The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog
- 2008Apr9Advertisers Granted Exception to Google Adwords Display URL Policy
Last week I talked about the new Google AdWords Display URL policy in a blog post titled, “Google AdWords Display URL Policy Reaches Local PPC Advertisers”. In that post, I explained that the policy means “that the URL that shows in your ad absolutely must be the URL that visitors get to when they click on your ad.”
Unbeknownst to many people, the Google AdWords team has granted exceptions to the policy.
Recently, many Google Adwords advertisers, upon logging into your Google AdWords account, see the following message:
The Google AdWords Display URL Policy was to go into effect on April 1, 2008. However, even though Google AdWords advertisers are still receiving these messages upon logging into their Google AdWords accounts, Google apparently is not enforcing this policy that they warned advertisers about. Google even went so far as to say in the Google AdWords “Inside AdWords” blog that “This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.”Well, apparently Google is not enforcing this policy. They’re simply asking advertisers to make the change. And they are granting [...]
- 2008Apr73 Letters That Can Improve Your Social Media Success
Did you know that there are three simple alphabet letters that can make or break your social media campaigns? So many times we overlook these three letters and never realize that they can help improve your social media profiles’ success. In fact, many top social media users use this and often we don’t realize that they’re using these three letters to make them successful.
What are these three letters? RSS. Yes, it is probably not surprising and we’ve all heard it before. Most of the time we associate RSS as being from our own site and our own blog; many blogs automatically create an RSS feed of the content, allowing you to syndicate it on other sites. But did you know that many social media sites (social bookmarking sites) automatically create an RSS feed of everything that you’ve bookmarked?Most likely you’ve spent time promoting the RSS feed of your blog and you’ve tried to get more people to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. But, how often have you looked at the RSS feed of your social media profiles that are available? Did you know that many social media sites give you an RSS feed [...]
- 2008Apr2Google AdWords Display URL Policy Reaches Local PPC Advertisers
UPDATE – We have received word that ReachLocal is not affected by the new policy
Beginning April 1, 2008, Google has officially changed their display URL policy. In short, what that means is that the URL that shows in your ad absolutely must be the URL that visitors get to when they click on your ad. In most cases, if you have a website and are directly paying Google AdWords to advertise on Google then this should not effect you. After all, when someone clicks on your ad they directly reach your website. If you are paying a third party to manage your pay per click (PPC) advertising, you may have seen an interruption.
The Google AdWords Display URL policy has changed, and the following is a Google AdWords message describing the policy change.
This policy change is in line with other changes that Google has made to their policies, which has typically included a policy to do everything they can to make sure that the URL displayed is going to be the URL that you get to when you click on that URL. This been a goal of Google’s organic [...]- 2008Mar26An Employee’s Lack of Attention to Detail – Is it Culture or a Disorder?
What I am referring to is how people in the search marketing and other fields seem to be ‘not paying attention to paying attention’. Mark Jackson addressed this issue in his latest Search Engine Watch column titled “All SEOs Are Living with Adult ADD“.
Some people think that this lack of attention may be due to a cultural shift in the workforce — younger workers are characterized by their desire for short-term instant gratification and lack the ‘big picture’ focus and spend too much time worrying about the details of a single project — neglecting other items that need addressing. Older workers are characterized by their desire to build a career and may have too much of a ‘big picture’ focus and can often neglect the smaller details. This is not always the case though but it tends to ring true in many businesses.
However, it may not be that culture affects the ability of either generation to focus on multiple tasks and follow through on all fronts of a project. It may actually be that these people have so much going on and just don’t have the ability to [...]
- 2008Feb193 Questions You Must Ask Yourself About Your PPC
No matter if your campaigns spend $500 or $500,000 a month these three questions could save you from wasting your money and almost immediately increase the return of your investment in paid search marketing.
1. How many keywords are you currently bidding on in your paid search campaigns?
2. How many of those keywords have had some type of conversion in the last 6 to 12 months?
3. Why are you still bidding on keywords that have not had any conversions?
This is one of the most common errors I find when our agency begins managing an existing paid search account for a new client. Would you keep betting on a horse if it continuously lost?
If you are not tracking conversions, bookmark this blog and come back in a month after you begin tracking conversions and read this again.
