Last week I got the opportunity to attend Day 2 of the PPC Summit in Chicago. The PPC Summit brings together experts in the pay-per-click industry who cover a number of B2B and B2C search marketing topics.  Topics include keyword targeting, ad copy strategy, landing page optimization, lead generation, ecommerce, third-party tools, social media, and analytics integration.

My favorite session was the first one I went to – Expanding Advertising Coverage: Local Search Opportunities. The talk started off with the benefits of local search and quickly moved into Facebook advertising. Unlike many of the other sessions, this one evolved into more of a conversation than a talk; the audience started asking questions, which we tackled together as a group.

Continue reading "PPC Summit Chicago"

Ever since the announcement that Bing and Yahoo! will fold into one search engine, there have been a lot of questions as to when exactly this will happen, what it means for advertisers, how it will affect users, and whether it will hurt Google.  I have spent some time trying to find answers to these questions, and thought I’d share what I found.

Most important to note is that the transition from Yahoo! to Bing will take anywhere from 12-24 months, starting in the US and then expanding to other regions. Therefore, advertisers’ and users need not worry about it just yet! When the transition is finally complete, here are some key points to know.

Continue reading "Yahoo! and Bing Search Marketing Agreement - What’s the Deal?"

When thinking about local search listings most people think of the Yahoo!, Bing and of course, Google. Other well-known listings may also come to mind: Yellowpages or Superpages, but marketers should not discount the smaller players in the market.

Many of these smaller local search sites offer valuable resources that you may not find in some of the larger, such as reviews, recommendations, photos, and promotion features. Even more important, however, listing your business in all local search directories makes it easier for your customers to find information on your business, which is critical to not only driving more traffic to your web site, but also generating more phone calls and delivering more customers thru the door.

Continue reading "Improving Local Search Listings"

SEO 101: Links matter. The more relevant links you have from domains with a high PageRank, the better. Twitter has a high PageRank, you can provide relevant links, so...Twitter is good for SEO. Right?

Wrong.

To those of you who are trying to convince people to use Twitter for the sake of SEO, Twitter does nothing for your link juice -- which, in my opinion, is awesome.

I still think Twitter helps your search presence, but it doesn't help SEO the way you might typically think. Here's why.

Continue reading "Twitter Takes the Wind out of SEOs Sails"

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village - The Onion

If you're interested in reading something legitimate about Google's Behavioral Targeting, you might enjoy these posts:

• Data Sharing and Privacy Concerns
• Does Google Ad Planner = Privacy Concerns?

Lately I’ve been focusing a lot of attention on optimizing our PPC text ads for several of our clients. I’ve read articles on PPC ad best practices, looked at presentations and consulted Google help for advice on how to write the best text ad. My findings were overwhelmingly varied and I realized the best resource was my own tests and results.

Here are my 7 Tips for Writing Effective PPC Ad Copy:

1.  Use actual keywords in the ad copy. Although this may seem like a no-brainer, I often see ads come up that don’t include anything remotely similar to my search query. Using keywords in your text ad will help trigger your ads more often. **An extra tip is to use a keyword in the display URL, allowing there to be one more occurrence of the specified keyword.

2.  Include a strong call-to-action. I like to take the short and sweet route such as “Order Now,” “Reserve Today,” or “Learn More,” which work well for my clients’ campaigns. However, other paid marketers choose to include longer versions, like “Click Here to Buy.” In the end the important thing is to include a call-to-action that grabs the visitor’s attention.

Continue reading "7 Tips for Writing Effective PPC Ad Copy"

This amazing post on why Google loves Denmark inspired me. What do people search for? What are we thinking? What does Google think? I started this thinking I would find some funny stuff, but I was not at all prepared for some of these results. Some of them are offensive, so be warned. Some are absolutely hilarious. All of them say something about human behavior online...

First, some general questions:

Why...

Continue reading "Search Behavior Proves Humans Are Just Weird"

Recently I’ve been focusing on finding Link and Display Advertising opportunities for several of our clients. The other day I came across an article in AdAge, by Noah Brier. Brier brought up a great point, explaining “…display advertising needs to be aware of where it lives. At least it should know what site it's on and what people are there for.” This is one thing I’ve been trying to perfect: finding the right placements for the right clients, and making sure visitos "act" on the site.

Credit: theavonne

The key success to display advertising efforts is not just about generating targeted traffic, but converting traffic. A lot of this has to do with the strategies we use, which Josh outlined in a recent blog post about the effective use of banner ads and microsites. But on top of that I've put in hours research and played around with a number of online tools. Here are the tools I've found to be the most helpful for identifying Link and Display advertising opportunities.

