Most Important Etiquettes of Social Networking

Social media, including sites like Twitter and Facebook, can help you find a perspective client and connect with people who can assist you with growing your business.



While I highly recommend you read this entire article, I thought I’d highlight some of the do’s and don’t here.

# DON’T spam. Ever – Self-explanatory, no?

# DON’T keep everything private. – Online privacy is important. It’s very important. But if you’re keeping every social interaction private, why are you even taking part in social media? Stick to emails and instant messengers and text messaging if that’s your goal, and stop making everyone else feel like your “club” is too exclusive.

#sabotage

Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
DON’T “go after” competitors. – If your competitor does something stupid, comment on it to your heart’s content. But don’t take part in social media sabotage — trying to bury their posts or news stories, trying to get them banned from social media platforms, or pretending to be an unhappy customer for example.

# DON’T create multiple handles to “gang up.” – If other people aren’t supporting your viewpoint, that should tell you something. It’s never okay to comment using multiple fake identities to try to support your own point (making it look like several people are agreeing). Not only is that idiotic, but you will get caught and exposed.

# DON’T try to incite a mob mentality. — In addition to not setting up multiple identities of your own, also avoid trying to incite a social media mob. If you blatantly go around telling everyone to comment on something with the same opinion, you’re guilty of manipulating the conversation. Share a link? Yes. Tell people what to say or encourage them to gang up? I don’t think so.

# DO think before “speaking.” – Yes, social media involves the ability to publish your thoughts instantly. But just because something pops into your head, it doesn’t mean it should be shared with the world. Think first.

# DO personalize messages and introductions. — When you first connect with someone new and they don’t already know you, go ahead and say hello. Let them know how you came across them. It’s a little less creepy and you might just make a great impression.

# DO think (and network) outside your circle. — If your social networks only involve people who agree with you, you’re living in a box. It’s silly at best.

# DON’T post questionable photos of others without their permission. — Regardless of whether or not you legally need a model release to post a certain photo, don’t post anything questionable or compromising of someone else unless you check with them first. It’s just the right thing to do. And if you don’t, remember this — karma’s a bitch. You have no idea what they have on you.

# DON’T send automated messages to new followers. — When someone follows you on Twitter, don’t use automated tools to immediately bombard them with messages (no matter how sweet you think you’re being in your not-so-personal “hello”). Remember, it’s not just you annoying them — others are doing it too.

# DO use your real name whenever possible. — At a bare minimum, use a recognizable name (such as a common pen name everyone already knows for you). When you interact anonymously, very little holds you accountable for your actions and words.
# DON’T excessively link to your own site(s). — This is another common sense one. No one cares about your site enough to want to see a link to it in every message you send out there in social media land. You’ll eventually just be viewed as a link spammer.

# DO give back. — Social media is a two-way street. Give as much as you get. Better yet, give even more!

#stalker

Credit: BigStockPhoto.com
DON’T turn into a social media stalker. – Please don’t follow people around on the social Web like a lost puppy. It really is rather creepy. Unless you’re best buds, no one wants to see you not only on Facebook and Twitter but also on all of their niche social sites ranging from crocheting to auto body repair.

# DON’T invite everyone you know to every social media tool you decide to use. — If they’re already networking with you in two or three places, that’s enough. Really. Unless the new service is completely ground-breaking, don’t nag them with invites.

Consider these rules while you are chalking out your SMM marketing plan and you can stop worrying about your efforts backfiring on you.

Influence of Social Networking on Marketing…

Needless to say that today Internet is the widely used medium to reach the target public, the web marketers keep inventing innovative ways or tactics to convert a potential customer into a regular customer of the company. Social Influence Marketing is one of the latest methods that online marketers are using to grab more and more customers and also to retain the existing ones, by motivating them time and again to purchase a particular product or service. Take a look:-



Social Influence Marketing basically means targeting the niche community in your social network. It involves using different social platforms to develop healthy relationship between you and your potential audience.

It is noticed that the target public is exposed to the advertising clutter and the consumers are bombarded with numerous advertisements. This is the stage where customers have to decide what brand of a particular product line they should go for. In such cases, word-of-mouth acts like a catalyst to woo these targets.

As a web marketer you may come across various customers who purchase your products and are happy using it. Now, out of all these satisfied customers there may be some customers who are spreading a word of appreciation for your brand, product or service.

You need to identify those few customers and use them as your key influencers to create a buzz for your product or service.

Social Media Influencers also known as the Opinion Leaders are the key people who have great ability to influence the buying habits of your potential targets.

These social media influencers can be the satisfied or unsatisfied customers who prefer to share their experience of using a product or service with their peers, family etc. You need to identify them on the basis of their behavior rather than their demography. This means that these people have an attractive social networking behavior like that of the college students, the teens etc.

It is a common tendency that before purchasing a particular product, we tend to know its reviews. These reviews help us make the decision of buying or not buying that product.

Can the Social Media Influencer really affect your sales?

* Yes, the social media influencer's can really affect your sales. It is because these people have a knack of participating in a number of conversations on various platforms like blogs, various discussion forums, direct mails, Twitter, Facebook etc.
* Personal interaction works. Social media influencer act as a marketing person for the company (in disguise) and a well wisher for the general target audience of the company.

Also, the web marketers use several tactics to retain these social media influencers. For example: - discounted rates, coupons, vouchers, free trips etc.

Therefore, to conclude we can say that personal interaction and human touch can really help you boost your sales. Thus, the use of social media influencers as a part of your social influence marketing strategy is the need of the hour.

AdWords Keyword Tools Are Not Always Correct!

I'm sure by now that everyone who reads here knows the AdWords Keyword Tool is showing numbers instead of the graphs it would show just a few weeks back. I think one of the big questions on everyone's mind is just how accurate is the data being shown? I decided to take a look in a few accounts I have access to and found at least keyword that seems to meet all the criteria I would use for a test. I found one in particular that was live in November, and the AdWords Keyword Tool does reference November data.

Here are a few details:

- The keyword is exact match.
- 100% impression share for November.
- It's opted in Google + Search Network
- US targeting

When logged into the account the keyword tool indicates that the approximate November search volume was 44,830. That estimate is based on exact match and the correct location targeting. Here's what surprised me - the actual number of impressions that keyword received in November was 56,770. Do a little rounding and the estimate provided by the keyword tool comes out within 10% of the real number.

Now of course that's one keyword in one account and in no way am I trying to imply that the keyword tool will be that accurate in all cases. I'm honestly surprised though at just how accurate it is in this case.

Anyone else seeing similar numbers?

Strategies For Quality Link Building - Say No To PR

Previously Google used regularly push PageRank (PR) data to its toolbar, figuring out the value of a potential link was pretty simple. The more PageRank, the fewer outbound links, the more valuable. Today, the toolbar isn’t even updated quarterly and webmasters have to do a little more analysis to assess the value of a link.



Where do you start? Look for more quality and relevance. We might not be able to see the current PR of a page, but we do know that PageRank affects crawl rate, so it’s logical to conclude that a quality page will be cached recently. A page that has not been crawled within the past month is probably not pushing much link power.

Is the content relevant to your target page? Are the other outbound links relevant? What’s the quality of the other websites the pages links to? In other words, what sort of a neighborhood are you joining? Will the anchor text benefit your site?

Sometimes the page may not yet have the value you’d like, but if you know it’s a new page, you can look at the other similar pages on the site to determine whether that page will carry value in the future. For example, you might want to decide between two article directories. Examine other pages in your niche to see what sort of crawl rate they seem to be getting; look to see whether older pages have toolbar PR. Who else is writing for the directory? What’s the quality of their content?

Some websites are just gimmes! That is, you know a link from them is worthwhile – .edu and .gov sites if you can get them – and when they are relevant. Links from your industry association or from your local chamber of commerce. Charitable websites or links from any organization you sponsor.

New SEOs frequently ask, what about link exchanges? Link exchanges still have value when they are highly relevant. Let’s say you have a restaurant in a popular tourist destination. It makes sense that you would exchange links with your vendors, and perhaps with websites for accommodations or attractions in your area. You might even feel comfortable exchanging links with some other restaurants in your area. After all, most visitors and locals will patronize more than one place.

The key is always relevance and usability. Ask yourself: am I helping the visitor to my website? If the answer is yes, the link is likely to drive traffic between the two sites, and that alone makes the exchange is worthwhile. The important thing to remember about exchanges is that they should only be a small part of your overall link profile. You want as many links as possible to be one way.

Things You Should Remember While Building Links

Link building is an extremely necessary part of search engine optimization. Links to your website can help relevant traffic and the search engines find and explore your web pages and so are of great significance.

It is necessary when running an SEO campaign to monitor your link building and to look out for any signs of weakness. You need to know if your link building is not good enough so improvements can be made. High quality links to your website can make a significant difference to your website and so must always be a priority.

If your website is ranked in low positions within the search results provided by the major search engines then this is a sign your approach to link building is not satisfactory. A number of high quality links to your website can improve your rankings a great deal.

