I recently visited the London office of Google as part of Google Adwords push to connect with agencies with help and support for their clients. It was good to see some of the offices, although I didn’t have time to have a look around the whole space (I’ll be back!).

Sandeep Menon, head of small business marketing, opened the afternoon session with some facts and figures on how the UK is leading the way in the digital economy (£100bn pa over 7% GDP) and #1 country for e-commerce which I didn’t realise. There’s loads on great info for stat junkies over at Connected Kingdom.

I’m not going to delve too deeply here but just wanted to get some topline points across if you are using Adwords.

Relevance was hinted at been the most important factor for landing page quality score when planning your adwords campaigns. This’ll be of no surprise to adwords experts but organising your campaigns into relevant groups as well as naming them correctly is important.

So a campaign should separate out their ads into sections and relevant keywords for each ad group. Seperate and clearly name all campaigns (search, content, mobile)

• For ads on the search network it was suggested there are no more than 5-6 ad groups, between 5-20 keywords including negative keywords and 1-3 text ads.
• For text ad varieties ensure you change all the text, not just the first line and use the keyword insertion tool if you can.
• Don’t duplicate keywords and ad groups.
• Delete or pause what is not working as it affects your overall account performance

Improving CTR

• Raise your bids and look at improving your Quality Score
• Ensure ads have keywords in the headline
• Make sure your landing pages are RELEVANT to the keyword list

Future stuff: Adwords will soon enable you to just target tablets like the iPad, great for getting through to the more affulent. Also mobile ads will enable users to click and download straight from the ad text.

Many businesses have had a nasty taste in the mouth left from Google Adwords, many having had their accounts shut down without warning, or simply struggled with getting a decent CTR (Click through Rate). I can say that these concerns were certainly voiced at the end feedback Q and A session.

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1. Google Downgrade Content Sites Recently Google announced it was targetting content farms in their...

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An afternoon at the Google office originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on July 25, 2011.

Recently Google announced it was targetting content farms in their recent algorithmic changes which affects about 11% of their search results.

The Google blog says: “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”

According to Sistrix, an independent keyword and SERPS research company, the biggest five losers are:

• wisegeek.com
• ezinearticles.com
• suite101.com
• hubpages.com
• yourdictionary.com

Other sites listed that online marketers might be familiar with include articlesbase.com (down 94%) Slideshare.net (down 56%) and PRnewswire.com (-91%)

It’s worth noting that ehow.com has not been affected by the changes. Ehow.com even gained SISTRIX value (from 270 to 310) and Keywords (from 317,320 to 324,021) during the algorithm-change.

This update is currently only in the US but other countries will follow.

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Google Downgrade Content Sites originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on February 28, 2011.

Just thought I’d do an update about the changing face of Internet Search in relation to SEO.

You may have noticed when doing searches that there are a lot real-time results such as Twitter, Facebook and other social network content, although Google can only index status updates from Facebook Pages – which are “for organisations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information to fans in an official, public manner.”

Bing have a deal in place with Facebook that goes further, indexing individuals’ status updates which have been set to public and Yahoo! have also started to integrate Tweet content.

Another big change on Google is the personalised search. This had an effect if you were logged into your gmail or any other Google account, but now you don’t have to be logged in. This means individuals will see an increasingly different result to another individual.

This isn’t great news for those concerned with SEO as you no longer know where your website will rank. When a result has been clicked a number of times, then that site will start to appear higher up in the search rankings for that visitor.

Personalised search is nothing new.

It all started in 2004 with a beta release through Google labs allowed users to refine search results based on their interests. Then, in mid-April, 2005, Google rolled out its search history feature called “My Search History.” This kept track of all the users’ searches and every page that they viewed from the search results. This time Google required users to have an active Google account. The process has been refined along the way climaxing with the recent change.

Personalised search involves many, many factors. Among them are:

• Geo-graphic factors (local top-level domain, IP address and query analysis)
• Technical factors such as browser, OS capabilities, cookies and toolbars)
• Time of day, time of year and other historical data
• Behavioural query history, interaction with search engine result pages and interactions with advertising and surfing habits).

So what actions can be taken in regards to personalised search?

Well best SEO practices still stand and these factors have become more important:

Factors such as demogaphics, keyword/phrase targeting strategies, quality content, search result conversion, freshness, site useability, social bookmarks, and analytics will all have an impact on your SERPS.

Practically this means:

• Get to know and research your audience and give them the (great) content they want
• Titles and Snippets that are compelling will attract a better click through rate which will in turn help these sites/pages rank better
• Make social bookmarking available and easy to do on your website
• Google Analytics will help in measuring both paid and organic traffic flows
• A logical navigation and architecture for a quality end user experience

Google Caffeine

Google also recently introduced Google Caffeine which ranks pages faster, giving you quicker results. And your page load times will now be a factor in ranking on Google. Simply put, the slower a page loads, the lower it will be ranked.

