The Search Engine Blog
News and Tips From The Search Marketing World
Keyword Questions Tool from Wordtracker Labs
Enter a word or two and find out what questions users are entering that are related to that word. I find this to be a excellent tool to learn what to write about. Need a nudge to get those creative juices flowing? Want to know what type of content needs to be added to your site? Jump out here and try a few words.
Online Sales To Surpase Retail
Filled with doom and gloom? Step away from the tv news and grab a cup of reality. If you sit with your head in your hands, you’ll get just what you deserve….a missed opportunity. Online spending percentages are suppose to surpass retail for the first time in history. Whether it’s saving gas or whatever the reason, who cares. Make certain your site is in order and get out there and sell stuff. Depression is for wimps.
Follow the link below for a writeup and audio on getting your site into shape.
Images on GoogleMaps
Upload your images and have them appear on GoogleMaps. It’s not a new service, but perhaps one you’ve overlooked. Grab some images of your area (perhaps including your business) and upload them….up to 2 Gb worth.
Bad News Is Really Good
Can bad reviews help your rankings? Perhaps. Here’s a forum thread where the poster complains about a competitor ranking high perhaps because of all the bad reviews with links in them. There may be other factors of course, but it does raise an interesting question. Google sees links. They may not know that these are bad reviews and so treat the links as negatives. These complaints may actually be helping this company sell even more product.
Want better rankings. Maybe you should practice poor customer service?
My competitor has lots of links from people complaining about them!
Interview with Yahoo’s Priyank Garg
A must read interview regarding search rankings and how links impact you. If you can only read one online marketing article today, this is the one. Read it, think about it, put it into action.
Site Disappears From Google – Film at Eleven
Yes, if your robots.txt file is unreachable, you may not be in Google. I have seen it happen and here’s a discussion on Google Groups about that very topic. Make certain you have a robots.txt file and that it’s reachable by the outside world.
Bad SEO. Bad Dog.
Searchviews has an article that reinforces warning signs from SEO hustlers. While the weekly meetings recommendation is overkill for small and even most medium size customers, the warning signs portion of the article is good old news worth repeating.
In general, if they offer guarantees, run. Silly to be in a business where the only guarantee you can offer is that you’ll do everything realistic to help a business, but this is marketing.
Google Obviously Failed Math
Occasionally Google emails me a message stating that certain customer accounts need attention. I appreciate being kept informed of changes that I should make to customers for whom I manage PPC campaigns for, but I’ve always been suspicious of the ones that want me to increase the daily budget. Here’s one that really got my attention.
This campaign met its daily budget of USD $15.00 on 14 of the last 15
days. Increasing the budget to USD $13.09 would allow the ads to show
more often and get approximately 31% more clicks per month.
Of course it’s hard to increase a budget when the increase is lower than the current amount. If you receive messages like this for your PPC campaigns, do your homework. Don’t just increase your spend. Examine your bids and phrases. See how your ads are performing. Make the dogs inactive and experiment a bit before parting with hard earned cash. Obviously their formula is flawed so use some common sense.
I Never Said That And Other Video Edits
YouTube adds video annotations so you can add speech bubbles to your video. If you aren’t doing videos to help market your site, you could be missing out on a large potential audience. Now with the ability to annotate your video, you can add that comic book flair to your presentation.
Need Help Blogging? Live Writer to the Rescue
Microsoft can occasionally do things correctly including help you blog better. The Windows Live Writer is an excellent tool for adding entries to your blog (or blogs) that many are raving about. It allows creation of blog entries even while you are offline and makes integrating photos easier than most built in blog editors. It’s also free for the time being…..
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