oct 2010 12:39:00 -0700

Meta tags are playing a vital role while doing an optimization on a website. It is to observe that Search Engines identifies a website goal and its purpose by acquiring its Meta tags. Meta tags contain page tile, page description, Meta keywords, Meta author information, Meta company information, etc. a website owner can use different Meta tags according to his or her needs.

Page Title Tag

The Title Tag must contain no more than 60 characters (generally, 100 characters may be indexed). This is the text that appears in the blue title-bar of your web browser.

Author Information – bio Tag

The Author Tag is for the person who wrote the material for the site. Normally people add up their names such as content writer, developers, SEO and SEM.

Website Subject Tag

The Subject Tag is for what your site is about. Music, Home Remodeling, Security, search engine optimization, etc. You can use upto 100 characters to write an ideal subject title for your website.

Page Description Tag

The Description Tag can have up to 150 characters. Generally, we use 200 to 250 characters in the description Tag which may be indexed, although only a slighter part of this amount may be displayed. You can find page description under the Google Results for a particular keyword search just above the teaser url path. Normally we call this a site or a page snippet. In other words this is a quick summary of the information on the page.

Classification Tags

Classification tag is quite similar to description but more in detail.

Keywords Tags

In the Keyword tag you can use everything relating to your site rich content that you think someone will search for to find your site. Its all upto you how many keywords you use to optimize your website. In general we create contents and then optimize them for a particular keyword targeting to that content.

Geography Tags

Where are you located? You can use Geography Meta tags to provide information about your geo location to the search engines. Like, if you are living in the California, USA, you can put a full street address (USA, CA, Montero, and St.12) in Meta Tags.

Language Tags

Is your site in English, Spanish, French, German or what? You can use Language Meta Tags to supply language information to search engines. In other words this Tag is used to known as localization tag.

Copyrights Tags

Who is the Owner of the site? We use normally a Company Name in copyrights tag e.g. Smart Solutions Net Technologies ®

Zip Code Tags

Enter your zip code in Zip Code Met Tags. You can use your state or city Zip Code to supply the local information to the Search Engines.

City or Town Tags

Your City or town name. E.g. New Mexico Nevada.

Country Tags

Your Country, you must use all names in Country Meta Tags e.g. USA, United States, United States Of America, America, etc.

Revisit-After Tags

This tells search engine how often this page updates. (Eg. 25 days) Mostly search engines ignore this Meta tags and to follow their own policies of visiting a website.

Distribution Tags

This distribution Meta tags normally used to publish a website in some limited areas and regions where the webmaster or a site owner needs to get traffic.

Robots Tags

You can use robots tags to direct search engines to index your pages with noidex, nofollow, index, follow links on a page. The values ALL and NONE set all directives on or off: [ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW] and [NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW].

The above Meta tags are in detail and complete, these meta tags will be added after the "html" tag and used to put before the "body" area of the page. You can use these Meta tags globally for your website or can add up for a particular page. This article has shown that how easily you can write such advance Meta tags without doing hard work on them. You can also use such free online tools to get Meta tags. But I’d recommend you to do not use these services for security reason. I’m hoping that this article will help you to create such advance Meta Tags for your websites. In the next article I’ll explain how to write effective page titles and page description for a particular page or a website.

7 Simple SEO Tasks to Complete for a New Site

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:25:00 -0700

I have assisted countless websites in launching a new or redesigned website. Regardless of the business or the industry, there are a number of tasks you should perform to make sure your SEO gets off on the right foot. The good thing is, these tasks can take no more than 30-60 minutes to complete and are well worth it.

1. Setup Webmaster Tools

Using a service like Google Analytics is great, but you really should verify your site with each of the search engines webmaster tools. These services allow you to diagnose and analyze things on your site, that a website analytics solution can not. Submit sitemaps, find error pages, diagnose slow loading pages, and tons of other neat tools are provided by the webmaster tools.

2. Install Analytics, Setup Your Goals

There is no reason why you should not be tracking your website visitors. Google Analytics is free, easy to install and provides a wealth of information about your website and your customers. Sign-Up for a free account and install or pay someone to install the javascript code on your website.
Also go the extra mile and track key actions on your websites. Things like contact form submissions, downloads, video plays, and purchases should be getting tracked to understand your conversion funnel better and improve your conversion rates.

3. Fix Canonical URL Issues

Something that I would say 90% of all websites never do, it fix the www vs non-www duplicate content issue. This is such a quick fix, but so many websites overlook it. Going with either the www or the non-www, will solve the issue of having multiple URLs for the same web page. Also make sure your internal links are going to the / and on index.html or similar.
PHP Sites: Add to .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
ASP Sites: Done through IIS

4. Add Your Robots.txt File

Go through your web files and identify directories that you don’t want the search engines to index. Things like your administration files or miscellaneous files found on your server, restrict them from being indexed.
Upload robots.txt file with below text. Make sure you replace “/folder name/ with the folder(s) you want to restrict.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder name/

5. Submit XML Sitemap

Once your website is 100% completed, use an XML sitemap generation tool to crawl your entire site and create an XML sitemap that you can submit to the search engines. Each search engine allows you to submit your sitemap right from within Webmaster Tools. This will help get your new site crawled faster and make the search engines better able to find ALL of the pages on your site.

6. Setup Your Local Business Listings

As you may know, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have local business centers that allow you to add a free business listing that has the chance to show up in the local results when a user performs a local query in one of the search engines.
I would suggest going to GetListed to help manage all of your local business listings. This free service will help you manage and check to make sure you are properly submitting and verifying your local business listings in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, BOTW and Hotfrog.

GetListed will cover the main local business directories you should submit to, but a service call Universal Business Listing will help you syndicate your listing to all of those 2nd tier local directories like InfoUSA, YellowPages.com CitySearch and Superpages.com. Instead of manually submitting your listing to lots of other local directories, pay $30 and have UBL submit your listing for you.

7. Add 301 Redirects

If you are redesigning a website, try to keep the same URL structure if possible. This way you will reduce the risk of losing any organic search engine rankings and traffic. However if for whatever reason the URL structure needs to change, identify the key pages that are ranking well and gaining traffic and 301 redirect them to the most relevant page on the new site.
If a client has purchased multiple domains and has mirror sites up, direct those sites over to the main site. There is no point in risking a duplicate content penalty for having multiple sites with the same content.
ASP Sites – 301 Redirect

PHP Sites – 301 Redirect
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-simple-seo-tasks-to-complete-for-a-new-site/24419/#ixzz10q1bYM9G

What’s New With AdWords?

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 6 Sep 2010 18:58:00 -0700

Google’s been busy with AdWords this summer, launching a number of new features. Here’s a wrap-up of six of those features as well as Google’s new advertising news website.

AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE)

This tool, which is currently in beta, lets you test and measure changes to your keywords, your AdWords bidding, ad groups and placements. Basically you run your existing campaign alongside an experimental campaign.
You choose what percentage of auctions you’d like each campaign to participate in, and then watch what happens. If your experimental campaign is significantly more successful than your original campaign, you can decide to apply the changes to all of your auctions.

Analyze Competition Feature

Google has added a new tool to the AdWords Opportunities tab that allows you to see how your campaign performance compares to the average performance of other advertisers. Google measures such indicators as click-through rate, average position, and impressions.
It shows these metrics for each of the different categories that represent your offerings. It can help you identify which aspects of your campaign are inferior to your competition, and then prompt you to improve those aspects accordingly.

Ad Sitelinks

Ad Sitelinks let you add additional links to pages within your site in your ads, provided your ads appear at the top of search results. The idea is that more people will click through to your site if you offer them more options. The feature was introduced in November, though this summer Google add a couple of new characteristics.
One new characteristic is that additional links can be condensed into one line of text (previously the only option was two lines). The other change is that advertisers no longer need Google’s approval to set up Ad Sitelinks for their campaigns. You can set up Ad Sitelinks in the Campaign Settings tab.

Keyword Diagnosis Tool

This new tool lets you see which of your pay-per-click keywords are currently prompting your ads to show, and why the other keywords aren’t spurring ads. You can access it from the More Actions drop-down menu within the Keyword tab.
If you want you can limit your diagnosis to a particular country and/or language. If you are seeing that certain keywords are not resulting in ads because of Quality Score issues, you might decide to resolve those issues. Or you might choose to increase your bids to get your ads shown.

Broad Match Modifier

This new AdWords management feature lets you create keywords that are more targeted than broad match and have a greater reach than phrase or exact match. To implement this feature, you put a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word following a (+) sign must appear in the user’s query exactly or as a close variation.
The words that are not preceded by a (+) sign will prompt ads on more significant query variations. This feature will likely drive more traffic for those switching from broad match, and attract more qualified traffic for those switching from phrase or exact match.

Reports Moving to Campaigns Tab

The AdWords Report Center is slowly being phased out as performance reports are moved onto the Campaigns tab. According to Google, it’s best to put performance information on the same page where you manage your campaign.
Reports include campaign reports, ad group reports, and account-level reports. They will specifically be stored in a new part of the Campaigns tab called the Control panel and library.

Google Ad News

In June Google unveiled Google Ad News, a website that aggregates advertising news, including news related to AdWords. The site is organized into advertising categories, including search advertising; mobile advertising; and TV, radio and print.
For advertisers and advertising professionals with little time to sift through the categories, a top advertising news category provides Google’s most valued advertising-related articles. Articles come from such publications as The Detroit News, Business Week, and The Guardian.

The Top 10 Free PPC Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:34:00 -0700

Below are 10 of what I consider the most useful free tools available. While there are many more free resources out there, these 10 (in no particular order) have generated the best results in terms of campaign performance and time efficiency. It’s important to mention that many of these tools have options to upgrade at a cost.

