Archive for March, 2010
March 12th, 2010 by Lisa Rosenkrantz
What is the click-through rate (CTR)?
By definition, it a mathematical percentage that refers to the number of unique users who clicked on an ad divided by the number of times the ad appeared (impressions). For example, if a Google Adwords ad was delivered 100 times and 10 people clicked on it, the average click-through rate would be 10 percent (10/100 = 10%).
Important Distinctions
The click-thru rate measures the percentage of people who clicked on an ad to arrive on the desired site, not those who saw the ad but entered the site any other way. This may be considered a positive response to the ad, but not calculated into the CTR. Also, there is quite a difference between the number of unique users clicking on an ad versus the number of clicks on an ad, since one person can click on an ad multiple times.
What is the significance of the ad click-through rate?
For one thing, having a high click-through rate leads to a high Quality Score, which influences your ad position and costs.
However, having a lot of clicks doesn’t necessarily guarantee anything for your business. In fact, in some cases a high click-through rate can actually be bad. If your ad is based on keywords that aren’t relevant to your business but the visitor doesn’t know that until they arrive on your site, they’re going to bounce pretty quickly. You might have generated a lot of clicks, but if they don’t convert they end up costing you money. This is especially punishing if your keywords are pricey!
Bottom line – check your AdWords click-through rate and compare it to your conversion rate to see if those ads are working for you.
Is there a perfect click-through rate?
While you do want a high click-through rate, it’s important to remember that nobody can really tell you what that number should be. There are so many variables – the specific campaign, the keywords, the ad copy – but it’s safe to say (and obvious) that you want a high click-through rate if it’s coupled with a high conversion rate. To make it more confusing, it’s entirely possible and desirable to have a low click-through rate with a high conversion rate!
What are some ways to improve your Google AdWords click-through rate?
• Use targeted, highly relevant keywords
• Write compelling ad text
• Go for long-tail keywords for cost savings
• Group keywords
• Set specific goals and expectations
• Know your target audience
• Be specific in your web placements
• Keep track of your campaign – check reports
• Use dynamic keyword matching
• Make sure the customer’s search query is prominently reflected on the landing page text
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March 12th, 2010 by Lisa Rosenkrantz
Most SEO discussions revolve around on-page tactics, which refers to optimizing the content of your website. This includes working with the text, links, images, and tags associated with your website.
What you should also dial into is off-page optimization (also referred to as off-page SEO), which is also important for driving additional organic traffic to your website. It’s a way of marketing your website, getting ranked in search engines and making a name for yourself.
Professional SEO strategists have an arsenal of ideas when it comes to effective offpage optimization. Here are just some of the techniques you can use once your on-page SEO has been implemented.
• Create social networking profiles, use them to make connections and update your status regularly. Let everyone know about promotions and events within your company. Great examples of popular community websites are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but you don’t have to stop there.
• Publish optimized press releases with a newsworthy angle. Submit them to popular PR websites.
• Create a company blog and add new, original content on a regular basis. Go one step further and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines such as Technorati.com.
• Write news articles for your website and submit them to bookmarking sites like Digg.com or Reddit.com or article sites like ezinearticles.com. These are great sources of traffic generation to your site.
• Publish photos and make them public and open to comments. There are a number of such sharing sites including Flickr.com and PhotoBucket.com.
• Share videos that promote certain aspects of your company, like products or services. Allow for comments and reviews. Some popular video sharing sites are YouTube.com and Metacafe.com.
• Participate in forums/discussion boards daily. Contribute both new questions and responses to existing questions, but make sure you come off as knowledgeable and not as a spammer.
• List your company in local business listings, online yellow pages and directories.
• Ask and answer questions in answer websites such as Answers.Yahoo.com.
These are just some of the things you can do to accomplish offpage SEO. Make sure anything you write for your campaign is relevant to your website. Never go overboard, or your efforts might be perceived as spamming.
