The first session I attended was presented by Ray “Catfish” Comstock, Senior SEO Director at Business Online. Catfish had a unique personality and although obviously very skilled at SEO seemed to be just or more passionate about landing a record deal. That conflict aside, here are some of the notes I took from the session: Read the rest…
In a recent article in Visibility Magazine, Point It client manager Maria Nikishyna reviews some of the top 10 tips for optimizing landing pages.
A landing page serves as a bridge between the marketing message that brings visitors to your website and the site functionality that enables those visitors to take action, such as filling out a lead form or making a purchase. In essence, it’s your organization’s first impression to the online community. In today’s market,
first impressions are tough to overcome, especially when the competition is just one click away. The old saying holds true, you only get one chance to make a good first impression - so don’t blow it.
Invest some time in testing and optimizing your company’s landing page. If done properly, it can offer a gateway to your business, giving customers the information they need to make purchasing decisions and delivering the essential sales information you need internally to run a successful business. Here are ten quick and easy tips to ensure your landing page meets customer expectations:
MSN now offers publisher placement performance reporting. This should lead to better Content network performance. Here are a couple notes:
Nice job, MSN!
Google Adwords is dangerous.
It’s seductive. It offers the promise of instant profits on one hand, yet on the other it has the potential to reach in to your wallet and clean it out.
Over the last two weeks, our team of client managers has audited almost forty new client and prospects’ campaigns.
Every one of them was hemorrhaging money like you wouldn’t believe. And these are prominent companies with smart marketers. So what’s going on?
The problem is that at first sight Adwords looks so darned easy to use. If you have a website, within thirty minutes you could set up Google Adwords and run ads to your site.
And within thirty one minutes you could just as easily be losing money!
I’ll wager that every Adwords professional lost money on their first campaign. I can recall the excitement I felt when my first ad went live, and the disappointment a day later when I saw how much I’d lost!
So what’s the best approach if you want to use Google Adwords?
I frequently have the opportunity to look into someone’s Adwords account, and almost without fail, I’m greeted by the sight of red flags flying.
It’s painful to see because this signals that good marketing money is going to waste.
So what should you be looking for in your Adwords account? Well you know your PPC is in trouble (and the flags are flying), when:
When I looked further, there were more of them – yikes!
Broad matches can be like runaway trains. They are the “catch all” terms that can be triggered by hundreds of different phrases that you may not have thought of. If they are not watched carefully, they’re off to the races, and so is your money!
A good rule of thumb is if the term is not profitable after 30 -60 clicks, then lower the bid or delete it.
I’ve looked into several Google Adwords accounts recently and it only took few minutes to see where a client was pouring money down the drain - and perhaps why Google’s stock is so high.
My pet theory on Google’s stock price? I’ll bet 80% of its value comes from underperforming keywords! Yes, keywords which never convert to sales yet still run, month after month, unchecked.
So here are a couple of ways to cut your PPC costs today Read the rest…
One of my clients is thinking of putting up a secondary blog on their website (they already have one blog up and running!). So they asked me for an opinion on whether they should use a subdomain or a subfolder for this new blog. This question made me realize that for many bloggers it really is worth thinking about. So, what’s the right answer? Which one should you go with? With SEO in mind, both have their advantages.
No mistake about it, hiring a search agency is a big decision. It could impact the very success or failure of your company and career. You need to find an agency you can trust to make the right decisions for you. Here are the top 10 questions I would ask an agency BEFORE hiring them:
1) How do you charge?
Many SEM’s have different business models for their fees. They can range from a % of media to Cost Per Action and there are many hybrids in between. Just keep in mind, if an agency gets fees as a % of media they are going to be incented to increase your media spend. As an advertiser, is that what you want? If I was an advertiser I’d want my agency to be incented to improve my Cost Per Action (CPA) or Return On Investment (ROI). If that means they have to limit media spend then that’s in my best interest. Some agencies will offer a flat cost per click among all clicks that you receive. This is inherently flawed as well, since they’ll be incented to drive only low cost clicks to you in order to increase margin. Those might not be the competitive keywords however that drive your business.
According to Inside Adwords Blog, Google Finance now shows display ads. Now, this is good news for those of us who have clients in the financial industry. There’s hardly any results yet but Google Finance might be a great opportunity so include Google Finance as your content network placement and get started.
While it is true that metadata has become less important for relevance ranking, it hasn’t lost it entirely. But why bother with it at all? Here are my reasons:
#1. Many search engines still use metadata.
MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and some other engines using Inktomi (What is Inktomi?) still rely on meta keywords for effective relevance ranking. They are aware of the consequences but claim that they are able to detect common spamming techniques and penalize the guilty websites by throwing their ranks to the bottom of their index.
