Month: March 2012

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AdWords Recommends Separate Mobile Targeted Campaigns

I sat through a seminar this past week that I found very interesting. It was done by Jason Woods from Google AdWords on Mobile Specific Programs.

Here are a few important points that I gleaned from the seminar that I wanted to share with you:

  1. Google AdWords is recommending that businesses do breakout campaigns to target just high end mobile phones and tablets. Although Jason Woods recommend that tablets be put into the desktop and laptop campaigns I don’t agree with that focus just yet. I’ll expound on that issue later.
  2. Google AdWords is recommending more general keywords in this program due to the types of keywords mobile users will type in.

Here are some of my comments and recommendations that I have seen from client accounts we are already managing that have separate mobile/tablet campaigns.

1. The click cost is typically less, but so are the conversions and activity. But don’t think you shouldn’t do a separate mobile program for these reasons, just alter your budget and click cost accordingly and watch your cost per conversion. So far we’ve have good results for clients in the mobile and tablet arena.

2. I don’t necessarily agree with putting tablets into the desktop campaign. I base this on my observation of tablet users. Most tablet users I’ve seen are using cell phone access to the web, meaning that they are out and about and are using access to the web via Sprint, Verizon or some other service. Although most tablets will connect to wireless networks, the fun of a tablet is to access information anywhere not just where you find a hot spot. Now this may change as more and more mobile service providers reign in big data users, but at this time make your own decision based on what you and your client see. For you, you may want to put tablets in with your desktop program.

It is easy to see if you should try a mobile specific program now by logging in to AdWords, go to your campaign tab, select the segment drop down, then click network. Google will show you the number of clicks and conversions that have come from mobile devices with full browsers and tablets with full browsers. Base your decision to do a breakout program from this data.

If you are looking for a savvy Google AdWords account manager, I would be glad to chat with you about your Google AdWords needs (301-705-7303) or I invite you to visit our AdWords account management services page for our programs and pricing.

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Google to Re Rank Overly Optimized Websites

Matt Cutts from Google dropped a bomb this past week. According to Cutts Google is set, in their upcoming algorithm, to re rank in their organic search placement websites that have been overly optimized in an effort to “level the playing field”.

Here’s what Matt Cutts from Google said in another exchange on the topic:

 “We are trying to make  GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those  who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links  or go well beyond what you normally expect.” Read the full article.

What does this exactly mean to website owners?

Well if you have really worked over your website for keyword density, aggressively worked to build inbound text links with very specific anchor text, your website may be hit with a Google search penalty filter in the upcoming three months as their new algorithm rolls out.

What should you do now?

We recommend a careful review of your home page now before your website is dropped or pushed to the 100th page in the search results to see exactly what may need to be changed to be more Google-friendly with this new content focused push. If you have built strong keyword density on some terms on your home page, now’s the time to remove some of the usages and make the content more readable.

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Pinterest Changes Policies to Move Copyright Onus Onto You

I just got this notice in my inbox on Saturday from Pinterest:

You agree not to post User Content that:

  • infringes any third party’s Intellectual Property Rights, privacy rights, publicity rights, or other personal or proprietary rights;
  • contains any information or content that you do not have a right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships
  • To third parties.  Pinterest values and respects the rights of third party creators and content owners, and expects you to do the same.  You therefore agree that any User Content that you post to the Service does not and will not violate any law or infringe the rights of any third party, including without limitation any Intellectual Property Rights (defined below), publicity rights or rights of privacy.  We reserve the right, but are not obligated, to remove User Content from the Service for any reason, including User Content that we believe violates these Terms or the Pinterest Acceptable Use Policy.  It is important that you understand that you are in the best position to know if the materials you post are legally allowed.  We therefore ask that you please be careful when deciding whether to make User Content available on our Service, including whether you can pin or re-pin User Content on your boards.  To learn more about copyright and fair use, please click here for some links to useful third party resources.

With every image you find on a website, or for that matter anywhere on the web, having some kind of copyright, you are potentially infringing on a copyright when you right click any image and stick it to your Pinterest board. With the concerns appearing on the web that Pinterest may go the way of Napster, it appears that Pinterest is taking action to mitigate potential copyright problems aggressively by moving the onus of infringement issues directly onto you the user.

Only you the website owner really knows where you have gotten their images. Even if you buy them from iStockPhoto, did you buy a one time use image or a multi-use image? If someone grabs your one-time use image and puts it on their Pinterest board pointing to you, it creates a copyright issue and potentially could have ramifications further down the road. Remember how Getty images sued website owners about their images being in website templates created by third parties?

Be careful with Pinterest, it may be a great place to get noticed but maybe a ticking time bomb.

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How Much Social Interaction Do You Really Need on Twitter or Facebook?

How much hands on fan interaction do you really need on your Twitter or Facebook business page? In my opinion, it depends on how large your fan base is. Here are some general guidelines to consider.

Twitter

under 100 followers – take time the first 30 days or more to follow people, sort them into lists, try to engage other writers and your followers. If you do not engage with people, your fan numbers will not grow. You may add one or two fans a month, but will in most cases your numbers will simple stay at a low level.

over 100 followers and up – your fan base with grow the more time you invest in interaction. I like five to ten tweets a day and then engagement with followers three times a week. For my own personal account I interact with followers on a daily basis, but if you don’t have the budget three days a week will still work out fine.

