Online Marketing Blog » search engine marketing

How to Get Started with Google AdWords – For Beginners

George — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 06:45:11 +0000

Google Adwords program is one of the most efficient online advertising program around and is used by companies to get more target leads and get more efficient Return Over Investment. Unlike other advertising program, Google Adwords program is more flexible and it charges per click or impressions (for images). Many companies large and small have turned to Google Adwords pay per click program to get qualified traffic and leads from the Internet.

It is always a demanding one to be an adwords professional, as it requires a great level of analytical and intelligent thinking. One has to be alert enough while playing with adwords campaign management as the keyword trends tend to change very frequently. Most of the companies hire an adwords specialist or outsource it to any other adwords advertising agency available.

It is very east to get started with an adwords service as one just to have a valid Google account to log in. It may take some time before you can be called as an adwords specialist or adwords service professional, but make sure that you make your basics right. If you have a strong basics then adwords campaign management would be like a game for you.

Here I have shared a video which helps to know more about getting started with Google Adwords and this is mainly aimed for those aspiring beginner aiming for a better adwords professional career.

Effective Keyword Research for Better Search Engine Results

George — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:21:20 +0000

A proper Keyword research is the most essential ingredient of a successful SEO campaign. An expertise keyword research professional can very well determine the fate of your search engine rankings. So keyword research is the vital part of SEO which needs to be done with care, patience and skil.

Keyword research mainly includes the identification of the right keywords which are more suitable for your website, so that your website gets more chances for ranking in search engines for the selected keywords. After finalizing the keyword research process, you just need to start optimizing your website for these keywords.

Keyword research needs to be done with much precision and you need to study a lot about the website and the industry the website is related to. While doing a keyword research you should also need to take care of other factors affecting keywords such as location, seasonality etc. Most of the time keyword research is a semi automated process which requires manual research as well as automated work with the help of various tools.

There are quite a good list of keyword research tools and the first one that comes to my mind is the Google Keyword research tool which is very much easy to use and free of cost. This keyword tool gives search information for keywords such as its search volume, Avg CPC, competition etc. But these results are mainly based on Google search results. To get search results based on the other major search engines you needs to go further with some good paid keyword research tools.

Trellian is one such company which offers one of the best keyword research tools and I have found it really effective. It offers you one of the best keyword research and discovery tool known as KeywordDiscovery. I have been using it for the past few years along with other paid tools and I have found Trellian really useful and effective. Trellian offers a trial version of the Keyword Discovery Tool and if your are satisfied with the trial version then you can download the complete version for better keyword research.

The 4 Keyword Match Types in Google Adwords

George — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:33:12 +0000

This post is mainly for those who are new to Google Adwords and those who would like to know more about the different search types used in Adwords campaigns. As we all know that Google Adwords is a paid tool is mainly used for running pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign to drive more relevant traffic to a website. Google Adwords are helpful for those who want instant flow of traffic and cannot wait for the site to get organic traffic.

Extensive and clever keyword research is necessary for getting better results from your Adwords campaign. While selecting keywords for your PPC campaign, there are mainly 4 types of keyword categories that you would come upon. These different keyword types are mainly based on the requirement of the site, the keywords competitiveness etc. Here i would like to shed some brief intro on the 4 keyword types that you would be using while managing your Google Adwords campaign.

1) Broad match
Broad match allows to show ads for keywords which have similar phrases and for the relevant variations of keywords. This is the most common and default keyword type that is used in Google Adwords campaign. Consider that you are bidding on a keyword “buy toys”. The ad will show for keywords such as toys, purchase toys, electronics toys etc. In this case your ad would be displayed for a broad range of keywords and there is always chance of irrelevant ads showing up.

2) Phrase match
Phrase match keywords show ads for keywords that contain the phrase that you have mentioned. Phrase match keywords helps in displaying more targeted keywords, but at the same time it is more flexible. As a result it helps you in showing up more relevant keywords and thereby saving your money. For eg. if you keyword is “leather shoes”, Google will show ads for keyword phrases such as “but leather shoes”, “best leather shoes”, “leather shoes for men” and so on.

