The Maine SEO Blog

I just watched the MarketingProfs’ webinar with George Seybold, head of Seybold Scientific, put on a great presentation on PPC basics. Here are some of my notes from the presentation:

Advertising Basics

• Traditional Advertising – TV, radio, print; impression based
• Banner Advertising – online equivalent of traditional advertising; impression based
• Pay-per-click – performance based

…and they all work together…

• Traditional – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead
• Banner Ads – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead
• Pay-per-click (PPC) – awareness, informative, branding, sales lead, closest point of sale
• The way they flow:
  Awareness & Branding –> Research –> Promotion & Point of Sale

Example: Car Buying

1. Awareness: TV, radio, search
2. Consideration: website, brochures
3. Point of Sale: PPC, website

Great quote from George: You have to be present to be selected.

Rules of Thumb

• PPC is not necessarily good for…
  - building awareness
  - branding
• PPC is good for…
  - incentive
• Banners are great for…
  - branding

Why do we search?

• Answer questions
• Find information
• Validation
• Entertainment
• Find products/services

How PPC providers differ

• Cost – Google is approximately 50% more expensive than other search engines
• Relevance – Google gets 63% of total traffic
• Demographics – Ask heavily targets women
• Shopping – New market entrant Bing is focused on Ecommerce
• Psychographic – Yahoo targets the financial/news-focused

Yahoo

• Lower cost per click (CPC)
• Financial/news target
• Attempt to drive searchers to the search engine
• Yahoo Mail solution is very popular
• 2nd largest search provider

Google

• Greatest search
• De-facto search standard
• Most advanced/relevant results
• More advertiser competition, more searchers to balance
• Largest content network (Adsense)

Ask

• Female demographic
• NO right hand column advertising
• Sponsored links are (almost) indistinguishable from organic results
• Lower CPC
• Less overall search result

Bing

• New! (as of about a week ago)
• Targeted for Ecommerce
• Freshly positioned as the “new type” of search engine
• Hybrid of Google, Yahoo, and Ask
• Decision-based search results

Ad Creation Basics

• Keyword selection
  - Use descriptive words (cd player vs. cd)
  - Think like your customer (cd album vs. compact disk)
  - Balance of search volume to competition (mp3 cds vs. best cd)
  - Longer tail search term is closer to the sale (red nike tennis shoes vs. tennis shoes) 
  - Recognize terms used across other industries (CD – compact disk vs. CD – Certificate of Deposit) 
• Can I pay for the first position in Google? No…quality score. 
• Quality Score – Google’s algorithm for PPC, based on: 
   1. relevance of keyword
  2. performance of ad click through rate (CTR) 
• Ad Copy
  - Needs an incentive, call-to-action
  -  Use geo-targeting (region, zip code, country, language, etc.)
• Measurement/Goals: Google Analytics
  Focus on:
  - New visitors (should be upwards of 75%)
  - # Pages/visit
  - Bounce rate (should be less than 50%) 

Some PPC Jargon

• Keywords – what your consumers are searching for
• Impressions – number of times ad is presented
• Cost-per-click (CPC) – money you pay for a click
• Click-thru-rate (CTR) – ration of impressions/clicks
• Conversion – reaching a desired goal

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEM 

The end of the world, as we know it.

Apparently, only a small subset of us are being affected. However, it seems the masses are having issues with everything from Gmail, to Google Talk, to Google Search.

Our saga begins when Twitter shows signs of trending, distressed Tweeps, and of course the ever popular hashtag (#gfail and #googlefail in this case).

Not to worry, I think to myself, I can live without Google for a little bit while they fix the problem.

Thinking I’m high and mighty in such a catastrophe, I soon remember I’ve been patiently awaiting an email from a client whom, I happen to know, exclusively uses only Gmail. I had to wait a solid hour for that blessed email.

The ego continues to slowly chips away as I realize just how much I use my Google Docs.  Not only that, but I actually do use my Gmail, and even a basic Image search to find a picture of Earth imploding becomes utterly impossible.

I decided I could forget my own egotistical Google issues for long enough to pleasantly watch the most recent blogpost I’d written be tweeted and retweeted. But to add insult to injury, I found Google’s issues went deeper: to Google Analytics.  I saw that as my blog loaded and transferred traffic data, it got stuck and timed out.

Since then, the problems have been fix, per Google’s official Twitter account,

The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll share more details soon.

And here it is explained via the Official Blog.

It is amazing though, and got me to thinking: what would we do without Google? @JackLeblond jokes we might actually switch to Yahoo:

Perhaps the google servers on ebay were failed attempt to raise $$ and now they are shutting down….quick everyone optimize for Yahoo now!

At least yesterday, when Twitter shut down for maintenance, we had something to do while we waited.

Nicki Hicks
I blog while Gmail is down

Photo credit

Last week, Search Engine Roundtable posted an article about GetListed.org, a site that is incredibly helpful for local businesses.  Get Listed truly is a one stop shop, as it pulls your local listings from Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Best of the Web, and Live.

Here is flyte’s snapshot of listings:

To break things down a little further, Get Listed shows a “To Do” list for you website: showing on which sites your business is claimed, where you have photos, and even citations.

What a great tool for consolidating all of my local listings!

Nicki Hicks
Location, location, location

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX – Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS – can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS – efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  – More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

Last week, both Yahoo! and Google announced adding a new algorithm. Now, their spiders will crawl Adobe Flash files!

(Keep in mind the following is only related to Google’s new algorithms.)

Flash files of all kinds are now being indexed – buttons, menus, Flash websites, you name it.  That way, any text or URL in the file will be indexed in Google searches.  The down side: images aren’t indexed yet – we’ll have to wait on that one.  Also, if you upload Flash via certain types of JavaScript, the bots won’t recognize the file.

But, more good news?!  You don’t even have to do anything!  No indexing, or putting your site in a directory!  Just sit back and watch for your Flash file to show up on Google (and Yahoo!).

Nicki Hicks
Google Fan