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January 28, 2012

5 Basic SEO Troubleshooting Tips for Content Marketers

Content Marketing at its core is about planning information that is thoughtful about the needs and interests of target customer groups as they take the journey through the buying cycle, interacting with content and pulling themselves towards purchase. The role of search engines in making ebooks, white papers, case studies, newsletters, webinars, reports, video, images and many other content marketing tactics is often underestimated or overlooked.
The effect of best practices SEO on content to attract relevant audiences can be substantial. However, search is a dynamic marketing channel requiring ongoing attention. Without proper care and feeding, search traffic can fluctuate, fall victim to more aggressive competitor SEO practices or never get off the ground. Or search engines can simply take away features that make SEO easier to do. Because search can provide such a significant and relevant audience to content, it’s worth investing time to troubleshoot for better performance.
Seeing great SEO, social media and content marketing strategy and tactics being implemented every day, I can’t help but be biased towards having a dedicated agency, consultant or in-house resource for optimization. However, dedicated resources are not very valuable unless there’s some appreciation for what an Optimize and Socialize approach can provide.
To provide some practical and tactical perspective on this essential intersection of SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing, here are a few tips for basic SEO troubleshooting that just about anyone responsible for content in an organization can use. I’ve also included some “SEO Drilldowns” that a pro might explore further and key considerations for content marketers.
Before we get into the Basic SEO Troubleshooting tips, here are a few important things to understand regarding Google and personalization:
Logged out – Google search results when you or other users are not logged in are as close to “generic” as you’ll get, but they are still customized according to your geographic location and your click activity during the session. The days of generic search results that can be predictably viewed by more than one person in different locations is gone. If you do search while logged out, you’ll get a more generic experience than logged in – so it’s worth noting the difference.
Logged in – Users of Google services who are logged in while searching will almost certainly be presented with unique search results. Personalization can be influenced by a variety of factors, including the recent social signals integration of Google+ into Google search results – aka Google Search Plus Your World and especially from the universal Google product data sharing that will start March 1st 2012. Other influences include past search history, geographic location and your interaction with search results are factors for Google to adjust search results just for you. Keep in mind, logged in or out, there are over 20o signals used to sort search results.
Google has made SEO troubleshooting increasingly difficult by encrypting search for users who are logged in to Google. Initially at 9%, our “Unknown” keyword referrers to Online Marketing Blog are now at 26%. Through a combination of historical data analysis and extrapolation from other data sources, you can fill in that gap somewhat, but it definitely takes an experienced SEO/Web Analytics person to do so.
For our purposes, we’re focusing on the basics that can provide insight regardless of logged in or logged out since they are so fundamental to improved visibility of content marketing assets in search engines. Basic troubleshooting often starts by a review of web analytics showing a decrease in traffic from a certain phrase over time or the aspiration to increase search traffic for a particular topic. Keep in mind, there is a difference between business competitors and content competitors in the search results (SERPs). Perform the following troubleshooting actions while not logged in:

1. Benchmark

From your web analytics, log the past 1-3 months of search traffic for the phrase in question (if any) to your website.
What you’re looking for: How often has the target keyword phrase driven traffic via search engines to your website each month, week and day? What does the trend line look like over time? Which pages are attracting search traffic for this phrase and any obvious variations of it? (singular vs. plural). If you’ve optimized specific pages for this phrase, look at all search traffic to it, including “Unknown” encrypted phrases. Basically, you’re documenting the performance of the phrase as a starting point.
SEO Drill Down: How a SEO professional approaches benchmarking current keyword performance might vary, but here are a few ideas. Expand on all the variations of the target phrase, the distribution of “unknown” vs. identifiable phrases, the split between different search engines as sources of traffic, brand vs. non-brand queries, the distribution of different pages and content objects across your domain that attract search traffic related to the phrase. Also review the appearance of the target keyword phrase(s) in Google Webmaster Tools ranked list of keyword phrases. What are the trends for this keyword phrase for ranking (iffy), traffic, inquiries and sales over time?
Key Content Marketing questions: For the content assets you’re optimizing, what role does the content play for target customers in the buying cycle? Is it optimized for phrases relevant to awareness, consideration, evaluation or purchase? What is the relationship of your optimized content assets to each other and to a landing page (if used)? If you’re using a hub and spoke or constellation model for publishing, map out the content and media objects intended to perform for the target phrase in question. Audit them to see what has actually been optimized for the phrase. What new content assets will be created on a go forward relevant to the target phrase?

