Creative Writing Technique for PPC Ad

Several basic techniques to apply for a better CTR when writing a PPC ad copy  top techniques to increase CTR of an ad creative:
(1) Optimize ad title, and description with a keyword  & Use keyword to begin the ad title.
2) Optimize display URL with targeted
(3) Create a unique sales proposition  (USP).
(4) Create sense of urgency
(5) include a call-to action
(6) Select a domain name with the theme that matches the industry or the nature of the product or service.
(7) Keep display URL concise. Omit www or http"// on the display URL.
(8) Target ad copy  on a certain stage on a buying cycle : comparison stage.
(9) Capitalize first letter of each word.
(10) Include geographical or other qualifier to screen out unqualified traffic.
(11) Target audience's explicit level needs with niche phrase.
(12) Provide incentives.

For the details about how to apply these techniques, please refer to the chart as below:


The Application of PPC Ad Creative Techniques

Targeted keywords: Organic Cereal

Use a keyword to begin Title Line: Organic Cereal on Sale.

Keywords in description: XYZ Cereal-Buy 1 Get 1 Free.
Keywords in Display URL: XYZFood.com/Cereal

USP: Organic Cereal.

Sense of Urgency: Offer Ends 1/1/09.

Call -to-Action: Buy Today!

Domain Name with a matching theme of the industry: In this example, select a domain name that matches the nature of cereal and food industry, such as Aroma, or Yummy.

Keep Display URL concise: use XYZFood.com/Cereal as opposed to www.XYZFood.com/Cereal or http://www.XYZFood.com/Cereal.

Target ad copy on a certain stage on a buying cycle: comparison stage.

Proper capitalization: capitalize first letter of each word to make ad more conspicuous than the rest.

Traffic qualifier: California Store Only.

Target audience's explicit level needs with niche phrase: use niche phrase "organic cereal" as keyword to target the explicit need of the audience.

Provide incentive: Buy 1 Get 1 Free.

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Finding Fresh Linkers: Quick Linkfromdomain Hack

Prospecting for bloggers in a niche is common practice in link building. One quick way to do this is to search for queries like “top blogs” to find curated lists of blogs. For example, a search for “top SEO blogs” will give you this top list of SEO blogs. The problem is that this list is dated (2007) and this is no longer an accurate representation of the best and most active bloggers in this niche. I know this because I’m active in SEO, but I might not know this when researching a new niche.
I was thinking of a quick scalable way to get some type of metric to judge fresh linkers. A way to differentiate from blogs like Ontolo that are currently active linkers from blogs like Stuntdubl, which have archives full of gold, but are no longer active linkers.
I came up with a quick little hack to get a vague metric.

Step 1: Linkfromdomain on Bing

This search operator from Bing returns pages that are link-to from a domain. Will wrote a link building post on linkfromdomain on SEOmoz.
The problem is that it doesn’t give any temporal information.

Step 2: Date Filters

A regular search on Bing will provide a date filter on the side bar.

When this filter is used, it adds a parmater in the URL:

• &tbs=qdr:d – Shows pages updated in last day
• &tbs=qdr:w – Shows pages updated in last week
• &tbs=qdr:m – Shows pages updated in last month

Step 3: Simple Hack

You can copy these parameters into the URL string for a linkfromdomain search in Bing.

For example, this search will show the pages Ontolo has linked to that have updated in the last month. You’ll quickly notice it doesn’t show links created in the last 30 days, but it shows you pages that updated in the last 30 days. This generally includes new pages or blog homepages.This hack lets you see sites that link to fresh content.

Step 4: The Metric

Up at the top of the results, you see the number of results which can be used as a rough metric to compare sites. I don’t think it’s a strong metric, but if you’re attempting to prioritize outreach in a scalable way, it’s one additional data point to use to sort out prospective link sources.

Step 5: Scale

To scale this, we need to create an agile tool to grab this data. This can be done in a Google docs spreadsheet. I recommend reading Tom’s post on how to do this.
This metric can be pulled off the results page using importxml and XPath.

=NOEXPAND(importxml(B2,”//span[@id='count']“))

I put together a quick proof of concept:

This isn’t perfect, but sites like seorefugee.com, seoblackhat.com,and stuntdubl.com get relatively lower scores, while sites like SEOmoz.org, MarketingPilgrim.com, and SearchEngineLand.com get relatively higher scores. I think the metric is most useful in the extremes.
I hope this quick little hack helps you scale your outreach.

