Search Engine Ranking: Google Gets Tough(er) on Spam

At KeyRelevance we've always taken a strong stance against search engine spammers - people who try to achieve a high search engine ranking through tricks that game Google's algorithms. Fly-by-night optimization like this could give the entire SEO industry a bad name.

Well, search engine spammers should beware -- Google is out to get you. Sources inside Google report that the search engine is stepping up its efforts to catch people who use unethical optimization techniques.

Google has always taken a strong position against people who try to artificially boost their rankings. Historically, though, Google did not use widespread automation as a way of checking for spam tactics, but instead relied on other Webmasters reporting spam sites through their spam report page.

Google has recently made changes to automatically check for common spam techniques while indexing pages, which greatly increases their ability to catch and penalize the spammers.

One thing they're starting to catch automatically is invisible text on the page. This old spam technique is used to artificially boost a page's relevance for keywords by repeating them over and over again. To hide this repetition from human visitors, spammers place the text in the same color as the page background, rendering it "invisible" to the user. That's obviously a big no-no, and no credible SEO would ever use such a tactic.

I recently worked with a client who took a do-it-yourself approach to search engine optimization. While I encourage my clients to learn about search engine optimization, and always communicate what I'm doing with their sites, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In this case, my client (on her own and against my recommendations) decided to go beyond professional optimization techniques and added invisible text and hidden links to her home page. The result? Within a week the site dropped from a top-10 ranking to no ranking at all.

So what should you do if you or an unprofessional SEO company you hired has used improper SEO techniques on your site? Well, the first thing is to clean up the spam! If you immediately correct the problem, Google generally penalizes the site for 30 days, although it can be longer. However, if you did a really bad thing (like cloaking) your site might be permanently banned.

Overall, I think Google's changes are good. But I have to admit I'm a little nervous about their detecting spam through automated programs and not by hand. From my time at NetMechanic, I learned a lot about the pros and cons of using automated programs to review Web pages.

Automated programs follow a rigid set of rules that may not adequately reproduce the common sense we humans use when reviewing a page. There are some techniques that are completely innocent that may be vulnerable to Google's automated spam-checking method.

One situation that worries me is Google declaring all hidden links as bad and automatically checking every page for them. I agree that most invisible links do fall into the spam category, but not all.

If you look at http://www.cnn.com/ you will find an invisible GIF link telling you to "Click here to skip to main content." Is this spam? Absolutely not. What CNN is doing is an accessibility technique called "skip navigation" to make their site friendlier to people with disabilities.

This handy technique allows people using a page reader to jump past endless lists of navigation and jump directly to content. This is a good use of a hidden link. I believe that Google would support this use and would encourage Web accessibility. It would be nice if Google could provide some reassurance to Webmasters that these "good use" techniques won't accidentally be penalized. Or maybe Google could provide instructions on how to use skip navigation in such a way as to not get into trouble. (Google, are you listening?)

Another automated spam check looks for duplicate pages (sometimes known as "doorway pages") on a site. Google has gone on record as saying "Don't have duplicate pages."

Google's stance on duplicate content is justified. Some conniving individuals make "doorway" pages that have duplicate content, but different keywords on each page. When found through the automated tools, these sites may now be penalized.

Most companies don't purposely duplicate content on their site, but it could be happening without their realizing it. For example, many marketing departments create specialized "landing pages" for their PPC ads to test different messages or to track their ads on different properties.

The problem is that many landing pages contain content nearly identical to other pages on the site. If a company isn't aware that Google frowns on duplicate content, this widespread practice could be hurting the company's site.

You can be smart about using your landing pages by making sure you place them in a separate directory on your server and exclude them through the robots.txt file so that Google won't try to index them by mistake. (See The Robot Exclusion Standard for detailed instructions.)

Google's move to automated spam checking puts the burden on the Webmaster to know whether they are doing something that might be construed as spam. It's smart to know which things the search engines frown upon, and stay away from anything that might get you tarred with the spammer label.

If you don't know what to look for or don't have the time, hire a professional SEO to review your site for potential problems.

Search Engine Listings: Can Spiders Crawl Your Web Site?

A fundamental to ensuring your web site appears in the search engine listings is making sure that search engine spiders can successfully crawl your web site. After all, if the spider can't reach your pages, then the search engine can't include them in their search listings.

