Posts Tagged ‘google’

Keyword Research - Be Creative!

Oct 13, 2009 keyword research

OK, so you have used the Google Adwords keyword tool to get a huge list of quality keywords, you’ve eliminated the bad ones with the “Negative Keyword” tool. Now it’s time to get creative.


Keyword Research - Domain Keyword Strategy

One often overlooked keyword research method is using domain names. Very few people do this but the keywords are so cheap (many times less than 10 cents), it’s definitely worth doing this. Here’s how it works. Take your MAIN keyword phrase and type it into Google. Copy the names of those domain names on the first result page and add them to your keyword list. (You can repeat the process for Yahoo and MSN/Bing for even more keywords.)

Why does this work? Simply because many people will remember a certain website address and then rather than typing that into the URL / address bar, they type it directly into the search engine. I’m not sure why people do this, but they do. At any rate, it’s a great way to get very cheap words that you can use for your Pay Per Click ad campaign.

google adwords ppc pay per click consultant

We look forward to answering any questions you may have about your current PPC campaign. Feel free to contact us at steve_dooley@link.freedom.com

 

 

 

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Best Practices

Aug 4, 2009 pay per click, seo, web building

To leverage your PPC ad spend, it’s crucial to have a website and/or landing page that is optimized for search. The following is a list of some of the processes we perform in order for your website to be easily found on the web.

1. 301 redirect - This is a server setting (in our case Apache) For example, http://yoursite.com will automatically redirect to http://www.yoursite.com This is important since you always want Google to index the “same” URL version of your website.

In the .htaccess file on the Apache server, the following code needs to be inserted

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^emeraldcoastdesign.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.emeraldcoastdesign.com/$1 [L,R=301]

 

2. Create a “robots.txt” file in the root directory of the server. This tells Google what directories to index and what directories not to index. For example, if there is a directory where all of your video media is stored, you would want to “Disallow” that directory to be read. Whereas, if you have a directory that contains the majority of your keyword-rich content, you would want Google to read that and only that content since it is relevant to the search terms that you would like to be found for.

3. Always separate the “style” from the “content” by creating a separate style sheet. This makes it easy for the Google Bot to distinguish between your relevant “content” and your source code.

4. Always provide keyword rich descriptions in the “alt” tags of your images.

5. Try to use text in your navigation bar rather than images. This is because text can be “crawled” by the search engines.

6. Name your directories with good descriptive words. For example, if you have a “beach condo” website, name your main content directory “beach-condo”. By doing this, the search engines “see” your site as very relevant to “beach condo”!

7. Use a blog powered by Wordpress. Wordpress blogs are already fairly optimized for search engines and blogs are simply a great way for you to get great content uploaded quickly that the search engines love.

8. Use includes where possible. If you need to make changes on a site, make it easy on yourself by having common elements on your site split up into “includes”. There’s nothing more agonizing than wanting to make a small tweak for SEO sake, and realizing that the change has to be made on dozens of individual pages:(

9. Create individual titles for your pages. The “title” tag is one of the most important, from an SEO perspective.

10. Customize the meta content and keyword tags. This is important in that these are the tags that “describe” your page’s content to the seach engines.

These are just some of the search engine optimization techniques we use here at Freedom Florida. Contact us today for a free analysis of your website.

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Google Search Term Realities

Apr 7, 2009 pay per click

Here’s a test. Go to Google and find out how best to advertise on the internet…

OK. How did you do your search? Did you type in “advertise on the internet”, “online advertising”, “internet advertising”, “internet + advertising”, “how best to advertise on the internet?”, “advertise + media + internet”? Any of those?

No matter what the subject, it’s very unlikely that any given 2 people will search for a subject in the same way. Why? Because we are all individuals and we are all human.

Our point is this. You do not know how someone is going to find your business or website on the internet. It is fascinating to see our PPC reports that tell us what search terms people use to land on one of our client sites. The truth is no one knows how someone is going to find your website. Don’t limit yourself to “Flowers in Destin” if you’re a florist. Our PPC experts can help you expand that search of keyword terms and optimize your campaign as you go. You only pay for “clicked” keywords (Cost per Click - CPC), so go wild, have your PPC guy or gal test different keywords, get the results, throw out what’s not working and try new ones. This is called A/B testing where you have different batches of keywords. After a few days the “losers” get tossed and you try new ones. Eventually, your new terms “beat” your winners, so you toss those and try some new ones. The key is testing, testing, testing and we here at EmeraldCoast.com look forward to finding those keywords that will take your business to the next level of sales!

