Tips and Tricks for the Advanced SEO

Keith Vera (@KeithVera)
Client Services Manager

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to attend SMX Advanced in Seattle, WA, and hear some strong presentations from some great SEOs. Overall the conference was very informative and a lot of fun. I attended the majority of the SEO tracks on both days of the conference, and my favorite session was “Build It Better: Site Architecture for the Advanced SEO, featuring @beussery, @ audette, and @SEO_Girl.

I found that on the whole, the SEO-focused sessions covered a lot of topics that are not only highly relevant in today’s natural search space, but also covered individual components of strong SEO programs that sometimes get overlooked or bypassed altogether. I’m going to cover a few of these SEO methods, tips and tricks that I have been working on implementing across various campaigns.

• As reiterated from @mattcutts of the course of the conference, in Google’s eyes, user experience is the key. Website and information architecture complements a good SEO strategy, and a strong user experience should always be the starting point with site design. SEO best practices can be leveraged later to achieve the best possible SEO value. In the simplest of terms, the primary consideration when looking at site information architecture is focusing on structuring all of a site’s content so that it can be easily absorbed by both your target audience and the engines.

• Images make good search results (and link bait) as they can give strong and relevant answers to specific search queries. Search engines will align images within SERPs or photo SERPs when images appear to match user intent. A few important points to remember when optimizing images for search are the file name, alt tags, text, captions, image quality, and includes in your XML sitemap. The example used by @beussery that I really feel drives home the point for optimization around images, is a result for the query “how to tie a necktie”. This is an example of a great result that is sure to drive a click response.

• While we’re touching on the subject of images for link bait, @chrisbennett’s presentation during the “Show Me The Links” track gave some really strong information on utilizing infographics for link bait. The best infographics are visually pleasing, and have a unique way of taking a significant amount of data and compressing it into a digestible format, or finding a unique way of representing that data. Good infographics are easy link bait, as they offer a lot of information in a small and interesting package. The following example of an interesting infographic that comes from Infographics Showcase:

There you have it, a few core ideas we took away from SMX Advanced that will hopefully inspire some new SEO ideas and activities. Have any success stories around these points that you’d like to share? Comment below:

Google Officially Acquires AdMob

Keith Vera

Client Services Manager

On Friday, Google announced that it had made another giant step towards growing its mobile internet advertising options by officially acquiring AdMob. According to Google and as seen on the AdWords Blog on Friday:

"It’s clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients’ and partners’ strategies and with this acquisition, it’s now a central part of our own business. In continuing to invest in this highly competitive area, we’ll be bringing together our technology, resources and expertise in search advertising with AdMob’s innovative solutions for advertising on mobile websites and in mobile applications."

As the adoption of smart phones continues to grow, all major advertising players are looking to expand their capabilities and move into emerging markets. Google’s mobile search volume alone has grown exponentially in just the past two years, and smart phone searches through WebKit browsers are up over 62 percent from the previous quarter. With the addition of AdMob’s capabilities to the growing variety of mobile advertising options, marketers will be able to take advantage of the extensive reach and timely value of reaching consumers directly on their mobile devices like never before. Let us know your thoughts on Google’s AdMob acquisition by commenting below…

Facebook: New features let users share as they browse

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

Looking to move more into competition with Google, Facebook announced today new features that will help Facebook users share their web activity with their contacts, or friends, as they browse the web. Focused on the peer connection, Facebook hopes to continue to grow its social media dominance by further connecting “friends”, allowing them to share web activity and interests outside of the Facebook website.

How it works: Websites can now install a “like” button or even use widgets that lets users share web content with their friends outside of Facebook.com. Comments and “likes” on content will show up on friend’s Facebook home pages, effectively sharing users browsing history, preferences, and interests (that they choose to share of course) as they move through the web outside of Facebook.com. Websites with large amounts of content will be able to take this new social browsing standard one step further, and outline within their pages what someone’s peers liked or recommended within a site.