Even though some of the tactics above don’t always get the direct (or “followed”) links that search engines crave, you can get a lot of buzz and natural links by keeping a high profile in the online world. A presence in the offpage world goes a long way when it comes to building organic search engine links.
Tags: off page optimization, off page seo
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March 12th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
Even though Search Engine Optimization has been a discipline for over 10 years, there are still a lot of site designs that make it hard for a search engine to make heads or tails of a website. While you would expect a certain lack of SEO knowledge from less sophisticated users and people who are new to site building, there are still quite a few cases where medium and large companies fail to consider search engines when creating a web presence.
Here are a few issues we (still) see in the year 2010, which effectively prevent a site from getting proper rankings:
- Lack of content on the homepage. There are some very big companies who believe that they can get decent search engine rankings without adding readable text to the site’s homepage. This is a huge mistake. Some of these companies will point out that Google has sparse homepage content, at which point we usually indicate that Google isn’t ranked in the top 10 for “search engine.”
- Site Designed Entirely in Flash. Adobe has made a lot of great strides in making its files readable, and should be commended for it. However, many of the designs we have seen fail to take SEO into account, so text in Flash files gets embedded into images, which aren’t read by the search engines. In many cases, the search engine sees a big blank spot when Flash is presented, so it can’t judge how relevant a site is.
- No hierarchy. For very large sites, the lack of a clear hierarchy presents a problem. The distribution of pages on a website should look like an organizational chart for a major corporation. The homepage would be the CEO, the category pages would be the directors, and so on. A lot of sites present a very wide and shallow profile, so the search engine can’t distinguish between an important category page and an ancillary product page. Hierarchies can be created using breadcrumbs, good directory structures, and HTML sitemaps, and are always recommended for sites with hundreds or thousands of pages. A Bad URL Structure can also keep pages from getting found which makes your “pyramid” look a lot smaller in the search world.
- Same Title on Every Page. Many enterprise level corporations are obsessed with branding, and want to be sure the same message appears on every title. A search engine can’t figure out the topic of each page if all the titles are the same, and the information at the left of the title is the most important. If your company name (xyz.com) starts every page title, you are robbing your site of a higher natural search engine position.
- “Set It And Forget It” Mentality. Part of keeping a site relevant involves making sure the site is updated frequently in order to stay fresh and account for search engine algorithm changes. In the corporate world, inertia can set in, so outdated information may be left on the site for years, and changes to the website may happen infrequently or as part of an initiative where all the pages are updated at the same time. After awhile, search engines visit less frequently, and competitors who keep fresh websites get priority in the search engine rankings.
Naturally, there are quite a few other mistakes made when it comes to building websites, and most of those mistakes are made in the small business sector. However, search engines have gotten very good at spotting many common mistakes, and can usually figure out the relationship between pages on smaller sites. Larger sites, however, may be compounding their design mistakes, and may be fractionalizing the value that search engines apply to each of that site’s pages. If you have ever wondered why a cheap looking site with minimal SEO work is beating a billion dollar brand name in the search engines, you may want to consider how good of a job that the big company is doing with its optimization.
Tags: design mistakes, seo friendly website design, seo mistakes
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March 12th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
A fairly new concept in the online world is “crowdsourcing” which basically refers to using members of the internet community to contribute to a project. As a term, it is often hard to separate from the idea of “outsourcing” where you can get small projects done on sites similar to Elance, Guru, and Odesk. With crowdsourcing, you are often appealing to a wider community, and you may or may not be paying for advice and input that you are getting.
When it comes to websites and SEO, there are a couple of ways that crowdsourcing can be used for testing and link building purposes. By making an “open call” to qualified people on the internet, you can solicit site designers, conversion optimizers, and SEO experts who will sometimes offer free advice, or who may actually perform part of the project for a fee. There are even overseas developers and programmers who bid on projects that include site design, logo creation, and shopping cart integration, and who may make a sample site “on spec” for you approval.