If you are still experiencing low rankings, you obviously do not have enough quality links to your web pages and this must therefore be worked upon. The more quality links you have, the greater the potential for exposure in the search results through the obtaining of top spots in the search result rankings.

The amount of traffic visiting your website is another important indicator of how efficiently your link building strategy is working. When running an on-line business, you must always be monitoring the amount of traffic visiting your pages because this is an issue of such great importance. For a business to be successful, you must first get users on your site and exploring what you have on offer.

If you do not have a lot of traffic visiting your website then your link building is not good enough. You should have relevant traffic arriving on your web pages from a range of suitable sources. This is achieved through the building of high quality links.

The third sign that improvements need to be made with the way you are building links to your site is if you search for your company name using a search engine and do not dominate the results. When searching for your business on-line, the first page of results should be relevant to your business and should be directing traffic to your website. If you are creating links from high quality sites to your own then this will be the case. If you do not have links from websites of this kind then they will not likely be featured in the search results and you are therefore missing many opportunities.

Building links is extremely important but is also quite challenging. Only the building of high quality and useful links to your website is beneficial in search engine optimization and many business owners struggle with this. They don’t know who they should be linking from and how to go about creating these links either.

We at Mindcore Consultants can help. We are highly experienced in link building and can develop a number of highly productive and effective links to your website which will benefit your business in many ways.

Shortcuts to Perfect SEO?

SEO is a complicated and competitive field of economic activity. The rewards of a successful campaign can be significant and may change the whole economic trajectory of a firm. However, to obtain these kinds of rewards you are looking at a lot of hard work if you are thinking of doing any aspect of the campaign yourself. It is always prudent to obtain the services of a specialist firm. Nevertheless, the question remains where there are sensible ways in which a campaign can get ahead of competing campaigns.



At Mindcore consultancy we try to ensure that our campaigns are always focused, flexible and multifaceted in nature. However, we always make each campaign as unique as the site it tries to advance is. This gives our campaigns a competitive edge over some rival campaigns. Notwithstanding this fact, none of our campaigns attain their targets with a great deal or rapidity. Furthermore, every campaign which is pursued takes a lot of effort, relevant skills and some other resources.

Whether or not there are shortcuts in SEO depends on two factors. The first is your view of black hat practices. These unethical methods may be thought of as a potential shortcut. The second thing is your definition of a shortcut. If the concept of a shortcut includes getting a little bit ahead somewhat faster than you would otherwise do, then that is different from perceiving a shortcut as something which gives you speedy access to something which is greatly desired.

When it comes to unethical practices, these can give a firm a transient advantage over its rivals. However, the satisfaction that can be gained from a deal with a black hat firm is only ever temporary. In the first instance, potential consumers are quick to spot untrustworthy sites and are unlikely to make meaningful purchases from them.

However, the consequences of using black hat methods can be much more severe than that because they can include being banished from the index via obtaining a search engine penalty. Google and the like are becoming more adept at tracking down unethical behaviour year on year.

While the lesson of black hat strategy is that the use of an underhand shortcut usually spells serious trouble somewhere down the track, it remains true that there is a myriad of legitimate ways by which incremental advantages can be pursued. Indeed, using Facebook and Twitter in conjunction with a SEO campaign can get more visitors to a site. In addition, it can provide more knowledge about those visitors for future marketing, while also ensuring that it is often the right type of visitor who frequents the site.

Using the social media networking sites can generate brand awareness in a positive way. So it could be said that it is something of a shortcut.If a lot of visitors come flocking to a site but find that it takes a long time to load they will become frustrated. Frustration can be compounded if they find it tricky to move about the site while they are satisfying their needs. Conversion rate optimization is essential, whether it is a shortcut or not.

4 INEVITABLE PROCESS OF LINK BUILDING

Link Building is the process by which you get incoming links to a website. A Link Building campaign is initiated to get incoming links to a website from other websites. The whole purpose behind link building or link development is to improve the link popularity of a website, or to improve the number of incoming links to a website.

Project Analysis


The first step for any link building campaign is to do a thorough project analysis. This includes the following:


Review of the website content
Review of current position on Search Engines
Review of Competitor websites targets for the link
Analysis of back links to competitor websites(link:// "www.adsonsearches.com")
Identifying the number of links required for the website


These steps help us identify the current position of the website and what we need to do in order to compete on the Search Engines. Statistics and figures collected in this step of the link building process also help to serve as a benchmark to compare the website progress later on.


Research and Preparation

The second step of our process involves Keyword Research, preparation of Anchor Texts and compile a list of web directories, which we will use to carry out the link building campaign.

Keyword Research
Anchor Text creation
Finding web directories for submission

Links Development

Once we complete our research and preparation, we are ready to start the Links Development process.

General Web Directory Submissions
Niche Web Directory Submissions

Submission to Social Media and Bookmark Sites: Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. Sites such digg, del.icio.us, stumble upon, squidoo, furl etc. are some well know social bookmarking sites. These sites help in creating backlinks to the client website.

Blogs: Create free blogs at wordpress or blogspot with content related to the website and put the website links in the blog which results in backlinks to the client site.

Blogs Comments: We can make comments on the blogs related to the client website and put website link in each comment we post. Register with clint domain name to post comment. Ex- If wipro is our client then register as wipro with blogs to post comment.

Forum posts: This is a very important means of link building. Before putting link on the post first try to make 5-6 general post in other threads without any link then put the client link along with comment in the relevant thread.

Reporting & Monitoring

At a regular interval we needs to check the incoming links and compile a report of the links collected for our client websites and update them about it.

Why brands not sure of social marketing’s value

Social media gets a lot of discussion and even a lot of participation from marketers, but in most cases budgets remain low. One reason for the reluctance to invest more is the old problem of ROI. While some marketers have created successful social media campaigns that they feel they can measure and determine a benefit from, many have still not solved the social success equation.

A September 2010 survey by Econsultancy, sponsored by digital marketing agency bigmouthmedia, found nearly half of companies worldwide still said “the jury is out” on the value of social media for their firm. This group still felt they were not able to measure the return on their social media investment—even to put a value on it relative to their other marketing activities.



Other research has also shown analytics and ROI are the single biggest problem in the way of social efforts.

Econsultancy’s report also suggested integration with many other marketing channels was lacking. While the vast majority of companies had managed to integrate email and social media, search engine optimization was the only other marketing channel that came close in integration efforts. This could be because social media efforts often naturally help search ones.

Research from several other sources, including eROI and StrongMail, indicates large majorities of email marketers have incorporated social elements in their campaigns, sometimes in sophisticated ways. Other digital marketers must similarly find ways to make social a natural fit with their own marketing channels rather than keeping it siloed for greater effectiveness.

Keep your business ahead of the digital curve. Learn more about becoming an eMarketer Total Access client today.

Make your Google Search More Prsonal Through Stars

Google has come up with yet another way to personalize search results. Now Google let you “star” search results that you like, just like the star feature in other Google products like Gmail, Reader, and Google News. When you star results you like, you will get them at the top of your results the next time you search a query significant to them.

To star the results, you had to simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when significant.

Example

If you star your result for favorite seo blog, next time you will see those results right at the top of your next search for.



One of the most important feature of stars is that you don’t have to keep track of them. You don’t even have to remember whether or not you starred something. When you perform a search, you’ll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. You can get your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them because Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar.

Best Way to Build Your Backlinks

Even if you manage to get lots of backlinks in a natural way, it is never a bad idea to welcome additional quality inbound links. There are several ways for acquiring backlinks which may be ethical while other ways may be illegitimate and unacceptable and can lead to your site being penalized in the long run. The legitimate ways of getting backlinks include directory submissions, forum posting, linking to other blogs, press releases, etc. Among the unacceptable ways are linking to link farms, buying links in large quantities, getting linked to websites hosting illegal content, linking to other websites that belong to the same person, etc.



To start building backlinks, the first step would be to identify sites from where you can acquire quality backlinks. This can be done with the help of Backlink Builder tool which generates a list of websites on entering keywords. Once you get the list of potential sites where you can post messages, articles, or backlinks to your website, the choice is up to you to visit these sites and start posting your content along with an inbound link to your website in it.

You may have a question about how websites generated by the backink building tool can provide backlinks free of cost. The answer to your question simply lies in the fact that such sites need content for their site. With you posting and feeding them with content without getting paid for it, helps you to get free quality backlinks in return from them. It is like free trading where you offer something required by others for free and get what you want for free. However, this free trading lasts as long as you post your content to sites that are respected and also as long as you do not end up posting fake content.

Below are some of the most successful methods that can be used to build backlinks.

Directory Submission

Getting your site listed in various directories is one of the basic steps that you should start with in your efforts to build backlinks. It may be unlikely to get any significant traffic through directories; however, the idea here is to get backlinks to improve your page ranking.

There are several directories to which your site can be submitted. These can range from general directories, blog directories, SEO friendly directories to non-reciprocal directories (directories that allow you to list your website in their directory even if you do not link back to them). Additionally, it is important that you submit your site to only those directories that have a high page rank.

