Posts tagged Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
6 Adword Campaign Mistakes You Must Avoid
Aug 24th
If you use Google Adwords you know that even the smallest mistakes can end up costing you money. Simple things like not optimising your campaigns properly especially on competitive keywords can reduce or impede your return on investment (ROI).
If used properly Adwords can help you easily achieve maximum return on investment (ROI) for the keywords or phrases that are most relevant to your internet business and can also improve your website stats by providing targeted traffic.
Because internet marketing is becoming more competitive, with more people than ever competing for keywords, it has unfortunately meant that search engine PPC campaigns and keyword prices are more expensive and so it becomes essential for you to avoid mistakes that will undoubtedly result in poor performing PPC campaigns. Below are 6 mistakes to avoid if you want to have successful Adwords campaign.
1. Creating long lists of poorly targeted keywords
When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign, it is import to choose your keywords carefully and resist the temptation to create a long unless list of irrelevant or generic keywords. For example, if you ran a mobile phone shop then, it wouldn’t be sensible to target the keywords “mobile phone” as the cost per click (CPC) for this generic keyword/ phrase would be amazingly high when compared to a more descriptive and relevant keyword/phrase, such as “Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.”
Do not choose keywords that are disassociative with what you offer i.e. if you only sell products do not choose keywords for repairs or spares, these phrases may well bring visitors to your site but produce no conversions as you do not offer these services.
It’s important to identify and understand your specific internet business niche, so that you can market directly to people who want the products or services that your internet business offers. Do not fool yourself into a postion of using broader terms as this will end up negatively impacting you as well as costing you money.
2. Lack of keywords in your ad text
Ad text is probably the most poorly done part of Adwords as most people forget that when they are creating descriptive ad copy, it’s imperative to inject their keywords in to the title and description while maintaining the balance between clarity and relevance. Your internet marketing ad copy should be written in such a way that anyone reading it will understand easily, exactly what to expect when they click on your ad.
3. Utilising single campaigns
Once you sorted out your ads into into easily identified ad groups, you can move on and create your campaigns. At this stage you should have created ads relating to each product specifically, you now need to group these into one container that describes them.
let us use the example of a florist. They have created ad groups for ‘Red Roses’, Red Tulips and Red Chrysanthemums’. The florist now needs to create a container called ‘Red Flower Bunches’ or ‘Flower Bunches Red’ – (remember red flowers maybe to generic) to hold all of the ad groups in the campaign.
This process is then repeated for blue flowers, gifts or anything else the florist may sell.
Having highly organised campaigns is the key to determining which ads are creating the optimal conversions. Don’t simply put all your ads into the one campaign — split them into separate campaigns to make tracking and amending the ad groups easy.
4. Using broad match only
When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the Adwords Ad serving service. You should also take advantage of the phrase matching options that AdWords makes available for your campaigns, if you are not doing this it is likely that you are missing out on potential customers and creating higher CPC for your campaign.
Broad matches are generally less targeted than exact and phrase matches. Broad matching is the default option under which your ads appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations.
When you use phrase matching, your ad will appear for your chosen search terms in the specified order you put them in, occassionally they will appear for other terms, too. The most targeted option that you can use is Exact matching, this works by only showing your ad for the exact keyword you specified. The negative keyword option is also a great tool as it allows you to specify the keywords you do not want the ads to appear for. Here’s a quick example of how these targeting options work:
· Broad match: Default option: Plumbing Technician London
· Phrase match: Surround the keyword in quotes: “Plumbing Technician London”
· Exact match: Surround the keyword in square brackets: [Plumbing Technician London]
· Negative match: Place a negative character before the keyword: -Plumbing Technician London
Make sure you take time to research and test all of these different matching techniques as not all will be right for your specific campaign.
5. Failing to optimise ad serving for your ads
When you start serving your ads, you should make sure you take advantage of the AdWords ad serving service, this service help to ensure that your most popular ads are displayed more often for any specific keyword or phrase based on its click through rate (CTR). This works by making more use of your popular ads and less use of those ads that people are not clicking on thus giving you more ‘bang for your buck’ as the expression says.
Basically the AdWords platform gives far more weight to ads with higher click through rates, displaying them more often than ads with lower CTRs in the same ad group, but you must use the serving service for this to work best for you.
6. Failing to track results
Performance of your AdWords campaign’s is important and in order to tweak and refine your process or remove poorly performing ads you need to regularly track results, this will help you identify which keywords work and which do not. By using any of Google’s tracking tools or any other provider tools (most are free) you will be able to do this form of monitoring.
Google has built into the AdWords interface Google Analytics web analytics tools which can provide you with in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign’s performance. Setting goals for a campaign will allow you to see whether the campaign is over or underperforming.
As you can see these 6 mistakes can cost you dearly not only in time but in monetary terms as well. Try to remember what your goal is for using AdWords and stick to it. Ensure you do not make these mistakes and hopefully you will have a far more successful adword campaign with a high return on investment (ROI) for your internet business.
Outsourcing SEO Tasks To An Internet Marketing Service.