The Washington Post has a interesting new Facebook news feature on the home page that will show the most popular Facebook “shared” articles, and the browsing activity of Facebook friends on the Washington Post site as long as you are logged into Facebook or Facebook Connect. Here is an image of the Washington Post homepage widget:

Washington Post Facebook Widget

Here is the expanded view of the feature showing the most popular overall activity as well as Friend activity:

Washington Post Facebook Widget

You can read a bit more on the announcement from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. Be sure to comment on this post and let us know your thoughts on the new Facebook changes and the impact.

Google AdWords Click-to-Call Update

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

Last month we talked about the launch of the new AdWords click-to-call feature as Google rolled out the service to all paid-search advertisers. Now, Google has rolled out a strong enhancement that brings click-to-call functionality to all mobile-triggered searches regardless of a users location through phone extensions. Advertiser phone numbers can now appear as the last line of ad text, and can be applied to all existing or new campaigns. Here is an example of what an advertisement utilizing the new phone extensions enhancement might look like:

Google AdWords Phone Extensions

We've been utilizing Google's new Click-to-Call features for some of our clients and have a few suggestions if you would like to take your PPC ads to the next level and implement click-to-call utilizing phone extensions:

• Treat your click-to-call campaigns as separate programs from your traditional PPC campaigns, much as you would campaigns that focus on advertising on the content network.
• Focus on the more general terms around your brand or product at first, with the goal of capturing users who are actively searching for your company, products or services. These users are more likely to be your stronger target-audience segment, and further down your conversion-funnel.
• Test and optimize your mobile campaigns just as you would your standard PPC campaigns, be sure to check your mobile calls-generated statistics frequently.
• Finally, be sure that you have a system in place to handle the new inbound call traffic. If your call center doesn't operate 24 hours a day, day-part your click-to-call campaigns to only operate during hours you can handle calls.

Let us know what you think of this new click-to-call AdWords feature by commenting below...

Google rolls out click-to-call for AdWords

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

After a successful testing of the new AdWords click-to-call feature, Google has rolled out the service to all paid-search advertisers. AdWords click to call now “makes it even easier for potential customers to reach you by adding a location-specific business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers”. Phones with full browser capability that can show standard HTML web pages, like the iPhone, will allow phone number in the ads to be clicked to make phone calls direct to a business. The ads can be served based on a users specific location, automatically displaying the business location closest to the user.

View how click-to-call adverting works, shown in the Google Mobile (Ad)itude video:
Mobile [Ad]itude 9 with Meredith: Click to Call Ads

Costs to advertisers are the same as the cost for a click, which is a very cost effective way to generate calls to a business. Let us know what you think of the new click-to-call AdWords feature, and if you’ve seen the same type of boost in click-through rates that trail participants reported.

Online Marketing Trends to Lookout for in 2010

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

As we close out the year here at EyeTraffic Media, every one of us has felt the need to take the time to reflect on 2009, and look ahead to identify key upcoming online marketing trends that we can expect to see over the course of next year. Digital marketing trends and subsequent marketer’s tactics are constantly evolving, and in such a fluid space about the only thing that we can expect is that the high ROI strategies of today are not going to deliver forever. Outlined below are a few thoughts on what we think you can expect to see evolving throughout 2010, and things that marketers should be planning for to maximize their upcoming strategy.

- Complete Digital Footprint: 2009 was the year that establishing social profiles became an integral part of many company marketing mixes, and it’s not difficult to see why. Gone are the days where simply having a website, an online face to your company, is a sufficient web presence. 2010 is the year where many companies will find their online voice. Social profiles allow companies to interact with potential clients and customers directly, and expand communication beyond a one-way blog or newsletter to include community building around a brand, and forums open for discussion. Developing your holistic online footprint is just the beginning of making the most out of the social space however, which leads us to…

- Real-time Communication: Real-time updates are available across every major social profile and is, of course, the basis of Twitter. As the world of real-time online status updates and news feeds develop across social platforms and SEARCH ENGINES, target audiences will expect the same value and convenience of real-time communication from marketers that they get in their everyday lives from friends, family and colleagues. Of course where marketers reach their audience in 2010 is something else entirely, bringing us to…

- Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing growth has accelerated over the past year; with the introduction of new smart devices more people are accessing the web via their phone than ever before. Social communication has gone mobile, as has significant percentages of search, and the mobile application market has exploded. Expect to see an increased focus and spend in the mobile arena in 2010 as companies focus on reaching consumers directly on their smart device through status alerts, sales updates, product or coupon information, and location-based information.

