Pleasanton Web Design

I had my first experience with a Google Adwords Strategist recently. As a Google Engage partner, Google issues me Adwords credits to pass out to my clients. The credits are only good for first time Adwords users.

I had just started to set up an Adwords campaign for one of my clients and issued them a $100 credit, when they received a call directly from Google. Google now offers free setup support for first time users, and this Google employee called my client to offer their services. My client is busy however, and after failing to contact them via phone, the Google employee emailed them a lengthy list of ways they could improve the campaign I was in the middle of setting up for them.

My client put the “Adwords Strategist” in contact with me, so we could work together to optimize their campaign. Here are the good and the bad ideas I got from our collaboration:

Good

1. Use all of the tools Google makes available to you to maximize click through ratio (CTR). This includes ad extensions (phone, location & sitelinks). It takes more time to setup, but for competitive keywords it should help your CTR. I think the major advantage to using all of these extensions is that it makes your ad larger than competitors who aren’t using them.
2. Negative keywords. This bit of advice was given as part of what I consider a bad strategy for this particular campaign, but I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Bad

1. Increase the budget. (My approach is to create a tight, efficient campaign and THEN increasing the budget, when the ROI is proven).
2. Forget about the niche, long tail keywords and only go after the highly competitive (aka expensive) keywords. ( OK, I can see now why I would need to increase the budget!)
3. Use broad match modifier type keywords to get more impressions and clicks, and add negative keywords to control CTR.

At that point in the campaign I was experimenting with exact match and phrase match keywords, and many of the phrase match keywords were giving me way too low a CTR, even with negative keywords. So how was I to control the CTR, and therefore the quality score, with broad match modifier keywords, which are less targeted, if I was already having trouble with phrase match? I didn’t get an answer to that question, just the repeated advice that I increase the budget and aggressively go after those competitive, broad match modified keywords and negative keywords.

I think the problem is that Adwords Strategists are low level customer services employees, well trained by Google in the mechanics and general strategies of running an Adwords campaign, but without a lot of experience in running campaigns for a variety of businesses. In addition to that, their strategies are not only aimed at making you a successful Adwords advertiser, but also maximizing earnings for Google.

For those of you who would like to take advantage of Google’s free Adwords setup support, and maintain the campaign yourself, keep in mind that Google’s advice will generally tend to:
1. Cost you more money and
2. Push you towards the higher traffic, higher cost keywords.

That has been my experience anyway.

Almost a month ago Google removed the keyword referral data for searches made by logged in Google users.  At the time Matt Cutts estimated that the overall effect as a percentage of the overall keyword data would be in the single digits. WRONG! At least for me.

My initial test for the couple of days it had been running when I wrote the first article showed minimal effect, along the lines of Matt Cutts’ statement. However as my weekly reports came in, I found that “(not provided)” was always on top, and was an alarmingly high percentage of the total. So high, in fact, that the data was functionally useless to me. In fact, over the month since the keyword referral data has been removed, the total percentage that is “(not provided)” is 24%.

So, think fondly of the days when Google supplied you useful data that would help you improve your web site promotion efforts and better serve  your business, customers and partners. Google just poked you in the eye!

Hey, maybe NOW you’ll start using Adwords!

Taking advantage of the current trends in social networking doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. You don’t need a social networking “guru” to get you set up. Here are the basic elements I recommend to get started.

1. Start a blog. This is the core of your social networking strategy. The overall goal should be to drive traffic and increase search engine authority of your website. The bottom line is that if you have value to add to the Internet, your website blog is your forum to do so.

After everything is set up, your blog will be the only thing you need to spend time on regularly. Everything else will be automatic.

2. Get Social. Create a Facebook profile, and create a Facebook Page for your business. Open a Twitter account. Create a LinkedIn personal profile and a Company profile.

3. Add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. You’ll need to uncheck the box that says “Share only tweets that contain #in”. This is a way to specify that only certain Twitter posts are displayed in your LinkedIn profile. Since your posts will be automatically fed to Twitter from your blog, you won’t have this control.

