keeftronics :: design | marketing » seo | sem

Speed Up Analytics

keef — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:07:43 +0000

Here’s another way to shave some milliseconds off of the load times of your pages. Not sure exactly what setting the async attribute to true does but according to David Walsh it will help speed up the javascript used when loading Google Analytics to your pages. The other change with this code is that it gets put at the top of the BODY rather than at the bottom of your code.

(thanks david walsh)

Anchor Links in Search Results

keef — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:43:53 +0000

The other day I was looking for “how to find pages internally linking to a page” and I noticed something pretty interesting in the results I got. Google noticed that the first results had an anchor link to a section on the page called “Internal Linking” and asked me if I wanted to jump to this part of the page. The SEO implication here is that by adding anchor links to your pages, Google can pick them up and you’ll get an extra relevant link in the SERP’s enticing potential visitors to click through to your site. It’s not clear to me whether you can just add the code into the page or if it needs to actually be linked to like a proper anchor link. Either way, it looks like it’s worth experimenting with.

Index Your Pages So You Can Hide Them

keef — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:15:58 +0000

I never got this before but according to this great article over at Yoast about how to properly block pages from the bots, the best way to make sure your pages are hidden is to have them indexed first:

So, if you want to effectively hide pages from the search engines, and this might seem contradictory, you need them to index those pages. Why? Because when they index those pages, you can tell them not to List them.

Ad Creep Continues in Google SERPs

keef — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:25:06 +0000

Google continues to increase ad real estate in its search results. First there was the Plus Box and then Product Listing Ads and now Product Extensions are available to everyone as well, through the Google Merchant Center. There are so many ads now available that when I do a search for a term like “copy paper” I only see 2 organic results above the fold, the other 13 links are all either from the Google Merchant Center or AdWords. The importance in ranking first or second in organic results becomes all the more crucial as Google continues to put the squeeze on organic results.

Blog Comments Hack for SEO

keef — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:27:15 +0000

I’ve been doing a little link building lately for a project I’m working on and part of that has included writing comments on various blogs related to the terms I’m trying to target. I noticed the other day on one of the blogs I was writing on that above the comment box they had the phrase “(You may use HTML tags for style)” – this means feel free to create your own anchor text, awesome. So now I type this phrase into Google in quotes along with the keywords I’m trying to target in order to find relevant blog posts that will allow me to put in my own anchor text. You can also try the phrase below that’s a WP standard “XHTML: You can use these tags:”

SEM Affiliate Scam – A New Kind of Click Fraud

keef — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:39:42 +0000

I recently started working for an eCommerce site and we use both SEM and affiliate marketing extensively. I was poking around Google Insights and checked out a few of the trending search terms involving our company name. When I did a Google Search for these terms I noticed that a bunch of our affiliates through CJ were bidding on “[Our Company Name] coupon” – a lot of these affiliates didn’t even have our coupons. So not only were we bidding against our own affiliates but they were hurting our conversions by not giving our customers what they were looking for and I’m sure our cart abandonment rate increased as a result.

Then I discovered one of our CJ affiliates, sharesale.com, was bidding on our actual company name and coming up first. So we were paying them for each conversion and they were just milking us by taking advantage of our brand recognition. They were simply redirecting them to our site after getting their referral (to stay within Google’s Terms and Conditions).

My guess is that tons of small eCommerce businesses using Comission Junction and the like are getting taken advantage of by their affiliates who are too lazy to do their job and just park on their advertisers’ keywords. I think this constitutes a new kind of click fraud.

Google Goes Canonical

keef — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:05:14 +0000

Google announced a nice upgrade this week for people who have duplicate content on their sites because of catalogs. Often times the same content will appear more than once depending on how you searched for something. So you may get the same content for a pair of brown shoes by filtering down to shoes>brown or shoes>men’s. You can now add a tag inside the tag and Google will understand that all of the duplicate pages refer to this url. This will also help shore up PageRank to this one particular page rather than it being diluted to all of the pages with the same content. You can read more about the particulars on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

Great Tips for Writing AdWords Copy

keef — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:55:08 +0000

I’ve been working on some $10k+ a month AdWords campaigns in the last month or so which has required me to spend some time doing a little research to try to maximize the potential of these campaigns. I found this great article on writing AdWords copy earlier this month. There are some great tips here on how to manipulate your ads to get higher CTR and conversions. In just one example they show how changing the headline from “Meditation Music” to “Music for Meditation” doubled both conversions and the click-through-rate. The example above shows the difference and ellipses can make. If you deal with SEM this is definitely worth a read.

The Future is a Digg-like Google UI

keef — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:35:16 +0000

I just caught this video of the new junk Google’s been “bucket testing” off of TechCrunch. I would love to have the option of dropping sites that I mistakenly click on. This happens to me everytime I try to download the subtitles for a DIVX movie. It looks like you will also be able to leave comments as well as voting sites up and down. How Google’s going to keep this system from being trashed by black hat SEO is beyond me. I’m sure that there will be a ton of hacking until they work the kinks out of the system – look what happened with Google Trends recently.

(thanks techcrunch)

Some AdWords Tips from SMX Advanced

keef — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:30:06 +0000

I really never thought of AdWords/AdSense being as complicated as this diagram makes it out to be. There was an SMX event about a month ago and the trade secrets are now public. A lot of the stuff didn’t seem very interesting but two tidbits stood out.

The more controversial one involves basically taking advantage of poor saps who don’t know any better, offering them a link exchange, and then throwing a nofollow on it so you get the link love and they don’t, but they’re none the wiser. This makes me feel a little dirty, it’s a minor offense to be sure, but you’re still deceiving people who trusted you.

More interesting, was Michael Gray explaining that the Quality Score on landing pages in AdWords had nothing to do with the landing page and everything to do with your organic rankings-

Michael says the Landing Page Quality Score is a lie. It has nothing to do with your landing page. It has to do with your organic rankings. The better you do organically, the better your quality score will be. Learn how to break things.

The only difference was the domain age. The domain that was created in 2006 had its ad jacked up to $10.00. The domain from 2008 was just $.75. It’s not just the domain age. They’re looking at the number of trusted links you get over a period of time. You need a certain number of links but you have to do it over a certain period of time.

How do you beat the Landing Page Quality Score? Every few months Google updates their Landing Page score. If your Web site moves into a non-trusted price jacked category, buy a new domain, create a new ad group, and move all your keywords over.

Google is a data borg. Every piece of data that you give them is going into their borg and being used in their algorithm. Every piece of data can and will be used against you. Think twice before you give it to them.

(thanks to bruceclay for spilling the beans)