10. Spyfu: Spyfu provides competitive intelligence for keywords and ad copy. This is a great tool to identify any keyword gaps you might have with your competitors. There is a pro version, but the free version gives you the big picture overview.

9. Geo Keyword List Generator: This is a great tool for building out geo modified keyword list. Just add a zip code and radius and this tool will pull in all cities, zip codes and abbreviations of relevant geo in that area.

8. Typo Generator: Similar to the geo generator, but this tool quickly produces common misspellings and typos of the desired search term.

7. Niche Keyword Finder: This is a great resource to ensure your bases are covered with your keyword portfolio. This often picks up themes that would normally go unnoticed.

6. Keyword Mixer: A quick way to build out a long-tail keyword list.

5. MSN Ad Lab: A full range of tools ranging from audience intelligence to keyword research. I also recommend adding the free Excel plug in.

4. Compete: Very similar to Spyfu, but sometimes the results differ, so it’s best to reference both sources.

3. Ad Words Wrapper: This is a great tool for creating match types.

2. Keyword Map: Another keyword generation tool, but this will display the results visually and showcase areas of possible expansion.

1. Google: There are really 11 resources included in this one. Rather than going through each one individually, I’ve provided a little blurb about some of the ones used more frequently. I recommend using and researching all of these on your own though.

- Google Ad Words Editor – This is a great time saver for building and setting up huge campaigns.
- Google Website Optimizer – This tool allows you to test and optimize site content and design.
- Google Analytics – Provides much of what an expensive analytics package can for free.
- Google Insights for Search – A great keyword tool for determining seasonality and trends.
- Google Mobile Ad Preview Tool – Offers a quick way to see your ads on mobile devices.
- Other Google tools include: Google traffic estimator, Google Alerts, Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, Google URL Builder and most recently the competitive tools through the Ad Words dashboard.

Five Steps to an Effective Pay Per Click Keyword Database

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 2 Aug 2010 07:37:00 -0700

If you’re still building pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns from a traditional keyword list, it’s not doing your business any favors. A spreadsheet is an inefficient, outdated way to manage keywords for search marketing, leading to wasted dollars and lost time.
A keyword database is a completely different approach to research and manage PPC keywords. Compared to a keyword list, it’s:

• Private and proprietary
• Easier to organize and manage
• Easier to update and expand
• More actionable
• Collaborative

Essentially, it’s a flexible infrastructure that enables you to work with large numbers of keywords and quickly determine which pockets of keywords have the most business value. You can then translate your database into a highly effective PPC campaign structure.
Building a keyword database isn’t difficult, and as your campaigns scale, you’ll find it much faster and easier to keep things running smoothly. Here’s the five-step process to build an effective keyword database.

Step 1: Start your PPC keyword research
The most important part of a keyword database, naturally, is keywords! To build a comprehensive, up-to-date database, it’s important to look at keyword research as an ongoing process, aggregating keywords from multiple sources.

Here are four sources, both public and private, that will help you gain a complete picture of the terms you should be using in your campaigns:

• Public keyword tools: A traditional Web-based is based on popularity; remember that overall popularity doesn’t guarantee relevance to your audience.

• Historical site logs: Your server logs are a great source of keyword data—they contain a record of the real search queries that have led people to your site.

• Web analytics: The keyword reports in your analytics provide a continuous stream of new keywords. Incorporate those new insights into your research.

• Search query reports: The search query reports in AdWords Editor are another source of real data. These tell you the actual search queries that have triggered your PPC ads.

Pooling these sources gives you a personalized database that is highly relevant to your business. Be sure to keep your research up-to-date with traffic and conversion stats to see which keywords do the most work in your PPC campaigns.

Step 2: Segment and organize your keywords
Better keyword research gets you a lot closer to more profitable PPC campaigns, but to reap the full benefits of your research, it’s crucial to organize your keywords into small, manageable groups of closely related terms. This process will improve your campaigns by enabling:

• Better landing pages: It’s easier to write targeted, high-ranking copy around close-knit keyword groups.

• Better ads: Similarly, you can quickly write relevant, compelling text ads for well-structured keyword groups (aka ad groups).

• Better click-through rates: More relevant pages and ads grab a more qualified audience, so your CTRs and conversion rates improve.

• Better Quality Scores: High CTR and relevance lead to high Quality Scores, so you pay less for better positioning.

A well-organized database structure makes everything else you do for PPC, from adding new keywords to managing bids, simpler and more effective.

Step 3: Cut out waste with negative keywords
With strong keyword research, you can identify profitable keyword opportunities. But for high ROI, it’s equally important to identify and eliminate waste. This means discovering negative keywords, or irrelevant terms that eat up pay-per-click advertising budgets without generating quality leads.

Here are a few ways to find negative keyword candidates:

• Generic negative keyword lists: These aren’t a bad way to get started, but remember that generic negative keywords may not apply to your specific niche, and many are likely missing.

• During regular keyword research: When looking for relevant keywords, also keep your eyes open for suggestions that aren’t relevant to your business.

• Search query reports: Regularly look through your search query reports in AdWords and remove irrelevant keywords from your ad groups.

• Organic log files: By using your own log files for negative keyword discovery, you can catch irrelevant keywords before they trigger your ads.

Step 4: Create strong, targeted text ads
The next step is to write text ads for each keyword/ad group. If you followed the above process, your ad groups are already highly targeted, so it should be simple to write strong, targeted ads. Here are some tips for writing effective PPC ad copy:

• Include the top traffic: driving keywords in the title, text, and display URL of the ad when possible.

• Don’t overgeneralize: address a specific segment of your audience.

• Test several ads for each ad group. Google will rotate the ads so you can see which works best.

• Always include a call to action.

In addition, to maximize Quality Score, your ads should clearly be relevant to their associated landing pages.

Step 5: Repeat as necessary to maintain gains
One of the benefits of a keyword database is the ability to expand your research without losing control. So keep monitoring, testing, and tweaking your campaigns to improve results. And keep adding keywords from your analytics! The keywords your clients use to find you are among your most valuable marketing assets.

Pay Per Click Advertising and PPC Management Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:33:00 -0700

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website, increase your leads-to-sales conversions, and announce new products and services. However, achieving success and maximizing your return on investment withPay Per Click is not merely a matter of outbidding your competition for prime ad placement. As with any Internet marketing strategy, it’s critically important to have a clear understanding of the fundamentals and develop a PPC advertising plan before the campaign is launched. Otherwise, you run the risk of wasting your time and resources to take advantage of this increasingly effective means of reaching your targeted audience.
Here are some Pay Per Click advertising tips that will help you get started:
1. Establish a Budget – This may seem simple and obvious but creating a budget and sticking to it is the best way to keep from overspending and falling victim to bidding wars for popular search terms.
2. Develop a PPC Marketing Plan – Creating a plan in the early stages gives you a template to follow which should include thorough research of your industry, your competition, and a prioritized list of your targeted keywords and phrases.
3. Consider your Target Audience – Spend some time assessing who you want to click on your ad, the search terms they are likely to use, and how broad or narrow your intended demographic may be. Determining your audience in the early stages will help to inform your decisions in every phase of the campaign.
4. Identify Niche Opportunities – Instead of focusing on the most popular search terms where costs and competition will be steep, think about specific two- and three-word phrases that may have been overlooked by your competitors.
5. Write Compelling Ad Copy – You have a finite amount of space, so choose every word carefully to entice your audience to click on your ad. Most web users know the difference between sponsored and organic search results but if your ad copy leads them to believe that the link will help them find what they’re looking for, your click-through rates and sales will take off.
6. Craft Custom Landing Pages – This is essential. Each ad must take the viewer to a landing page where they can quickly and easily find what they need. Always remember that web users scan content and the decision to stay or look elsewhere is made in seconds.
7. Create and Analyze Performance Reports – These reports will tell you which ads are underperforming and which are exceeding expectations. Use this data to fine tune and adjust your marketing plan. Track your results at regular intervals.

PPC Tips for the Small Business Owner

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:40:00 -0700

The following tips provide the framework for developing a successful and cost effective pay per click campaign.

Time/Day Parting – Google allows advertisers to determine the day of week or even the time of day they want their ads to display. This can be a very useful tool for small business advertisers who know when their customers are most likely to look for their product or service. By setting your ads to display at only high performance times you increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce your costs.

Match Types – Gone are the days of simply adding keywords that are all set to broad match and hoping for a return. Sure, casting a larger net brings in more traffic, but it also punishes your budget. The quality of that traffic might also suffer depending on the chosen keywords. Try using the available match types, especially exact match, to control costs and which searches are actually displaying your ads.

Negative Keywords – Selecting negative keywords to offset unwanted traffic is an absolute must for any campaign, large or small. For example, f a florist that sells only fresh flowers and plants might want to include the negative “artificial” to prevent traffic from artificial flower type keywords. Using negatives also allows you to pursue higher volume keywords without the exposure to unrelated searches.

Geo Targeting – According to a 2009 TMP/comScore report, 80% of consumers expect businesses in their search results to be within 15 miles of their location. This definitely doesn’t apply to all industries and regions, but it should provide a starting point with your targeting. It’s important to mention that with Google’s targeting granularity, you could potentially target your business out of traffic if it’s set so small that only a few people will see the ads.

Other Search Engines- Google has the lion share of the search market, but they also carry the highest bid prices. Bing and the like might not offer the volume that Google does; however, smaller search engines often have lower bid prices, which ultimately produce lower conversion costs. Test out a small budget on these other engines to start looking at your PPC efforts as a portfolio.

