The Marriage of Bing & Yahoo
The long awaited Bing & Yahoo search alliance partnership is now underway, and it appears as if it will be complete by fall. If you have a self service Yahoo Search Marketing advertising account you will be transitioned to MSN (Bing) in the Microsoft Ad Center.
If you're not in the USA or marketing heavily in North America, this isn't as important, as Yahoo & Bing tend to be more popular in the west. However, that said, there still is going to be more international traffic to be had from MSN's Search Engine, Bing, who will now have roughly 25% market share of all Search Engine traffic.
For further details on what this partnership means for advertisers on Yahoo & Bing I suggest you watch this video.
Ranking well in Bing is a bit different than Google, and if you're doing well in Bing now, expect your referral traffic to really spike in the fall.
The Robots.txt file
One of the overlooked ways in which a website can get into trouble is by not fully utilizing the robots.txt file or even worse, not having one at all. Here's what a robots.txt file looks like- or you can simply visit ours at www.matrixmarketing.pl/robots.txt
The robots.txt file is there to tell web crawlers what to index and what they shouldn't index.
For example, let's say your web designer uses a folder for testing some new look and feel of your site called "v2". If the folder "v2" is a duplicate version of your website text in a new look, and is found by Googlebot, you will be slapped with a duplicate content penalty. And if you think Google will never find pages that aren't public or linked anywhere internally on your site, think again. Some of our clever competitors may know that you do temp work in the "v2" folder or the "temp" folder and PURPOSELY link to the site (via some free blog software perhaps), bookmark it, ping it, and voila! There it is, all of your duplicated content being indexed in Google- and you're left with the bill.
Another one of the several uses of the Robots.txt is to BLOCK bad robots from coming to your site, scraping your content, images, etc and stealing your bandwidth in the process. The Robots file is the first line of defense against the bad bots, and most webmasters have their front door wide open for all of these email and site scrapers to walk right in.
As Michael said to Dwight in The Office, "Don't be an idiot"...
Get a robots.txt file!!
Understanding Google’s PPC Monster
I think it's important for you to first understand the fundamental principles in which the system of Google Adwords is based on, as when you understand this, it will open up your eyes to understanding how to give them what they want and have much more success with Adwords overall.
First, remember more than anything else, Google wants (and is on the road to demanding) that you deliver RELEVANCY to what the user is searching for.
After all, the reason for Google's success to begin with is the fact they created more relevant results for users who were searching for virtually anything on the internet.
For example, if someone is searching on Google for "Apple Computer" Google obviously doesn't want ads displaying "how to make money online" or anything else that is not nearly relevant to the exact keyword.
They are only willing to accept ads surrounding the Apple Computing world such as sales, support, etc. This goes without saying, although there was a time in AdWords history where you could bid on such things as "Apple Computer" and send them directly to a webpage that was all about making money from home, or even dog training. Obviously, as an advertiser, you don't want to be bidding on keywords that are unrelated to what you are selling.
But this didn't stop a lot of DUMB advertisers from trying to do it anyway. Sometimes you just cannot understand the lack of common sense some companies have, especially in the world of AdWords, but I digress...
Google has since come down on a lot of the advertisers in stages, with what has been not so affectionately termed as "Google Slaps" by the AdWords advertiser community.
The "Google Slap" is a somewhat murky algorithm that determines a specific pages "quality score" relating to the keyword that is being bid on.
For example, if you own a golf store, and you are looking for a way to find new customers for your business, you may try to bid on the keyword "nike golf clubs online" as an example. However, if Google determines that the web page you are sending traffic to is JUST about Golf Clubs, they MAY determine that your web page has a bad "quality score" and will either 1) Raise the price of what you will be charged per click or 2) Disable the ad from showing in the first place....(or a semi-combination of both).
Neither of these situations is optimal, obviously, and it drives a lot of advertisers NUTS that they cannot pay Google ENOUGH to get their ad listed! To them, it just doesn't make sense they won't accept the ad and will not take their money.
Now, there is a reason for this, and as you can imagine, it's about MONEY.
The bottom line is in order to maximize profits from the incredible Google Machine, you need to understand and appreciate their concern for relevancy. And it goes really far beyond what you may just see at the surface.
The bottom line is Google is looking long term. They want to provide their users who are conducting searches with HIGHLY RELEVANT results- because the last thing Google wants is to lose the confidence of their users to actually find what they're looking for when they are clicking on ads.