It is also important to know that listing a site in directories is a time consuming process as it requires you to first find out quality directories to which you want to submit your site. Once this is done, you have to search through the categories and sub categories in these directories to find out the specific category to which your website belongs. Therefore, keeping the time constraint in mind, it is a good idea to hire a professional SEO company that provides directory submission services so that you can save time and concentrate your efforts and resources on your other core business functions.

Forum or Blog Posting and Article Directories

Forum posting and Blog posting is another way of getting quality backlinks to your site because search engines usually index forums as well. Getting backlinks from blogs or forums that are reputed can be very helpful. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to the forum policy. Moreover, there may be times when the administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant.

While posting in forums and blogs can be done faster and require lesser efforts, submission of articles to various directories can take a very long time since articles are longer when compared to posts and also involve a though process to write them. However, it would still be worth the time and effort in the long run.

Press Releases and News Announcements

Though this is not a day to day practice to build quality backlinks, it does fetch good results if done the right way. There are several websites out there which publish press releases or news announcements free of cost or may charge a fee. A press release that is well written can boost visitor traffic to your site and also a backlink from a reputed site to your site is a value addition to your entire SEO efforts. However, a press release can be used as a medium only if there is something newsworthy. That is the reason why press releases and news announcements do not factor in as a daily way to build backlinks.

Content Exchange

Content exchange can also be very helpful in getting you quality backlinks. For example, you can provide free RSS feeds to websites that are interested in them. When your RSS feed gets published by the other site, you will get an inbound link to your website. This will also drive a lot of visitor traffic that will visit your website to get more details on the headlines and abstract they read on this other site.

Creating Quality Content

Creating professional and quality content is also very important to get more backlinks to your site. This is because content that is well written is always noticeable and there would be more number of people who would want to link to it.

Leaving Comments

To create awareness and get visibility for your site, you can also leave comments on others blogs. Leaving comments that are appealing to read will always have a good chance of drawing the attention of more people to your site.

Practices to Avoid While Building Backlinks

There are several ways in which links can be built, however, it is important to realize that certain link building ways can ruin your SEO efforts. One such practice to avoid is link exchange, wherein, when you place a link on another website, that website in return will place a backlink to your website. There are a few things to be considered with this concept of link exchanging. First is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Having more outbound links than inbound links is not good. Second, there could be a possibility of your link partner being a link farm. In this case, your site can get penalized or banned by search engines as link farms are considered as unethical SEO practice.

Additionally, you must also be careful about linking to sites that are suspicious or host illegal content. Though search engines will not penalize you for having backlinks from such websites, since you do not have control over what they link to, linking with such sites can ruin your SEO efforts.

Coming Shortly: Let Yahoo! Search Entertain You

At Yahoo! we are constantly enhancing the search experience to help you find answers, discover new content, and get things done online. This fall, we’re making one of our most significant updates to Yahoo! Search to provide new experiences on the search results page and across the Yahoo! network.



Today we’re giving you a sneak peek at just a few of the enhancements coming to Yahoo! Search. With more searches than ever for information-rich topics like music, movies, and news, we’ll be launching new, more visually compelling search results that let you discover information and be entertained all on one search result page.

lady gaga rich result

You’ll see new, rich search results for entertainment and news searches:

* Entertainment – The new Yahoo! Search experience for entertainment-related searches will provide richer content results whether you’re searching for movies, music artists, or celebrities by combining images, news articles, videos, tweets, events, and ratings.

* News – The new Yahoo! Search experience for news searches will be more conveniently organized with videos, images, articles, and tweets on a single page so you can immerse yourself in the headlines of your choice and stay in the loop on important updates as they develop.

Also coming this fall, the Trending Now lists on Yahoo.com and across the Yahoo! network will be accompanied by slideshows that feed your curiosity about what’s hot on the web. You’ll be able to browse through pictures from the entire Yahoo! network without ever leaving the search results page.

slideshow example

To see the slideshows, click on a trending term on Yahoo! You’ll then see a search results page featuring a slideshow of the top images related to the term in the center of the page and a list of other trending topics on the left side of the page. By clicking on a topic with the photo icon (like “Sandra Bullock” or “Jerry Seinfeld” in the mock above), you can browse through slideshows of the trending stories we feel are best told through images. You’ll also be able to explore more about the topic within the slideshow by clicking on the related links to the right of each image or the search result listings underneath.

These are just a few of the cool enhancements we’re adding to Yahoo! Search to make it the most relevant search experience for you, for whatever you’re doing online. Stay tuned for more details when we roll out these experiences for you this fall!

Kaushal Kurapati, Senior Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Caroline Tsay, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Serach

Installation Guide - Google Analytics on Blogger

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people actually visited your blog each day? How about knowing which of your posts are the most popular? Well surprisingly Blogger doesn’t currently offer any native blog analytics but fortunately there is Google Analytics — available for free.

Google Analytics is a great tool that will show you all sorts of useful information about how people found your blog, keywords they searched on to find you, where they came from and even how long they stayed. You’ll learn more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your blog. This is a must tool if you are trying to build a profitable blog otherwise you are flying blind!

This article will show you how to add Google Analytics to your Blogger blog. It’s a fairly simple process and doesn’t require any technical skill at all.
Step #1 – Setup a Google Analytics Account

Go to Google Analytics and sign in using your Blogger login. If your account doesn’t work for some reason, you can create a new one instead. Once you login you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Google Analytics Blogger Sign Up Step 1

Click on the “Sign Up >>” button and proceed to the next step which will ask you for your general information. Website URL, Account Name, Country, and Time Zone. The screen will look like this:

Google Analytics Blogger Step 2

If you noticed, I just put my Blogger url (without the http://) and called it “David’s Account” because this is your top-level container for 1 or 100 different websites so it’s a good idea to name it something more general. The next step will ask you for your contact information which includes your first name, last name, phone number, and country. Easy so far right? :-)

Google Analytics Blogger Step 3

Your last step in signing up will ask you to accept the user agreement terms and conditions which you should read (just kidding…who actually ever reads these entire legal terms anyhow?).

Google Analytics Blogger Step 4

Now this next screen is very important. This is the code you will need to copy and paste into your blogger template. Go ahead and click into the box and it will automatically highlight the entire block of code for you. Now you need to copy that code and paste it into notepad or into a MS Word document. Save it as you’ll need to use it later.

Google Analytics Blogger Step 5

After you click on the “continue >>” button you will be taken to your brand new Google Analytics dashboard! You will see your blogger blog listed but with no analytical data….yet.

Google Analytics Blogger Dashboard

Ok, now you are done with setting up your Google Analytics account. The next step is placing the tracking code into your Blogger template so it can report back to Google Analytics and provide you with some cool data points.
Step #2 – Adding GA Tracking Code to Your Blogger Template

This is not a very difficult step even if you are afraid to touch your template code. Login to your Blogger account and then click on the “Layout” => “Edit HTML” tabs. This will bring you to the template code. Before you make any changes, I advice you to back up your template just in case there are any problems. After you’ve done so, continue reading.

Now in the edit template html code window, scroll all the way to the bottom of your template code and look for the tag. There should only be one of these closing tags in your template. If you can’t find it then your template wasn’t properly created and you should add one right above the tag.The tag should always be your last line of code in your template. It signifies the end of your template.

Ok, now go back to the code you saved before in a Word Doc from Google Analytics. You are going to copy it and paste it right above the tag as illustrated in the image below. The yellow highlighted code is the new GA code I just pasted into my template.

blogger google analytics code 2

Save your template and you shouldn’t get any error messages. If you do, it’s most likely not related to this GA code and something else with your template itself. Assuming you’ve been successful with your save, you are all done embedding the GA code in your template!
Step #3 – Confirm Google Analytics is Tracking

Go back into your Google Analytics account and look at your dashboard. Most likely you will see a little yellow exclamation mark under the “status” column that looks like this: google analytics tracking not installed. This means everything isn’t working properly yet which is fine because we are about to tell GA we just added the code. From your dashboard, click on the “edit” link which is located to the far right.

Google Analytics Blogger Dashboard Edit

After you click on that link, you’ll see another screen like below. It will say “Tracking Not Installed” followed by a link “Check Status”. You’ll want to go ahead and click on that link which will tell GA to visit your site and look for the new code you just pasted in your template.

Google Analytics Blogger Dashboard Check Code

Assuming you pasted the code in there as instructed above, GA will find the new code and begin tracking everything on your blog. If you are still having problems, it’s most likely something to do with GA and you should read their help guide to troubleshoot your problem.

Google Analytics Blogger Dashboard Success

The message seen here, “Waiting for Data” means you have correctly setup GA and data is being gathered! Click on the top left Google Analytics logo and it will take you back to your dashboard. From there click on the “View report” link and that’s where all your very important Blogger visitor data will start appearing!

Google Analytics Blogger Dashboard Results

Now it usually takes an hour or so before you will see any data (maybe longer if you don’t get much traffic to your blog) so please be patient. Trust me, you’ll be logging in at least once a day just to see how much traffic your blog is getting. It’s very addicting and powerful information to learn from. You’ll be surprised which posts are your most popular and what countries people are coming from to read your blog.