Posted by Justin
Source : distilled

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Tips for Multinational Search Marketing

A full day of international focused sessions at the International Search Summit @ SMX Advanced London last week was bound to deliver a wealth of insights and tips for organisations targeting multiple global markets online.
It would be impossible to list them all in one post – but we’ve selected some of the key tips any international marketer should consider. Then keep reading to see how to attend the next International Search Summit, June 9th in Seattle!

1. Don’t translate all your content – it could be money down the drain. Instead, focus on translating only the content that will drive ROI.
2. Research potential markets carefully – but don’t rely purely on analytics data to determine which markets to enter. Other factors to consider include keyword research data, competitors, ecommerce regulations and usability.
3. Check out currency and payment preferences in your target markets. In some cultures, such as Russia, users will order goods online but choose to make the payment offline. If you don’t have the capabilities to facilitate local payment methods, you are unlikely to succeed in that market.
4. Google uses ccTLDs and IP addresses as the main factors to determine the geographic location of a site – so local domains and local hosting have a positive impact on rankings and should be used wherever possible. Google Webmaster Tools should not be used to target multiple countries speaking the same language.
5. Be aware of multilingual countries such as Switzerland, Canada, Belgium and India and ensure you optimize your content for all languages; otherwise you’ll be invisible to a large number of potential customers.
6. Remember that local links are gold – and carry the most weight with search engines. However, interlinking all your global sites using a geo-selector is an effective way of driving more links – especially if you link to the equivalent page each time rather than the root domain.
7. Utilize Google Places. It is now available in 100 countries and effective optimization for Places will increase your chances of ranking highly in local search results.
8. Optimize for mobile. There are roughly 1 billion mobile web users globally and 49% of those have a full web browser on their phone. In many emerging markets where internet access is limited, mobile is the most common means of accessing the web.
9. Remember that Google doesn’t dominate search in all markets. 75% of Chinese web users search on Baidu, 87% of the South Korean population prefer local search engine Naver. Also, most Western social sites are banned in China and even in Japan and Korea where they are accessible, local social networks are the most popular. Be prepared to develop a presence on local sites if you want to engage with local users.

by Search Engine Land

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Reach Your Targeted Audience with Google TV Ads

“Google TV Ads' online functionality makes it easy to track results and adjust our campaign accordingly. For a company our size, Google makes television accessible.” - Melanie De Vito, Marketing Manager — netTalk

“After adjusting for seasonal influences, SelectQuotes’ CPL decreased by 35% after four weeks of optimizing campaigns using Google TV Ads’ call attribution feature.”-Kim Terrill, director of broadcast media — SelectQuote

Steps to follow ...

1. Overview and AdWords setup
2. Determine your budget
3. Pick your targets
4. Upload your ad and launch on TV
5. Measure and optimize your campaign

1. Overview and AdWords setup

Google TV Ads is designed as an easy way to advertise your business on national cable television. Through the Google TV Ads platform, build campaigns and air ads nationally across more than 100 cable networks. The Google TV Ads system delivers over 1.5 billion impressions weekly, or for those versed in television buying, over 1200 GRPs per week.
To get started, you will need to create an AdWords account. Go to the AdWords sign up page to create an account. If you already have an AdWords account, skip to Step 02.

2. Determine your budget

Television is one of the broadest reaching advertising mediums. According to the Nielsen Company, roughly 99% of all American households watch television on a regular basis. While this means it’s a great way to advertise to your audience, it also means that your message can get lost if you don’t run at a minimum reach and frequency. Google TV Ads does not have a minimum budget requirement, but campaign budgets should be set strategically to give ads enough exposure to make an impact with your audience. You decide for yourself how much you want to spend on your TV campaigns by specifying a daily budget and a maximum cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bid for your ads.

3. Pick your targets

Several targeting tools are available to help you pick relevant programs, times of day and networks:

1. Audience search. Search by audience demographics such as gender, age, household income, and over 35 hobbies and interests to find targets that will reach your audience most effectively.
2. Program targeting. Find shows that are contextually relevant to your product or service, or audience interests. For instance, by searching “hiking,” Google’s system will recommend programs that match the context of the keyword, as well as programs correlated to hiking (such as outdoor and adventure programs).
3. Network and daypart targeting. If you already know which networks and times of day will reach your audience, simply select the days and times you want your ads to air.

