Content is what Search Engines want to index, sort and bring to the searchers. Relevant content is desired by all who want their site to be a stopping point in the daily life of the internet. But there is content that can actually harm your site or business if you are not careful to implement a few guidelines. 1. Review factual content to make sure it’s still correct and valid The last thing you want to be known for is being “outdated.” Whatever your industry, make sure that the products, methods and services are “up to code” so-to-speak. Dispensing outdated information is the same as dispensing false information and will damage your credibility. 2. Don’t refer to dates if possible Referring to articles or writing your own is great for your company’s website. It shows that you are a thought leader and have 3rd-party information that backs up your agenda. However, if the articles date is over a year old, it can start to show its age. It is worse for tech related companies since the environment changes rapidly. If the information is still foundational, remove the dates. 3. Give your old offers a decent burial Everyone is looking for a deal and providing a coupon or special offer is expected. If your offer is for a limited time, then there are some precautions you should take. Such as putting an expiration date on your offer, take note of all the pages you post your offer and keep your offer from being indexed by using by modifying your robot.txt file . Remember, people have printers and will print out your offer or page. They will also scour your site for any clickable link and removing a link doesn’t make your page “go away.” The last thing you want is the potential of an old “unprofitable” offer coming up and having the awkward customer service experience of telling them you can’t offer it anymore. 4. Don’t delete the page The page has been indexed, spidered, logged , cast in index iron … whatever.  The point is that it has aged and that carries some weight with the search bots.  So while you are going to  dump your old content, use the page in a better way with revised content, new coupons or offers or relevant links to other parts of the site you want to host newer content. Remember that content is still king, but even the king needs an updated wardrobe now and then. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Some Tips to Keep Your Website Copy Updated and Relevant

Any professional SEO’er should submit an XML sitemap for each of their clients. A sitemap is like writing out directions for the search engines on how to crawl your pages. Sure, the search engines can find all the pages on their own, but with clear directions, they’ll be able to find and crawl more pages faster and easier. Within your XML sitemap, you can set priority levels and frequency levels for each page of your site. The debate is, whether or not setting these levels actually helps increase your SEO traffic and rankings. This will be a two part series. Next week, I’ll dive into frequency levels in your sitemap. Let’s start with the priority levels. Priority Levels: Setting a priority level for each page of your sitemap should tell the search engines which pages are more important than others. By default, when you submit a sitemap to the search engines your homepage gets a priority level of 1, and all other pages get a priority level of .5. You can change this to set certain pages importance factor over others.  The priority level settings can go from 0 up to 1. (0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0). Your homepage should typically have the highest priority level. However, if you have a main upper or left hand navigation, these pages may want a higher priority level than some other pages like a contact us page, or about us page. You could set the upper or left hand navigation pages to a priority level of .8, and all other pages you could leave at .5 or .6. In theory by doing this the search engines will spend more time crawling your most important pages over others. However, according to sitemaps.org , submitting priority levels in your sitemap are not necessarily going to get more pages crawled or indexed higher in the search engines. It merely represents to the search engine crawlers which pages you deem most important, therefore when choosing one of two pages to crawl, the search engines will choose the one with the higher priority level over the other. Another theory is that you could set your priority levels for all your pages around .8 to try and get more pages of your site crawled and indexed - although they may not all be ranked as high as if you were to only set a higher priority level on a few pages. Meaning, it may be easier to get a few pages ranked higher in the search engines than getting a bunch of pages ranked higher in the search engines. According to Thomas Shultz , by setting priorities in your sitemap it’s likely that the search engines will crawl pages with a high priority level more often. For new websites, he says this will help determine which pages to crawl first and can also help determine which URL to show if multiple pages from a site match a search query. Again, according to sitemaps.org, assigning a high priority level to all of the URL’s on your site isn’t necessarily going to help you due to the fact that it is only used to select between URL’s on your site. Changing Your Priority Levels: Changing your priority levels in your sitemap is relatively easy. It’s basically a tag within each URL listed in the sitemap. I use GSiteCrawler to run my sitemaps. It’s a free service that you can simply download, run the sitemap, remove pages if you choose, change information like priority levels and frequency, and generate a fully upload-able XML sitemap to the search engines. The priority tag within your sitemap should look something like this:  <priority>0.8</priority>. If you run your XML sitemap in GSiteCrawler, it will look something like this: I use XML Notepad to edit my sitemaps. With this program, again it’s free, you can simply click on the line that you want to edit and edit it right there. I think that for priority levels, it’s best to not ignore them and leave them to the default settings. I think we should be trying and testing everything to keep increasing our SEO traffic and rankings. Adjusting our priority levels within our sitemaps, and focusing on our most important pages, could increase how often our pages are crawled and indexed. If not, then you really don’t lose anything. Stay tuned next week for a how and why to set frequency levels in your sitemaps! Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Does Setting Priority & Frequency in Your Sitemap Help Increase Rankings?

