Recent Articles
How many angles are you looking at keyword research from?
Feb 27, 2008 Keywords, Pay Per Click 4 Comments
When doing keyword research it is important not to get in a rut and simply look at keyword research as “consumer” only… or worse, from the business point of view rather than the potential customer’s point of view. But smart keyword researchers realize there are many angles to consider when planning your keywords so that you don’t miss out on a particular segment which could equal clicks and conversions. And this is especially important because not all pay per click advertisers consider all the different angles that a searcher might search on, meaning less competition and lower cost per clicks for you. And if you are struggling to get more traffic on specific pay per click platforms, such as Microsoft adCenter, this can enable you to add some new keywords to your campaigns and get some additional traffic from any of these angles you weren’t previously bidding on.
Obviously, this shouldn’t take the place of your main keyword research, but to enhance what you currently have or to add to your repertoire when you do research for new campaigns.
So look at your keywords and market from some new angles, and see if you can’t enhance your pay per click campaigns by considering new or complimentary keywords from these angles: Read More..
How many baskets are your eggs in? How to go from a single income source to multiple sources
Feb 25, 2008 Advertising, Google, Keywords, Search Engine Optimization 3 Comments
Being a top AdSense expert, I inevitably get many emails from publishers who have gotten their AdSense account suspended and then I get the sob story about how they won’t be able to pay their mortgage, they will have to let all their employees, etc etc. Trust me, I have heard it all! But regardless of their AdSense account being suspended, the real reason of their immediate money issues is the fact that they had all their eggs in one basket… in this case the AdSense basket. The same can go for someone who is working one killer affiliate program that suddenly ceases to exist one day, and is left with no viable alternative option to slip into the deceased affiliate program’s place.
The same applies for those that have their one killer website… their pride and joy, but unfortunately the one that brings in 95% of all their income. If you are old school SEO enough, you will remember that many people found themselves in this position when the now-infamous Florida update hit in November 16th, 2003. When Google updated their algorithm (which wasn’t done in a continuous style back then like it is now) that day, the forums lit up with people whose websites literally stopped getting any Google traffic overnight. And with the huge Google share even back then meant that people who were living the good life with their Google rankings suddenly found themselves scrambling in panic-mode to not only restore their rankings but to also restore the sudden loss of income, whether AdSense, affiliate income, or other.
So if you are one of those who has most of your eggs precariously balanced in a single basket, here is what you can do to diversify a bit so that you won’t have to go into panic-mode when disaster strikes your bottom line, and why you should do it. Read More..
Building your list of cheap and free negative keywords
Feb 18, 2008 Keywords, Pay Per Click 6 Comments
There are always those people who are looking for things for free… even when you know that what they are looking for isn’t free (looking for a “Free iPod” or “Free XBox” anyone?). But when you are broad matching your PPC campaigns, you want to ensure you aren’t paying for ads when it is the freeloaders looking.
Here is a list of common freeloading keywords that you can add to your negative keyword list.
free
freebie
cheap
complimentary (and mispellings of the word)
“free download”
“free sample”
offers
comp
complimentary
gratis
pass
If you sell any kind of software or subscription service, you will also want to add these keywords to your negative keyword list too.
crack
crack
warez
cracked
keygen
keygen
torrent
password
p2p
hack
cheat
Now, if you are offering something for free, you need to take care that you aren’t actually losing traffic because if this, such as if you are offering a free consultation or free eBook!
Not sure if you are getting traffic from any of these freeloading keywords currently? If you are using dynamic keyword insertion in your URLs, you will be able to track the exact keywords people are using when they click your ad. So if you are selling iPods or XBoxes, you can see how many of those people were actually looking for free iPods or XBoxes, and not seriously looking to purchase one. People looking for freebies rarely convert, particularly when they are searching for these types of products.
Cheap can be a tricky one, because in some markets it can work well, but in others it is much harder to convert. If you are selling a service, for example, you don’t necessarily want to be known as “cheap”, especially if customers are paying a premium for your service… if you are good at what you do you can charge a premium for it that someone new or not as well known wouldn’t be able to do. If you are selling a product that you are pricing very competitively, this can be a good converting keyword for you. Remember people who are using the keyword “cheap” are usually shopping around for the best possible price and might hit 4 different advertisers looking for which one is the cheapest. So if you are the cheapest you have a much higher chance of converting… but if you aren’t, this is one you will want to either watch very carefully for conversions or add to your negative keyword list. Bottom line: “cheap” can be successful if whatever you are selling or offering is the cheapest, but people are looking for the cheapest above anything else you can offer and your conversion rate will reflect this.
Once you have selected which negative freebie keywords you need to add, simply cut and paste it into your PPC campaigns so that you will no longer be serving up broad match ads when they keywords searched for include those words.
