Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

Advertisers and agencies in Search Engine Marketing Industry all over the world practice various methods of optimization on their Accounts. Few people share their knowledge for the benefit of others and community. The Inside Adwords Blog continously updates useful information for Advertisers to help achieve their ROI. Below are some of my favourite resources which share tips and knowledge on Adwords Account Management.

Optimization Tips from Adwords Team

Adwords 101 : Part 1

Adwords Optimization Part 1

Adwords Optimization - Assesing your Website

Adwords Optimization - Account Structure

Adwords Optimization - Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Beyond Keyword Basics

Adwords Optimization - Ad Text Optimization

Generating New Keywords

Managing and Optimizing Bids

Landing Page quality Update

Website Optimizer Strategy

ROI Matters - Part 1 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 2 of 3

ROI Matters - Part 3 of 3

Google’s Help on Dynamic Keyword Insertion , is a must read for large advertisers

Other Adwords optimization resources shared by various advertisers around the world..

A) 32 Very Good Useful Tips on Adwords : This is list of Top tips put in one document. 13 calls to action verbiage ideas: Browse our store, Submit Your RFP (RFI), See our client list, Free Shipping, Order today, ship tonight. Download our brochure, Free Consultation, Free demo, Free quote, Free Report, Start now, Call 24/7.

B) Google’s Expanded Broad Match : Find out What is Google’s Expanded Broad Match, why google displays ads after remembering previous searches, how to test it?

C) Protecting from Expanded Broad Match : How to prevent from showing in expanded broad match.

D) Reaching Local Auidence : If you are a local business looking to reach local audience, then this can be helpful.

E) Using Video Ads in Adwords : Explaining the usage of Video Ads in Adwords Account.

F) Know about Placement Performance Report : The new feature Placement Performance Report greatly helps in getting insights into the account and performance in content network. Find out how to use it.

G) Search Query Performance Report : Search query reports generates keywords which have actually been searched on google to reach your website. This would help in generating negative keywords, additional potential traffic/profit keywords .

H) Adwords for Auto Sites/Forums : Find out how to manage adwords accounts in Auto Sites and Forums.

I) Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Adwords Account : What not to do & How not to manage your Adwords Accounts.

J) Tips to pay less and get more : Simple tips to optimize your account to spend less on adwords. You can also read the 5 Tips for Spending less on Adwords.

K) Adwords Expert Tips & Techniques: How new developments affect the adwords account management

L) Optimizing PPC Campaigns for B2B Businesses

M) Landing Page Optimization : 10 Tips you should never forget on optimizing landing pages.

N) Best way to generate PPC TRaffic and perform PPC Marketing

Small Changes to Ads which can boost your CTR

There are various small changes that can be made to adword Ad Text which can boost your CTR way above the competitors. You can find the exhaustive list on various blogs, Some of them are given below:

• Adding … in description Increases CTR: A test points out that adding 3 dots … at the end of the description line 2 will increase the CTR of the Ad.

• Plural & Singular : Small changes from singular to plural can boost your CTR

• Speaking to User as 1st Party : Using phrases like You Will Get can sometimes lead to higher CTR. Addressing the user directly as 1st person will help you boost CTR.

Few Adwords Tips for Beginners starting out on Advertising Online:

1. How to Get Started with Adwords
2. 8 Tips for Advertising Online :
3. Broad, Extact, Phrase Match :
4. Adwords Tip for Beginners :
5. Good Tips for PPC Starters:

You must watch the 2 hour Video on Perry Marshall Talking About Adwords.

Read a comprehensive description on how to test A/B testing of Text Ads, Landing Pages with Adwords.

These resources & knowledge on Adwords may not be present in the Google Adwords Learning Center

For Appearing for Google Advertising Professional Exam you could visit the Adwords learning center http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

This is my personal list of bookmarks on Adwords. However do keep a looking for more postings on Adwords Tips.

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If you are looking for some authentic information on SEO, Link Building, this is the right article. The information & advice written here is 100% accurate and can be implemented without second thoughts. This is a SEO, Link Building Advice given by Google, Yahoo themselves.

Google, Yahoo has come a long way from the days it used ignore webmasters when Google started out to helping webmasters/site owners with optimizing websites. Google has created a special channel of communication with webmasters/site owners for helping them design search engine friendly websites to make information available to users easily.

Link Building

Google clarifies Link exchange is fine as long as it does not look excessive and spam. This means the link exchange schemes & programs deliberately increasing links in attempt to achieve ranking is bad. Buying and selling links is bad. Any marketing done excessively is bad for websites. The discussion on this on webmasterworld can be found over here. Google in its Webmaster guidelines had stated that any link exchanges schemes, buying, selling links are not good for website rankings. As per Google the links are editorial votes to webpages and have to given naturally to add value to visitor.

A) Google introduces Paid Link Reporting service, find mattcutts story over here and here. Link selling sites loose the ability to transfer PageRank.

