If you’re running a large volume PPC campaign, either for one product or multiple products, there are two things you want to ensure you do to keep your costs down and your conversions up. First, you want to set-up your campaigns properly so that you can segment your traffic and better understand what keywords perform for what campaigns. Second, if your campaigns are truly high-volume, you might want to consider an automated tool that can help you monitor and manage your campaigns as they evolve.

Step 1: Campaign Set-Up

Cost control starts at the campaign level. If you’re running ads on both Google’s Search and Content networks, it’s important that you segment your campaign by setting up identical campaigns, one for search and one for content. This will allow you to better monitor performance, control budgets and optimize ad groups and keyword bids for each network respectively.

For content campaigns, you will also want to use site and category exclusions. Doing so will help you (1) avoid paying for untargeted clicks, and (2) maintain your Quality Score by preserving your click-through-rate (CTR):

Another way that Google gauges the relevancy of a page is by monitoring how many people click-through to it from the search results. The more frequently that users click your ads, the higher the Quality Score your ads receive. Google does this to reward advertisers who show their users the most relevant search results. [...]

Google will also give your entire Adwords account a Quality Score. So the CTR of all adgroups in your campaign in your account will be considered against your Quality Score.

Finally, check the Quality Score of your individual keywords. You will want to pause any term that (1) has a Quality Score of four or less and (2) has zero conversions. Quality Score not only affects a keyword’s cost-per-click (CPC) and first page bid estimate, it also influences your overall ad ranking and a keyword’s eligibility to enter the ad auction.

Step 2: Bid Management

Managing your costs when you’re dealing with hundreds of keywords is one thing. But when you’re working with thousands of keywords, you might want to consider an automated tool that can help you manage your bidding on all of your long-tail terms.

• Acquisio SEARCH offers PPC software that includes bid management and aggregation tools. Among other things, it shows you which keywords should be paused, emails you when keywords have poor Quality Scores, and lets you to set maximum CPCs aligned with a dynamic expression like first page bid estimate.
• adCore by Podium is PPC bid management algorithm that adjusts bids at the keyword- and ad group-levels. It can help you test different ad creatives, and there’s even a keyword cleanup feature for removing terms with low click-through rates or that have CPAs above a predefined value.
• Clickable. Clickable’s ActEngine analyzes your campaign and automatically generates performance recommendations, namely, in the form of proposing bid increases on effective keywords, reducing bids of underperforming keywords, or notifying you of terms that have fallen below their first page estimates.
• DART Search by DoubleClick is an automated bid management tool. With it, you can bid on your keywords up to 12 times a day. It also allows you to create a bid strategy by choosing two rules to be applied in a particular order. Bid rules include those based on position, conversion, and ROI, etc.
• SearchCenter is part of the Omniture Online Marketing Suite of applications. SearchCenter is an automated bid engine that offers the most common bid management tactics, such as rules-based and portfolio bidding. SearchCenter also offers Day Parting, but so do most other modern PPC engines.

Automated tools can help you streamline the management process, but they can’t replace regularly scheduled, hands-on fine tuning necessary for successful campaign management. After all, automated tools can only crunch the number you give them. They are not able to recognize and understand trends the same way that human being is. They lack the intuition of experience or the understanding of what makes your product and customers unique. So fine tuning from your campaigns with such measures as testing new ad copy and landing pages will still be an integral part of your PPC maintenance. Automated tools will just help you do the heavy lifting.

In all seriousness, search has been a confusing place from the beginning and it continues as such. I joined GoTo.com when it was entering the throes of the second phase of search. I have decided to write a different perspective on this with a little long forgotten history. It’s written from my perspective in the industry so if it comes across as self-serving or you want things more clean, just hit the Back button or go read what Danny Sullivan and Jason Calacanis wrote about the deal.

Phase 1: Netscape Built Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek

Netscape was THE browser back in the day (I have to put it that way or my Old Internet Guy will be revoked card). It didn’t have its own search engine but it had a button you could press to get to one of the 4 main search engines. The best part was, it gave them traffic for the price of… FREE!

Mind you, Yahoo wasn’t a search engine. It was a directory that David Filo and Jerry Yang (oh, he commits infanticide later in this story) started as grad students at Stanford.