2. Search Results Landscape

Search for the phrase on Google and/or Bing (logged out) and document the URL, title and description for each of the top 10 search results:
What you’re looking for: Identify the type of websites and content that have high visibility on the target keyword phrase. Capture information about the pages or digital assets that the search engine finds most relevant. Besides capturing the title, description and web address, note the types of content and sources – commercial, non-commercial, web page vs. media or local. It’s helpful to know what kinds of content as well as which websites/pages the search engine finds most relevant for the phrase and topic. If the search engine favors video content, PDF files and news sources, then it might mean an adjustment in your content marketing media mix for that phrase.
SEO Drill Down: More data about the SERP can be quite useful to log including: Content Type (web page, social, news, image, video thumbnail, local, product, pdf, MS Word doc), Content Category (Business, News, Blog, Media, University). Documenting the search results page over time can reveal trends such as whether the same pages maintain top positions, and what the diversity of content types is. Additional research into social signals is worth tracking as well. All such SERP analysis is performed while logged out.
With the level of personalization now in place with Google, savvy SEOs will have access to user accounts that exemplify the target audience persona’s online behaviors in order to trigger a personalized search experience that is similar to the customer segment.
Key Content Marketing questions: According to your content plan, what types of content and media are you creating and what’s the difference between those media types and the categories/formats of content presented in search results for your target keyword phrases? It’s useful to know of the content marketing types in place for your efforts have any particular preference in the search results for the target phrase. If not, what other types of content, sources and media are in favor? Having a picture of the logged-out search results landscape for target keyword phrases can influence editorial decisions about formats used. If blog posts are virtually ignored but press releases are favored, then it may be useful to leverage news story-style press releasees in addition to your blog posts.
This task is also used to collect information about content competitors for use in our other steps below.

3. Keyword Presence

Use the Advanced search option in Google or Bing to check for the presence of the target search phrase anywhere within the pages of your site. Refine that search to look for the exact match presence of the phrase in the title tags of your pages.
What you’re looking for: Does the target keyword phrase exist within content on your site? If so, where? It’s simply amazing how many companies expect traffic from certain keyword phrases when the target keywords are either not present in a significant way or not at all on the website.
SEO Drill Down: Further refinements might include looking for exact match of the phrase as well as variations and with modifiers. Look for the phrase in Title Tags, within H1 tags as headings, within body copy, within anchor text links between pages, as image alt text, annotations to images, video or other media, use within breadcrumb and navigation links.
Additional considerations include any page level barriers to a search engine finding or crawling links. Document the presence as well as the lack of presence for keywords in the areas commonly used by search engines to determine page relevancy.
A review of the top ranking pages documented in Step 2 above should also be checked for the presence of the target keyword phrase.
Key Content Marketing questions: Are keywords being used in your PDF templates used to create eBooks, Reports or White Papers? Are digital assets such as infographics, videos, blog posts, press releases and other content marketing objects using keywords where relevant? Are keywords used in file names, folder names and navigation to content assets?

4. Inbound Link Footprint

Using a link tracking tool such as majesticseo.com or opensiteexplorer.org, check for the total number of links to the content assets that have been optimized for the target keyword phrase. Do the same review with the top 10 competing URLs found in step 1.
What you’re looking for: Links are like electricity for content when it comes to visibility in search results. Links are also important sources of direct traffic. If you expect a page or digital asset to be considered the “best answer” for a query by a search engine, keywords on the page are not enough. A quantity of links to a specific page will make it easy to find and also serves as a ranking signal.
The more topically relevant the content is of the link source, the better. Also the actual text used to link from another web page to your web page matters as well. “Click here” for our White paper and Get “More info” on our Newsletter are not nearly as useful as “Download our Red Widget Whitepaper” or “Sign Up for our Product XYZ Newsletter” when it comes to anchor text.
SEO Drill Down: Using advanced features of link analysis tools, check for the quantity and diversity characteristics of links to target pages. Also check for the on-topic relevance of the link sources. How authoritative are the link sources? What is the context? Is it a news story in a major industry publication or is it one of 200 links on the same page pulled together by automated software? Look at the types of links: text, image, follow vs. no follow, redirect, placement on page (high, low), number of links on the page, context for the link, overall topic. How many links use the target keyword phrase as anchor text? How many variations of the target phrase are used? What is the rate of link acquisition over time for your optimized page?
Besides performing this link research on your own optimized pages for target keywords, it can be useful to review this data on the content competition identified in Step 1 for benchmarking and comparison purposes as well as to identify new linking opportunities for your own content.
Key Content Marketing questions: As you craft relevant content in alignment with target customers and their stage in the buying cycle, think about how you’re promoting that content to attract inbound links from relevant websites. Social networks (Step 5) can have a significant impact on the reach of the content you promote, but social isn’t the only channel of distribution. If your white papers, case studies, archived newsletters and webinars get links from other sites that have commenting functionality, be sure to publicly thank them in a relevant comment. Link out from your blog to get on the radar of industry bloggers and they may link to the next press release, infographic or report that you publish.