Aug 7th

Internet Marketing Services Help Hit The Target, Freeing Up Your Time To Concentrate On Your Core Business
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important element in making you website highly visible. A degree of expertise is required to incorporate SEO into a website and make it popular among the search engine results returned. It is undoublty a time consuming process which needs constant monitoring. A website’s SEO development is just one of the many activities which an online business owner must undertake to stay in business.
However it is not the key function for many business owners who decided to trade online and in many cases ends up consuming more of their time than the actual matter of doing business. Instead, of doing this time consuming process and outsourcing it, many business owners fail to take the options opened to them of outsource for fear of cost or poorly done work. This post will look at the advantages of outsourcing your SEO to a specialist or Internet Marketing Service.
Outsource labour intensive tasks
SEO has many labour intensive tasks attached to it, many need manual intervention, which in order to complete properly and this is where an Internet Marketing Service could help you. Take for instance ‘Keyword Research’ which is a data collection process which requires data handling techniques, though anyone can do this it is labour intensive and can suck up hours of time especially if you are unsure of what you are doing.
Worse still is if you choose after all that time the wrong keywords to target, these task are far better left with the professionals who specialise in them and do them day in and day out. This type of task is easily outsourced to an Internet Marketing Service.
If it is a really brain numing task and extremely basic then you could use services like ‘Mechanical Turk’ , but remember these people are not skilled so cannot give an informed opininon on what you ask they will merely perform the task as you set it down for them regardless of whether you have set this correctly or not.
Likewise you have the task of ‘Competitive Analysis’ which requires information gathering about the strategies of businesses and their websites who are in competition with you. Once you set the framework for the processes, it becomes repetitive and can be easily handled by an Internet Marketing Service who will be able to present the final analysis of any research in a report format which can be easily understood.
The task of ‘Content Creation’ can be very difficult particularly when it comes to getting the article so that it is SEO Friendly, this task for most business owners is hard to do or to contnuially sustain, it is far better to opt for a company that can help you with this rather than do it yourself.
Another reason to use an Internet Marketing Service to aid you here is a report published by emarketer.com show that good web content creation and useable articles are extremely important to help you engage with new customers as well as current ones. For more information see our post on this Content Creation For Lead Generation
Constant testing and monitoring of search engine rankings, site statistics, marketing split testing and further improvements in the content is practically a full time job in itself and if you try to do too much yourself you will end up not working on other ares of your business. All of these repeative tasks can be performed by specialist trained to track search engine rankings test and update the content regularly to make the improvements.
As we have seen, you can save lot of time when you outsource your SEO tasks to an Internet Marketing Service. There is large amount of expertise which you can access through outsourcing to them. The time saved can be utilised for core business activities to generate more revenue for your business. Hence, outsourcing your SEO to an Internet Marketing Service is a smart way of achieving economic efficiency which will help you to manage your business more effectively.
‘Backlinks and SEO’
Jul 20th
Whether a newbie or an old hat online, most business owners are familiar with the concept and importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), if your not sure on this topic check are past posts on the subject. Basically SEO is the technique used to get the natural traffic to your website and Search Engines the cost free carrier to increase traffic to websites.
When your internet business site is ranked highly within natural/ organic search results your business recieves more traffic and hopefully more leads, sales etc. A major tool to help you achieve good SEO is ‘Backlinks’. Today’s post looks at what Backlinks are, how they can be used to benefit your business?
‘What is a Backlink?’
Basically a backlink is an incoming link to a Webpage on your site for example which is navigated through/from some other Webpage on the internet. It is a link coming into your site which does not neccesarily navigate to any other external link. Many search engines use an algorithm which gives weight to the amount of Backlinks a Webpage has, while assigning the page rank, ranking of your page on a search engine is determined by the number and quality of backlinks to your site. Hence Backlinks are a great tool for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
The Backlinks of a Webpage indicate the characteristics of the visitors and hence you can develop improved content on your Webpage according to the type of visitors. So Backlinks can act as guides for content development as well, also If lots of other websites provide links to your internet business website, a natural increase in traffic will occurs.
‘Why build a backlink’
It is an fairly obvious that the greater the number of Backlinks your Webpage has on external websites, the better your chances are of getting more visitors, however backlink building is not so much about quantity (although important) it is more about the quality of the links as poor link quality can have the opposite affect to the one you desired.
‘How to get good backlinks’
The basic pre-requisite for getting a backlink is putting up ‘quality content’ on your website. It is important in getting people visiting you, especially when they are visiting an external site having similar topic to yours. So, ideally it is easier to establish this type of backlink. But that does not mean you don’t have to put in any effort because you do.
The first thing to do is find places on the web which contain content related to your Webpage. This can be accomplished by doing some research on search engines using relevant keywords. You can also make use of automated tools like ‘Backlink Builder’. Some sites allow the links to be added externally, so from a list of websites of your interest, go to those ones and post your link.
A Backlink can become popular giving even more reasons for another site owner to post your link, you can post your link on relevant discussion forums, blogs etc. You can also provide free RSS feeds on different websites to attract more traffic. If your Webpage contains exclusive news then you can get a number of Backlinks naturally using this method.