Keyword Development–The Google traffic estimator tool might show you that the keyword “new shoes” generates 1,500,000 searches each month, but that doesn’t mean it’s a quality keyword for your ad group. To maximize your budget, think locally and specifically. For example, if you’re in the printing business, expand past the generic and more expensive “printing” keywords; pair them up with location identifiers to better define your product and audience. By using the keyword ”printing shops Denver 80202,” you pay less for a consumer that is further along in the buying cycle.

Tips for Google Site and Category Exclusion Tool

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:05:00 -0700

Targeting Google AdWords contextual advertising campaigns just got easier. This new tool keeps your ads from appearing in some pretty dodgy places online.

Google launched an important new tool that prevents your ads from showing on poorly-performing sites: the Category Exclusion tool.

Remember why content campaigns drain ad dollars? You waste budget because contextual ads appear on sites that are "poor quality," meaning visitors to those sites are not likely to convert, even if your ads garner clicks.

We've discussed several strategies for controlling which sites carry your ads. The Category Exclusion tool simplifies the job by allowing advertisers to exclude whole swaths of site types.

To find the tool, click on Tools under Campaign Management. First you're allowed to choose a campaign. Though you can choose search campaigns, you shouldn't -- the tool really only acts on keyword-targeted and placement-targeted content campaigns.

Having chosen a campaign, you'll see the familiar site exclusion text field where you can type or paste the specific domain names of sites that shouldn't carry your ads. But you'll see two additional tabs: Topics and Page Types. Let's start with Topics. Here's an example of what you'll see:

click to enlarge

Here's Google's explanation for each of the topics that can be excluded:

Conflict and tragedy
Crime, police, and emergency: Police blotters, news stories on fires, and emergency services resources
Death and tragedy: Obituaries, bereavement services, accounts of natural disasters, and accidents
Military and international conflict: News about war, terrorism, and sensitive international relations
Edgy content
Juvenile, gross, and bizarre content: Jokes, weird pictures, and videos of stunts
Profanity and rough language: Moderate use of profane language
Sexually suggestive content: Provocative pictures and text

But Google doesn't trust its intuition, or yours, to lead to an intelligent decision about which site topics to exclude. The tool shows you, based on your campaign's history, exactly what you're risking by excluding sites within each topic.

In the example above, the advertiser would probably be wise to exclude sites in the crime topic, since the CTR has been a dismal .52%, with no conversions. But the advertiser might think twice before excluding sites in the juvenile topic, since despite the poor CTR, clicks from that site are converting at a respectable 7.41%. Notice that cost-per-conversion data is also available, so advertisers can make sure their decisions are likely to result in acceptable ROI .

Let's turn now to the Page Types tab:

click to enlarge

Here the advertiser is presented with a range of page types that have traditionally yielded poor results for some advertisers. Again, Google's explanation of each type:

Network types
Parked domains are sites in Google's AdSense for domains network. Users are brought to parked domain sites when they enter the URL of an undeveloped Web page into a browser's address bar. There, they'll see ads relevant to the terminology in the URL they entered. The AdSense for domains network is encompassed by both the content network and the search network. If you exclude this page type, you'll exclude all parked domain sites, including the ones on the search network.
Error pages are part of Google's AdSense for errors network. Certain users are brought to error pages when they enter a search query or unregistered URL in a browser's address bar. There, they'll see ads relevant to the search query or URL they entered.
User-Generated Content
Forums are Web sites devoted to open discussion of a topic.
Social networks are Web sites offering an interactive network of friends with personal profiles.
Image-sharing pages allow users to upload and view images.
Video-sharing pages allow users to view uploaded videos.

This data is fascinating because it illustrates something I've been hearing from Google for some time: it's not uncommon for pages/sites like parked domains (arbitrageurs) and error pages to yield good-to-excellent CTRs and conversion rates. In the example above, only social network pages yielded poor results, while the others produced results that rivaled the best search campaigns.

So, use the tool to further fine-tune your content campaigns -- but watch out for these caveats:

Not all languages are supported -- at the moment only Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish sites can be excluded
The tool is not infallible -- so continue to run Placement performance reports and use the Site Exclusion tool to opt out of poorly-performing sites/pages.

5 Ways to Kill Your Search Rankings & Their Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 10:15:00 -0700

One of the biggest fears for web site owners that have long relied on search traffic for new business is a sudden drop in search engine rankings. Some webmasters are experiencing this very situation as a result of Google’s recent Mayday update (Matt Cutts video).

In most cases, it takes a lot for a tenured web site to mess up its search visibility. In other situations, it doesn’t take much at all. Avoiding mistakes that result in exclusion, penalties and more often confusion for search engines are often overlooked. Don’t fall victim to carelessness and ignorance when it comes to maintaining the search visibility achieved from years of content and online marketing by avoiding these common mistakes:

1. Website Redesign

Probably one of the most common situations that result in fluctuations in search visibility involve significant changes to a web site’s design, content, internal linking relationships and the new use Flash, Ajax or JavaScript for navigation. Search engines copy websites and the links between pages. Think of it as taking a picture of your site. If you change your site from what the search engine has a copy of, the new form might not include the same content, keywords and crawlable links.

The worst case scenario is when a company decides to redesign the website and over write all previous SEO work. Upon finding that search visibility has completely tanked, they call up the SEO agency and demand an explanation.

Solution: When significant changes are planned for the company website, work with your SEO to identify how the new design will impact search visibility. Have them map out and prioritize the implications of page layout, content and keyword usage, navigation, links and redirects.

2. New Content Management System (CMS)

Along the lines with a new website design, changing content management systems can create a lot of confusion for search engines. Many companies have had websites long enough that the legacy CMS used to launch the site no longer serves the needs of the organization. Large companies may find that the hodgepodge of CMS used by different business units and acquired companies is inefficient and a common content management system would better serve the organization.

A change in the CMS means a change in the templates that format web pages, navigation and oftentimes the URL structure of pages. It’s common that major changes in content are rolled out along with new website software and that can spell confusion for search engines. URLs that change can also create confusion. For example, web page file names that previously ended with .asp and now end with .aspx are perceived as completely different.

Solution: While the IT department or web developer will understand the importance of redirecting old URLs to their new counterparts, execution in a search engine friendly manner is another thing entirely. 302 vs. 301 redirects and mapping URLs when there is no logical page in the new system are essential. Identifying the top sources of inbound link traffic to pages and conducting an outreach program to get them to change the URLs other sites use to link to your site is a specialty area for link building SEOs moreso than IT. Simply put, make sure you have a SEO migration plan.

3. Loss of Inbound Links

In the SEO game content is King and links are the Queen. Or content is the Yin and Links are the Yang. Whatever the metaphor, links are an essential mechanism for search engines to discover pages and signal for ranking them. Companies that proactively acquire links organically, or that earn vs. buy the links, don’t have much of a problem in this area. The longer other websites link to your site, the better. But some sites may go offline temporarily or permanently. A blog may decide to remove it’s blogroll or a site may simply decide to remove links to your site. If you change your CMS as noted above, other sites that don’t know this will continue to link to your old URL format (.asp vs .aspx) and that will appear as a loss of links. If you buy links from other sites and they are detected by search engines, those links may be devalued of any PageRank. There are many reasons for link loss.

Solution: Active content creation, promotion and social participation are essential for building a significant and relevant inbound link footprint on the web. Those links will drive traffic and serve as a signal to search engines for ranking your content in the search results. The key is to monitor your link footprint on an ongoing basis using link building tools that will identify major fluctuations in inbound link counts. Then you can drill down to see where the link loss has occurred and see if you can do something about it. The best defense is offense, so make sure you have an active link acquisition in place so minor to moderate fluctuations in links will have little, if any effect.

4. Duplicate Content

Serving up duplicate content using different URLs confuses search engines. This can happen when sites use queries on a database to display lists of products in a category that can be reached multiple ways. Printer friendly versions of pages, other English language versions of pages or outright copying content from one website to another can all cause duplicate content issues. When an search engine is presented with multiple versions of the same content, it must decide which is the original or canonical version, since engines do not want to show the exact same thing to users in the search results. Anything your website does to make that process confusing or inefficient can result in poor search performance for your web site.

Solution: A professional SEO working with website content managers can help manage broader duplicate content issues for a company website and any micro sites they’re publishing. With press releases, RSS feeds or articles that are syndicated, it’s a best practice to make sure the original is published on your site first, then to have any duplicates clearly link back to the original. Ongoing monitoring can also help with unintentional duplicate content issues caused by other sites scraping your site’s content.

5. You’ve Become a SEO Spammer!

As more content is published and promoted online, more websites are launched and more competition comes into the market, companies will be tempted to achieve the coveted first page listing at any cost. Many companies that succumb to this temptation do so because of seeing their competition get away with tactics that are clearly more aggressive and manipulative than search engines allow. Webmasters might see suggestions in forums (often disinformation) or get advice from others doing well in the disposable site, content monetization game.

Engaging in simple things like hidden keywords, redirecting pages to present one version to search engine bots and another to site visitors or publishing numerous copies of the exact same web site using search/replace keyword optimization can all result in negative effects. There are far more aggressive tactics considered spam than that of course, but SEO spam isn’t an area we work with and I’m not interested in promoting unsustainable, high risk tactics.

Solution: Understand the webmaster guidelines from each search engine: Google, Yahoo, Bing. Don’t violate those policies with the site(s) that are your bread and butter. If you must test, do so with other websites that are not going to affect your business. Rather than focusing on loopholes and exploits, be a better marketer and understand what your target audience wants, what influentials respond to and develop smarter, more creative marketing that can stand on its own to drive traffic and sales. Include SEO in those “UnGoogled efforts” and you’ll realize the added benefit of great performance from your website in search engines as well.

