They actually guarantee that my site will appear above all other sites on every search engine for my selected keywords.

I knew, of course, that it was some sort of scam, but I was curious about exactly what the scam was. They never actually say it in so many words, but apparently their “service” is a browser-based plug-in that inserts an ad for your site at the very top of the page in your web browser.

They key point that they don’t tell you is that only people with their browser plug-in installed will see your ad. Here’s a screenshot of their home page:

AdWord Express is a scam

The only way AdWord Express could be accomplishing that is with a browser plug-in. Google doesn’t sell ad space like that, and neither do any of the other major search engines.

And here’s a screenshot of their “Browser Upgrade” page:

AdWordExpress is a scam and they will install malicious plug-ins into your browser.

They very cleverly don’t tell you anywhere that their “EXCLUSIVE TOP PLACEMENT” will only appear to people who install these browser plug-ins, but that’s obviously what they’re doing.

And here’s a screenshot of the status bar for installing the “Upgrade for Internet Explorer” and the “Upgrade for Firefox”:

AdWord Express will install plug-ins to your browsers. Probably malicious malware-laden plug-ins. After all, a company that will scam you in one way is likely to scam you in other ways.

See what’s going on there? The IE “upgrade” will run a program called “Upgrade.exe,” and who knows what that will do on your computer….. The Firefox “upgrade” will run “install_tb_XPI(),” which will install something to Firefox —The name suggests a plugin that displays a toolbar, but who really knows?

AdWordExpress is found at adwordexpress.com. They have a private registration through Network Solutions. I swear that the day I received their spam, they were at adwordexpress.net, but that domain now has a GoDaddy parking page. The two domains were registered on 10/4/11 and 10/6/11, just 2 days apart, so they’re probably the same people. It appears that perhaps GoDaddy has already detected their scam and deactivated their site. The .com is still live through Network Solutions, though.

Please…… don’t anyone fall for this scam. And whatever you do, do not install their “browser upgrades.”

Firefox

If I have the focused Firefox window on my secondary monitor, I can’t open a new window. I also can’t do anything that would normally result in a new window, such as “View Source” or see “HTTP Live Headers” or open Firebug in a new window.

I have to drag the window over to my primary monitor, get the new window launched, then drag the other window back over to the second monitor.

Firefox, I love ya, but you gotta do windows better!

Lion: First Impressions

Read my account of my initial Lion impressions.

The Charlotte Harbor Community Sailing Center uses the Lifestyle theme.

TwentyFifty uses the StudioPress Freelance theme.

Sustained Panic is built on the Lifestyle theme.

I broke down not long ago and bought the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package — a collection of themes that are all based on StudioPress’s Genesis framework. I have not previously been a WordPress power-user, and I hadn’t previously used WordPress all that much. So I’ve been reluctant to spend money on commercial themes when there are so many free themes readily available. But something about the StudioPress design approach, and their attention to detail and customizability has been catching my eye for a long time.

When I realized how powerful and capable WordPress has become, I knew I needed a collection of themes that I could customize and re-use over and over, so that I didn’t have to keep spending hours hunting for a suitable theme, and then more hours learning how to customize it.

The StudioPress designs are attractive: clean and elegant, not cluttered.

The Nock It Archery Blog is also built on the Lifestyle StudioPress theme.

The themes are fully widgetized, with plenty of built-in customization options, plus a special plug-in to take advantage of the “hooks” that the Genesis framework uses.

There’s a built-in Feedburner subscription form. Default layout options – Content-Sidebar, Sidebar-Content-Sidebar, extra custom menus in the header. Drop-down menus.Many of the StudioPress themes offer color choices and other extras. Oh, and they’re very search-engine optimized.

One of my favorite aspects is that StudioPress explicitly allows me to use these themes on clients’ sites. I can send a client to the main StudioPress Themes page and tell them, pick out any one that you like.

I created a site for the Charlotte Harbor Community Sailing Center on the Lifestyle theme. A client selected the Freelance theme for her site, and the Education theme for her own client’s site.

Then I used the Lifestyle theme again on the Nock It Archery Blog. And then again on the Taxidermy Blog and the Sustained Panic blog.

I have to say, I love the Lifestyle theme. I’ve now converted this blog to the Lifestyle theme, as well, and I’ll probably switch a couple of others over to Lifestyle. It’s a very clean, elegant design, easy on the eyes, easy to customize, and easy to navigate.

First, ugly sites are often sites that were originally built back in the 1990s by some business owner who had no web design sense or technical knowledge but wanted to promote his business online. It was much more difficult back then to actually sell online (not many shopping cart scripts existed, and ones that did exist were very expensive). So the business owner didn’t just install a cart and sit back and wait for orders to roll in. Rather, he put valuable and unique content on his site. Over the years, he added and added and added more and more content, and garnered lots of link love, and now his site is very well aged and very well linked.

MacGregor has a content-rich, incredibly useful, but butt-ugly site.