B) Google Introduces No-Follow attribute

C) Link Building with Google Bookmarks

D) Link Baiting Advice by Google & by MattCutts

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engines are interested in providing rich, useful & relevant content to end users. This can happen only when site owners publish rich content & design a search engine friendly site.

Search engines would want to index all the content provided by site owners. It is therefore in their Business Interest to help webmasters provide more content to search engines. Search Engines therefore encourage webmasters to publish more content online both quality & quantity.

Website owners are looking to drive traffic from Search Engines by optimizing websites. Search Engines are looking to provide relevant, quality results to end users. Therefore it is a Win-Win solution for both. The only glitch is Spam.. Spam is defined as any activity where this equation is disturbed.

Search Engine spam is defined as any activity by website owner which is in the business interest of webmaster but not in business interest of Search Engine. However there is no such thing as “Webmaster Spam” when the site owner’s business interest is not protected by search engines.

SEO Tips by Google

• SEO Basics
• Google Sitemaps
• Using Robots Meta Tag
• All about Robots.txt
• Quality Guidelines for Webmasters
• Duplicate Content Caused by Url
• Understand Duplicate Content
• SEO for Flash Files
• Server Location and SEO
• Using Google Webmaster Central Tools
• New Robots Meta Tag check: X-Robots Tag and Unavailable_after Meta tag
• Canonical Urls
• Google Webmaster Help Center

Some of the active channels the information & Tools online are:

A) Google Webmaster Central

B) Google Webmaster Discussion Group

C) Google Sitemaps

SEO Tips by Yahoo

Yahoo.com also offers extensive help and awareness program for webmasters for optimizing websites for higher ranking on search engines. In some areas like Dynamic Url rewriting they offer more advanced help than Google.com

• Basic SEO on Yahoo
• Ranking Factors on Yahoo
• Yahoo Webmaster Guildelines
• Yahoo Site Explorer & Sitemaps
• How Yahoo Handles Redirection
• Reporting Duplicate content through Urls & Faqs on Dynamic Urls. WMW Discussions on dynamic urls in yahoo is very useful
• Removing Urls from Search Index
• Yahoo Store Help

Web Master Tools offered by Yahoo

1) Yahoo Site EXplorer

2) Yahoo Search Blog

This is an article which is worth bookmarking for all SEO, SEM Managers, as the resources listed has to be referred by everyone in this field.

The golden fact is everyone (Search Marketing world) is aware of it but very very few people have the patience to constantly observe & learn for maintaining their website rankings on Top of Search Engines.

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In Pay Per Click Marketing through Google, Yahoo, MSN advertising is done on search and content websites. Users type in queries and find sponsored results for each keyword. Users then click on the Ads based on their liking.

In display marketing the websites you advertise on, provide extensive details like quality of traffic on their website, as a part of media kit. For example information on user’s geography breakup, economic class break up, age group breakup, gender breakup etc. However search engines never provide such details to advertisers. At the max they give search volumes, competition volumes, estimated clicks for each keyword, geography and ofcourse the hot keyword trends in the market.

In countries like India, where Google market share is about 80% and with Alexa rank in Top 3, you can safely assume all demography of people browse Google.com.

The keywords driving traffic to your website can give a lot of information about the nature of audience present in that particular market.

• Group campaigns, adgroups based on theme, product.

• Target each set of keywords in each location, content, language, Ad Scheduling.

Let’s discuss with an example of shopping site. Assuming shopping site extensively advertise on all products, in each location separately. Just by looking at your campaigns, you can identify:

1. The best performing location that generates traffic

2. The best performing product for each location

3. The least performing product for each location.

4. Location wise serious buyers can be identified, Looking at Avg time spent for each campaign in Analytics,

5. Time range with maximum activity on the site. Users are active from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm or throughout the day?

6. Which product page has highest bounce rate? Look at Campaign/Adgroup wise Bounce rate.

7. Which location has maximum repeat customers? Look at % New Visit for every campaign

8. Judge the competition in the market. Competition in Market is directly proportional to competition in PPC bidding.

9. Identify seasonal changes by change in traffic, location wise.

10. For B2B products or High Value products, if majority of conversions take place from content network. Quality of users buying your products is quality of users browsing those content sites.

11. Best location that generates maximum sales, you can do this if you set up E-Commerce Revenue Tracking in Google Analytics.

Your PPC Account can act as a pulse for your online business.

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The need to market & optimize videos.

1) High traffic/Popularity on Video Sites such as Youtube.com, Google Videos, Daily Motion, AOL-cut, Yahoo Videos and other video search engines,

2) Availability & increase in usage of broadband internet in India.

3) Search Engines moving towards Universal Search.

4) Social Sites enable sharing and voting best videos.

5) Increase in traffic to Torrent sites and forums where people share videos

Ways to Market Video Content

Marketing & Optimization are 2 different terms, Marketing is creating new and optimization is refining the existing content. Marketing is mainly push, Optimization is pull.