Introducing The All-Important Quality Score

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 07:53:00 -0700

Throughout this column, the phrase “Quality Score” has popped up on different occasions. Understanding Quality Score is fundamental for successful paid search campaigns, but can be a difficult concept for beginners to understand. So the time has come to cover this topic so you can use Quality Score to your advantage and not fall into its traps.

The early days before Quality Score

In the beginning of paid search, auctions existed in a purely capitalistic marketplace where the advertiser who was willing to pay the most for a keyword was awarded first place, the second highest-paying advertiser’s ads were second, and so forth.

It was an easy system to understand and it made sense. However, the ad space became a bit muddled. Advertisers with deep pockets literally took over the search engine results pages on keywords that weren’t necessarily related to their business. For example, a global soft drink company could start to take over terms such as rock and roll, skateboards, or even Britney Spears. These advertisers mostly weren’t trying to cause chaos—they were just trying to reach their target demographic. But in doing so, the sponsored search results for some keywords could potentially contain no results directly related to what a searcher was looking for.

The engines realized that this could be a problem. Google has long maintained that the best thing for its business is to keep results as relevant as possible—including paid listings. To improve the relevance of paid search ads, Google created the Quality Score. Microsoft and Yahoo soon followed with their own systems to improve relevance of ads.

So what is Quality Score?

Simply put, Quality Score is a numeric grade from one to ten (ten being best) assigned to each of your keyword/ad/landing page combinations. The score is updated frequently, calculated at each time your keyword is searched on to account for changes to your terms and creatives. So what’s the value of a high Quality Score? If your keyword is deemed highly relevant, Google will lower your cost-per-click and rank your ad higher than other competitors even if they’re bidding more for those terms. On the flip side, a keyword with a low Quality Score may mean you have to bid a premium price to even appear on a search result page.

How is Quality Score calculated?

We don’t know exactly what goes into the Quality Score black box but we do know that high click-thru-rates (CTRs) are a big piece of the pie. The engines probably correlate high number of clicks as “virtual votes” by past users for the advertiser and figure a good CTR means a relevant keyword.

Google does offer some insight into how Quality Score is calculated in the AdWords help area:

While we continue to refine our Quality Score formulas for Google and the Search Network, the core components remain more or less the same:

The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google; note that CTR on the Google Network only ever impacts Quality Score on the Google Network — not on Google
Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
The quality of your landing page
The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
Other relevance factors

Note that there are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid:

For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the CTR on that particular placement in addition to CTR on Google.
For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.

What do you really need to know about Quality Score?

You’ll have plenty of time to test various tactics to improve Quality Score once the campaign starts, so don’t waste too much time worrying about it right now. The one thing you do need to take into account though is to make sure you keep your ad groups tightly focused. Because click-thru-rate is the biggest weighting factor to Quality Score, you’ll want to make sure that your ads are highly relevant to the keywords in each group so that you get the best CTR as possible. In my experience, as long as you’re getting a good percentage of clicks to impressions, the engines will consider your terms relevant enough to gain fairly high scores. After that, there are just a few things to keep in mind such as ensuring that your landing pages are loading at a good speed and you have some of your ad group’s keywords in your ad text. You do those things right and your Quality Score should be just fine.

Overall, my best advice is to not obsess over Quality Score. There are a couple hundred other factors to PPC success that are just as important. The important thing now is to just make sure you understand the concept fully and do some extra research if you feel you still need some clarification.

The premise that ad popularity and a high quality score leads to improved search advertising results may or may not be true….especially for B2B advertisers. I urge business marketers to challenge this assumption and understand the relationship between PPC quality score and ROI-based results.

Quality Score algorithms

In simple terms, ad position is primarily determined by how much an advertiser is willing to pay for each click (i.e. your bid) and the popularity, orclick-through-rate (CTR), associated with your ad. Relevancy also plays a role… and very poor landing pages can lead to penalties.

More information can be found here on Google Quality Score, and Yahoo Quality Index. Details aside, Quality Score causes most advertisers to try and maximize response, or click-through-rate.

Note: Not surprisingly, this methodology also increases the click charges that go into the pockets of search networks!

Tips on PPC targeting

All advertisers should be deploying these PPC best practices to accurately target your audience:

Select very specific keywords and long tail keyword phrases
Utilize keyword match-types
Deploy negative keywords
Test geo-targeted ads (even for national brands)
Implement day-parting

This week’s question: ”What have you heard about Quality Score?”

Google Caffeine Is Live (But Don't Panic, It's Cool!)

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Wed, 9 Jun 2010 10:16:00 -0700

Today the official Google Blog and other official blogs announced the cross posted news, that Google Caffeine is live, the new Google index and indexing mechanism. According to the blog post the main change is the speed by which the web is indexed. This advancement primarily concerns the distribution of news today, which happens in realtime. The update corresponds to this demand and the expectation on the side of publishers to be indexed in time.

If you search Google on Tuesday, you may notice that the information you're looking for is a bit "fresher" than it would have been on Monday.

That's because the world's most popular search engine has unveiled a new search method called "Caffeine," which claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google's old search.

"Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of Web content we've offered," the company says in a news release on its official blog. "Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before."

That doesn't mean Google has changed its search formula entirely, or that search results will pop onto your screen faster than before. Essentially it means that Google is able to find new content more quickly. So, for instance, a new Twitter update that, in the past, would be been missing from search results because Google hadn't found and indexed it yet, would be posted to Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.

Here's a promotional video from Google that explains how the search works.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, google built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

To better understand how Caffeine works, it might help to think of Caffeine as a blog and the old Google as a newspaper. Where a newspaper collects content and then publishes it all at once, at the beginning of the day, a blog is constantly looking for new information and updating on the fly. This is sort of how Google Caffeine works. Rather than collecting big "batches" of Web pages to index for its search, Google is trying to publish more frequently as it goes.

"Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second," Google says.

"Content on the Web is blossoming," she writes. "It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average Web page is richer and more complex.

"In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

"It's interesting to see that Google is focusing again on the element of its offering where it does lead the pack: search," he writes. "That's what made its [Google's] name, but it's clear that even if Microsoft's Bing hasn't (yet?) won the market share, it has got Google thinking about how it can improve what it does."

I’ve not seen as many people notice another feature of Caffeine that may be the most “actionable” form an optimization perspective. Google now has more ability to associate data about any particular piece of content they index. They are explicitly telling us that they are building capacity into their algorithm to reference more indication of the quality or importance of a document. Also note that a document might not refer to just a web page, it could be a video or other content.

What does that tell us? Yes, your content will get retrieved and indexed more rapidly than ever before. But you also need to make sure that Google gets as many signals as possible that it is worthy of attention. Links to it, reviews of it, “Likes”, tweets and any bit of information that Google might be able to pick up are more important than ever. This has been fundamentally true for some time, but the number and nature of these signals of quality are only going to increase.

Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 8 Jun 2010 09:41:00 -0700

Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks. These frequent changes are one reason Google itself downplays algorithm updates. Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm

Google’s Matt Cutts just posted a video on YouTube answering the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt said Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches. But overall, he hopes to average at least one change per day to the algorithm. He said in 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.

A few months ago we covered a Wired story on Google’s algorithm where Udi Manber, Google’s head of search said Google has introduced 550 “improvements” to the search algorithm in the past year alone. So I guess Matt was being conservative with his math?

Here is the video:

However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A, ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

I asked Google for more specifics and they told me that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before. Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with “item” pages that don’t have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them. For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite. Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

Before, pages that didn’t have high quality signals might still rank well if they had high relevance signals. And perhaps now, those high relevance signals don’t have as much weight in ranking if the page doesn’t have the right quality signals.

What’s a site owner to do? It can be difficult to create compelling content and attract links to these types of pages. My best suggestion to those who have been hit by this is to isolate a set of queries for which the site now is getting less traffic and check out the search results to see what pages are ranking instead. What qualities do they have that make them seen as valuable? For instance, I have no way of knowing how amazon.com has faired during this update, but they’ve done a fairly good job of making individual item pages with duplicated content from manufacturer’s databases unique and compelling by the addition of content like of user reviews. They have set up a fairly robust internal linking (and anchor text) structure with things like recommended items and lists. And they attract external links with features such as the my favorites widget.

From the discussion at the Google I/O session, this is likely a long-term change so if your site has been impacted by it, you’ll likely want to do some creative thinking around how you can make these types of pages more valuable (which should increase user engagement and conversion as well).

Update on 5/30/10: Matt Cutts from Google has posted a YouTube video about the change. In it, he says “it’s an algorithmic change that changes how we assess which sites are the best match for long tail queries.” He recommends that a site owner who is impacted evaluate the quality of the site and if the site really is the most relevant match for the impacted queries, what “great content” could be added, determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.