Not that many readers remember the other early players like:  Excite (bought by ISP @Home and destroyed), Lycos (is that German for search?) or Infoseek (bought by Disney, renamed Go and successfully sued by GoTo over the logo before being shutdown… is Disney even on the Web anymore?), and Altavista (which was a project by Digital to prove the value of its servers. It was at altavista.digital.com. Catchy and user-friendly, huh?)

Phase 2: Netscape wants to charge

Imagine that, people realized there was money in search. The big four weren’t so keen on paying (well, the ones that were not Yahoo stuck around for a small amount). There was a group of upstarts with deep VC pockets and were willing to pay to play. GoTo.com was in there as were AskJeeves (IAC later committed “butlercide”), Looksmart (it was our goal that it didn’t look smart… sorry Claudine and Sean), Go2Net / Infospace and a few others. It was fun even if many portal execs (OK, most portal execs) thought we were doing the work of the devil.

GoTo had one thing going for it (this is the self serving part). Todd Tappin, our CFO, wouldn’t let us sign an unprofitable deal. He did let us bid them up to hurt the others, especially Looksmart. There was one deal Jeffrey Brewer, our fearless CEO, insisted that we sign and pray. It was a bet your business deal. It was, of course, Netscape.

Netscape had an annual bidding process for its search traffic. Minimum $30 CPM and maximum 15% of the traffic. I lobbied to have our offer go in at 25% and 35%. We sent in both with different CPMs and (HOLY SEARCH, BATMAN!) they said yes (after asking if we meant it). Panic. Jeffrey remained calm and said he could get the money if the deal went south. Well, the day it was announced the stock we up 40% (we went public 2 weeks prior) and, much to our surprise, it was profitable due to having 20 keywords listed whenever users saw it. That was an important point in the development of paid search. We briefly messed up the marketplace by driving traffic to specific keywords (at least when we let distribution partners do so).

Needless to say, Ask.com is the only survivor of this class (”We’re #3!!!”). GoTo and Altavista (along with FAST and Inktomi) were bought by Yahoo along with Tim Cadogan (who headed up Yahoo Search for a few years before leaving to found OpenX).

Phase 3: Yahoo Builds Google

Did I really write that Yahoo built Google? Yep. Sure Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the technology but Yahoo marketed the hell out of that thing. From 2000-2004 Yahoo continued to provide only the Yahoo Directory and had its search engine “powered by Google”. This legitimized Google by giving it credibility with Yahoo’s users who soon figured out they could go directly to Google.

Google didn’t have to pay for traffic and Yahoo’s former users didn’t have to search via navigating through 6 clicks to find a site in a directory.

Trip to Mountain View to pitch Google on paid search. Yes, we heard that paid search was not relevant and would never be on Google’s SERPs. And they meant it. It wasn’t a trick. Google’s investors later talked to Larry and Sergey and said that the fractions of a cent for Yahoo search was nice to fund development but was nothing compared to what Google could make with GoTo-like paid search. The VCs won and Larry and Sergei became billionaires.

Google figured out to sign a deal that was great for AOL (rumored to be as high as 100% of revenue plus pre-IPO warrants in Google). What did it get from that? It went from 0 to 100 (that’s in 1,000’s of advertisers) overnight as every GoTo advertiser wanted to keep the gravy train that was newbie AOL users.

Oh, MSN launched a search engine too. To its credit, Microsoft wouldn’t poach employees from its partners so Yahoo (which did) got Tim Cadogan.

Over at Yahoo, Terry Semel stepped in and asked why in hell did Yahoo not have a deal with GoTo to monetize search through text ads. Good question. My first call for GoTo (the week before I started) was to Ben Padnos at Yahoo. We spent a year and a half on a deal that got mucked with a handshake (it’s a long story about two people who used to work together and had the relationship turned upside down on this one… oh, and they didn’t like each other). Terry signed the deal and like it so much he bought the company. He didn’t like the idea that Yahoo didn’t have control of its advertiser base (Carol, are you listening? You really should be.)

Phase 4: The Death of Yahoo and the Rise of MicroLiveBing

You’ve all been following what happened to Yahoo when Jerry Yang turned down Microsoft’s $33 a share offer (Oops). You heard that Microsoft just stole Yahoo’s search business with the original Netscape-sized down payment of FREE.

Yahoo hasn’t done much to improve its search engine since Tim left a couple of years ago. Microsoft (as much as we like to knock it for its poor name choices) has been gobbling up every interesting search company it can find and has been trying to build a better search engine. Microsoft even admitted Google was better by using the exact format of Google’s search results (paid and natural). Now it’s buying marketshare.

