Cameron Gibbs

From a single keyword, its very easy to generate an incredibly long list of keywords… synonyms, plurals, misspellings, broad matches, phrase matches, exact matches, etc. Keep in mind the costs associated to managing so much data. When the data becomes spread over so many keywords, it becomes difficult to analyze and interpret… which keywords are working, which ones aren’t, which one have a max cpc that needs to be adjusted, etc.

I was once analyzing keywords that generated thousands of dollars of clicks over several months that didn’t lead to a single sale. At first glance, I was shocked… but then I realized that the ads would have showed up for those keywords even if I hadn’t been bidding on them because I was bidding on the broad match version of the keyword at a slightly lower price (which keyword wasn’t doing bad). Moral of the story… long lists of keywords are just spreading the data thin (impressions, clicks, ctr’s, conversions, etc) making them difficult to manage.

On the flip side, Google doesn’t always show ads for synonyms and misspellings so make sure you do include them.

Within the adgroups, be sure to take advantage of the exact and phrase matching — searchers typing the exact same keywords are looking exactly what you’ve got. Since exact matches are the most targeted forms of keywords (i.e. they have the highest conversion rate), they are the most valuable so you’ll want to set a max cpc higher than broad matching. Phrase matching is also more targeted than broad so it should also be set higher than broad’s max cpc but lower than exact match’s… it just makes sense.

If you don’t have a huge product line and/or its worth the time, you may even want to create separate adgroups for each type of keyword (broad, phrase, and exact) in order to more easily manage them since they will each have a different max cpc.

Ok, this is another really obvious tip but it can’t be stressed enough. There are a number of reasons why you want to have targeted adgroups. I will explain how to create targeted adgroups and what the benefits are to doing so.

First, take your entire product line and divide it up into as few main groups as possible… each of these groups will be a campaign in google. Next, create an adgroup not only for every product, but for every keyword family. A keyword family is a group of keywords that for the most part, are just a variation of one keyword (word or phrase). For example, if you sell widgets in various forms, don’t create one adgroup for all of your widgets. Instead break your widgets down by how they are searched for such as blue widget, widget extender, or microsoft widget. By doing this, you can create an ad that contains the exact keywords the searcher is using. Both the searcher and adwords like this and you will be rewarded with a good CTR and quality score. There is a way to show the searchers exact query in your ad, but searchers have figured out that advertisers that use this technique don’t really have what they’re looking for.

Another benefit to targeted adgroups is keyword management. You’ll find that some keywords for a product merit a higher max cpc while other keywords for the same product don’t. It’s difficult to manage adgroups that have several keywords with different max cpc’s and when you’re running your adgroup reports, each keyword in an adgroup that has a max cpc that is different than the default cpc shows up on a separate line, making management of those adgroups confusing.

Heidi and I have two boys with very good sleeping habits (both sleep soundly through the night). We’ve known several parents whom have not had such luck so we feel very fortunate. If it takes hours to get your little one to sleep or if he/she regularly gets up through the night, here’s what we do… it’s always worked great for us.

From the day we brought our boys home from the hospital, we got them in a nightly routine of taking a bath, feeding, clothing them warm, and putting them to bed. It’s a great one-two-three punch and it almost never fails. Try to do it about the same time every night and make sure that if they take a late nap, they don’t sleep too long; otherwise, you’ll be having a long night. By doing this, both of our boys were sleeping through the night at two months.

As I’m writing this, Noah is lying next to me wide awake and its almost midnight — knock on wood.

Heidi and I just finised watching Wal-Mart, the High Cost of Low Prices. Though the “documentary” is obviously very biased and full of half-truths, I learned a few things and found it to be interesting. Though it makes a lot of claims that I don’t agree with, I recommend the movie to anyone.

I should also mention that I slept through much of it (it was late) but Heidi gave me a recap of everything I missed. Thanks honey.

It’s been said that there are two sure things in life: death and taxes. Well, there’s one more, regular updates to search engine algorithms.

Search engines regulary update algorithms (google 3 or 4 times a year) to improve the results and fix weaknesses exploited. If you want your site to get to the top of the results and keep it there, its important to keep informed on SEO. One of the best ways to do this is to read blogs from notable SEO’s. Here’s a few I highly recommend: SEO Book, seomoz.org, Matt Cutts, and searchenginewatch.