According to Search Marketing for Non Profits, Google can now crawl javascript links like the ‘onClick’ function . These links in JavaScript were previously invisible to Google. And now some are using JS to deliver paid links that don’t violate Google’s guidelines even. From Search Engine Land, Google is now truncating URL’s in the SERPS in order to present results in a more easy to read format. Could this change hurt your chances of receiving that user’s click if particular keywords are now being removed from your URL’s? People started talking about this a while ago, but the FTC’s new rules for blogs that engage in affiliate marketing or receive any kind of compensation for something they write about are becoming closer to being a reality: and people are not thrilled. Whether you think it’s useless, overbearing rule making or look at it as a possible opportunity , you ought to be aware of how things are going to work. A pretty diagram from Brian Carter at Search Engine People! Actually, there are lots of interesting points about how social media marketing interacts with other aspects of search marketing that accompany the pretty diagram, which does help as a tool to understand what Brian has written. Fantastic! Let’s face it, we all make mistakes, but are the mistakes that you make costing you cash? Aaron Wall discusses some of the 14 common SEM errors made and how to avoid/correct them. When you are building your keyword list, are you considering whether or not those keywords will be worthwhile in the future? SeoBook discusses keyword trends and the tools you can use to predict the rising interest in keyword areas. Is Facebook really going to kill SEO? As this social media giant grows in subscribers so does website traffic. Some companies are starting to see more traffic to their sites from Facebook than Google. With this evolution, it will be even more important to generate quality content to attract links. Janet Meiners at Small Biz Trends covers the basics of what small businesses should expect from their SEO consultants. It may seem simple to us, but the truth is that many small business owners who are new to the world of SEO may not know what can be done or how it will benefit them. Nathania Johnson at SearchEngineWatch.com noted a new feature on MSN’s Bing called ‘Best Match’. The search engine is now separating official sites out from the rest of the results and placing these sites at the top of the SERP above organic results. Johnson also notes that the feature is not completely up to par as certain popular brands are still not being recognized and therefore separated out. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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SEO News Round Up for June 26, 2009

If you wanna make some display ads for yourself…or your clients, but don’t really have the time, money, expertise: that’s okay! Yahoo is piloting a program that provides templates to help you in creating display ads and displaying them for a minimum of $30/day. Read Yahoo’s take on why you would want to run them, and how to get started. Hey! Apparently this has confused a ton of people, not just me. Good to know. Google’s conversion metrics change in AdWords . Why’d they do that? How does it work? What does it mean! If you can follow along with the many possible conversion scenarios, this post from Chris Compton might clarify things a bit. Microsoft is living large at Cannes Lions Festival this year! Watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s presentation on “ Living Up To The Promise Of Online Advertising ”. He discusses many issues, including the newest addition to the Microsoft family, Bing! What’s the word on the street? Listen to the Google agency experts as they give you their analytics tips from the “streets” of Google ! In the last two weeks Bing! increased its paid click share from 8% to 13%. This can have huge implications for how marketers assign their budgets to this search engine. The only question is, can this growth be sustained? Only time will tell. Managing a small business PPC campaign? This means war. Pay-per-click war, that is, and there’s definitely an art form to defining your competition and what you’re up against. Anthony at Marketing Pilgrim discusses tactics, tools, and tips of small guerilla marketing and how you can prepare yourself for the PPC battleground. I’ll do keyword research in exchange for a chicken and some milk? SemGeek talks about how bartering might lend a hand in the tough economic times . The entry continues with reasons on how and when this old fashioned technique might be beneficial for some clients. Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/ . Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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PPC News Roundup for Friday 6/26/2009

