If you want to see my post for today, you can find it on our sister blog at Blog-World Watch. Today’s post is about Feedburner.
Use Feedburner For Blog Feed Tracking
Feedburner has been around for a while and just last year Google bought this interesting free tool. That should tell you something right there, when Google buys something, it has increased perceived value.
Feedburner allows you to make your RSS or Atom feed generated by your blog or e-newsletter user-friendly. Providing it in a format that matches the feed reader of your subscribers. It can turn an Atom feed into an RSS 2.0 feed or other version of RSS feed. It will track your activity and subscriptions with the new PRO tools that are now free to all, and will even allow you to send your blog posts as emails to subscribers.
Previously I have been leery of losing my domain tag on my feed address, but I have decided that the information and ability to track performance is more important than keeping my domain name tag on my feed.
Feedburner is easy to implement with WordPress and New Blogger auto-install widgets. So if you haven’t checked out Feedburner, now’s the time to take the leap and to know more about your news feed, reach, and subscribers.
Advertising Globally on Google AdWords
Here’s a quick tip for you on using global advertising on Google AdWords.
You can blow through your budget at an unprecedented rate when you advertise globally without any controls. It is far better to set up your architecture in this manner to be able to control your spend more effectively and in the global regions that really work for you.
First identify using your website analytics software where your traffic comes from and see if this meshes with your sales in the real world.
Second, group global areas into separate campaigns. Typically I will use a US & Canada market, an Asian market (includes Australia) and a European Market (includes Europe the Middle East and most of Russia). Then using my own time zone, I calculate the best times to show the ads in the grouped time zones. Typically I do not want my ads to show in the middle of the night in any of these markets as this is a way to encourage poor quality clicks. I want my budget to be spent in prime time. I am using ad scheduling to choose the best time zones. Remember in your control panel you enter your zone, but converted to the new time zone. I use this tool to help me arrive at those figures. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
Third, I assign campaign budgets by region. I have found that this is a crucial step towards effective advertising. Additionally you will be able to evaluate clicks and conversions to adjust your spend as your program progresses.
With a little bit of advanced planning you can have AdWords global advertising work effectively for you.
Website Best Practices
Here is my short list of best practices that all website designers and website owners should consider while their site is under design. If you website is already up you may want to consider any items that you don’t have covered in your next website update.
1. Include a privacy and legal policy. In today’s world, you need to make sure that you have yourself covered. If you are marketing to prospects and clients using email you must have a privacy policy in place. If you are doing pay per click advertising, Google will be looking to see if you have a link to your privacy policy on your landing page. Having one may even improve your quality score with Google AdWords.
2. Consider having your navigation be text based. Don’t hide your navigation in JavaScripted rollovers. Search engine spiders cannot read JavaScript. If you feel you absolutely must have this design element, provide alternative text navigation at the bottom of your page. Consider instead styled text using cascading style sheets to give many of the same effects but with the benefit of search engine readability.
3. We’re seeing a lot of activity in social bookmarking right now. It is a smart idea to add this to your new website as I feel that this interaction with readers will eventually improve traffic to your website and may even be a factor in the future for organic placement.
4. Make sure your website is feed enabled. That means that if you have a blog, install in the head tags the link to allow IE 7 and Firefox to autosense your blogs feed.
5. Make sure to include a site map in the footer links of your website or on your sidebar. Most sites over 10 pages will benefit from this. Arrange your site map by topic or mimic your site architecture. The links on your site map can even be to specific paragraphs on your pages using anchors. Don’t just list your pages. For example if your About page contains team information and your services, in your site map have a separate link to each paragraph. Your web master will know how to do this using links and anchor tags.
6. Consider providing links to important content in your footer. When someone is at the bottom of the page by having navigation right there, you make it easy for people to work their way around. At the very minimum provide a link back to the top of the page so they can access your navigation quickly.