There’s a saying amoung SEO’s that “content is king.” The more content you have, the more content google (or any other searh engine) has to match up queries to. The more unique content you have, the more valuable you become to google and more importantly, google users. Google actually avoids indexing pages that have the same content as pages already indexed.

Take wikipedia for example. When was the last time you did a search and wikipedia wasn’t one of the first results? It’s been awhile for me. Just about every page in wikipedia is full of informative, unique content.

One of the first things I learned about building a web site was the difference between static sites and dynamic sites. Though I’m not a programmer, I’ll try to do my best to explain the difference between the two and why static pages are crucial to SEO…

Static pages are pages that you create that don’t include any code that will make the content of the page change. For example, your standard old HTML web page is a static page. A dynamic page, on the other hand, is database driven. Dynamic pages are pages that are built by pieces pulled from different tables in a database that come together to form a page; they are built on-the-fly and they don’t really exist as pages within the web sites directory. They use more advanced code such ASP or PHP. Webcrawlers like the googlebot, can’t/don’t crawl pages that don’t exist.

One of the other benefits to a static web site is the url. The url for a static page uses the file name of the web page which you determine. This will allow you to put keywords for the page in the url. Dynamic pages, conversely, contain long query strings that don’t really describe the page. As an example, here is a page that uses a static, seo-friendly url, and here is a page that uses a dynamic url.

To prove that the url is a factor in determining the web pages’ relevancy, do a search for extension cable in google and notice that google bolds the keywords in the url of each of the sites listed.

If you have a dynamic site and none of your pages are getting indexed, switch to static pages or you’ll be fighting an uphill battle just to get your pages indexed, let alone ranking well in the search engines.

There are a number of things to keep in mind when building inbound links to your site. The most important is the anchor text. On a side note, I have something to confess… for years, I never knew what the “a” stood for when I was creating a link by typing a href=blah, blah, blah. Once I learned about anchor text for SEO, it suddenly occurred to me that that’s what that lonely a stands for. Anyway, back to SEO…

So, if you sell widgets, and you want to optimize your site so that it comes up first in Google when someone is searching for a widget, you use widget as the anchor text for those inbound links.

Another significant aspect that the googlebot and other webcrawlers record and consider is the location of the link on the page. The best placement is in the primary content of the page or in the upper sections or left side. Text-Link-Ads.com is a site that brokers link renting and they have a calculator that tells you which locations on the page are considered the most valuable, a good indication of where you want your links to be.

It is also important to point a significant number of inbound links to your homepage for a couple of reasons. First, your homepage likely links to other pages on your site so it will pass linkjuice on to them. Also, though I’m not sure I totally believe this one, Google may discount a site that has serious linkage to a few subpages but little linkage to the homepage.

Remember to try to get links from quality sites. Google makes it very easy to know which sites are quality sites… they have a good PageRank. You can see a sites PageRank by downloading and installing the Google toolbar.

So, when building links, remember anchor text, the location of the inbound link on the page, and links from quality pages are all key to SEO.

Every SEO will agree that the most important factor in SEO is backlinks, both quality and quantity — it’s no secret.

There are a number of ways to get other sites to link to you… here’s a few: reciprocal links (you link to someone and they link to you), renting links through a broker or directly from another site, buying permanent links, sponsoring or advertising on sites (pretty much the same as renting), etc. You can also comment on others blogs and link back to your site or write in online article directories, such as ezine articles, and include a link to your site. But the cheapest and the best way to build links is by the sweat of your brow — developing a quality, valuable site that other sites will link to.

You can see how many sites are linking to you by typing the following in the google search bar link:yourdomainname.com. In yahoo, type linkdomain:yourdomainname.com. You’ll notice that Google and Yahoo will also list pages on your site that link to the homepage… this is normal.

So, when optimizing your site for search engines, the number one thing you can do is build links, lots and lots of links! There are a number of other things to consider when you’re building links… but I’ll leave that for tomorrow. It’s past my bedtime right now.