4. Upload your ad and launch on TV

Once you’ve picked your targets and set your budgets, it’s time to upload your ad. If you already have a creative asset, you can simply upload it within the AdWords tool. If you don’t have a television ad, consider using the Ad Creation Marketplace, an online marketplace of industry professionals ready to help you make your new TV commercial. For pointers on developing a television commercial for the first time, advertising icon Jon Bond offers 5 steps to consider in the video to the right.
After your campaign is set up, and your ad has been created and uploaded, we’ll check to make sure your ad complies with the technical specifications and advertising policies of Google and our TV partners. Once your ad has been reviewed and approved, it will be ready to run on national television.

5. Measure and optimize your campaign

Once your ads have aired on television, the next step in the process is to optimize campaign performance. Historically, television is a difficult medium to track and optimize, but with Google TV Ads advertisers can take advantage of cutting-edge measurement tools. Google TV Ads provides several tools to help measure campaigns, including:

1. Google TV Ads reports. TV specific reports are integrated directly into campaign summary pages, allowing easy analysis and optimization of campaigns. Reports are based on data from millions of anonymized set-top boxes, so you'll always have the most accurate performance metrics at your fingertips within 24 hours of airing.
2. Call attribution. If your goal is to drive sales and leads, you may want to consider including toll-free phone numbers in your ads. Google offers call attribution, an easy, free way to track customer calls driven by your TV ads. Using Google’s advanced algorithms, you can track which ad placements have generated the greatest number of leads.
3. Web traffic reporting. Using Google Analytics, track TV campaign metrics including TV impressions and ad plays alongside daily web traffic volume. By comparing TV impressions with web traffic, you will be able to track lifts in search query volume and website traffic that may have occurred due to TV advertising.

Source : Google TV Ads

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Robots.txt

I just had a bit of a conundrum with the robots.txt file on a website, and have managed to find a solution which I thought would be interesting and useful for anyone wanting to make sure that they are blocking the right things in their robots.txt file.
The problem
You have a folder on your website which contains some useful pages which you want Google to be able to see (e.g.www.yoursite.co.uk/folder1/useful-page.html), BUT the default page for this folder (e.g.www.yoursite.co.uk/folder1/) is either blank or creates a duplicate version of one of the sub pages.

In this case what you want to be able to do is to tell the search engines to NOT view the root folder but to see all of the sub pages within the folder.
However, if you add the below to the Robots.txt file for your website both the folder and the pages underneath it will be disallowed, and the search engines won’t then see your valuable content.
Disallow: /folder1/
The Solution
I wondered if it might be possible to use a $ at the end of the disallow line as this is the Regex symbol which means “if there’s anything after the last character in my rule, then ignore it” which should mean that if the below rule is created then all sub pages from my folder WILL be visible whilst the folder root isn’t.
Disallow: /folder1/$
I’ve tested my new rule in Google Webmaster Tools – for both www.mysite.co.uk/folder1/ and www.mysite.co.uk/folder1/useful-page.html and as hoped my folder root is blocked but my useful page is visible.
So, I’ve successfully blocked a page I don’t want Google to see (as it could be seen as duplicate content) whilst allowing Google to see all of the useful content contained inside my folder.
Needless to say, in a geeky way, I was quite excited about this discovery, and I shall definitely be using this solution again to ensure that the SEO of websites I work on is not impacted by Google seeing pages I really don’t want them to see.
by Emily Mace

Related Posts

1. SEO Speak: What is a Robots file?Google Adwords Bot and Robots.txt
2. Checking your Robots.txt file
3. Yes you CAN redirect a robots.txt
4. Adding Pages to robots.txt Takes Time to Work
5. Testing your Robots.txt file
6. More on Robots.txt
7. Can I redirect a robots file?