That leaves us with Google just shy of 70% of the market (including it’s $1 billion dollar deals with AOL and MySpace), MicroHoo at around 28.5%, Ask.com with a few percent (and lots of Google AdWords results) and a few others.

Phase 5: Can there be new search engines?

I really want to say yes but I don’t see how. Back in the day (again, it’s required along with at the end of the day) search engines could start and they could buy traffic. The deals are sealed with BIG money now. They could also get press and get users. The biggest suck in this vacuum is that Google and Microsoft buy them up when they show any promise. And who amongst the giants wants to compete with Microsoft and Google? I’m hiding behind the handball backstop for this playground brawl. These guys are going at it everywhere!

Google has done a few things well.

• Google is a technology company. Yahoo was not, is not and will not be. GoTo wasn’t either. Microsoft isn’t really. By that I mean that Google produces excellent services. They are fast. They are what users want. They aren’t clunky and relying on old technology.
• Google innovates. Who cares if Orkut is only big in Brazil. Look at everything else that Google gives the world… for FREE!
• Google gives it away for free. Half of Microsoft is Windows and Office. If you wanted to hurt Microsoft, what would you do? Give away an operating system (Chrome OS) and a productivity suite (Google Docs). First Round Capital says that “if your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!” Google uses its significant revenue from search to give everything else away… for FREE! Why? People keep coming back. As much as I want to hate Google, I now have a G1, I use Gmail, etc., etc., etc.

Google isn’t great at marketing, Apple is. Google just builds great technology. It’s winning. If it keeps innovating, it has a good chance of becoming really scary (or even scarier). Think about how many entities’ livelihoods are based on changes to Google’s natural search algorithms and paid search rules. A couple of years ago I read an article on the half-life of tech leaders (I think it was by Josh Kopelman but I can’t find it). IBM’s dominance lasted for 30 years. Microsoft’s for 15 years. Google is past 7 1/2 years. Hmmmm….

I hope that Microsoft succeeds on this one. It hasn’t used its near-monopoly power well in the past. I hope that we can see the market stabilize at 60/40 or to have a real third player (kind of like how I’d like a centrist political party in this country).

My only prediction on this is that there will be a new battle for distribution. Microsoft needs more search traffic. It needs to provide a big base for advertisers to get the CPCs up and to make it worthwhile for us all to spend money there. And it needs the traffic to prove the credibility to the end users and the experts who make the noise that the general public hears. Steve Ballmer has stated that he is willing to spend BILLIONS a year on search for the next 5 years. The man is the world’s first employee billionaire. He seems to know a thing or two.

My only question is this: Microsoft is paying for the search traffic on Facebook. How is it that Facebook still provides 19% of Google’s traffic?

The simple truth is that they are based on a loophole left by the Supreme Court. In Quill Corp v. North Dakota (1992), the Supreme Court ruled that only the US Congress can force companies without nexus in a state to collect sales tax for that state. The loophole was that having a salesperson in the state created nexus.

Who is a salesperson?

A smart lobbyist figured out that the states can expand the definition of a salesperson to include anyone who is paid commission for advertising on its site. They neglected to realize that this is advertising and can be cut off with the click of a mouse, just as Amazon has done in several states and promised to do in several more. That means no increase in sales tax revenue.

The real equation is: AB178 = a decrease in income tax revenue + a decrease capital gains tax revenue + an increase in unemployment payments. In other words, it equals less revenue!

Let’s end the debate

Enough on what is constitutional or fair. Enough talking about how there is no revenue because affiliates will be terminated by the retailers or affiliates will move to other states. No one in state government is interested in that. They want another solution. (I’ve told them that doing nothing is a better solution. That resonates about as well as talking about a solution from Congress.)

My solution: Climb through the looking glass

My solution is climbing back through the same loophole the states are using. It’ll kill loyalty sites (including my own) but it will keep many more around and suck all of the revenue from bills like AB178.

Enter Shopzilla, our white knight

The Shopzilla Publisher Program is perfect for this. Not only does Shopzilla pay on a CPC basis, it has a quality filter to protect retailers. That means that any sites that have questionable practices or low-quality traffic, will be paid less or will not be able to survive.

