Interactive Limited’s Initial Campaign Checklist

February 23, 2008 | Comments


Below Are the First Items We Check When We Analyze a Prospective Client’s Marketing Campaign.

Quality Score Problems:

  • You are using keywords that are too broad, and this is killing your quality score and conversion rates.
  • Your Adgroups have too many unrelated keywords, and the ads are not relevant.
  • Your landing pages do not have important keywords on them, or they are not specific enough for your Adgroups.
  • You have no negative keywords, and you don’t use phrase and exact-match keywords enough.

Campaign Setting Errors:

  • You are day parting based on your office hours and are missing out on great sales that come in after hours.
  • You have the search network turned on, and you are in a B2B market.
  • You are inadvertently rationing your ads with standard distribution instead of accelerated distribution.
  • You have the content network turned on, and you have never run a site-performance report to block bad sites that do not convert.
  • You never split your content ad prices to even out your conversion costs.
  • Your campaign budget is set too low, and your keyword bids are too high. You are not engaging the algorithm to “pull” your ads to optimize your click costs.

Geo-targeting Errors:

Content Matching – Different Game, Different Rules

February 22, 2008 | Comments


In Search Engine Watch, on Dec 3rd, 2007, David Szetela wrote a fantastic article on a topic I rarely see talked about for SEM: “How Google, Yahoo Content Ad Matching Really Works.” Not only does content matching work, but it can also help you find great partner sites to advertise on.

Here are the highlights:

  1. Run your content campaigns separately from your search campaigns.
  2. Separate content campaigns into small ad groups, each with ideally 20 to 40 keywords and never more than 50.
  3. Don’t bother using different match types, e.g. phrase and exact match in Google. Match type is ignored by the content matching algorithms.
  4. Don’t bother with separate bid prices for each keyword. These too are ignored, and the search engines operate based on the ad group’s default bid. Use negative keywords to help the algorithms “figure out” sub-categories of content network site pages where your ads should not appear.
  5. Create ads and keyword lists that, taken together, will match a particular theme or category.

Read more about this here…

Linking Experts Reveal (and Hide) Their Methods in a Group Interview

February 12, 2008 | Comments


The post “11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out” from Sugarrae Consulting is one of the best articles you will read on SEO and link building this year. While many of these experts seem reluctant to share their secrets, if you read between the lines and follow the links embedded in the article, you can find some juicy nuggets.

Looking for .gov back links? Wondering which directory listings still pass link juice? Think social networking or social bookmarking tactics will jump start your site? Need a quick summary of cross-linking strategies? You will find information here you can use today and keep using for at least the next six months… until all the rules change again.

Read more about this here…

Comments from Matt Cutts about the Use and Usefulness of On-Site HTML Sitemaps

February 6, 2008 | Comments


From Blogoscoped.com:

Below are direct quotes from the forum. Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts discuss the New York Times “spiderbites” sitemap. Is an HTML sitemap useful to visitors, and is it ethical for SEO? Apparently, the answer is yes.

Danny Sullivan

“NYT has had these for some time, to my understanding. I think SEW Forums had a discussion about them ages ago, or they might have been similar ones that About.com does. They do, as they did then, seem to be a way for search engines to spider individual pages. We’ve only had all the search engines support XML sitemaps for less than a week now. Until last week, only Google and Yahoo actively were able to accept them (Microsoft supported them in concept, but without autodiscovery, there was no way to provide them). Even with XML sitemaps, I’m sure plenty of big sites will still feel it is worthwhile to have actual HTML sitemaps.”

Matt Cutts

“That’s correct, Danny; this sitemap has been around for years. I’ve known about this particular sitemap since 2005, and dug into it back then. Before that, I dug into the sitemap on about.com because of the same name as well. But despite the

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Google’s Matt Cutts Explains Snippets for Search Listings

February 3, 2008 | Comments


Matt Cutts explains “snippets” in the video below. The bottom line is that Google pulls the snippet most of the time from the meta description tag. A well-written description tag will therefore vastly improve your click-through rate for organic search. For more information, go to Google’s Webmaster Blog to get a complete explanation about how to control your snippet.

Read more about this here…

What are Latent Semantic Analysis and “Natural Phrase” Targeting and How Can You Use them for Search Optimization?

February 3, 2008 | Comments


Matt Cutts of Google gives an excellent summary of Google’s use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) in an SMX Advanced workshop video. He references the use of the tilde (~) search at Google.com for the term you are focusing on, and he gives some pretty explicit hints about how to write ad copy.

The tilde search will give you a list of sites that are related to that term, but will also highlight related terms from other sites. Then when you look at your own content, you can ask yourself if you are using those related terms enough. Can you swap a few terms? If you want a good tool that will run the tilde search and scrape keywords for you, try this Ontology Finder.

For a great article by Aaron Wall on this topic, read his post here. To summarize the article and its implications for SEO, Wall writes:

  • Pages that are too focused on one phrase tend to rank worse than one would expect (sometimes even being filtered out for what some SEOs call being over-optimized).
  • Pages that are focused on a wider net of related keywords tend to have

    Read more about this here…