4. Twitterfeed. Go to http://www.twitterfeed.com and open an account. You will need to enter the URL for your blog’s RSS feed. This will differ depending on your blogging software.

The next step is to set up Twitter feed to publish your blog posts automatically to Twitter, as well as your Facebook profile, or business Page. Once this is done, your blog posts will automatically show up on Twitter and Facebook, and through Twitter, on your LinkedIn profile. All  you have to do is write the post!

1. If I simply build a website, it will show up on page one of the search engine results.
   Many people have no idea how search engines work, and consequently don’t understand how websites get listed,  or consider that it may be difficult to get seen. Search engines are “free” advertising, and there is a lot of competition. If the terms you want to rank for are very unique, then chances are there is little traffic for them. If the terms are not unique, then you have a lot of work ahead of you to beat the competition.
2. Just put the right words in the magical meta tags, and my web site  will show up on top
   Meta tags had a lot more weight when the Internet was young. Then webmasters figured out how to game the search engines, and all that stopped. You still need to know how to use meta tags properly on your web pages, but working on meta tags alone will get you nowhere.
3. It’s relatively easy to get on top of the search engine results if you know a few tricks.
   A lot of SEO companies make promises like “guarantee top ranking in 1 week or your money back.” The catch is that you can’t have top ranking for any term you want. Getting on page one of Google for “Used car with red paint in Hayward California” is easy. Getting on page one for the term “Car” is just not going to happen for a small or even medium size business. If a company makes it sound easy, they either don’t know what they are doing, or they are trying to scam you!
4. If I’m on top of the search results for the terms I have chosen, I’ll be getting traffic and making money.  
   Being on top of the search engine results doesn’t make you money in itself. You need targeted traffic, and to convert that traffic in to sales, or whatever your objective for the web site is. If you rank highly for keywords that aren’t searched for, you won’t get traffic. It may sound obvious, but targeting the right keywords is a step that is often overlooked.
5. Once my website is published to the internet, it should show up in the rankings right away.
   It can take from 2 to 4 weeks for your site to show up in the search engine index, and another 4 to 8 weeks for it to be completely crawled and included in a way that you will achieve optimum results. Also, most major search engines factor in such variables as domain name age, so it may take a matter of years before you can break on to page one for competetive keywords, especially if your competition has been around for a while.
6. Submitting a site to many search engines will result in traffic to my website .
   SEO companies that say they will submit your site to 300 search engines are trying to scam you. There are at most 10 major search engines that will bring all of your traffic.You certainly want to submit your website to them, but if you take other necessary steps, such as obtaining incoming links to your
   site, search engine spiders will find your web site even if you don’t submit. And just because the search engine knows about your site, doesn’t mean that it considers it important enough to rank highly in search results.
7. Pay per click (PPC) is an easy and inexpensive way to get search engine traffic quickly.
   When Google Adwords and it’s copiers came out years ago, it was pretty easy and relatively inexpensive to get good traffic. This is no longer true. It is very easy to waste a lot of money trying to learn how to run a pay per click campaign. It may not even be cost effective to run a PPC in certain niches, and it can be very costly to find that out the hard way.
8. The web designer is the expert, and I don’t need to get involved in the web site design process to obtain great search engine performance.
   Web designers are experts in making your Internet business plan a reality. To do that, we need to know as much as possible about your business, products, and customers. It is not uncommon for different departments in one company to use different terms to refer to the same thing. It is also not uncommon for people inside a company to use different terms than do customers when referring to the same thing. Maybe you offer a service, but it isn’t that profitable and would rather not push it. Not communicating this kind of information to your web designer can result in a website that is less effective than it could be.
9. Search engine optimization is something that can be tacked on after a website is built.
   Web design is more than graphic design for web pages. Even more important than making a website look pretty, is creating an information design that will make the website user friendly. Since search engines should always be considered as a user in the design process, that means making the website search engine friendly. And since the information design is the foundation on which the graphic design is built, it necessarily comes before the graphic design.
10. The website alone determines ranking in the search engines.
    External factors are what makes the difference between page 1 and page 100 of the search results, especially for competetive search terms. Search engines want to serve up the most authoritative and important results to their users. They determine the authority of a website based on the number and quality of relevant links pointing to that site. A related misconception people often make is thinking that linking out to many sites will improve your authority. In reality, linking too much to other sites can bleed the authority from your site and hurt your efforts.