Google Analytics is very powerful and we have just learned how to install it into your Blogger template. We haven’t even scratched the surface on the features and reporting it can do. For most Bloggers, this will be enough. Data will be collected and you will just review it. Others with more in-depth goals (like selling products or services, creating a sales funnel, etc) will want to spend more time learning GA. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and don’t blame me for your new found addiction!

Ready to super charge your blog? Check out our professional premium blogger templates or make money by joining our blog affiliate program!

Arts in selecting Content Keywords

There are various and sundry methods for choosing kws for your enhanced content campaigns, ie. contextually targeted advertising on the content network…

* use your instincts and the Google Wonder Wheel
* use the Google Keyword Tool to find related kws, then sort
* use Textanz tool according to David Szetela’s method
* use keywordspy related keywords and sort

The keywordspy.com method I am testing is very similar to using the free Google Keyword Tool, but I’ve found keywords to be somewhat different, plus keywordspy allows you to sort keywords according to “profitability”, which may be an indication of a good niche. Wonder Wheel may dive too deep into long tail terms, and the textanz method is too time consuming for my liking.

My sorting method is based on several factors:

1. search volume and relevance, preferably at least 2 words
2. keyword niche profitability… indicates a profitable niche
3. choose between 5-15 broad keywords only
4. keep an eye for negative keywords as well

How Many Keywords Should You Optimize A Web Page?

Getting listed on Google's first result page is the goal of any search engine optimization campaign. If you have taken the time to find the best keywords for your website, you probably have a very long list with many keywords. That automatically leads to the following question:
For How Many Keywords Should You Optimize A Page?

The answer to this question is simple: one. A single web page should not be optimized for more than one keyword. Of course, that keyword can consist of several words, for example "buy inexpensive golf shoes".

If you have optimized one of your web pages for that keyword (it's actually a key phrase) then you should not optimize the same page for other keywords.

It's much better if a web page is highly relevant to one keyword than somewhat relevant to many search terms. If you concentrate on one keyword per page then it is much more likely that your web page will get a top listing on Google for that keyword.

If you also want to get high rankings for your other keywords such as "brown golf shoes", "golf shop" or "golf equipment" then you should optimize other pages of your website for these keywords.

You will get the best possible results if you optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords.
How To Optimize A Web Page For Your Chosen Keyword

When you optimize a web page for a keyword, it's important that the right elements of your web page contain the keyword in the right frequency. The easiest way to optimize a web page for a keyword is to use IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.

The Top 10 Optimizer in the brand new IBP version 11 has been improved and it will tell you in plain English how to change your web pages. Just follow the instructions and your web page will be perfectly optimized for Google (or Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine that you choose).

In addition to the elements of your web page, the Top 10 Optimizer will also tell you if you have to work on the links to your website and how exactly you should change the links so that your website can get a page one ranking on Google.
Optimize For One Key Phrase, Get High Rankings For Many Keywords

You should always optimize your web pages for a very targeted keyword that consists of many words. A keyword that consists of many words is called "key phrase". This has several advantages:

1. It's much easier to get high rankings for targeted key phrases because the competition is not as fierce as the competition for one word key words.

2. Key phrases attract much more targeted website visitors. People who search for "golf" might be interested in magazines, clubs or even a car. People who search for "buy inexpensive golf shoes" are looking for inexpensive golf shoes and they are ready to buy.

3. By optimizing your web page for a key phrase, you automatically optimize your web page for the parts of that key phrase. For example, your web page will automatically be optimized for "golf shoes", "inexpensive golf shoes" and other keywords if you optimize your page for "buy inexpensive golf shoes".

Optimize one web page for one keyword and optimize as many pages of your website as possible for different but related keywords. In this example, optimize different pages of your website for "buy inexpensive golf shoes", "find the perfect golf club", "country club", "golf sport information", "golf carts", etc.

The more pages you optimize, the better. If many pages of your website have been optimized for many related keywords then your website will look relevant to the topic of your keywords (in this example: "golf"). If search engines think that your website is relevant to a special topic then it will be easier to get high rankings for the individual keywords.

Ten ways to determine if you have social influence

You follow 100K people and they all follow you back.

You follow 100K people and 200K follow you back (this person has more influence than the previous).

You have a low (follower/followee) ratio because you un-follow the majority of the people who you previously followed.

You go to the local grocery store and a random person shouts “Hey, I know you! I follow you on Twitter and RT everything you share”.

You have a personal Facebook Fan Page (it doesn’t matter how many people like you either. The mere fact that you have one is all that matters).

Your twitter CTR is 38% on all the links you share about YOU.
Others randomly RT YOUR Klout score (keyword – RT)

You get invited to speak at every social media conference (even if you have to pay for your own travel, you still have influence).

You check in to a random location on Foursquare and it turns into a Tweetup in honor of YOU!

You get your profile image on Fast Company; you Tweet it, it gets RT’d … and the cycle continues.

In case you didn’t get it, I am being completely facetious with this post. I personally think that anyone who considers themselves to have “real influence” just because they have a certain amount of followers or fans is a complete joke. My opinion only.

There are only 3 things that I care about having influence over; my family (and friends), my co-workers and my clients in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.

Google Quality Score Update, Bugs & Ad Pause Feature

So I go away for a few days and come back to not just 389 blog spam comments to disapprove but the news that Google has launched another quality score update which has subsequently sent some advertisers cpc’s through the roof.

The Seroundtable also reports that an advertiser has been charged for clicks accrued while their Adwords campaign was paused. I am willing to take a bet that these impressions and clicks were from the content network, as I reported previously, this technical problem has STILL not been resolved by Google.

Further news on the quality score update suggests there was a bug in the system causing minimum cpc’s to rocket, as reported by Jeremy Mayes -

Unfortunately, due to a technical issue, you may notice that the minimum bids for some of your keywords increased dramatically, despite them being high performing, good quality keywords. This is a temporary issue that our engineers are aware of and they are working to resolve it as soon as possible. I am sorry for any inconvenience.

Seroundtable has now reported that the bug has been fixed by Google. So what caused the problem?

We won’t find out, but we do know that Google were specifically tweaking the minimum bid area of the quality score algorithm again. As the Inside Adwords blog explains -

First, we’re improving the way that we set minimum bids for keywords where we have limited data. For example, if the system does not have any data on a keyword, we’ll try to assign that keyword a lower initial minimum bid until we have enough data to make a more accurate assessment of the Quality Score for that keyword in your account. Second, we’re improving the Quality Score algorithm to make it more accurate in predicting the quality of all ads.

Not all went quite to plan then?. On a more positive note Google have introduced new features that allow advertisers to pause and resume keywords, adverts and sites (if its a site targetted campaign) aswell as rolling out the much talked about quality score column to the masses.

Definitely the most useful of those will be the ability to pause adverts. Why? Because it means you can KEEP ad history which makes up an important part of the quality score algo.

Take for example a client who runs the same promotional adverts once a month. Previously advertisers have always had to create NEW adverts which would have no history or amend current ads to reflect the promo which would in turn mean you lose the ad history upon edit. Furthermore, when the promo period ends, the advertiser was once again forced to delete or amend adverts back and lose history all over.

Now you can simply pause and resume them when it suits you while maintaing the history you have built.

Pausing keywords could be useful in some circumstances, but unlike adverts, keyword quality score is kept at account level. If you delete the keyword then re-add it, it will still hold the same history.

Corporate Social Bookmarking Tools : eLearning Technology

I was just asked on twitter about using social bookmarking tools that work behind the firewall. I thought I had blogged about this before, but I'm not finding the post.

Here are the social bookmarking tools that I commonly cite in presentations:
BEA Pathways
Cogenz
Connectbeam
del.irio.us - perl based, very similar to del.icio.us
IBM Lotus Connections
Scuttle – Open Source
WSSsearch - SharePoint add-on
Any others? Good comparisons of these?

I originally included: Jive Software - because I thought they had it, but it appears they don't.

The Value of a Facebook Fan: A different POV ($136 per fan)

A few months ago, I wrote about Vitrue’s study on the value of a Facebook fan being worth $3.60; and last week, Syncapse released a similar study and assigning a $1.36 value to a fan. The 18 page comprehensive study can be downloaded here but here are some key findings:

Product Spending: Facebook Fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period

Brand Loyalty: Facebook fans are 28 per cent more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook

Willingness to Recommend: 68 per cent of fans are ‘very likely’ to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28 per cent of non-fans)

Brand Affinity: 81 per cent of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39 per cent of non-fans)

Earned Media Value: Incorporating all of the above factors, the average value of a Facebook fan is $136.38 to an organization

10 ways to determine if you have social influence

1. You follow 100K people and they all follow you back.

2. You follow 100K people and 200K follow you back (this person has more influence than the previous).

3. You have a low (follower/followee) ratio because you un-follow the majority of the people who you previously followed.

4. You go to the local grocery store and a random person shouts “Hey, I know you! I follow you on Twitter and RT everything you share”.

5. You have a personal Facebook Fan Page (it doesn’t matter how many people like you either. The mere fact that you have one is all that matters).