The MacGregor Sailboatsite is a good example of this. It was built by Roger MacGregor himself, who designed the MacGregor sailboat and who owns MacGregor Yachts. It’s a horrible horrible site from the perspective of design, usability and navigation. It does all of that completely wrong. But it’s packed chockful of everything you ever wanted to know about the MacGregor, and MacGregor owners love that site.

Second, ugly sites are often sites that were built by hobbyists — people who are simply passionate about a topic, and started their site without any intention of making money from it. Before eBay, before CJ, before AdSense, these hobbyists were out there creating volumes of good content about their topic of interest.

They, like the business owner above, garnered lots of link love, and today have well-aged and well-linked sites. Perhaps they’ve added AdSense or affiliate links on their site, and now they realize some hefty income from their hobby site. It’s icing on the cake for them; they didn’t start the site to make money, and if the money dried up they would continue to maintain the site. They didn’t know or care about design, and they still don’t. But they offer some of the best resources for information about their hobby. Non-profit organizations often fall into this category too. A Page About Freemasonry is a good example of this type of site. It was created by a guy who is a Mason and who loves Masonry, and wanted to share information about it. The site is nothing special, design-wise, but it contains scads of good info about Masonry.

Third, ugly sites that are ecommerce sites are often built by small business owners who can’t or won’t pay a professional to build their site. They use whatever free software they can get their hands on, and they do it themselves. They care deeply about their business, but they have no clue about web site development.

These sites can do well because the owner’s personality and passion very often shine through loud and clear. People get a sense for how much the owner cares about his product and business, and so they trust the site enough to buy from it despite its lack of professionalism and design aesthetic. These sites are often created by business owners who are very active within the community of people who use their products — so they’re known within the industry, and people feel comfortable buying from them.

AmmoMan is a trusted source of ammunition in the gun community

AmmoMan is a good example of this type of site. My word! I would never deliberately design an ecommerce site to look like that! But lots of people who shoot know AmmoMan is a good place to buy ammunition, and lots of shooters have met the owner at various shoots and gun shows over the years.

So…. yes, ugly sites can do very well. But in my experience, whenever I’ve taken on a client with an ugly site and redesigned it, it did better than before. My redesign will typically also improve search engine crawlability, usability, navigation, etc., so it’s not an apples/apples comparison. But it provides evidence that ugliness, by itself, is neither required nor sufficient for a well-performing site. When ugly sites perform well, it’s typically not because of their ugliness but in spite of it. People are very forgiving of ugliness when the site gives them the information they couldn’t find anywhere else, or sells them the product they need at a better price than they can get anywhere else.

Next thing I know, Mr. X calls me to tell me that he’s hired someone else to develop a new site for him, and he’ll have new hosting as well. Okay. It would have been nice if he had at least asked me for a quote, but that’s fine — he has every right to go with someone else.

I sent him the ftp login info so that he can give it to his new webmaster to grab the files from the existing site, in case those are needed. I also suggested that he open an account with GoDaddy so that we can transfer his domain to his own account, since I have no desire to continue to renew Mr. X’s domain every year and bill him for it. If he’s not hosting with me, and not paying me anything to do updates or other maintenance to his site, handling his domain renewal is just not worth my time. So I walked his secretary through opening a GoDaddy account, and I transferred the domain to him.

Mr. X’s hosting was paid up through the end of the quarter, so I told him that I would keep his hosting active through July 31, but his new webmaster needed to either have his new site up and running on the new host by then, or move the existing site to the new host, in order to avoid any downtime for his site.

The last week of July arrived. Before I shut off his hosting, I decided to see if he’s got the site hosted somewhere else yet. Nope. It’s still pointing to my server. I email Mr. X. I get a reply back from his secretary, who said that he’s out of town and she doesn’t know anything about a new webmaster. She was under the impression that the domain transfer was all that was needed. (Even though I made it very clear in my earlier emails that the domain registration was completely separate from the hosting.)

I explained that she really needed to get Mr. X to get his new webmaster to get either his existing site or his new site up and running on their new host (whoever that might be), and to change their nameservers to point to the new host. I explained that if I just shut off his hosting their site would disappear from the web altogether. I also noted that they could renew their hosting with me so as not to have any downtime if there were any problems with the new webmaster or the new host. She said she would talk to Mr. X about it.

Aug. 1 arrived. I checked, and sure enough, the site was still live on my server. I emailed Mr. X and told him that he either needed to get his site running on his new host immediately or renew his hosting with me, because as soon as I shut off his hosting on my server, his site would disappear.

I received a reply email that said, simply, “This has been taken care of.” When I checked again, the domain nameservers were pointing to GoDaddy’s nameservers. So I shut off the hosting on my server.

Now his site consists of a GoDaddy parking page.

I suspect that Mr. X never did hire another webmaster. I have the feeling that he was expecting his secretary to build him a new site, and that she knows virtually nothing about it. I don’t know why he told me that he had hired someone else, nor do I know why he was so determined to move his hosting somewhere else. He had never complained to me about any problems with either the site or its hosting, and he certainly wasn’t overpaying for the hosting. I believe he may have thought he could save some money, somehow, although the small amount he was paying me for the hosting meant that at most he could only save a little tiny bit on his hosting by going with a cheaper host.