Shopzilla is where you can find many of the stores who terminated NY affiliates. I did a quick search and here is the list that I found. I’m sure there are more but I wanted to get this out today. I think that any retailers who want to keep their affiliates in all 50 states should consider using Shopzilla. In addition, I am guessing that some of the other comparison shopping networks have similar programs to compensate publishers using CPC and systems to protect retailers against low-converting traffic. I’d also bet that the affiliate networks will join in with their own CPC compensation structures.

Sign up: Shopzilla Publisher Program.

The list

Here’s what I have so far:

Identify Your Main Benefit — Your headline needs to immediately connect with the customer. Remember, consumers just want to know “What’s in it for me?” That’s why your PPC headline needs to focus on the main benefit your product offers. Let’s say you’re selling an e-book for students taking the SAT. A good benefit-driven headline would be “200 Points SAT Increase.” Why is this headline effective? Because it clearly states the benefit of the product. And the fact that it has a specific number makes the benefit less vague and more believable.

Be Different — One thing I’ve noticed about PPC ads is they’re often all the same. Usually, there’s no compelling reason to click on one ad over the other. That’s why you need to be different. Take a look at the competition’s PPC ads, and try to figure out what you can do differently. If their headlines are statements, make your headline a question. If they all focus on the same benefit, choose a different benefit to target. Do everything you can to make a searcher’s eyes lock onto your ad instead of a competitor’s.

Create Urgent Call to Action — Now that you have a powerful headline, you need to seal the deal by following it up with a strong call to action. Use powerful ad words like: save, free, you, now, and today. For instance, on the earlier SAT e-book ad, you could follow up the headline with “Save 25% when you order today.” Or, “Get Your Free SAT assessment today in under 10 minutes.” The point is this: potential customers need to feel like they need to take action right now.

Don’t Forget the Keywords — By now, you know the importance of including the right keywords in your PPC copy, so I won’t insult your intelligence by exhausting this topic. Just remember to seamlessly blend your keywords into your copy and URL.

Always Try New Copy — Never just write one ad and stick with it forever. The only way to know you’re running the most profitable AdWords campaign is to always be testing. Try new headlines and new calls to action. Keep experimenting with different copy until you find one that achieves the highest profit for your campaign.

Deliver on Your Promises — Of course, the best AdWords copy is meaningless if your landing page doesn’t deliver on the promises you made. In other words, if you promise a “200 Points SAT Increase,” your landing page better tell the reader how that’s going to happen. Make sure to include testimonials that drive this point home. The best PPC campaigns include ads that are unified with highly targeted landing pages.

Do you write powerful Adwords copy? Share your Adwords copywriting advice with us in the replies!

That brings us to Microsoft, the largest software company in the world and a company with one of the world’s highest market caps. You know that it must be a leader in anything it tries, especially something as critical as the Web. Do you remember years ago when everyone said that Microsoft had missed the boat and it was too late but Bill Gates announced MSN with much fanfare? Since that time, MSN has suffered AOLitis, that is, a lack of identity.

MSN lost to Google. MSN became Live.com while still being MSN at times. (I think there was even Start.com when Windows95 came out.) Live.com seemed like a good name. Not if you suffer from AOLitis.  Live.com now redirects to Bing.com, Microsoft’s latest Web idea.

I have to give kudos to Microsoft for trying to start over from scratch at the 10 years of failure in search. Google won, we all know that. In fact, Google won to such an extent that the one well-designed part of the Bing interface is search results (both natural and paid) that look exactly like Google’s search results. (Sorry, I don’t have time to take screenshots today. It’s all there if you go to Google and Bing.)

Take a look at Bing. Do you get it from looking at it? What do hot air balloons have to do with search or any of the other features of the site? The one resounding comment from the quick poll I did was that people think that this looks like a typosquatter’s landing page, not the search engine of a top 3 Web property.

I wish Microsoft luck with its new search engine. I really and truly hope that it works. I would like to see a real competitor to Google. I think that the Web needs competition instead of one player with upwards of 80% control of the Web’s jumping off point. I just don’t see how Bing.com is the answer.

Comments on Techcrunch sum it up best. Many people think that Bing stands for But it’s not Google!

AdWords as a Top Priority
If your business model demands a constant and high volume of new customers, then managing your AdWords will require a comprehensive solution. That solution, in turn, should feature a resource (PPC manager, 3rd party agency, etc.) that is experienced with PPC and very knowledgeable about your industry. In addition to monitoring campaign performance, your chosen resource should be providing in-depth analytics on conversions so that your campaigns can be optimized on an ongoing basis.