5. Social Shares

Check for social shares of the target URLs on your site that are most relevant for the search phrase in question. Do the same for the top 10 competing URLs found in step one.
What you’re looking for: Is your content being shared on the social web? It’s not a “nice to have” anymore. Social engagement and sharing of your content is absolutely essential in order to gain advantage within search and social distribution of your content. Social media optimization of your content is essential and includes making it easy for readers to share your content to their social networks as well as having an active social presence that’s focused on building up a community you can promote content to. Documenting the presence of social shares for your own content and that of the top 10 competing URLs form Step 1 can help identify opportunities.
SEO Drill Down: For the content that you’ve created, optimized and built links to, document the presence, frequency and sources of social media shares. Do so at regular intervals in the way you might take snapshots of the SERPs page for your most important target keyword phrases. Social shares means links within public Facebook posts, Tweets, public Google+ shares, Q/A sites like Quora and even bookmarking/news services. Pay attention to the presence of keywords along with those socially shared links and whether they are congruent with your keyword targets.
Beyond link sharing on social sites, look for social engagement with your content where there’s commenting functionality. Cross promotion with different social channels such as blog, video, image, document hosting (Slideshare) as well as social networks like Twitter and Google+ can provide rich signal for both search engines and users.
Key Content Marketing questions: While social network participation for content marketers is often focused on the social channel conversation relevant to the buying cycle and customer segments, it’s also important to consider broader visibility. In other words, when it comes to social promotion and shares as well as network size, bigger is better. As always, a quantity of quality (relevance) is the ideal. At the same time, the size of your network determines the universe of exposure. In other words, the more Facebook and Google+ fans/friends you have, the greater the likelihood that your shared content will be seen overall. Facebook’s recent report showed on average, you are more than 7 times more likely to share a link on Facebook if you’ve seen the link from one of your friends, so get friendly and grow your network.
Social media and it’s direct influence on search visibility is a reality and content marketers must consider not only the topical relevance of the content they create, the keywords and links but also social promotion, sharing and engagement.
Another consideration for Content Marketers and the Social SEO equation is the importance of Author authority and trust. Officially there may be no such thing as “TrustRank” at Google, but with the forced Google+ accounts, Author Markup and unified user data sharing across Google services, trust associated with a user is clearly important. An individual who has a significant social network, produces a quantity of quality content that a community actively engages with will have distinct advantages when promoting content over a brand that publishes generically. Content Marketers should factor in named entities of individuals and/or the brand itself and what it will take to create a relevant presence to be considered authoritative for important topics.

Conclusion:

Clearly the dynamic and increasingly complicated nature of today’s search engines can make the reliability of any one conclusion valuable for an indeterminate period of time. That’s why, if search traffic is important to your business, that your business has an experienced professional analyzing search, social and website performance data on a regular basis. As content marketers, we put a lot of hard work into planning, creating and managing thoughtful content designed to attract, engage and inspire readers to become customers, advocates and participants in the brand community. Keeping tabs on how those community members and customers discover our content is essential for it’s ability to have an impact.
By Lee Odden

Source : http://www.toprankblog.com

The Art of SEO Evangelism - Being an SEO Evangelist within an organization

Being an SEO Evangelist within an organization requires lot of energy, a lot of knowledge, thick skin, and a lot of relationships. Success is hard to come by and will require a lot of hard work, but it is definitely attainable. I would almost say that this does not apply to just SEO, but to all programs launched within an organization. Along with all that being an evangelist for the entire industry requires the same amount of tenacity.
I have spent a lot of time doing this through consulting efforts by convincing SMB’s to embrace the web and most importantly (at least to me of course!) adopting SEO. Each and every time was a struggle and required hard work, but was *always* worth the time spent.
As I mentioned, getting organizations to adopt SEO when they (a) have never heard of it, (b) don’t believe it is “really that important right now” (typically I’ve heard this from startups), or (c) still believe SEO is spamming. That all being said, here is my “guide” to the art of SEO Evangelism.

Knowledge of SEO

I start with knowledge, because it is extremely important to bring that into your conversations. Your knowledge and experience is crucial to your successes. Companies want proven success and someone that has the ability to deliver. This is especially true in the consulting world, as organizations want that track record of successful projects. In-house organizations are looking for a track record of successful performance.
Be sure that you have done your research on an industry, a skill and/or an organization. Have an understanding for what the company is doing for SEO. Put together questions that you feel people should be asking. Make sure that you have the skill set to do the research, put together the strategy, and execute the plan.
You also bring that knowledge to the table through the experiences that you have been through. Bringing only theories and ideas to the table will leave you in a weak position. So, that means that you want to speak in a strong tone and voice about your experiences. Using terms like “I think” or “i guess” or definite no-no’s. In previous consulting roles I have started conversations by saying, “My experience…” or “Previously…”, so that you are talking in terms of experiences. Now remember, you still need to be able to deliver, but I am assuming you already have that ability.
Knowledge is an important piece of the salesmanship of your SEO Evangelism. Use your knowledge and experiences to your advantage and make sure that people know of your skills.

