5 reasons why PPC is not for lazy unoptimised websites

04.05.08 Posted in Google Adwords, Search Analysis, Search Engine Optimisation by Barry

Last week, I was speak­ing at the sem­i­nar which cov­ered Search Engine Mar­ket­ing and Web Ana­lyt­ics, one of the mis­con­cep­tions that came up was that of the expla­na­tion of Organic v Paid Search.

It was black & whitely explained that web­sites listed organ­i­cally were opti­mised, while paid list­ings were lazy & unop­ti­mised!

Rather that the two meth­ods com­pet­ing with each other, I find they actu­ally com­pli­ment, and I’d always rec­om­mend a PPC cam­paign to assist SEO.

Here’s my  5 rea­sons to utilise PPC & SEO

  1. Wider Reach — PPC allows you to tar­get searchers which may not be pos­si­ble to do with SEO, as it’s impos­si­ble to opti­mise for every search term in every country.
  2. Con­ver­sion Opti­mi­sa­tion — PPC traf­fic allows you to con­trol the land­ing page for search phrases, this is extremely use­ful when analysing your con­ver­sion process, you can test a page which is only avail­able to your PPC vis­i­tors. Tools such as Googles Web­site Opti­miser or Crazy Egg are great in this sce­nario, this can then feed back into your main website.
  3. Brand Pro­tec­tion — with the recent changes to the trade­mark pol­icy on Google Adwords, your com­peti­tors may be bid­ding on your trade­marks. As you own the brand, you will most likely have a max­i­mum qual­ity score, with a min­i­mum cost per click for those terms. It also allows you to cor­rectly use the ‘Offi­cial Site’ or Copy­right / Trade­mark sym­bols in the ad text, increase click through rate and lower costs.
  4. Key­Word Research — Cur­rently the best key­word research tool for traf­fic in Ire­land is either using googles key­word sug­gester, or cre­at­ing an adwords cam­paign with exact/phrase match on a group of key­words and using reports to deter­mine the search pat­tern. The key­word place­ment report in Adwords should should addi­tional search terms that have trig­gered your ad. All this infor­ma­tion can be used to feed back into your SEO efforts, as well as lower your PPC costs by look­ing closer at the long tail searches.
  5. Instant Results — PPC can be turned on/off within min­utes, and allows you to instantly get listed, while SEO results may take a long time, and even then may not get that cov­eted page 1 listing.

PPC adver­tis­ing obvi­ously isn’t for lazy web­sites, and in many cases is vital to cre­at­ing a great web mar­ket­ing strat­egy.

If this sites a Rockin’, Google comes a Knockin’ — How to use crawl information to your advantage

09.20.07 Posted in Google Analytics, Search Engine Optimisation by Barry

I’ve just come back from Digiweb’s Online Edge Sem­i­nar, where Damien Mul­ley raised some­thing inter­est­ing about how often Google indexed his blog con­tent, around 15 min­utes after con­tent was pub­lished, Google was live and on the scene index­ing Damien’s lat­est posts.

Damien blogs often, many times a day, so know­ing that his con­tent is indexed so often allows him to be able to respond very quickly to top­i­cal issues (Some­thing I’m sure he takes advan­tage of), but this can also be use­ful for sites that are indexed at a slower rate. By know­ing the fre­quency of Googlebot’s visit, you can make an informed deci­sion to push out content.

An exam­ple of this may be a Press Release or News Item on your web­site, if your site is being indexed at a slower rate, say every 7 days, get­ting that fresh con­tent out before Google­bot can be hugely impor­tant to see it being returned in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Of course cre­at­ing fresh and inter­est­ing con­tent, will mean Google­bot likes you and will come back more often, like a free­loader to a beer sam­pling party.

Mea­sur­ing when Google­bot comes, and it’s fre­quency is pos­si­ble by analysing your web logs, or a much eas­ier method (and more pro­duc­tive) is by cre­at­ing a sitemap and upload­ing it for use with Google Web­mas­ter Tools

A sitemap allows you to tell Google when you have new con­tent, and cre­ates a read­able file con­tain­ing links and infor­ma­tion about the pages on your site.

Cre­at­ing sitemap files, ensures Google knows all about what pages are on your site, with Web­mas­ter Tools, you can also see lots of other cool infor­ma­tion about your website.

Using these bits of infor­ma­tion can give you a bet­ter insight into how Google views your site, and after all isn’t that what it’s all about?

Site Inclusion Problems? — Try New Google Webmaster Central Message Centre

07.20.07 Posted in Search Engine Optimisation by Barry

Google have added a new fea­ture to their Web­mas­ter Cen­tral. Here’s what their help cen­tre say about the new feature.

What is the mes­sage center?

The mes­sage cen­ter pro­vides a way for us to com­mu­ni­cate impor­tant infor­ma­tion to you regard­ing your Google web­mas­ter tools account and the sites you man­age. Our intent is to make it easy for you to receive impor­tant infor­ma­tion asso­ci­ated with your sites.

More info from the Web­mas­ter Blog

Ini­tially the mes­sages will refer to search qual­ity issues, but over time we’ll use the Mes­sage Cen­ter as a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel for more types of infor­ma­tion. Here’s an exam­ple: inform­ing the site owner about hid­den text, a vio­la­tion in our web­mas­ter guide­lines.

dashboardwithexamplecom.PNG

Good news for any­one who is hav­ing issues with con­tent not being indexed.

Fur­ther Read­ing — Search Engine Land

Canonical URLs and how to avoid them using redirects.

04.28.07 Posted in Search Engine Optimisation by Barry

Some­times if domains are incor­rectly setup, the domain urls www​.domain​.com and domain​.com are con­sid­ered by search engines as sep­a­rate pages. As both pages are indexed by search engines, you may be penalised for dupli­cate con­tent (bad).

To avoid this, you can redi­rect all traf­fic to one stan­dard URL, a canon­i­cal URL. Canon­i­cal means ‘stan­dard’ or ‘authoritative’

I’ve imple­mented two sim­ple meth­ods around this.

1. Mod Rewrite in .htaccess

This is apache server spe­cific, cre­ate or amend your .htac­cess file with

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^barryhand\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.barryhand.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This enables the Rewrite Engine (line1) while a con­di­tion on line2 comes into play when peo­ple access bar​ry​hand​.com , this is also case sen­si­tive [NC]

The 3rd line redi­rects to www​.bar​ry​hand​.com using a per­ma­nent 301 redirect

2. Google Pre­ferred Domain

Google allows you to con­trol your pre­ferred domain from their excel­lent web­mas­ter tools sec­tion. A whole host of good­ies and stats are also avail­able once you ver­ify your site ownership.

Enabling both these meth­ods will assist in search engine opti­mi­sa­tion , for more infor­ma­tion see here -

Search
Recent Posts
Social Media Links
Categories
 
March 2010
M T W T F S S
« Feb    
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
Tags