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Google AdWords budget analyser now live
2007-02-15 13:44:03
I posted at the end of last month about the Google AdWord s detailed budget analysis which would be coming available to advertisers. While checking my account this morning I noticed that this has now been added with a link to show how will my budget affect my ad performance?The budget for my account was displayed as OK, as shown above, alongside the link which shows how changes to a general accounts budget, keywords, bids and geographical targeting can make a difference to your campaigns performance. This uses an interactive slider tool to display the primary and secondary effects of account changes such as the expected amount of impressions, clicks and change in ad position.Google seem to be very busy with AdWords updates at the moment as they've fixed the Google AdWords Professional verification status pages in addition to revealing that a quality score column will be added to accounts this week and testing a new CPC site targeting model.-------------------------SEO Services - Pro...
More About: Google Adwords , Adwords

How to check Google supplemental results
2007-02-14 19:43:03
Aaron Wall has found a site search command which allows you to view all your Google supplemental index results."If you want to view ONLY your supplemental results you can use this command site:www.yoursite.com *** -view"Last September Google allowed the checking of supplemental index results using a site:www.domain.com ** query but this stopped working a couple of weeks later. Hopefully this one will remain active as it's a very useful and effective way to find which webpages may have become orphaned or contain duplicate content (two common reasons for supplemental results). If your site does have a high ratio of results in the supplemental index here's an excellent guide on how to avoid them.-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Mental , How To , Men , Results

Blogger <$BlogMetaData$> tag includes noindex meta tag!
2007-02-14 19:43:03
I noticed today that blog.seoptimise.com has been removed from the Google index. The blogs web design was updated earlier in the week and by looking into the source code I found that this was being caused by the Blog ger tag which produced the sites meta tags including this line of code:meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />Luckily I managed to spot this fairly quickly and hard-coded the generated code instead (without the noindex, nofollow meta tag obviously) so hopefully Google will notice this within the next couple of days. The meta tag is used by most Blogger templates and I'm sure it doesn't normally do this but it's definitely worth looking out for. Hardcoding this also has the advantage that you can replace the RSS auto discovery tags with your own FeedBurner URL instead of the default blogger XML files.-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Data , Meta , Index

Is Social Media Marketing ethical?
2007-02-14 01:41:02
Cameron Olthuis has defended the use of social media marketing as an SEO technique following Jason Calacanis' latest statement, including the comments: "This whole gaming of digg/Netscape/MySpace is being called SMO--social media optimization. That's the worst thing I've ever heard of. Anyone who hires an SMO firm is an idiot."I would have to agree with Cameron on this: "There is nothing wrong with promoting content, so long as you aren't cheating the system. Actively promoting content is also important because unlike what those on soapboxes would have you believe, success doesn't always just happen."SMO (Soci al Media Optimisation) involves using social media websites (such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit) as a portal to distribute content to a wide audience. Providing the system isn't being cheated the content must be of a high quality, otherwise it wouldn't get enough votes to be promoted to the social media homepages. In my opinion this is an excellent method of sharing qu...
More About: Marketing , Market

Strange Yahoo! SERPs Results
2007-02-10 13:39:04
When searching to see which sites were listed for a Yahoo ! search on SEOptimise I found that none of the results were relevant and they all had something to do with soroptimist instead!Here's a screenshot of the Yahoo! SERPs (click image for full size):The uk.yahoo.com results list the sites I would have expected to see with a suggestion of "Did you mean: soroptimist". This makes far more sense to show the correct results alongside the suggestion rather than just forwarding to what they thought I meant.I've submitted for a Yahoo! directory listing this week so hopefully this will help to return results related to SEOptimise when searching on Yahoo.com.I also found another surprising result listed for the same search and an "SEOptimise blog" query on Yahoo! UK. Instead of listing the correct page title it displayed the blog owner/poster name instead, the correct title is listed however for the label page in 2nd place:-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business onl...
More About: Results , Strange , Stra , Range

Google AdWords arrow trick example
2007-02-07 13:37:02
Last month Shoemoney posted a tip to increase CTR by placing the keywords searched for in the shape of an arrow in the AdWord s ad text. Shoemoney has now backed this up with an example using the arrow trick for a ringtones AdWords ad and this shows a 100% CTR increase over the regular ad. For more information and a screenshot of the ads performance please read Shoemoney's Google AdWords arrow trick to increase click through rate post.-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Rick , Google Adwords