6. Your twitter CTR is 38% on all the links you share about YOU.

7. Others randomly RT YOUR Klout score (keyword – RT)

8. You get invited to speak at every social media conference (even if you have to pay for your own travel, you still have influence).

9. You check in to a random location on Foursquare and it turns into a Tweetup in honor of YOU!

10. You get your profile image on Fast Company; you Tweet it, it gets RT’d … and the cycle continues.

In case you didn’t get it, I am being completely facetious with this post. I personally think that anyone who considers themselves to have “real influence” just because they have a certain amount of followers or fans is a complete joke. My opinion only.

There are only 3 things that I care about having influence over; my family (and friends), my co-workers and my clients in that order. Everything else is irrelevant.

How to Choose Content Keywords

There are various and sundry methods for choosing kws for your enhanced content campaigns, ie. contextually targeted advertising on the content network…

* use your instincts and the Google Wonder Wheel
* use the Google Keyword Tool to find related kws, then sort
* use Textanz tool according to David Szetela’s method
* use keywordspy related keywords and sort

The keywordspy.com method I am testing is very similar to using the free Google Keyword Tool, but I’ve found keywords to be somewhat different, plus keywordspy allows you to sort keywords according to “profitability”, which may be an indication of a good niche. Wonder Wheel may dive too deep into long tail terms, and the textanz method is too time consuming for my liking.

My sorting method is based on several factors:

1. search volume and relevance, preferably at least 2 words
2. keyword niche profitability… indicates a profitable niche
3. choose between 5-15 broad keywords only
4. keep an eye for negative keywords as well

Changes coming at Yahoo Search Marketing, codename Panama?

eWhisper posted some insider info about YSM over at WMW, but the thread requires a membership. So go to his site for read about it for free.

A quick summary is that they are planning on doing a massive overhaul of their existing system that has not changed in years.

Here are the main things that will change:

* Account structure will be like that of google.
* Bidding will be more like google, mainly in that it will be performance based, using CTR data.
* They will also be adding a bunch of tools like that of MSN Labs.
* They are also supposed to add geotargeting which would be a huge step, since now you can only target by country, and to do so you need an account per country!
* The other nice thing is that they say they will leave bidding open, meaning you can see what your competitors are paying.

This is great and should be helpful to anyone using the system, especially those trying to exploit it (c:

Now if they would only kill some partner relationships like the douchebags who run searchnut.com. Thanks for 30x the traffic of yahoo itself!

Why do all search partners suck?

It is roughly 3:00am, my stats program updated for the day about an hr ago, and I am already about 8x as profitable today as I was yesterday. That is kind of weird eh?

The only 2 variables in the advertising that I was doing was 1- day of the week, and 2- opting in to Googles Search Partner network of SHITE.

I do not think #1 was the issue, since we usually do pretty well on Sunday, so I am going to go with #2 being the culprit for yesterdays narrow margins.

To start the morning off we decided to try the Google search network to see if we could increase traffic and sales to one of our sites. We usually spend about $30 an hr, and today spent nearly 4 times that per hr. Our ROAS (return on ad spend) is usually around 75% and today we were running at a sweet 3.2%. I would have been better off putting my money in a fucking ING saving account to get that rate. To give you a better idea of how much we got p4wn3d by google, we spend $1525 to make $49.

The biggest source of new traffic was an amazing “high quality” partner searchportal.information.com. These assholes have more sophisticated robotic clicking than your run of the mill rip off companies. They were actually passing the user agents of numerous cell phones, which is a new fun trick, since we are not opted into the mobile market.

So I give props to both google and searchportal.information.com ganging up and giving me some sweet double anal action.

Tomorrow I get to waste 2 hrs requesting a refund for the shitty traffic you sent. The worst part about this is that the only true source of decent traffic at the moment are the following companies/settings:

Google – google network only
Yahoo – none/some with hard work and numerous complaints.
MSN – does not let me buy adult traffic, low volume for non adult sectors. PURE traffic and highly recommended.
ASK – a joke

So in the sectors I work in my only real choice is Google, and with that only the Google/google partner sites provide conversions for me.

An Insider Look From a Yahoo! Search Trend Spotter

When “American Idol” is on, it’s a busy day for a trend spotter like me.

I sometimes sport the fancy title of Web Trends Analyst: My job is to interpret search interest in pop culture and help develop news stories for reporters and readers like you. As you might imagine, a billion or so searches lend themselves to many narratives. Figuring out the “what-does-it-all-mean” goes beyond declaring the winner in an ever-changing popularity contest, or what’s on top of everyone’s mind day to day. (Although, I can tell you Sandra Bullock has lately beat out Lady GaGa as the most-searched celebrity, and “Twilight” leads in searches for the most anticipated movies of the season.)

Instead, I face questions like this: What does the rise in apocalypse-related searches following natural disasters say about our modern society? Are the lookups following Tiger Woods’ story prurient, or are we repeating our ancient fascination with the morality tale? And can search activity project what the masses will decide, even before the masses know themselves?

Fear not, I harbor no aspirations to be the next Nostradamus (who has measured in the top 30,000 searches in the past 30 days). While you can use search trends to gauge fan interest, you can’t use queries to predict who’ll win an Oscar or the World Series.

But queries can point to some interesting projections when it comes to reality shows, where the fate of a limited set of contestants is decided by a mass audience. American Idol presents an increasingly rare and unique confluence of such circumstances (as does “Dancing with the Stars” to some extent, but the judges’ scores also play into the ABC show’s formula.) By gauging who the core “Idol” voters are (generally ladies 30-54), determining the influence of hometown loyalties, and factoring in the tween factor, we’ve made 3 out of 4 correct projections. (Darn you, dark horse Kris Allen and America’s propensity for the underdog, even among underdogs.)

All the interpretative dance we do around search data is actually more important than figuring out the winner. Analyzing search trends helps us understand the impulses and processes of why people make their choices at that particular moment in time. About the only other comparable phenomenon is, well, the presidential elections. Back in April 2007, when party candidates were just raising money for their presidential campaigns, I ranked the Democrats and Republicans by Search popularity. The order adhered pretty closely to the amount of money they brought in. Back then, a largely unknown Barack Obama edged out Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose first-quarter fundraising was separated only by a mil.

Who we are, as a collective culture, is what fascinates me. As a former features and entertainment reporter, I love having at my fingertips the curiosity of the masses (anonymous and in aggregate). The typical trend story relies on a handful of interviews, and a (hopefully) savvy reading of repeating occurrences or underlying themes. A better trend story pinpoints which specific groups of people practice the trend and maybe throws in some robust poll data or study results. The best ones recognize the historical context in which the trend has (re)emerged and gets to the “why.”

For me, I’m getting to the why. My job is to read the Search tea leaves, distill the narratives that fit the fact and context, and serve up my brew. You can get a sip of what we trendspotting editors do throughout Yahoo! from the Buzz Log, our annual Year in Review and on Twitter via Yahoosearchdata. Keep searching — I’ll be looking out for all of you.

Yahoo To Reduce Minimum CPC To 5p

My Yahoo rep has confirmed that they will be reducing the minimum cpc from 10p to 5p on their ad platform here in the UK on (or around) the 19th of January. This is positive news for advertisers who have previously been put off by the minimum 10p bid. The change will be introduced on the current platform before any migration to the upcoming Panama (or Yahoo Search Marketing 2.0) product which is expected around the end of Q1 in the UK.

However, in a rather strange move, Yahoo are not set to completely change the base cpc bids from 10p. There will still be a small number of ‘keyword categories’ (expected to be in the region of 150K terms) that will remain subject to the original base 10p bid. Categories with high cpc’s such as finance are expected to be those kept to 10p.

I would think implementing a complete change of bid would be far easier than trying to run keywords with different minimum bids, so its a little strange. I don’t have access to the full list of categories, but it would seem the high cpc keywords will be those kept to a base 10p bid. Although you could argue that changing bids on these keywords would not have a huge effect on overall average bids & potential revenue to Yahoo due to the small cpc decrease and intense competition, it could also be seen as a form of revenue protection.

I am hoping for a complete removal of minimum cpc with the upcoming introduction of quality based algo. But we will have to wait and see if this ever happens.

New Yahoo PPC Keyword Tool In Pipeline While Wordtracker Offer Free Version

There’s been a whole host discussion over the past couple of weeks about the current problems with Yahoo (Overtures) keyword tool and its slow death.

Well, it seems a Yahoo rep has confirmed that a new Yahoo keyword tool is in the pipline and should be released later this year. YahooSarah replied to a thread over at the WMW forums -

I wanted to confirm that YSM’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed. We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year. If you are an advertiser, I’d suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).

Good stuff. On another positive note, Wordtracker have released a nice free keyword tool themselves. They have a useful information page that explains how the tool estimates daily search volume for any given keyword. The basic rundown is -

Every day, on average, we collect about 3.32 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 527.8 million.