Source: Robots.txt – blocking the right things | Vertical Leap Blog

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Changer Landing Pages As Per Google Instant Preview

Google turned on Instant Previews for Ads last month. Now, a little magnifying glass appears next to each search ad, which the user can click on to see a preview of the landing page for the ad.
It may not have received much fanfare, but this is a huge change for post-click marketing.
Until now, PPC marketing and landing page optimization were separated by a gap: the click. The only information a user had to make a decision to click was (1) the text of the ad itself, a mere 135 characters and (2) the position of the ad as a faint signal of quality or value. And, where applicable, any brand equity that the advertiser had previously established. It wasn’t until the user clicked that they could factor in the actual experience that the advertiser would deliver in return.
That structure let a lot of advertisers get away with poor post-click marketing experiences. As long as the ad — just the ad — tempted people enough to click, they generated their traffic, increased their click-through rate (CTR), and had a shot at snaring some fraction of those respondents in a conversion.
But the game has changed. Poor post-click marketing experiences can no longer hide behind the click.
Now, upon entering this “preview mode,” a user can hover over any ad — or organic listing — on the search results page (SERP) to see what its landing page looks like. They can read snippets of text from the actual page to see how closely it relates to the text of the ad. And by effortlessly moving their mouse around the SERP, they can quickly compare all of the different advertisers before they decide to click on any.

Pre-Click & Post-Click Marketing Converge

To appreciate the impact of this change, imagine that you’re thinking of touring of some wineries in Napa. You do a search for “Napa Valley wineries” and see the following two ads:

Would you choose A or B? Personally, I think A is a better ad, but B is certainly credible. “Sit back and relax. Leave the driving to us.” That’s an appealing proposition, and in your mind’s eye, you can almost see a limo winding its way through mountain vineyards. You might click on both.
Now take a look at these ads with the preview mode enabled:

Changes your perspective immediately, doesn’t it? I reduced the size of these to fit here, but even without reading the details, you can tell at a glance that A is still credible and consistent with its ad.
But B suddenly looks like junk. Its snippets of text are just keyword spam. Its island-themed photo of people in Hawaiian shirts clashes with the mental image of a Napa Valley wine tour. The headline of “Wine Tours in Napa” and the custom URL of www.winecountrytours.com are not enough to save B. Its credibility is shot.
That’s a big change in the laws of the search universe.

Best Practices For Instant Preview Landing Pages

Google Instant Preview for Ads immediately suggests several best practices for landing pages.
First and foremost, design matters. A landing page that looks good can now send a signal of the quality of the advertiser — potentially a stronger signal than the text of the ad or its position on the SERP. Compelling landing page design can now differentiate you before the click, as well as after.
Second, message match matters. In other words, the promises that the ad makes should be reflected in the copy and imagery of the landing page. Here’s a great example by Silverpop, whose ad promises “The Top 5 Questions You Should Ask When Selecting Marketing Automation” — and their landing page preview clearly fulfills that promise.

Third, don’t put long forms on your landing page — unless your conversion offer is extremely persuasive. Users who preview a page with a long form and very little other content are likely to be reluctant to click through. (“Oh, goody, I can’t wait to fill out all those fields!”)
Instead, consider using a short form — such as just asking for name and email address. Or postpone your form to the second page of your landing experience. Or implement “progressive conversion,” just asking one or two fields on page one, and then following up with subsequent questions on page two or three. This becomes an additional benefit of deploying multi-step landing experiences.
For example, consider this landing page to a multi-step experience, with the form postponed to page two:

Fourth, speaking of testing, think carefully about your A/B and multivariate testing when experimenting with significantly different offers on your landing page. Google has not made clear exactly when and how they capture these preview thumbnails. If they happen to capture a thumbnail with a big “40% offer” banner, but then when the user clicks through they don’t see that in their version, that would not be good.
One way to prevent problems here is to test with matched pairs of ads and landing pages. So instead of testing one ad with two different A/B versions of a landing page, test an A version of the ad matched to an A version of the landing page against a B version of the ad matched to a B version of the landing page. (In this case, the A and B landing pages should have separate URLs.)

