PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

PPC Hero
According to Amber Benedict, there are two main reasons why you should run AdWords Search Query Reports–to gain insights on new keywords and negative keywords.

“The search query report will give you a list of actual search queries that customers are typing in the search bar to trigger your ad,” Benedict says. “It’s good to know this information especially if you find some keywords that aren’t currently in your account.” These rogue queries were most likely triggered by your broad match keywords–and you can rank higher on, and more precisely target, these keywords if you incorporate them directly into a campaign.

The same goes for negative keywords, as the reports help you discover random terms that your ads are showing up for–terms that may not be relevant to your product or service set, and are possibly generating costly, non-converting clicks. For example, “If you don’t offer natural or organic dog food, then you should add ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ to your negative keyword list. This is a great way to qualify your traffic, decrease spend and increase conversions,” Benedict says.

Joe Mandese
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — The Internet has already surpassed television based on one significant statistic–the number of gross advertising impressions served. And if online publishers can figure out how to properly measure the worth of those impressions, they ultimately will overtake television in an even more important statistic: share of marketers’ advertising budgets. That was the conclusion of Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman and co-founder of comScore, during a keynote here at the opening of the OMMA conference Monday.

Sharon Housley

Many companies use websites to establish their brand. Others use websites as a communication tool. Some companies see websites as sales vehicles and “billboards”. Still others use their website as an educational tool. And some may be any combination of the above. The website must have a purpose in order for it to be effective.

What Is It That You Are Trying To Accomplish With The Website?

A strong understanding of the website will allow a webmaster to emphasize the action they want the website visitor to take on the website. By defining and understanding the purpose of the website, webmasters and publishers can better structure the information on the website. Information can be provided with the appropriate emphasis and navigation. An ideal website will lead the web visitor to take the action the webmaster wants. Continue Reading »

SEM IS A PECULIAR FIELD, because it strands between the high-tech world of targeting algorithms and the old-fashioned world of human grunt work. Most of us in the industry are more comfortable talking about the high-tech aspects of SEM than we are about the generally low-tech roles that humans play in it, but I’d argue that it’s very often the human element that makes the difference between a winning and a failing search campaign.

We often take over search campaigns that are riddled with basic errors. For example, ad groups (which ideally should only have a handful of thematically-related keywords) may instead be populated with hundreds of marginally related keywords, Broad Match and DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) may be over-used; also negative keywords may have been badly neglected, and other basic errors may be handicapping the campaign. In some cases the campaigns that we inherit are so poorly organized that they’ve got to be reconstructed from scratch. Often, these basic errors aren’t the result of any particular incompetence on the part of the previous SEM agency or in-house team, but the natural result of progressive “tweaking” over time in response to different client/management demands: a case of “too many cooks spoiling the broth.” Continue Reading »

adCenter Blog
Microsoft’s adLab showcases some of the advertiser and publisher tools that the software giant’s engineers are working on, and today’s post offers an overview of two tools from the Keywords & Content category.

The Entity Analysis tool “breaks down complex user queries into separate entities making it easier for the delivery engine to serve the most relevant ad,” says Mel, an adCenter Community team member. So users searching for “needle,” would no longer see ads for Seattle’s “space needle,” while a query for “cheap flights to Paris,” would be analyzed in terms of “cheap flights” and “Paris.”

Meanwhile, the Detecting Commercial Intention tool better equips Live Search and adCenter to determine whether users’ queries are driven by an immediate purchase intent, or whether they’re just gathering data to make a purchase at a later stage in the buying cycle.

Over the last decade marketers have come to accept that search is a channel primarily suited to direct response.  Especially in paid search, those investing in search marketing campaigns are generally measuring success based on explicit return-on-investment goals.  Initially, marketers opt for simple success metrics like cost per sale or cost per application.  Eventually, as they get more sophisticated, these marketers embrace metrics more closely linked to campaign — and business — profitability, such as gross margin per sale or customer account value per click.  An entire sub-industry of search analytics and optimization, in fact, has grown up around these metrics.  And by all accounts these measures of search campaign success are widely accepted and appreciated — consider the size of the paid search marketplace as evidence to support this claim.

But more and more marketers are finding out that measuring search as a stand-alone direct response channel does not tell the whole story.  They are finding value intrinsic in search campaigns, like its ability to move brand perceptions, which are not accounted for in their old ROI models.  And they are uncovering more effective optimization techniques through understanding external factors that can impact search marketing success.  In short, search marketers are getting smarter about how they measure and manage successful search campaigns.

Continue Reading »

Links are vital to the success of your website. The more links you have from other pages and websites linking back to your site, the more popular it will be within the search engine rankings, so it pays to make a constant effort to increase links wherever you can.

They also provide extra streams of traffic from all kinds of directions, and can net you new customers and sign ups. The good news is that there is more than one way to increase the number of links you have. Continue Reading »

BlogStorm
Patrick Altoft says that the key to being successful in search is to start using SEO strategies before they become popular. “For example a site that exchanged links 5 years ago now sees good rankings because of these links, while anybody building similar links this year will not see anywhere near the same effects,” Altoft says. “The same applies to article and Web directory links, paid links and almost any other link you can think of.”

So to stay ahead of the curve and prep for a strong 2009, Altoft suggests being aggressive as possible when it comes to trying new organic strategies, as well as trying to make educated guesses about where the engines themselves are headed.

Altoft uses social media as an example, arguing that “there can be no doubt that within the next 18 months social data will start to become more integrated with the natural search results.” So that means maximizing your client’s (or your own) social media strategies now, from building a presence on multiple social networks, to increasing RSS subscribers and including bookmarking and sharing buttons on Web sites-all to lead to a stronger organic presence come 2009.

The London Times
Google might have developed an effective way of searching for Web pages on the Internet, but its achievement pales in comparison to what is possible on the “Web of the future,” says Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founding fathers of the Internet. He says the Internet will allow any piece of information, like a letter or photo, to be linked to any other. Social networks, for example, would be superseded by networks that connect all kinds of things through something called the “semantic Web.” Berners-Lee says this marks the next phase of the Web’s development.

“Imagine if two completely separate things — your bank statements and your calendar — spoke the same language and could share information with one another,” he says. “You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money. If you still weren’t sure of where you were when you made a particular transaction, you could then drag your photo album on top of the calendar, and be reminded that you used your credit card at the same time you were taking pictures of your kids at a theme park. So you would know not to claim it as a tax deduction.”

Undeniably, Web 2.0 is an honored progress in the arena of web design. I am feeling massive excitement to introduce you people with this modernism of website design. Web 2.0 templates have comfort of numerous designing facilities like as innermost layout, effortlessness, content versatility, intelligibility as well as appealing color contrasts.

These are some mobilized key specifications of web 2.0 design

Artistic attraction

Your wish to do a website design with some astounding effects which makes your site more appealing. A web 2.0 design helps you to draw some artistic designing aspects which will capture audience concentration and helps you to keep them at your site for long time.

Content range

In web 2.0 design style, you are able to use larger fort sized contents for decorating your web page. Here you can focus vital key phrases with a larger font size at your content.

Effortless navigability

Viewers of your site is chasseing for information or produce what they required! Thus web 2.0 design styles suggest you to keep easy navigation system for visitors at your site. Continue Reading »