‘Things to avoid’
In the pursuit of getting better ranks in SERPs some websites owners resort to ‘linkspam’, which refers to an attempts to place as many inbound links as possible regardless of the context and content of the originating site. Another poor choice to use in many cases is ‘link exchanges’, this is you put my link on your site and in return I put yours on mine.
Do not get me wrong here if both sites can mutually benefit each other by a link exchange and are of similiar standing in SERPs this could be a brilliant match, however many people simply use link exchange purely for linkings sake and to their deteriment as these types of link exchanges or link exchange sites are banned by many search engines.
Finally you should never put links on illegal websites such as child pornography, illegal download sites etc as it could earn a bad name for your business. Backlinks are one of the strongest tools for online promotion. All you need to do is to generate good quality content, promote your links and constantly monitor the traffic being generated from them.
In tommorows post we will look more closely at how to acquire good quality backlinks, the do’s and don’ts.
For or Against Bothering with a DMOZ Listing!
Jul 14th
This post picks up a little from the last post on DMOZ as looking online we noticed a debate going on about whether having a DMOZ listing was still worthwhile. So we decided to do a quick post discussing the points for bothering with a listing and those against it as a summary round up of the views being put across on the subject by big players like SEOmoz who we would like to thank for their inspiration on this post. If you have a point of view on this subject we would love to hear it.
As stated in the last post, DMOZ was once seen of the mother of all Directories, The queen, the must have important link to obtain and many people still hold this view. The point for having a listing as discussed in various articles and forums are as follows:
1. Google had the directory copied originally as the Google directory, which was once linked to from their home page, it is still listed but now you have to find it in their large service list – but it is there
2. DMOZ brings direct traffic as their pages ranked well for search queries and were used directly by web visitors before Google basically cornered the market in search.
3. DMOZ received many new inbound links on a regular basis making it extremely valuable in the eyes of the search engines
4. DMOZ was an active place that was regularly used to add, review and modified links making it relevant and up to date.
5. DMOZ is still regarded as desirable by many as it seen as a status symbol, badge of honour for your website.
However the people who are not so thrilled with DMOZ arguements are equally compelling as many feel it is outdated, out of date and rendered practically useless. Below are the points made by the against camp:
1. DMOZ is practically inactive – The basis of this arguement is that many new sites aren’t being accepted and those listings that do exist are typically quite old and many just do not exist any more.
2. Big players like SEOmoz have listings in DMOZ and are not receiving more than 10 visitor a day, which only goes to prove how few people are using DMOZ.
3. The number of inbound links has dropped as people use different sources to gain links.
4. The number of people who no longer regard DMOZ as a worthwhile place to link to has increased with many companies doing very well using other link strategies with less wait time and restrictions, this includes paid directory submissions.
5. The shear number of failed submissions, due to any number of reasons including, no one to review that category and the fact that many editors are now worried about accusations levelled at them for reasons from being bribed to keep people out to bias.
6. The ROI in terms of time and effort to get a listing with DMOZ is not worth it.
These are the arguements for and against, we would love to hear your point of views on it now.
Tips For Getting Listed With DMOZ
Jul 13th
DMOZ was once regarded as the queen of all directories and is still widely regarded as a favourite by all top Search Engines. Google see sites that are listed in DMOZ as a positive thing as all sites in it are hand picked and reviewed strictly on conditions set by its editors.
It is not easy to get a listing in DMOZ and many people constantly try for many years without success. There are many people who dislike DMOZ and claim among other things bias in terms of getting listed being used.
There really is no short cut to getting listing in DMOZ, if your entry was not accepted look at the issues that may have caused this on your website. DMOZ likes good quality sites to be listed that satisfies their quality guidelines.
Here is a quick list of what it takes to get listed on DMOZ and even if you follow all of them you may still not be listed.
1. Make sure your site doesn’t violate the DMOZ guidelines. There is no point in submitting if it does or it is a duplicate site with mirrors or an affiliate site full of links. Also in keeping with this guideline make sure your site is complete and that contact details can be found. Do not try to get a listing for a multilevel marketing site or one that promotes illegal or immoral activites.
2. Contact Information: For credibility purposes this is a must, it must also be verifiable, easily found on your site and accessible.
3. Value for users: If your site is providing value for its users by having good quality articles a forum, reviews or community area then it may have a better chance of getting a listing.
4. Find the right category: Many people find they cannot get listed because they submit to the wrong category, make sure you find the right one to submit to, if there is no one category you fit into try find the most appropriate one for your sector or suggest a new category – but remember it takes time. It is also worth remembering that it may be easier to get a regional listing rather than a general one.
5. Submission Guidelines: Have a well written title tag and a good descriptive description tag. The best title tag will be your company name itself. When writing your description make sure it is not an ad, the best description will be something which falls into the category you have opted for using the DMOZ submission guidelines. Here is a link to them http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html
6. Multiple listings: Are generally not allowed.
7. Patience: After you submit your site wait for at least a year before checking again, look for anything which would have caused you not to get listed and fix them before resubmitting.