Blogger mark's edited posts as new
2007-02-07 13:37:02
This is a feature in the new version of Blog ger I find quite annoying, when editing an old post it is marked as new and re-added back into the RSS feed. This has happened today when correcting a spelling mistake in my Aviva Directory post.Does anyone know if it's possible to prevent this from occurring for edited posts?-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Post , Edit , Posts

Google SERPs display stylesheet error
2007-02-07 13:37:02
While doing a search for my last blog post Google displayed part of it's page source code, mainly the stylesheet, instead of the actual results.Here's the screenshot (click image for full-size) of the page shown instead of the Google SERPs: I also noticed this appear for a search yesterday but haven't seen it appear before this, has anyone else found this error appearing recently?-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Play , Style , Display , Styles

Google Webmaster Central backlink tool
2007-02-07 13:37:02
Google Webmaster Cent ral now provides a backlink tool for site owners. Matt Cutts posted about this yesterday to make sure users understand that "the backlink tool doesn?t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet" and "do not assume just because you see a backlink that it?s carrying weight.".When logging into my own Google Webmaster Central account, and clicking on the new links tab, I saw that 2,189 were recognised to this blog, while this still has a way to go before showing as many links as Yahoo! Site Explorer (currently 5,146) this is a great improvement over the sampling of results using a Google link: command search (98 links).-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Google , Tool , Link

What Everybody Ought to Know About Linkbait!
2007-02-07 13:37:02
You can't goto an SEO blog today without reading about Andy Hagans? Ultimate Guide to Link baiting and Social Media Marketing, definitely well worth a read and I've used one tip already with my post title! :)-------------------------SEO Services - Promote your business online, submit for a free website analysis today!
More About: Body , What , Hat , About

Which free keyword research tool to use?
2007-02-04 13:35:03
This has been an important week for free keyword research tools, Overture's tool has been unavailable for the last few days (now back online) while Word tracker and Keyword Discovery have both released free versions of their own keyword research tools. So now there seems to be much more choice to find the best keywords, but which tool is best to use?OvertureI've been using the Overture keyword tool for over a year and while the responsiveness has sometimes been very slow I have generally been quite pleased with the results. The search count has been lower than I expected as these figures are only based upon Yahoo! queries from the previous month and occasionally some strange long-tail results appear, such as the "beer college college..." result above but overall this gives a good idea about the popularity of keywords. Another advantage I like is how you can search to find the popular keywords in the UK using the Overture UK tool.WordtrackerMy first impression of using the Wordtracke...
More About: Research , Free , Search

5 Yahoo! Search Marketing Panama Tips
2007-02-04 13:35:03
Yahoo! are upgrading U.S. accounts to Panama tomorrow and the Yahoo! Search Market ing blog have posted 5 best practices to make sure users are ready for the new ranking model."Here are five practices that you, if you have upgraded to the new platform, should put in place right away in order to get the most out of the new ranking model, and out of your account:1. Include keywords in your ad (use our Insert Keyword feature).2. Carefully determine keywords for your ad group.3. Use ad testing to learn which messages are performing best for you, based on click-through rate normalized for position4. Use our Excluded Keyword feature to help optimize your Advanced match type. 5. Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals."Panama will not be available until later this year in the UK, so far I have only seen screenshots of the new interface but I do manage a couple of American Yahoo! Search Marketing clients so I'm looking forward to seeing the new system ...
More About: Yahoo , Tips

After reading Pronet Advertising's post today about making y
2007-01-13 19:16:01
After reading Pronet Advertising 's post today about making your content delicious I was inspired to add Digg and Del.icio.us buttons to this blog. It took me a while to find all the information I needed to create both buttons so I thought I'd write about the process here.I found that most recommended methods of adding a Digg button doesn't actually work which I found surprising as it's used by blogs such as SEOmoz. This is by using http://www.digg.com/submit?url=INSERT_URL which sends you to the submit page but doesn't include the appended url of the story your submitting. As a workaround I inserted the same URL used by FeedBurner which skips to the second phase of submitting a Digg story and inserts the URL and title. Below is the code used for Blogger, if you use different blog software you would obviously need to change the way the URL and title is written.<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$Bl ogItemPermalinkUrl$>&title=<$BlogIt emTitle$>" target="_blank">...
More About: Reading , Post , Today , Read