3) Exact search
Exact search is the most effective of the keyword types and shows ads for only the exact keywords that is mentioned in the Adwords campaign. This is helpful in showing up the most targeted ads and helps in optimizing your Adwords budget to a great extent. For example if you keyword is “buy shoes”, ads would be displayed only for the keyword “buy shoes”

4) Negative Search
Consider that you do not want to show ads for any search that includes a particular term, e.g your keyword is “leather shoes” and you do not want to show ads when someone searches “italian leather shoes”, then you can use the Negative search option.

These four terms are just the basics that you need to know while you start doing Adwords campaign. There are more stuffs that you need to know which I would be covering later.

Solving Duplicate File Issue with Search Engines

George — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:46:34 +0000

Duplicate content have always been an obstacles for webmasters while going for search engine optimization. Many of the webmasters got their site penalized by the search engines for using duplicate content in their website. The main case of duplicate content arises when multiple URLs on the same domain pointed to the same content. This issue mainly arises in dynamic and CMS driven sites and the webmasters really live with the fear of being penalized by the search engines. The case arises when more than a single URL on the same website points to the same content under certain conditions. Consider pages in a CMS driven web site http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs&category=chairs and http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?item=woodchairs&trackingid=3254&sessionid=7184 which points to the same content at http://www.yoursite.com/products.php?item=woodchairs

Here the first two URLs are pointing to the same content even though they have different URL parameters, which may cause duplicate content issue. There are mainly 2 ways to solve this issue. One is the Parameter Handling technique and the other is by using rel=”canonical” tag. By doing this the search engine would be able to understand this duplicate issue and the chances of being penalized are reduced, but not guaranteed. Parameter handling is done at the host level via Google Webmasters tool, whereas rel=”canonical” tag has to be put on each web page.

The rel=”canonical” tag is more effective as it is applicable to almost all the search engines, whereas Parameter Handling is applicable only to Google. This tag is to be put inside the section of the duplicate URLs.

By doing this the search engines would understand these duplicate URLs all refer to the main URL and avoids penalty. All other additional URL properties are also transferred during this.

5 Social Bookmarking Sites that Drives Huge Traffic to a Website

George — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:58:01 +0000

Social Bookmarking sites allows you to bookmark your favorite websites / web pages and access it from anywhere in the world. Social Bookmarking sites are the best sources to get traffic to your site, provided used in the proper way. A lot of social bookmarking sites have surfaced since last few years and all these book marking sites are used in order to get adequate traffic to websites. Social Bookmarking also serves as a good resource for getting back links and these sites are regularly indexed by search engines. Among all the social bookmarking websites available, there are some sites which send enormous traffic to your site. As per my experience, I would like to list the top 5 social bookmarking sites that have send traffic to my websites all along. The listing is in the order of the amount of traffic generated.

1) Digg

Digg currently tops the chart in terms of traffic generation and is the most used social bookmarking site. Digg enjoys an Alexa rank of 114 and Google Page rank of 8. Digg allows you to submit web pages and Digg’s voting and commenting system enables to get the webpage to the Front pages or most popular section of Digg. Once your site gets on to the front page, the traffic that you are going to enjoy is enormous.

2) Stumbleupon

The second most traffic generating social bookmarking site, StumbleUpon is also know for the quality of traffic it generates. With a Google Page rank of 6 and Alexa traffic rank 298, Stubmleupon helps in getting relevant traffic and that too in bulk. This social bookmarking site also uses the user voting system for the submitted items and is a major source for traffic generation.

3) Reddit

Reddit is another social bookmarking news site which has a unique way of operation. Reddit also has user voting and commenting system, which determines the fate of your website. Once your site gets on to the front page of Reddit, get prepared to receive an outburst in the website traffic. Reddit holds a Google Page rank of 8 and Alexa page rank of 475.

4) Delicious

Delicious is a classic example of Social Bookmarking site and as compared with sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon, Delicious is not focused on votes. Rather the popularity of a story in Delicious depends upon the number of users who have saved a particular page as bookmark, along with the tags. Delicious has a Google Page rank of 6 and Alexa Page rank of 527.

5) Mixx

Mixx is a small social bookmarking site which is growing in the right way. May not bring the enormous traffic to you, but still have a lot of varieties which makes it one of the best social bookmarking sites. Mixx is also based on voting system and the articles with sufficient vote reaches the popular page and as a result traffic flows to your site. Mixx enjoys a Google Page Rank of 8 and an Alexa ranking of 911.