AdWords as a Necessary Evil
Conversely, if AdWords is a channel that you plan to leverage just because your competition is doing so, you should consider a solution that can maximize returns on your limited investment in PPC. Here, you will want a resource that can quickly identify the most appropriate keyword sets according to (1) your budget, (2) your niche, and (3) your main competition. In this case, you require an AdWords solution that is intimately familiar with your product and experienced with PPC in general.

AdWords as Only Part of the Picture
Finally, if PPC is just one component to an already comprehensive online acquisition strategy, then you should consider how to both leverage AdWords as a standalone channel, and use it to shore-up your other channels. For instance, you may want to weigh the pros and cons of allowing your affiliates to leverage the channel as well.

Although there is an opportunity here to encourage your affiliates to leverage PPC in doing so you will also need to offer your affiliates additional support and tools so that they can produce results, and not just clicks. Affiliates will require tools and support to optimize their own PPC campaigns.

For example, Google provides excellent analytics on click-through-rates, but it cannot help your affiliates determine the value of each keyword they bid on. If you’re going to encourage your affiliates to use PPC then your affiliate marketing platform should be able to track referrals according to keywords. After all, optimizing a PPC campaign requires that you have detailed reports on all you KPIs. These include referred customers, average transaction, and the long-term revenues generated by each AdWords ad.

Maximizing Your Return on Clicks
Optimizing your PPC strategy requires that you consider how PPC will relate to and affect your overall acquisition strategy. After all, PPC is just one of several acquisitions channels, and should complement your other acquisition efforts.

As with any powerful acquisition channel, PPC has the potential to generate either great returns or great losses. Making sure that your Adwords campaigns are managed with the right experience and supported by tracking software that can collect ongoing intelligence on campaign performance, then, are key components to PPC success.

These questions have become more and more difficult to analyze as the search engines have adjusted their policies. For example, when Google first implemented the policy of only allowing one sponsored ad per display URL, the performance marketing industry flinched. Companies who didn’t understand Google’s pre-auction process, started pulling back on allowing any search partners to run ads with their display URL thinking that their own campaigns wouldn’t work anymore, and that these search affiliates would only eat away at their profitable campaigns without adding any incremental value. Some innovative search publishers reacted by working with their partners to come up with alternative URLs that would allow multiple ads to display while still leading to the same page, while other search publishers started building landing pages to market their partner’s sites, also taking up multiple ad positions.

Google reacted by implementing a policy that all display URLs in ad copy must match the final landing page URL. This meant that the alternative URL direct linking to the merchant site idea would no longer work. Google also started selectively looking at affiliate landing pages to determine if a landing page was a “bridge page” solely for the purpose of promoting a single company. When these pages are identified as a bridge, Google assigns a much lower quality score and the affiliate’s bid prices go up dramatically, effectively shutting down those campaigns. There has also been some speculation that Google has linked some of these bridge pages to the company’s own domain name, so that these ads then compete for the single ad placement, just as if they were direct linking and using the same display URL.

A recent article was posted on Search Engine Land entitled “Direct Linking Affiliates: Nuisance Or Serious Problem?” by Lori Weiman, who works for a company whose goal is to present direct linking affiliates as a serious problem, create fear, and then sell a solution that helps track and report on this “problem”. In this article Ms. Weiman makes a number of arguments:

Will Direct Linking Search Partners Increased your CPC?

Ms. Weiman suggests that direct linking search partners will increase the cost per click of your own ads because affiliates will have the same quality score and therefore your ads will only be competing on bid price to determine which ad will be displayed. She also suggests that you and your partners will need to keep increasing your bids to out bid each other, thereby raising your costs.

I would respectively disagree with Ms. Weiman. First of all, when you understand Google’s “pre-auction”, it’s actually the affiliates who companies push towards using an alternative URL that actually drives up a company’s bid costs. These ads actually compete with each other in the final keyword auction to determine exactly how much each must pay for its position. Secondly, affiliates and their partners come from very different economical positions when it comes to keyword bid prices. Affiliates are typically making only a fraction of what the company is making on any given sale, therefore, the bid price at which the company can be profitable is often much higher than what an affiliate can afford to bid for any given term to remain profitable.

Will Direct Linking Affiliates Reduce your Clicks and Impressions and cause Data confusion?