I tell myself that you can’t save people from their own mistakes, and that his site is now his problem, and his problem alone. Nevertheless, I hate to see a site disappear from the web, and kill its standing in the search engines, due to the owner’s stubbornness, lack of knowledge, and unwillingness to listen.

I suspect what’s going to happen is this: The domain will expire in a few days. It will go into the registrar’s redemption period, so that no one else can register it, and only the former web developer would be able to renew it. Even if they can reach him at that point, they probably won’t want to pay the redemption fee. So they’ll end up registering a new domain.

I can build them a nice new site. But they’ll lose the two years’ worth of “aging” of the existing site on the current domain. They’ll essentially be starting over from scratch.

This could have been avoided by the client simply registering the domain in their own name in the first place. I frequently end up registering clients’ domains for them, because they don’t know how and they don’t want to learn how, and they consider “all that technical web stuff” to be beyond anything they can or want to manage themselves.

Fortunately for my clients, I don’t plan on disappearing, and I would never ever hold a domain for hostage the way some web developers do. So I consider that my clients’ domain are safe with me. But nevertheless, I always recommend that a domain should be registered in the business owner’s own account in their own name. They wouldn’t allow any other important business asset to be owned or controlled by some third party, and they should apply the same standard to their domain.

I gave him some basic background information on the whole paid links/nofollow debacle. I explained to him that while we don’t know for sure if Google penalizes sites that sell links, they might, and even if they don’t they might start to in the future. His site performs extremely well in all the major search engines, including Google, and I suggested that he wants to be very very careful to avoid doing something that could harm his site’s performance in Google.

I recommended that he tell the link broker that he would be happy to sell the links but that they would be nofollowed — predicting, also, that the link broker would decline such links. He did, and they did.

It still irks me that after introducing the nofollow tag under the guise of reducing blog link spam, Google then expanded its recommended usage and then further expanded that to become essentially a “requirement” that paid links be nofollowed. With Google’s focus on inbound links for ranking pages, Google almost singlehandedly created the voluminous quantities of link spam that infests the web. Now they require that webmasters and website owners help them clean up the mess.

My client is smart and savvy, and has spent years building a very high-quality site that has garnered thousands of links from major universities, public school systems, Discovery, PBS, the History Channel, Fox, and many many other large, authoritative sources. But he doesn’t live, eat and breathe SEO, and he didn’t know about paid links or the nofollow tag. He was interested in the offer he received because his AdSense income has dropped this year, and he’s looking for other sources of revenue. I’m not typically the type to cry “It’s not fair,” because I know that life is simply not fair — but in this case I’ll make an exception. It’s not fair for Google to threaten dire consequences to his site simply because he didn’t know that an offer he received would violate Google’s policy on paid links. This man focuses on building a quality site; he doesn’t spend his time practicing black-hat SEO or poring over Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Copyright Incident #1

Not long ago, I made a copyright mistake during the course of a project for a client whose site had previously been created by another website designer. The site’s content was decent, but it badly needed a new design and underlying code structure to make it user-friendly and search-engine-friendly, along with the addition of some new features. So I used the existing content and placed it into the new design. Two of the pages in the previous site contained articles that carried copyright notices. My mistake was in assuming that those two articles were used with permission — that either the client or the previous designer had contacted the copyright owner and obtained permission to use those two articles. I didn’t verify that assumption with my client; I simply used the articles on the new site. It turned out that permission had not been obtained, and before long my client received a cease-and-desist letter from the copyright owner.

Ironically, the old site was so search-engine-hostile that the articles could probably have been used forever on the previous version of the site, and the owner would never have discovered their use, because they never would have been found in any search engine. However, I made the client’s site crawlable by search engines, which made it easy for the copyright owner to track down the unauthorized use of the articles.

Take-Home Lesson: Never assume anything about copyrighted material. I don’t consider it my responsibility as a website developer to police the content my clients provide me. I occasionally use stock photos on client sites where I purchase the license myself, but otherwise content is the client’s responsibility. However, while it may not be my legal responsibility, it certainly represents good practice to help my clients (and, incidentally, myself) to stay out of trouble.

Copyright Incident #2

Not long after the cease-and-desist incident, a different client sent me a collection of photos to be used on his site that I was developing. The images were all embedded in a Word document, and I used a program called FileJuicer to extract the images. FileJuicer’s a great little program; it works on Word files, PDFs, and many other file formats, and extracts into separate files all the images and other embedded elements from the file. When using FileJuicer, I usually don’t pay attention to any files except the images that FileJuicer extracts — but in one of those weird coincidences, I happened to open the URLS.html file that FileJuicer created. This file was a clickable list of links where all these photos came from.

It turned out the photos were lifted from a variety of websites, and I was pretty sure my client had not obtained permission for their use, particularly since one of the sources was a competitor of my client.

I contacted my client and let him know, as diplomatically as I could, that he was not legally permitted to use those photos on his site unless he had permission. I offered suggestions for alternative approaches, including contacting the copyright owners for permission to use the images, taking his own photographs, and paying for a license for photos from one or more of the royalty-free stock photo sources. Fortunately, my client saw the wisdom of this, and agreed to use photos from other sources.