Click-Through Metrics For Landing Pages

This move by Google now makes the click-through rate (CTR) metric relevant to landing pages. As people become aware of this feature, previews of good landing pages will garner more clicks than previews of bad landing pages. This is certainly easy enough to test with matched pairs of ads and landing pages, as we discussed above.
Which landing page previews have the greatest impact on CTR? What’s the relationship between that new CTR and the subsequent conversion rate (now that people have a clearer expectation of what the landing page will deliver)? These are all excellent opportunities for new conversion optimization experiments.
In addition to winning more traffic, this may indirectly impact your quality score. Although Google says these previews will not effect quality score directly, it’s generally accepted that CTR is a significant factor in quality score. So if great landing page previews increase your CTR, your quality score benefits indirectly.
Congratulations, Conversion Science readers. Google has effectively elevated your post-click mission to the very top of the search marketing funnel.
by Scott Brinker
Source -

Google Instant Preview: A Game-Changer For Landing Pages

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Tips To Integrate Google Analytics & YouTube

As companies spread their media mix, and expand their activities to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social channels, it is essential to try and integrate numbers as much as possible. And this integration should not only be on the marketing message and design, but also on its tracking. It is important to have a centralized marketing measurement tool that can provide us with the ROI of each of the channels.
I have previously discussed Google Analytics integrations with Webmaster Tools, with Website Optimizer, and with Feedburner at Search Engine Land. In this post, I will discuss how to best integrate Google Analytics and YouTube Branded Channels.

Who Can Benefit From It?

Recently, I created the Online Behavior Channel on YouTube, and considered the choice of investing in a branded channel or not. The main factors that led my decision to invest in it were the option to add a customized header with links to my content and the possibility of adding Google Analytics to it.
Therefore, if you are not a branded channel, you do not have the option to track it with Google Analytics (see all branded channel features in this pdf).
Below is a screenshot showing where to find the Google Analytics option and how easy it is to add the code.

Setting Up Google Analytics

As it is clear from the screenshot above, it is very simple to add the Google Analytics tracking code to a YouTube branded channel.
However, I recommend the configuration below to your Google Analytics profiles in order to keep the data clean and analizable.

Use the same Account ID (UA)

The first decision to be made is the account that will be used: will you use the same account you used for your website or a different account?
I believe you should always use the same account, this will enable you to see the stats for your YouTube channel together with those of your website or separately (see below the configuration you needed).

Create YouTube & Non-YouTube Profiles

In order to be able to analyze your YouTube traffic separately or together with your website traffic, you should create two new profiles on your account:
1. Only YouTube Traffic: this profile shows only the behavior of visitors to the YouTube channel.

2. NO YouTube Traffic: this profile shows only the behavior of visitors to the website.

In addition to the profiles above, the overall profile that includes all domains (which is the default profile) should be kept for analyzing the aggregate traffic to the website.

Wishes For A Better Integration

A few months ago I wrote a Google Analytics Wishlist, which included the main items that I felt were missing in the tool, including a more powerful integration with Adsense, with Website Optimizer and with Webmaster Tools.
Following my experience with YouTube and Google Analytics, I feel the integration is far from what companies need. Here is what I would like to see further detailed in Google Analytics on YouTube:

• Subscribes as Pageviews. In order to enable the tracking of YouTube conversions on Google Analytics, the YouTube team should add a trackPageview call every time someone subscribes to the channel. This is fundamental as one of the main objectives of the YouTube Channels is to get people to subscribe to it. Today, this cannot be measured using Google Analytics.
• Video interaction as Events. As part of YouTube insights, they offer Hotspots stats, a report showing which parts of the video are “hotter”. If this type of information was available on Google Analytics (as Event Tracking) that would be a great tool to analyze video interaction.

As I believe Google is always looking into ways to integrate their tools, I am looking forward to improvements to this integration.

The Author of this post is Daniel Waisberg

Source: Search Engine Land

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Use Google Analytics to Choose What Keywords to Focus

Once your website starts getting at least some traffic from organic search queries, you can help increase conversions (inquiries, signups, purchases, phone calls etc) by investigating what happens once people reach your website from the search results.
You can use Google Analytics to choose what keywords to focus on and to check the entrance pages (landing pages) for issues hurting conversions.

How To Choose Which Organic Keywords To Focus On

Most websites have hundreds or thousands of keywords bringing visitors to their website so it’s ideal to have an easy way to select which keywords to focus on.
In Google Analytics, you should have either some important (non-ecommerce) conversion Goals being tracked or e-commerce turned on and set up so that it is tracking transactions. You’ll then be able to see the conversion rates by keyword as follows:

1. Choose Traffic Sources / Keywords
2. Set a date range of about 3 to 6 months (Less if you’ve made a fair number of changes to the site that might have affected rankings, changed URL’s etc)
3. Choose “Show: non-paid” (See the screen shot below)
4. Then choose either a Goal Set tab or the Ecommerce tab (see the screen shot below)

Sort on Visits if needed by clicking on the column title (or export to a spreadsheet so you can sort the data in various ways).