Link Exchange and Things to Take Care

George — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:42:44 +0000

Reciprocal linking is practiced by a vast number of SEO / webmasters around the globe for a long time. This helped to get better ranking and backlinks for the websites in the initial stages, but as time progress reciprocal linking was started being used in the most unethical way and gradually search engine (especially Google) started cutting down on many sites which offered reciprocal linking services in an aggressive way. Many of the link exchange sites got penalized by Google in a really bad way. As per my experience, since then the link exchange stuff does not seem to work and many webmasters stopped wasting their valuable time on link exchange. But that doesn’t mean that reciprocal links have lost all its value.

Even now many of the companies are giving much importance to link exchange strategies and convinces the client that link exchange is the ultimate thing for a successful SEO campaign. It has been found out that Google red flag the sites which exceed a particular amount reciprocal links. But it the fact is also that, if you have reciprocal links from quality website, it won’t harm you either. But the debate still continues and it is better to stay away from link exchange with spammy, irrelevant and low quality sites. If you want to do link exchange, here are some of the things that need to keep in mind.

1) Check the quality of the site that you wish to exchange links.

2) Check the relevancy of the site.

3) Check the page rank of the page, where your link is supposed to be placed.

4) Try to maintain a particular limit for the number of backlinks for your site.

5) Check the age of the website with which you wish to do link exchange.

These are only a few things, but there are many more which depends upon the nature of the website. But if we keep the above points in mind, it would help us in getting better rankings. After all we must not forget that it is the quality, not quality that counts in the end.

Digg – A Beginner’s Guide to Digg

George — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:40:07 +0000

This posting is for those who are new to Digg, the King in social media site, or those who wish to know more about Digg and its functions.

Digg is among the top social bookmarking sites around and is known for its popularity and the amount of traffic it brings to a site. Digg is mainly used to submit and promote sensational news, articles, blog postings, videos, images etc which creates some sort of wave among the users. Digg is one of the most used social media sites, and is one of the best social media sites to drive traffic from, if used in the proper way. Digg was started back in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. Many other social media sites today has drawn inspiration from Digg.

The basics of Digg is discovering and sharing content on the internet by submitting links, and voting and commenting on those links. Basically Digg has two sections.

1) Front Page or Popular Section
Once the stories submitted in Digg acquires some amount of Votes (Diggs) and comments in a particular time frame, it is promoted to the Popular section or the Front page. The stories that appear on the front page of Digg is supposed to get a huge traffic depending upon the nature of the story / Image / Video submitted. The amount of traffic mainly depends upon the time the story spends on the front page. The more time an article stays on the front page, the more the traffic to the site.

2) Upcoming Section
The upcoming sections lists the submissions that are yet to hit the Digg Front page, and is mainly categorized as the Most Recent, Most Digg and Most Comments subsection. Once you are logged into Digg, you would also be able to see the Recommendations section which is classified into Most Recent, Most Matches and Most Digg subsection. The Recommendation section shows articles based on the behaviour of your profile. There is also the Hot section in the upcoming section, which is displayed on the right navigation, which helps in getting Diggs for that particular articles on the Hot section.

These are the most basic things about Digg, and to remind you – do not use it for spamming purposes. Digg might ban your profile, your IP address or even the particular website that your are submitting. So Digg has to be handled with care. Apart from this there are many other things which are required to be successful in Digg, which I would blog about in the coming days. Still then get an idea about Digg, and stay tuned for other Digg related articles on this blog. If any one has some queries you can mail me at georgescifo at gmail dot com.

New Way to Run Local Ads in Google Adwords

George — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:39:02 +0000

We need to have local business ads as a separate ad unit in Google Adwords in Order to run local Ads. Now Google is ready to come up with the local extension feature which helps the users to create local ads by dynamically attaching your business address to ads. This feature also helps to add the extensions to your existing text ads. Business owners can set up this extension by linking the Adwords campaign with Local Business Center (LBC) and others have to manually enter the address into Adwords. The address along with the ads would be shown based on the relevancy of the search. If there is not relevant address based on the search, then no address would be displayed on the ads.

With the coming of location extensions, the local business ads would no more be a separate ad format. The local extension feature also gives more variety to your audience targeting. The local extension feature helps to reach the local customers in a more effective way and showing them relevant information. In short the feature helps in promoting the business brand, products, services, and associates your business with a specific location of interest to the user. This is applicable whether the ad appears in Google Search, Content Networks, Google Map and Google earth.