He notes that the change:

has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).

is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).

impacts long tail queries more than other types

was fully tested and is not temporary

Using Search Funnels to Grow Your Adwords Account

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 7 Jun 2010 11:16:00 -0700

What is the new search funnels feature?
Search Funnels are a set of reports in Adwords that allow you to analyze ad impression and click behavior for campaigns, ad groups and keywords. So why is this important for advertisers? Adwords currently attributes conversions to the last click, but as we all know, few conversions are driven by just one click on one ad. There are usually many touch points with a customer, so the search funnels reports allow us to see the impressions and clicks that lead up to the conversion, which in most cases is just as important as knowing what finally lead to the sale.
What reports are included?
The search funnels reports are found in the Adwords interface under Reporting > Conversions. Click the link on the right hand side of the page, and you will be taken to the Search Funnels section.
Let’s first define the data that you will be accessing from these reports.
First click – The first time one of your ads is clicked.
Last click – The click on an ad that precedes a conversion. All conversions in Adwords are by default attributed to the last click.
Assist click – The click on an ad that precedes the last click.
Assist Impression – When an ad is shown preceding the last click, regardless of whether or not the ad was clicked.
Items to Note:
The number of conversions in Adwords will differ from the Search Funnels, because Adwords includes conversion from the Google Content Network, and the Search Funnels do not. They also exclude information on organic results, actual search queries, and competitor keyword information.
Cookie settings – search history is currently set at 30 days, and is not yet customizable.
Reports within the Search Funnels
Overview – Show how keywords and campaigns work together to create a conversion. Data is generated from conversion paths, or the sequence of ad clicks & impressions that lead to conversions. As mentioned above, content network, organic and competitive information isn’t provided.
Top Conversions – This report pulls together the various conversion types that you have set up through Adwords conversion tracking.
Assist Clicks & Impressions – This report is helpful when you need data that is not conversion focused. Assisted impressions are when your ad is shown, but not clicked, but these metrics are important in considering how many touch points you have had with the customer. Once again, you can see data for all conversion types together or individually, and you can drill down to the campaign, ad group and keyword levels.
Assisted conversions – This report shows both last click and assisted conversions. The drop down box allows you to view all conversions, or select one particular type. This will come in handy if you have different types of conversions set up (a sign up versus an ecommerce purchase), and you want to see if there is a difference in how each type conversion is reached. This report also gives you the ratio of Assisted conversions to last click conversions, so see below on the details of how to analyze this metric.
First Click & Last Click Analysis - First click and last click analysis reports allow you to focus on conversion paths that began or ended with a specific campaign, ad group or keyword. Once you are on the level you want, you can choose any other report in the drop down (while staying focused on conversions).
For example, you can choose the top paths report in drop down. Once you are there, the breadcrumbs will show you that you are in a subset of conversions. You will stay drilled in until clicking on a main navigation report.
Top Paths – Shows most common conversion paths, and how everything works together to create conversions. Choose keyword in the dimension drop down box, and you will see the most common path for keywords. If the same keyword is repeated, it represents two clicks for that keyword that then leads to a conversion. As with the other reports you can also view data on the campaign and ad group level. If you select keyword path (impressions) you will see the sequence of keywords that showed your ads, regardless of whether the ads were clicked or not. This data closely represents the breadth of related keywords people are searching for prior to converting.
Time Lag – This section represents the time it takes customers to convert. If it takes a lot of days before a conversion, you will know that your customers are in the research phase of the buying cycle. However, if conversions come on the first day, and the rest of your research shows that there was only one click and one keyword, you will know that your customers are coming to you on those terms when they are ready to buy. The hours data represents the first 24 hours in hour segments.
Path Length – This report is a high level diagnosis that allows you to see how many clicks it takes to get a conversion, and the type of conversions. As mentioned before, different conversions may take more clicks. You can also see how the value of your various conversion types changes by clicking the value link. The data represented here is the percentage of your revenue that is attributed to paths of different lengths. Additionally, if you change to the impressions view you will see how many times people saw your ads (without clicking) before converting.
The search funnel reports can be overwhelming when you first look at them, but it is important to keep in mind that the additional data that is provided is just one more way we can make educated decisions. Start with the overview reports and familiarize yourself with the broad data like understanding on average how long it takes before your customers convert, and identifying if your campaigns tend to have more assisted or last click conversions. From there you can dive deeper into the data, and ensure that you are benefiting from it, and not just spending time looking at more numbers.
Along with the tips above, remember the following:
Keywords play three roles in a conversion path. Last click (immediately preceding the conversion), assist click (immediately before the click that leads to the conversion), and assist impression (ad is displayed but not clicked).
The ratio of assisted conversions and last click conversions is a quick indicator of whether the keywords serve more in the role of last click or assist click. A value close to zero means they are last click, and a value close to 1 means they are equally an assist and last click. The higher the number, the more they are in the role of an assist click.
Some keywords in your Adwords campaigns may not show up in the reports because they only include keywords that play an assist or last click role.
Assist clicks & impressions report break out information in same way, but for clicks and impressions instead of conversions.
When possible, have FUN with this data. This is great information that will help you grow your accounts, and at the end of the day that’s the main goal, so enjoy getting there!

10 Easy Ways to Optimize Your PPC Landing Pages & Increase Conversions

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Wed, 2 Jun 2010 07:29:00 -0700

It’s common knowledge that a professional website design can increase conversion rates and sales. A professional website design ensures trust and credibility with your users. But website design and landing pages can play a part not just in SEO, but in PPC too.

Actually, there is an entire procedure to optimize PPC campaigns including writing successful PPC Ad Copy, Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns Now, back to PPC landing page optimization. The tactics I describe in this post will not only improve your Quality Score which can increase your ad position for a lower cost, but can also help convert more people that come to your website.

Now, I will admit that most of these tips are for lead generation, not all of these tips would apply to an ecommerce website.

Call to Action/Buttons – It’s no secret that adding a call –to- action or a button that is large and very noticeable on your PPC landing pages will help increase conversions. Anything that draws attention to a user is more likely to get clicked on. Tell people what you want them to do on your landing page, don’t just assume they’ll know automatically.
Minimal Navigation – The key to successful PPC landing pages is keep the user to from getting too distracted. Remove the top, left or right hand navigation from your main site on your PPC landing pages. Simply have your company logo at the top left of the page with a link to your homepage. That will be enough for people to click on if they need more information before converting.
Important information above the fold – Some people who are searching for a service like yours are sometimes in a hurry. If they enter your landing page and don’t see what they need to do within the first 5 seconds, they’re likely to bail. Be sure that your call to action, button, or form is above the fold. Be sure to check Google analytics to see what resolution size the majority of your users are currently using. This will help your designers make the important information above the fold for most of your users.
Easy-to-scan copy – I’ve worked on clients before that use way too much industry language in their PPC landing pages. You have to think that if an executive is looking for a service they’re likely to ask their assistant, intern or even a receptionist to do research before they engage in anything. While the executive may know all the industry jargon the assistant or intern may not. Also, these people who are searching for many companies are in a hurry, and simply just scan the copy on your landing page and don’t necessarily read through it all the way. So break up your copy into several paragraphs instead of one large paragraph. And I like to use the rule of thumb to put your benefits or advantages of choosing your company in a bullet list or numbered list so it stands out more prominently.
Few images to convey professionalism – Some PPC landing pages I have seen have a lot of well, dorky images that don’t convey any professionalism whatsoever. This can really turn off a potential client and make you look untrustworthy. Have one to 2 images on your PPC landing pages that show professional looking people, smiling as if they have just engaged in yoru services and are incredibly happy. Also having too many images on your PPC landing page will make your load times longer.
Fast loading times – One factor of the Google Adwords Quality Score is the load times of your pages. If it takes more than 10 seconds to fully load your pages that’s way too long. It should take less than 5 seconds. Large flash files, too many images, or animated graphics could hinder your fast load times. Also, if I have to wait for a flash animation to load before I can get information about your services, I’m more than likely not going to stick around or come back.
Dynamic headlines – Using dynamic headlines on your PPC landing pages is a great way to better target what the user is actually typing in the search box. Dynamic headlines are generated by tracking URLs that will insert the specific keyword into the headline. This is like using dynamic keyword insertion in your PPC ads, only it’s for your landing pages. If the page headline is more targeted to what the user typed in the search, they’re much more likely to continue reading and complete an action.
PPC keywords in your landing page copy – Many people think this is only true for SEO, but you still need to include your PPC keywords in the copy of your PPC Landing page. This will not only help improve your Quality Scores, but will also help your users connect better to your copy.
Short contact form – You could potentially be driving away qualified leads by having a contact form that is too long. If your contact form is running below the fold, it’s too long. You should be able to see the ‘submit’ button above the fold. Look at your current forms and only require the information you truly need. If someone sees a very long form, they may think, ‘This is going to take too long to fill out’ and could possibly skip that process altogether.
No Clutter – This is really a no-brainer, but unfortunately too many people make the mistake of dumping too much content on their PPC landing pages. You should have one main goal of your PPC landing page, not 3, 4 or 5. Remove any extra copy that isn’t necessarily useful to the user. Remove any unnecessary images or icons.

If you need any persuasion to make changes to your existing landing pages, just take this for an example: if you were to make changes on your landing pages, and increase your conversion rates by .5%, add that to your current sales and see how much of an increase that is. You would be surprised how much additional revenue .5% would drive.

If you have any additional PPC landing page tips that will help increase conversions that I have not mentioned feel free to add them in the comments section!

PPC Ad Copy Tips - Writing Successful PPC Ad Copy to Boost your CTR

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:46:00 -0700

One of the most important factors of a successful PPC campaign is writing successful ad copy. You can spend a good deal of time on other aspects of your campaign but skimp on the ad copy and you might not get the results you're looking for. This two-part article will review several tips for crafting high performing ad copy and methods for testing its effectiveness.

Managing paid advertising on the search engines can be tricky. The little boxes of ads seem innocuous, but many advertisers don't effectively capitalize on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) opportunities. One way to make a big difference in paid search campaigns is with ad copy. Here are several pointers to get your ad copy right!

1. Qualifications and Guarantees: Another way to help your searchers feel a little more comfortable about clicking on your ad is to state any qualifications or guarantees you have. Are you a certified professional? Are you an award winner? Do you offer a money back guarantee? Answering these questions might be enough to get a click.

2. Use of Exclamation Points: When I first tried this experiment, I guess was disappointed to find out that people really do respond to exclamation points!!!!

3. Dangling Top: Create an ad version where the top description line extends past the bottom description line.

4. Display URL in Title Case : This technique can call out your brand a bit.In cases where your domain actually has some keyword value/keyword association, this Title Case technique can have an even greater impact.