How can you use the “mind of the mob” to improve your optimization? First and foremost, you can offer an incentive for the person(s) who first discovers major SEO issues, or the most problems. This can give you a lot of input, some of which may uncover a set of minor issues that can blur your overall SEO picture. Crowdsourcing is also a good way to solicit links, but only if your crowdsource is relevant to the topic at hand. You can even create link bait that would be of interest to such a group, and solicit improvements or “things you’d like to see” in the form of online tools, information, templates, or code. With SEO crowdsourcing, you have the potential to make your virtual focus group into a great potential source of links.
The Google PageRank Algorithm can be considered analogous to crowdsourcing. In its most basic form, the algorithm spiders the internet for links and measures the relationship between them, assigning values to each site based on link popularity. In a manner of speaking, the “crowd” in this case has been surveyed, unwittingly, and has presented a result back to the search engine, which then uses that information to improve its results. You could even say that search engines are the biggest users of crowd-based input, and have turned the preferences of Netizens into the most business model in the online world.
Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages when it comes to crowdsourcing. Unpaid “experts” may be novices who are trying to rack up experience. It also may be difficult to find experienced members of the crowd, or you may get people who are trolling for a better payment once part of the work is complete. On the plus side, you can get more honest input on design choices, since semi-anonymous members of the “crowd” aren’t bothered by the political implications of telling you that your site is a mess, and that its SEO functionality is questionable. You can even take some of the toughest criticism you get on a “dev site” and ask yourself if the general public would amplify the same thoughts. Finally, you can use tools like Google Analytics and ClickTale to see how your crowd really interacts with a site, which will give you input on potential hangups in usability and conversion.
The collaborative nature of crowdsourcing means that you can also become a member of the crowd, which can improve your own company’s credibility and online reputation. If you have time to offer input on other people’s sites, SEO functionality, or even give advice on usability, then your own position in the online world is enhanced. The Web 2.0 community may have a lot of members, but there are plenty of “crowd groups” which are trusted to deliver input on specific questions, and finding the answers to some of these questions can improve your ability to find solutions to similar problems down the road. In the meantime, you can develop relationships with fellow crowd members and potential clients, which can certainly work to your advantage the next time a tough question comes up and people are looking for the “expert” in the crowd.
Tags: crowdsourcing
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March 5th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
One of the most important considerations in DIY website design involves getting website design templates that are search engine friendly. This is essential because many do-it-yourself website design suites are based on content management system (CMS) platforms that may not allow you to control page titles, meta descriptions, and other factors that are going to determine how well your site ranks in the search engines.
If you’re looking to buy a DIY template, or download a website from a template, you have a lot of choices available. Some of these with be SEO friendly because you have total control over the code, and if you are an intermediate HTML designer then you can just go into the site’s source code and drop in the relevant title, meta description, keyword, and content information. (By the way, the general consensus in the search engine crowd is that the keyword tag can be left blank, but we prefer to use it so we can track the page’s focus.)
If you’re building your website on a CMS, you may need to do some digging to find out if the site is SEO friendly. Normally, a DIY site design suite is using a CMS if you can utilize “drag and drop” web design elements. A few platforms which let you create your own website will only allow you to create a “default” title tag that is going to show up the same on all of your interior pages. This does not help your site because the search engine can’t figure out which pages are the most relevant to the topic. Some other CMS systems will stick your domain name into the beginning of the title, and this also reduces your search engine effectiveness.
You don’t have to be a custom website design expert to enjoy the benefits of good search engine optimization, but it helps to understand whether the platform is SEO friendly before you buy it. In some cases, you may not have control over your domain name if you choose to leave a DIY web design and hosting company and go somewhere else, which means that you are starting at square one when it comes to optimization. For website design templates that include shopping carts, it is doubly important to have built-in SEO friendly features that are going to present your products in the best possible way to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or they aren’t going to be visible among the top results. Over the past couple of years, more and more templates and website builders have added complex SEO features into their standard offerings. If you plan to make a website using one of these tools, then adding SEO functionality to the list of requirements will help you get a head start on search engine rankings.