Unfortunately many web sites use technologies or architectures that make them hostile to search engine spiders. A search engine spider is really just an automated web browser that must interpret your page's underlying HTML code, just like a regular browser does.

But search engine spiders are surprisingly unsophisticated web browsers. The most advanced spiders are arguably the equivalent of a version 2.0 web browser. That means the spider can't understand many web technologies and can't read parts of your web page. That's especially damaging if those parts include some or all of your page's links. If a spider can't read your links, then it won't crawl your site.

As a search engine marketing consultant, I'm often asked to evaluate new web sites soon after their launch. Search engine optimization is often neglected during the design process, when designers are focused on navigation, usability, and branding. As a result, many sites launch with built-in problems, and it's much harder to correct these issues once the site is complete.

Yet often its only when their site fails to appear in the search engine listings that many companies call in an SEO.

That's a shame, because for small businesses, search engines are by far the most important source of traffic. Fully 85% of Internet users find sites through search engines. A web site that isn't friendly to search engines, its value is greatly reduced.

In this article, I'll give an overview of the issues that can keep a search engine spider from indexing your site. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it will highlight the most common issues that will keep spiders from crawling your pages.

Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising: Smart Campaign Management Tips

Just What Can You Pay Per Click?

The most important thing to know before starting your PPC campaign is how much you can afford to bid for a keyword. High traffic keywords on Overture and Google – the leading PPC providers - can cost $5.00 per click for a top ranking. Can you afford that?

Consider this: the typical e-commerce site converts about 2% of its visitors. That means you need to bring 50 visitors to your site before you make a sale. At $5.00 per click, you’ll spend $250 dollars to generate one sale. Ouch!

Keep in mind that you usually want one of the top 3 listings for a keyword. These are the listings distributed to most of the PPC engine’s partner sites. For example, a #3 ranking on Overture will place your listing on Yahoo, MSN and Alta Vista. A #7 listing won’t appear on any of these search engines.

So you’re caught in a catch-22: you want a high PPC ranking to get traffic, but the top rankings for popular words are too expensive.
Cast Your Net Broadly

The solution is to cast your net broadly, targeting a large number of less popular keywords. These words are usually less expensive and, taken as a group, can give you a considerable volume of traffic.

For example, suppose you run a ski resort. The keyword “ski vacation” currently receives over 60,000 searches per month. That’s great, but it costs $5.01 per click for the top ranking. Instead of competing head-to-head for that keyword, you would be better off choosing “ski trip” (4,771 monthly searches at $0.57 per click for the top spot) and “ski lodge” (4,244 monthly searches at $0.55 per click for the top spot).

By targeting a number of these less popular keywords, we get nearly the same traffic as if we had targeted “ski vacation,” but at a fraction of the cost.

Note that this is the opposite of the strategy you typically use in your search engine optimization campaign. In an SEO campaign, you focus on perhaps a half dozen high traffic words. That’s because it takes a lot of hard work to earn a top listing.

In contrast, it’s relatively easy to create a new PPC listing. Since you don’t pay unless someone clicks on your listing, there’s no added cost for doing this, so targeting a large number of keywords makes sense.

The word “ski chalet” only receives 930 searches per month. So what? At $0.52 per click, it’s worth adding to your PPC campaign.

It’s common for PPC advertisers to target dozens of keywords. I’ve managed PPC campaigns for clients using over 1,000 words.
Smart PPC Management

The downside of this approach is that it can be hard to manage such a large number of keywords. You’ll want to track your listings, making sure your rankings haven’t dropped. Plus, you’ll want to know which keywords are sending you traffic and converting visitors into customers.

Many businesses also use a PPC bid management software package like Bid Rank or GoToast to manage their listings. These software packages track your listings, and can adjust your bid if you drop in the rankings.

Many companies also outsource the management of their PPC campaigns. Most SEOs now offer PPC management services. These options cost money, but they usually pay for themselves by running your campaigns more efficiently.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to use a software package or a consultant to start your PPC campaign. But you do need to know what sort of cost per click you can afford. If you decide that $2.00 per click is your maximum bid, then stick with it. Don’t get into an emotional bidding war if you lose a top ranking. It’s much smarter to look for new and cheaper keywords. Cast your net broadly and you’ll save money.

Expand Your Market By Improving Web Page Readability

The importance of a web site being easy to read was brought home to me through personal experience with my aging mother. As a hard core Internet junkie, I felt compelled to share the wonders of the Web with her. Unfortunately, her eyesight had diminished and reading on the Web was an unpleasant experience for her.