Energy & Thick Skin

Energy and thick skin go hand-in-hand because I compare traits of the evangelist role similar to a telemarketer. Have an understanding that people are going to do and say a number of things that will upset you. They will mock you, assume they have more knowledge, challenge you, etc. Don’t let this get you down at all, keep your energy level high and keep going at it. NEVER get into a pissing match with someone about how important SEO is.
That all being said, keep that intense energy level and constantly talk about SEO in meetings, in passing, at lunches, and anywhere else you can think of. SEO should be mentioned in almost every conversation you have. Start asking product teams if they are building SEO into their product lifecycle? How is marketing integrating SEO into campaigns? Show everyone that you are talking to that you care about their job more than your own and that you are truly vested in their success.
Now, remember those people that did not want anything to do with SEO? Drop hints here and there, provide statistics and results, show case studies, etc. The more data that you bring to the table and the more fact finding you do will start to sell them, just based on performance and metrics. Keep going at it and let the data win them over!

Relationships within the organization

The most important piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, is the relationships you build. I feel this way about any new program that you launch. As always I feel it is especially important with SEO, because it is so hard to sell within an organization, to startups and getting buy in from individuals.
Start developing casual relationships with everyone you meet. Keep in touch with the people you meet and continue to have conversations. Sometimes conversations will drift towards the interest (or sometimes lack there of) of SEO. Ensure that you are developing contacts that are spread out throughout the entire organization, in product, marketing and technology. You are looking to create evangelists within each organizational unit in the company that will then begin take SEO under their wings as well
Creating relationships and empowering peers within these cross-functional areas will spread the word of SEO to their teams. This is very important because the knowledge you gain is not something that you can get by digging through analytics data. They can provide insight into their organizations key strategies, thoughts and challenges. The relationships that you build are crucial for that alone!

Putting it all together!

All of this is to your advantage because you can now start to build your SEO Strategy for the business needs and get buy in from executives about incorporating SEO into the product and marketing lifecycle and strategy. You can also find yourself with UX teams that are excited to fit keywords and phrases into content and create link architecture while building out a sites information architecture. Finally, technology will have no problem helping to ensure the meta data and tags on the page fit into the SEO strategy.

The cycle continues…

You will be consistently selling, re-selling, evangelizing, re-evangelizing, and so on and so forth. It will be a constant that you will always see within organizations as they change, adapt and bring in new people. The key is to maintain that same level of energy and continue to build those relationships!

Source :VisibleFactors

SEO Evangelism - top 10 steps to making clients believe | SEO Project Management by JPH Digital Consultancy

What can we do to make clients believe in SEO? How do we sum up years of industry insight in one sales pitch? How does the client work out if maybe, just maybe this SEO consultant is for real.
The project manager must explain the huge potential of a well optimised site, whilst at the same time managing expectations and detailing the pitfalls involved with any SEO strategy. Here are the top 10 techniques that I have found useful when managing SEO projects:

  1. Provide a coherent plan of work.
  2. Keep the client updated on progress with that work both in terms of deliverables and results, the client will find out sooner or later and sooner is normally better than later.
  3. State exactly what you aim to achieve with each stage of the plan.
  4. Tell the truth, a consultant can’t charge £10,000 per month for buying low quality links, that is not SEO, that is lying.
  5. Tell the truth, if your client is a one man band they simply aren’t going to be able to appear top for the term “Cheap Holidays”, it is your job as an SEO consultant to come up with a solution that can generate a good ROI based on the tools available to you.
  6. Tell the truth, if your plan isn’t working and it is a good plan that has worked elsewhere, perhaps there is a variable you don’t know about. Talk to the client to try and find out what the cause might be, for example they may have just changed from a .co.uk to a .com or they may be distributing duplicate content via affiliates.
  7. Explain clearly the options available to a client for their SEO strategy, think of yourself as a financial advisor, it is your job to advise and define a good investment portfolio with a mixture of long, medium and short term investments dependant on your client’s specific needs.
  8. Always get sign off on the distribution of any branded materials.
  9. Clearly report on your successes be they improved rankings or increased traffic.
  10. Discuss your failures, several times in my career the team and I have spent hours pouring over traffic data to analyse dips in performance only to have them explained away in the meeting we’ve been preparing for as,”oh we never have any traffic in July, all our users are on holiday”.