Marketing departments have been laboring over and tweaking branding strategies for a lot longer than they’ve been looking to SEO for exposure on the web. So, despite SEO being an effective branding tool , there are often some conflicts to work out before you can get your branding and SEO strategies working together effectively. A long time ago, in a far away place, I worked with an international medical service client that was just getting started with SEO. Lucky us, they were creating a totally new website so we could write every word of content—a big job but great for a company that never thought much about SEO. We did all our keyword research, identified how searchers were seeking out our client and their competitors online. Then, we got the branding materials from the marketing department. Uh oh. We saw clients searching for our client as a “clinic” or “practice,” but that’s just too bad because the branding plan forbid us from using those terms at all! We were to refer to our client as a “hospital,” never anything else. And, since searchers often look for reviews and testimonials, we thought we would make sure to include patient testimonials and experiences—but no, can’t do that. “Patients” are only referred to as “guests.” Guests!?! Who goes searching for review and recommendations from “hospital guests”? I’m not suggesting abandoning all branding plans or guidelines, and some restrictions like these are necessary and positive. You have to balance your brand identity with your SEO investment. Here’s a few simple things to help you strike a profitable balance between SEO and branding strategies: First, do your research. The most common issue with developing an SEO strategy can be language and search terms —they’re different from region to region, country to country and, sometimes, you’ll find some crazy overlaps you never expected. Wouldn’t you want to know if your company name was actually an common manufacturing industry term before you got started with your SEO project? Then there’s the standard soda versus pop debacle, or the drinking fountain versus bubbler debate. And, it’s critical to understand how your competitors are positioning themselves online—it’s critical to understand their branding and SEO strategies as well as your own. Where do your branding strategies intersect with your SEO? Understand the overlap and work with your SEO professional to understand the effects of this overlap. For example, if you have terminology restrictions, are your chosen terms what your consumers are searching to find you? And, how are other terms performing? Are you handing traffic to your competitors by ignoring them? Let your SEO professional break this down for you, show you the numbers so you can decide if your SEO/branding overlap needs some tweaking. If the numbers tell you that you need to make some compromises, are their some creative solutions? For instance, with the “hospital” we were able to make use of those forbidden words in a way that actually helped boost the branding efforts. Statements such as “other clinics can’t offer…” and “if you are a patient at another…practice, we can offer…” were a creative solution to working with forbidden terms without associating them with the brand. With a little creative maneuvering, you can work around branding restrictions and actually help further develop your brand identity. Remember that branding isn’t the sole objective of your marketing strategy, though your branding plans may have been written that way. If you’re getting started with SEO, it may be time to revisit your branding and rework branding strategies to fit an integrated marketing plan, including SEO and other online strategies. You may find, as you revisit these plans, that vernacular has changed and the values of your customer have changed—use SEO as an opportunity to freshen up your overall branding strategy and maximize your potential online. My experience isn’t unique, it’s the epic branding battle of “hospital” versus “clinic,” and “mobile phone” versus “cell phone.” A good SEO firm or consultant will come to you with these issues, explain the hurdles that strict branding guidelines can cause, and will show you the numbers regarding qualified traffic that your branding strategy will bypass. Be open to compromise when it comes to stringent branding standards and focus on maintaining a consistent message and image for your company. Branding is your chance to define your company and SEO is the opportunity to own that image online. When branding and SEO work together you’ll see it in traffic, sales, search rankings and leads. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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How to Make Your Branding and SEO Efforts Work Together

Marketing departments have been laboring over and tweaking branding strategies for a lot longer than they’ve been looking to SEO for exposure on the web. So, despite SEO being an effective branding tool , there are often some conflicts to work out before you can get your branding and SEO strategies working together effectively. A long time ago, in a far away place, I worked with an international medical service client that was just getting started with SEO. Lucky us, they were creating a totally new website so we could write every word of content—a big job but great for a company that never thought much about SEO. We did all our keyword research, identified how searchers were seeking out our client and their competitors online. Then, we got the branding materials from the marketing department. Uh oh. We saw clients searching for our client as a “clinic” or “practice,” but that’s just too bad because the branding plan forbid us from using those terms at all! We were to refer to our client as a “hospital,” never anything else. And, since searchers often look for reviews and testimonials, we thought we would make sure to include patient testimonials and experiences—but no, can’t do that. “Patients” are only referred to as “guests.” Guests!?! Who goes searching for review and recommendations from “hospital guests”? I’m not suggesting abandoning all branding plans or guidelines, and some restrictions like these are necessary and positive. You have to balance your brand identity with your SEO investment. Here’s a few simple things to help you strike a profitable balance between SEO and branding strategies: First, do your research. The most common issue with developing an SEO strategy can be language and search terms —they’re different from region to region, country to country and, sometimes, you’ll find some crazy overlaps you never expected. Wouldn’t you want to know if your company name was actually an common manufacturing industry term before you got started with your SEO project? Then there’s the standard soda versus pop debacle, or the drinking fountain versus bubbler debate. And, it’s critical to understand how your competitors are positioning themselves online—it’s critical to understand their branding and SEO strategies as well as your own. Where do your branding strategies intersect with your SEO? Understand the overlap and work with your SEO professional to understand the effects of this overlap. For example, if you have terminology restrictions, are your chosen terms what your consumers are searching to find you? And, how are other terms performing? Are you handing traffic to your competitors by ignoring them? Let your SEO professional break this down for you, show you the numbers so you can decide if your SEO/branding overlap needs some tweaking. If the numbers tell you that you need to make some compromises, are their some creative solutions? For instance, with the “hospital” we were able to make use of those forbidden words in a way that actually helped boost the branding efforts. Statements such as “other clinics can’t offer…” and “if you are a patient at another…practice, we can offer…” were a creative solution to working with forbidden terms without associating them with the brand. With a little creative maneuvering, you can work around branding restrictions and actually help further develop your brand identity. Remember that branding isn’t the sole objective of your marketing strategy, though your branding plans may have been written that way. If you’re getting started with SEO, it may be time to revisit your branding and rework branding strategies to fit an integrated marketing plan, including SEO and other online strategies. You may find, as you revisit these plans, that vernacular has changed and the values of your customer have changed—use SEO as an opportunity to freshen up your overall branding strategy and maximize your potential online. My experience isn’t unique, it’s the epic branding battle of “hospital” versus “clinic,” and “mobile phone” versus “cell phone.” A good SEO firm or consultant will come to you with these issues, explain the hurdles that strict branding guidelines can cause, and will show you the numbers regarding qualified traffic that your branding strategy will bypass. Be open to compromise when it comes to stringent branding standards and focus on maintaining a consistent message and image for your company. Branding is your chance to define your company and SEO is the opportunity to own that image online. When branding and SEO work together you’ll see it in traffic, sales, search rankings and leads. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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How to Make Your Branding and SEO Efforts Work Together