Since last April I've been publishing my Australia travel ph
2007-01-13 19:16:01
Since last April I've been publishing my Australia travel photos to share with friends and family. Rather than uploading the images to Flickr I decided to set myself a long-term Google Images project to try and achieve high rankings for some popular keywords in Google Images.Due to the infrequency of Google Images indexing it has taken a while to achieve good results, but in the last few days, following the PageRank update, I started to notice an increased amount of traffic via Google Images.So far top page results have been achieved for Sydney, Brisbane and Dublin searches. With #1 rankings for the following search terms:Sydney Harbour Bridge Sydney Opera HouseBondi BeachSouth Bank BrisbaneAustralia ZooSydney AquariumHong Kong DisneyGoogle Images can be an excellent method of gaining traffic as there is far less competition for popular keyword phrases, whereas ranking for Google's web search for Sydney keywords would involve a much larger amount of work, including numerous qualit...
More About: Travel , Publishing , Rave

Frank Watson of Search Engine Watch found while querying a G
2007-01-13 07:15:04
Frank Watson of Search Engine Watch found while querying a Google AdWords problem that quality scoring impacts the delivery of your ads even if the ad variations are set to be displayed evenly."A rep at Google explained it this way:Regarding the serving, this actually is a common question that we receive. The system tries to equally rotate ads but there are other factors that weigh into this rotation. In your case it does look fairly even for the most part, however the system may be looking at the one ad as one with a less quality score than the other, thus not serving it as often. Although you have it opted into rotate more evenly it isn't guaranteed that the system will functionally work to an exact science. I know this isn't the answer you were hoping for, but this is what we have been told by engineering!"
More About: Search Engine Watch , Rank , Search Engine

Microsoft adCenter are running an online seminar for an hour
2007-01-13 07:15:04
Microsoft adCent er are running an online seminar for an hour next Wednesday at 8:30am (US Pacific Time).Here are the webcast event details:"If you feel that your marketing efforts are vanishing into cyberspace, join this webcast to see how Microsoft adCenter can help you develop ads to target the audience you want. This session provides real-world examples of successful advertising campaigns that have benefited from the powerful demographic-targeting capabilities within adCenter. We share case studies, demonstrations, and tips on how you can apply similar techniques to your own advertising campaigns using Microsoft adCenter demographics and Microsoft adCenter Labs research tools. View this webcast to discover how to reach your potential customers and increase your return on investment."
More About: Running , Microsoft , Seminar , Online

Yahoo Search Marketing minimum bid reduced to 5p
2007-01-11 19:14:01
Yahoo! Search Market ing have confirmed that minimum bids will be reduced to 5p in the UK from January 19th.Here is a copy of the email I received today:"Dear Advertiser,In order to reflect the dynamics of the market, and to help you maximise your return on investment, Yahoo! Search Marketing will introduce a new minimum variable bid pricing structure. This means that from January 19th, our bidding prices will start from as little as £0.05*, which is great news for your business!Please note that minimum bids will vary by search term, with the lowest bid price starting at £0.05*. Yahoo! Search Marketing is dedicated to providing world-class online marketing products and services that drive highly targeted customers to your business while allowing you the greatest return on investment.We hope this new pricing will help you make the most of your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and allow you to drive even more highly targeted customers to your site.If you have any queries about this new ...
More About: Yahoo , Mini

LinkedIn Launch Answers Product
2007-01-04 13:12:03
LinkedIn have today launched a new Answer s section of their website. This follows the closure of Google Answers at the end of November and looks like it may become a major competitor to Yahoo! Answers with a stronger focus on business and technology related questions from LinkedIn users.
More About: Product , Link , Launch

Top 20 Daily SEO & PPC Blogs
2007-01-04 01:12:01
I thought I'd post the main blogs which I subscribe to and read on a daily basis. These are all excellent blogs in their own different ways and help to provide the latest SEO and PPC news, there are additional blogs I subscribe to as well but the 20 below cover most of the stories I'm interested in reading about.I've also added these blogs into my blogroll:Search Engine LandSERoundtableSEOmozSEO by the SeaMarketing PilgrimPronet AdvertisingTop Rank Blog Matt CuttsGoogle BlogGoogle BlogoscopedSearch Engine WatchSearch Engine JournalThreadwatchShoemoneyGray WolfStunt DublJim BoykinInside AdWordsYahoo! Search MarketingMicrosoft adCenter
More About: Daily , Blogs , Dail , Logs