I literally became her human page reader and the Internet became a mother-daughter activity. Sometimes I'd copy and paste the text of articles into Word and kick up the font size to 16 to print them out so she could share articles with her senior friends who didn't have geeky daughters.

Reading on the web can be hard work for anyone, not just the elderly. Eye strain runs rampant in the online crowd. Numerous studies have shown that reading performance drops dramatically on the web.

Making your web pages more readable is smart. You not only expand your market potential by making your pages more accessible to more people, but many of the techniques that improve usability, make your pages more search engine friendly as well.

Improving your viewer's reading experience on your site is easy if you keep a few things in mind. Here are my favorite readability guidelines.

1. Use contrasting colors. Text is easiest to read when the font text color and the background color are in high contrast. Low contrast irritates the reader and causes eye fatigue. Viewers with impaired vision may not be able to read low contrast text at all.




2. "Chunk up" your copy. That's technical talk for make your page more scan-friendly. Large blocks of dense text intimidate the reader and cause "information overload." Look at the two pages below. Which one would you rather read?
   
   
   Here are a few easy ways to break up blocks of text:
   
   
   
   • Use bullets and subheadings. They help get the readers attention and say "Hey you - this is important!" Colored bullets are an easy way to add color and visual interest to a text heavy page. Subheadings should be brief and convey a summary of the section. Too often we're tempted to use clever titles whose meaning is lost on the reader.
   
   
   
   • Keep your paragraphs short. Breaking a long paragraph into several smaller sections invites the viewer in to read. A little white space between the paragraphs gives the site a clean look.
   
   
   
   • Impatient visitors want to be able to glance at your page and hit the important points. You can help them by bolding important points or highlighting the text in a different color to draw their eye.
   
   
   
   • Use columns to control text width. Your goal here is to avoid running your text all the way across the page. Pick up any newspaper. Notice how they place the text in columns. The shorter width makes the text easier to read.
   
   
   

Major Search Engines and Directories

In the search engine list below, Search Engine Watch provides a guide to the major search engines of the web. Why are these considered to be "major" search engines? Because they are either well-known or well-used.

For webmasters, the major search engines are the most important places to be listed, because they can potentially generate so much traffic.

For searchers, well-known, commercially-backed search engines generally mean more dependable results. These search engines are more likely to be well-maintained and upgraded when necessary, to keep pace with the growing web.

On this page, you will see reference to "crawlers" and "crawler-based results" versus "directories" and "human-powered results." These describe the two major ways that search engines get editorial listings. See the How Search Engines Work page to understand more about the difference between crawlers and directories.

If you are interested in being listed in these search engines, see Search Engine Watch's Search Engine Submission Tips section for free, step-by-step help about the essentials to submitting to search engines and improving your chances of ranking well. Relevant links to specific tips are integrated into this page, as well.

Also consider becoming a Search Engine Watch member, to gain access to detailed information about how the various major search engines work. Finally, for an at-a-glance view of how the major search engines get their results, see the Search Engine Results Chart

SES San Francisco 2010: Register Today and Save $600

I know that August is months away, but if you register for SES San Francisco 2010 today, then you could save up to $600.

Now, the agenda hasn't been posted yet. But, we do know who the keynote speakers will be.

Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company, is speaking on Day 1. As CMO, Hayzlett is responsible for the company's worldwide marketing operations including the design and implementation of all marketing strategies, investments, policies, and processes.

His social media skills have made him one of the top C-level executive Twitterers in the world. He is also cowboy -- literally: A South Dakota native who always wears cowboy boots and still has a little house on the prairie.

BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, is speaking on Day 2. A psychologist and innovator, he has created a new model of human behavior change, which guides research and design. Drawing on these principles, his students created Facebook Apps that motivated over 16 million user installations in 10 weeks.

Fogg is also the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. His upcoming book is entitled The Psychology of Facebook. Fortune Magazine selected him as a "New Guru You Should Know."

And Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners.com, is speaking on Day 3. He is the author of the bestselling book Landing Page Optimization.

Ash is the chairperson of ConversionConference.com, the first conference focused on improving online conversions. He is a columnist for ClickZ and the host of the weekly Landing Page Optimization show and podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm.

This should be enough to convince you that SES San Francisco 2010 is a must-attend event. But, what if you have to convince a skeptic in your organization that you should register before the rest of the agenda is posted?