Source : JPH Digital Consultancy

Evangelism about SEO in an Organization

Evangelizing SEO within an organization and spreading the word in a “grass-roots” sort of way is something that is very hard to do. I always think about it and get excited over the fact that I can make a difference and become a “thought leader” for an organization. The truth is, the evangelism of SEO within a traditional organization or small business can be painful.

I’ve been faced with this a couple times at organizations and while sometimes it is great and can lead to tremendous success, other times, it ends up just being a painful battle without any change.
So, basically I wanted to run through some of the things that I have done to try to get people excited about SEO and Search Marketing. I would call it by “Top 5 tips for SEO Evangelism,” but I don’t want to seem to cliche. (Oh darn, I already did!)
TALK TO PEOPLE! – This is by far, the most important rule that I have given myself. Get people in the know about SEO. (excuse my cliche sounding rhyme’s!…lol). Bring up topics going on in search, throw out numbers about how search is growing in popularity. SEOMoz does this well by putting quotes from well known articles on their homepage, these are things that you can total mention to people within your organization and hopefully build buzz. The main goal and hopefully you can get this going is to have people talking about SEO/SEM to each other.
Baby Steps – On the marketing and creative side we tend to see a lot of “ownership” around pages. They don’t want major changes to be made. So start with small things like meta tag, title tag and page naming changes in that could help certain keywords without changing your messaging or content.
Web Standards – Work closely with your web development teams to get better at coding. WATCH OUT THOUGH, YOU BETTER KNOW YOUR STUFF! Do not attempt to make it an attack. Evangelize it, that is what this is all about, spreading thoughts, knowledge and wisdom to other teams for the overall good (sounds like i am trying to save the world a bit??). Anyway, to get to the point, you basically want to get people thinking they should be standards compliant, ensuring the design elements are CSS based and that your HTML is read like a document. This allows for better site crawlability and your HTML will be read better by spiders.
Make Suggestions – Take a risk and go out on a limb by putting in thoughtful input whenever possible. Some things I have done with this is made statements in meetings about the amount of searches there are for a certain keyword or phrase that we could be capitalizing on.
Use Analytics to your advantage – This will help put everything together. Give you an unbelievable amount of data to take back to your colleagues and counterparts. Oh and guess what else this gives you?! We all know that the “Big Wigs” like seeing the numbers quickly and to the point, so this is a great way to evangelize your successes, no matter how BIG your “big wig” is.
Now that you have my secret and effective list of evangelism for SEO, you better put it to good use!! Spreading the word and starting a movement of sorts around will definitely help spread the word about SEO, building better sites, with a better user experience and great content.


Source : VisibleFactors

January 23, 2012

How to Set Up Your Google AdWords Image Ads

In the first post we covered how to create and optimize text ads, and in this post we’ll focus on how to create image ads for your Google AdWords campaigns.

First we’ll walk through the actual mechanics of creating an AdWords image ad. Go to the Ads tab in AdWords, then select “Image ad” from the “New ad” drop-down menu:
AdWords Image Ad
Then you can associate your ad with an ad group, upload your image (more on that below), and fill out a few additional fields:
New Image Ad
You’re able to upload your image (note the 50k max limit, as you may need to compress some image files) and then you designate:
  • Image Name – This is mainly for your own housekeeping, so choose something logical that would be helpful for you in searching and sorting through images later (for instance, you may want to create a filter in Excel at some point to see how all of the image ads you uploaded in January did, so you might name the image January-300-50.gif)
  • Display URL – For certain ad units your URL may be displayed, so similarly to creating a text ad, you’re able to designate a dedicated display URL that’s separate from your destination URL.
  • Destination URL – This is the URL you’ll want to send traffic to.
Then you simply save the ad. As you can see in the image above there are several different sizes you can create:
  • 300 x 50 Mobile leaderboard
  • 468 x 60 Banner
  • 728 x 90 Leaderboard
  • 250 x 250 Square
  • 200 x 200 Small square
  • 336 x 280 Large rectangle
  • 300 x 250 Inline rectangle
  • 120 x 600 Skyscraper
  • 160 x 600 Wide skyscraper
One of the advantages of creating image ads for the AdWords content network is that they give you an opportunity to get access to different properties than simply running text ads. Some sites and pages will only accept image ads, so having images to display gives you access to this inventory.
As with creating image ads in general, doors are further opened when you have versions of your ads in all of the available sizes; again, some sites only have ad units for certain sized image ads, and you can’t access them and find out if they drive qualified traffic if you don’t have an image ad available in that size.
As we mentioned in our post on AdWords Networks & Devices Settings, it’s frequently effective on the display network to start out broad and then narrow your focus, so access to a larger pool of sites can help you generate more volume from your display campaign.

So How Do You Create the Image Ads?

