Sydney Bentley

One of the best things about Google Adwords is you can test and measure your advertising messages quickly and for little cost.  Why not invest 10% of your print budget in Adwords testing and reduce the risk of an ad bombing?

With print advertising you write the copy, select the graphics elements get it typeset, send it off to the publishers and several weeks later you wait for the phone to ring. It’s very hit and miss.

The trouble with PR and advertising professionals is they have a very similar mindset. They’ve been over-educated and often can’t relate to their target markets. This is often called the curse of knowledge.

Here’s a thought … why not use Google Adwords to test headlines and then use the best performing headlines in your print and direct mail campaigns?

You could also use this technique test headlines for media releases.

The theory is that Google Adwords is a perfect market for testing. What you think is a great headline may not be so in the marketplace.

By testing different headlines, and only headlines, for you will have valid data to base advertising decisions on.

Once you have the best headline sorted out, then you can test body copy. Admittedly you only have 2 lines of text to play with, but those two lines could be the lead sentence or paragraph for your print or mail campaigns.

Does this make sense?  Comments and Stumbles please.

Contribution by web design brisbane

Google, in a posting on its official blog last week, said a new feature known as Search Wiki allows users to individualise SERPS by promoting or demoting according to their own tastes.

SearchWiki lets users who have a Google account rearrange their search results, re-ranking websites by moving them up or down in the results page.

Useless or inappropriate search results can be removed and others included.

“With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site;’ Google said. “You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong.”

The California based, organisation said the changes in rankings will be shown the next time users log on and will not change searches done by other users … yet.

SEO experts are worried that announcement could lead to the fragmentation of their SEO markets with search results being inconsistent across user profiles.

SearchWiki marks the first time that Google has encouraged users to modify their search results.

A video explaining the new feature is online at googleblog.blogspot.com.

Google dominates the internet search market, being used for more than 90 per cent of all Australian searches in October 2008, according to industry monitors.

The company also announced in another blog posting that it was discontinuing Lively, a virtual world website similar to Second Life, at the end of December 2008.

“In July we launched lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in unique ways,” a spokes-bot for Google said.

“But we’ve also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks, not every bet is going to pay off,” it added.

“It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritise our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps (applications) business.”

If you are looking for affordable web design Brisbane, or SEO training Singapore, visit searchtempo.com. BSON121208-1

There’s are things that you can do to keep Google happy and improve your search engine rankings. In a nutshell they are:

1. Add new content. If Google notices that you add content on a regular basis it will visit your site more regularly. If Google does not see a change in your web site in a 90 day period, it will set a flag not to visit for another 90 days.
An easy way to add new content is to have an industry news section on your web site. Add a new story every week or so. This is why Google is in love with blogs – blogs change regularly and tend to have relevant and useful content rather than just corporate patter and spin.

2. Make the content interesting and relevant. By creating good content you will encourage people to link to your web site. This will improve your Google PageRank, improve your search engine results AND generate natural traffic. This is called link baiting.

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READER QUESTION
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Stephanie from Coffs Harbour asks: “Does online video marketing work?”

Answer: Yes, most definitely and very quickly too. There’s over 100 ideo streaming sites that are desperate for new content. The better known ones being Google Video, Youtube, Metacafe and DailyMotion.

Google will pickup video’s within 48 hours of posting. The secret is to put the key phrase is in the video. I
suspect that Google ranks video content higher than most other content because of the extra effort involved in producing it. And the video doesn’t have to be full motion either. A simple recorded PowerPoint presentation, with or without narration, will rank equally as well.

Click on the picture to see the interview

As Google Adwords and Google Adsense becomes more mainstream, the rate of fraud from self-clicking (commonly called Google-bation), and click-draining (clicking on competitors ads), will increase exponentially.

The problem is that the electronic antichrist has an obvious conflict of interest in eliminating fraud. Like most web site owners running Google Adsense, you probably are tempted to just “test” ads to make sure all the html you have embedded on your site is working.

In some markets these little “tests” can reward the web site owner over $20 per click. Drugs, bank loans and obesity cures pay pretty well I’m told.

And if you only test one click per day, that’s $140 per week. You and Google share the booty and if the pain is spread across multiple Adwords advertisers. Who is to know? What are the chances of being caught?

The super-paranoid defrauders who do their research will probably discover the joys of anonymous proxy servers. With these little beauties you can click on your ads all day long. An iPod by lunchtime, a new Xbox 360 by dinner – the money and the buzz of ripping off the electronic antichrist becomes addictive.

And for the truly entrepreneurial why not hire some click-workers in a low-wage country?

Some enterprising click-workers roam from Internet cafe to Internet cafe in large third world cities with lists of web sites in their hands. They may use up to 15 different cafes per day in an effort to show the Google database different IP addresses.

Their full time job is to click on Adsense ads on specific web sites. They get 10 – 20 cents per click – substantial and pretty easy money for them. The Adsense publisher and Google get much more, and the poor old Adwords advertiser foots the bill.

