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The Webmaster Lockin Game and How to Defeat It

You may not know it, but in my industry it is a common practice to lock in a customer to create a long term cash flow. Some webmasters will even set up accounts in their own names for services for which you are billed just to make it difficult or nearly impossible for you to leave them and thus secure payment from you in perpetuity.

I do not believe in this particular business model and have helped a number of clients break these chains, but there are some things that you can do as an educated consumer to keep from getting in this position in the first place.

  1. Make sure that all accounts set up for you are in your name, tell your webmaster that all accounts must use your email, and your preferred password. By this I mean your web hosting, your email, your domain name, your Twitter account, your AdWords account, and even your Facebook Business Page.
  2. Once these accounts have been set up for you, make sure they are done properly and login once so you can verify that you have ownership. Review the settings in your account to verify that you are not just invited to login to the account, but you are the registered account owner.
  3. Only allow your credit card, and not that of your webmaster, to be used to pay for these accounts if there are charges. A red flag to you would be where the account is supposedly in your name, but that your credit card is not tied to the account for payment. In actuality you may just be invited to see the account but may not own it.
  4. If your web designer or webmaster refuses to do number 1, 2, and 3, I would recommend that you find another resource for your services.

Remember when your accounts are in someone else’s name, you own the rights to nothing. If your Facebook Business Page is set up as a page under the account of your webmaster and you decide to terminate your webmaster, your account, you thought you owned, is lost. It is not transferable. If your hosting account is set up as a child under the parent account of your webmaster and you have a problem, the hosting agent will not speak to you as you are not the account owner.

It is unfortunate that many clients actually do not know they do not own their own accounts until there is a problem and they want to fire their webmaster. Don’t let this happen to  you! It can be costly both in time and money to remediate if even possible.

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SEO As We Have Known It Is Dead

Yes it is true, with the advent of personalized search where everyone sees a different search results page based on their accumulated search history and social media site interaction, search engine optimization as we have known it over the years is dead.

In fact, it is so dead that we have dropped our subscription to WordTracker and removed SEO services from our website. Yes, that means it is really dead. There is no more keyword stuffing, over optimization, or special code massaging that provide organic search placement. Now it is about building content that is focused on your services and building “web authority”.

In fact, with personalized search the keyword research tools that we previously used to assist in identification of good keywords to cover and niches to target have all pretty much gone away. WordTracker used to be one of the best, but is now in my eyes simply a keyword discovery tool and the AdWords tool does a pretty good job at that for free.

So what’s the key now to good organic placement? Well, first it is important to know that what I see in the top ten will not be what you see and so on and so on. There are some results that Google seems to show consistently for all  search users, but it is not as it was where if you were in the number three position, we all saw you at number three. Those days are long gone.

What we recommend now for organic placement is that make sure your website works for you and focuses tightly on your products and services. Using brainstorming techniques and results from your website analytics program to identify your keyword targets, build content and backlinks activity, get blogging, do quarterly press releases, and do a white paper or feature article once or twice a year. If you are not active in Facebook now, make sure you have a Facebook Fan Page in the next six months. All these things working together for you build your site and insulate you from organic placement drops that sometime previously popular SEO tactics, when they fall from favor, may bring.

You can still place organically, but not using the same tactics that we used to use before. That’s for sure!

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AdWords Keyword Discovery

Not every keyword you can dream up for your products is a good keyword to use in Google AdWords. When determining what keywords to use, I find it crucial to also think about the type of matching that should be used as well.

For some general keywords broad match should be considered off limits. A better use for some keyword phrases would be only phrase match or exact match. The default for AdWords is broad match. When you wrap your keyword phrase with ” it is called phrase match. When you wrap your keywords with [ it is called exact match. Google reviews your match type in determining how to show your keywords.

If you are getting many impressions but your click through rate is low, then you may need to carefully review what broad match keywords you are using and either pause them or show them instead as phrase match or exact match terms. Remember when it comes to broad match, Google adds other words in your phrase, before, after, in between, and even uses synonyms. In some cases your broad match term could be showing ads on search phrases that are not even remotely pertinent to your services.

I am not saying broad match keywords are not usable in a well structured AdWords campaign, but that thought should be given to the words before a match type is selected.

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Transition from Yahoo Ads to Bing Ads

If you have been advertising on Yahoo, now is the time to carefully review your Yahoo account. Specifically in regards to the character count in your ad text titles. The reason for this careful review is for you to be ready for account migration from the Yahoo PPC platform to MSN adCenter which is the platform for Bing.com ads.

Yahoo has allowed up to 40 characters in the title. Bing/Microsoft will only allow 25 characters including spaces. For accounts that have been migrated already and did not make the changes, adCenter simply drops the ads. I had one client do his own migration and no ad text imported which was a huge problem for a program of his size.

By the end of this month all ads served on Yahoo and Bing will be controlled from the Microsoft adCenter control panel. It is by far better for you to control what gets imported and prepare now than to have an import arbitrarily done for you.

Don’t wait, get started in preparing your account this week to prevent end of the month problems.