For about the last year or two Google has been gearing up towards targeting small businesses in order to get them more involved with AdWords. Staff within Google London have previously mentioned this to me and just yesterday it was announced by an admin on the AdWords blog that they have created a new category in the AdWords Help forum specifically for SMBs.
The Small Business Corner is designed to help smaller advertisers to understand how to get the most from their AdWords campaign and is an area for discussion about best practises.
This is a welcome step towards working with SMBs, who often burn their fingers while testing out AdWords. There are, unfortunately, too many stories of small businesses (and some larger ones also!) who have set up their own account with Google, not done their research or simply who have not fully understood the best ways to set their account up and who ultimately lost a lot of money.
At Pipon we also have a focus on smaller businesses at the moment and are aware of the tight budget restraints that they are operating under. For this reason we are able to ensure that small but highly targeted PPC campaigns are set up that will allow a smaller budget to still produce some great results. In these instances, rather than competing on highly sought after generic keywords we hone in on what is called the 'long tail'. In other words, keywords that individually tend to drive less traffic than the more generic ones, but that do convert very well and, as a group, do still drive a substantial amount of traffic.
Hopefully the new Small Business Corner will provide the kind of information that will further enhance the work that we are doing to make PPC advertising more accessible and profitable for small to medium sized businesses.
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Tuesday 24 August 2010
Monday 16 August 2010
Top 5 SEO Tips
We often get asked what are the most important elements of SEO so today I thought I'd point out the top 5 most important.
1. Keyword Research
Great SEO always starts with thorough keyword research. There's not much point in working really hard to achieve top positions in search engines for keywords that don't drive much traffic. That said, there is room to develop a strategy that incorporates the 'long tail' keywords, but the point being that there is a strategy behind this and it's important to understand which keywords will only bring a small amount of traffic and which will bring a lot.
There is a good free tool available for keyword research called the Google Keyword Tool. Here you type in a few keyword that you think are relevant to your website and it spits out several more keywords that might be relevant, as well as traffic estimates for each one. You do still need to sift through the data but it allows you to get a good feel for which keywords generate the most traffic, as well as giving you lots of new ideas for other keywords you perhaps had not thought of where there are many people searching.
2. Optimise Your Website Navigation
I would recommend doing a wireframe of your website so that you can clearly see the whole navigation of your site. At this point you should check to see how 'deep' your website goes. Does it have a more horizontal look to it, where even the deepest page is only 2 or 3 clicks away from the home page? Or do some sections of it go very deep with pages that are 5 or more clicks/stages away from the home page?
The ideal situation is that most of the pages should be within 3 clicks of your home page. This makes it more likely that the search engine spiders will be able to crawl your whole site. Play around with your navigation to see what you can do to achieve this balance. Don't worry too much if a few pages go quite deep though, as long as they are not pages that are very important pages.
The other factor involved in optimising your navigation is to ensure that your URLs are keyword rich and do not contain any unnecessary characters. Once you have completed step 3 it is best to come back to this. You will need to name your website's directories and files using the relevant keywords. You should also make sure that you don't leave a space in the file names or this will place the percentage character in your URL, which isn't ideal. And additionally, if your URLs have more than one question mark in them (possibly due to your CMS or because you have a database driven site) then you will need to use a URL re-write.
If you are unsure how to go about this please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with a Search Engine Optimisation quote. Our number is at the top of this page, or please feel free to email us and we'll get straight back to you.
3. Match Your Keywords To The Pages of your Website
Once you have created your extensive keyword list it's time to match up your keywords to your web pages. Use your wireframe to match 2 or 3 keywords to each page. Ideally these keywords should be semantically linked, although on the homepage this might be a little more difficult if you have several different products or services you are talking about.
These will now be the keywords that you are optimising each page for. It is important to take your website on a page by page basis, while at the same time not losing site of the whole.