With the rise of social media comes the truncation of communcation. Our interactions with individuals continues to get smaller and smaller. Now with Twitter being all the rage (and rightly so), our interactions (at least via Twitter) are limited to 140 characters. This doesn’t give us a lot of space to say what we have to say. So, when you include a link in your Tweets, it needs to be as short as possible.  So, I thought I’d give you a quick list of good URL shorteners. There are numerous URL shortening services out there but I thought I wouldn’t overload you with options, and just give you four good suggestions. Bit.ly With Bit.ly you can save all of the shortened URLs you create. This tools tracks the conversations that include your shortened URL. You can view the number of clicks from each source as well. Very handy! Cligs Cligs provides real-time traffic stats, along with geographic data on users who click on your shortened URL. You can see the number of Delicious saves. These URLs are search engine friendly and they are fully customizable. budurl Budurl claims that they are most the most powerful click stats tracking available. I can neither support nor dispute this claim. However, you can customize your shortened URLs and track your clicks and stats. However, to get a deeper level of stats, you can upgrade to a paid account with Budurl. This just depends on how detailed you need your stats to be. tr.im With tr.im you can customize your shortened URLs, and you can track the number of clicks generated by your shortened URLs. Question: what do all of these have in common (besides shortening URLs)? They can all track the performance of your shortened URLs. You obviously have a purpose for your social media endevours (you should!) and these tools will help you gage your success at generating clicks to your blog or starting conversations. This article is short and sweet… I’m staying with the theme of keeping things short! But if you are using Twitter, Facebook or any other site with limited character space, you need to short your URLs! These are a few helpful tools to shorten your URLs but also track the effectiveness of your social media strategies. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Monitor Your Social Media Initiatives with Trackable Shortened URLs

On Monday, Yahoo released their new display advertising for small and large businesses. Yahoo’s display advertising program is identical to Google with a few twists.  You can target your display ads geographically, demographically, and within specific content network placements. The funny thing about Yahoo’s new display advertising is that it’s not connected to your Yahoo sponsored search account – mainly because you don’t have to have a Yahoo sponsored search account to advertise via display ads. It’s easy to track the performance of your display ads to. You can get daily reporting on impressions, clicks, CTR, conversions, spend, etc. You can set a daily campaign budget for each display advertising campaign, with a $30 per day minimum. There are two pricing models, one for CPC (cost-per-click) and the other is CPM (cost-per-impressions).  I’m not entirely sure why people would want to pay just for people to look at their ad with the CPM model, I’d rather only pay when someone clicks on my ad which is the CPC model just like regular Yahoo search marketing. If you’re nervous about the creative aspect of your display advertising, Yahoo has a solution. It’s pretty cool actually – you can choose from several different business categories, and Yahoo will provide you with many different display ad design templates that you can easily edit and make your own.  In the screen shot below, I selected the retail business category, and you can see the different templates Yahoo offers. What’s cool is that they also give you the impression count and click-through rate for each template. So you can choose your design based of past performance of that template. Once you’ve chosen your ad design template, you can customize it with your information, logo, pictures and ad copy. Now that I have customized my ad with my own logo, images, copy, etc. It shows me a preview of what my ads would look like in all sizes offered. The next screen allows you to enter your destination URL of your ads. You can enter separate destination URL’s for each separate ad or just one destination URL for all of your ads. If you’re running analytics, don’t forget to add tracking to your destination URL! To finish up your Yahoo display ads, you must select your budgeting, CPC or CMP bid, targeting, and industry.  Yahoo provides a list of industries in which you can advertise your ads on. You can select several industries at the same time which is nice. The only bad thing about the budgeting is that Yahoo will recommend a CPC based on my ads and industries I targeted, and I couldn’t bid below that recommendation – which really isn’t a recommendation but a requirement to get your ads to run.  What’s even worse is that the recommended CPC for my specific ad was $3.79!  But you can set a daily budget and they will not exceed that daily budget. Again, the minimum daily budget can’t be any lower than $30/day. To submit your campaign and begin running your ads, you have to create an account and submit your credit card information.  Or you can save your campaign as a draft and come back to it later. I think the overall process is super easy and anyone can create an ad with their templates. You don’t target via keywords which could yield potentially unqualified traffic. However they do offer reporting so if you find there are sites that are spending too much and not converting you can remove those sites. I think it’s a step in the right direction for Yahoo – let’s just hope it actually drives some good conversions! Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/ . Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Yahoo’s New Display Advertising – See How It Works

