Many off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns could be falling short of their full potential due to poor on-site structure and badly written copy, warns PR Company, Punch Communications.

Online PR News – 27-May-2011 –Many off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns could be falling short of their full potential due to . . . → Read More: On-site SEO vital if off-site SEO is to work, Says Punch Communications]]>
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Many off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns could be falling short of their full potential due to poor on-site structure and badly written copy, warns PR Company, Punch Communications.

Online PR News – 27-May-2011 –Many off-site search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns could be falling short of their full potential due to poor on-site structure and badly written copy, warns PR Company, Punch Communications.

Businesses or SEO Agencies undertaking a campaign need to perform a comprehensive review of the website they are going to be promoting before they even entertain starting any off-site activity. Without this initial action, Google and other search engines won’t pick-up on the relativity of the website and page content against the chosen keywords.

On-site activity that needs to be taken into consideration includes ensuring urls are appropriate and search engine friendly, the keywords are suitably used within the copy, website descriptors are correct and, H1, H2 and alt tags are all fitting for the designated landing page.

Ben Leuty, account manager at Punch Communications, commented: “On-site and off-site search engine are two very different animals, almost individual campaigns in their own right, but one won’t work without the other. On-site SEO serves to increase the ease in which a search engine will read the website and decide upon how appropriate it is to the search. If the urls are complicated, the copy incorrect, and the likes of H1 and alt tags not appropriate to the matched keyword, search engines will glace at the site and more often than not, move on to scan the next site. As a result of this, any off-site SEO work will be severely hindered, if not rendered useless altogether.”

Off-site SEO campaigns are effectively link building exercises and increases a websites rankings based on the number of links facing back to a particular page against the relevant search term.

Ben continued: “Punch has a great deal of experience with both on and off-site SEO and currently successfully manages campaigns for almost three quarters of clients. We, ourselves are positioned number one for a number of terms including PR Agencies, PR company, digital PR and many more. A successful SEO campaign is a great means of lead generation and can literally change a business, so it’s well worth taking the time to ensure a website is optimised on-site before any off-site activity is under taken.”

For more information regarding Punch and its PR, Search and Social services, please visit www.punchcomms.com

Incoming search terms:

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This video shows you how to find your unique genetic keyword code.

Use this keyword density tool to get a better landing page quality score and better page rank. The result? Lots more traffic to your website.

Google and Bing are constantly working on integrating the social and search results. Social media becoming the voice of the people cannot be ignored or neglected.

Twitter is  the most popular micro blogging platform as of today .Twitter is a large network and  has the potential to supplement your SEO activities .  If . . . → Read More: 10 Tips to Improve Your SEO Using Twitter]]>

Google and Bing are constantly working on integrating the social and search results. Social media becoming the voice of the people cannot be ignored or neglected.

Twitter is  the most popular micro blogging platform as of today .Twitter is a large network and  has the potential to supplement your SEO activities .  If the tweets from your account are focused and topical then it surely helps you to establish your online reputation and build a brand online. But, on the contrary, vague tweets do not have any SEO benefit and it is just a sheer waste of time and energy.

Below are some tips that you may consider while tweeting which will help in your SEO campaign.

1. Brand Name

Your brand name or username should reflect your site name or offered services as this is what will be mentioned and displayed as your network, re-tweeted your posts. The more re-tweets your post’s get, the higher its significance.

2. Profile / Bio

As a point of reference, put your website link on your profile page. The bio content is the information part of your Twitter. Maximize it and make it relevant to your website, and the link that you display on your twitter profile, point it to a relevant page that will help with your conversions, rather than just pointing it back to your websites home page.

3. Links

Since Google is now displaying  tweets in SERPs, despite nofollow, putting your links on your posts will aid your link building activities or has the potential of giving a wider web presence. Also, accompany your links with effective keywords. You can post your links several times or in interval in order to maximize possible keywords and contents, and exposure.

4. Hash Tags

Hash Tags is a Twitter feature that works like a Meta data for your tweets. These are posts with “#” symbol like “#web” and “#development”. Hash Tags help organize tweets and determine the trending information in Twitter.

5. Mentions

If you to mention users in Twitter you need to put a “@” symbol before their usernames. It is like a retweet effect and the more your account is retweeted, the higher your relevance. It is like voting policy. Hence, whenever you tweet, or Re-Tweet other users ensure to use the @symbol before their username.

6. Be a Help to Others

Re-tweeting, other relevant posts especially those that are of the same niche with yours will help you build your brand and promote your services. Posting everything coming from your site may somehow looks like a spam. Also, as you retweet, you have been a help to others too, by giving your followers a good choice of links to view.

7. Tweet Interval

Do not post bulk of tweets at once as this will annoy your followers, clogging up their stream, but instead spread your tweets out over the day with a decent interval, I would suggest of about an hour or two interval is good.

8. Blog Site

Promoting a blog site like your corporate one is a good option too. Blog sites can provide more information to your visitors and is the best place to interact with them, help them, know their thoughts, allow them to share your articles and contribute contents via comments, and also giving them the option to Re-Tweet your articles.