You should now go back to step 2 and optimise your URLs based on what keywords are relevant for each of those pages. If you must only choose 1 words out of the 2 or 3 keywords for that page, use the keyword that you most want to optimise for, which perhaps might be the keyword that drives the most amount of traffic.
4. Optimise Your Page Titles, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and H1 Tags
The next step is to go into the code of your pages (or you might be able to do this via your CMS) and optimise your meta data. If you're looking at the code you will find this in the section of the page.
Link building is a whole topic in itself for SEO so I can't go into the full details here of how to acquire them. However the important thing with link building, that often gets overlooked, is to ensure that you are link building using the appropriate keywords and linking them through to the most relevant page. You don't need to always place links coming into your homepage when you might have another page with more specific product information on it.
An example here might be a clothing website. If your homepage talks about the range of products you do and is geared up to rank for the more generic terms, such as women's clothing etc then you should link build to that page only for those generic terms. Whereas for the deeper pages, such as a page dedicated to women's jeans, should have links coming into it for the keyword women's jeans.
For a very quick and far from comprehensive overview of how to get links, think about some of the following:
As you can see, even with only 5 top tips there is still a fair amount of work involved with SEOing your website. The key thing to take away from this however, is that the most important aspect is keyword research and planning. This forms the corner stone of your SEO strategy.
If you are interested in SEO and would like Pipon to give you a quote please call or email us today. We have SEO packages to suite almost every budget and welcome the opportunity and challenge to work with businesses big and small.
1. Keyword Research
Great SEO always starts with thorough keyword research. There's not much point in working really hard to achieve top positions in search engines for keywords that don't drive much traffic. That said, there is room to develop a strategy that incorporates the 'long tail' keywords, but the point being that there is a strategy behind this and it's important to understand which keywords will only bring a small amount of traffic and which will bring a lot.
There is a good free tool available for keyword research called the Google Keyword Tool. Here you type in a few keyword that you think are relevant to your website and it spits out several more keywords that might be relevant, as well as traffic estimates for each one. You do still need to sift through the data but it allows you to get a good feel for which keywords generate the most traffic, as well as giving you lots of new ideas for other keywords you perhaps had not thought of where there are many people searching.
2. Optimise Your Website Navigation
I would recommend doing a wireframe of your website so that you can clearly see the whole navigation of your site. At this point you should check to see how 'deep' your website goes. Does it have a more horizontal look to it, where even the deepest page is only 2 or 3 clicks away from the home page? Or do some sections of it go very deep with pages that are 5 or more clicks/stages away from the home page?
The ideal situation is that most of the pages should be within 3 clicks of your home page. This makes it more likely that the search engine spiders will be able to crawl your whole site. Play around with your navigation to see what you can do to achieve this balance. Don't worry too much if a few pages go quite deep though, as long as they are not pages that are very important pages.
The other factor involved in optimising your navigation is to ensure that your URLs are keyword rich and do not contain any unnecessary characters. Once you have completed step 3 it is best to come back to this. You will need to name your website's directories and files using the relevant keywords. You should also make sure that you don't leave a space in the file names or this will place the percentage character in your URL, which isn't ideal. And additionally, if your URLs have more than one question mark in them (possibly due to your CMS or because you have a database driven site) then you will need to use a URL re-write.
If you are unsure how to go about this please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with a Search Engine Optimisation quote. Our number is at the top of this page, or please feel free to email us and we'll get straight back to you.
3. Match Your Keywords To The Pages of your Website
Once you have created your extensive keyword list it's time to match up your keywords to your web pages. Use your wireframe to match 2 or 3 keywords to each page. Ideally these keywords should be semantically linked, although on the homepage this might be a little more difficult if you have several different products or services you are talking about.
These will now be the keywords that you are optimising each page for. It is important to take your website on a page by page basis, while at the same time not losing site of the whole.