Take-Home Lesson: Clients will generally be reasonable about this kind of thing, when you’re trying to keep them out of trouble. If I had ignored what I discovered from the URLS.html file that FileJuicer created, my client would probably have been hit with a number of cease-and-desist notices from a variety of different entities.

He may even had received one of the dreaded Getty Images demand notices. Getty Images has been in the habit for some years now of sending threatening and intimidating settlement demand letters to people who are allegedly using a Getty Images image without a proper license. Getty often demands exorbitant sums — they often demand in the neighborhood of $1,500 to $2,000 for a photo that can be licensed for $40 or $50. There’s no telling how many people roll over and pay these exorbitant and ridiculous sums in the face of the threatening letter from Getty, reasoning that an individual or small business owner is better off paying whatever Getty asks, if it will make Getty go away, thus avoiding the hassle and expense of a lawsuit.

It’s entirely possible that the photos my client sent me originated from Getty. The sites he got the photos from may have paid Getty for a license, or may have lifted the photos from somewhere else that had paid the Getty license fee. Either way, my client could well have received one of those hostile Getty demand letters if I had proceeded to post the photos he sent me.

Here are a few guidelines on copyright and using material that you didn’t create yourself:

Copyright Guidelines

Copyright Fact #1: Virtually anything you might find on the Internet is copyrighted. If it’s legally capable of being copyrighted, it’s copyrighted, unless the author or creator has explicitly placed it in the public domain. (And note that “it’s on the Internet” does not mean it’s in the public domain. It’s still copyrighted.) In the United States, anything created in the past 75 years is subject to copyright, and everything created since 1989 is automatically copyrighted at the moment of creation — no need for a copyright notice, and no need to register the work with the U.S. copyright office. Simply by virtue of creating it, the creator owns the copyright. (There are exceptions that hinge on “works made for hire,” under which a work created by an employee in the course of his employment is owned by his employer. I won’t address “work for hire” just now, except to note that it exists.) Generally, you must assume that if a work exists, it is copyrighted.

Copyright Fact #2: You may not use copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright holder. There are exceptions here, too, such as fair use for commentary or criticism, but in general, one must assume that one cannot copy and use material owned by others without their permission.

Copyright Fact #3: Even if you’re not making money from the copyrighted material, or if you’re not using it for commercial purposes, you will still be committing copyright infringement if you use it without permission.

There are lots and lots of nuances, considerations, exceptions, and ramifications when using copyrighted material. Bear in mind, IANAL — I Am Not A Lawyer. Anyone wishing to use any copyrighted material in a way that they think is permissible under copyright law should consult a competent IP attorney for appropriate legal advice. My bottom line message is:

Never use material that you did not either create yourself or obtain permission from the copyright owner to use. That approach will keep you out of trouble.

• Brad Templeton’s “10 Big Myths about copyright explained” is a nice summary of some common copyright myths.
• If you like to get it “straight from the horse’s mouth,” the U.S. Copyright Office has very comprehensive information on copyright law, along with an online form for registering your copyrighted works.

Both eNom and Network Solutions, two very large registrars that handle millions of domain registrations, are the target of a major phishing attack. It is believed that the perpetrators’ purpose is to acquire the login details for victims’ domain registrar accounts and thereby steal or otherwise compromise their domain registrations.

Phishing warning posted on Network Solutions home page

Phishing warning on eNom

These e-mails make a dire warning about “innaccurate whois information” or some other problem with your domain, and warn you that you must take immediate action to avoid having your domain registration canceled.

The fake eNom e-mail
(click image for full-size view)

The above image contains the actual text in one of these e-mails that I received. Since I have my e-mail program set to display the actual URLs of links, you can see that the link to “verify your contact information” is set so that it would appear to be a link to enom.com but in fact is a link to enom.com.ssl45.mobi.

If you receive any e-mail about your domain registration (or any other online account you may have) you should never click any link in the e-mail. If you want to verify things for yourself, go directly to the website where you have your account by entering the address in the address bar of your browser.

And it never hurts to drop into your domain registrar account to double-check that your contact information (particularly your e-mail address) is current, and to lock your domain, if your registrar offers such an option. Security experts recommend that you change your password regularly, and that you do not use free web-based e-mail accounts (such as GMail) for any sensitive accounts.

A Realtor may be an expert at marketing and selling real estate — but that Realtor may not be an expert at writing AdWords advertising copy or managing an online pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your web site without waiting for the long-term results of organic search engine optimization. It’s also an easy way to throw away lots of money without seeing any return.

We’ve put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising to help you get the most bang for your buck. This article focuses primarily on real estate PPC advertising, but the concepts are applicable to most any type of service or product.