5. Question Mark in Heading - Ask the Question: Another way to set up your headline is to simply ask a question that gets the searcher thinking. You might be surprised if you ask a compelling question and then follow up in your description with some compelling answers. This can also help make your headline stick out especially if your competition is employing the keyword insertion method.

6. Include prices and promotions in title or text copy for store product if we offer study guides at cheapest rates:

7. Use a strong call-to-action: Enroll Now, Buy, Purchase, Call today, Order, Browse, Sign up, and Get a quote - Promotions and sales capture people's attention. If you have a giveaway or a product that's on sale, put that in your ad. If you use this method, be sure that you send them to a page that actually has the promotion or the sale (more on this topic in part two).

8. All Title Case

9. Test multiple ads in each ad group

10. Write Specific Ads for Specific Keywords

Gear ad copy to the specific terms in your paid search accounts. Statistics tell that visitors are more likely to convert to a sale, sign-up or other type of conversion when they see queries they've keyed into the search engines in your actual ad copy.

11. Dynamic Keyword Insertion (Warning: Advanced Topic): DKI is an advanced method that allows you to dynamically insert a keyword from your ad group into your ad copy, if triggered from a search query.

KEY POINT: The most important factor of your PPC ads is the headline or title. More than any other part of the ad, the title can impact the CTR of your ads.

It is impossible to infer a concrete plan of action for the best possible PPC ad copy based on two micro-tests. Ideally, you will implement your own testing and discover the optimal ad copy for your own unique offer. In the following section, we offer the most effective techniques we have learned from several years of PPC ad copy testing.

2. What are the most important practices to keep in mind when optimizing your PPC ad copy? (16 Techniques)

1. The most important element of your PPC ad copy is the heading or title. The more potential customers identify with your heading, the more likely they will be to click your ad. The number of characters allowed in your heading is quite limited, so optimizing the best possible combination of words is of utmost importance.

2. Using relevant keywords in the ad title usually work very well. This technique captures the attention of users by putting their search terms in the most prominent position in the ad.

To match your title keywords to search terms, you will have to set up individual ad groups for important search terms. On Google AdWords, you can use automatic keyword insertion, which will save a tremendous amount of time when setting up campaigns spread over numerous keywords. For example, if you have 1500 keywords and want to put all of them into a single ad group, you can set up your account to automatically insert the search terms into your title (as long as they don't exceed character limitations).

3. If your prices are the lowest or close to the lowest in your industry, placing product prices in the ad title can boost CTR and skyrocket conversions.

4. "Free" add-on offers work well in the ad title. For example, if you offer free shipping, free bonus software, or a free 30-day trial, try mentioning that in the ad title and the primary offer in the body.

5. Make sure the "display URL" is the shortest possible URL. Display URLs are basically free brand exposure for your domain name. Even when no one clicks your ads, you are still receiving exposure. If your site domain iswww.PoonamBhatt.com, do not use http://www.poonambhatt.com/Pay-per-clcik/ as the display URL. Make it as simple, uncomplicated, and memorable as possible.

6. It is best to display URLs without the "www" in front of them rather thanwww.poonambhatt.com. It thus becomes more likely that they will remember your site.

7. When possible, try to quantify your ads. If you have the most or greatest variety of products in your niche and you believe that gives you a competitive advantage, use that in the ad. If the price of your service is relatively low compared to alternatives, advertising the price in the ad copy – or even in the ad title – can be quite effective.

8. Avoid using hype in your ads. This is especially true for those products and services whose potential customers may be inherently skeptical. For more on an honest approach to writing copy.

9. Create a sense of urgency in your ads if it can be done without hype. Rather than using words like "amazing" or "unbelievable," try "limited-time offer" or "available for overnight shipping."

10. Use clear, precise sentences, not just keywords.

11. When space is available, always add a credibility indicator. Examples of these include: 30-day money-back guarantee, 5-star rated merchant, etc.

12. Be aware that CTR is not the only important factor in a highly effective PPC ad. Conversion rate is also very important. The temptation on PPC engines is to use highly specific ad copy to pre-qualify your clicks. This may allow you to pay for less clicks while achieving a higher conversion rate.

However, Google has minimum CTRs that must be maintained for your ads to remain active. The minimum CTR varies by keyword. In addition, a high CTR will also positively influence your ad placement in Google, so sacrificing CTR to increase conversion, while it could save you money, is often quite risky.

13. Create a unique approach that focuses on the opposite or reverse of what your competitors are advertising. As we saw in Test Site A above, a reverse-psychology approach can often outperform the expected approach for some ad types.

14. KEY POINT: You cannot write PPC ads in a vacuum. Testing is essential. Furthermore, you must pay attention to what your competitors are doing in the PPC engines. Study your competition's ad copy to determine how your own marketing voice can be distinctive from that of your competitors.

15. Review our previous PPC-related reports, listed in the "notes" below.

These sixteen techniques should help you develop the best possible ad copy for a variety of PPC campaigns. But again, nothing should replace ongoing testing as your primary means of optimizing your copy.

URLs and SEO: SEO Best Practices for URL Structure

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:04:00 -0700

URLs and SEO: Various Strategies for URL File Names: Below are various strategies for URL file naming.

1. Why do we care?

URL is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects that affect both SEO and usability.

It affects:

Rankings (placing keywords in the file path is one of the most effective ways to make the keywords more prominent);
Click-through: a “clear”, “readable” URL can be anotherreinforcement signal for the user to click it;
Usability: a good “obvious” URL helps the user understand what the page is about even before entering the page.

2. Keywords in the file name

There is no doubt that keywords in the URL matter (so far they even matter a lot). However this doesn’t mean that you need to stuff your URLs with only keywords. The best practices would be:

Keywords in the file path occur naturally;
Keywords in the file path help make the URL easier comprehensible and memorable;
URLs do not consist of only keywords: here’s a good point expressed by Onreact in his post on top 10 fatal URL design mistakes:

Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs in as much as their posting becomes totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy

3. Word separators

While Google has become much smarter when it comes to identifying separate words in the file path, a dash is still considered the best choice:

Word separator	Disadvantages	Example
Space	URL encoded as %20 (makes the URL not easy to read). This may also prevent from sharing the URL in some social bookmarking services.	/word1%20word2
&	URL encoded as %26 (makes the URL not easy to read). This may also prevent from sharing the URL in some social bookmarking services.	/word1%26word2
Comma (,) or period (.)	Abused by spammers	/word1.word2 OR /word1,word2
Underscore	Traditionally it isn’t seen by search engines as a word separator (this is slowly changing now)	/word1_word2
Hyphen	NONE	/word1-word2

4. URL length

While it is still considered the best practice to stick to shorter URLs, the factor is becoming less and less important:

Usability: Very few people manually type a URL in the address bar. They either use bookmarks or search history (e.g. FireFox / Chrome smart address bar that shows URLs while you start typing the title of the page) or just use Google to find the page again;
SEO: Google can handle very long URLs (though it is still rumored that it prefers short URLs, I personally don’t see any big difference);
Click-through: Google now breaks long URL in SERPs smartly: it only shows the parts which use the search term or even substitutes the URL with breadcrumbs.

5. Case sensitivity

We have discussed this before: URLs are case sensitive. That being said, if you have two versions of the URL live and linked to (which is only possible if your site is on Windows server), this means that both lower- and higher-case URL versions return 200 OK status when queried. This will cause some duplicate content issues but Google will most likely be able to figure that out (by choosing one of them). What’s more important is that you are wasting plenty of link juice spreading it between the two versions.

It is recommended to always choose lowercase pattern (just because there will always be people who will link to a more traditional, plain-text version) and to use 301 status code to redirect all other (capitalized, upper-case, etc) versions to the lowercase one.

6. URL Extensions

We’ve discussed URL extensions previously and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter too much if an URL have one or not. There are some pros and cons (listed below) but these are rather minor arguments:

Argument for using an extension: intuitive browsing: seeing an .htlm people may understand that is a page with content, seeing / people may assume that’s a folder. Although there is no direct impact on rankings, an URL extension makes it clear both to a user and a search bot whether this is a page or subdirectory.

Arguments against using an extension:

Reduce the overall URL length, which is just better overall. Not that the 4/5 characters that are in the .html or .php really add a lot, but sometimes small things can make a difference.
No problems with any technology changes (moving to anew CMS, etc): no need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

7. More URL tips:

Cool URIs don’t change
Don’t put dates in the URL.

Length of the URL: no more than 3-5 words in your URL. According to Google’s Matt Cutts if there are more than 5 words…

[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.”

Here is one more evidence in favor of short URL: recent research shows that short URLs within Google SERPs get clicked twice as often as long ones. So by sticking to short URLs you get both better rankings and better clickthrough.

Short URLs will also help in direct type ins of URLs (if anyone still uses that instead of Google).

Dashes are better than underscores. Although Google has no individual preferences (meaning you won’t be penalizes for either of the versions), dashes are more preferable as Google “sees” each hyphened word as an individual one:

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2?.

Unlike a domain name, URL is case sensitive – meaning that if by any reason (your choice or CMS) you stick to a an upper-case version, remember that this can cause a few issues: people are most likely to link to the standard lower case one and you might both lose link juice and suffer from duplicate content issues.

Moving to static URL structure: my favorite tactic is to use 301 redirect only for most powerful (in terms of linking and traffic) pages and leave all others to be handled via 404.

If you hesitate if your URLs may be perceived as spammy, check out SEOMOZ URL Spam Detection Tool that will estimate:
- spam words;
- hyphens;
- subdomain depth;
- domain length;
- digits.
Mind your file extensions (i.e. don’t end your URLs with .exe) as they might prevent your pages from crawling.