Google describes Caffeine as:
“a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Of course this all has implications for your search engine optimisation and your online business strategy and something to be well aware of!

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The Change of Online Search originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on March 17, 2010.

This is a quick case study on indexing for the Google search engine and reaching the all important first page. It also just took an few hours of my time yesterday.

The search phrase I was looking at is a fairly competitive one for ‘web prosperity’ which has a lot of buzz around it right now. Web Prosperity is an MLM program with a very handy main product suite aimed at Internet Marketers, which at the time of writing (during its pre-launch phase) is receiving sign ups every few seconds with 5,100,000 results for this search term and a lot of attention and buzz.

When choosing a domain name, unless it is your own branding, consider the keyword phrase as part of it – in this case I chose webprosperityreview.org.uk (although most were gone by the time I got around to it)

I wanted to use a .org as they can rank pretty well but I’m not sure it makes too much difference. As the .org for this domain was gone I went for .org.uk

Naturally I went for the wordpress blog option for content on the domain and spent an hour or say putting together a couple of blog posts about the program as well as adding categories named with the key phrase in such as web prosperity review etc.

Next I added my essential plug ins including ‘All in 1 SEO’, Google XML Sitemaps, ‘Related Posts’, ‘Sociable’ and ‘Statpress’. There are others that should be installed but I didn’t in this case.

I created one remote wordpress blog at wordpress.com and a Squidoo lens. Next I drafted a press release just covering the basic details of the program and submitted it to pr-inside.com.

Next it was a quick visit to animoto to create a video using images and graphics and uploaded this straight to youtube.com. Following that I used heyspread.com to distribute the video to 19 other video directories.

Next task was to socially bookmark it myself using socialmark.com as well as another 30 bookmarks through my outsourcer 9as well as blog carnival submissions. Interestingly these last two tasks have not been completed at the time of writing.

That’s it! Today the site is no.1 – whether this will hold up without further work is doubtful, but the point is it can be achieved without working too hard. Other keyword phrases would probably need a lot more work than what I’ve put in here.

The stats (using statpress) also show a lot of traffic – as seen below on this two day old blog!

Other case studies we’ve done recently have had similar results and all these strategies are covered in great detail in my upcoming ebook ‘New New Media World’ in an easy to follow step by step process and guide. If you are interested in reviewing the first draft copy and giving me a testimonial (If you think it is worthy) please contact me.

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Rank #1 on Google inside 24 hours originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on January 5, 2009.

Google Knol is described as a unit of knowledge – an authoritative article about a specific topic
and initially reeks of opportunity what with the ranking reports.

As Google roll out their wikipedia meets Squidoo mash-up there is concern that Google are
favoring their own Knol content over authority work. There is also ‘no follow’ which means
you get no credit or value for your outbound links.

Another issue is knoljacking – someone could post your content to Knol, get a couple of inbound links
and beat your ranking even if your site is an authority site.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook writes that he put the same article from the ‘authoritive’ work.com and placed it in a knol to find it ranked higher.

All this seems to be leading to a worrying trend in my opinion.

Still, let’s look at the positives – if they rank well – might as well use ‘em.

Linking to your websites and blogs will drive traffic and act as another back door
in the satellite game of Google love, even if the links are ‘no follow’.

Comprehensive information with several paragraphs and subheaders- using keywords in the title.

Let me know your comments on Google Knols!

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The dark side of Google Knols originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on July 28, 2008.

Google is like the Holy Grail of marketing on the web. Rank well in Google and your profits are pretty much set.

But there is SO MUCH bogus information out there, often coming from the “gurus” themselves.

http://searchenginemythsexposed.com

Jonathan Leger has released a new free report that completely
obliterates the following myths about Google (and then goes on to
show you what DOES work):

Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All
Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content
Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank
Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank
Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings
Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content

..and..
MYTH #7: THE BIGGEST MYTH: Ranking In Google Is Hard!

He’ll also pay you for referring other people to this
powerful free report? And that he’ll pay you for anyone THEY refer
as well (even while it’s in pre-launch)? Find out more about that
when you download your sample chapter from:

http://searchenginemythsexposed.com

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Google Myths Free Report originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on January 9, 2008.

You must check out this interview Howie Swartz did with Jerry West recently if you have any desire to get your website top of the search engines. Jerry West, of seorevolution.com, is an EXPERT in his field..listen and learn. By the way SEOrevolution, a membership site has had its’ doors shut to new members but Howie has a way in for you.

http://www.searchingdot.com/2007/08/15/jerry-west-interview-working/

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Jerry West SEO Expert Interviewed originally appeared on Online Marketing Intelligence on August 31, 2007.