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Microsoft’s update of LiveSearch launched this weekend. I haven’t read much of the hype, because I expect it is just that – hype. What I have absorbed is that Bing is supposed to be a “Google Killer” and a substantially new way of performing search, with the searcher being kept on the Bing site longer (because it gives them everything they need) so they can be exposed to more advertising.

The first thing I noticed when visiting Bing.com is the nice big graphic on the homepage. There was a little arrow indicating I could change the picture (hot air balloons, how original), but when I clicked on it, I was prompted to install Microsoft SilverLight, with no explanation of what it is.  I happen to be aware that it’s supposed to be a Flash type program that allows rich media experience, but I don’t know that the typical visitor would be. Anyway, I learned my lesson from Windows Vista and my daughter’s X-Box to thouroughly research performance of Microsoft products before exposing my life to them, so, no thanks.

The searches returned results identical to LiveSearch. Focused on keyword relevance rather than link authority. On-page trump off-page factors, so very easy to get good ranking, even for competitive terms. Good news, I guess, if anyone actually starts using Bing.

On Bing.com you are automatically shown local listings, including a little map for certain searches. Not a huge difference from Google, which does that already. Also included are categorized links below the top result, kind of like Google Sitelinks.

A search for Pleasanton Restaurants in Bing resulted in a list of the worst  restaurants in the area. I have a stomach ache just looking at it. The same search on Google results in a list of some very good, and some so-so restaurants. This is probably due to the review feature of Google Local. Bing has reviews listed too, but they are all pulled from Yelp. Bottom line is, as my son would say “FAIL.”

In conclusion, my first reaction to Bing.com is that it is a mediocre attempt to copy Google, so I have a hard time seeing how it is going to be a Google Killer.

Matt Cutts addressed the Google algorithm update that recently gave a boost to brands that I commented on in my post Big Company Google Boosts Other Big Brands in Search Results. He basically downplays the change and apparently ignores the question posed “What does Google consider a ‘Brand’” by saying his team doesn’t consider brands. Right. What is Vince based on then? Guess it’s a secret.

Let’s face it. Maybe Google started off as a egalitarian, nice, fair, “do no evil” type of company, but they have officially hit the big time. Big companies aren’t nice or fair. There is too much money involved. If you still buy into the nicey-nice Google culture, read the New York Times article on Google’s Marissa Mayer and the reaction/comments from Silicon Valley Web Guild and ValleyWag. That, along with comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, paints a pretty good picture of corporate executives drunk on their own elitist Koolaid (ok, crappy metaphor, but it’s early).  He calls the internet a cesspool. And the solution? Good ole Big Brands. Trusted by millions.

So what does that mean to you, trying to make information about your products and services available to the general public ? It’s going to be harder, at least in the short term. What does it mean to you, the searcher trying to find specific information that’s a little bit off the beaten path. It may be more difficult.

Here’s a possible side-effect of the brand bump in the Google SERPS, that I haven’t see much discussion about. In a couple of different verticals I work with, I’ve noticed page one being filled with directory results from large paid directories, rather than websites of individual businesses, when doing a local search for a specific product or service. Are these big directories considered a brand?  How does adding an extra step of displaying a directory results page in the search engine results page help anyone?

So Big Brand=Higher Quality, More Accurate Content=Better Search Results? No. Google has the ability, resonsibilty, or authority to determine what information is “TRUE” and what is not? NO. My personal opinion is that such an idea, forced into the algorithm by the almighty dollar rather than a concern for helping the searcher find what they are looking for, will result in people switching to another search engine to find what they are looking for. Then, when the traffic decrease results in a loss in revenue, Google will move the other way. I hope.