You should now go back to step 2 and optimise your URLs based on what keywords are relevant for each of those pages. If you must only choose 1 words out of the 2 or 3 keywords for that page, use the keyword that you most want to optimise for, which perhaps might be the keyword that drives the most amount of traffic.
4. Optimise Your Page Titles, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and H1 Tags
The next step is to go into the code of your pages (or you might be able to do this via your CMS) and optimise your meta data. If you're looking at the code you will find this in the section of the page.
- Page Titles - Create unique page titles for each page using your page specific keywords. Make sure these aren't too long and put your brand or company name at the end rather than the beginning. For example:
- Meta keywords - Each page should have a unique combination of meta keywords. These should include your core 2 or 3 page specific keywords plus a few others that are relevant to that page. For example: meta name="keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation, pipon solutions, pay per click, PPC, search engine optimisation, SEM, SMM, paid search management, google, adwords, london, UK" />
- Meta Description - This is often the description that you will see in the search engines. You should use your core page specific keywords but also make your sentence compelling enough to entice users to click through to your website. Again this should be unique and should describe the content of that specific page. Ideally this should not be more than 165 characters, including spaces. For example:
- H1 Tags - Use your H1 tags wisely. This is what a user will usually see as the title of the page. It's similar to a title in a word document and, as such, there should be only one instance of this. Use your most important, page specific core keyword here. For example:
Link building is a whole topic in itself for SEO so I can't go into the full details here of how to acquire them. However the important thing with link building, that often gets overlooked, is to ensure that you are link building using the appropriate keywords and linking them through to the most relevant page. You don't need to always place links coming into your homepage when you might have another page with more specific product information on it.
An example here might be a clothing website. If your homepage talks about the range of products you do and is geared up to rank for the more generic terms, such as women's clothing etc then you should link build to that page only for those generic terms. Whereas for the deeper pages, such as a page dedicated to women's jeans, should have links coming into it for the keyword women's jeans.
For a very quick and far from comprehensive overview of how to get links, think about some of the following:
- Directory submission, writing and submitting articles to other websites, blogs and article directories, contact any partners or suppliers to ask them for a link from their website, press releases using an online PR site.
As you can see, even with only 5 top tips there is still a fair amount of work involved with SEOing your website. The key thing to take away from this however, is that the most important aspect is keyword research and planning. This forms the corner stone of your SEO strategy.
If you are interested in SEO and would like Pipon to give you a quote please call or email us today. We have SEO packages to suite almost every budget and welcome the opportunity and challenge to work with businesses big and small.
Wednesday 11 August 2010
Fast Follow on Twitter
On their blog yesterday Twitter was talking about the ability to 'fast follow' another user or company without the need to sign up for an account. At the moment this is only available to US users, however they state that they are working on extending it to other countries.
The way it works is by texting 'follow NotifyUSERNAME' to 40404 (in the US). This then allows you to receive tweeted updates from that company, even though you don't have a Twitter account. You won't appear in the users followers list though unless you sign up.
This will be great a opportunity when it comes to the UK. It will allow advertisers to place their Twitter name in their advertising, be it on bill boards, TV ads, press ads etc in much the same way as they now have a URL on display. It will become one of the ways of measuring engagement with outdoor media.
Clearly this does depend on having some way to view the number of users who are receiving tweets as part of fast follow. I'm sure the great team at Twitter have already sorted this issue out or are working on a solution.
The way it works is by texting 'follow NotifyUSERNAME' to 40404 (in the US). This then allows you to receive tweeted updates from that company, even though you don't have a Twitter account. You won't appear in the users followers list though unless you sign up.
This will be great a opportunity when it comes to the UK. It will allow advertisers to place their Twitter name in their advertising, be it on bill boards, TV ads, press ads etc in much the same way as they now have a URL on display. It will become one of the ways of measuring engagement with outdoor media.
Clearly this does depend on having some way to view the number of users who are receiving tweets as part of fast follow. I'm sure the great team at Twitter have already sorted this issue out or are working on a solution.
