How To Write the Best Website Content?

What Makes the Best Website Content?

One of the most frequent questions my clients ask is, “What makes the best website content?”

This is a great question and presents the perfect opportunity for me to explain the roles that content, and the different types of content, will play in the success of their website.

Here’s the gist of what I tell them:

1. There are two types of content: “site” content and “marketing” content:
   1. “Site” content is the standard stuff such as an “About” page, a “Frequently asked Questions (FAQ)” page, a “Contact Us” page (and form), a “Privacy Policy” page and, if needed, a “Terms of Use” page. In other words, this is the content that customers expect to find on a website.
   2. “Marketing” content is made up of all the articles, blog posts, white papers, ebooks, slideshows, videos and podcasts included on a site. This content should be useful, original, credible and friendly (more about these points below).
2. “Marketing” content is the most effective way to continually drive organic (non-advertising) search engine traffic to your site. This is called, “Inbound (or Content) Marketing“.

This infographic details the four key elements that all types of marketing content must have in order to be effective at driving traffic to your site.

Once we have this talk, most clients are fired-up about content and want to get started adding “marketing” content right away. As you might expect, the next question they ask is, “What works best when creating marketing content for a website?”

To help answer that question, both for them and for you, below is an infographic that details the four key elements that all types of marketing content must have in order to be effective at driving traffic to your site.

What Makes the Best Website Content - Infographic

BY MATT MANSFIELD

Source : http://www.mattaboutbusiness.com/

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How to Allocate AdWords Budget: New Shared AdWords Budget Options

A Challenge In Allocating AdWords Budgets - Know about the New Shared AdWords Budget Options

AdWords budgets are generally set per campaign, per day (i.e. you set a daily budget for each of your campaigns). This usually gets complicated because most advertisers have multiple campaigns.

If you're a reader of the WordStream blog or if you've used our AdWords Grader, you’ll know that we recommend that you break up every campaign theme into at least 3 different campaigns for targeting:

• Mobile search
• Display network (or Remarketing)
• Google search

Now imagine having broken up every campaign into three campaigns along these lines, and you can start to see how it might be a challenge to allocate say, a $100 daily budget into so many little pieces. Some campaigns might exceed the daily budget limit, and then shut themselves down, where as other campaigns might underspend, leaving unallocated budget.

Of course, having unspent budget at the end of a day isn’t inherently a bad thing. (Unless you're an agency specifically tasked with spending a specified budget). Furthermore it's almost impossible to know ahead of time exactly what the split between mobile search, Google desktop search and display inventory will be.

Introducing Shared Budgets In AdWords

All of the above is just to motivate the need for a new feature in AdWords, released Monday, called Shared budgets in AdWords.

Shared budgets in AdWords let you establish a single daily budget that’s shared by multiple campaigns in an AdWords account. Shared budgets can make it easier to match your AdWords spending along the lines of your business or marketing objectives, rather than having to split it up along campaign distribution options. Let's walk through an example of how to set your AdWords budget using shared budgets in AdWords.

How AdWords Shared Budgets Work

Say you’re a vendor of business software for contact management. Suppose you’re currently running three campaigns for your software product, broken down by desktop search, display advertising, and mobile search.

Your overall marketing plan allows you to spend $100 per day across your three campaigns. Without shared budgets, you’d next have to decide how to allocate the $100 daily AdWords budget across each of your three campaigns. If you don’t necessarily know or care how the amount is split between display advertising, mobile search, and desktop search, using a shared AdWords budget is potentially a great solution.

This means that AdWords will make automatic budget adjustments across campaigns, so you don’t have to constantly monitor and change individual campaign budgets throughout the day.

How To Set Your AdWords Budget Using The New Shared Budget Component

It's not exactly easy to find. You need to use the shared object library area of AdWords, which I personally think is a bit of a bad neighborhood in terms of AdWords usability, but anyway, here it is. You just "Create a new shared budget," give it a name and amount, then save it, as shown here:

Once you’ve created the shared budget, you can then apply the shared budget from any campaign setting pages, like this:

Who Wins, Google Or Advertisers? Should You Avoid Shared AdWords Budgets?

Now that I’ve described what AdWords Shared Budgets are and how to use them, let’s think about whether using Shared Budgets in AdWords is even a good idea in the first place.

(Believe it or not, not every AdWords feature has the best interests of advertisers in mind...)

For example, I realize you could easily make the argument that this new feature could be less about helping advertisers and more about helping Google drain every penny of available budget from your account to increaseGoogle Revenues and Earnings. Quite simply, by aggregating budgets across different campaigns (with each campaign having different levels of available ad inventory), it’s more likely that Google will be able to spend the specified budget amounts.

A key question is when does the Shared Budget kick in? For example, I would be concerned if an AdWords budget was shared between a very fast campaign (as in, a campaign that racks up lots of impressions, clicks and cost at a very fast rate) and one or more slower campaigns.

The risk here is that the faster campaigns would suck up all the available budget quickly, leaving little or no budget for the slower moving campaigns, which might have undesirable effects. For this reason, I would caution against sharing budgets across dissimilar campaigns (i.e. campaigns with different objectives). For example, don't create a shared budget called "my total daily AdWords budget" and share that across all the campaigns in your account.

Other than that, it seems at first glance to be a reasonable way to manage budgets across similar campaigns. Have you used the new AdWords Budget Sharing feature in your AdWords account? Why or why not? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

About The Author

Larry Kim is the Founder and CTO of WordStream, Inc.

Source : WordStream

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news_keywords Metatag - The Meta Keywords Tag Just For News Articles

Google Announces A Meta Keywords Tag Just For News Articles

Meta keywords are back.