I’ve known that there was something wrong with DMOZ (Open Directory Project) for some time. There have been many sites over the years that I have submitted to DMOZ every six months, painstakingly going over the information to make sure that it meets the requirements. What a colossal waste of time. The sites rarely get listed. No explanation from the editor. The submissions just fade into nothing.

DMOZ is a valuable link. Google uses the DMOZ directory as a basis for the Google directory. Many other directories on the Web do the same, so your DMOZ link is duplicated many times over. This can add up to a lot of incoming links, and significant link authority.

The DMOZ editors are volunteers, but they hold a lot of power. I found a enlightening example of how this power can manifest itself in the blog Corrupt DMOZ Editor.
Here’s an excerpt:

Another day, another screwed DMOZ submission
It’s another day and more submissions are lining my queues. I go to a cafe with free internet access and cute college age kids behind the counter, and log in to one of my dmoz accounts using firefox to spoof the OS and browser. Then I delete a handful of listings starting from the top without even looking at them. The next batch I include but I make sure to drain the listings of any useful keywords. The next bunch I keep on hold for the next time. I have a few listings that have been on hold for, I kid you not, eighteen months.

The postings on this blog are a few years old, and I’m not sure how tongue-in-cheek some of the information related is, but reading through the blog confirmed the image I had of what goes on behind the scenes at DMOZ. Geeks with power. Not a good combination. Something as obviously dysfunctional as DMOZ will go away on it’s own, hopefully sooner than later. In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to promote your website. I’m done wasting my time with DMOZ.

Let me start out by saying 90% of the SEO companies are out to scam you, so be careful. Here are some tip-offs that the company who is pitching you should be avoided:

1. They talk a lot about “meta-tags.” Sure, the description meta-tag is still important, as it’s used as a short description on the results page. Modern search engines are looking for good, relevant page content and link authority, NOT hidden content.

2. Reciprocal link exchanging is a central aspect of their strategy. Search engines, especially Google, consider excessive link exchanging to be a violation of their guidelines and will penalize you for it.

3. Submit to 300 search engines! There are only 3 or 4 that really matter, and it doesn’t take much time to submit to them. Submitting to the other 296 certainly won’t hurt, but it isn’t the key to making your website a success.

Things you should do:

1. Ask for references. Actually contact them and find out how successful their client relationships have been. Make sure improvement has been long-term. The danger of looking only at short-term success is that an unethical (black hat) SEO can get you huge short-term improvement, but get you banned in the long-term, long after they have your money in their bank!

2. Ask for guarantees. You are generally going to be paying a lot of money for and SEO service, so they should give you some kind of guaranteed position, or improvement in position.

Until now, the only way to get an inkling of which backlinks to your Website Google knew about was to use the “link:” operator. As I’ve mentioned before, it is utterly useless, especially if your Website dwells in the lower bowels of PR (PageRank). Here’s the backlinks the “link:www.tpdesigns.net” tells me that Google sees.

Nine backlinks? All that work for only nine backlinks? Well I knew I was being had, so Yahoo! to the rescue. Here’s what Yahoo! Site Explorer tells me about my backlinks:

6,228 backlinks? That’s more like it! Without actually counting, I can say that might be most of them.

Today I saw in Matt Cutts blog that Google Webmaster Tools now included backlinks. It had to be an improvement over the totally useless “link:” operator, and it is. I logged in, and after clicking to my Sitemap, I was pleased to see a new tab label “Links.” Here’s what it said:

448 Backlinks. That’s more like it. I noticed the the main difference between the number of backlinks displayed on the “Links” tab in Google Webmaster Tools, and the “Inlinks” displayed in Yahoo! Site Explorer seemed to be that Google was limiting backlinks displayed to a certain number per site, while Yahoo! was displaying most, if not all of them.

Google Webmaster Tools has always had some cool features, not all of which have worked for me. I’ve always felt that I’ve received limited data because my Website was just too small for Google to care about. With the new backlinks feature, Google has given me a reason to log into Webmaster Tools on a regular basis, as well as given me hope that their other tools may be made more useful to us little guys in the near future.