All the SEO Blogs you'll ever need
2007-01-04 01:12:01
I wrote a post yesterday containing 20 essential daily SEO and PPC blogs, if you've got a bit more time on your hands the Top Rank blog have created an excellent list containing 250 must read search marketing blogs.
More About: Blogs , Blog , Ever , Need , Logs

Is Google Becoming Evil?
2007-01-03 01:11:02
Danny Sullivan today wrote an excellent post listing 14 "Is Googl e Evil ?" tipping points since 2001. Google's methods have been questioned several times recently, with many users unhappy with the use of Blogger tips appearing for all blog searches, and the last week alone has seen reports of mass Gmail deletions and the Google Calendar disappearing. In my opinion, as commented on Search Engine Land, Google became the number one search engine by providing the most relevant, unbiased search results, while using the motto "do no evil". I think they seriously need to think about the impact adding Blogger or calendar tips into the SERPs will have to their reputation and maybe concentrate on growing by following the same methods which have already provided them with so much success. As soon as users start to feel that they're not being provided with the best possible service they'll turn to another site which can.It will be interesting to see if Google will respond to the negativity s...
More About: Ming

Applying PPC ad copy tips to SEO
2007-01-03 01:11:02
Rand Fiskin raised an interesting point today about SEOs taking a note from PPC specialists & focusing on the ad copy. This gives some examples of how websites aren't making the most of their titles or descriptions and how following the methods of PPC advertisers could greatly increase the sites CTR."How we author title tags & meta descriptions. This has gone from a game of keyword stuffing and phrase manipulation to the art of writing headlines - an almost exact parallel with the PPC task of writing the ad title and description. Yet, when I look around the web at competitive search results, the ad copy is still considerably better at drawing in visits - For example, if you were to reverse the paid and organic results, I'm betting the advertisers would see a dramatic drop-off in CTR, while the organic results would receive a huge boost."I agree with this and find for the majority of search queries the ad title and description of paid listings are far more compelling than the organ...
More About: Tips , Lying , Copy , Irritating

How to create good PPC ad copy?
2006-12-31 01:09:01
The Yahoo! Search Marketing blog has posted some useful tips about creating ad copy that clicks.This focuses on the main points of knowing your company?s USPs (unique selling propositions), taking a look at competitors? ads, creating compelling ad copy around USPs and split testing ads."Take a look at competitors? adsIn many cases, search ads are unappealing. Try something catchier or use a different tone. A little creativity will never hurt any Sponsored Search account! In one account, I changed ad copy from this:Flasks & Bar AccessoriesGet unique bar sets, wine openers and more. Great for gifts. Order now.To this:Wonderful Wine Openers and AccessoriesEntertain with sleek steel or soft wood for a Zen effect. Order today.The second ad helped dramatically increase sales for two reasons. First, it was specific to wine openers. It didn?t try to sell a bunch of products (like the first version). The second reason was because the ad?s tone was appropriate to the audience it was targeting...
More About: How To , Good , Copy , Create

Google AdWords Content Network Multimedia Guide
2006-12-31 01:09:01
The Inside AdWord s blog has posted about a new training centre multimedia webinar about the Gooogle AdWords content network."The short but informative online guide will walk you through what advertising on the content network is all about. It?ll explain what makes advertising on the content network different from search advertising, how contextual advertising works and how you can use it to connect to customers through mass media sites, like major news sites, as well as smaller niche sites devoted to a specific topic, such as electronic gadgets. The guide will also tell you about the features and options available on the content network, such as site targeting, different ad formats, bidding features and performance tracking tools."
More About: Google , Media , Multimedia , Time

Yahoo Search Marketing Keyword Insertion
2006-12-31 01:09:01
SERoundtable today pointed to a WebmasterWorld thread which shows how to use dynamic keyword insertion for Yahoo Search Market ing , this is for the new version codenamed Panama. "1. Click the Campaigns tab > Summary subtab. The Campaigns page opens.2. Identify a campaign and click its link. The Campaign Details page opens.3. Identify an ad group and click its link. The Ad Group Details page opens.4.Click the Create New Ad link. The Create Your Ad page opens.5. Decide whether to insert the keyword into the title or the description of the ad.6. Enter the title and description of your ad. At the point in your title or description where you would like to insert the keyword, click the Insert Keyword link below the text field. {KEYWORD: DEFAULT_TEXT} will be inserted into your title or description, and you may then replace DEFAULT_TEXT with the keyword of your choice.7. Enter the URL and ad name for the ad.8. Click Save Changes.9. In the Ad Group Details page, find the related keywords in ...
More About: Word