You should think of this article as a “what to expect when you’re expecting” in regards to launching a new website. More to the point, I will focus on the effects that launching a new website will have on your pay-per-click campaign. Okay, I’ll just say it: you may break your PPC account. However, I want to discuss why making a global change to your PPC account is a big deal; what will happen when you change all of your destination and display URLs at the same time; some tips to mitigate the initial shock to the PPC system; as well as some tips to get your performance back up to speed. As you learn how to better engage your audience, provide a more rewarding user experience, and increase your conversion rate , your website will evolve over time. And sometimes your website will make an even bigger leap to a new name and URL. If you’ve done your research and have a great team in place, then launching a new website is probably the best decision for the launch haul. But expect some bumps when it comes time to make the switch in your PPC campaign. Launching a new website is one of the global changes you can make to a PPC campaign that can severely effect your performance. Here are a few reasons why this is such a major change: You will have to update all of the display and destination URLs within every PPC ad. This means you’ll either need to pause all of your old ads and launch new ads with your updated website info. Or you’ll alter all of your current ads with this new information. Either way, Google AdWords will see these ads as new submissions. This means you’ll have to re-build your AdWords Quality Score and historical performance for these ads. Google AdWords will have to evaluate this new website site/landing page. I don’t have any time frames set in stone from AdWords as to how long this takes, but it can take a while to re-build this trust. Any time you make a global change to a PPC campaign, this sends up a red flag. The search engines prefer slow, gradual changes over time as you optimize and enhance your campaign’s performance. Changing all of  your ads at once definitely shocks the system. Those are a few reasons why launching a new website is a big change for your PPC campaign. However, what should you expect when you change all of your ad texts at once in order to send users to your site? This what I’ve seen in the past as a result of this global account change (keep in mind, these symptoms my not always occur, but they occur frequently and you should plan accordingly): Your Quality Score can take a hit. By this I mean your Quality Score could decrease. This is because your ads and keywords have a symbiotic relationship that has accrued a performance history, and when you sever that relationship, it can negatively affect your account. This means that your ad positions on the search and content networks will decrease. If you ad positions decline, your impression share will decline on the search network. And your impression/click volume on the content network can decrease due to lower positions. In a sense, you’re shocking your Quality Score and your account may see a deflation in volume due to the changes. But this doesn’t mean that you should never re-launch your website or make major changes that may negatively effect your PPC campaign. But while you’re in the development stage of your new website, you need to plan for a fluctuation in your PPC performance when the change occurs. So, how do you mitigate this performance fluctuation and how do you get your account back on track when this does occur? Those are some good questions. First, let’s discuss some actions you can take before you launch the new website in your account: Set the proper expectations Let everyone know (who needs to know) what to expect when this change occurs. This will help preserve your sanity. If everyone knows that you’ll have to re-build your performance history and Quality Score beforehand, that will make your life much easier. Optimize your account structure Optimizing your account structure can create tighter ad groups with more focused and relevant ad texts. The result of these efforts can be a higher click-through rate. You should review/tweak your account structure and make changes a few weeks before your new website launches. You should do this step a few weeks in advance because you’ll need to give your account time to adjust to these restructuring changes. Keep in mind that restructuring an account can also shock your Quality Score. So, you will need to make these changes gradually a few weeks before the new website launches. Pause your old ads, write new ads Your old ads with the old website information have a history built up with your keywords. Even if these ads are paused AdWords can still recognize their presence and this can help re-build your Quality Score after a global change. So, instead of changing all of your current ads, you should pause these old ads and upload new ones. Utilizing AdWords Editor can help you can be methodical and careful in these changes. I use AdWords Editor for almost everything so anytime you’re making a global change, this is the way to do it. Increase bids a few days before the launch Let me say this: I don’t believe in haphazardly throwing money at a PPC problem. That’s not how I roll. But if you can anticipate a short term drop in ad position after the website switch, you can preemptively increase your rankings before the change. Those are a few tactics you can employ before launching the global change in your account. When you launch your new site your performance will dip as the account re-adjusts to the changes. The decreased ad position and performance should be short term, but here a few things  you can do help your account gain back its Quality Score and overall volume: Conduct keyword research If you find that you need more search volume, conduct keyword research in order to add new terms. You can do this before the launch as well. Temporarily increase keyword bids Stop griping. Of course you don’t want to increase your CPC, but this tactic can help. If you drop in ad position and you need to increase volume, this is a great way to do it. Also, temporarily increasing bids can help enhance your click-through rate which can enhance your Quality Score. And this helps increase your ad position and lower your CPC. Have patience And then it just takes time for your account to acclimate to the big changes you’ve been making. This means that time heals all wounds. AdWords will eventually begin to look normal again. Keep in mind that you don’t want to panic and restructure your account and make even more major changes in order to fix your performance right away. These will be more alterations that AdWords will have to review and acclimate to and this can make the healing process take even longer! Unfortunately, I can’t predict exactly when you’re account will be back to its old self. This process usually takes a few weeks, at least. This is where the patience part and the setting of proper expectations comes into play. So, when should you start panicking because your performance isn’t picking back up? That’s a good question. If things aren’t starting to pick back up around the three week mark, you should contact your Google Representative to make sure everything with the account is solid. But this will be different for each account. These challenges shouldn’t deter you from launching a new website, but you should know what to expect when you make a big change to your PPC account (like altering all of your ads at once). Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/ . Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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What to Expect When You Make a Global Change to Your PPC Account: Launching a New Website