Tags: seo friendly website design
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March 5th, 2010 by Patrick Hare
One of the hardest things for any newcomer to search engine optimization (SEO) to discover is that there is a wealth of information online about SEO, and much of it is contradictory. To become any thing close to a true “SEO Expert,” it is almost necessary to learn the entire history of SEO, have a clear understanding of all the methods people used to trick search engines in the past, and apply that knowledge so your new site does not get filtered or banned before it even gets off the ground. Whether people come into the universe of SEO as DIY site builders or customers, there is a sharp learning curve.
Much of the education given to customers of Web.com Search Agency starts with the basics. You don’t have to know too much about engines in order to drive a car, and you shouldn’t have to have a degree in SEO before you can take your site out on to the internet. We usually start at the beginning with keyword research, since our goal is to get our customers the highest quality of relevant traffic that will result in a conversion. By involving our clients in the educational process, we can help them grow their businesses by considering all the possibilities for online traffic. This part of the process also helps set realistic expectations while we tailor the on-page optimization.
What should a novice know about SEO? If the sales process was done correctly, a person should understand that search engine rankings are going to take time, and competitive keywords must be achieved with hard work and a substantial investment. For companies who may have had an active site for a long time, and a lot of brand equity, rankings could literally come from a few small changes to the site’s metatags or content. The vast majority of sites, however, need to present themselves in a way that is going to gain (and keep) a certain level of credibility in order to achieve rankings. Therefore, professional seo consulting clients and amateur do-it-yourself optimization dilettantes should have the same idea about the road ahead. If anyone tells you that they can get you “instant” rankings on Google, ask them if you can pay once the rankings are attained.
Most of the time, the best seo education and training comes from an in-depth knowledge of the work. The art of optimizing websites depends on a set of ever-changing variables, most of which are heavily debated in the search engine world. However, the basic combinations of good keywords, relevant content, and good links are still the foundation for getting good search engine positions. An SEO consultant can steer you through the many traps and SEO nuances that may trip up someone who is not familiar with the territory, but at the end of the day their methods for getting high rankings should depend on proven principles that are supported by a majority of the SEO community. Most reputable SEO firms can even answer one or two specific questions about a course of action in and be able to debate the pros and cons of a certain method. As an SEO consumer, you can gain a working knowledge of SEO concepts, which will help you decide whether or not a certain initiative is working, or how it could be improved. At the end of the day, our job is to get you the best rankings possible, which not only keeps you in the black, but also keeps us on the retainer as a valued consultant.
Tags: novice seo
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March 4th, 2010 by Lisa Rosenkrantz
What is the Wonder Wheel?
It’s a free tool provided by Google that shows related keywords in a simple graphic. It literally looks like a wheel with spokes and is an especially wonderful tool for those who love visual aids.
What do you use it for?
It is a powerful visual tool for identifying PPC ad group themes for search and content campaigns. It allows you to clearly see the connections between your search term and other related searches, and helps you target your ads more precisely on the Google content network. Since Google places your ad according to themes, using terms that are considered to be related in the Google Wonder Wheel throughout your text, especially in your ad groups, gives you an increased chance of appearing on relevant sites across the network. You can also use the Wonder Wheel to discover common negative keywords that you can use to prevent your ads from being served up when irrelevant searches are made.
It’s just a tool, remember, so you do have to study the groupings and the road they take you on. We recommend you use the wheel in conjunction with the Google keyword tool, etc. It’s a great place to start, though.
Where is it located?
Relatively hidden, you do have to know where to look. Once you’ve entered your search term, select Show options.
A menu will appear to the left of the search results. Select Wonder Wheel.
The Google search Wonder Wheel appears.
