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AdWords Starter Edition – When to Use It

Google AdWords is not for everyone and every product, but it can be an excellent way to promote your products on the Web. However AdWords set up and management by a professional is an expense and for an untested product or a new service you are thinking of promoting professional set up and management may be too costly for your initial testing.

Enter the Google AdWords Starter Edition! For unusual products never seen in the marketplace, e-books, or unusual services that you wonder is there a market for, there is no better way than to test online marketability than with the Google AdWords Starter Edition.

The Google AdWords Starter Edition is so simple and easy to set up that any business owner can do market testing themselves to find out if there is even interest for their product. Not sure if people will pay $5 for your e-book about your vacation to Paris with your wife? Test it on Google AdWords Starter Edition. Not sure if people will want to buy a magnetic scalp roller that grows new hair – test it!

If you generate clicks AND sales during your test, the next step is to find a professional Google AdWords account manager to set up an AdWords program that will build on your test and really work to market your product. The information that you have garnered in your two week to 30 day test on the Starter Edition will be considered valuable by your account manager and will help them to focus on what has been successful initially and to build on that success.

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Why Are Meta Tags Important?

First let’s review what exactly are meta tags. Meta tags are sentences arranged in a specific format that contain information that is crucial to search engines. This information provides specific criteria that search engine use to categorize your web pages.

Of all the Meta tags that can appear in the source code of a page the most important are the following:

  • Title Tag
  • Meta Description

We call these tags “hot property real estate” for your website. So what about the Meta Keyword tag? Is that one important? It used but is no longer used by any of the search engines.

The importance and use of Meta tags comes and goes. Several years ago, Google did not even use the Meta Description tag. Google instead either created it’s own from sentences grabbed from your page content or used the description found in the Open Directory Project. Now however Google uses the Meta Description tag that you embed in your source code.

Yahoo for many sites is not returning the Meta Title tag in their search results, they are instead supplying the first <h1> tag or header tag on the page in the content.

Personally I feel that the Title Tag and Meta Description Tag are some of the most important tags on your page. The first, Title Tag is typically crafted as a keyword dense string of keywords about 80 characters long. I never include the business name in this very small space as search engines will pick that up from the page content.

The Meta Description tag I usually craft as a keyword dense series of two or three sentences that are done with proper punctuation and grammar. I stick closely to the theme of the content on the page. Additionally I craft a different Meta Title and Meta Description for each page in the website when humanly possible.

I have seen sites move up in the search results based on changes in these two crucial areas alone, they are this important to organic placement on search engines.

You can review your own Meta tags very easily. First the Meta Title tag is visible at the very top of your browser screen just before the frame of your monitor starts and typically is just to the right of the IE icon above your browser buttons.

The Meta Description tag is visible by right clicking on your web page and by selecting view source. Your browser will most likely open the page’s code in Notepad. Scroll or use Find to locate this line <meta name=”description” content=” This is the lead in code syntax where your webmaster or web developer has placed your actual Meta Description. Some sites will not have this important Meta tag and we recommend correcting this for best search engine placement.

For more information on our search engine optimization services please visit our website.

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When You Should Not Hire a Blogger

Although we provide professional blogging services, there are sometimes when you really should not hire a blogger and should blog yourself. Here are several examples where you are a more effective blogger than a paid blogger.

  • If your industry is niche specific and highly technical. An example would be an accountant who serves government agencies and wants blogs on government accounting procedures and changes in federal acquisition.
  • If the topics that you blogs done for are more like case studies of actual customers you have worked with on projects. An example would be an Internet security consultant who wants blog posts on procedures and strategies that they have used for a specific client to solve a problem.

Sometimes a professional blogger cannot replace you and the information you have learned and mastered over years of working in your industry. No blogger can get inside your brain and write from an expected level of authority on niche specific, business specific, or customer specific needs.

For cases such as these and others where really you need more “meat” for potential readers, we recommend that our blogger write on general news topics two days a week and that you the “industry expert” write one day a week. This allows for a volume of keywords on-topic posts to be created for you, but provides some in-depth insight that your readers and subscribers will value.

There are still some areas in which we personally as professional bloggers cannot provide services for, or will pass on writing for, but with your participation on your own blog, you can provide real value on difficult to write for topics.

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Investing in an Assistant

If you are a small to medium sized business owner you will understand that downtime is important but very hard to have when you own your own business. You typically cannot shutter your doors and windows when you go on vacation or want to take a weekend off. You can control that you don’t work 24/7, but most business owners will continue to have some degree of contact with the office even when on vacation.

For me, I am getting ready to do some European travel this summer. I will be out 10 days in Paris, France and out two weeks in Russia later in the summer. In both cases I am not expecting to have email or phone contact. So short of closing your business and angering customers what do you do? For me, I am taking my Christmas holiday to train a new personal assistant. Although in one week I cannot do a brain clone, I can set the groundwork with a new assistant to give them the background needed to be able to monitor and answer as many questions as possible in my absence and then continue additional long distance training. I will be training my assistant to do minor AdWords account management tasks and to monitor customer service e-mail and voice traffic.

I am fortunate in that I am already working with the person whom I have chosen to be my personal assistant, but if you do not have the same situation, you may want to consider contacting Kathy Goughenour of Virtual Assistant Training. Kathy has been a personal assistant and now trains others on how to be virtual assistants. She knows her students and can recommend one to you to contact to become your personal assistant on a full-time or part-time basis.

There is no reason in today’s web connected world why a personal assistant cannot monitor phone, email, and business traffic for you from just about any location. If you are feeling too tethered to your own growing business, now’s the time to start planning for your free time by considering training a personal assistant.