PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Get Elastic
Excluding irrelevant or low-performing keywords (i.e., negative keywords) from your campaigns can greatly increase relevance (and efficacy), particularly when using broad and phrase matching. Linda Bustos offers some tips for negative keyword research using a trio of Google tools–the Keyword Tool, Google Suggest and Google Product Search. With Product Search, for example, you can find shopping-related terms, particularly brand names of products that you don’t carry, that should be excluded from your campaigns. “When a search query involves a brand name, it’s a strong signal that someone is looking to research or purchase a specific item, not check out other brands,” Bustos says. “So your general ad will have lower click through, which lowers the click through rate of your entire AdGroup, hurting all your keywords’ ad positions and possibly raising your cost-per-click.”

Search Engine Guide
According to Stoney deGeyter, a “Destination Web site” is one that “truly deserves to be ranked well in the search engines.” It’s likely that every business owner wants to have a site that ranks well, so this post is the fourth in a series that details how to build and market Destination Web sites.

The four factors that go into marketing a Destination Web site are: strong on- and off-page SEO that involves more than just search engine rankings; compelling content that drives conversions; synchronized on- and offline marketing efforts; as well as business management and customer service that extends beyond the sale.

“The difference between a Destination Web site and any other is that all of the strategies above must be used together and you have to be at the top of your game with each one,” deGeyter says. “Too often businesses focus on only one or two of these areas simply looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales. These boosts are often effective, but are also just as often very short-lived.”

Adweek
A new survey claims that America’s slumping economy is having an effect on online ad growth. Conducted by William Blair & Co, the new survey forecasts that the gloomy economic outlook will contribute to slowing growth. The investment bank queried 150 Chicago-area interactive marketing companies about their budgets, and two thirds of respondents said economic conditions would affect spending.

According the results, the respondents expect Internet advertising to grow slightly more than 16% in the next year, less than the 19% William Blair tracked in previous surveys. Respondents pegged paid search and ROI-based direct response ads as the sectors most likely to thrive.

“Online’s healthy, but the economy is definitely having an impact,” Sean Riegsecker, CEO of Centro, a Chicago ad service for newspaper sites, told Adweek. “In a weak economy, people are going to move more towards direct response. We’re seeing brand advertising take a much bigger hit this year.”

SEO Scientist
If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the “juice” to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts.

Rihtman’s test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first link on each page carries all the weight. He tested one start page with two links to the same destination page, and found that Google only indexed the first link. Even with a nofollow tag, the giant’s spider still picked up the initial link and ignored the second.