Obviously you’ll need something to upload where image ads are concerned. One option is to use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder, which we’ll talk about in the next post in this series. If you want to create your own image ads, there are several options:
  • Use a Designer – Obviously you can hire a designer or use a designer who works in house. It’s a good idea to make sure someone involved in the process has a strong understanding of display design best practices (they should be attention-grabbing if direct response is your goal, include a call to action, etc.) and again it’s a good idea to make them aware of the different dimensions you’ll want so that you can access various properties.
  • Banner Ad Shop – There are a few of these – I’ve had success with Banner Weaver but there are others as well (feel free to leave your favorite in the comments). They tend to get the fundamentals of banner design right since it’s a focus for the site, and it’s a cost-effective way to get a batch of custom banners for your campaign.
  • Crowdsourced Banner Design – Using crowdsourced banner ad design from places like 99 Designs can also be a really effective way to solicit a number of different design concepts from various designers. The quality here can be a bit hit or miss, but frequently you can come out of it with one or a few concepts that can help you keep your ad creative fresh.
With most advertisers leveraging retargeting it’s increasingly important to have multiple variations of ads, and to have sources to tap to get new creative so you can constantly be rotating new ad creative into your display campaigns.
In the next post in this series, we’ll show you how to use another means of creating image ads: the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder.

How to Use the Google AdWords Display Ad Builder

The display ad builder has a lot of different features and options, so we’ll walk through some of the different things you can leverage the tool for in your AdWords campaigns. First you navigate to the tool and start to create a new ad with it:
Display Ad Builder
The first decision you’re faced with is the type of “template” you want to leverage in your campaign. In the left navigation of the display ad builder product you have a lot of options:
Display Ad Themes
As you can see there are a number of “themes” and templates available to you. Assuming you’re creating a standard image ad for your display campaign, you can either leverage the featured/suggested/show all options or the specific themes (the seasonal or industry-specific options). Once you select a category of ad you’ll be shown the different visual templates available in each section:
Display Ad Templates
As you can see you’re also offered the opportunity to sort the ads by:
  • Newest
  • Most Popular
  • Highest Click-Through Rate




Since you’re likely looking to drive qualified traffic using these ads, I find it’s best to consider the “highest click-through” and “newest” ads first as these have a history of working from a CTR perspective in the case of highest click-through, and are fresher in the case of the newest ads. The most popular ads are just that: the ads being most often used by other advertisers. One of the major disadvantages to using the display ad builder is that the ads can sometimes be too cookie-cutter and not sufficiently customized to your own brand and offering; choosing the ads most frequently used by other advertisers actually exacerbates this problem.
In choosing a template you want to keep in mind a few things:
  • Which ads best match the look and feel of your landing page? Remember anyone who clicks your ad will be sent to your landing page; you want that experience to be fluid and consistent.
  • Which option offers the best means of messaging to prospects? Choose a theme that will give you the right amount of space with your headline, benefit statement, and call to action while also positioning each of these properly.
  • Which ad maps most closely with your goals? If you’re using this display campaign for direct response, you want an ad that will be differentiating, disruptive, and eye-catching – which best accomplishes that? If you’re using the ad more for branding, which layout most closely aligns with your brand and allows for the best use of your logo and brand colors?








Also note as you’re evaluating your options in this initial screen that the colors the ad currently uses can be changed:
Customize Display Ad
As you can see the next step in customizing your ad with Display Ad Builder is applying:
  • Colors and fonts
  • Your logo
  • Your display and destination URLs




If you’re severely design-challenged, you might try to enlist someone with at least a bit of a “design eye” to make these customizations, but altering fonts and colors is actually quite easy, particularly if you’ve chosen a template that already fits well with your site’s basic look and feel and will incorporate your logo and messaging well.
Also note that much like with uploading a display ad, we’re presented with a series of size options. As I mentioned in the last post in this series (on creating an image ad) creating your ad in multiple formats offers you an opportunity to have it show up in multiple formats, and is generally a good idea (you get to see how your creative performs on a variety of different sites).
Finally you’ll be presented with a preview of your ads – take a moment to review the ad layout in different formats here, as the different shapes can sometimes change the look and feel of an ad fairly dramatically.
That’s it! In a matter of minutes you can have a presentable image ad created for your AdWords campaigns. While this really is a very handy tool, it’s worth noting that often having an ad professionally designed to be a bit more customized and differentiated can more than pay for itself in terms of improved performance. That said, the Display Ad Builder can be invaluable if you’re looking to:
  • Get an ad or series of ads up very quickly
  • Need to rotate ads in and out seasonally or for frequent promotion (and need control and speed in this process)
  • Are looking to test one or a few headlines/basic concepts and would like to get feedback quickly before committing design resources to building out different banners





And many small to mid-sized advertisers in particular can build out a perfectly profitable display campaign without engaging any design resources and costs whatsoever by leveraging the Display Ad Builder.