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Google Likes Directories Named “Descriptively”

Apr 7, 2009 seo

OK, you have a golf country club website and your boss wants you to have a section of the website devoted to the 2009 Masters Golf Tournament so you have your web developer throw up a few pages. The developer puts them in a directory called “mastersgolf”. That’s all well and good, but if you go live and serve pages from the directory called “mastersgolf”, you’ve missed out on a huge opportunity to score major points with Google. You could have called that directory “2009-masters-golf-tournament”. Why does this help? Simple, people who search for information about The Masters Golf Tournament don’t punch in “mastersgolf”, they punch in things like “Masters Golf Tournament”! The names of your files and directories are a huge factor in how Google “sees” your content. That is why we have directories like “destin-online-advertising” at www.emeraldcoastdesign.com. Simple see! No more work for the web developer, yet many search engine points scored :-)

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Secret SEO Tip - Don’t Tell Anyone!

Apr 7, 2009 seo

Website owners…

Want more people to find your site on Google?

Want Google to crawl your site more often?

Want to rise quickly in your target audience demographic?

Here’s a top SEO secret that almost no one actually does. It’s incredible. I can’t believe we’re giving this information away for free. Are you ready? Are you sure you’re ready?

OK, here’s the secret to SEO…

Create original content

No tricks, no gimmicks.

Now, of course you are going to want to make sure that you have well formatted, well laid out code that is professionally done to make sure that each one of your web pages will benefit from your great content. The web developers at EmeraldCoast.com can help you with the source code side of things, so that you can focus on your core business.

It’s important, as a business owner to view your website as an outsider would. If you came to your web site, would you “stay”? Or would you quickly go elsewhere to another website because this isn’t the content that you were looking for in your Google search? If you would go elsewhere, then you need more pages on your website with more content in order to build credibility with your customers so there is a level of confidence to purchase from you.

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Sponsor Text Links - Effective?

Apr 7, 2009 text links

On EmeraldCoast.com, our text links have a very high Click Through Rate (CTR)

What are Sponsor Text Links?
These are the hypertext links that you see in the upper right hand corner (in the “Sponsor Links” box) of the EmeraldCoast.com, Destin.com or PanamaCity.com websites.

Are they effective?
People click on these mainly because they do not look like advertisements. And, basically they really aren’t. They’re simply hyperlinks that take you to the sponsor’s website or splash page that we have created for them. Also, no matter what page the user is on within EmeraldCoast.com, those links will always appear in the upper right hand corner of the site, in plain view.

Still not convinced that text links work?
There is a young company called Google on the Internet. (If you can’t find them, you can “google” them at www.google.com :-) Google brings in several billions of revenue each quarter. A large chunk of that revenue is from their Adwords and Adsense programs. Adwords is the program for online advertisers and Adsense is for the website owners wishing to monetize their website.

How much do you text links cost?
On our website, you will find a list of our Sponsor Text Link prices.

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Effective Pay Per Click Campaigns

Apr 7, 2009 pay per click

When running a Pay Per Click Campaign on the web, one of the biggest factors of success is the landing page. Landing Page Optimization is a whole discipline with itself and beyond the scope of this blog post but here are 2 common mistakes many people make.

Making your homepage, the landing page.
There may be times where this is acceptable (branding efforts for example) but think about it. You have spent your advertising dollars with Google or elsewhere to acquire that specific customer and you bring him into a generic wide-scope web page that has things like “About Us” or visual/graphic distraction. Great graphics are important for the professionalism of your site but don’t distract your buyer and tempt him to not follow through with his reasons for clicking on your Google ad. Bring him to a very detailed, specific keyword-rich product or service web page that fills his need or reason that he clicked on your ad in the first place!

There is no call to action.
This is somewhat related to the first issue. If you are going to spend marketing dollars to acquire this customer, give him a “Buy” button. Give him a “Sign Up Here” button to request more information. Give him a discount on your product or service for requesting more info. Give him an “RSS Subscription” option. Give him something! In the end, it’s important to think about what, ideally, would I want a potential customer to do on this page. Then say, OK if he doesn’t do the first action, then I’d at least want her to do this, etc.

Of course, you’ll want to “track” these options using Google Analytics or some other form of tracking software. More about the importance of tracking in a later blog post.

Local search and PPC help is only a click away at Emerald Coast.com

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SEO Tip - Importance of the Anchor Tag

Apr 6, 2009 seo

Try this experiment. Go to Google and type in “click here”. You’ll get adobe.com or apple.com or doubleclick.com. Why? It all has to do with the importance of the text that you put in your “anchor” tag. The reason, sites like these come up first in the Google search results page is because, all over the internet, on all kinds of websites, users are given the opportunity to “click here” to download their software.

The text that goes between your “anchor” tag is often the most overlooked SEO “trick”. It is important to note the only real SEO “trick” is clean disciplined source code, but more about that in a later blog.)

Let’s look at an example. You have a business here in Destin. When you place a hyperlink on your web page, rather then saying “To find out more about Online Advertising in Destin, click here“. Google would prefer you to code it like this. “Find out more about Online Advertising in Destin.”

By creating the link in this manner, you are “describing” your link to the search engines. The search engines see this as a link about “Online Advertising in Destin” which is a much more descriptive than “click here”.

There is no one magic bullet when it comes to search engine optimization, but this is another example of how to “please” Google.

Find out more about how our web developers code our websites.

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