How stale and dated is your website?
Feb 15, 2008 Search Engine Optimization, Usability 3 Comments
We have all had that money maker website that ranks really well but are desperately afraid to touch anything on it, incase whatever it is about the site that Google’s secret sauce is so in love with gets destroyed in the process. But unfortunately, Google doesn’t necessarily like it either when a site hasn’t been updated in years, despite those killer rankings.
Not only that, humans don’t really like it when they can tell a site hasn’t been updated in ages either, and they couldn’t really care less whether Google loves it or not. And after all, sure, Google can drive the traffic, but if the mass majority of your visitors leave out of disdain when they see you 1999 web design, is it really worth keeping it looking as it did when you first launched it with your Frontpage 97 design skills? Which brings me to the question…
So when was the last time you really updated your website? And then the next obvious thing…
What makes your website look stale, outdated and old?
Copyright date
Does your copyright date still say 2005? Or worse, 1999? Copyright date is a common way that people check how current a site is. And no, people are usually smarter than to be tricked by those javascript “today’s date†scripts that were so popular a few years ago. So make sure your site’s copyright notice is updated, and if you want to show that your site has been around since 1999, change it to 1999-2008 instead.
Font choice
Some fonts are, well, so 1999. If you have Comic Sans MS anywhere on your site, change it immediately (here is a link for the three people that have no idea what font this is). In fact, if the temptation is to great (and for many do-it-yourself webmasters, it seems to be the font of choice) go and remove it from your computer completely. Your conversion rate will thank you for it.
Background images
True, some sites definitely suit having a background image, especially if it is a tasteful Web 2.0-ish design that isn’t too distracting. Note the part about the tasteful design because not all webmasters get that part, especially when they have some photo they want to show off and have it sized to the entire browser window. But the only reason you should have a photo background image on your site is if it is directly related to what the site is about. For instance, a beach resort might have a background image showing the beach, which could be acceptable, so long as the text is still legible. Best practices would be to have a plain background beneath the text so people can actually read what you are trying to tell them, but too many people try and put the text right over top of the photo and inevitably, some of the text will be very difficult to see. And the biggest piece of advice when it comes to webpage backgrounds… if it is clouds, or anything space related, ditch it immediately.
Cache date
Look and see how many people are viewing your site via Google cache and you’ll probably be shocked. But if Google’s last cache date of your home page is six months ago, you’ve got some work to do.
Centered text
Yep, way back when the <center> tag was new, people went nuts with it and everything on the site, including all written text such as articles, was centered. Well, the <center> tag is not new anymore, and very few things should be centered except titles/headlines and subheaders.
Animated “under construction” signs
I also thought these went out about a year after animated gifs first became all the rage, but I still not only see them on older sites, but also on newer site that should know better. If a page is under construction, you are better to not add the page to be accessible to the public in the first place, or at least put a small amount of text on the page so it is passable as a legitimate page and not telling the world that you just haven’t had time to do it yet.
Sparkly anything
Sparkly animated gifs had almost died a quiet death when the MySpace crowd brought them back with a vengeance. There is no reason why any legitimate website should have sparkly images if it is targeting anyone over the age of 13, unless there is a damn good reason for it… and I am still waiting for anyone to supply me with a damn good reason!
Link exchange pages
If you still have link exchange pages on your site – usually aptly titled Link Exchange Page 1, Link Exchange Page 2, and so on, and of course with the pages being called something obvious like links1.html. If you are going to have link exchange pages, be a little less obvious about it. Smart webmasters stopped calling them link exchange pages years ago. Sorry, no examples to protect the guilty!
Homepage refers to outdated events
The last summer games were quite the event, but if your homepage is still showcasing them, you should really update the homepage or change it to a retrospective slant, so people aren’t wondering why you are featuring something that happened a couple of years ago as “new”.
Design
While design can be subjective to a certain extent, it can date a site especially if it is done without columns or a CSS file in sight.
Color scheme
Do you remember the old school html tags when colors used to be specified by name instead of HEX #, and the most popular colors were cyan, blue and purple, usually on a black background? Well, if your site still has them, you seriously need to consider a new color scheme for your site. Nothing can date a site faster than having a black background with cyan text… unless you happen to have a site catering to gamers, and then it seems to be the norm.
Last updated June 17, 2004
If you haven’t updated in the last six months – or worse, years – remove the last updated date from your homepage. The only time you should really use this is if it I the first time you have updated in years, or if you have a massive repeat visitor base that you want to alert to what has recently been updated.
Of course, there are always those odd ball exceptions. This site hasn’t changed much about its design in ten years, right down to using the same neon confetti background image.