In my previous local SEO post , I mentioned how local businesses can gain previous ground back from e-commerce. What’s simply mind boggling is that this can be done without even having a website. When conducting a local search  you may get that Google Maps block that shows where you can probably find whatever it is you’re looking for … usually. What should pique your curiosity is that these results don’t mirror the regular Google Natural Search Results. To further confuse the issue, these Google Map results tend to include and sometime rank businesses highly that don’t even have websites. The Audacity! Actually, this was probably the most amazing decision to happen to Local SEO .  This type of rank shifting gives the non-technical business an edge they didn’t even know about. I get a warm feeling about a mom and pop shop getting more visitors and they probably don’t have a clue. “Enough Sentiment. How do I get in there?” Ok, so you want to be ranked high in Google Maps? Well, since the rules change regularly to keep exploitation low, we can reverse engineer enough to see what exactly is going on and map out a pattern. 1. Find a Google Map result of a business without a website and look at it Start with the top one and do as much research as you can on where they are mentioned. Find out if they are in paid directories. Search for the address and see where it pops up. This will yield the biggest fruit.  By looking at the other places that business is listed, you can infer what Google seems to look at more predominantly. 2. Notice how this competitor ranks in organic listings. Do they appear in the Google 10? If so, what 3rd party directories are giving them a lot of clout. Join those directories too. For instance, if citysearch.com seems to be constant in a lot of these website-less businesses, then this is worth checking into and getting listed in there.  On a side note, it’s worth noting how many 3rd party directories DON’T show up - ever - in your research and take that into account. 3. Dust off the phone books, if you didn’t pitch them already I know, I felt you cringe from here.  The reason to check into phone books is to see how they advertise.  If they are advertising big, it’s probably a good guess that the phone book ad seller through in some paid directory or some other internet service with it.  It helps narrow down what this competitor is doing. 4. Look for reviews Notice how many reviews they may have garnered across several directories.  Good and bad reviews may not make much of a difference because “reviews” themselves are powerful. 5. Notice the Age of the Business A lot of these directories ask this question.  Keep in mind that age of a local business is a measure of the stability.  It’s not something that can be faked and if that turns out to be an issue, there’s other battlefields to fight on and win. 6. Are they part of a chain? This is another one that you will have to wrestle with.  If they are a chain, they’ll have more locations in the map.  Adding several locations to Google Maps is not an option if you don’t have them.  Claiming your space in Google Local, requires a physical address where a post card can be mailed for verification, or an immediate automated phone call. 7. Where do they advertise? Do they do TV, radio, and print? Are they on billboards or locally distributed fliers? This offline advertising prompts people to type in their business name into Google and click on a 3rd party directory.  You’d be naive to think that Google doesn’t notice that type of behavior. 8. One-up them. Add photos, videos any content to the 3rd party directories that you can. So you found where those businesses are listed and what they are doing offline.  Now you have the information you need to “do one better.”  Fill out profiles completely, add online coupons, add your commercial to the video section, add photos and of course … advertise offline.  Sound like a lot of work? It is, but you’ll notice a difference when leads start coming from your efforts once you get the ball rolling. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Local SEO: How to rank higher in Google Maps