Factoring Time into SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:19:00 -0700

We all know that it takes time for your rankings in the SERPs to change. Although they do fluctuate frequently, long-term improvements in your SERPs rankings take time to produce.

Some time needs to pass before the Search Engines are confident you deserve increased rankings. Things that can happen during the days, weeks or months before you see some real results include:

Increase in aggregate traffic – if more unique visitors are landing on your website, then that means there’s a bigger trend of searchers looking for you, therefore your website is more relevant, so the more traffic you have, the more you’re seen as authoritative
Increase in links pointing to external pages linking to you – this has a snowball effect because you receive more link juice from one link linking to you when other websites are linking to the page that’s linking to you.
Increase in the amount of clicks from searchers – search engines have a general idea of the percentage of clicks the #1 position for a keyword should get (i.e. the #1 result should be getting 40% of clicks, while #2 should get 20% – arbitrary numbers), so when there’s an imbalance of clicks (if the #2 result starts getting 40% of clicks while the #1 result receives 20%), the results in the SERPs are re-ordered (the #2 result would be bumped up to #1 to see if it can maintain the 40% of clicks it has been receiving)
Increase in age of domain – as your domain ages, and you continue to renew your domain for at least a few years until expiration, your website’s authoritativeness increases because it’s an older source of information.
Increase in age of backlinks – as the age of the backlinks pointing to you increase, search engines believe that your website is more authoritative because the links serve as past proof that your website is worth checking out. While search engines love fresh content, they also highly respect older content

Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 18 May 2010 06:59:00 -0700

Pay per click advertising is a form of marketing with major benefits. It differs from other methods of marketing in its ability to allow advertisers and marketers to measure and analyze the results of their techniques, to refine and optimize them to increase ROI beyond almost anything possible in the offline marketing world. Google AdWords is currently the prominent pay per click resource available today. Learning some of the ways to optimize your AdWords campaigns can cut costs while keeping conversions up in several ways.

Here are four ways to refine your AdWords campaign to see where money spent is producing the best return and to adjust settings to maximize return on investment.

1. The Segment option. This is one of the newest additions to AdWords. The Segment option is available within your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. Within each, the options are different, but allow for viewing of your results in specific ways of measurement. This can include breaking into specific units of time, such as weeks or days of the week.

By viewing your data this way you can discover what weeks are most active for a seasonal market, as well as information such as which days of the week are most prone to getting better conversion rates. By knowing this data, you can reduce costs where your conversions are more expensive, increase bids where you are seeing better conversion rates, and in all these ways increase ROI.

2. A-B Split Testing for ads. This can be one of the most effective means of increasing CTR for your ad groups. Have two or three ads active for each ad group. After a number of clicks (ideally at least 20 clicks on each ad), choose the better performing ad. Replace the more poorly performing ad with a different ad copy. Repeat the whole operation to find which advertisement will produce the best CTR or the best conversion rate.

Doing this can often improve your CTR by a factor of 2 or more, and a higher CTR improves Quality Score as well as increasing lead generation. To get an accurate reading for proper A-B split testing, make sure your campaign setting for Ad Delivery->Rotation is set to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

3. Remarketing with the Audiences tab. This is an element of AdWords that works only for the Content Network. When the Audiences tab is enabled, you can create remarketing lists to target specific visitors to your site. By placing code on specific pages within your site, a cookie is put on all users who visit these pages.

Then when they visit other sites with similar targeted themes, a very relevant ad is shown to these users to give them motivation to return to your site to make a purchase or opt-in. This works by reaching out to visitors who had visited your site previously and displayed some kind of interest in that market. Often this remarketing approach can increase conversions by contacting people who have an established interest in your products and reconnecting with them.

4. Changing advertising frequency/rate settings. Advertising can be adjusted in AdWords to not just advertise for certain days and hours of each day, but the amount for CPC can be adjusted to raise or lower bidding rates for certain days and hours. The setting is within each Campaign settings area, under Advanced settings->Schedule and choosing Ad Scheduling, the selecting “Bid Adjustment” inside the scheduling option.

After doing research for performance for specific days within your campaign you can make changes to cut costs and increase ROI nicely. For example, after viewing that you are getting little or no conversions on certain days of the week, you can pause these days with this setting. In the same way, any days that have better conversion rates can have an increased bid amount to maximize CTR for those days. This can all help improve business results for your AdWords campaign.

By knowing about and using these different options within AdWords you can greatly improve your pay per click results. AdWords optimization is a definite way to increase ROI and open additional opportunities to expand your marketing methods. Properly using these techniques can cut costs, increase profits, and help you make the most out of this powerful tool.

Why SEO is like The Biggest Loser

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Thu, 13 May 2010 06:17:00 -0700

Few television shows are as close to a one-to-one comparison to Search Engine Optimization like The Biggest Loser. From the personal trainers to the eliminations to the goal of the show, trimming down an SEO site is eerily similar to the weekly weight-loss programming seen frequently on NBC.

Every contestant is obese. When a SEO is first contacted by an internet business, whether to join the In-House team or as an outside consultant, it is very rare that the website they start work on is doing well at all. Almost certainly, the website will be fat, out of shape, and will require work, whether through link building (working out), or on-site optimization (diet and lifestyle). If things were working out great and the person had great control of their site or their SEO services, they wouldn’t be contacting you, the personal trainer.

The process takes a long time. SEO is not a quick fix. While we can make some quick, immediate changes to a website (diet and lifestyle), it takes long term commitment to link building (exercise) and maintenance of the website to get to our ideal image, which is a front page rankings. Hopefully, these front page rankings will convert traffic into customers (dates!).

Every person requires a different trainer style. Every client and company is different. Some clients will require ninety e-mails and countless phone-calls to finally change their title tags (dietary habits), while others will do so instantaneously. Some of these clients will like you a little too much and start calling you even when you shouldn’t be working. This happened to Bob Harper in Season 8 with Amanda – I know, I thought it was a little weird too.

The less efficient contestants get cut. Many times you will have to eliminate entire parts of a website and restructure them to get your ideal picture. At the end of the process, you will be left with the best parts of your website, and those parts will be in the best shape of their lives, due to the link building and on-site optimization that was implemented throughout the process.

Unfortunately for the contestants (and the SEOs getting paid), the show ends. Whether it’s by mutual breakup, the company folding or underperformance by one or both parties, the website no longer has its personal trainer. This, of course, can lead to..

.. the contestants getting fat again. Ranking first doesn’t mean you have to stay first. Many times websites will lose their dedication to link building, start scaling inefficiently, and get passed up by fitter, sexier competitors. Many of these contestants were fat in the first place because they had no concept of optimal SEO practices, and if they choose to never take them up or really learn them, they’re bound to get fat again.

So what lesson can we pull from this tale of obesity and sorrow? Learn your SEO, continuously practice it, and, for heaven’s sakes, work out. And I don’t mean link build, please get in the gym.

I don’t want to see you on that show.

The SEO Tool That May Make You Switch to Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:00:00 -0700

The huge variety of addons is the main reason why I am a stubborn FireFox adopter. It is fun to watch how Google Chrome is quickly catching up in that respect.

This week I am looking at a cool SEO extension for Google Chrome you will want to check out.

The utility has a pretty unique name – SEO Site Tools and here’s the full round-up of its features (mind it that all stats mentioned below can be expanded by clicking the link to the full report at each provider’s site).

1. See “External page date”

This section contains aggregated data from various web tools and search engines, like:

Google PageRank,
Number of results for SITE: command in Google and Bing;
Cache date in Google and Bing;
Backlinks per Yahoo SiteExplorer;
Backlinks per SEOmoz’s Linkscape and Majestic SEO;
Alexa traffic details;
Quancast and Compete.com rank;
Domain presence in Dmoz:

2. View “Page Elements”

Lots of useful information here:

Meta tags information;
Code verification status;
Anchor text found on the page;

Page headings;
Page headers.

3. Get an Overview of the Domain Presence in Social Media:

Facebook reactions;
Reddit actions;
Stumbleupon views;
Total Tweets;
Digg votes;
Diggs to domain;
Delicious bookmarks;
Google buzz mentions:

4. Access Server and Domain Information

What you see here is quite clear: a handy overview of the domain account holder’s records as well as server stats:

5. Look through Suggested Changes

The last section lists some suggestions you may consider for better rankings and improved SEO:

Link quantity;
Meta tags recommendations;
URL length; etc:

The tool also allows to highlight on-page Nofollow attribute used for links.

6. Enhance SERPs

The tool also allows to enhance search results in various ways:

Enhance Google, Bing and Yahoo! SERPs with PageRank (set the default PageRank for that: Google PR, MozRank or MozAuthority);
Number search results:

7. Add Social Stats to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools:

The tool allows to add some nice “Social Reactions” stats to your Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools reports:

8. Customize Options:

The above behavior can be customized via the tool options (#6-7). You can also set up the default section of the page analysis (#1-5):

Why Google’s Redesign Could Be Good News for Social Marketers

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 11 May 2010 06:26:00 -0700

It’s all about the real estate. Google results pages have historically been about simplicity. Any search “options” have been such a little part of the UI that, let’s be honest, hardly anyone knew they were there.

Before now, Google attempted to predict what users wanted by including universal search (such as news, videos, and images) right in the organic results. Most recently, social conversations (blog posts, twitter updates, etc.) have made their way into the SERPS. Today, a clear left navigation gives users quick access to specific vertical search features right from the results pages:

While universal search results had created added opportunities for search marketers to capitalize on SERPs, this latest change favors social marketers. In addition to video, images, maps, and news search; blogs, Forums (Discussions), and Twitter/Buzz like services (Updates) have been given their respective real estate from Google results pages. So if you’re not already involved in these as a part of your internet marketing strategy, you’ve just fallen further behind.