Ms. Weiman suggests that if an affiliate ad is displayed instead of your internal ad, that the company is losing clicks (and ad impressions) to the affiliate and that this will somehow affect your ROI and CPA analysis for your keyword lists.

I have heard this argument before coming from search agencies who want to keep 100% control and be able to be 100% certain that a click is never lost to an affiliate so that they can have what they call a fully accurate view of their search statistics. First, I am not sure that I would consider a click that comes to the company through an affiliate link a lost click. I would argue that having some good quality search affiliates promoting your program would actually increase the overall clicks to the company’s site and increase overall sales as well.

For any company, there is a vast number of potentially available keywords to bid on. I have yet to find a company who has been able to identify the entire set of possible keywords that will convert for them. This includes companies running their own “robust campaigns”. Turning off quality search partners could mean not having full coverage on all of these terms and not generating the incremental sales that come from them, or worse pushing these same partners towards your competitors.

So I would ask, is it more important that the search agency or internal search team be 100% certain that one of their potential clicks never comes through the ad of an affiliate, or is it more important to increase the overall number of clicks and sales at a measurable CPA?

Will Direct Linking Affiliates cause Cookie Confusion?

Ms. Weiman suggests that since consumers often search on multiple keywords and often click on a number of ads before actually purchasing. She contends that you would be paying twice for the sale if a costumer clicks on an affiliates’ ad, gets a cookie, and then clicks on one of your paid search ads and purchases the product.

This brings up the whole “Attribution” discussion that could be its own blog post. I do agree that this “could” happen; it is also just as likely if not more, that a potential customer clicks on one of your partner’s ads (costing them money) and then calls the 800 number to order, or walks into the store to make a purchase. Reports have indicated for every dollar spent online, six are spent offline. On both of these cases the search partner doesn’t typically get compensated. They deal with this by tracking and measuring their revenues and online conversions for each keyword.

I am a strong advocate for not having a wide open search policy. What I suggest is that you look at your program and identify 1-2 search partners that you can trust, and test direct linking to see if it can generate incremental sales without affecting the success of your own internal search programs.

If you attended Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, you may have had a chance to hear Tony Pantano, CEO of imwave, discuss this topic. Unfortunately, his time slot competed with the Steelers playoff game and lunch, so Shawn and Missy ave been gracious enough to let me post some excerpts from his presentation. In this segment of the presentation, Tony talks about the issues and some of the misconceptions of direct linking and use of the company’s display URL by your search partners:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other videos from this session will be posted at http://www.youtube.com/imwave as they are available.

•    Linking Only to Your Home Page- One of the most common mistakes I see when examining back links is finding every link pointing to the same page. Most of the time, these links are always to the home page, but this rule applies to any single page. You don’t want every inbound link aimed at the same page. Why? There are several reasons. Most importantly, it doesn’t look natural to the search engines. Second, it doesn’t help you improve your rankings for the long-tail keywords, the bread and butter of search traffic, on the deeper pages of your site. Third, it’s terrible for usability. People want to go directly to the information they need. Making them land on your home page before finding what they want will lead to a high bounce rate.

•    Not Getting Links Consistently Over Time- This happens a lot with new websites. They get a ton of links right off the bat, and then they never get another. Again, this doesn’t look natural to the search engines. Link building isn’t a one-time process; it’s something that takes a long-term commitment. The best way to consistently get inbound links over time is to focus on publishing quality content that begs to be linked to. They don’t say “content is king” for nothing.

•    Not Linking Out- It’s one of my pet peeves—the idea that you can’t risk losing any of your “link juice” by linking out to another website. Or even worse, that if you link out to another website, your visitors won’t come back. Both of these notions are flat out ridiculous. Linking out is important because it helps you build relationships with others since blogs typically ping the webmaster when there’s a new inbound link, it enhances the user experience by assuming the link is relevant and adds insight, and it establishes your blog as a leading resource when you put all the info people need in one place. And if you provide great content, you don’t have to worry about your readers coming back.

•    Always Using the Same Anchor Text- Occasionally, situations will arise where you will have control over what anchor text you want in your back link. Obviously, you want the anchor text to include relevant keywords for search engine placement purposes. However, don’t fall into the trap of using the same anchor text every time. Quite simply, it doesn’t look natural if every link pointing to your website says the same thing word for word. Don’t give the search engines any reason to suspect you’re involved in shady link building practices.