And on the flip-side if you want to drain away your competitors advertising budget the technology is just click away.

It’s 8:30. You’ve just arrived at work. You unlock your PC and open your browser – Firefox of course.

Taking your first slurp of coffee you go to Google and search on a keyword phrase for your industry. At top and right of page you see your competitor’s ads.

You put your coffee down.

Click, click, click, click (center-button tab browsing is the best thing since the web browser). There goes $120 of your competitors advertising budget. Google is $120 richer.

You do this every day … $28,800 per year of your competitor’s advertising budget blown on your coffees.

The phone rings. It’s that boring client from Sydney. While you listen to her tales of woe on the phone you search on a term that may be related to her business.

Bingo! There they are. Click, refresh, click, refresh. That call just cost her $30.

You see the Google business model doesn’t take into account human nature. Some people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty. Correction, a lot of people are greedy, rude, arrogant and nasty, especially if cash is involved.

Google has got away with it for so long (2-3 years), because the same sort of people ain’t that tech-savvy. There were a few exceptions of course, but they were lost in the white noise.

Not now. As Google Adwords and Adsense becomes mainstream the rates of Google-bation and click-draining will increase.

This year watch out for the growth pay-per-action and pay-per-sale. The affiliate marketers have it right.

John Hacking is Product Manager for Search Tempo, a Brisbane based search engine optimization and marketing firm that specializes in helping small businesses get found on the Internet.

Over 80 percent of Internet users use Google to find products and services on the world wide web. It stands to reason that if you want to generate more qualified sales leads you need to rank on the first or second page within the search engines results pages on Google.

As Google gets more and more sophisticated with each algorithm update, search engine optimisation methods have to change to keep getting good results.

Here is a list of ten important tactics that you can use to improve your Google rankings.

Use the right keyword phrase The most important factor in getting quality web traffic is to optimize your web pages for the correct keyword phrase. Getting the most sales is often a balance between search volume for key words and level of competition. Use the Overture keyword tool and Google Adwords tool to research and identify your best keyword phrases. Look for keyword phrases that have high search volume, but low competition. It also pays to see what key words your successful competitors are optimising for.

Put your key word phrase in your title tag Forget about putting your company name in the title tag (unless it is a valuable part of the key words), it’s a waste of words and will not help you rank in the search engines. The first three of four words in your title tag should be the key word phrase you are trying to optimize for. Try to limit your total character count to 60 characters.

Write a compelling description tag Title tags are for search engines, description tags are for people. Spend time researching and writing a description tag that compels the reader to click on your listing. Come up with a great offer, use action words. Use shock and awe. Use anything that will get them to click.

Use H1 tags An often neglected search engine optimisation technique is to put your keyword phrase in H1 tags on your page. This tells Google that the following text is about your keyword phrase. Google weights H1 tags nearly as highly as title tags. This tip alone can drastically improve your Google. Similarly, the use of bold and strong html tags can emphasize a key word phrase within the paragraph text where it may not be appropriate to use H1 or H2 tags.

Get the right keyword ratio Aim for a keyword density of around 3-5% of the page contents. Try to work your key word phrase into the page so that it reads naturally. This may take some research and analysis of successful web sites. Remember to use headings and sub-headings that include your key words.

Use alt tags and description tags on images Key words used image file names, alt tags and description tags add to the key word density of any web page. They doesn’t make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. In some product classes a Google image search may lead web surfers to your web site.

Get quality one-way incoming links through article marketing and directory submissions As far as Google is concerned; link exchanges are just about dead. They can help to get your web site spidered and indexed more quickly, but these days they add very little in terms of Google search engine rankings unless the link is on a trusted site and that site has excellent page rank. Wikipedia and DMOZ are examples of such trusted sites.

A more effective approach is to write interesting and informative articles and submit them to article directories. Make sure that you use the author bio/resource box to maximum advantage by using your key word phrase in the link anchor text, AND, by pointing the anchor text to the correct page. Your home page may not be the best choice of pages for your selected key phrase. This will also ensure that more pages than just your home page gets indexed.

Use Social book marking If you have something newsworthy, humorous, quirky, unique or shocking to say, submit a link to your web page to sites like digg.com or redit.com. These up and coming web 2.0 power houses can create a buzz overnight driving thousands of interested visitors to your web site.

Note, just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. If it’s boring link it will quickly get buried by newer and more interesting stories. But what the hell, it’s free to submit links to these sites and you never know your luck.

Record a podcast Google loves podcasts … it just loves them. Get yourself a decent microphone and some podcasting software like Audacity and go for it. Once you have an interesting and tightly edited podcast, put it on your web site and submit it to all the major podcasting directories like iTunes and Podomatic.

Sign up for Google Adwords Although Google will deny it, anecdotal evidence suggests that Goggle favors Adwords customers over non-Adwords customers. This is true for new web sites that often take months to get spidered and indexed by Google. I have seen brand new sites get spidered, indexed and listed in the search engine results pages in as little as a week.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot either. You can set up a low budget campaign of 50 cents to one dollar a day and still get favorable treatment.