Using a UK Based Web Hosting Company to Improve Google.co.uk
2006-12-31 01:09:01
I am currently in the process of moving this website to a UK based web hosting company. The reason behind this is because in order to get listed in the www.google.co.uk search results, when the UK filter is applied, it is important to have one of either a .co.uk domain (irrespective of the hosting location) or a UK based server. SEOptimise.com doesn't meet either of these requirements at the moment as it uses a .com domain suffix and is hosted by 1&1 in Germany, therefore it hasn't been included in the Google UK SERPs. www.google.co.uk provides 68% of all web searches in the UK, according to Hitwise last month, which obviously means that the site has been missing out on potential traffic from many UK searches where high global rankings have been achieved, being UK based this is a major issue.The switch should be complete in the next couple of days and I'm looking forward to seeing how the UK rankings improve once the new server information has been collected by Google. For anyone...
More About: Hosting , Web Hosting , Company , Comp

Common Google AdWords Questions
2006-12-31 01:09:01
An excellent post from GuyFromChigaco on the DigitalPoint Forums covers many commonly asked Google AdWord s questions:"Q: I Just got started/am planning to start with AdWords . What should I read first?A: Check out the official AdWords Learning Center.Q:What is the quality score?A: AdWords Quality Score defined.Q: Why can't I see my AdWords ad?A: Start with: Can't see my AdWords ad.Q: Can I have multiple AdWords accounts?A: Official Google response.Q: I have to bid $5 or $10 just to activate a keyword. Why?A: You need to improve your keyword's quality score.Q: How often does AdWords reevaluate my landing page?A: "AdWords visits and evaluates advertiser landing pages on a regular basis."Q: How often do you visit landing pages and update Quality Scores?A: We plan to visit pages at least once a month but may do so more often.Q: I'm getting lots of impressions but no clicks. What should I do?A: You should optimize your campaign.Q: Why is AdWords is ignoring my daily budget?A: Make sur...
More About: Question , Questions

Google AdWords Quality Score Column
2006-12-31 01:09:01
A DigitalPoint forum post displays a screenshot and information about the new Google AdWord s quality score column. In my opinion this is an excellent feature to indicate an individual keywords quality score as either poor, OK or great."Quality Score ColumnThe Quality Score column displays your keyword's Quality Score to help you monitor your keyword relevance. This is a customisable column that is disabled by default for new accounts. It can be enabled at any time.Each keyword will be labelled with one of three possible Quality Score states: Great, OK or Poor. Your ads may be performing effectively and with lower costs if your keywords have Great or OK Quality Scores. However, keywords with a Poor Quality Score may need to be replaced with more specific keyword choices. If you do not want to replace poor quality keywords, you can try optimising their associated ad text and landing pages."
More About: Words , Google Adwords , Adwords

Social Media Profiles
2006-12-31 01:09:01
I hope everyone enjoyed a great Christmas! With this week being generally quieter than usual I've taken the chance to work upon a couple of things I've been meaning to do for a while but haven't had time for. One of these is to create and improve my social media website profiles. Building online profiles is a good way to add a few more inbound links to raise the profile of a website and also help to control the top 10 search results for your name or company name queries. If anyone has already signed up for these sites and would like to add me as a friend or contact that would be great and if you need an email address to do this it's kevin 'at' seoptimise.com.Here are some of the profiles I have created:LinkedInMyBlogLogSquidooYahoo360M ySpaceTick Me
More About: Social , Media , Soci , Profile , Profiles

SEOptimise 2006 Stats
2006-12-31 01:09:01
As this blog started early in 2006 I thought I'd post some end of year stats. Top 10 Posts:How to increase StumbleUpon trafficGoogle AdWords account snapshotGoogle AdWords dynamic keyword insertionLinkbait using Google AdWords10 tips to getting started with Google AdWordsCrazy Egg website trackingGoogle digital photo frames arrive in UKA day in the life on an internet marketing consultantGoogle AdWords geo-targeted ads accuracyHow to waste money on AdWordsOther Stat s :293 blog postsTechnorati Rank 94,938 (283 links from 36 blogs)RSS Subscribers: 70Alexa Rating 82,395 (3 months)Yahoo Site Explorer 2,758 links (expect from this domain to entire site)Google SEOpti mise query 9,630 results