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Meta Description Tag in SERPs
Recently we've noticed that the meta description in the SERPs seems to be changing. It's a little odd because in Yahoo the descriptions we're seeing, and also the page titles, are up to 2 years old! In Google what seems to be happening is that the meta description is only half being picked up and the rest of the description is coming from elsewhere on the page.
What we've also noticed is that this hasn't been the case for the first few results, but only for those listings that are lower down the first page. The first few results are still using the meta descriptions tag to populate the results.
As we all know, the meta description tag has not been used by search engines, specifically Google, for indexing a page according to specific keywords for a long time. Although there have been some discussions about Google starting to change their stance on this it would still hold true that they are unlikely to use this tag for the purposes of ranking a website according to specific keywords, in other words for SEO. However, it has also been common practise for the search engines to use this tag, when it has been properly populated on the website in question, for the description that shows up in the SERPS. For properly - and by this I mean non-spammy and at the correct length - meta descriptions it seems strange that they wouldn't use it for some websites and they would for others.
At a keynote presentation at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto conference in June 2010, Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google announced that they have been placing more emphasis on meta descriptions. Again, this was not for SEO purposes but was for overall relevancy. Yet this seems to be the opposite of what we've recently found. Given that the descriptions showing in the SERPs have actually changed from what they previously were, perhaps this is a good indication that Google is currently testing out some new updates or algorithims in this area.
As for Yahoo showing pages that are more than 2 years out of date... is it possible there are some issues to do with the Yahoo/Bing affair that are causing this? I think we'll have to do some more investigation on this.
What we've also noticed is that this hasn't been the case for the first few results, but only for those listings that are lower down the first page. The first few results are still using the meta descriptions tag to populate the results.
As we all know, the meta description tag has not been used by search engines, specifically Google, for indexing a page according to specific keywords for a long time. Although there have been some discussions about Google starting to change their stance on this it would still hold true that they are unlikely to use this tag for the purposes of ranking a website according to specific keywords, in other words for SEO. However, it has also been common practise for the search engines to use this tag, when it has been properly populated on the website in question, for the description that shows up in the SERPS. For properly - and by this I mean non-spammy and at the correct length - meta descriptions it seems strange that they wouldn't use it for some websites and they would for others.
At a keynote presentation at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Toronto conference in June 2010, Maile Ohye, senior developer programs engineer at Google announced that they have been placing more emphasis on meta descriptions. Again, this was not for SEO purposes but was for overall relevancy. Yet this seems to be the opposite of what we've recently found. Given that the descriptions showing in the SERPs have actually changed from what they previously were, perhaps this is a good indication that Google is currently testing out some new updates or algorithims in this area.
As for Yahoo showing pages that are more than 2 years out of date... is it possible there are some issues to do with the Yahoo/Bing affair that are causing this? I think we'll have to do some more investigation on this.
Friday 6 August 2010
New Ad Format For Google Mobile Ads
Google have recently announced that they have launched a new mobile ad format allowing advertisers to serve relevant local ads to mobile users while they are browsing the mobile web or using their favourite apps.
This will be taking place on the mobile display network in the form of a banner text ad that is expandable, showing the business location on a Google map as well as the ad creative, click-to-call phone number and options to get directions. And the best part is that advertisers will still only pay when a user clicks-to-call or clicks on the URL but NOT when a user clicks for directions or for the map expansion.
In order to take advantage of this new feature a location extension must be added to the mobile ad.
This is a great feature for businesses that rely on local custom and walk in business. It will help their ads stand out on the mobile display network and ensure that they see a greater ROI from their mobile PPC campaigns.
This will be taking place on the mobile display network in the form of a banner text ad that is expandable, showing the business location on a Google map as well as the ad creative, click-to-call phone number and options to get directions. And the best part is that advertisers will still only pay when a user clicks-to-call or clicks on the URL but NOT when a user clicks for directions or for the map expansion.