Google Analytics Organic Keyword Conversion Rates

Scan through the list and more closely examine any keywords with a conversion rate that is lower than some minimal percentage.
You’ll likely notice a fair number of keywords with a conversion rate of zero. You’ll need to make a judgment call on each of these as to whether the phrase is relevant to the conversion goals of your site.
Sites tend to rank for many phrases that aren’t very relevant and are not likely to lead to conversions. Skip those and focus on the keyword phrases that you believe should be leading to conversions.

Check The Entrance Pages For Issues

Although we have some control through optimization, it’s the search engines that decide what web pages rank high for organic keywords and thus become the entrance pages when people click through (unlike PPC where you choose the landing page) so the first step is to check any entrance page with more than a minimal number of entrances for issues.

• In the Google Analytics table of keywords you generated, click on a keyword in the table that you want to examine.
• Next, click on the drop down selector you’ll see in the screen shot below

• Then select Landing Page (see in the screen shot below):

You’ll be presented with a list of the entrance pages for that keyword (You may have to click “non-paid” again on this page too).
Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t turn the entrance page listings into links in this table, so you’ll either need to copy and append the URL segment in the listing to the website address in a browser address bar or follow the next steps.
Here’s what I do using two monitors. I open Analytics again in another instance of the browser on the other monitor and do the following:

1. Choose Content / Top Landing Pages
2. Select “containing” in the Filter option selector you’ll see in the screen shot below.
3. Copy all or part of the URL segment from the keyword entrance page listing into the Filter field (see the screen shot below)
4. This will generate a list of entrance pages that contain the URL segment.
5. Click on the entrance page you want to examine.

Google Analytics Landing Pages Filter

When you click on the landing page you wish to examine a Content Detail page is presented. Click on the “visit this page” link you’ll see in the screen shot below to view the page.

Typical Issues With Organic Entrance Pages

Here are some typical issues we see with organic entrance pages along with some suggestions on how to handle them.
Files with no navigation
We often see the content of frames (albeit less often these days) or orphaned “pages”, or the content from pop-up windows get indexed in search engines and viewed without any site navigation. In other words, people are clicking on the search results for these files and the page that they land on has no easy way for them to navigate into the rest of the web site.
For framed pages (if you still have this issue) determine if they really need to be developed as a frames system and rebuild them if not. There are also some JavaScript solutions to ensure that frames pages load correctly. Trying Binging “JavaScript ensure frames load correctly”.
Consider not using pop-up windows or putting the content of pop-up windows into a folder and disallow that folder in your robots.txt file. Recheck what entrance pages are being returned after a couple of months.
Old web pages still live
Webmasters often leave old web pages up on the site where they continue to get indexed by search engine. Many times I’ve seen entire old versions of websites moved to a folder on the site, but search engines find and index them. Sometimes, these old pages rank for important keywords.
Unfortunately, old web pages usually have broken navigation links and images, out of date information, and countless other issues. Consider setting up a 301 redirect from the old page(s) to the best page on the live site to capture that keyword traffic for awhile. Then work to optimize a page(s) on the live site for the keywords.
File not found
You may get “404 file not found” errors for many reasons. You’ll need to determine why this is happening for specific keyword phrases to decide if there are issues that need to be addressed. In some cases “file not found” errors are returned from search results because a web page was deleted or moved and the search engines haven’t removed the old URL from their listings yet.
Setup a 301 redirect for this URL to the best page on the live site. Recheck what entrance pages are being returned for the keywords wtihin a couple of weeks or months.

Is This The Best Entrance Page For The Keyword Phrase?

