Month: August 2010

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AdWords Makes It Hard to View Reports

Effective September 15th AdWords is changing who can be emailed reports. In fact after that date AdWords won’t even be emailing you a report, rather will email you a link to view the report online.

For me this has totally wreaked havoc in the way I do reporting. I have an assistant who does reports for me. She takes the Excel data and pastes it into a letter where I have noted important comments about an account monthly. Previously she was emailed a zip file by AdWords on the first of every month.

Now I will have to add her as a read only user on every AdWords account so that she will be able to now manually and repetitively login and download a report. Worse yet is that there is no real column control on the report as there was before which means that adjusting the columns in Excel becomes a task that must be done for each report for each client.

Man, I hate this change! I have tried inviting her to my My Client Center, but that does not give the report access she needs, so I will now need to add her to each individual account. I understand the security issues involved but AdWords should have polled professionals such as myself before making this seriously bad change!

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Web Authority – How Do You Built It?

Web authority with search engines is built based on authoritative content that is unique and informative. The content you create for an authority site should not only clearly and transparently detail your services, but should provide more in-depth informational content on topics that dovetail with your service offerings.

Search engines reward large content-rich websites with organic search placement. This depth of content is not built over night, but should be considered a work in progress with new pages added on a monthly basis. For new websites we recommend that a client start with a minimum of 25 pages of content and immediately start blogging three days a week on site launch.

Over time as your website grows, you naturally establish authority on your selected topic as you build keyword density. For many websites, in a year or less, they will start to see good organic improvement. Continue that process for years and your website can grow to over several thousand pages of interesting unique informational content that is targeted around your service offerings. Not only does this make a better website for readers, but search engines reward these sites with better organic placement.

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SocialPoster Making Social Bookmarking Easier

Social bookmarking can be time consuming, but if you break adding your links down into manageable posting chunks you can receive the link benefits with less effort. I like www.SocialPoster.com for my posting help.

First, I prepare my links and descriptions in Notepad. Make sure to turn off word wrap to prevent posting spacing issues.

Second, make sure before you start that you have logged into all your accounts and set your login cookies.

Third, copy and paste your posting information from Notepad into the SocialPoster interface. Tick off the social bookmarking sites you will be using and then click “Start Posting”.

No submissions are automatic, but for some sites, SocialPoster will autofill your submission allowing you to work more quickly. You may only have to enter the tags or a description instead of the full link submission.

P.S. Social Poster has not paid me for this blog post. I just think that their free online application is a real help and wanted to share it with you.

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Social Bookmarking Best Practices

Social bookmarking is a great way to easily start building one way inbound links to your website. There are a few things that I have found out that I wanted to share with you from my use of social bookmarking over the last several months.

  1. Don’t waste time using automated software or services. All the sites have worked to defeat the use of any automated entries with catchpas and other scripting techniques including even sensing the time and quality of your submissions.
  2. Don’t add all your bookmarks on one day. I space mine out on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule with one link per service per day.
  3. Use your top pages or blog posts that are on viral newsworthy topics to generate incoming traffic.
  4. The sites that generate the most traffic for me are Reddit and Stumble Upon. I use others, but in my referrer logs these are the most active services that send me website traffic in addition to links.

One more tip I use SocialPoster.com to make this labor intensive process of adding bookmarks a wee bit easier.

Social bookmarking is still a new service for us, but we are finding that for link generation it does have value and is less expensive for the client than article marketing.