Continue reading "Link and Display Advertising Research Tools"

My colleagues and I have been discussing/arguing/throat-punching where to place the H1 -- does the H1 belong on the logo? Or as the page's title? It's a rather hot topic right now (great for happy hour and dinner partying), and I guess a bit hotter than I thought. Keith Tweeted about H1Debate.com in which you vote for H1 placement via a Tweet...who knew?! Here's what I voted and why.

Continue reading "The Great H1 Debate"

UPDATE: As promised, I've added to the list thanks to our comments. Check it out!

We receieved an email from a friend asking for a few SEO resources, and it seemed to make sense just to throw them into a blog post. Here they are...10 of my favorite SEO tools:

Continue reading "10 Great SEO Tools and Resources"

This is my first time referencing, and being referenced by, an Inspire blog post. Cross-pollination delight. Frankly, I’m honored. Hopefully the designers will let me sit at their lunch table now.

In case you didn’t know, Adobe & Google have teamed up to make Flash content SEO friendly. For as long as I can remember anyone interested in SEO has steered clear of Flash – which in my mind is unfortunate as Flash can provide a web experience that non-Flash sites cannot replicate. Erik covered everything really well, so I’ll just throw in a few additional thoughts.
Yahoo! Too: First, it’s worth noting that Adobe also passed along their technology to Yahoo! and while Yahoo! has not yet implemented the technology, Yahoo! said , “Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.”
Meta data and cache: As Erik mentioned, this step forward is still only indexing any text and links within a Flash piece, it won’t be indexing photos (even if they are ALT tagged) or other non-textual content.
The same goes for meta data. These algorithms (I just pushed my glasses up) will not index meta data nor will Google cache the indexed information. I know there are debates on whether meta data even matters anymore; but when your site is Flash and needs all the help it can get – meta data could be helpful. But, moot point. Also, the lack of cache means we won’t be able to discover what exactly Google has indexed.

Fail, Google.

But that’s not all folks. I have, of course, saved the best for last…

Continue reading "Google is Indexing Flash: Hooray for SEO!"

We have lots of clients asking for Search Engine Optimization.  I wish I had had magic search engine ranking powers; but there isn’t a silver bullet to ranking in search engines. 

SEOspace had a fantastic post on the value of In-Bound Linking Vs. On-Page SEO.  I liked this article for two reasons:
1. It defined some of the process necessary to rank in search engines. 
2. It highlights the symbiosis of In-Bound Linking and On-Page SEO

Check out the post here.

At a recent meeting about how we could help a prospective client drive more traffic to her web site, she made an interesting comment:

If we are seeing new leads generated with our Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns, let’s just bump up the budget ... we can spend more money there instead of hiring on new sales people.

We generally agreed with her assessment but, to really see Google and other search engines as a sales force, there are a couple of important things to keep in mind:

1) Make sure you are keeping tabs on the traffic you receive from any PPC campaigns. There’s a possibility that all this “great traffic” is leaving your site within seconds. Just as in a standard sales process, you need to qualify your PPC leads. Lots of visits should not signify success. Define success by if you are seeing more business, more links, etc.

2) Make some sort of attempt to calculate ROI. The easiest way to do that is to assign a value to achieving one of the goals you’ve set out to accomplish. For example, if a new lead generates $1,000 of business for you, how much would you be willing to spend on attaining another one? You may not have that sort of information available right now, but drive towards being able to justify what you spend on PPC campaigns.

Today’s Washington Post has an article (”For Ted Leonsis, a Quest to Find Himself Faster Online”) on Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and owner of the Washington Capitals. It describes how he launched his personal blog, Ted’s Take, initially in an effort to control the results in Google on a search of his name (previously, results were “a hodgepodge of news stories"). It’s an interesting summary of using a blog and an intuitive SEO strategy to establish a specific reputation online. Here are the steps Ted followed:

1. Define the blog - he decided the blog would be both personal and professional, presumably to reach the widest audience.


2. Write often - Ted notes that frequency of updates is an important ranking factor, and often posts several times per day.


3. Link out - The article implies that outbound links help ranking, but that’s primarily because they help ...


4. … Encourage Links In - By linking to other popular bloggers like fellow sports team owner Mark Cuban, Ted’s earned links back to his blog, which both drives direct traffic and represents “votes of approval” in Google’s indexing algorithm.


5. Name drop - Ted hints that his keyword strategy is to use the names of the famous people he deals with regularly in his posts and tags, presumably so that searches on those names will return his blog. That’s a challenging approach, though we’ve managed to make some good headway with a similar SEO strategy for ExecutiveBiz with their weekly “Executive Spotlight” feature.

With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban’s 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted’s Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL’s corporate bio), Ted’s primary objective has been achieved.

Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.