If there are no issues with an entrance page such as those pointed out in the previous section, consider whether it’s the best page for people to enter the site for this search query. The fact that you are examining the entrance page for this keyword phrase because the conversion rate is low would suggest that it may not be the best entrance page.
Here’s an example from a client’s site. They sell cooking products on their e-commerce website. They also publish their own book on a specific cooking topic which they sell on the site. People do search on the name of the book.
However, the top entrance page, the page ranking highest for the name of the book, was a page for a free recipe from the book. Not only was there no easy way to get to the page where one could by the book, nowhere on the page was it even mentioned that the book was for sale.
Here’s what we suggested:

• Add a prominent “call to action” one or more times on this page to get people over to the page where they can buy the book.
• Optimize the book page to try to get it ranking higher than the recipe page and even de-optimize the recipe page if necessary. Note: If it isn’t important for this page to rank for other phrases, you might use a Meta Robots Tag to keep search engines from indexing is. See Meta Robots Tag 101.

by George Aspland
Source - http://searchengineland.com 

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Check Out Your Competitor For Linkbuilding

This is my basic process for competitor based linkbuilding, with specific examples from various live linkbuilding campaigns.
I use Open Site Explorer for the link analysis as well as to measure my rate and quality of link acquisition.
1. Find your REAL Competitors
When working with a client, I always ask them who their main competitors are. In most cases they over estimate some brands and underestimate others. They often think only of brick and mortar companies and forget web-only players and content aggregators.
I take a basket of 100 keywords that I think are likely to be the most ROI beneficial to the client and check competition by SERP Saturation.
Example of SERP Saturation for a basket of travel industry keywords

Often this process throws up new sites that no one was aware of, but that have been quietly doing very well
I choose three top competitors and load them into the SEOmoz Campaign Manager. Here is the real data from my UK train industry campaign

2. Understand what Types of Links you Need
I create a range of graphs per competitor from the granular competitor link analysis data. This allows me to see what type of links I need.

When I see that I have all followed links and no nofollowed links, I know I can target low quality, exact match links with little risk of penalties. In the example above, you can see I need to concentrate on getting links from a wide number of sources.
3. Create a Baseline for Measurement
This is very simple. I just record the granular link data from my site and 3 competitors into Excel whenever the SEOmoz crawler updates.
Hotel Industry example:

I can get a very easy view-over-time on what is and has happened to backlinks. Once this data is in excel, its quick to create graphs for visualisations and reporting.
Train industry example:

It is very easy to see we have a significantly increased the number of incoming links in a short space of time.
These graphs keep clients happy but there is more going on behind the scenes.
It is very important to monitor the Domain Authority and homepage Page Authority to make sure that your linkbuilding does not gain links at the expense of reducing your other domain-wide authority metrics.
4. Export a Competitor's Backlinks into Excel
I keep only the URL, Page Authority and Domain Authority columns. Add a column for Action, Category and Notes. The Category column is the real value add.

Sort the list into 100 unique domains, and then by page authority. Then visit each site on the list.
In the Action column, record the action you take (UNO means Unobtainable, I don't think we can get a link etc) In the Category column, categorise the website.
This is the list I use for the train industry:

• News - Quality news site
• Blog - Personal writeup about that company specifically
• Reference Site - Write up that mentions the company as a reference or resource
• Owned Other site - a different website that they own
• Twitter - I will follow them with the Twitter account
• Student Site - specific for each industry
• Timebased Event - specific for each industry

A lot of links are from student sites and a lot are timebased events like past conferences, so I make a specific category for them.
When I email the webmaster, I keep track of the date I sent it, the person's name, the email address I sent it to and any other notes like phone numbers.
I keep an email folder for each linkbuilding campaign that contains all the replies.
I got three great tips from Frank at www.orchidbox.com while writing this post.

1. Check the whois email address if there is no email on the site. A bonus here is that these people are less likely to be being spammed, so your email may be received without preconceived scepticism on their part.
2. Add a column for whether the site uses Adsense or not. This can allow you to target PPC ads at high quality websites in your niche.
3. Add a column for whether the site takes article submissions or not. If you can't get a free link, you can at least write a decent guest post for your link.