If users STOP clicking on ads, 97% of Google's revenue is gone, and they will be out of business. So, again, it's about relevancy for Google, as this will sustain the confidence from its user base to find what they are looking for and continue their very successful advertising model.
Interestingly enough, if you can write excellent ads (and it's not too difficult), you can literally being paying .15 a click when your competitors are paying 2.00 a click because Google REWARDS ads that get a lot of clicks. Makes sense, right?
Hope you enjoyed this article...
P.S. When initially getting started in your Google Adwords account, admittedly, you can feel as if you're getting into the cockpit of a Boeing 777 airplane. The interface can be quite confusing, and that's just the start of it. This is precisely why we offer our PPC Management service to clients who are looking to properly manage their PPC campaigns and develop them into advertising campaigns that routinely deliver ROI's of 100% or more! For more information, simply click on the PPC Management link, follow the instructions and you'll get a free audit of your campaign!
Google Eye Tracking Study
A LOT of focus is often put on gaining a "top ten" ranking in Google, since that leaves your website on the first page of results and gives you the opportunity to "be seen".
But in looking further, is it REALLY a "top ten" ranking that you should be after? Take a look at what users are really looking at today...
In looking at this further, in reality, what you should be most interested in is the top 5 positions in Google, not the top ten.
And for the record, our extensive testing shows that the TOP 4 positions get over 80% of the clicks on any given search.
As a matter of fact, AOL released their CTR (Click Through Rate) of their organic listings and it turned out to be as follows:
Now, Google users tend to be more refined than that of AOL users (sorry AOL users!) and you cannot expect the exact same type of CTR's for Google. Google users scan the listings a bit more than just trusting the #1 result.
However, as you can see with the Google Eye Tracking Study focusing on the top 5 positions makes the most amount of sense.
You may also want to review my post on the importance of the Title Tag and your Meta Description as it regards to CTR. This is something very SEO's talk about or truly understand, since they only care about "positioning" and not the most important thing:
CONVERSIONS
Hope you enjoyed it.
Google’s Search Bar…
I am in the Vienna airport right now, but wanted to post a quick update.
Google's search bar just got a LOT bigger. Personally, I don't like the change, but you can use ctrl - in order to get it back to where it was previously size wise.
Now, it's interesting to note that recently Google made it public that nearly 50% of its searches are UNIQUE! Yes, 50%! It's a number that shocked a lot of people, but if you've been following the search engines for a while, you know that users are becoming more advanced, often using full sentences in their search versus the standard 2-3 word searches that were common years ago. Could the larger and wider bar as a default for Google be behind part of the thinking here? An interesting point to ponder indeed...
Quotes vs. No Quotes
One of the biggest "games" that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies play with their unsuspecting clients is what I call the quotes vs. no quotes game. Since most companies are focused on their core business and cannot keep up with the always changing SEO world, it is understandable that most companies would not understand this "slight of hand" trick that they play, but I wanted to expose this once and for all.
Basically, when you do a search on Google, you will always see results 1-10 out of _______. And the "______" is the amount of pages that returned as a MATCH to what you were searching for. For instructional purposes, let's use the example keyword of "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" without the quotes.
This means for the keyword "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" (WITHOUT THE QUOTES) Google has returned 721,000 matching PAGES (not to be confused with websites) in the results. This means that, in order to achieve the #1 ranking for the keyword "car insurance in pittsburgh pa" you would need to beat out 721,000 other pages for the top relevancy on this keyword right?
WRONG.
Although this is what almost all SEO's will show you, as it looks incredible to be able to get the #1 spot out of 55,400,000 competing pages doesn't it?
But, things are not always as they appear.
In reality, you really want to determine the true competition for how many pages are competing for a certain phrase by using quotes.
So, when you apply this to "car insurance in pittsburgh pa", you get an entirely different picture of the TRUE competitiveness of this phrase! Only 8 competitors? If indeed there are consumers doing a search for this phrase, it only means good things for you, if you sell car insurance in Pittsburgh, PA because finding the top 10 for low competition phrases like this is quite easy. And while still the SEO firm getting you ranked for phrases like this is a valuable service, understand it's not as difficult and costly as they would like for you to believe.
