Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

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This is one of those Basic SEO posts, that i feel silly writing about because “everybody knows” this information already. But then I look at websites of prospects and I realize that not everybody really does know. Or maybe they do and they just forget. In any case, this will be a quick reminder / refresher.

Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.

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I am a day behind on getting this out for the day 2 of Small Business Marketing: Unleashed, but better late than never.

Day 2: Workshops

The day was kicked off with a presentation by one of the sponsors ideablob.com, and then we were released to go to workshops. (Sage Lewis, of SageRock.com tends to refer to each session / workshop as a class, which truly describes what the conference was like.) There were three time blocks with four workshops running in each block – Each block running an hour and a half. With that amount of time, we really were given in depth lessons on each topic. The hot topics were repeated, so you didn’t miss out on anything.

My schedule:
Keywords and Content presented by Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks Search Marketing
Building a Community presented by Sage Lewis of Sage Rock
Link Building presented by Debra O’Neil-Mastaler of Alliance Link

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Day 1: Sessions

WOW. What a great day. The day gave us four sessions / two tracks of indepth introductions to all aspects of Search Marketing for small businesses. Each speaker had a full hour to go into more depth on their subject than any conference you’ve ever attended.

Rather than have a keynote speaker, Unleashed opened with a general overview of what Online Search Marketing is all about. Jennifer Laycock introduced three incredible presenters,
Matt McGee of Marchex and Small Business SEM (who happens to hate Twitter I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them Sam I am.), Wendy Piersall of sparkplugging.com and Matt Bailey of SiteLogic.com.

After the Common Sense introduction, we split out into the sessions. These are the ones I got to attend: Click here to keep learning

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing optimization work performed by my team as well as many of our client’s competitors. I’ve been studying the quality of the optimization work performed, both as a measure of comparison, and to simply get a feel for what other people are doing that perhaps we are not. What I found was pretty eye opening.

In many cases, as I peruse through the text and code, I can hardly tell where any “optimization” has occurred. It’s like knowing that surgery was performed but not being able to see the scar. Yet in some instances the on-page optimization looked like surgery performed by Leatherface of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is what I call “SEO Bloat”.

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I’m big on reputation management tracking. I have well over 50 Google alerts set up at any one time. I track my own name, company name, blog name, names of my employees, names of my competitors, company names of my competitors and even my articles. All via Google Alerts.

So you know I had to be interested when I got an email about trackur, a new reputation monitoring tool from Andy Beal.

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Problem: Client says that site traffic and sales have decreased since starting SEO campaign. You know that since taking over SEO you have eliminated hundreds of pages of duplicate content and increased search spidering of important pages. Site usability has improved significantly and rankings for key terms are also improving. Many site architectural issues have been uncovered but remain unresolved and can only be fixed by the client. What do you do?

I was posed this problem recently and my first thought was, let’s look at the analytics. Unfortunately, the client refuses to give us access to their analytical data, which means everything I’m about to say here falls under the category What-Could-Have-Been-Though-We-Won’t-Know-For-Sure.

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Last week Yahoo posted a blog about how using the negative keywords helps increase relevance. Where they did provide a list of steps, I thought I’d take that a bit further and outline the steps for each of the three major PPC providers.

Google AdWords
Quite often you will want to create a negative keyword list that applies to your entire campaign, rather than creating individual lists for each ad group. Google makes this easy by following these steps:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account.
2. Click the campaign you wish to edit.
3. The number of existing campaign negative keywords will appear beneath the campaign name and daily budget.
4. If no campaign negative keywords exist for your campaign, click Add. Otherwise, click edit.
5. You may select and enter negative keywords for your campaign in one of two ways:

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In the never ending effort to improve the success of the current campaigns, I recently spent some time going back through our AdWords history to see which ad creatives had been successful, as well as to see what keywords had converted strongly. I went back a year, prior to my employment with Pole Position Marketing. Sometimes I feel like my creativity has been tapped out, so I was hoping for some inspiration.

Looking at the campaign level, I found some paused and deleted campaigns with healthy Conversion Rates, leading me to wonder why that campaign had ever been paused, much less deleted. A quick glancing at the CTR and my questions were answered. Sometimes it is best to just dump what isn’t working and begin again. Ad group quality score certainly reflect that.

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SEO

• How to Determine the Effectiveness of Your Internal Link Structure
• Do You Vary Anchor Text in Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts
• 6 Tips for Blogging in 2008
• Five Situations Where You SHOULD Use NoFollow for Linking
• WordPress.com and SEO Blogs – Love or Hate?
• Link analysis done right

Copywriting

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Planning and organizing are often overlooked aspects of PPC accounts. A retailer knows their product inventory and wants to sell it online. Let’s say they sell sporting goods, everything from bowling shoes to tennis balls. They create a pay-per-click account and get a huge list of keywords that anyone might use to find the products they sell. The problem is that they do this without planning ahead.

They compile a gigantic list of keywords because they sell hundreds of products. They create one campaign with one ad group to sell everything in their inventory. Their ad lists the company name and points everyone to the home page. Thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dollars later, few conversions are the result.

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