Search Engine Monkeying

I created this new tool to improve Google AdWords Quality Score.  The Google SERP Checker shows what keywords actually generate any ads at all when the keyword is queried in Google.  If you eliminate the keywords with no ads then the overall Quality score for that AdGroup will go up and a lot of the prices for your keywords with high minimum bids will drop. 

A co-worker of mine, Jason Bosch, was having a particularly difficult time with a controversial campaign he was running.  In one of his AdGroups for example, about 120 of his keywords had a minimum bid of either $5.00 or $10.00.  He typed in by hand each of his keywords into Google and recorded if they brought up ANY ads at all, not just his.  He then went back and deleted these keywords from his account.

This caused his overall quality score to go up considerable.  about 70% of his keywords that had high minimum bids of between $5 and $10 dropped to around $.50.  If you don’t feel comfortable deleting the keywords entirely, copy the campaign in AdWord editor and erase the keywords without ads from one of the AdGroups.  Because Google assigns a different Quality score to the same keyword in different AdGroups, you will be able to see if there are any positive results.

Google SERP Checker - OM3: Online Marketing, Monitoring, Management

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Tags: GoogleAdWords Quality Score

Popularity: 14% [?]

Manage Defined Spend (MDS), a new AdWords tool, enables advertisers to build and apply budgets under a single service agreement.

AdWords already permits advertisers to build and manage separate ad budgets under multiple service agreements. MDS instead enables users to build out “child” accounts under a single “parent” agreement.

The new option will appear under My Client Center. A button to the right marked “Modify Budget” gives clients access to the MDS.

Child account shells cannot be created directly on the site. AdWords users must access a Google representative to create them. According to AdWords consultant Shimon Sandler, Quality Scores and Account Histories will not be affected.

Invoices can also be consolidated and downloaded directly from the interface.

New AdWords Tool Consolidates Multiple Campaign Budgets - MarketingVOX

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Tags: GoogleAdWords

Popularity: 12% [?]

FSBO: the English language For Sale By Owner. At auction: the entire world’s languages. Without a second thought, we buy and sell words on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask in the U.S. and overseas search engines. Now that search engine marketing has become a global game, the need for translation services for Web sites has never been greater.

Virtually every small- and medium-sized enterprise I’ve spoken with during the past year has been aggressively translating Web sites to reach global audiences. In the worldwide search engine ecosystem, that’s no surprise. What is surprising: the small number of SEOs (define) and SEMs (define) who leverage language translation.

SearchEngineWatch: Global SEM Growth Leaves U.S. SEOs Behind

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Tags: ForeignMarketing

Popularity: 7% [?]

If there is one black mark that some search-engine-friendly copywriters will have left on the early years of digital marketing and advertising history, it will be for how they managed to butcher various language structures throughout the world with their new brand of “search engine friendly copywriting” style. 
                                                                                                                       
For those who are fairly new to search engine-friendly copywriting and optimization, the whole problem started years ago when many soon-to-be search-engine-friendly copywriters noticed a pattern in search engines such as AltaVista and Google, where the top results tended to skew more toward copy with higher repetition of whatever targeted “search-engine friendly” keyword phrases they happened to be using. (continued)

MediaPost Publications - ‘Search-Engine-Friendly’ Copywriting Style Is Often Not Very Friendly To Humans - 11/21/2007

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Tags: searchengine copywriting

Popularity: 7% [?]

Nick O’Neill reported that Google was using private Facebook user profile information to influence there AdSense ads.  Apparently, the who issue spawned from Googles private relationship with the Facebook developers.  Read more at the article below.

Google Confirms Facebook Violation, No Personal Data Stored - The Unofficial Facebook Blog

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Tags: Googlefacebook

Popularity: 8% [?]

Are your competitors using black hat SEO techniques to get a better page ranking then you.  Google now has a free way to report your competitors who are using paid listing to improve their listing.  They have already clamped down on bloggers who include paid listing in their posts.  Now you can fight back too.

Google Webmaster Tools - Report paid links

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Tags: GooglePagerank

Popularity: 6% [?]

I really like this PageRank detector for Dig (not affiliated with Digg).  The detector pings your site from a number of different services and then displays the I.P. address and the PageRank your site received from each of the sites.

