Search Engine Watch
David Szetela offers an extensive tutorial on the essentials of crafting “killer” PPC ads, including everything from touting your competitive advantage (awards and accolades), using a decisive call to action, highlighting benefits as opposed to features, and even creating a sense of urgency. And he includes examples of each tactic.
He also explains the one and only goal of a PPC ad. “Let’s agree on one thing: the objective of your ad,” Szetela says. “Is it to sell your product? Get a sales lead? Nope. Your ad’s objective is this, and only this: Get the click.”
Bill Hartzer
Bill Hartzer delivers the rundown on six ways to get “nearly instant” links to your Web site. And why might you need inbound links ASAP? “Perhaps it’s a blog post,” Hartzer says. “Perhaps it’s just a new web site and a brand new domain name and you ‘want to do something’ to jumpstart it somehow.”
First, submit your site to OneMission.com or Easy Link Directory, two sites that quickly establish links. You could also add link-back to the site through one of your (many) social media accounts, including StumbleUpon, dropjack.com and spicypages.com. Or go one better and craft link-worthy content on the site, and use said profiles to promote the articles.
Lastly, make comments on some “do follow blogs,” typically for one of the most recent posts. “Keep in mind that you really DO need to make a useful comment (especially on my blog) because most of these (if not all of them) are moderated,” Hartzer says.
PromotionWorld
Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. “Google, regardless of it’s [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals,” he says. “It’s important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process.”
For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. In contrast, Google trumps Yahoo when it comes to users aged 45+. So if you’re positioning a product for the younger set, “there’s still a sizeable audience to be reached through Yahoo,” Henige says.
Meanwhile, in terms of spending power, Google beat out Yahoo with searchers that had spent more than $500 online–and tended to attract searchers from the “affluent suburbia” and “upscale America” brackets. So if your goals are built around driving sales of big ticket items, “gearing your search engine marketing plan towards Google, at least initially, may be a good place to start,” Henige says.
Search Engine People
Blog posts tied to breaking news often suffer from a limited shelf-life–but they can help garner lots of juice-passing links that can help propel your blog (or the encompassing site) to the top of the organic listings. And there’s a new plugin for WordPress bloggers that lets you automatically create 301 redirects so that you can pass the juice on from those highly-trafficked posts.
Search Engine People developed the free plugin, which is available at http://www.searchenginepeople.com/tools/wp-301redirect.zip. It allows you to redirect any blot post or page to any other post or page–whether its internal or external–simply by entering the new URL. And you can even choose a specific time and date to have the redirect occur.
WebmasterWorld
What happens when you tweak title tags across a swath of pages on your Web site at the same time? Apparently, tumbling rankings, a decrease in the number of pages indexed and an ensuing slowdown in traffic, according to one Webmaster’s account. Internetheaven, a WebmasterWorld forums user,explains that organic traffic to his site dropped by 65% in the wake of him changing the title tags for about 60 of the site’s 250 pages.
“Last week I went through about 60 of them and adjusted the title tags to something I thought would be more appropriate,” he said, “E.g. from: ‘CompanyName - Get your keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 & keyword4 Quote Now from Company Name’ to CompanyName.com ¦ Company Name Keyword1 & Keyword2 Quotes’.” And while it wasn’t a drastic change, as the site wasn’t generating much traffic from the deleted terms, the ensuing results were awful. So the discussion focuses on whether Internetheaven fiddled with too many title tags at once and sparked Google’s “excessive optimization” radar. As one reader says: “Unless you are a super trusted authority site (ie you can throw up a page on a long tail and rank Top 3 in an hour), then Google is very cranky about title changes lately.” The reader suggests that Internetheaven should change the bulk of the title tags back to their original setup, leave one “optimized” and see how/when the rankings fluctuate.
Another reader suggests that including “Companyname.com” as the first word of every title tag was likely the culprit. Google weights the first words of the title more than later words,” says Steveb. “Putting Companyname.com as the first words of every page is suicide, and odd anyway. Change is not a problem, literally completely useless duplicate content is.”
MarketingSherpa
MarketingSherpa recently surveyed marketers about their most under-used campaign performance metrics when it came to search, and found that conversions and ROI came out on top.
Over 40% of marketers said that they didn’t track conversions (23%) or ROI (20%) for their search campaigns. It seems that while search has been lauded as one of the most accountable ad channels, a significant number of companies are not maximizing the ability to track it to actual sales (or other conversion action).
“With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who will optimize and balance their spending,” the report said.
Search Marketing Standard
Yahoo shares a wealth of usability testing data and Web site design experience with Webmasters through its new Developer Center, and Kevin Gold reviews some of the Center’s offerings. “Yahoo has exposed their testing results on issues ranging from ratings and reviews, reputation, navigational structure, ad placement layouts, bead-crumb navigation best practices and wire-framing tools,” he says. “In my past experience, I have spent considerable time searching for this grade of information and have often paid for best practices based on valid testing. Now it’s free.” For example, Yahoo has tested a number of reputation monitoring tools and has posted the results in the Developer Center, including case studies as well as precautions. Gold also suggests tapping the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) blog for more design and usability info.