SearchPath Blog
SearchPath Internet Marketing Blog - Thoughts, ideas, humour, information and more ...
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Google has announced yet another AdWords tool, the “Conversion Optimiser”.
Still in beta, this is effectively Google’s version of the many big management tools already available. It promises to automate the process of “monitoring and adjusting your cost-per-click (CPC) bids in order to get more conversions for a lower cost”.
The algorithm works by considering several factors each time an ad is eligible to appear. These include:
1. The search query itself. Perhaps people are more likely to convert on more specific terms?
2. The location of the user. Do people in London have a higher conversion rate than those in New York?
3. The conversion history of sites. Do certain websites within site targeted campaigns convert more often?
While this tool claims to take the effort out of running effective PPC campaigns, we are more sceptical. The Conversion Optimiser is after all just an algorithm, meaning human judgment and preferences cannot be taken into account.
In addition, Google has been making increasing efforts to claw back control of PPC campaigns over the past year with different bid options that place the search engine in control.
This utility appears to be Google’s answer to improving advertiser’s returns. However, to truly maximise your ROI there is no alternative to the experience, knowledge and flexibility offered by SearchPath’s
Pay per Click service.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Do you have PDFs on your site? Have you considered the SEO potential of these documents and optimised them accordingly? A useful recent article on Search Engine Land covers some of the SEO techniques that can be used with PDFs, but are often neglected. The article offers tips on
PDF optimisation for high search engine rankings. I will cover some of them here:
1.
Write good, keyword rich content in the PDF. This follows on from one the basic techniques in standard SEO, and ensures the search engines will find your PDF for the keywords you have chosen.
2.
Make sure your PDF's are text based. When the PDF is made using images, the spiders can't read it.
3.
Complete the "title" document property. The equivalent of the HTML title tag, this is the line of text that shows up in the search results. Often it is left blank, with the title of the PDF showing as "pdf". This is unlikely to get clicked. To specify a PDF title, go to File>Document Properties.
4.
Pay attention to the version. The article comments: "While search engines do “read” and index PDFs, search engines’ capabilities tend to lag new versions of Acrobat. Although Acrobat 8 is out, for now you should save your PDFs as version 1.6 (Acrobat 7) or lower to ensure search engines can index the content. Not only is saving PDFs at a lower version good for the search engines, it’s also good for users. Not everyone has the latest versions of Acrobat Reader. Accordingly, I’d recommend saving PDFs as version 1.5 or lower. This way it will be good for search engines and most readers.
5.
Keep you PDF's a manageable size. Not only is this annoying and unnecessary for site visitors, it’s also burdensome for the search engines. If it’s too big, the search engines may abandon the PDF before even getting access to its content. Using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>PDF Optimizer to “right-size” the document.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Just read a very interesting article in NMA about how Facebook and other social networking sites are influencing big brands. The full article can be read on
NMA.
Essentially sites such as Facebook are increasingly sending large volumes of traffic to websites - in August 2007, over 1,900 retailers received traffic from Facebook. Data from Hitwise shows the site is an increasingly important source of traffic for online retailers like Amazon, ASOS, Ebay and Play.
The influence the sites has is illustrated by this comment in the article: "Wherever consumers congregate they inevitably talk about brands, and Facebook is no exception. Companies can't have their own page on Facebook, but communities can be created around brands. The effect can be negative, as when HSBC was forced to change its student banking policies due to pressure from Facebook users. More positively, Cadbury's recently made the news by announcing the reintroduction of its Wispa bar following a grass-roots internet campaign that drew support from over 100 'Bring back Wispa' groups on Facebook."
Primark is particularly popular on Facebook, and this year the fashion retailer has seen a 64% increase in the amount of traffic its website receives from the social network. In the UK, Facebook ranks 20th in terms of delivering traffic to retail websites.
Online brand management is an increasingly important area for companies, in interacting with & influencing consumers, and also in managing any negative feedback.
If you would like to know, call SearchPath on 01285 643 496.
Monday, September 10, 2007
We don't brag too often, but this time it is worth it!
Our latest Internet marketing campaign, for Classic Lawns, has successfully achieved its target of the no. 1 spot on Google for the term 'lawn mower'! (Out of 3.4m competing results).
We can't divulge what this means in terms of traffic but, as you can imagine, our client is delighted with the results!
Friday, September 07, 2007
We still get lots of question about this META tag and what value it still has. Well... most of the top search engines now totally disregard the tag and have done so for a good while. Why? Well just like e-mail used to be a nice thing, so did the keyword META tag (many year ago now though) and then along came SPAM and like a shot something that had its uses is not either not worth using anymore or just a lot more annoying.
Basically, people would just spam the tag with long lists of, mainly, the same words to try to get listed for that term. It didn't really matter if the pages were good or really that relevant so search engines decided, understandably to be a little bit smarter.
So should you still use it? Well we do (old habits die hard)... There are still some search engines who look at it (albeit partially), so our advice is still use it but don't spend too much time on it.
There have also been lots of questions over the years about what format to use. Well we mainly go for...
meta name="Keywords" content="internet marketing, web marketing, search engine optimisation"
i.e. self closing tags with the keyphrases (not words) separated by a space and comma.
It is also a good ways of keeping tabs on the actual keyphrases you are using on the page both direct and long tail.
So, in essence, still use the META keyword tag but don't spend too long over it and don't abuse (even if it is just for old times sake!).
