Google has recently announced the release of a new interface for Adwords (Adwords is Google’s PPC (pay per click) advertising scheme). As well as some nice cosmetic changes to the interface, the developers claim that they have completely re-structured the code allowing them to add future updates and additional functionality much more easily, as opposed to trying to ‘tack’ additional bits to a system that was over 6 years old.
The changes have been implemented following talks with different advertisers worldwide. The Google team have taken the feedback into account and incorporated the most popular changes. Ultimately the aim was to improve the user experience, and increase the usability of what can be a complicated system.
The latest version of Adwords see’s huge improvements in efficiency, with users being able to change keywords, bids etc with just a few clicks and without having to reload the page. Previously users could have between 5-10 clicks which included a reload of the page each time. The system aslo enables a greater level of insight by removing barriers for viewing and comparing your data.
To find out more information straight from the source, we have included this video (see below). This is one of about 7 videos released by Google, and I’m sure there will be many more to follow including tutorials of how to use the new system. Personally, we welcome the changes and more importantly, we’re looking forward to all the new functionality that could become available in the future.
Before I write this post, I must stress that I do actually like Twitter (can you see where this is going?). However, today I have must have been on about 5 different websites that have integrated Twitter and have a huge archive of their Twitter posts (or ‘Tweets’) on their homepage. As such, I had absolutely no idea what the purpose of their site was about until I clicked on through to different pages. The homepage content, which is so important from both a usability and Search Engine Optimisation perspective is now a collection of tweets, general ramblings and in some cases, just garbled messages and API key messages from Twitter.
I can see the benefit of integrating Twitter into a website, but I think it should have a section of it’s own, or at the most be simply part of the blogroll. Having it as the main content of the homepage may confuse many visitors or simply turn them away from the page which will increase bounce rate and lower the site conversions, which seem to heavily out weigh the advantages of constantly updated content.
When dealing with an SEO company, one of the phrases you will probably hear a lot when discussing your campaign is ‘long tail keywords’. Long tail keywords are basically a combination of multiple keywords to more accurately describe what you are searching for.
So what are the advantages of using long tail keywords?
Well, consider the keyword ‘SEO’. This keyword on it’s own is extremely competitive, so being able to rank highly for this keyword alone will involve considerable time and investment before you begin to see any results. However, if you were to to use another keyword to i.e. include the geographical location, for this would be less competitive giving you the opportunity to rank highly for it. So, instead of optimising for the term SEO, you may optimise for the term ‘manchester seo‘. Additionally, SEO as a keyword isn’t particularly targeted, as the searcher could be looking for an SEO company, a specialist, tips, advice or even just a definition.
If we used a long tail keyword, i.e. manchester seo company, then again this will be less competitive than a single keyword and is also more highly targeted (the searcher is most likely looking for an SEO company based in Manchester).
The longer your long tail keyword is (the more keywords it made up of), the less competitive it will be to rank for. However, make sure you do your research first. It might be easy to rank for a very long tail keyword, but if no one uses it as a term to search for, you won’t get any traffic from it. This is all part of your keyword analysis that should be performed at the very start of your campaign.
While performing a weekly check to see how Elevator ranked for certain keywords, including manchester seo and manchester seo company, I noticed an increase in organic searches from Yahoo. On further investigation, I noticed that Elevator SEO was now on the first page in Yahoo for some of the optimised keywords, but that the traffic from Google was still relatively low compared to the traffic we were getting from Google which wasn’t ranking as highly.
After a bit of research I found out the latest search engine market share for April 2009. Unsurprisingly, Google is by the far the market leader with 81.39% of the total market share. Yahoo was in second place with 9.93%, which is a huge difference. This explains why less traffic originates from Yahoo despite better performance in keyword rankings.
The data also shows approximately a 4-5% increase in Market Share for Google (approx a 6.5% overall increase) since April 2008, and a 2-3% decrease for Yahoo (approximately 16% overall decrease). This perhaps illustrates the sustained growth of Google, and the importance of ranking well within as Google over other search engines.
If you’re reponsible for creating backlinks to a website, such as submitting the site to directories, requesting a link or reciprocal link from a similar website etc it is good practice to make sure you keep records of all your activity. This is especially important if you’re not the only person responsible for doing this! A good method is to use a spreadsheet within Google Docs, which allows the same spreadsheet to be used simultaneously by multiple users in real time. Editing a document using Google Docs is much more efficient than most document management systems as it allows everyone to work from the same document at the same time, and even see what your colleague is typing!
The spreadsheet above has 4 columns:
The URL of the website or directory that you are trying to get to link to your site
The date you submitted your URL or contacted the site webmaster
The status of the request, which we have as either ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’ or ‘Failed’
Any useful information or notes associated with the request, that may serve as a reminder or can provide instructions to other users
There are many other columns which you can add that you may think are useful and can help you assess the quality of the links. For example, useful columns might include:
Page Rank (PR) of the page the link to your site is on
The number of other links on the page
The date the link was added to the site
Type of link (i.e. directory, direct, reciprocal etc)
The more information you include, the stronger your records will be. However, the flipside is that the more information you need to fill in, the longer the process will take! It is also possible to ’sort’ the information, so once you have compiled a large list you can sort the data by i.e. status, date submitted, page rank etc.
Similar to Microsoft Excel, you can also change the format of cells with ‘rules’, using ‘conditional formatting’. This allows you to review the status of your requests with just a quick glance using different colour schemes for each status type. For example, entering the string ‘Pending’ into the status column automatically makes the text bold and changes the background colour to a light orange.
Although this process may seem like a lot of work, ultimately it will save you time and effort and also any potential embarrassment by contacting the same webmasters repeatedly!
We offer a free SEO website analysis report for everyone who would like to know more. Simple provide few details including your name, email and domain. Once verified we will analyse your site and send you a PDF of your report. Click for your Free Analysis