Recently, I performed an SEO audit for a potential client. I took a couple of days and scanned through their website, meta data, back end code, etc. to find any improvements he could make to increase rankings and traffic. After coming up with a rather large list I had a call with the client to discuss all of his options. During the call I presented numerous recommendations for our SEO campaign but the problem I ran into was that the client kept asking me how much it was worth to make a change on his site in terms of improving his SEO. In other words, he would only make the change if I told him it was “SEO gold.” The first thing people should know about SEO is that it’s a gradual process that improves over time.  SEO isn’t something that magically changes overnight or even in a few weeks, (there are a few exceptions to that rule of course). Sometimes SEO takes months and even years to see great improvements. Gradual improvements can be seen within a few weeks and only a couple of months. But to get to first page of search engine results, when you’re not even ranked, could take a while even if you’re an SEO expert. So, I found myself asking, “Is there really such a thing as SEO gold?” I think it truly depends on the client and what is good and bad about their site in terms of SEO. If a client has zero keywords in their meta data or has no meta data at all, adding that aspect of SEO could yield great improvements. Or, if a client has nothing but images splattered all over their pages with no copy, then adding HTML copy could be considered “SEO gold” for just that client. Below is a list of the basic SEO tactics everyone should implement on their site and I have prioritized them according to what I have experienced making the largest improvements throughout all of my clients. I like to start with the low-hanging fruit (things you can accomplish somewhat quickly) first. 1. Keyword Research: research all keywords and their variations and find out which have the highest search volume, least amount of competition and which are most relevant to your products. 2. Meta Data: Start writing page titles and meta descriptions with your keywords incorporated into them. Don’t worry about meta keywords - the search engines really don’t use them any longer and it can tell your competitors which keywords you’re trying to target. 3.  301 Redirects & Canonical Tag:  For any pages that are 404′ing or have been moved implement a 301 redirect. Also implement a 301 redirect from your no www version of your homepage to the www version of your homepage. This will help prevent any duplicate content issues. Also, you can add the new canonical tag to the homepage to tell the search engines which version of your homepage they should pay more attention to. 4.  Alt Tags: Find any images on your site that do not have alternate text and make your new keywords your alt text.  Don’t make your homepage header alt text say, “home” - unless you want to rank for the keyword, “home”. 5.  Paid Directories:  Add your website to the paid directories . Some cost between $99 and up to $300 per year.  The best directories to use for SEO are business.com, yahoo directory and bestoftheweb.com.  There are of course more, but those are my recommended top 3. 6.  Submit a sitemap:  Download gsite crawler for free. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to your root directory. 7.  Robots.txt file:  A robots file allows you to block certain pages of your site like miscellanous images, etc. from being crawled. So, if you have an excess of images on your site and they don’t necessarily need to be indexed, include those in your robots file so the search engines can crawl more important pages of your site. 8.  Internal Linking:  Internal linking is when one page of your site links to another page of your site. This helps create a flow of link juice from pages with high PR to pages with zero to little PageRank. 9.  Additional Content & On-Site Optimization:  Creating additional content is a long term strategy. Constantly updating your site with new content will not only keep customers from returning but also the search engines. If the SE know that you update your site frequently they are more likely to come back and crawl your site more often, eventually leading to more indexed pages. 10.  Link Building & Free Directories:  Link building is another long term strategy.  Link building is the process of getting other well known, trusted websites to link to your site.  This will help increase PR to your site - but it involves doing a lot of research and finding relevant sites that will link to your site for free. 10.  Link Bait:  Link bait is the process of creating something viral that people will pick up on quickly and send to their friends, etc.  An example of link bait could be a contest or online promotion/sweepstakes where people enter to win - they twitter about it, Facebook about it, and pass it on to their friends therefore generating a lot of links to your site. 11. URL Structure: The search engines crawl your homepage first. Then they go one directory level down from there, and so on.  So if your important pages are buried deep within your website, it’s possible the SE’s can’t find them. Create a URL structure where the SE’s can easily find your most important pages right after they crawl the homepage. 12.  Back-end Code:  If your developers know nothing about SEO, have them read some SEO coding articles .  There is a better way to code your website to make it more SEO friendly with the search engines. 13.  Social Media & Blogging :  Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo, etc. There are a plethora of choices out there to promote your company. Get involved, do some research on where your target audience is spending most of their time. Most of these links will be no followed, however it’s a good way to get some additional branding and traffic to your website. There are so many more things to understand about SEO and what it takes to get good rankings. These are just my top 13 SEO tactics to implement and in an order that should help your SEO rankings the most. What you should take away from this post is that SEO takes time. Again, it’s a gradual process of changes made to your website over time that ultimately helps increase traffic and rankings. Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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13 SEO Tactics To Achieve “SEO Gold”.