5. A Linkbuilding Email Template
Keep it short and simple but do all the important bits.
----------------------
Hi there
Would you add www.clientsite.co.uk/ to your page http://www.yoursite.com/uk/en/careers/student/offices?
They have discounts for buying online and no credit card charges and serve the area your users live in.
Cheers
Stephen
----------------------

1. Informal, personal where I can get the recipient's name form the website
2. Not a lot to read, tells them exactly what I want and where I want it (i.e. Don't make them think!)
3. Tells them why giving me a link is good for their users
4. Tells them why giving me a link makes their site better
5. Doesn't make any wild promises on my site, or suggest anything spammy
6. Doesn't take a lot of my time to replicate or personalise, I can shift a lot of these in a day if needed

Don't overthink this. If you are in doubt, just send the email. I have had PR 9 backlinks using this method. Follow up if you need to.
6. Gather your Business Intelligence
Now that the link building is done, segmentation is where you get extra business intelligence. I have two extra columns in my Excel. The example below is from an analysis of links pointing to the www.thetrainline.com.
Actions
Describes the action taken - already have a link, sent email, called, filled form, don’t want etc.

This gives me a good overview of how my links compare to theirs.
Site type
Describes the type of site it is. This changes slightly depending on the site and vertical, there is no hard and fast rule.

This tells me where they get the bulk of their links from and can be used to guide the next phase of linkbuilding strategy as well as in this case, feeding back into actual product development.
7. Turn Business Intelligence into Strategy
Here is some actual feedback to the client based on link analysis of The Trainline.
Geography One of the main reason links are not obtainable, is that The Trainline operates on a larger geographic scale than [client] and therefore gets a larger numbers of targeted links from local organisations. A lot of websites use The Trainline site as a single reference point when they just want to list one place to go to look for cheap tickets. [client] cannot compete as they do not have comprehensive geographical coverage.
Student Student websites are a great source of natural links and are a good fit for our product. They are also very price conscious and could respond well to a value message.
From this I would suggest

• Linkbuilding to focus on student websites
• Building a separate, country wide, student focused ticket selling domain. This will be incredibly powerful in achieving links not only from education institutions but also being available to use as a countrywide reference point by newspapers, blogs and other references

8. Know When to Move On
I normally do this for the three main competitors and then stop.
By that time I've done three sites I have good feel for the link landscape in the sector and have sponged up most of the available links. Each site after this brings diminishing returns.
That's how I do it. Having a plan to follow makes it easy to sell and less painful to do.

osted by Stephen
Source - Competitor Analysis for Linkbuilding: A Guide for People who Hate Linkbuilding | SEOmoz

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Optimize Video for Universal Search Results

Optimized your online videos for search engine visibility. Both Google and Bing are serving up videos as part of their top organic content, and these videos will get 41% more action (CTR) than the plain text ads that surround them. There are three key things that will help boost your visibility on universal results, and thanks to a study by aimClear we have some insight for you!
About the Study: Using the YouTube keyword search tool, aimClear identified 978 keywords that were then matched up using Google and Bing’s keyword buckets.
Choose the Right Hosting Platform: It’s shouldn’t come as a surprise when I tell you that videos hosted on YouTube come up 84% of the time on a Google results page (they own YouTube, remember?). Things get a little more evened out at Bing with YouTube videos returning 38% of the time.

Google Universal Video SERPs Platform Allocation

Bing Universal Video SERPs Platform Allocation

Check Rankings within that Platform: I think it goes without saying that, like anything with SEO, rankings and visibility will play a huge part in turning up in universal results. The more action your video gets on its hosting platform (views, likes, comments…) the more likely it will be to find its way to the top of a universal results page. Most importantly aimClear found that of those videos that appeared in universal results, 100% of them also appeared on the first page of results on their native platform.
Keyword Intent is Big: You probably took on your first video with the intent to move the needle and make sales, and that’s not a bad way to look at it. Incorporating a call to action in your video is extremely important; in fact it’s like Sales Video 101. But it’s not going to help for SEO purposes. When choosing a title for your video, adding tags and annotations you should focus more on informational keywords rather than navigational and transactional. Informational videos are comparative, instructional and educational… in essence they’re about engaging content. Navigational keywords have website addresses, brand names and descriptions. Of course, transactional keywords are all about the end result: buy now, huge sale, etc…
All of this is important to note because search engines are now returning videos as top content on results pages. For Google the format varies from “two-packs”, “three-packs” and “four-packs” (as well as some other versions) while Bing will almost always serve up a “four-pack” of videos toward the top of the page. Of course all of this information is useful, but really what’s most important is that your video is full of great content that is engaging and relevant to your audience. Now go forth, and get a million views on YouTube!
By: Justin Gonzalez

Source : HOW TO: Optimize Video for Universal Search Results

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