Facebook

under 100 followers – you will really need to buy ads to try to build your fan base. Try Facebook pay per click using sponsored stories. Be aware that you will add fans quickly, but may lose up to one third of your new fans when you stop advertising. I am not sure as to why, but this is what I have seen happen. If you do nothing, you may add only one fan a month. After you get 100 followers fans will grow at a steady rate, but only if your content is good. You don’t even need to spend a lot of time interacting with fans once you hit this level, it seems to be more a factor of the quality of your content.

over 100 followers and up – the frequency of posts as you get to this level appears to be important. One or two status updates a day appear to simply get lost in the noise that is now part of the Facebook timeline. I recommend five updates a day. I have not seen a huge increase of fans based on interacting with them, growth seems to be more a factor of memorable content versus engagement.

I invite you to check out our Twitter and Facebook page management services to see if we might be a good match for your business’ social media needs. You’ll find that we provide a number of service engagement levels at affordable prices.

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Get the AdWords Time Machine Cranked Up Again

If you are in this business, you’ve heard it too… “I used to have such great results on Google AdWords back in 2006. Why can’t you just roll my account back to those settings. Surely I will get more clicks and activity at a cheaper price!” There is no time machine that can turn back the clock to give you clicks and performance that you used to have in the past on Google AdWords.

Here are a few changes that I have seen in the last eight or so  years that have impacted advertisers on AdWords. I will only list ten, but you can leave a comment with the ones you have seen too.

  1. Introduction of the quality score based on your keywords, ad text and landing page.
  2. Highly competitive bidding from new advertisers bidding on your keywords pushing up the market price per click. In one year I saw a 33% increase in click costs.
  3. Increased use of technology to manage bidding from specialized programmer interfaces. AdWords now has many of these tools available to use as rules in accounts, but before only the big companies with special programming staff had access.
  4. Tremendous variety of ad choices from text ads to video ads. We used to only have one choice text ads on Google.com.
  5. Proliferation of the publisher network through AdSense. There has been an improvement in the publisher network, but it has been pretty awful and rife with fraud previously before Google wised up to the issue of robot ad clicking.
  6. Issues of using trademarks in your ad text and keyword list. It used to be you could use them and then trademark owners have gotten very testy of even demanding you remove them from your keyword list in the US even when Google says you don’t need to go that far. In some cases, it has made it impossible for some legitimate businesses to promote their product and service on AdWords. I know of several specific cases.
  7. Google AdWords providing account set up and management services directly to businesses and putting themselves in direct competition with firms such as my own. Remember when they did this in the early days of certification.
  8. Instituted a program to certify account managers. I managed AdWords before there even was a certification program. I’ve seen the tests be tough, easy, and they are tough again. I’ve even had people ask to pay me to take the test for them. No I haven’t done that, I am offended to be asked to do so, as it hurts the professional credential I work so hard to keep.
  9. Introduction of TV, newspaper, and telephone into AdWords. We don’t have the option to buy AdWords ads in print newspapers, but we used to. Telephone started out as a totally different beast and only to a few select advertisers. Remember the green click to call phone icon. I like the new phone integration much better and am getting great success using it for my clients.
  10. Remember the early days you could create AdWords ads and target your Google Places page all from within the control panel. I liked that much better than AdWords Express. There was better control, but we cannot do that anymore.

These are just a few of the changes that I personally have seen. Each one has had an impact of advertisers as AdWords has matured into the vibrant ad platform that it is today. So sorry, there simply is no going back what AdWords used to be it has morphed over the years into a very cool, high tech valuable tool that will drive sales and website traffic. It is much more complicated but more powerful than it was before. With this power comes significant market acceptance and competition for the available clicks, sorry, but that’s progress.

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Scribe SEO Plugin Reviewed

I thought I would run the Scribe WordPress plug-in through its paces and let you know my thoughts and if it is worth the monthly subscription fee.

First, I bought the publisher level and paid a discounted fee of $17 a month instead of the regular price of $27 per month. The plug-in touts itself as SEO made easy. You will need to have one of several themes in use or piggyback on the All in One SEO plug-in to use Scribe. For more information you can visit the business’ website. I think that if I had paid $27 a month, I would be very unhappy, but as I only paid $17 a month I am willing to continue through this weekend to test the options.

Once installed, you will see several new fields in the left hand sidebar of your blog: a Scribe Keyword Research Tool where you enter in your potential keywords for your blog post to get suggestions, the Scribe Content Optimizer, and Scribe Link Building tool. From the website, it sounds like this is a great tool to help you do all these things to improve the content of your blog post to get better placement, but in reality is is just a reminder checklist of things to do. It will green light that yes your blog post has content. Whoops, you forgot to write a custom title tag, but get this without suggestions and without automation. Hey, the All In One SEO plug-in will write both your meta title and meta description tag for you FOR FREE!

Once you perform the analysis of your blog post, which is where your subscription fee comes into play giving you a word count, readability scan, the tool will make some recommendations of blogsites where you can go and try to get back links. It does not help you get back links, just gives you a shortlist. It will then give you some suggestions of social media sites you can try to get links from too. What the tool does not mention to you is that all WordPress applications and most forums will do not follow your links.

Do I think that this plug-in is worth the money. No, I do not. I feel like for me as a professional blogger, I can write my own post it note, did I put a title on my blog post, and did I install the All In One SEO pack for WordPress and set up automatic generation of the meta description tag without paying $17 a month. I can’t wait to install this one.

Oh, by the way it gave a 95 rating to this blog post.