When you are in the process of building a pay-per-click advertising campaign, one of the least enjoyable but most important things to consider is your budget. How, in fact, do you intend to spend your (or your clients’) money? The answer, as always: It depends. Are you a veteran online who is trying to drive a specific part of the business? Or are you a first-timer trying to find out what exactly happens in this untapped advertising medium? Do you have a thriving storefront business that you’re seeking to expand, or are you an online-only retailer dealing with razor-thin margins? There’s lots to it , of course, but budgeting always starts with your basic strategy. With these thoughts in mind, here are a few tactics to consider: Budget by product line or service offered Perhaps the most logical to first-time online advertisers, budgeting by product line is probably the easiest to conceptualize. This budgeting tactic involves the simple campaign strategy of devoting a campaign to each individual product line, and setting your daily budget accordingly. Because you have organized your account with product-specific campaigns, you will be able to easily check whether or not you are on track to hit your monthly spend goals or limits. Budget by desired conversion If you have a website that seeks to accomplish multiple things, you have a different type of budgeting task. There are many sites that seek to drive, for instance, “Contact us” form completions, online purchases, email newsletter subscriptions, and job applications. Each of these four elements impacts the business in a different and beneficial way. To budget by desired conversion, then, pool your keywords into relevant groups by conversion type. From there, organize these keyword groups into separate campaigns and track your spend, similar to in the first option. You may run into difficulty here, as several keywords may have overlapping conversion possibilities. Alternatively, you may consider “by landing page” rather than “by conversion” budgeting. Rather than adjusting keywords on a desired conversion-by-desired conversion basis, you could simply run the same keywords in each campaign, and use advanced dayparting options to focus spend on a different landing page according to the time of day. In addition, if your company has separate business units or altogether separate budgets handling these tasks, you might want to go so far as to create completely independent online accounts. Go where the traffic takes you The most basic tactic is sometimes the best tactic. One budget. One campaign. Press “Go,” and see what happens. Rather than try to make the internet and a competitive online advertising space fit your motives, simply deal with the nature of the market. This is the easiest budgeting tactic, but probably the most harrowing. It can be particularly helpful for new online advertisers, however, as high conversion rates can indicate your strengths relative to the rest of the online sphere, while high search-traffic terms can call attention to areas where you can expand and improve your business. Another note on budgeting: I have always found that, at the outset of a campaign, you are better off operating with a full flow of water, rather than a trickle. Be aggressive, and let your keywords build quality score. As the month progresses, more carefully track your day-by-day spend to ensure that you are tracking towards your ultimate goal. Also, as you set your daily budgets, always remember that, as a rule, weekends will see lower search and click traffic than weekdays. Therefore, never simply construct a monthly budget and divide by 30 to set your daily budget. Consider, instead, that you will probably spend about 80% of your budget from Monday through Friday, though this figure can vary drastically based on the contents of your site and the demographics of your target market. Do you have any other budgeting tactics that you have used? We’d love to hear about them in the comments. Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/ . Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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How to Spend All That Money: A Few PPC Budgeting Strategies

As you know, we’ve been looking through some of PPC Hero’s photo albums that were stashed away in his Fortress of Awesomeness (he changed the name of the fortress because “Solitude” was too somber and he wanted something that reflected his awesomeness). It’s always nice to go back and reminisce on the innocence and cuteness of those earlier baby photos . We also discovered a few photos of PPC Hero as a teenager. This photo was taken by PPC Hero’s proud father as they practiced their catching and bating skills in the back yard. Eventually, PPC Hero had to give up baseball because he kept hitting the balls for miles with his super-human PPC strength. Happy Father’s Day everyone! Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/ . Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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Happy Father’s Day from PPC Hero!

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9 Services Every Marketing Pilgrim Should Know About

Obviously we have to mention the resolution to the past weeks’ uncertainty about PageRank sculpting via nofollow . Probably not what you want to hear, but at least there’s useful advice about current best practices from Rand at SEOMoz. Are you (or your clients) reluctant to deal with creating & maintaining social media accounts? It may seem like a lot of work, but Mike Moran at Search Engine Guide makes some interesting points about the importance of social media in being ready to react to negative publicity and unexpected obstacles. A pretty cool post from Kim Krause Berg at Search Engine Land about the human behavior-internet interface and how they change each other. Does the constant information flow make you feel weary? Is your target audience overwhelmed? There’s a lot to think about from a personal and marketing perspective, and it will be interesting to see how the relationship continues to evolve. Saurav Kneoteric has a great post on how not to judge your SEO keyword competition . He mentions that not only new SEO’ers but experienced people too judge a keywords competition just by typing that keyword into the search in Google and looking at the total number of search results. This is not an accurate estimate of a keywords competition because not all of those listings are relevant to your search term says Saurav. He goes onto explain the best way to determine this information with more accuracy. Aaron Wall discusses the vanity url phenomenon that is going on right now. He also discusses the value of these links and things to consider when trying to go viral. Rand has a good point on the SEOMoz blog about constantly implementing 301 redirects for each page that may return a 404 error page. Rand questions this strategy and claims that 404 pages are not always as bad as they seem . There is a lot of talk about engaging in SEO practices for Twitter, especially when it comes to optimizing for keywords. This post from Search Engine Journal takes a look at the future of Tweet keyword optimization . Want to optimize your site for more Bing visibility? Vanessa Fox over at Search Engine Land has some great tips on how to optimize your site for Bing . Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/ . Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

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SEO News Round Up for June 19, 2009