- 2008Feb12Search Engine Optimization Pricing
I’ve written about this in my Search Engine Watch column, to some extent, but I think it’s worth a little more detail.
It seems to me that many prospects who call into Vizion Interactive want to gravitate – almost immediately – to the question “how much do you charge for search engine optimization services”.
This is why I have made it my mission to try and help people understand what goes into a search engine optimization project, so that they get a better understanding why there should not be a “cookie cutter price” for search engine optimization services.
Imagine if you were to build a house. You would probably need to get a quote for the land, a quote for the various builders (quality varies), a quote depending on the square footage, etc.. All of these things must be considered because it’s a unique project based upon what you want.
It’s the same thing with search engine optimization. Some websites are “ready made” for search engine optimization and may require “nothing more” than keyword research, competitive analysis, site structure/Information architecture analysis, standard recommendations for titles/meta descriptions/meta keywords, a sitemap, etc.. However, some other websites may be lacking on [...]
- 2008Feb8SEO Request for Proposal RFP
In my push towards helping to create some Standards, demystify search engine optimization and help more and more people get search engine optimization into their marketing budgets, I am offering up a free RFP template for those seeking search engine optimization services.
Certainly, there will be other search engine optimization firms out there who may want to offer some suggestions AND I WELCOME THEM! (add them as a comment to this post, and I will try to include them, as we revise this moving forward).
As with all things “interactive”, this document should be a living/breathing thing, constantly evolving to include other key influencers.
Update: I look forward to hearing more suggestions. In the meantime, here is Version 3 of the Search Engine Optimization RFP.
*Certainly, we’d appreciate your consideration for assisting you with your search engine optimization efforts. So, if you’d like to include Vizion Interactive in your RFP distribution, please send the completed SEO RFP to sales@vizioninteractive.com.
- 2008Jan28Things to Avoid with Google AdWords
Duplicate keywords competing in multiple ad groups or the same ad group
Uncompetitive bids causing low ad placement
Terms that have had low impressions or clicks still active in the account
Terms that have been made inactive by Google for too low of a bid
Terms that have had cumulative spends but no “conversions” or “leads”
Ad text that is inconsistent, non compelling or lacking a strong call to action statement
Lack of negative keywords to eliminate unwanted traffic
Poor account structure that limits proper budgeting or has a negative effect on the over quality score- 2008Jan28Digg: A Victim of Social Promotion?
Last week Digg changed the way its algorithm promotes stories to the Digg home page. The changes were implemented to prevent users from colluding to promote each others’ links.
Essentially, Digg wants to protect the quality of their product (socially curated media) by making it difficult to game the system for undeserved results. As Digg has long been rumored to be shopping itself around for buyers, it makes sense that they would want to preserve a high level of quality by keeping out the Digg equivalent of spammers and exploiters. Ultimately, its success will depend on maintaining high-value content.
The idea behind Digg is that good content and links will rise to the top as more people ‘digg’ or endorse any item they find appealing. Theoretically, the more Diggs a particular item gets, the more popular it is, and the more value it has to the readers. The reality is that just like with any voting system, Digg can and will be manipulated. As long as individual users have the power to affect the outcome, they will attempt to undermine the quality of the result for personal gain.
Unfortunately what we’re learning here is that the same forces that make [...]
- 2008Jan23Canonical issues: the details matter
Most people are aware that they’d like their website to be accessible regardless of whether a visitor types in the WWW prefix or not, but they usually don’t think to check whether or not an appropriate 301 redirect is setup to enable this. In today’s post, I will explain why paying attention to such details is important, and how you can bolster your SEO campaign by ensuring consistency in this area.
In brief, most website home pages are accessible through several “different” URLS. For example:
http://yourwebsite.com
http://yourwebsite.com/
http://yourwebsite.com/index.php
http://www.yourwebsite.com
http://www.yourwebsite.com/
http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.phpBecause of this, search engines may not always treat each “different” URL as being the same page. In fact, Google (according to Matt Cutt) has reason NOT to equate all variations because there are websites out there that intentionally have different content across such variations.
So what?
It is possible that your SE rankings are being affected by this issue. If the search engines see these “different” URLs for your website as being different webpages altogether, then you are losing PageRank and probably showing up lower in the SERPs than if the search engines saw these variations as ONE web page.
How can you fix it?
You’ll need to choose what you want your default page to be (e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com/) and [...]
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