Yahoo Testing New Quality Based Ranking Algo In UK

An Email from Yahoo has been sent out to UK advertisers to explain that they are currently testing the forthcoming ‘quality based’ ranking model in some keyword markets. So if you spot your keywords in different positions to those in the bid landscape, this could well be a vertical in the trial.

The full email details -

Yahoo! Search Marketing is constantly striving to improve both the advertiser and customer experience, with the goal of providing the most relevant and targeted listings as users search, click and travel across the Internet.

To accomplish this, we constantly test new implementations and matching technologies. To help ensure we launch our new ranking model successfully we have started running a limited test across our UK advertiser listings in which the display order of Sponsored Search listings in some keyword markets is based on factors other than bid.

In determining listing position, the test will take into account a particular ad’s click-through rate, as well as other relevancy factors. The total amount of Sponsored Search traffic that we are providing to you should not change, but due to optimisation of certain keywords you may see traffic volume increase or decrease depending upon the relevancy of your offers and other optimisation factors.

As always, we encourage you to track your results from individual keywords, so that you can manage your bids and creative for maximum return-on-investment.

Our new Sponsored Search system will be rolled out in the UK soon, beginning with advertiser migration later this quarter. We will be contacting you with more specific information as the rollout date approaches.

Using Clients To Rank For SEO

This is another subject I have been meaning to discuss that I haven’t seen debated a huge amount openly even though everyone in the industry is aware of it.

Simply checking the UK agencies ranking for ‘SEO’ (as an example) it’s very easy to spot that some of them are using their own clients as a link network to rank for that very term. I am not going to call anyone out or make examples of anyone, they know who they are.

Presumably by doing it they think its fine, so perhaps I can give examples.

Historically web design and development agencies have always left a signature in the form of a hyperlink on client’s sites often in the footer to show who produced the site. This for me is not a problem at all, but is it right for search marketing agencies often acting merely as consultants to do the same?

Do any other types of consultant do this? No. What benefit is this to the client? None. Does it do them any harm? Mmm.

seo1

Is It Ethical?

While I am sure most clients are aware of the ‘SEO’ hyperlinks, I know for a fact that some clients are either not aware, or do not fully understand the implications of having the link.

I have also seen cases where the links are hidden extremely well, or hidden completely in a few cases which obviously makes this a little darker as it goes against the search engines guidelines.

Perhaps these clients have been given code to insert on their site as part of their SEO service (a scrolling text box…) with the keyword rich anchor & hyperlink included, perhaps it’s a requirement of the contract or even incentivised as an option for reduced fees, or they have been told that linking out to reputable sources will ‘help them rank’.

I also know some of these agencies hard sell their SEO services off the back of their ranking for the said term to justify to potential clients why they should work with them over the competition. Obviously ranking for ‘SEO’ by using their clients as a link network does not say anything about their actual skills as an SEO agency, but they often pass it off that it does.

There are definitely varying levels of ethicality in this, I believe some agencies are very open about it while some are less so and I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular. But it does make you think, if some are willing to use their own clients as a link network for no benefit to the client, what does it say about them?

In an industry that is so often criticised for lacking credibility & transparency, does this not simply support these assumptions?

Perhaps some view this as simply a form of advertising similar to web design agency signatures, a clever technique to outrank the competition that is no more than any other type of ‘partner’ (if reciprocal) or supplier link or the incentivised links at least could be seen as no more than a form of paid links you see everyday.

Perhaps some would argue that despite all the criticisms above and questionable ethical nature, if it helps them rank for their desired term it’s clearly worth it in the long-term regardless.

seo4

My personal opinion is that everyone involved owe it to their own industry to keep standards as high as possible and in particular for their own clients.

Using your own clients as a link network for your own benefit no matter how you pass it off, to me, is taking advantage of your position. It is of no benefit to the client and it sends out the wrong message about our industry. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone work with an agency that uses this technique regardless of how good they might actually be in reality.

How To Use Match Types For Maximum Return

As noted by Barry over at Seroundtable, apparently Google is now recommending that you do not have multiple match types for the same search phrase. So for example, you shouldn’t have the keyword ‘golf clubs’, set on broad, phrase and exact match types.

Broad - golf clubs
Phrase – “golf clubs”
Exact - [golf clubs]

Now I haven’t heard or read anything official from Google personally, but a member over at Webmaster World gives the Google representatives reasoning as -

“Instead of triples of all keywords, they want advertisers to go from “broad” to “narrow” (in their words).”

Although Google may have a point that every keyword does not need to be replicated for each match type it is suprising to hear (if true) because actually you should start completely the opposite way with your PPC campaigns. So ignore Google on this one and I will explain in more detail why. If you don’t already know what each match type does, read up here.

Start Narrow

Don’t waste your money by using the default broad match straight away. Start narrow with specific exact, phrase and negative keyword combinations before even thinking about using broad match.

You can start with all exact match phrase keywords before building out to phrase match, but if you are confident and use negative keywords properly phrase match is easy to use. Not all keywords will require an exact and phrase match equivalent either, but absolutely those keywords with medium to high volume should have an exact match version. Equally those lower volume keywords might not require a exact match version. So to take the golf clubs example, I might start with only an exact match version of [golf clubs] as it’s very high volume and could potentially appear against an even larger number of terms if on phrase. However, a lower volume term like “buy golf clubs uk” probably wouldn’t require an exact match version and you could start this on phrase match straight away.

This approach means you do not need a different match type for every keyword and helps to keep your campaigns managble when dealing with hundreds of thousands of keywords already. I know some agencies and bid management software companies recommend replicating keywords into each match type which is fine, but you will often find that your campaign is bloated and a large part of it is unnecessary.

The narrow to broad approach also applies to the actual keywords you are using aswell as the match type, so use specific keywords with long tail variations, rather than more generic general phrases to begin with.

Make sure your campaign is performing with these match types to start with – monitor your internal logs and run search phrase reports (to see what people really searched for) to expand your current keywords or add further negatives to your campaign.

Use Broad Match To Sweep Up

If you have additional budget or want more volume you can then think about introducing broad match, although the expanded match element does need to be very closely monitored.

Use broad match to ‘sweep up’ any low volume keyword variations that exact and phrase match types have not already covered. When using broad match, try initially going in with a lower bid than your exact and phrase match equivalents and it can produce great results. You will need to continue to monitor your logs and run search phrase reports to further expand your keywords (& negatives). Again, aswell as match type you can also start to trial more generic search phrases for further volume (on exact match of course, have you been listening?).

Splitting Adgroups Based On Match Type

Not always, but sometimes it makes sense to split up adgroups via match type. You know when using an exact match phrase that for the advert to appear that [exact phrase] must be searched for, so it makes sense to focus your advert on this term specifically. When using broad match, your advert might appear against a number of keyword variations so sometimes it makes sense to diversify your ads a little more and test. You might find that you just make a new adgroup for just one or a few of your exact match keywords as you need greater control over them for example. Remember, trial, review and test what produces the best CTR and more importantly conversion for your campaign.

Optimise Match Types Based On Performance

Obviously the great thing about using various match types is that each match type will perform differently from the other. So each should have their own separate bid and be optimised based on their own individual performance. This allows you to have greater control over your campaign and ultimately spend money where it makes the most sense for improved return.

Note – Don’t forget, the choice of match type does not impact your quality score. All match types for the same keyword have the same quality score regardless, so this is not a factor. They do obviously massively influence your CTR though, which is the biggest factor of Googles quality score algo.

Always Get The Dot Com

I always wanted the ppcblog.com domain, but unfortunately it was registered before I got the chance.

At the time, the .net & .org were available aswell as the .co.uk and nobody had built a brand around the name ‘PPC blog‘ in the same way there were seo blogs seemingly everywhere.

About 2+ years ago when I developed this site for a little fun the ppcblog.com domain used to redirect over to payperclickblog.com and the site was aptly named after that domain. This was great as I always wanted to work with the shorter url and ‘brand’.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book is however the owner of the domain which his wife Giovanni and he have decided to develop in the past week, seperate and away from the payperclickblog.com domain.

Aarons SEO Book is a fantastic resource, so I have no doubt this new site will be equally full of great regulary updated content. Regular enough to stay in the Toprank search marketing blog list (ping) which I got kicked from for not updating regulary enough…

As I have never really had a goal for this site other than to share random thoughts, have a nice testing platform for ideas or vent frustration it doesn’t bother me that it shares the same name. But it does highlight the importance of getting all the TLD’s you can if you want to establish yourself globally and block out competition.

Geographical filters are pretty strong, unless you are a high authority domain and in my view you still can’t rely completely on Googles Webmaster Central (and others) to set geotargetting for the sub directory/folder route. Getting all relevant TLD’s for each country in my opinion can still be the safest way to go. Which I might expand upon in another post as I am going off subject.

Anyway, so don’t get confused guys with your .coms and .co.uks – or do and I might get more traffic. ;)

Some Do's and Don'ts For Building a Social Bookmarking Network

Developing a strong presence on social networking and bookmarking sites doesn't involve complex formulas or algorithms. Sure, sites like Digg and Reddit have algorithms, but your best bet is to focus on the two major pillars of success on social bookmarking sites - great content and a network of users to promote it - rather than focusing on racing to the front page.