There's a little "truth" delivered to you about an otherwise "dirty little secret" in the SEO business.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Understanding How The Google Spider Works
Google is by far the Internet's #1 search engine, controlling nearly 80% of the search engine traffic at the time of this blog post. So, given the fact that countless numbers of new websites and pages on old websites are being added, how in the world is Google able to keep up? The short answer to this is—Google’s spider.
What is a “Spider” or “Crawler?”
Google's spider nicknamed "GoogleBot" is designed to scan through the various webpages on the Internet and compile them for later processing. The function of GoogleBot is to provide more relevant results in the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages), validate HTML code and linking, eliminate as much spam as possible, and generally deliver quick results.
How Does GoogleBot Work?
Simply defined, the update process with GoogleBot works like this: Google starts with a giant list of websites that they already know exist (because they have indexed them before). From there, it scans these websites and identifies new links which they haven't seen before and follow those links and index those new pages as well.
And as you can imagine, it grows exponentially from there.
When the spider reaches the website, it automatically navigates through the site, searching for keywords, tagging meta tags, and navigating the inbound and outbound links as well as the various components of the site. As Googlebot visits and crawls through the website, the software is essentially forming a snapshot of the website and all its individual web pages at that particular point in time. That snapshot or “memory” of the website and its individual web pages is then cached.
The cached information is then added to Google’s memory banks, also known as the index. The index is Google’s “memory,” and when a visitor types in a search term, Google searches its memory for websites and web pages that fit the bill. At different intervals, Googlebot will go back to the websites in their index. GoogleBot will "crawl" the website again, take in the new data, and form the new snapshot of this page. This new snapshot is then added to the index in Google which then updates Google’s memory of your site.
How Does Google’s Spider Affect Websites?
The best websites on the internet are dynamic and "evergreen" (always changing, updating, etc). But of course there is a lag between the time a site is changed and the time when the GoogleBot finds it. In other words, it takes time for Google to know about when a page has changed. When conducting a search on Google, the search results reflect the information that was available only during Googlebot’s last crawl of the site. If recent changes were made to your website before Google had a chance to crawl the site, then the results from the spider will not be effective until the next crawl.
A lot of companies try to "trick" the GoogleBot in a number of ways, through doorway pages, cloaked pages, etc, but most of these tricks are short lived. We never have encouraged "spamming" techniques with Google even though in the past it was much easier to trick their algorithms than it is today....and it's only getting harder. So, the bottom line is you're much better off playing the game straight and giving Google what they want rather than employing some shortcut which will only come up hurting you in the long run.
Avoiding Spider Bites
If you’re running a website that attempts to trick the bots in order to draw traffic to advertising or some other types of promotions, you WILL get bit and penalized.
Your best bet will always be to learn what Google wants (which is UNIQUE and VALUABLE CONTENT regarding your topic) and they will reward you greatly with free traffic (and money, if you're doing it right).
I hope you enjoyed this article!
Matt Connelly
All About Google SiteLinks & Anchors
When you're doing a normal search on Google, you may recognize something called "Google Sitelinks" in the results (they are very prominent in wikipedia results) and it can be a very valuable way to increase your CTR (click through rates) within the Google search engine results pages. For example, when you search for "charlie chaplin", you will find the following in Google:
Do you see the additional links "early life", "pioneering film artist", etc? These are what we call Google "sitelinks". They are additional hyperlinks which show in the Google results so someone scanning the results can actually be directed to a SPECIFIC SECTION of a page within the results. This is especially useful on pages that have a LOT of content on them and you want to provide an "anchor" so the visitor can find this content immediately without scrolling down the page too long.
Previously, it was thought that this option of sitelinking in the Google results was only for "authority" websites such as Wikipedia etc, however, this is NOT the case! You can employ this strategy as well by using the proper code in your HTML. Look at the code in this example web page we'll call Meta Tags Explained and look for the code a href=”meta-tags-uncovered.html#author.
The “hash” is an “anchor” on the page and allows you to go to a certain spot on the page. So, all you need to do in order to get these sitelinks is to create some anchors on a page, and then reference those anchors with some links, even internal links.
That is it! Now, we cannot guarantee this will work on ALL websites but it did in all of our testing, and we highly recommend you try this out for yourself as it will greatly increase the click through rate you receive in the search engine result pages.
If you're interested in more tips like this, please join our list in the upper right hand corner of the page and we'll be glad to share them with you!
Matt Connelly