The steps for adding or editing the ad’s address extensions are given below.

1) Log into your Adwords account.

2) Select the campaign which you wish to edit.

3) Click on the Settings tab.

4) In the settings area go to Audience – > Locations and select one of the options shown under Show relevant addresses with your ads.”
a) Business Owners
b) Non Business Owners.

5) Then Click Save.

Hope this becomes useful for who needs to adding/editing their address extensions.

Does Just Getting Backlinks Guarantee Better Results on Google?

George — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:01:08 +0000

We all know that getting backlinks to our site plays a major role in getting better search engine placements. Most webmasters try to get as many inbound links as possible to ensure better search engine ranking for their site. This is a good ploy, but at times a website with more back links than its competitor may be ranking lower for the same keyword when compared with its competitor. This is a general scenario most webmaster faces and this issue should be deeply looked into. There are various reasons why a website with more inbound links than its competitor is losing the battle in the search engine rankings with its competitor for the same keywords. Just getting many backlinks alone does not aumatically make your site keywords rank highly.

As we all know that Google determines the ranking of websites in search results based on various metrics such as onpage and offpage factors.
On page factors are those which are visible on your website by making changes in the HTML code. On the other hand offpage factors are those factors that are not visible on your website but are done by working on external sites. So both offpage and onpage factors plays an important role in your search engine results. Offpage factors inlcudes link building activities such as article submissions, directory submissions, promoting the site through forums, blogs, social media sites etc. There are are certain parameters to keep in mind while getting backlinks for your site.

1) Try to get better backlinks, i.e quality backlinks from sites which are relevant to your site content.
2) Avoids links from link farms, low grade directories and other spammy sites.
3) Try to get links from pages with better page ranks, ie, 3 and above.
4) Add compelling content on your site and prompt other webmasters to link back to you.
5) Try to get your major keywords included in the anchor text of your inbound links.

These are the basic offpage factors needed for you to have an edge over your competitors in search engine results. Try these things and I am pretty sure that the results would be there at the doorstep for you.

10 Blog Directories You Should Submit Your Blog To

George — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 08:10:22 +0000

When you plan to set up a blog, there would be many factors that come to your mind. First the blog should be neat, the content should be compelling and the most importantly the blog should drive traffic. More traffic means more readers, followers and other extra income. So usually we try to make the blog as Search Engine friendly as possible and add all the available SEO plugins. Also we try to take care while deciding on the keywords, to get more traffic. Apart from this we also try to get links from other sites, which are very much related to our blog in terms of content. Another way to promote your blog is to submit your blog to various blog directories, which contains list of the blogs and are arranged according to the theme of the blogs. These directories make it easier for other to find blogs related to their interest and helps us in getting targeted visitors. There are various blog directories available, but I would like to list 10 of them which I have found useful.

1) Bloggeries – Bloggeries is a good blog directory which accepts blogs and has various sub categories. It also has features such as forums, listing of the most viewed blog, latest blogs etc.

2) Blogged.com – This is a free directory and shows the postings of the blogs as a News feeder format. This has various features such as following others, starting discussion etc.

3) Blog Explosion – Blog Explosion is another free blog directory which helps in getting traffic to your site. Once you submit your site, it would take up to 7 days to get your site approved or rejected.

4) Super Blog Directory – This is another blog directory with useful features such as the latest submitted links and blogs, most popular blogs, top rated blogs etc.

5) Bloggapedia – Bloggapedia is another free blog directory with a good layout and helps to see the most popular searches in the directory.

6) Bloggernity – Another blog directory which is free and worth for blog submission. Offers features such as forums, blog search etc.

7) Blog Universe – Blog Universe is another unique blog directory which is used to submitted video and podcast blogs.

8 ) Blogcatalog – This blog directory serves as a social community for bloggers and helps in searching, connecting with other bloggers, promoting your own blog etc.

9) Blog Hub – Another important blog directory with features such as new blogger list, hot topics etc.

10) Spill Bean – Spill Bean is another attractive and simple blog directory which helps you to submit your blog for free.

There might be other blog directories which I have missed, but these 10 directories seems to be more important to me. Hope you have enjoyed reading this.