Building your social bookmarking network involves more than just adding users to your friends list. Participation is required - it's what gets you noticed. Voting for, spreading and commenting on other users' content shows you're willing to contribute to the community.

Keep reading for nine basic do's and don'ts when building your social bookmarking networks.

DO friend, IMvite and follow power users - but DON'T become a pest

The best place you can start building your social media presence is by making friends with power users. They have literally hundreds, if not thousands of friends, and a vote on your content from them can often translate into additional votes from their followers.

But remember, everybody is busy. They most likely won't have time to digg, vote or retweet 100 links a day or answer a beginner's questions personally. Be sure you vote on their content and respect their time.

DO participate in the SOCIAL part of social bookmarking - but DON'T be a troll

Commenting and participating in conversations on social bookmarking networks isn't so much about being social as it is about taking the time the to look at other's submissions.

But don't be too controversial just for the sake of stirring things up, and don't reply to something just to disagree. You can try to be funny, but remember not everyone will appreciate your sense of humor, so be careful.

DO embrace multiple social networks - but DON'T spread yourself too thin

There are literally thousands of social media networks and instant messaging utilities out there. Joining multiple social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz is a great way to expand your reach. Manage your time wisely, though. Creating and maintaining an active profile can be a lot of work on some sites, so don't spread yourself too thin.

DO submit content from community favorite sites - but DON'T submit commercial content

When you're a part of a social bookmarking community like Digg, Newsvine or Propeller, it's likely you will notice certain sites make the front page regularly. Being the first to submit new content from these sites can be a great way to get noticed.

On the other hand, submitting content that has no place in the community you're in is one of the sure-fire ways to fail at social bookmarking. If you appear self serving, folks will vote your stuff down and remove you as a friend. Be sure what you're promoting is worthy of votes!

DO submit content from a variety of sites - but DON'T consistently submit content from a single site or short list of sites

This may seem obvious, however, there are many people who only submit their own content and occasionally make comments on or vote on other stuff. This is a red flag that you're only in it for the marketing, which is not the image you want to project.

The best way to avoid looking like a marketer is to submit articles, etc. from a wide variety of websites that fit the bookmarking site.

DO sign in, vote up, retweet and comment regularly, DON'T leave huge lapses of activity in your accounts.

One of the keys to successful marketing through social bookmarking sites is being a regular. Taking too much time away could mean all of your hard work going to waste. It's not that you can't take a well deserved vacation. But the more available you are to vote and spread submissions of others, the more influence you will have in gaining exposure for your own stuff.

DO perform favors for your friends - but DON'T ask for too much without giving something back

Help your friends out and they'll help you! Don't wait to vote up or retweet your friend's submissions. If you go out of your way for them, the more likely they'll do the same for you.

Don't ask too much without giving something in return and if you ask someone to vote or retweet something, be sure it's top quality content. Eventually, people will avoid or ignore you altogether if it's not.

DO act like a human being, DON'T act like a computer or robot

The basis of social media like bookmark networking sites is the human touch - the fact that a real person cares enough about a topic to pass it along to others who they think will also care. If you're trying to get content out to as many people as possible, you need to act like a real person. Be friendly and have conversations with others online from time to time.

DO keep at it and DON'T give up

Like anything, building a network for social bookmarking sites takes a lot of time and hard work. You don't have to spend all day everyday on social media to be successful. But you need to find a routine you're comfortable with and stick with. Persistence is the key to success.

Does Your Small Business Think Local?

For a long time, small businesses struggled with search marketing, because to succeed, they had to specialize, rather than being all things to all people in a local area. That's still good advice, but changes in how people use search (and in how search engines work) are suddenly making your location every bit as important as your specialty, at least for some businesses.

I've been talking for years about how businesses need to avoid the trap of thinking that being local will help them in search marketing. Just a few months ago, I beat that drum again, in urging that small businesses specialize on the Web. And that advice isn't wrong, because most searches are not focused on location, and if you want to win those customers, you need to do something special.

But that advice is increasingly incomplete.

Every week another shoe drops on local search--search queries that provide different results based on the searcher's location. Time was that searchers needed to type in a location to get a truly local search ("plumber in cleveland" or "dentist 90210"). Then the search engines started noticing the location of your computer using its IP address, and targeted paid ads and later organic searches based on where you are now, without you typing anything special into the search box. So, if you are in Cleveland, you just need to type "plumber" and you'll see local search results and local ads.

But now it is getting even more interesting. As more and more searchers are using their mobile phones, the kinds of searches they do are changing. Now they are likely to search for "coffee" or "office supplies" or any number of things that they need while driving or walking around. This makes being local again the most important thing, without any need for specialization at all.

As iPhones, Android phones, and other newer phones make it simple to search for things nearby (Google just announced its "Near Me Now" service), you can expect mobile search usage to increase dramatically in the next few years.

So how can local businesses make sure they are found? Start by trying out some searches yourself. Start first with your computer, but then try your phone, too. Ask your geeky friends to help you by searching on their phones when they are near your location so you see what they see. Different phones have different apps; different carriers have different default search engines; different locations will provide different results. And as personalized results become more common, different people will get different results, too.

So, yes, it's not that easy to check thoroughly, but you are better off checking in an imperfect way that looking at nothing at all (and just hoping that it goes well). And there are ways for you to help yourself:

* Use location words. It doesn't hurt to make sure your address is in your footer of every Web page and that you use other location words to describe your business ("Cuyahoga County" or "greater Cleveland area" or "northern Ohio," depending on how widely you draw customers from.

* But don't overdo location words. Be honest with yourself. No one is going to travel an hour for coffee, but they might do so to get their classic car repaired. Make sensible choices about your real drawing area.

* Use local listing resources. You should make sure you are listed in as many Internet Yellow Pages directories as you can (most are free) but you can also use a free service such as GetListed.org to quickly show you how your business fares in local search, and help you make the moves needed to improve.

* Don't ignore reviews. Yelp and other review sites have long been consulted by the savvy local shopper, but you should expect reviews to be increasingly built into the regular search experience. Google might have been rebuffed in its attempts to acquire Yelp, but you should expect every search engine to provide reviews in its searh results.

So, while that car repair shop still needs to trumpet its specialty (classic car repair) to draw customers from a wider area, focusing also on very local search might snag the motorist whose car just broke down a mile from the location of the shop. For that customer, it's still location, location, location.

Take Your SEO from Trash to Cash

Imagine yourself driving through a newly renovated area of town. The asphalt is freshly laid with bright yellow lines down the middle. Young, budding plants have been planted along the sidewalks between the street and newly stuccoed office buildings that look to be full of leather bound books smelling of rich mahogany. Now imagine walking into one of those buildings to find torn up carpet, water-stained ceilings, crumbling sheet rock on the walls, and someone doing their business off in the corner.

Imagine the change of emotions you'd feel. Stepping up to the door you feel confident that you're walking into a place that's going to meet your needs. But as soon as you open the door, you're hit with a stench that is the forebear of whats to come.

Focusing on search engine rankings while ignoring the quality and usability of your website may be a great way to get visitors in the door, but what will they find once they get there?

Putting your money where it counts.

When you're on a budget, as many businesses are today, you really want to spend your money where you're likely to get the greatest benefit. Unfortunately, money isn't always spent on what is actually the most beneficial, but rather what is perceived to be. While SEO can help you gain exposure and drive traffic to the front door of your website, if what's behind those doors isn't up to expectations, all the money getting them there is simply a waste.

A couple years ago I had my wisdom teeth removed, had a root canal and then a cap put on one of my teeth all in a couple of months time. I had to see several different dentists, each a specialist in a different area, so I got to see quite a few dentists offices, noticing a stark contrast between them.

Most of the offices were roomy and full of nice furniture, but one stood out as a genuinely scary experience, especially for someone who suffers from mild claustrophobia. The receptionist's desk was two and a half feet wide and piled high with about a years worth of "stuff that can wait."

I was placed in one of the procedure "rooms" looking right at someone else being examined by one of the nurses. As I laid back in the chair to get some X-rays, the nurse had to duck repeatedly around overhanging equipment while stepping over a small office trash can to get out to the hallway. It was like trying to perform an operation in a closet.

This is what many business websites are like when they focus on SEO and ignore their website design. There is nothing wrong with investing in SEO to drive traffic, but SEO is not the end of the story.

Conversions matter

A while back we had a long-time client undergo a major site redesign. They had held their rankings pretty solidly over the years but the site was design was getting stale. We had also been prodding over the previous months to address their site's many inefficiencies. Because their business had been growing significantly since we started working on their SEO campaign, they were never in a real hurry to make any changes. But finally they made the move.

The client invested in a major redevelopment of the site and rolled it out to the public. Almost immediately something amazing happened. Their conversion rates jumped by 30%!

This jump wasn't the result of new keywords optimized, or previously optimized keywords suddenly moving up in the rankings. The increase in conversions was directly tied to making their site more appealing and user-friendly.

