November SEM Resource of the Month
November 29, 2006
This month’s SEM resource of the month carries on from October. E-Consultancy has recently released another blinder: Paid Search Marketing (PPC) Best Practice Guide. This comprehensive and in-depth heavy-weight of a guide is packed with over 250 top PPC pages.
Another fantastic piece of work by Dave Chaffey, complimenting the SEO Best Practice Guide and will no doubt further assist you in your full SEM efforts.
Key Sections:
Part 1. Planning For Paid Search Marketing
Part 2. Targeting With Paid Search Marketing
Part 3. Budget And Bid Management For Paid Search
Part 4. Creative, Testing And Optimisation For Paid Search Marketing
Part 5. Communications Integration For Paid Search
Part 6. Appendices For Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide
PubCon Vegas 2006 Roundup
November 25, 2006
It’s that time of the year where search engine marketing professionals gather for the 2006 WebmasterWorld’s PubCon.
Seoroundtable provides a solid roundup of what was going on.
November 14th:
- WebmasterWorld Pubcon Kickoff Keynote Address - Guy Kawasaki
- Feeds, Blogs, News, and Social Search (FeedBurner, Digg, Topix)
- SEO and Big Search
- Feeds and Other Alternative Optimization Opportunities
- Link Development and Linking Optimization
- Affiliate Strategies and Content Strategies
- Feeding the Engines - Writing Copy
- Corporate Mega Site SEO Management
- Special Afternoon Keynote by Jon S Von Tetzchner of Opera
November 15th:
- New Age of Web Advertising Keynote by John Battelle
- Local and Mobile Local Search
- What Every Webmaster Should Know: PHP, PERL, ASP.net
- International and European Optimization
- Search Blogger and Reporter Forum
- Purchasing Links
- Duplicate Content Issues (Yahoo & Google)
- Super Session : Search and Research on a Rail
Cool Party: Yahoo! Rents Out Hugh Hefner’s Sky Villa in Palms Hotel
November 16th:
- Special Guest Keynote - Danny Sullivan - Search Engine Land
- Press and Public Relation Campaigns
- Forums and Communities : Building and Optimization
- Spider and DOS Defense - Rebels, Renegades, and Rogues
- Interactive Site Reviews and SERP Quality Control Forum
Lee Odden shares some videos from Pubcon. I particularly liked the views of Lee, Rand Fishkin & Todd Malicoat on social media marketing & linkbaiting and how important they are now and for the future.
SEOMOZ’s Monster PubCon Roundup!
Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Unite in Standardising Sitemaps
November 19, 2006
The big 3 have joined in support of Google’s sitemaps protocol. It is nice to see them all playing ball together and now webmasters will only require one stop in showing the major search engines an up-to-date picture of fresh content that is available for crawling.
Links
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft adopt same Web index tool
adtech London 2006
November 15, 2006
I recently had the pleasure of attending the adtech digital marketing showcase earlier this September. It really was quite cool!
The two day event “is firmly established as the industry’s must attend interactive marketing show. The show is designed to bring companies operating in the ‘digital advertising and marketing space’ together with UK decision-makers who understand the value of investing in interactive marketing.” adtech blurb.
Today I received an email with a breakdown of the stats for the two day event. This triggered something in my head to write a short summary of what went on and also to share some figures for the industry we are in.
There were some refreshingly new seminars by next generation agencies discussing user generated content and web 2.0. I particularly liked Jamie Riddell’s Web 2.0 seminar and how it related to blogging and social media marketing. They have recently launched a social media blog.
Top Marketing Areas of Interest
You can see the emerging social media marketing strategies of blogging, Web 2.0 and IPTV, along with mobile marketing are dominating the new look online marketing techniques. Here’s to next year’s do!
Adwords Autumn Movement
November 11, 2006
Adwords begins to show its golden colours of Autumn! Earlier in the month I mentioned a new Adwords beta tool for testing landing pages - that of Google’s Website Optimzer – it doesn’t stop there! Google has been busy, very busy.
Adwords Account Snapshot (Beta)
Kevin Gibbons has discoved a cool AdWords account snapshot new feature that sneaked into one of his clients accounts. Yes, it’s beta and no there appears to be little documentation, but it looks very useful indeed. It gives a high level campaign overview of cost, clicks, impressions and CTR – all in graphical format. It also shows a snapshot of alerts, announcements, help and tips.
Keywords Ad Diagnostic Tool
AdWords released a Keyword Ad Diagnostic Tool earlier last month as discussed in a DP Furum’s post and at the SEO roundtable. Beta testing has finished and the tool appears to be available for all.
You will notice that each keyword in your AdWords account will now have a magnifying glass associated to it. Viewing the magnifying glass will reveal the status of the keyword and if inactive, a reason will be provided. So I gave the tool a spin and discovered that one of the keywords I was bidding on became inactive and the reason given is that it is now a trademark brand term. Less ambiguity, I like it!
AdWords Advertisers Can Site Target Specific AdSense Publisher Channels
Searchenginewatch recently discussed a new AdWords feature that targets specific areas on AdSense publisher’s website. This means an advertiser can target an AdSense website by genre that may be more relevant to the products and/or services that they sell.
This looks like a good feature, but the advertiser requires the publisher to turn it on and segment the site areas which may or may not result in relevant units for advertisers to make use of. I would imagine that large AdSense publishers would initially adopt the feature early on and it will be interesting to see if smaller publishers follow suite.
Quality Score Algo Update
AdWords has updated its quality score algorithm for landing pages. Jen Slegg provides a good summary of the affects it could have on businesses and in particular affiliates.
“The official AdWords blog just updated to include new information about their landing page quality scoring system, where advertisers whose ads lead to a “poor user experience” on the landing page could see their minimum bid prices hiked up in the coming days. The goal is to provide a better user experience for those who click the ads, with Google saying there will only be a “small number” of advertisers who will be affected.”
“Who will be the small number affected? I suspect the first to be targeted will be those whose landing pages consist of nothing but ads…” Jen’s blurb
This is causing immense stress within the affiliate community and the changes are certainly not on their Farther Christmas’ list for this year! The result is that the cost per click for certain keywords is sometimes going up as much as ten fold! Luckily, Shoemoney offers some useful tips to mask a page from being identified by Google’s quality score bot as purely being an affiliate page.
On the flip side, some advertisers are really benefiting as Google’s quality bot senses a good quality experience for its customers and competition slowly drops off!
Links:
AdWords Landing Page Quality Score Impact, on Content Bids
Google AdWords Landing Page Quality Ranking Initiated
Google AdWords Advertisers Up In Arms Again Over New Algorithm
Google’s Response to the Uproar Over the Landing Page Score Updaes
New PPC player in the form of Amazon’s Clickriver
November 4, 2006
With the pay-per-click (PPC) success of the big three, Google, Yahoo & MSN, it comes as no surprise that Amazon is after a slice of the PPC pie.
Step up Clickriver, currently a beta service in the states, which will allow advertisers the opportunity to purchase sponsored ads on Amazon.com. Clickriver displays ads during the complete shopping process, whether it begins with a user search or by browsing a category, right through to a resulting purchase. I’m sure this will raise a few eye browses in the search marketing world.