9. Twitter Button

Twitter button is now a requirement to many websites. It is a great aid to share pages easier.

10. Build your online brand

An effective Twitter account does not just help in your SEO, but will build your online brand, and increase visibility of your company and brand, by building new connections.

Last but not the least, determine a purpose for your Twitter presence. Do you want to focus on customer support or share information about your products and services or would you like to engage with your potential customers or would just like to converse with people from your own industry, etc. Only when you have a purpose you will get a direction and only then it is possible to monitor and measure the success, else it becomes a vehicle without a driver and no destination.

Optimizing your twitter account is optimizing your search engine visibility too. By managing it well, you will have a higher chance to create a bigger network, connect more to people and gain the exposure you need.

Duncan Parry | Mar 30, 2011 | 0 Comments

In January, Google introduced a useful addition to AdWords that potentially makes managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns a lot easier. Maybe it was because January is such a busy time of year, but it’s a feature that seems to have passed . . . → Read More: Easier Negative Keyword Management in AdWords]]>

Duncan Parry | Mar 30, 2011 | 0 Comments

In January, Google introduced a useful addition to AdWords that potentially makes managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns a lot easier. Maybe it was because January is such a busy time of year, but it’s a feature that seems to have passed by many advertisers. Here’s a recap.

What Are Negative Keyword Lists?

Simply put, a central place to store master list(s) of negative keywords and apply them to multiple campaigns. This is an improvement on the old way of doing this in AdWords, when you had to laboriously copy and paste negatives between campaigns — a process which can mean copying thousands of words for a mature campaign that’s been built out over time.

Accessing Negative Keyword Lists

The lists are easy to access. In AdWords, simply click Control panel and library on the left of the screen, and select Negative keyword lists.

In the example above, you can see that I’ve already got a list in place of 127 keywords applied to four campaigns. You can create multiple lists and apply them to different combinations of campaigns.

This is useful if you want to apply a master list of negatives to all campaigns, and another, separate list to only a select few — for example, if your product range is limited in some regions, but not everywhere.

Creating new lists is easy — just click the New negative keyword list button, name the list, and paste in the keywords. You’ll need to spend some time consolidating existing lists across campaigns — more on that later — and then you’ll need to apply them to campaigns. That’s where AdWords interface design provides something of an obstacle.

Applying Negative Lists to Campaigns

Using this feature, it feels like Google designed it without thinking through the workflow involved for existing campaigns (i.e., most of their customers).

Once you’ve created lists, there’s no easy way to apply them to multiple campaigns. Instead, you have to go into every single campaign and then apply the lists(s) that are relevant to that campaign.

Here’s the process:

1. Click All online campaigns on the menu on the left of your screen

2. Click the campaign to apply the list to

3. Click the Keywords tab

4. Scroll to the bottom of this screen

5. Click Negative Keywords

6. On the right of the inflated lists that appear, click Keyword Lists

7. Click Add

8. Click Add next to the negative keyword list you want to apply

9. Repeat across multiple lists

10. Click Save

Unfortunately, you need to repeat these steps for every campaign — there’s no way at the time of writing to select multiple campaigns and apply the same list(s) to them all at once — which would have been a real time saver. There’s no way to apply them to multiple accounts within the same My Client Center (MCC) either, something that would help with enterprise level accounts like national retailers.

Negative Keyword List Deployment Steps

Interface gripes aside, negative keyword lists are a worthwhile addition to any AdWords campaign. Here are some steps to follow to get the most out of them:

1. Download your account via AdWords Editor

2. Sort the columns in Excel and delete all of the rows and columns with anything other that negative keywords and the keyword type in them

3. Use these to plan the lists you need — I’d suggest a Whole Account list of terms you’d never, ever want your ads to appear for, and then any more specific lists you need around those you have in AdGroups or only in some campaigns in the download

4. Rearrange the negatives in the download to populate these lists and save them

5. Add any additional terms that spring to mind, or you can find via search query reports or keyword tools

6. Save the master list(s) and then start adding them via the procedure above

7. Update your campaign build out process to include applying these lists to any new campaigns in future

Negative keyword lists will no doubt become a standard of AdWords campaign management — hopefully Google will improve the interface over time and add support via AdWords Editor and the API, too.

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Duncan Parry, Head of Paid Search Co-Founder of Steak, began his career in search in 1999 at Lycos, during the early days of the search industry.

In 2001, Duncan joined the editorial team at Espotting where he worked on PPC campaigns for some of the UK’s leading brands in finance, travel, recruitment and e-commerce. He left in 2004 to work as a consultant specialising in both paid and natural search, during which time his clients included publisher VNU’s portfolio of UK IT, finance and recruitment websites.

As an industry thought leader, Duncan features regularly in trade press publications, and has also been quoted in the Financial Times. He was a 2007 finalist of the Start Up awards ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ and was selected as a top 50 brightest and best rising star in the science and innovation category of the Courvoisier The Future 500.