Each subgroup has further subgroups for you to explore.
The Wonder Wheel for Google search is a useful tool for working into both your SEO and PPC strategies. Why not enjoy another perspective and possibly have a wildly successful impact on your ROI?
Tags: Google wonder wheel
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March 2nd, 2010 by Lisa Rosenkrantz
Choosing the right domain name can be an effective way to bring traffic to your site in addition to your healthy SEO and PPC efforts. When it’s all said and done, you want your domain name to be remembered, even if your name sounds flat-out strange. Word of mouth is powerful, so a good idea would be to choose a domain name that’s short, sweet and easy to type. Think: Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and Monster as the ultimate in unusual yet short and easy-to-remember domain names.
Of course, because those domains don’t tell you what the site is all about, they’ve required a boatload of marketing and branding to be on everyone’s lips, which is not possible for everyone. Thus, there are a number of suggestions we can offer for those who are launching a new online business or information site, and want to maximize their online presence – starting with their name.
• Make sure your domain name reflects the type of content that will be found on your website. Intuitive domain names like ProFlowers.com or BestPromDresses.com tell the whole story – users don’t have to wonder what they’ll find if they click on a link or type your domain name in the browser.
• Select your domain name according to your top keywords. Make a list of the terms/phrases that best describe your intended website. Say you’re launching a handbag site. Start with “handbags, designer handbags, fashion bags, purses” and so forth. Check availability, and if your top choices are already taken, play around with variations by adding words before and after. You’ll eventually find something strong that you can live with. Sometimes, the firm from which you’re purchasing your domain can make suggestions.
• Choose .com domains above all else even if they’re more expensive. It’s a fact – the average type-in user automatically uses this domain and you don’t want to lose these people. If you can purchase the .net, .org, etc. as well, great! 301 redirect them to your .com.
• Avoid using numbers, hyphens and other confusing or hard to remember additions/variations. This can cause your domain name to be lost in translation and send people to a competitor. For example, if your domain is Wool-Sweaters.com, people are likely to mistakenly type in WoolSweaters.com instead.
• Make sure your domain name is not a violation of someone else’s trademark.
We’ve got plenty of ideas up our sleeves for choosing a great domain name. We can also help you create a brilliant SEO and PPC campaign for your site to really get you noticed in the search engines.
Tags: choose domain name, choosing a domain name
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March 2nd, 2010 by Lisa Rosenkrantz
What is a mirror site?
It is an exact replica of a website, hosted at a remote location and used to improve the availability of the original site. It can be static (most common), which requires frequent updates. It can also be live, which changes when the original one does. The mirror can be a copy of the entire website, or it can be used as a file archive. Some websites have multiple mirror sites.
Why should you mirror a site?
The original purpose of a mirror site was to combat censorship. In the event a website is shut down, a copy of it is available at a remote location, just in case. Along the same lines, a mirror can be used as a storehouse for old versions of websites for anyone who needs to view them.
Today, there are many additional legitimate reasons to develop a mirror website, which generally have to do with managing site traffic and keeping servers running smoothly.
What are some of those reasons?
• To manage sudden traffic increases
• To get around firewalls
• To speed up downloads
• To balance load
• To synchronize files
If used properly, website mirrors help you to improve the reliability and availability of your website, which not only gives you peace of mind but improves your online reputation.
From an SEO standpoint, there are important considerations when mirrored sites are used. Since mirror sites are exact duplicates of your main site, you should have controls in place to make sure Google, Yahoo and Bing only cache your preferred site. One of the problems with live mirrored sites is that a search engine may consider new site content to be “original” to the first site it spiders after a change, so your preferred site may not get the credit it deserves. Search engines are skeptical of duplicate content in general, so one part of your site that should not be mirrored might be the Robots.txt file, which can instruct search engines to ignore content on the version that is not expected to get search engine rankings.
Tags: mirror site, mirror website
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