When you have a website that has killer rankings, webmasters can be somewhat apprehensive about updated what is on the page incase Google’s secret sauce isn’t so happy about those changes. But you also need to ensure that your visitors don’t come to your site and immediately do an about face because the site looks, well, old. If you have one of these websites, changing the above things can ensure your site doesn’t look outdated, even if you update the content and homepage very infrequently.
Still not convinced? Change bits and pieces at a time over a period of weeks (or even months!) so you can evaluate exactly what Google is thinking of your much needed changes. This will also give you the opportunity to backtrack if suddenly things start to tank and you think your updating had something to do with it. And I can’t stress enough… make sure you keep backups of everything before you make the changes, and keep them for each change you make. This will make it easy to undo your changes to figure out what went wrong.
So if you have any of those oldie but goodie websites, take some time to make sure you aren’t committing one of the above faux pas which immediately dates your website, even when the content – while not recently written – is still valuable and updated.
Ten things all blogs should have to increase your odds of success
Feb 14, 2008 Blogging, Usability 4 Comments
It is surprising as I go through hat tips on various posts in my RSS reader that some blogs I end up on are lacking some things that I consider to be fundamentals to a blog. You know, those important things that all blogs should not be without, yet time and time again I run across blogs missing at least one or sometimes multiple things that are pretty crucial. And not only that, many of these things are crucial to the overall usability of a blog, which can be directly related to both your number of subscribers as well as how often those subscribers read your blog entries.
How does your blog stack up to the challenge of what all successful blogs should have?
Read More..
Eleven steps to creating a killer 404 error page
Feb 13, 2008 Google, Search Engine Optimization, Usability 21 Comments
Talk about 404 pages has suddenly hit the blogs over the past day because of the new way that the Google beta toolbar is handling 404 errors. Now, instead of showing a default server 404 erorr page, Google will instead show a few different options to try and find the site, whether it is heading up to the home page or searching in Google for the site. But, if you have a custom 404 error page (one that is longer than 512 bytes, which would generally cover most site’s custom 404 ages) Google will still display your custom 404 page.
Which brings up what many webmasters have been pondering… what exactly should go on a custom 404 page? Here are eleven things that should go on your custom 404 page.
Read More..
What is your robots.txt file telling your competitors about you?
Feb 12, 2008 Reputation Management, Search Engine Optimization 13 Comments
Have you ever thought about your robots.txt file, beyond how the various crawlers interact with it? Chances are that if you have one, you probably haven’t looked at it in since the day you created it. Well, it is time you take a fresh look at it and see how it looks not just to a bot’s eyes, but look at it through the eyes of a competitor.
You would be surprised at the number of sites and companies who use their robots.txt file as a way to keep bots out of certain directories on their site, but not considering the fact they have just pretty much handed the keys to those private areas over to their competitors. How? Because many people create their robots.txt file thinking that if the bots aren’t indexing those pages, no one will find it… but when you include those directories in your robots.txt file, you are telling real people exactly where those directories are. And surprisingly, many of those “secret” directories allow competitors to access it without requiring any kind of authentication or password. Read More..
Why you should bid on misspellings of your company name & brand
Jan 15, 2008 Advertising, Branding, Google, Pay Per Click, Yahoo 7 Comments
Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.
If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Read More..
Best practices for soliciting direct buy advertisers to your website or blog
Jan 9, 2008 Advertising, Blogging, Linking 12 Comments
Sometimes it is nice not to have to rely on Google AdSense or various CPM, CPA or CPC networks to generate revenue for your blog or website. And it is even nicer when you can supplement that income with additional revenue generated from direct buy advertisers, meaning they are advertisers that want to advertise directly on your blog without having to go through a middle man – meaning the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and you get the entire advertiser’s ad spend for your site without having to share it with a third party who takes a cut of your profits.
When you reach a certain level of traffic and repeat visitors, especially if you are well known as an authority in your space, it is often more profitable for you to solicit advertising directly, as opposed to using a third party such as AdSense or a CPM network for your advertising. What is the certain level? It will vary depending on your niche or market area, but if you are one of the top blogs or websites in that area, you can likely command the money to make it worth the effort of doing it.
Many people don’t want to deal with the added workload it takes to sell advertising directly, when they might only make an extra hundred dollars a month, but when you could be bringing in an extra ten, twenty or thirty thousand a month, usually the annoyance of the bit of extra work isn’t as much of a concern.
So now that you’ve decided to make the jump and accept direct buy advertisers, here is how you should do it to ensure that you aren’t leaving any money on the table and are making the process as user friendly for those advertisers as possible. Read More..