First, the basics:

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-per-click, or PPC, advertising, is an online advertising model that allows you, the advertiser, to run ads on the Web — and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your web site. This is called a click-through (or click-thru). The ratio of ad views to click-throughs is called the click-through rate, or CTR. Google and Yahoo are the two biggest and best-known PPC networks; there are others, but they don’t have nearly the reach of these two — and Google is by far the biggest. We’ll focus here on Google’s AdWords program, but all the major PPC advertising networks operate using similar concepts.

One major benefit of PPC advertising, of course, is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Imagine being able to put an ad in your local newspaper that only costs you money when it causes someone to call you! But another major benefit of PPC advertising, which is sometimes overlooked, is that it allows you target your advertising precisely in a way that no other advertising medium can match. Think laser targeting: You make a keyword list, precisely targeted to your professional services. Those keywords will trigger your ad, which is precisely written to capitalize on the keywords that triggered it. And the ad itself sends users to a page on your site that is precisely written to give the user exactly what he is looking for.This is not your father’s advertising — This is Scud-style laser-guided-missile targeting!

Imagine being able to run commercials on television that would only get shown to viewers who had just been searching for exactly your services! And only having to pay if that viewer actually responds to your ad! Then imagine being able to custom-tailor that viewer’s experience when he does respond — controlling exactly the message he gets, which may be different from the message some other viewer gets who responds to different ad you’re running.

How Does PPC Advertising Work?

You, the advertiser, bid on keywords related to your business. You bid the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay per click, and your bids go into a pool of bids. If your bid is high enough (compared to the other bids in the pool), your ads gets shown when someone searches Google using the keywords you bid on. The keywords you bid on trigger your ad to show on Google’s search results pages when a user searches for those keywords, or triggers your ad to appear on web sites that carry AdWords ads, when that site’s on-page content contains those keywords. It gets more complicated that that — you can use different types of keyword matching to define how broadly or narrowly you want Google to match your keywords.

When your ad is shown and a user clicks your ad, they get taken to the landing page on your web site that you specify, and now it’s the job of your web site to induce that user to call you or submit your contact form, or do whatever is it you want that user to do once they arrive at your site.

Setting up a PPC Campaign

In your PPC account, you start by setting up a “Campaign,” which consists of an ad and the associated keywords that you want to have trigger that ad. (You can create multiple versions of the ad within the campaign; we’ll address that a little further down. But it helps to think of a campaign as “one ad and its associated keywords.”) You should set up multiple campaigns, with each campaign being tightly focused on one particular theme or topic. A real estate agent might create separate campaigns for “homes for sale,” “condos for sale,” and “land for sale,” for example, and depending on your marketing approach, you might want to have even more campaigns. You might also want to create one or more campaigns aimed people wanting to sell real estate, who are looking for a real estate agent to represent them in their sale.

Within each campaign, you create an ad and a list of keywords that will trigger your ad. A “keyword” can be — and usually is — a phrase : one or more words together. A Realtor, for example, might bid on terms such as “Punta Gorda homes for sale” or “waterfront condos,” while a carpet store might bid on “carpets,” “floor coverings,” and “rugs.” You want to create a specific and unique list of keywords targeted precisely at the topic of the campaign. For your “Homes for sale” campaign, for example, your keyword list might include “homes for sale,” “houses for sale,” “waterfront houses for sale,” “affordable homes for sale,” and so forth.

Now, wait just a goldarned minute! Shouldn’t the “waterfront houses for sale” be in a separate campaign aimed at waterfront houses? Yes indeed. And shouldn’t “affordable homes for sale” be in a separate campaign aimed at affordable homes? Yep. Exactly so. Look very critically at your keyword list, both while you’re developing it and after you think you’re done, and see if there are keywords that should be separated out into a campaign of their own. After all, we’re working on a laser-targeted approach here.

Keyword Matching Options

You’ll want to read the support documentation in your PPC network for the keyword matching options. In Google, keywords can use broad matching, phrase matching, or exact matching. What are these options, and how do they work? Until you gain experience in your PPC campaign, phrase matching is probably your best bet to use, but here’s a quick rundown:

• Broad Matching: In Google’s AdWords program, this can be a good way to throw away money. The “broad matching” option in AdWords automatically includes Google’s “expanded keyword matching technology,” which tries to use computer “intelligence” to match your keywords with other, related, words, such as synonyms and related phrases, that in all likelihood will include terms that you do not want. Your carefully crafted “Gulf-front home” ad may be shown to people looking for a lake-front mountain cottage. Your target audience will not be well-targeted, and the click-throughs that you get are less likely to be interested in your services. As you gain experience in PPC advertising, you might want to include some broad matching, but if you do, you definitely want to use an extensive negative-match keyword list.
• Phrase Matching: Phrase matching will trigger your ad for any search query that includes the keywords in the order you specified, even if the search included additional words not part of your keyword. For example, a phrase-match keyword “waterfront homes” will match searches for “waterfront homes with a pool” and “Florida waterfront homes” — the search will always have your keyword phrase in it.
• Exact Matching: Exact matching only triggers your ad for searches that exactly match your keyword. Using the example above, if you put “waterfront homes” in your keyword list as an exact-match keyword, a search for “florida waterfront homes” will not trigger your ad.