These are just a few trends we at EyeTraffic expect to see in the upcoming year. Do you have any that you would like to add to this list? Post your comments below.

Google AdWords Translator Toolkit

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

Google announced Tuesday AdWord's new Google Translator Toolkit, which includes "translation search, bilingual dictionaries, and custom terminology databases. This new toolkit could help advertisers that are targeting audiences in different countries to translate their campaigns more efficiently.

Translator Toolkit:

Have you used Google's new Translator Toolkit yet? If so, let us know what you think by posting up some comments.

EyeTraffic Adds New Client, Mervis Diamond Importers

Keith Vera
Client Services Manager

We are extremely excited to announce our newest client, Mervis Diamond Importers. Mervis is the authority for diamonds, engagement rings, wedding bands, and diamond studs in DC, Virginia, and Maryland.

We look forward to building and tracking measurable interactive marketing campaigns that create lasting relationships between Mervis and their customers.

Learn more about diamonds from Mervis here. We're fans of Mervis, and you can be, too at http://www.mervisdiamond.com/facebook.

Social Media in a B2B World

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Social media has become increasingly important in the B2B space, and lately is beginning to be recognized as a significant lead source. All social media is centered on mutual affiliations or interests, providing large pockets of online communities that B2B companies should be leveraging for lead generation and branding efforts. Of course to capture interest in these communities, a company need to become an active participant that provides a lasting value through the different social channels. Below, we’ll take a quick look at how providing fresh content and ideas allows B2B companies to become more visible and valued to target audiences in the top social media channels.

• Blogging: Blogging should be centered on industry specific topics, and need to be published regularly to help build and grow an audience base. Blogging can lead to solid lead generation as a loyal readership and “community” builds. Blogs should be used as a platform for company and industry updates, and stimulating thought leadership in any industry.
• Facebook: Facebook has become an increasingly resourceful messaging platform for B2B companies. Creating company and product fan pages allows for tremendous visibility and also allows a company to communicate directly with its fans and evangelists. New information shared on these fan pages is also automatically streamed to fan’s Facebook news updates, helping to create a constant connection between a company and its community.
• Linked In: LinkedIn should be utilized to close the social loop in a B2B professionals community, particularly as it is a business-focused network. Take advantage of LinkedIn group announcements and company status updates to automatically promote company messaging across linked industry groups and professional connections.
• Twitter: Twitter is a great platform for pushing company messaging, news and events out to a collective audience. There is a lot of visibility to be gained by simply getting the word out about your company or products and services. Tweets can be at will or scheduled, and ReTweets with different calls to action are particularly effective as audience growth mandates more tweet volume to generate message visibility.

Take a look at EyeTraffic’s social media specialist Blake Bowyer’s blog for tips on social media messaging 10 Pithy Social Media Tips in 140 Characters or Less. Don’t forget to Comment, and tell us how you’ve been leveraging social media in the B2B space.

Rich Media and Video in AdWords

Keith Vera

Account Manager

Google is making it easier for advertisers to build, display and track new Rich Media and Video advertisements in AdWords through new templates in the display ad builder. One of the major benefits of this new services is that it allows advertisers to track interactions with their advertisements ("mouseover rate"), display multiple products or areas within the ad, and use multiple destination URLs to fit each ad feature. Below is a quick demo:

Social Networking Surpasses Email

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Social networking now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time according to the latest Nielsen report, surpassing email in internet activity popularity. The report “Global Faces and Networked Places” looks at data from December 2007 through December 2008, and finds that not only do “member communities” exceed email in participation; the sector is experiencing twice as much growth than any of the 5 most popular online spaces.