Article Archives by Duncan Parry

Dear European Commission: Please Don’t Ruin PPC - Mar 2, 2011

UK PPC: Is Microsoft Distracted in Paid Search? - Feb 2, 2011

How to Keep Up To Date in Search - Nov 19, 2010

5 Ways To Help Your Paid Search Team - Oct 22, 2010

More article archives

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If you just use topic targeting, you will usually receive a lot of impressions; but not necessarily a lot of conversions. It is fantastic for reaching a . . . → Read More: 3 Ways Topic Targeting Can Improve Your Display Advertising]]> Google AdWords has a feature known as topic targeting. This feature allows you to target topics and not necessarily placements or keywords across the Google Display Network.

If you just use topic targeting, you will usually receive a lot of impressions; but not necessarily a lot of conversions. It is fantastic for reaching a large number of people; but targeting on topics alone is fairly broad.

However, you can use topic targeting in conjunction with other AdWords features to improve your content advertising performance.

Fixing The Multi-Intent Keyword Problem

There are some words that have very different user intents. Often these words are in completely different topics. Using topic targeting along with keywords can help refine your ad serving so that your ads are only shown to those you wish to target.

For instance, if you are selling Bleach, you often have a problem with targeting. There is a Japanese show named Bleach. Bleach is also used for laundry. Using the keyword ‘bleach’ is not very useful.

If you are selling Bleach DVDs (the Japanese show), you might think that words such as ‘Bleach DVD” would not be displayed on bleach cleaning sites as why would someone buy a DVD about doing laundry?

The problem is that Clorox did a large promotion with the TV show Mad Men so there are plenty of sites that mention Clorox, Bleach, and DVDs when talking about laundry.

There are many cases like this where it is almost impossible to have both a large display reach and have that reach targeted.

Enter topic targeting.

To fix this problem, you can create your display campaign as usual with keywords and ad copy. Next, navigate to the topic tab and add the categories that are relevant to your topic – in this case it would be Comics and Animation.

In addition, you can have negative topics. If you wanted to ensure that your ads were not displayed on pages associated with cleaning supplies, you can also add those categories as negative topics.

Before you are finished, you need to make sure Google is limiting your ad serving based upon topics. Navigate to your campaign settings and make sure your ads are only being displayed on ‘Relevant pages only on the placements, audiences, and topics I manage’.

Once you have followed those steps, your ads should be displayed more appropriately to an audience that is interested in the Japanese show and not to those doing laundry.

Finding More Inventory On High Traffic Sites

According to Double Click adPlanner, the New York Times has 540 million pages views per month. Very few people would want to buy ads across that entire site. However, with AdWords you could buy ads just in the travel section, which would narrow down your impressions to about 10,000 per day. If you sold airline tickets, you could also input some keywords about air travel so that your ads are only shown on the New York Times travel section when the article is about airline tickets.

While that can be nice targeting to a small to mid-sized account; it ignores too much inventory for a large account. There may be articles in the business section about travel where you would want your ads to show.

This is another place topic targeting can help.

Using placements and keywords together is fantastic targeting; however, often keywords can narrow down your inventory too much due to Google’s theme matching. Using topics with placements can help to find a larger set of relevant inventory on a placement.

To set up placement plus topic targeting, follow all of the steps in previous example except when it’s time to choose keywords – choose placements instead.

Remarket Only To People Interested in Your Topic

Remarketing is an effective way of brining people back to your website. However, what commonly happens is that a user is sent a link from a friend or an outside source and visits an article on your blog,  looks at a product for a friend, or was just curious about a product and has no intention of buying.

However, since they were on your site – they have a remarketing cookie on their browser so you show them lots of ads regardless of the site they are on. These types of scenarios lead to accounts having 100,000 impressions and 4 clicks from their remarketing campaigns.

If you only wanted to show your ad when someone was on a site about your topics; you can combine remarketing with topics.

This can help you reach users only when they are researching a product or service that you offer, and you will not show ads every time they are on a page in the display network.

To accomplish this targeting, follow all of the steps listed in the first example, but instead of adding keywords – add a remarketing list.

Please note: I would not always recommend using topics and remarketing in this way. There are many reasons to show your ads to someone regardless of the site they are currently visiting. This is a technique that some will find useful and others will not.

Conclusion

Topic targeting by itself can drive lots of traffic to your site. However, most people do not have the budget nor the desire, to advertise at the category level. Yet, topic targeting is useful in these three scenarios:

• If you are having problems reaching your market due to multiple keyword intents, topic targeting can help.
• If you like using remarketing, but your budget is small, topic targeting can improve your ad serving.
• If you want more inventory, but still want it to be relevant, topic targeting with placements is a good combination.

Of course, if you just want lots of semi-targeting impressions, you can use topic targeting by itself to serve your ads on a large variety of sites.

The most effective AdWords accounts place some restrictions around their ad serving. Topic targeting is one of those restrictions you can use to improve your ad serving, which should help increase your account’s profits.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

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