Well, technically, it’s not the same meta keywords tagthat died years ago for traditional SEO purposes.

No, it’s a new news_keywords metatag that Google just announced today and only works for news publishers that are sources in Google News. The new metatag essentially gives publishers some freedom to be more creative in their headlines and article copy, and not have to worry about cramming keywords in everything they publish. Here’s a quick explanation from Google News Product Manager Rudy Galfi:

The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.

Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text.

Google has already published a help page showing how to implement the news_keywords meta tag, which is like this:

meta name=”news_keywords” content=”World Cup, Brazil 2014, Spain vs Netherlands”

Publishers are limited to 10 news keywords and they have to use commas to separate each one. (Talk about back to the future, right?)

Google also warns that using the news_keywords meta tag isn’t a quick path to ranking better in Google News. It’s only one signal, and “high-quality reporting and interesting news content remain the strongest ways to put your newsroom’s work in front of Google News users.”

In other words, if you’re running a “news” site called Marty McFly’s Tech Dump that no one’s ever heard of and has low-quality content, the news_keywords tag isn’t gonna help your iPhone 5 review outrank Walt Mossberg and the Wall Street Journal. Sorry.

by Matt McGee
Source : http://SearchEngineLand.com

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Why Not To NOT Choose Ad Rotation Options in Google AdWords?

In a Google AdWords campaign, we have a few ad rotation settings to choose.

1) Optimize for clicks: show ads expected to provide more clicks (this is the default setting for new campaigns)

2) Optimize for conversions: Show ads expected to provide more conversions

3) Rotate: Show ads more evenly

You can get to these settings in AdWords under any Campaign -> Settings -> Advanced Settings section -> Ad Delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping -> Ad rotation (click “Edit” and you should see something similar to the picture below. Click the picture for a bigger version.)

Why I Always Choose Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions (and NOT Rotate)

I have been running my campaigns on either Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions settings for years. It can be hard to simplify or strive to back business metrics into clicks or conversions but it’s well worth the effort, in my opinion.

Optimize for Clicks

Optimizing for clicks let’s Google automatically choose the ad that will produce the highest click-through rates (CTR) in the near term.

When uploading a new advertisement, Google will automatically test that ad with limited impressions over time to see if it will produce a better CTR than the current winning advertisement.

I love this option for rapidly testing ads; not to mention that it helps my quality scores and gives me a competitive edge.

Rapidly testing ads under this setting is easy – and this is my primary reason for NEVER using Rotate: Pause the current winning ad, clone it and unpause the clone – test your new ad against that clone and Google will give each ad a fair shot at producing a better CTR before choosing the most relevant ad as a winner. Google makes you more competitive in the marketplace by not having to wait on you to revisit the test to pick a winner by CTR. In other words, Google is giving an advertiser traffic that their competitors likely didn’t receive by automatically running the advertiser’s winning ad more heavily than other active ads in their ad group.

One should only choose this option if they are confident that the audience arriving through that campaign will satisfy the business goals of the advertiser regardless of the volume of traffic.

For example, I am confident that my landing pages for a specific niche should convert at 12% given a specific campaign’s existing keyword list, bids, ads and historical metrics. It is safe for me to drive as much traffic as I can to that website because the business metrics for this campaign are stable at any traffic volume the campaign can give me.

Optimize for Conversions

Optimizing for conversions let’s Google automatically choose the ad that will produce the highest conversion rate in the near term.

When uploading a new advertisement, Google will automatically test that ad with limited impressions over time to see if it will produce a better conversion rate than the current winning advertisement.

Testing ads under this setting is easy too – but depending on your conversion metrics or tracking, it may take a little bit longer to determine the winning ad: Pause the current winning ad, clone it and unpause the clone – test your new ad against that clone and Google will give each ad a fair shot at producing a better conversion rate before choosing a winner. Google can drive more converting traffic to your website quickly by driving traffic through an ad that is more likely to turn into a conversion. Letting Google do this automatically is smart because conversions are not lost in the hustle if an ad test is on Rotate and simply waiting for you to revisit and pick a winner yourself. Why would anybody want to lose conversions to a competitor?

One should only choose this option if they are able to prove value to the business for every conversion they are tracking through AdWords.

Rotate (Please do NOT choose this option!)

I don’t recommend this option unless you have the time or the technology to do this in a more efficient way than Google can with the above options, or you have a different business metric that you’re striving to optimize for – for example: a low bounce rate/higher engagement, profit per impression (PPI), or other metrics.

Most advertisers should NOT use this option for a few reasons:

- Waiting for a person to pick a winner is inefficient. One will either lose clicks or conversions if they are unable to pick a winner based on CTR or conversion rates.

- Most advertisers are not optimizing for PPI or other metrics. Even if one is optimizing toward PPI, money could be lost to costs due to lower quality scores on ads that might produce decent PPI but lower volume traffic and conversions. There’s almost always going to be an opportunity cost…but if you’re optimizing toward PPI on Search Campaigns, you likely already considered or tested the alternatives.

- AdWords recently decided to optimize this setting toward clicks automatically after 30 days. You might as well Optimize for Clicks now if you’re going to Rotate. Or you better carve out plenty of time in your routine to review hundreds, thousands or millions of ads each month – depending on how big your AdWords account(s) are.

You Have a Choice

It’s up to you as an advertiser or business owner to determine which metrics or settings will work best for your business model. Currently, AdWords gives us 3 options: Optimize for Clicks, Optimize for Conversions or Rotate.

I recommend running with Optimize for Clicks or Optimize for Conversions. Make either of those options work for your business and I’m confident that you will be on your way towards a high quality, highly relevant, and highly profitable Google AdWords account.

Source : http://www.qualityscores.com/blog/

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