Dig Pagerank in 700+ datacenters

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Tags: Googlepagerank

Popularity: 21% [?]

Although it was originally designed for domain variations, I thought this would be a good tool for identifying and creating a variety of new keywords based on misspellings. 

“This tool will generate a list of common misspellings for the given domain name. It can be quite useful if you want to catch up the customers that have misspelled your domain. It supports three keyboard layouts for various countries: english (QWERTY), german (QWERTZ) and french (AZERTY).”

Double character typos
Typos based on hitting an intended key twice (like “heello” instead of “hello”).

Transposed character typos
Typos based on transposition errors (like “ehllo” instead of “hello”).

Missed character typos
Typos based on a missed key (like “ello” instead of “hello”).

Wrong key typos
Typos based on a user hitting the wrong key that is near the intended key (like “jello” instead of “hello”), only uses characters valid in ascii domain names.

Domain typo generator - Domain misspellings tool

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Tags: domainkeyword misspellings.

Popularity: 7% [?]

There are surely hundreds of different ways that people can mess up their sites. Based on our experience from working with scores of clients, here are the 9 most common problems that we find:

1. Broken information architecture - These are sites that fail to map the nature of the information they are providing into an understandable hierarchy. Bad for users and search engines.
2. Poor site usability - Results in poor conversion rates, poor lifetime value per visitor, and a less attraactive site for linking to.
3. Mismanaged internal link juice - Some sites allocate their link juice poorly, resulting in not enough of it going to their most important pages.
4. Content getting buried over time - A surprising number of sites that create huge amounts of content use publishing systems that buries stuff over time. Such a lost opportunity. People and crawlers are looking for this stuff, don’t hide it!
5. Bad redirects - Why is is that every engineer who does not have a background in SEO defaults to using a 302 redirect? OK, that’s probably unfair (you might even say ignorant), but it sure seems that way at times.
6. Poor titles and headers - Keyword tools are wonderful weapons. These are valuable for far more than SEO. Keyword tools tell you what language people use when referring to your products and services. Even in a world without web sites, this is something you would want to know. Then you need to make sure you have pages and content that addresses the major topic areas that relate to your business.
7. Insufficient content - No content (or tools) means no links means no traffic. It’s that simple. What unique value are you offering a visitor to your web site? Why would someone link to your site?
8. Duplicate content - It’s unbelievable how much duplicate content that some sites create. It’s a common killer, and it’s a very big factor in poor page rank management.
9. All flash site - Very, very pretty, but not a great experience for a crawler. This does not mean you can’t have an (almost) all Flash site. Just make sure you offer text link navigation options and use a technique like Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) to tell the crawler what is in the movie.
10. Same meta description (and keywords) on every page - These elements are included in duplicate content filter checks by the search engines. And, of course, the meta description is important because it often gets used as the description that the search engine uses for your web page, so make sure it describes the unique info to be found on that page.

We have run into many other problems along the way, of course, but these are the most common offenders. What other common SEO mistakes do you see? Discuss this over in the SEW forums.

Posted by Eric Enge at November 16, 2007 10:34 AM

The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes [SearchEngineWatch]

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Tags: SEOmistakes

Popularity: 7% [?]

For any smart internet marketing company using PRWeb to get visibility for your web sites, I have some great tips for you. I have figured out a simple yet clever strategy to make sure that your press releases are seen by cities and regions that are looking for your specific keywords.

The next time you get to the MSA field when submitting your press release and it says “Your release is currently targeting All Regions/International and the following Cities / MSAs:” take your top keyword or keyword term and use Google trends to see where in the US or worldwide you can add to your targeted region.

Say you own a web site dedicated to selling after market Jeep car parts, for example, and you are about to send out a press release about a new product line your will be carrying. Before you send out the press release go to Google Trends and search “Jeep“.

Now it is essential to refine your search. Make sure to select your region and time scale. I always try to select “Last 30 days” so I get the most relevant results.

After narrowing down the search it will shoot out the top searched cities for your keyword of “Jeep”. If your keyword or terms comes back with no results, try to simplify them until you get results.

(continued)

Targeting Your Press Release With Google Trends | eVisibility Insider - Internet Marketing Blog

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Tags: localGoogle search

Popularity: 6% [?]