Negative Keywords

The ability to list negative keywords for each campaign is one of your most powerful — and one of the most often overlooked — tools in your PPC toolkit.

You should include negative match keywords in every campaign you create. Negative-match keywords ensure that your ad is not shown for searches that include the negative keywords you specify. For example, in your “homes for sale” campaign, you might want to list “nursing” and “retirement” and “Masonic” and “children’s” as negative-match keywords — because you don’t want to show your ad to people looking for a nursing home or retirement home or Masonic home or children’s home. If you set up a campaign for “luxury homes,” you’ll probably want to list “mobile” and “manufactured” as negative keywords, so that you don’t show your ad to people looking for mobile homes. You might also include “affordable,” “tear-down,” and “handyman special” in your negative keyword list for your “luxury homes” campaign. You should spend at least as much time developing your negative-keyword list as you do developing your regular keyword list.

If you are a Realtor who sells real estate in Florida, you should include every U.S. state other than Florida in your negative keyword list. You don’t want to show your ad to people looking for “homes in Montana” or “condos in California.” You can still display your ad to people in those states — someone in Maine who is searching for “waterfront homes in Florida” is probably a good target for your waterfront homes campaign. But someone (whether in Florida, Maine or California) searching for waterfront homes in Oregon isn’t your target market. Don’t show your ad to those folks.

Keyword Bidding

You have to specify the amount(s) you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad. If you bid too low, your ad won’t be shown. If you bid high, Google’s AdWords program automatically adjusts your cost-per-click (CPC) to one penny over the next-highest competitor. If you bid $4/click, and the next-highest bidder is bidding $0.50/click, you’ll pay $0.51 per click. But be careful: You could cause a bidding war that ends up costing everybody more money. You’ll have to experiment to find the bid price that works best for you. Use Google’s keyword tool to see what the average CPC is estimated to be for your selected keywords, and bid somewhere in that neighborhood to start.

You’ll have to experiment to find the bidding level that works best for you, and you’ll probably need to adjust your bids up or down as your market changes. A few real estate agents over-bidding in your market could cause your minimum CPC to increase significantly — and likewise, a few real estate agents who blew through their advertising budget with nothing to show for it could decrease your CPC when they drop their PPC advertising.

Writing Your Ad

Laser targeting is the key. Did we mention laser targeting? Don’t forget: You’re creating a laser-targeted advertising campaign here. Write your ad headline and copy so that it is laser-targeted to the keyword list you created. Are you bidding on the keyphrase “luxury waterfront homes”? Your ad headline should read “Luxury Waterfront Homes.” Your ad copy should expand on that theme. A campaign for “waterfront condos”? Your ad headline should read “Waterfront Condos.” Give that searcher exactly what he’s looking for.

This is why you should create multiple campaigns, each with its own specific keyword list. Don’t try to use the same ad to reach people looking for luxury homes and waterfront condos and commercial real estate. Create separate campaigns, separate keyword lists, and custom-written ads to laser target your ads precisely at the laser-targeted keywords.

Your Landing Page

AdWords, and the other PPC networks, allow you to specify a particular landing page on your web site for each ad. Do not send simply people to your web site’s home page. Here again, laser target your landing page so that it exactly reflects your ad and your keyword list. Your “luxury waterfront homes” campaign should send people to a page on your web site that promotes and offers luxury waterfront homes. Your “commercial real estate” campaign should send people to the most appropriate page on your site for people interested in commercial real estate

It’s a good idea to consider developing specific landing pages for specific campaigns. If you don’t already have a page on your site that’s exactly perfect for a given ad campaign, you should create one. It doesn’t need to be part of your site’s main navigation, and you don’t care about optimizing it for organic search rankings. You want your landing page to reflect exactly what your visitor was looking for, and exactly what he expected to find when he clicked on your ad.

The Laser-Targeted Campaign

If you have followed the steps above, you have created multiple ad campaigns, each with a carefully developed keyword list, and a carefully written ad, and a carefully created landing page, such that for every campaign, you are targeting a very precise type of search, showing an ad that exactly matches that search, and sending the user to a landing page that exactly matches that search. You’re creating an information scent that the user can follow. You’re taking that user by the hand and leading him down the path to exactly what he’s looking for. Congratulations! Now…..

Read, Read, and Read Some more

There is much, much more. You should spend some time reading everything you can get your hands on about PPC campaigns, and you should spend some time exploring the account management interface in your PPC account. Study up on geotargeting. Learn how to run your campaign only at specific times. Read about the differences between the search network and the content network. Set your monthly maximum budget. Explore different keyword matching options, and try out variations on your ads. Read up on Google’s “Quality Score” to find out how that affects your cost-per-click.

Through research and experimentation, you’ll figure out what works best for you to maximize the return on your PPC dollars.

Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign.

Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it.

The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves.

What they’re doing is pay-per-click, plain and simple — where you run ads on Google, which appear in the “Sponsored Links” section, and you pay a set amount “per click” whenever someone clicks on your ad. There’s nothing wrong with pay-per-click; it can be a powerful tool to get targeted traffic to your site. And there’s nothing wrong with paying a PPC expert to manage your PPC campaigns for you. But I’m skeptical about anyone who offers a PPC campaign on a fixed budget, while attempting to conceal exactly what they’re doing.