The new site design cost them about what a years worth of SEO cost them. With a much more user and search engine friendly site, the efforts we were able to shift the efforts of the SEO campaign from creating band-aid solutions to being able to invest in a far more focused keyword targeting campaign.

With the additional revenue the client began talking about expanding the online marketing efforts; and why not? With a newly polished, high-tech interior, why not do all that you can to drive even more traffic to the higher-converting site?

No one can deny the value of getting first page placement for relevant keyword phrases. But many small businesses still need to be convinced that there is more to marketing than rankings and traffic. Bringing traffic into the slums isn't all that difficult to do. Getting someone to buy from you while they're there is. Lucky for you, it's not too great of a distance to go from trash to cash. Conversions do matter. And in the end, conversions are what matter most.

4 Reasons to Build a Social Media Strategy

As a small business social media strategist, I'm very happy to see so many companies finally beginning to recognize the need to invest some of their marketing dollars into social media. I'm even happier to see how many of them are willing and able to dedicate some internal staff to the matter. On the other hand, I'm finding that many of these companies have absolutely no idea WHY they need a social media strategy. They just feel the pressure to get involved and hope something will come from it.

Unfortunately, that's no way to build a strategy. What good does it do to invest time and money into a blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other number of social media outlets if you have no goals, no measurement and quite frankly, no idea why you're there.

What companies need to do is embrace the benefits of social media while very carefully thinking through the goals of their outreach efforts. Different goals will require different strategies. Taking a shotgun approach of simply trying to "get out there" will rarely result in a solid payoff. It's far better to sit down and carefully consider what your company's goals are and to build backward to create a strategy that's most likely to meet those goals.

Here are four key reasons why your company needs to consider planning and launching a social media campaign.

Reason #1: Social Media Gives You Unprecedented Ability to Listen to Your Customers

For companies that don't already have some type of social media strategy in place, this is usually the best place to start. While it takes a little bit of common sense and guidance to create an active and vocal outreach plan that will deliver results, pretty much anyone is capable of listening to the existing conversation.

The goal here is threefold.

1. Find out where your customers are: The first thing you'll need to do is find out where your customers and potential customers are spending their time. You can run a search for groups or fan pages on Facebook, search for keywords related to your business on Twitter Search, set up Technorati and Google Alerts or using a free service like Social Mention. You can (and should) also check your log files to see what types of social sites (blogs, forums, Twitter, etc...) are sending traffic to your site.

2. Find out what your customers think of you and your competitors: Once you've figured out where to look (or as part of that process) it's a great idea to run searches for your company (and products) and for your competitors and their products. This lets you know what your customers like and don't like which gives you an excellent starting point for making changes, playing to your strengths and otherwise building offerings that will appeal to your audience.

3. Find out what your customers' passion points are: This becomes one of the keys of a social media listening strategy and it's one that's often overlooked. Social media listening isn't just about hearing people praise or complain about you, it's about identifying subsets of potential customers and learning about the things that drive them to conversation. Finding out what makes them tick and finding the hot button topics that get them focused.

Basically, companies need to view social media as a sort of endless focus group they can tap at any point in time. For companies that invest in listening and really sit down to consider how this information impacts them, there's amazingly valuable information available. Using this information to impact all forms of marketing can make this specific strategy perfect for companies who don't have time to invest in a social media voice, but who want to reap some of the benefits.

Reason #2: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Build or Introduce a Brand

Sometimes, the entire goal of a social media strategy is to create awareness about a new product, a service or a brand. Consumers are heading online in droves to have conversations and thanks to the explosion of interest in microblogging, social networks and blogs, they're talking about more topics and reaching more people than ever before.

Getting a customer to talk about your product used to mean they mentioned it to a handful of friends or co-workers. These days getting them to talk about it might mean they share it with hundreds of friends on Facebook, thousands of contacts on Twitter or even tens or hundreds of thousands of readers on a blog. That's a massive amount of potential exposure.

Let's take a look at three different ways of approaching this one:

1. Use social media to introduce a brand new company to the world: This is one of the most popular ways of using social media. New companies are springing up all the time, often in very competitive markets. Finding (or paying for) brand evangelists to go out, build relationships and educate communities about these companies can be very effective. The key here is to come at things from the relationship and educational side of things. Plugging or pushing products on social media rarely works, gently creating opportunities for exposure by becoming part of the community can get the job done very effectively.

2. Use social media to introduce an existing brand to a larger audience: For companies that simply haven't gotten into the social media space yet, there's tons of opportunity to grow beyond their current reach. These are the types of companies that benefit most from looking at their analytics and talking to existing customers to find out what communities they're part of online. From there, it's a matter of branching out into new and similar communities (i.e. if you get great traffic from parenting forums, seek out new parenting forums) or finding creative ways to equip your current customers with the desire to evangelize you to their friends.

3. Use social media to introduce a new product or service from an existing company: This tactic is very similar to introducing an existing brand to a larger audience. These companies generally have the head start of an existing base of loyal customers from which to build. This means they can approach existing customers who have active voices in social media and offer them the chance to test and experience the new products or services.

Reason #3: Social Media Gives You a Unique Way to Gather Feedback

Another excellent reason to turn to social media is the ability to gather feedback from your target audience. While this may sound similar to the concept of listening to the conversation, there's a strong difference in the two goals. Listening is focused purely on listening to the existing conversation without trying to influence it's direction. Using social media as a feedback channel is all about actively soliciting input, ideas and even complaints about your products or services.

The thing to remember with this type of social media strategy is that it takes some serious investment. You can't just show up on a popular social media channel and ask people to tell you what they think. You have make a heavy investment into building relationships first.

There are several different ways to do this:

1. Use your blog to run ideas past loyal readers before you launch them: The great thing about building up a reputation as a company who listens is it gives people reason to talk. Southwest is one of the best examples online of a company who has established a strong feedback channel with their loyal customers via a blog. If you regularly take ideas to your readers and demonstrate that you not only listen to, but act on their advice, you can open amazing doors of opportunity. Listen to your customers. Talk to your customers. Use social media to find out what they want and then deliver it. You won't be sorry.

2. Use social media to recruit a team of beta testers: Sometimes you have ideas or products you need feedback on, but are not yet ready for public consumption. While social media seems to be the very essence of "public consumption," it can still be a very valuable outlet for beta testing. Why? Because you can use social media to establish the types of relationships needed to put together a small group of beta testers. You can reach out into the community to find influencers, build relationships with them, and offer them exclusive and early access in exchange for their feedback and ideas.

3. Use social media to ask direct questions: Sometimes using social media is as simple as asking a direct question to a larger audience. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and even YouTube can be immensely valuable in terms of getting your question out to a group of people you already know share an interest in your topic or your product. The ability to ask your customer base what they want so you can find a way to deliver it carries a lot of value.

Reason #4: Social Media Gives You the Chance to Demonstrate Personality

One of the single greatest advantages the Internet and social media has given small business owners is the ability to once again go head to head with their big box counterparts. A decade ago, this was because web sites gave no indication of business size. The small mom and pop shop could have a site that looked just as good, was priced just as good and carried just as much inventory as a company like Sears or Walmart. These days, smart small businesses are using social media not only as an equalizer, but as a competitive advantage.

You don't have to look far to find a story of a consumer who feels unappreciated or ignored by a larger brand who has made them unhappy. No one likes to sit on hold for 2 hours trying to lodge a complaint or have a product replaced. Smaller brands who sell the same product at the same price but actually answer the telephone have the chance to differentiate themselves and bring in loads of new customers. Beyond that, small companies who establish a voice via their blog or social media outlets have the chance to build credibility by building relationships directly with consumers.

Here are a handful of ways to use social media to do just that:

1. Demonstrate your unique personality by communicating as a person and not as the company: Companies are faceless, people are not. Using social media to tie your business brand to a personality can go a long way toward making even the largest company feel small and approachable. Whether it's answering questions on Twitter or sharing anecdotes or stories on your blog, letting some of your personality shine through goes a long way toward helping consumers feel connected to your brand.

2. Use various social media outlets to make yourself both available and helpful: This may be the single biggest way companies are using social media to establish personality right now. Whether it's the president of Zappos making lunch plans with a complete stranger while he's in town on business or someone from Comcast responding to customer frustration with a solution...big brands are using social media to communicate openly and helpfully with consumers and it's paying off.

3. Use social media to communicate in the way that's most natural to you: Back in the early days of social media it was all about blogs. The problem with this is not everyone is a good writer. These days, a lack of natural writing ability won't keep your personality from shining through. Whether it's shooting video, recording a podcast or simply sharing unique finds and quick insight on Twitter, social media has opened up a ton of ways (other than writing) for people to communicate. This lets everyone play to their strengths and gives you a chance to be "you" in the best and most comfortable way you know how.

To be honest, there are dozens...maybe even hundreds of reasons to get involved with social media. These are just some of the strongest. What it all boils down to is this; your customers are online and they are using social media to communicate. If you aren't, you're business is missing opportunities. No one says you have to master every use of social media all at once, but you're doing yourself (and your bottom line) a disservice if you don't at least give some thought toward creeping into the social media space to do a little listening.