In order to take advantage of this new feature a location extension must be added to the mobile ad.
This is a great feature for businesses that rely on local custom and walk in business. It will help their ads stand out on the mobile display network and ensure that they see a greater ROI from their mobile PPC campaigns.
Thursday 5 August 2010
Changes to AdWords Trademark Policy in the UK
Yesterday Google announced that they will be updating their PPC trademark policy from 14 September 2010. These changes will bring the UK, Ireland and Canada in line with America, whereby advertisers will be allowed to include trademarks they do not own in their ad text.
Additionally, on a Europe wide basis, advertisers will also be allowed to include trademarks as keywords within their AdWords accounts.
According to Dan Stokely, Google's product manager, the reasoning behind this update is to create a more useful and better service for both advertisers and users. The example he gives is of jeans resellers who will soon be able to include the brands that they resell in their ads.
My question is: how will brands react to this?
In many cases when I've worked with brands who allow others to resell their goods they tend to have trade agreements, whereby the reseller has signed a contract that stipulates they are not allowed to use the brand's trademarked terms in any PPC. However, in plenty of other cases I have come across, these same brands face issues with resellers who are not authorised or perhaps who do not really even have said brand's items but are simply trying to cash in on the name.
How do brands now protect their trademarked terms? Dan Stokey has suggested that 'some' resellers will be allowed this privilege. Perhaps these will only be authorised resellers... I'll have to do some more investigation to follow up on this.
Additionally, on a Europe wide basis, advertisers will also be allowed to include trademarks as keywords within their AdWords accounts.
According to Dan Stokely, Google's product manager, the reasoning behind this update is to create a more useful and better service for both advertisers and users. The example he gives is of jeans resellers who will soon be able to include the brands that they resell in their ads.
My question is: how will brands react to this?
In many cases when I've worked with brands who allow others to resell their goods they tend to have trade agreements, whereby the reseller has signed a contract that stipulates they are not allowed to use the brand's trademarked terms in any PPC. However, in plenty of other cases I have come across, these same brands face issues with resellers who are not authorised or perhaps who do not really even have said brand's items but are simply trying to cash in on the name.
How do brands now protect their trademarked terms? Dan Stokey has suggested that 'some' resellers will be allowed this privilege. Perhaps these will only be authorised resellers... I'll have to do some more investigation to follow up on this.
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Is Online Gambling About To Go Legal in The US?
Four years after the ban on online gambling in the US it seems that there is about to be a U-turn. Last Wednesday, 28 July 2010, a vote took place by the financial services committee in the US, which was in favour by 44-22 of regulation of online gambling as opposed to prohibition.
For gaming firms such as PartyGaming, 888 Holdings and Sportingbet this means a likely return to the hay days of pre-2006. The US ban caused a major slump in their share prices and also a significant dent in their profit margins.
But what does this mean for search? It's interesting because prior to the ban competition was rife among the key players in the industry in both PPC and SEO. In fact, it still is outside of the US. However with the reintroduction of the US market we can expect to see some fluctuations at first, as the various gaming firms try to reposition themselves, followed by fierce competition yet again. The most interesting part is that there will be a small window of opportunity for smaller and newer firms to compete and, if they get their tactics right early on, to gain significant market share against the bigger players. Watch this space...
For gaming firms such as PartyGaming, 888 Holdings and Sportingbet this means a likely return to the hay days of pre-2006. The US ban caused a major slump in their share prices and also a significant dent in their profit margins.
But what does this mean for search? It's interesting because prior to the ban competition was rife among the key players in the industry in both PPC and SEO. In fact, it still is outside of the US. However with the reintroduction of the US market we can expect to see some fluctuations at first, as the various gaming firms try to reposition themselves, followed by fierce competition yet again. The most interesting part is that there will be a small window of opportunity for smaller and newer firms to compete and, if they get their tactics right early on, to gain significant market share against the bigger players. Watch this space...
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