Much of this growth can be attributed to the increasing popularity of social networks among an older demographic. As reported by Christine Pepin in February, females over the age of 55 are one of the fastest-growing Facebook user segments, growing by 175% over the last quarter alone, with males over 55 growing over 137%. This new growth helps put over 45% of all Facebook users over the age of 26.

Google News Gets Paid Advertisements

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google made good on their promise in November to bring paid advertisements to some of their vertical search engines. Yesterday, Google launched paid advertisements on the Google News search-results pages in the United States.

This launch comes on the heels of similar testing and launches across other Google properties including Image Search, Finance, and sponsored videos on YouTube.

Successful Landing Page Components

Keith Vera
Account Manager

The importance of landing pages in the success of a PPC campaign is often overlooked. For conversion-focused campaigns, properly designed and tested landing pages are just as important as the ad text that gets the visitor there, affecting everything from the bounce rate to campaign ROI.

Most successful landing pages contain the same components, but before we get into what those mostly universal items are, the first thing a landing page needs to deliver on is what the PPC ad promised that got the visitor to click initially. Irrelevant information on landing pages will result in a lost visitor almost instantly, even if your site does offer what they are looking for. If that information is not immediately evident that visitor has most likely departed your site in favor of a competing site. To make sure a page delivers on the ad promise, a quality PPC landing page should contain the following:

- Product or Title paralleling what was offered in the PPC advertisement

- Information regarding the product or service, outlining the benefits concisely

- Prominent call-to-action above the fold

Now of course there are other factors on the actual page build that are important, but these three points are consistent across all of our most successful PPC campaign landing pages. Let us know your thoughts, and what has worked for your PPC campaign landing pages.

For a great source on landing page design I highly recommend MarketingSherpa’s 2008 Landing Page Handbook.

Google Announces New Search-Based Keyword Tool

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google announced yesterday the release of a new “search-based keyword tool", currently in beta. This new tool is designed to help advertisers find appropriate Google AdWords keywords that are relevant to a particular landing page they want to use, essentially taking the guesswork out of keyword selection. Just plug in your website and a list of terms is returned that will help you better understand what your “potential customers” are actually searching on to find your products or services.

The problem with this new approach, for service based businesses in particular, is that the site or pages the new tool will make keyword suggestions for are (or should be) already optimized for highly relevant terms based on search volume. These terms are found through traditional keyword research like using the keyword tool Google already offers. Just to test, I ran two different service-based sites through the new tool, one currently optimized for SEO, and one that is not. Naturally, the site optimized for SEO had many keyword suggestions that were highly relevant to the site, along with all the important information like monthly search volume, competition level, and suggested bid price. The site that is not currently optimized returned just one extraneous-for-paid-search keyword suggestion.

It appears that the new search-based tool is only significantly valuable if the site that it is analyzing is properly optimized or able to be crawled easily by Google. I can see this new tool being useful to help analyze current landing pages, or to possibly catch some keyword terms that advertisers may have missed during initial keyword development. Let us know your thoughts on Google's new search-based tool.

Google AdWords Quality Score Update

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google announced Thursday through their blog a major update to how AdWords Quality Score is calculated. According to Google, here are the updates that advertisers can expect:

- Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query

- Keywords will no longer be marked 'inactive for search'

- 'First page bid' will replace 'minimum bid' in your account

What does this update mean for advertisers? For starters, all keywords in campaigns that are currently inactive for search will suddenly be active. If bids on those terms are low enough then there should not be too much of an issue, however if bids are high enough for those terms to show ads, a large unexpected spike in spend for those campaigns could occur. AdWords users will also most likely see cost-per-clicks across their campaigns rise in the coming months, as more advertisers take advantage of the new fist page bid option.

These changes will roll out slowly over the next few days before they are fully implemented. Advertisers can also expect to see future updates to AdWords Editor and the AdWords API to reflect the new "first page bid" option.

Google Captures Mobile Search Majority in Q1

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Almost mirroring its traditional search presence, Google was able to capture 61% of the total mobile search market in the first quarter of 2008. According to a recently released report by Nielsen Mobile, Google ranked highest in mobile searches, with Yahoo and MSN following with 18% and 5% respectively.

