Category: News & Trends

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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.

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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.

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An Interesting Case Study on Black Hat Tactics

Click our blog post title to view the site that we will be talking about or visit it here at www.Mag-Gro.com. This site has been poorly treated by a number of professional webmasters. The client has a nice product, but has simply not been able to get the web exposure that he really needs. His site has been managed by at least two other webmasters before the client came to us.

The first and most severe issue that we uncovered when we analyzed the site on the server was then unbeknown to the client one of the previous webmasters had created over 100 doorway pages and had even installed them in a directory on the server in a directory called Doorway. Ouch, search engines really hate that. Clearly much time and effort had gone into creating these pages which consisted of line after line of on topic keywords some even linked to his website but in no order or with formatting. There was not even an effort to create keyword dense content, just gibberish on a page.

Many of these doorway pages pointed to the client’s website and some to his MySpace site all in an effort to try to drive traffic. Additionally over 10 pages resided in the root of the server with keyword dense names that had been connected to the doorway pages or to the MySpace site. His real website consists of only ten pages but there were several hundred pages actually sitting on his server.

On top of that, no sitemaps had been created and conversion tracking for his pay per click program had not been installed.

Yikes, I am talking about not taking care of business for a client. We now have this client under our wing and are working to remediate the problems and to drive legitimate traffic to the site. We’ve already cleaned up the server and now our next step is to clean up the pages which we will be working on over the next several days.

Click into the site to see what you think and let us know your comments below.

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Welcome to Design-World Watch

Welcome to Design-World Watch a new blog from Nancy McCord owner of McCord Web Design. We post to this blog every Thursday.

You’ll want to check out our other great blogs for more informational content, tips, tools, and best practices at the addresses below:

Web-World Watch

This is our main blog and updated on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. It is our oldest and most developed blog. Topics discussed are pay per click marketing, search engine optimization, best practices, Internet marketing, podcasting, using video, and other Web worthy information.

Blog-World Watch

This blog is fairly new for us and we update it on Tuesday. Topics are focused on the blogosphere and include blog widgets, blogging tactics, blogging for search engines, blog practices, writing for your blog, and how to use a blog to garner website traffic.

 We hope that you’ll choose to subscribe and check back each week for new information and interesting tips.