Despite their claims about being “featured on that first page 100% of the time,” they *have* to be setting a maximum per-month budget, which would be below what they charge you — otherwise, where would their profit come from? If and when you get enough clicks that the monthly maximum is reached, your ad would not show again until the following month. Period. There’s no other way they could make these offers and stay in business. Yet they don’t seem to want to tell you outright that your ad is running on a pay-per-click basis.

I haven’t had the pleasure of receiving any calls from NetBiz myself, so I can’t speak to the truthfulness of their sales pitch. But other people who have spoken with NetBiz reps report their experiences:

• An Austin, Texas, Realtor wrote a blog post nominating NetBiz as 2007′s Most Misleading Telemarketing Call.
• A Realtor in Hawaii reports on his blog that a NetBiz telemarketer claimed to be calling “on behalf of Google.”
• The Website Publisher blog also reports phone-spam from NetBiz and deceptive claims that they’re calling “on behalf of Google”

Furthermore, if you’re going to spend money on pay-per-click advertising, I’d recommend that you either hire someone who knows what they’re doing, or learn a little bit about it yourself and manage your own campaigns. For PPC advertising to be effective, you need to focus on carefully written, tightly focused ads, with very carefully selected keywords lists to trigger the ads, and with tightly focused landing pages on your site developed specifically as landing pages for your ads.

This slap-dash kind of offer from NetBiz, with no discussion of the value of the keywords, or any focus on writing the ad itself, and no mention of targeted landing pages — I just don’t think it’s a good way to spend your advertising money. NetBiz seems more focused on getting your money than on running advertising that will work for you.

PPC advertising isn’t rocket science, but getting a decent return on your advertising dollars requires more thought than NetBiz seems to put into their offers.

As always, do your research, gather the facts, and make up your own mind. But I recommend avoiding the NetBiz approach.

Read more about AdWords advertising:

• Maximize your Pay Per Click Return
• Eight Tips Every AdWords Advertiser Should Know

The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.

Years ago, there was a tourism campaign — I think it was sponsored by the Florida Tourism Bureau or some-such quasi-governmental agency. The tagline was “Florida: The Rules Are Different Here.”

That campaign was pretty lame, and it was widely ridiculed and lampooned. This was during the 1980s drug-running heyday, and the “Rules” tourism campaign came to be associated with that. But the message about different rules could be applied to website development. “The Web: The Rules Are Different Here.”

I frequently see sites — and am sometimes asked by new clients for re-designs of sites — that were obviously designed/developed/coded by someone with a background in print design who hasn’t yet learned that the rules are different here.

They use huge graphics that take forever to load. They use rigid, inflexible designs that fall apart when you resize the text in your browser, or when you have a browser window that’s larger or smaller than the window the designer tested in when developing the site. They use drag-and-drop WYSINWYG (What You See Is NOT What You Get) software programs that write code that’s invalid, that displays improperly in some browsers, and that often makes use of javascript or Flash buttons for links — making those all-important links invisible to the search engines.

They don’t understand that the web is not a fixed canvas, like paper. They don’t understand that some of the most important types of visitors are search engines, which are essentially deaf and blind users with browsers that have neither Flash nor Javascript.

Many — probably most — print designers are perfectly capable of learning the “rules of the web” and how it’s different from print work. But all too many of them don’t.

I checked the DNS settings on the server. I did traceroutes from my computer. I went to websites in other parts of the country and did traceroutes. I pinged. I double-checked and triple-checked the nameservers. Everything was exactly right, and I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out why the client couldn’t reach his own site.

Finally, it struck me: The client was searching for the site, using the search box on Yahoo and Comcast.

Once I told him that his site not indexed yet (because it’s brand new), and that he needed to enter the URL directly into the browser’s address bar — voila! Problem solved.

This is one to file away to deal with future “can’t reach my site” issues.

Note to website designers and developers: If you ever have clients who can’t reach their site, check to see if they’re searching for it.

“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.

I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”

My site, tropicalwebworks.com, promotes my website development firm, and it’s located in Punta Gorda. I have nothing to do with face lifts. I don’t have a single client who wants to rank for face lifts. And I don’t particularly target Cape Coral.

Furthermore, there is only one result (count ‘em, one) in google for the search allintitle:face lift cape coral. That means that the competition for that term is virtually zero, and I could easily rank for face lift cape coral if I wanted to. Which I don’t.

I really don’t understand the point of sending spam offering to help people rank for search terms that they have no interest in.

And of course, the main take-home point is that reputable search engine optimization firms don’t send you e-mails out of the blue offering to help you rank for worthless keyphrases. If you receive such an e-mail (or phone call), that’s a sign that you should run away.

(Update: Within a couple of hours of posting this entry on my blog, my site was ranking #1 for face lift cape coral in Google! Take that, you spammers!)