How to run Google AdWords ads and ensure zero conversions
Nov 19, 2007 Google, Pay Per Click 13 Comments
Sometimes I click on a Google ad when searching for something and run into a perfect example of a landing page that offers zero chance of converting, no matter how you slice or dice it. Usually it is an attrocious design or some sort of coding error that causes those 0% conversion landing pages to show up. Then you get the really, really bad 0% landing pages, the ones that not only won’t convert, but that also send those first-time visitors hitting the back button as quickly as humanly possible… because…. wait for it… the landing page is one that is threatening to report first-time visitors to the authorities with possible legal action being taken. The reason? The site is flagging completely legitimate clicks as fraudulent ones, and sending them off to a special landing page threatening legal action. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to shake the webmaster and say “What on earth were you thinking???”
Here is a perfect example of one of those landing pages (click for full-sized):
My friend sent this to me, wondering what she possibly could have done to get this kind of message accusing her of fraud after simply clicking a Google ad… because while those in the industry know what this means, Joe Surfer does not know what an “IP address” or what “fraudulent click activity” is, and instead focus on the part “reported to the proper authorities” and “legal action may be taken”. So of course, I think maybe there was a slow response and she inadvertantly double or triple clicked the ad. And since I am moving soon, I tried the same search: Victoria movers and clicked on the moveit.ca advertisement (that link is to the site’s homepage not a click through the ad), which happened to be the first on the list, sitting above the organic listings, being careful to only click it a single time. And sure enough, I was greeted with the same warning threatening me with legal action. Now, I have a static IP, and have had the same IP for eons. I have never searched for Victoria movers and have never seen the site before, yet I got this same warning message. The URL seems to automatically forward from http://www.moveit.ca/?cd=gle to http://www.moveit.ca/security.htm
Now, any click fraud detection system that is set to ship new users visiting a site for the first time off to a click fraud warning page is definitely flawed. I am on a fairly common Canadian ISP, so it is not an issue with multiple people from an obscure ISP possibly hitting the page multiple times. And with a static IP address, there shouldn’t be any issue with that tripping any click fraud detectors.
There are definitely lessons to be learned, especially for those pay per click advertisers who are concerned about click fraud and are using an automated solution to deal with it that might be too powerful or too outdated, either of which could be the problem in this case.
First, never send your pay per click traffic to a webpage threatening legal action unless you are 110% sure that person you are sending is truly engaged in click fraud, such as isolating a competitor’s IP address that seems to hit your site 5 times every morning at 9am and sending that one person off to that landing page. But when you threaten innocent surfers, you will discover that your seemingly low conversion rates in your Google AdWords pay per click campaigns are not because your landing page sucks or you have a high number of invalid clicks, it is simply because you are sending them to a page that is threatening them! Trust me, the vast majority of people really don’t like to be threatened, especially when they are in the role of customer! There are too many competitors out there vying for that customer to lose them this way. Remove the warning page and your conversions will go up since you won’t be alienating so many visitors from the very first page view. I can only imagine the stats for the number people who have landed on that threatening landing page in error.
Second, you are paying for the traffic through AdWords regardless of what landing page you send the visitor to… so you might as well send them to a page that has a chance of converting into a customer (which it likely would have done so with my friend) rather than having those people click the back button as quickly as they possibly can for the fear of having the authorities showing up!
Third, make sure if you use click fraud detection software that it isn’t wrongly flagging legitimate clicks. And likewise, ensure that your pay per click expert who is handing your campaigns actually knows what he/she is doing and is not sending people off to that threatening landing page in error (like is definitely the case in this instance!). When your click fraud detection software isn’t correctly identifying what is possibly invalid click activity, it will make applying for credits with Google, Yahoo & MSN much more difficult since there are so many legitimate clicks mixed in. In this case, I am guessing someone handling the detection software went and added a major Canadian ISP to the filter, and effectively blocked a huge % of Canadian web surfers, including a very high percentage of those who would be doing a search for “Victoria movers”.
Fourth, this could definitely cause issues with Google AdWords and the terms of service when you are not only sending visitors to an incorrect landing page, but also threatening those legitimate visitors with legal action. Not to mention the nasty things it can do to your quality score if the click fraud detection software sends the AdWords bot off to that threatening landing page too!
And fifth, remember that everything you present to a visitor makes an impression and doing something like this makes a big one, and not neccessarily the kind of impression most business want to make! As a result, my friend will not use MoveIt.ca to find a moving company, and neither will I. And I am open to suggestions for a good moving company in Victoria 
Anyone else run across any AdWords/YSM/AdCenter ads that you know have zero chance of converting? Some of my favorite ads are the ones that were clearly done by people training others on creating AdWords ad, with “example” or “sample” used as the title and in the text, but with the company’s URL used because you know someone forgot to turn off the campaign after training was over 