According to Hitwise, Google captured 68.29% of all searches in May, 2008. Yahoo and MSN followed as usual with 19.95% and 5.89% respectively. Below is the Hitwise chart showing month-over-month and May 07 to 08 market shares for the big three:

PDF Optimization

Keith Vera
Account Manager

PDF downloads are a great way to publish content to your site and establish extra conversion points for any interactive marketing campaign. Optimizing those PDFs on your site however, is particularly important and often overlooked during the creation process. If PDFs are not created correctly search engines will not be able to index their content, and like all un-optimized content, that PDF will be a wasted opportunity to improve search engine rankings.

Galen De Young recently blogged about the different strategies marketers can use to optimize PDFs for the web, as a follow up to Marketing Sherpa’s article: How to Optimize Your PDFs to Increase Search Traffic: 10 Steps

Below are several key takeaways from both Galen’s blog and the article:

- Not all PDFs are created equal: PDFs that are picture based or are scans of original documents will not allow engines to index the text. Instead create PDFs straight from Microsoft Word documents

- Use the PDF properties to add an optimized title for the document

- Build links into all of your PDFs

- Make sure to use keyword-rich anchor tags to link to your PDFs

- Specify the reading order in the document so the engines know which text is the most important and will help you with the indexed description of the document

Mobile Advertising Obstacles

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Mobile advertising is the next generation of online advertising that will eventually rival the search advertising market. According to EMarketer Inc., the mobile advertising market is predicted to reach $16.2 billion globally by 2011. However unlike current online advertising and unfortunately for the search giants, there are a few hurdles that may keep mobile advertising from the mainstream in the US for quite some time.

US wireless carriers are presenting a significant obstacle for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, as they try to tap into the growing mobile advertising market. Currently, mobile web access is very restricted in the US due to high subscription costs from service providers. Wireless carriers are wary to give up any control over their mobile phone users, and are approaching this emerging market very carefully as to not lose out on new revenue streams. The main concern for US wireless carriers is that inexpensive web access would allow mobile search users to go directly to Google or Yahoo mobile, avoiding their own revenue-generating mobile services.

Of course there are other small obstacles, such as a clumsy mobile experience from most presently available mobile-ready phones; however the main mobile advertising barrier remains between US wireless carriers and the search engines.

So what’s your opinion? Will the search giants come to an agreement with wireless carries to bring mobile advertising to the mainstream US in the near future, or will the two groups have a much longer wait to capitalize on this up-and-coming revenue stream?

Changes to Google AdWords Site Targeting

Keith Vera
Account Manager

The Google AdWords Site Targeting Campaign program has been redubbed "Placement Targeting" and features new options. The renaming of the site targeting tactic as reported by the Inside AdWords Blog comes from the upgraded drill level in which advertisers can now place their advertisements on sites within the Content Network. Advertisers can choose to show their ads all the way down to precise subsections of sites and even a specific ad block on a Content Network page.

Along with the new improvements, Google is also introducing a new cost-per-click bidding option allowing advertisers to pay per click, or per impression depending on needs. Conversion focused campaigns can be run on a CPC basis to maximize ROI, while branding oriented campaigns can be run on a CPM basis to maximize impression share.

Share your experience with Placement Targeting.

Google to Stop Pre-Announcing Quality Score Updates

Keith Vera
Account Manager

Google announced Tuesday that they will no longer alert advertisers about upcoming landing page quality score updates on their Inside AdWords blog.

“Lastly, you may recall past Inside AdWords blog notices alerting advertisers about upcoming landing page quality updates. Since our systems frequently visit landing pages and update Quality Scores on a regular basis, we will no longer post advance notice of upcoming updates. We will, however, continue to inform you of any significant changes to landing page quality guidelines or the factors which are considered in calculating landing page quality.”

Despite the stoppage of the pre-announcements to quality score changes, the Inside AdWords blog is still a great resource for landing page quality guidelines. Learn more about what makes a quality landing page at the Google AdWords Help Center.