Blogs

While Google blog search is nothing new, this new navigation is sure to generate some increased usage. If you own, run, or write for a blog, that could mean an increase in traffic from Google. If you don’t, it’s probably time you started one…

Freshness of content will also be a consideration for users. While the results are set to sort by “relevance” by default, buttons to sort by date, and/or limit results to the last 10 minutes, hour, day, week, month, and year are easily accessible. The default results, too, even seem to favor the fresh content and include information on how old the post is within the SERP listing. What does this mean for you? Keep blogging…as often as you can.

Updates – Twitter & Google Buzz Search

In December, Google released their “real time search” feature. Tweets were included within results and a full page of real-time tweets was just a click away. Last month, Google added a dynamic archive function which gave users the ability look back at specific days & times or track twitter trends across an entire year. Now, Google has given this search feature a place in their new navigation.

For marketers and content producers, the “Top Links” section of the results is just one more opportunity to spread content by promoting it on Twitter and Google Buzz. While the potential for consistent traffic may not be as appealing as the blog search section, it’s certainly another good reason to make services like twitter and Google Buzz a part of your social media strategy. And if nothing else, it makes for a great tool for ORM or tracking and monitoring social campaigns within the twittersphere.

Discussions – Forum Search

Who says forums are dead? “Discussions” is the final social addition to the new Google navigation and it focuses on forums and answer services like Wiki Answers and Yahoo! Answers. It’s quite useful to users who may be looking for solutions to questions that others might have already posted online. Much like Blog search it’s not a completely new service, but again, this change will likely mean increased usage. So if you own, run, or moderate a forum, this could translate into increased traffic and thus additional activity.

For the rest of social marketers, however, it means allocating more time to participating in industry forums as a part of their social media strategy. Being active within forums and providing answers to common industry related questions on services like Yahoo! Answers can give an individual or brand extra exposure and more importantly: credibility & authority.

Bad news for SEOs?

The down side to Google’s new navigation could be reduced use of the general results. With these extra options easily accessible for users to refine their search, Google has essentially marginalized their search algorithm. The effect could be reduced clicks which could drive traffic down for sites that typically do well in organic results. But as search & social media continue to blend into small parts of a larger entity; marketing strategies will need to adjust. And this change by Google is just one more example.

PPC Magic: 3 Steps To Turning Hundreds Of Keywords Into Millions

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Fri, 7 May 2010 08:19:00 -0700

Basically, the long tail approach dictates that we not only use high-search volume, general terms, but also load up our accounts with many, many niche terms—the theory being that these tail terms are cheaper due to less competition and also more relevant so they drive higher engagement with users.

I’ve seen campaigns with a few hundred terms perform very well. I’ve also seen campaigns with millions of terms perform poorly. Remember, we test everything in search engine marketing! So, other than the actual logistics of managing a huge list, there really isn’t any drawback to adding and testing many keywords if you think they even have the slightest chance of providing value to your advertiser. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that for beginners to PPC, try to limit your lists to 10,000 to 20,000 max.

The key is using modifiers

So, how do we take the hundreds of terms we uncovered during our research and turn them into tens of thousands (and maybe even millions) of long tail terms? The secret is with modifiers. For example, if you’re selling used cars, you may take a core term like used car and add buying modifiers so now you have purchase used car, buy used car, shop for used car, etc. As search marketers looking for tail terms, we may combine our core words with multiple modifier lists. For example, if we matched up every term with the dealer’s car brands, we wouldn’t have just purchase used car, but alsopurchase used Saturn, purchase used Ford, purchase used Toyota etc.

Each advertiser will have their own set of modifiers that make sense. However, some common modifier directions include:

Buying cycle. Used for awareness/interest terms, modifiers such as info onor research could be used. For users further down the funnel, buy, shop, purchase and so on also make sense.

Adjectives. If you’re selling broadband service, then description words likefast, speedy, and quick could be important. For banks, it might be performance words such as high yield or safety-conscious words like insured.

Geographical. Lists of cities, towns, states, DMAs, metro areas, etc. If the advertiser is a U.S. based national brand, you may almost always use states and top DMAs as modifiers. Certainly car insurance Omaha should be treated differently than car insurance New York City. Similar geographical modifiers can be used elsewhere in the world.

Here are three steps to using modifiers to build giant keyword lists.

Step #1 – Identify your core terms. If you’ve been through all of the research ideas in this column, you will have already compiled a pretty comprehensive list of keywords from keyword tools, competitor research, and so on. So, you should be able to look through all of the terms and quickly pull out a high level list of core terms. If you’re an online retailer, maybe those core terms are your main categories. Or, if you’re a service company, you will probably have a handful of terms that are used most when people search for your company.

As an example, I’ll use a clothing retailer based in the western region of the U.S. Here is their core term list. Make sure to include plurals and any very common misspellings in the core list.

T-shirt
T-shirts
Jeans
Shirt
Shirts
Dress
Dresses

Step #2 – Generate your modifier lists. 5 lists that come to mind for this retailer are:

Sizes: Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL
Color: Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Brown, White, Black, Orange
Purchase terms: Buy, Shop, Browse, Purchase, Deal, Cheap, Inexpensive,
Qualifiers: Brand name, Designer, Name Brand, Quality, Chic
Western States: California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Montana

Step #3 – Generate permutations. You can use a permutation tool such as Keyword Lizard or Keyword Combinations to input your various lists. You’re always going to want to use your core terms in combination with modifiers where it makes sense. Here’s a screenshot from the free Keyword Combination tool:

Suddenly, you have tail term lists with designer jeans California, small blue shirt, and inexpensive XL t-shirts. In fact, from your seven core terms and five simple modifier lists, you can easily generate over 200,000 keywords.

Okay, here’s where the magic happens. Check the math: 7 Core Terms X 5 sizes X 8 colors X 7 purchase words X 5 qualifiers X 8 States = 78,400 variations of your core words.

Abracadabra!

Actually, you have more than that. There are keywords that won’t contain every list. So you really add one more modifier per list that is a “blank space”. Once you do that, you get 186,624. Wow! In fact, if you were to add just one more keyword to one of those lists, the total available permutations would be 207,360! You won’t use all of those keywords, especially if you cap them at 3-4 words per keyword phrase. However, chances are you’ll be using many more modifier lists and core terms so the list could grow to millions very easily. Ultimately, you certainly will have plenty of great tail terms to test.

And, if you do it right, you can easily segment the keywords into groups and campaigns. For this example, there could be a “sizes campaign” or a “states campaign.” That way you can address similar words with the most relevant ad text and landing pages. Next week, we’ll dive deeper into campaign and ad group segmentation.

Google Gives its Search Results Pages the Bing Look

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Thu, 6 May 2010 10:38:00 -0700

Google has given its main web product, web search a much needed redesign. And while this is a welcome development since it’s been quite awhile since Google has done this to its major service which happens to be the company’s bread and butter, the new look of the search results pages will kind of remind you of Bing though. It’s actually a simpler kind of Bing’s search results pages.

Anyway, putting aside its similarities to Bing’s search results pages, Google’s redesigned search results pages now features a contextually relevant, left-hand navigation which highlights Google’s search verticals including – news, blogs, images, books and more. The new side panel is powered by Google’s search technologies – Universal Search, Search Options Panel and Google Squared.

What’s good about the contents of the left-hand panel is that it is dynamic and changes depending on the type of your search. Through Universal Search technology, the items on the left-hand panel changes and suggests the most relevant genres of results for your query. And you can switch seamlessly to these different types of results. It could also suggest different views on how you want your search results to be displayed or even display the search results together with other related topics.

In addition to the said enhancements to the search results interface, Google has also tweaked the color palette as well as the Google logo – giving the search results pages a modern and still simple look and feel.

The redesigned Google search interface is being rolled out globally today, although I haven’t seen it when I tried visiting Google Search. Have you seen the changes already? How do you like the new design and navigation of the Google Search Results Pages?

New Change To The Google SERPs

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Wed, 5 May 2010 07:05:00 -0700

Google has rolled out a new change to their results pages. This noticeable change is that of brand links for certain search queries.

For example, if you are searching for “baseballs”, you might get links for Rawlings, MacGregor, Ussa, Easton, NFHS, and so forth. (See image below) If you do a search for snowboards (by the way… it’s April 30 and snowing here in Utah) you might get links for Burton, K2, Ride, Forum, and GNU.

I have now seen this on a few occasions and each time the listings tend to appear near the top of the results, just below the ppc paid listings. These “brand links” are not links to the sites of the brands, however, they are links to SERPs for queries that incorporate those brands into them. For example, clicking on “Burton” will take me to a page targeting the search query “burton snowboards”.

What this means for ecommerce SEO is a more important focus on optimizing and getting ranked for big for brands. In high school, we used Rawlings and Usssa baseballs. Until I did this search query this morning, I forgot that we used the Usssa balls. If I was going to purchase some baseballs, I would probably click on one of the two brands. If you were a dealer of Rawlings baseballs, optimized for Rawlings baseballs, and showed up high in the SERPs, you might have just got my business.

It is unclear whether these results have been rolled out on a mass scale or if they are just part of a limited test. However, many of the searches I performed this morning had the brand results. Also, no one really knows how to get your brand listed in these suggestions. It is assumed that it is related to how frequent theses brands are searched for in relation to their respective items.

I’ll tell you this, when I do keyword research going forward, I will be paying close attention to the associated brands with particular search queries to see if there are any “favored” brands that I can optimize for.

55 Quick Search Engine Optimization Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Poonam Bhatt) — Tue, 4 May 2010 13:31:00 -0700

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.

Written By: SEJ