Social Media including videos is a place where there is a very thin line between the two, both exist simultaneously. For example: Viral Marketing is both Push and Pull. Videos is also both Push and Pull. Advertisers need to push only to an extent beyond which pull has to take it forward.

1) Include Your Website Name inside your Video

2) Keep posting Videos Frequently

a) Post Videos about your Company, Investor Information.

a) Post videos on Product Usage

b) Post videos on Customer Testimonials

c) Post Videos on Training and Development Program

d) Informational B2B programs in your Videos

e) Awareness about your Industry

3) Upload Videos in all possible video search engines such as youtube etc.

4) Submit your Videos to Digg, Stumbleupon and other such content sites.

5) Embed Videos in your Blogs, Websites etc.

6) Give Links to all your videos in your sitemap

7) Give links to Videos from inside the content or article.

Include Digg this Button on webpages which embed videos

9) Include Keyword rich content, brand names in Titles, Descriptions of Videos around the Videos.

10) Include ror.xml Sitemap or podcast RSS feed and submit to google, yahoo and other search engines.

11) Ask Users to Post comments, this will add the content on the page.

12) Create a Textual version (SubTitles) of the video in all languages of your TA and embed in your blog

13) Give links of your sites which link to Youtube video, inside Youtube Video page.

14) The Page which embeds the Video in blog, website must have keyword in H1 tag as Heading.

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Selling SEO is a bad business model, since any business must have strong fundamentals. Businesses should be able to define finite parameters that affect its revenue, expenditure and therefore profit. And a considerable amount of control is expected of these businesses on these parameters.

SEO is a field where parameters affecting the business model are more dynamic. Search Engine Optimization services offered by an agency to its clients has absolutely no control over Search Engine Algorithms, which ranks web pages in organic listings. Neither has it any full/part knowledge about its working.

Despite all this agencies across the world offer Search Engine Optimization services promising its clients higher ranking in Google search results, fully aware of the fact that Google itself cautions users on choosing SO services.

My idea about writing this post is about SEO Agencies how they can best sell services & operate ethically and businesses on whether or not choosing such a company if yes then how to do it?

SEO Agency India

SEO Agencies must act like any other Ad agency or a PR agency, they promise to work for your promote your brand online but do not take fully responsible for the result of the action/promotion.

Similarly SEO agency must follow the below important issues:

1) Make a review of the website initially and send it to the client.

2) Educate your clients about Search Engine Guidelines & process of SEO. They should be repetitive, if need to be emphasize on maintaining search engine friendly site.

3) Suggest/Work more on making the client content copies more appealing to the user.

4) Overlook every change made on the site to ensure high search engine crawl ability.

5) Evaluate the site on all commonly believed ranking factors

6) Any change you suggest on the site, educate the client first on why you are suggesting it.

7) Be transparent about your past clients, projects and method of working, such as explaining this activity would have high probability of generating this result.

Do not perform Link exchanges, use more Link baiting methods.

9) Communication is the key, keep informed about latest developments in your work.

10) Avoid spamming of all forms, Black Hat SEO and other unacceptable methods to boost rankings.

11) Avoid using software that queries Google, other search engines.

12) R&D and innovation is must need for every SEO company. They should have resources/manpower who constantly works on new methods & ways of promotion.

13) There are some SEO companies who have converted their SEO division into an assembly line production unit, every new SEO project is taken through same set of standard processes without any customization or knowledge input. All this in the name of ISO standardization. This is due to sheer lack of knowledge of Industry dynamics (environment). You must understand one size does not fit all.

SEO Client India

Every Company having a website & can convert its online visitors into sales/revenue must think about SEO services at some point or the other. Organic traffic is highly targeted and gives higher ROI than any other online source of traffic. More over Organic traffic adds branding value to the company, for ranking top for branded terms, in addition to generating traffic.

Companies when choosing a SEO service provider must remember following things:

A) SEO results cannot be achieved overnight. It requires patience and hard work.

B) SEO can be done both in-house and outsourced to an agency.

C) In-house SEO will give you flexibility, Accountability and a person who understands your business and your company.

D) SEO agency may have the expertise but lack insight into your business, or may be unaware of your company processes. Also if you do not want your outsourced partner to make direct changes to your website, then co-ordination between your Tech departments is a key issue.

E) Get details of past work, previous clients.

F) Know about their mode of work or standard processes. Get to know if they use any SEO software

G) This is a single test for choosing SEO agency; find out how much of R&D, knowledge work, innovation or Human involvement is present in forming SEO strategies for your project.

H) Make sure they do not perform any spammy activities to artificially boost your rankings.

I) They should be ready to educate you, whenever & whatever necessary about SEO and processes.

J) Be Open to new suggestions/ideas which your SEO consultant may suggest. For example Flashy design, extensive facelift for the site may not convert into equivalent sales/revenue for the business. It may not make business sense to have a highly decorative website. Ordinary simple websites with great content can do a much better job of generating traffic, revenue, meeting ROI & brand value.

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