•    Completely Ignoring Reciprocal Links- Every so-called SEO guru out there preaches against getting reciprocal links for your website. The reason for this is that reciprocal links essentially cancel each other out in the eyes of the search engines. But if these “gurus” could stop worrying about pleasing the search engines for a second, they’d see there are benefits to occasionally engaging in reciprocal linking. It can generate highly relevant traffic to your website, and it helps you build a relationship with the other linker that could prove profitable down the line with guest blogging opportunities, referrals, etc. Plus, it improves the user-experience, assuming the link is to a relevant site.) Remember, it’s not always about the search engines; humans count too.

•    Trying to Push Every Post to the Front Page of Digg- If you’ve read any of my posts, you know I’m all for social media marketing. I think it’s a great way to build links, to engage with your target audience, and to generate traffic to your website. However, you need to realize that not every post you write is worthy of the front page of Digg or of any other social media site for that matter. If you’re constantly pushing every single post on these social networking sites people will begin to ignore you. Even worse, you could end up getting banned.

•    Not Knowing Your Competitor’s Back Links- If you don’t know what your competition is up to, how can you expect to pass them in the SERPs? Take a look at their back links by entering the link: www.yourcompetitorssite.com (example URL) into the Yahoo search bar. Not only will this help you understand what you need to do to outrank them, but it could also provide a great starting point for your link building campaign. You may be able to get inbound links from the same sites that link to your competition.

Now that you know some link building pitfalls to avoid, you can kick your campaign into overdrive. And remember, quality trumps quantity every time.

What link building mistakes have you made? Share them with us in the replies!

That being said, let me go into a mini-rant mode.

Many of us spend a lot of money with Google every day, month, week and year.  Each year Google has sent out a nice holiday gift thanking their top advertisers for their participation in Google’s Adwords program, nothing fancy, a USB card, an electronic travel kit, or my favorite, a donation from Google to a charitable project of your choosing.  Often the blogs are a buzz with the Google gift of the year.  This year?  Nothing.

I reached out to some other top PPC affiliates and have heard the same thing.  Many companies have cut back on holiday gifts, and I think that is a sign of the times in this economy, but when you are working with a company like Google and are spending upwards of $1M per year with them, seeing them cut back on the holiday cheer seems a bit Scroogish to me.

Thoughts?

A Quick Overview of Keyword Density

I doubt any of you don’t know what keyword density is, but let’s do a brief overview just in case. Keyword density is the measurement of how many times a keyword appears in relation to the total number of words in the document. If your keyword shows up 3 times every 100 words, your keyword density would be 3%. Simple enough, right?

Moving On…

Now, some believe there is a magical keyword density range that helps you achieve higher search engine rankings. The general consensus of this group is you want to aim for anywhere between a 3%-5% keyword density in your copy. Supposedly, landing in this sweet spot drastically increases your chances of ranking well in the search engines.

So, is this true? Should you be optimizing your pages to hit the “magic” keyword density range? The simple answer—no.

From the search engine’s perspective, there is no sweet spot for keyword density. The variance in keyword density in the SERPs is proof enough of that. Pages with a wide range of keyword density rank well for certain terms. It’s just not a great measurement of a page’s relevance for a keyword, and it’s far too easy for humans to manipulate it.

The simple truth is search engines are far too advanced to be tricked by something as basic as an optimal keyword density.

Side Effects of Keyword Density

Beyond the obvious fact keyword density isn’t too important to search engines, there are other nasty side effects that come from chasing this myth. Most importantly, it creates robotic copy that’s a nightmare to read for human visitors. You can’t write naturally if you’re constantly trying to hit this tiny keyword density range. It makes your copy feel forced, and it’s obvious that it’s tailored for search engines instead of humans.

Secondly, it diverts your focus from conversion to keyword density. Even if keyword density was the most important search ranking factor (which it isn’t), what would be the point of ranking well if your copy didn’t convert any visitors?

That’s why I say to stop worrying about keyword density. The search engines don’t care about it; it’s a poor measurement of a page’s relevancy; it breeds poorly written content; and it distracts you from the most important thing—conversion. Instead of trying to find ways to manipulate the search engines, focus on converting your visitors into customers. Write natural copy that connects with them and addresses their needs.

Also, beware of any SEO company that tells you they know the “magical” keyword density to get you top rankings. They’re selling snake oil, and frankly, they have no clue what they’re talking about.

What are your thoughts on keyword density? Do you care about it anymore?