By Tom Demers

Source : WordStream

Search Query Combinations for Link Building Process


You need to know a vast array of scalable strategies, tactics, and hacks for Link building.  You need to know what WP-cache can do, and you need to know how to use abandoned domains.  You need to know how to start a broken link building campaign, and you need to know what Chrome Scrape Similar can be used for.
And, most importantly—most unequivocally—you need to have a set of “tried and true” search query combinations.  The following is my set.  Please add your favorites in the comments section below. 


1st Query1.

Tactic: Use this combo to find .edu job listsing (e.g. Princeton’s job board). Many of these boards do reside behind no-follow barriers, but it’s still a phenomenal tactic—you get a great link and a potential, high quality job candidate.
Search Explanation: This search query combo is a favorite of link builders in non-profit and environmentally friendly industries.  The site:.edu or inurl:.edu query will help you find any school (.Edu) program related to your keywords, and the intitle:careers will help you find universities that are likely to accept job postings from your company. Also, add the “OR” operator to widen your search.
E.G. “keyword” site:.edu intitle:careers OR intitle:jobs OR intitle:opportunities
And don’t forget about the regional variations, such as ac.uk.
E.G. “keyword” site:.edu OR site:.ac.uk intitle:careers



2nd Query2.


Tactic: Find resource pages for authority sites.  S
pider the “resources list” for competitor links or broken links.
Search Explanation: This search query combo is the starting place for most broken link building campaigns.  Resource pages tend to have titles such as “Other Resources”, “Resources”, or “Link List.”  In my experience, the title “Other Resources” is most common for pages that will allow others to contribute to the list.  Add the –inurl:pdf, -inurl:ppt, and –inurl:doc to make sure that only HTML pages are returned.  If you don’t know what to do with this, read about it in my blog post, entitled A Tactical Guide to Broken Link Building.
Also, there are ton of different ways (and tools) to find broken links.  I use this query combo to find broken links when using the Check My Links Chrome extension.  When using Xenu, however, I exclude the “intitle:” portion.  It returns a more general list.  Not as accurate, but it’s easier to scale.  If Martin McDonald is reading, I’d be interested in hearing what tools and queries he uses to find broken links on MSN.com.



3rd Query3.


Tactic: Used for finding Do-follow blogs to comment on. This tactic, known as comment marketing, is one of the quickest ways to get a link.  And although these links aren’t as strong as a proper in-context link, you can get hundreds of these guys in a fraction of the time.
If abused, however, this form of link building can get you into serious trouble.  So make sure to monitor your competitors’ link profiles to determine the appropriate amount to use.
On a side note, some SEOs use this tactic to demote competitive sites or negative pages about their client’s brand—a tactic known as Google Bowling.  Doesn’t work as well as it use too, but some have claimed it still works, especially against pages that have been abandoned. Nonetheless it’s an interesting tactic for Online Reputation Management campaigns.
Search Explanation:  Do-follow blogs often have the CommentLuv Enabled plugin installed.  This is how we find them.  There are a number of other ways to find do-follow blogs, but in my opinion, this is the most consistent way, as all blog formats are different.
Here are a few more ways to find do-follow blogs: Use a do-follow blog commenter like Scrape Box or Market Samurai; join do-follow finding platforms such as Comluv.com or InLineSEO.com; subscribe to do-follow memberships such as ActuallyRank.com; or you can get lucky and stumble across  a do-follow list - but that’s rare.
Also, here are a few other search queries combos worth trying in Google’s image search:
  • “keyword” ifollow*.gif
  • “keyword” inurl: ifollow*.gif
  •  “keyword” “U Comment – I Follow”
Also, by adding intext:”red widget” or intext:”powered by Comment Plugin” to all search queries, you may stumble upon a few more comment sources.  These search queries, however, were much more effective in the past—before everyone caught on.



4th Query4.


Tactic: Find authority sites that have a donation page.
Search Explanation: This is a small trick I picked up from Wil Reynolds at SEER Interactive, but if you put intitle:“in-kind donations” vs intitle:donations, the resulting SERPs will be far less cluttered.  A number of .org sites are non-profits, and a number of their pages have the term “donations” in the title.  “In-kind donations” is used less in articles, and more frequently on the page to submit donations. Try various versions of “in-kind donations”, such as “in kind donors” or “in kind contributions” as well.



5th Query5.


Tactic: Find sites related to your business that feature have testimonials.  Some testimonials may even be site-wides.
Search Explanation: Don’t waste too much time searching for your exact match term and “testimonials”.  The SERPS will be cluttered with testimonials for your competitors’ products.  Instead, search for terms related to your industry.  For instance, if I worked for a company that sold solar panels, I’d enter the following command “wind-energy” “testimonials” site:.org
And for those that didn’t know, the “+” command has been retired by Google.  So if you’re using Google, use “keyword 1” ”keyword 2” instead of “keyword” + “keyword”.