I decided I should upgrade Tropical Blogging to the new version. Of course, I made sure I had backups of all the files, and a backup of the MySQL database, before doing anything.

I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress, de-activated all my plugins per the instructions, followed the instructions to upload the files, and then followed the instructions to update the database. (Which basically consisted of clicking an “Update” button.)

All my posts were still there. But all the categories were missing! No, actually, they weren’t missing — they had numbers but no category names, and none of the posts were assigned to any categories.

I found a couple of posts on the WordPress support forum about this, but they weren’t any real help. The database structure had changed — there was no longer a “categories” table in the database. There’s a “category-to-tag” converter and a “tag-to-category” converter in the admin area, and I tried both, but neither one did anything.

I ended up manually re-creating each category, then manually assigning each post to appropriate categories. I almost just went back to my old WordPress installation, but I have this weird obsessions where once I start down a road I really hate to give up and go back.

I also discovered that my theme doesn’t work with this new version. It appears to work, initially — the home page of the blog loads just fine. But clicking any of the posts to “read more” results in an error. So I have to use a different theme, or get into troubleshooting that theme. Bah!

I’d like to update my clients’ WordPress-based blogs, but I sure don’t have time to muck around doing crap like that. For now I’ll take a pass. I hope WordPress addresses this issue, or those blogs will just forever have to be stuck on whatever version they’re currently runninng.

I’ve been seeing great commissions since switching my eBay affiliate links to ePN (eBay Partner Network), but unfortunately eBay’s reporting isn’t much better than Commission Junction’s. If you want to see what item sold on eBay for any particular transaction, you still have to download the report, open it, scroll over to the column with the item numbers, copy the item number, go to ebay.com, paste the item number in the search field, and hit “Go.”

What a PITA! I’m pretty good with php, so I decided to roll my own script. I started out with just the basic info that eBay provides in the downloadable report, and wrote a script that outputs the report contents with the item id as a clickable link so that I could go directly to that item on eBay.

Then I added code to use eBay’s developer API to pull in the item name, thumbnail image, number of bids, buyer name, seller name, and category name.

Now I have a really cool script that shows me exactly what items sold in eBay, their prices, pictures, and extra info.

I’m such a nice person, I decided to give this script away to any eBay affiliate who wants to use it. I’m not forcing you to upload your transaction report to my server; oh no…. I’m offering the script as a free download that you can download, put on your own server, and run from within your own hosting account.

I’m doing this because I’m such a nice person. And because I think it just might get me a few nice backlinks.

• You can get the script here:
  TWW’s eBay Report Tracker

Check out a screenshot: (click to enlarge)

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement.

I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO.

Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold.

This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.

I’m currently participating in a discussion on the SitePoint forums in which the topic of discussion is a web site developer who offers “SEO friendly CMS” (content management system) — but this developer builds his clients’ sites in frames. Not only does he use frames, but the framed content is actually hosted on his domain, not his clients.

There are many, many reasons this is a terrible idea. I won’t go into those here.

What I want to talk about is the statement by one forum member who wrote, “When the pages are indexed, yes they’ll show his domain but unless the client has specifically asked for that not to happen it’s not unethical.”

That’s completely wrongheaded thinking, in my opinion. Clients should not have to know enough about the website building process, the architecture of html pages and framesets, and the inner workings of search engines to request that the developer avoid certain practices that would be bad for the client’s site.

The client hires the web developer because the web developer allegedly has expertise in this area. Any monkey can peck at keys on a keyboard; it’s not the web developer’s time-on-keyboard the client is in need of. It’s the web developer’s expertise.

When I hire professionals or specialists to perform a service for me, I rely on their expertise. I don’t think I should have to study up so that I can tell my mechanic how much torque to use when tightening the tires on my car, or tell my plumber what not to do in order to avoid damaging my plumbing system, or tell my doctor which medicines are contraindicated, or provide my lawyer with the exact wording necessary for a business contract. I hire those people because they supposedly know what they’re doing. They’re supposed to know how to do the things they’re hired to do, and they’re supposed to know what techniques and processes to avoid due to potential damage.

In a similar vein, I believe that anyone who holds him or herself out as a professional website developer — and particularly one who claims “SEO friendly” anything — has a responsibility to perform the promised service using industry-accepted “best practices” without regard to whether the client has sufficient knowledge to request those best practices specifically.

I believe, in fact, that it is unethical for a website developer to engage in the types of practices discussed in the SitePoint forum thread, and in many other practices as well.

But unfortunately, from the client’s point of view, I don’t have a solution to offer. The client, who is usually not an expert in these things, doesn’t even know the right questions to ask, much less have any way of evaluating the answers. It’s all too easy for the unethical developers to give impressive-sounding, baffle-’em-with-bullshit, high-falutin’ answers. It’s easy to talk the talk; but how does the client assess whether the developer walks the walk?

A lot of the things the client should be assessing aren’t obvious from looking at the developer’s portfolio, unless the client himself becomes an expert on web technology. It’s not rocket science, but in my experience, most clients just don’t have the time or the inclination to do that. They’re too busy running their businesses.