6th Query6.


Tactic: Find niche blog directories, forums, reviews, and other “submit” type sites.
Search Explanation: If you haven’t noticed, most directory pages that allow you to submit your site instantly have a “Submit URL” type wording in their titles.  Try adding different variations of this to your search query combination, such as “Suggest a URL” or “Submit a site” or “Add *URL” or “Submit *Review”, or try all of them at the same time!
E.g. “Keyword” intitle:directory OR intitle:”submit URL” OR intitle:”Submit a site” OR intitle:”Add *URL” OR intitle:”submit *review”
Remember, Google limits each search to 32 words.  So as long as your total words come in under that amount, you can add as many query additions or restrictions as you want.
PRO TIP:  To filter the results even further, try adding inurl:.php.  Most of the “submit” type pages are powered by PHP. Putting the inurl:.php restriction on your search query combo will help you find the instant directory submissions.
E.g. “Keyword” intitle:directory inurl:php



7th Query7.


Tactic: Find paid link opportunities, particularly from universities that accept discount codes.
Search Explanation:  Some universities will allow you to send them discount codes to your products, and they’ll post these codes (with a nice link) on their website.  Often the phrase “alumni discount” or “student discount” or “sponsors’ page” or even “student discounts for” will be in the title.  Again, you can check for all four popular forms at the same time by using the OR operator.  Google will limit any query for 32 words long.  By doing this, you might find a page like this or even this.



8th Query8.


Tactic: Find sites that are linking to your competition, but not your site (also known as “Link partner sites”).  Great for finding the low hanging link opportunities.
Search Explanation:  Often if 3 or more of your competitors are getting a link from the same source, you can get that link as well.  This is a quick way of finding this information out.  You could also use SEOMoz’s link competition tool, but I’ve found that using these search queries is just as accurate—and much quicker.
The only issue with the link: query is volume. Google only shows a very limited amount of results for these queries, so although you will find a few quality prospects (if you get any), that’s all you get with this one.



9th Query9.


Tactic: Foot print tracking.  Find blogs that allow anchor text in their comments section.  Often the resulting pages are Do-follow links.
Search Explanation: Sites that allow anchor text in their comments section have a few common foot prints.  One of them is the text “Allowed HTML tags: <a>”.  Other common foot prints include “Notify me of follow-up comments?” or “Powered by WordPress” or “Powered by TypePad”.
E.g. “keyword” AND “Allowed HTML tags:<a>” “Powered by WordPress”
I use the “Powered by WordPress” footprint to find WordPress blogs so I can scrape their comments for frequent commenters.  We’ll offer frequent commenters on sites of our competitors the chance to write for our blog, or maybe we’ll exchange articles with them.  The goal is to get these contributors to join our community.
PRO TIP: Remember that because most blogs have different formats, scraping blog comments at scale can be next to impossible to do programmatically.  However, most scrapers that you can buy—such as ScrapeBox—have the ability to scrape WordPress and TypePad based blogs with some consistency.  They’re not 100% accurate, but it’s a great tool for scalable link building.



Bonus queryBonus:



Tactic: Great combo to find associated subdomains for each site.  This is used more for link profile research rather than for link building.
Search Explanation: In case you haven’t noticed, there is a difference between theinurl: and site: operators.  In short, the inurl: operator will search subdomains much more easily than the site: operator.  Include them both in one search query to find your competitions’ subdomains.  By doing this I’ve stumbled upon subdomains such as dev.competition.com or staging.competition.com.  This will give you a heads up on your competition—helping you beat them out in content marketing or website planning.

What to do with your list?


After running these queries, you’ll want to quickly scrape them into excel.  How do you do that?  First, before running each query combination, expand Google’s search result settings to 100 results.  Next, if you understand XPath, download Neil Bosma’s SEOToolsand use that to scrape the search results into Excel.  If not, check out the Chrome’s Scrape Similar, or my favorite, Google Results Bookmarklet.
Either way, you’ll scrape all the URLs into excel and mash them up with SEOMoz’s API to get some metrics.  If you already have an SEOMoz API key, then you can downloadBusiness Hut’s excel spreadsheet. Once you have metrics on each URL (e.g. Domain Authority, number of inbound links, page authority, etc), sort the list and start contacting the URLs at the top of your list.  It’s that simple J
Are there any other favorite search query combinations that I missed?  Please let me know in the comments section.  Also, just wanted to give a shout out to two articles that helped a lot for this post: one post by Search Engine Land and another post by SmugGecko.

This post was written by...

Cleo Kirkland

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