Well, check out what attendees have said about the value of attending previous SES events.

Is E-mail Marketing One of Your Online Marketing Goals?

Assuming that a sale or lead is the only important goal for its users to achieve is a common mistake many people make in search campaigns. After all, these are the figures they see when looking at where they're making money.

However, every Web site has different buying cycles, and users are each visiting at different stages of this process. You aren't just looking to convert that sale -- you also need to stay in the minds of potential customers who aren't quite ready to buy.

Plus, once you've done the hard part and clinched the sale, you want to do everything you can to ensure you have a happy returning customer. This is where e-mail marketing has a huge part to play as an online marketing tool, so here are some tips on where mistakes are commonly made.

Why Your E-mail Marketing Campaign is Useless

If your e-mail marketing campaign makes you a small but regular profit, then you might be satisfied with that -- but what if it's doing more damage than it's worth?

What if your e-mail marketing messages are actually damaging your brand among a wide audience? Is that worth the small number of sales they generate? While there are plenty of deliverability, style, and content issues you should work on to get the most out of your e-mail marketing, instead consider how you can avoid harming your brand with clumsy marketing.

If you're committing the following e-mail marketing mistakes, then your campaign will likely cause more damage than it's worth for the tiny number of sales it's achieving. If you haven't got the skill or time to enhance it, you'd do better to scrap it.

1. Contacting for no reason: Speaking as a consumer now, I don't care if your head of sales wants a weekly marketing e-mail; I only want interesting and useful stuff reaching my inbox. If you have nothing new to offer since the last time you e-mailed me -- no new product, great discount or interesting article -- then there's no reason to be in touch and I will resent the intrusion.

Of course, it's different if your leads have signed up to a newsletter: then you can send it out weekly, although you will have to work harder to keep subscribers. Decide what your tactic is and stick to it -- don't just send half-hearted sales pitches for no reason.

2. Sending without consent: This isn't just bad for business, it's actually illegal -- yet I still occasionally receive unsolicited marketing e-mails from largish companies. We're not talking some spammy outfit operating from a country you've never heard of, but legitimate businesses operating within this country.

Most of them probably don't know they are breaking the law. Don't worry too much, there's an "implied consent" clause. If a customer gives you their e-mail address during the course of a sale, or if they haven't opted out of receiving e-mails when given the option, then you're fine. Of course, you should still treat their inbox with respect.

3. Making it hard to unsubscribe: Perhaps a lead receives your e-mail and it doesn't annoy them, but they just don't want to receive any more of them. They scan your message but can't see an unsubscribe button, or worse -- they click the unsubscribe button but have to log into your site or navigate a complex form in order to complete the process.

There's no need to place additional barriers in the way to stop people unsubscribing. They aren't going to decide that, because it's so hard, they'll just remain subscribed. Instead, you'll turn a disinterested recipient into a downright hostile one, effectively ensuring you'll never make a future sale with that customer.

4. Sending inappropriate content: Maybe you're a retailer and this week you have a great deal for families. So, you package it all up with a load of other family-friendly content and send it out to your list.

Unfortunately, because you've failed to target only families, you end up sending it to a bunch of single people, retirees, and child-free couples. All these prospective customers feel like your content isn't relevant and unsubscribe.

It's vitally important to target your contacts with relevant messages. You may want to target as many people as possible with your offers, but target the wrong people and your subscriber list will soon drop off.

5. Offering poor content: No matter how good your deals, if your copy is badly written and your layout is poor and clunky, it's not going to score the CTR you need and it won't make your business look good.

It doesn't matter if you're offering half-price tickets to see England play in the World Cup Final; if your copy is riddled with typos and clunky phrases, you won't get the response you're expecting. What's more, you'll damage recipients' perception of your company.

There's no excuse really. If you've found some brilliant deals that are relevant to your target audience, why would you package them in a badly worded e-mail? It's such a little thing to get right, but get it wrong and your e-mail marketing will fail to sell and alienate your potential customers.

Here are 5 steps to take in dealing with a crisis:

1. Plan to move quickly into a plan of action. This may include calling on professional resources such as a lawyer, counsellor, the human resources department, or a life coach. When we share our situation with these people, they will have an outsider's perspective that can set us in the right direction, when our head is too cloudy to think on its own.

2. Focus on what we can control. In a crisis, there is often much we can't control. Our choice of action will likely have limitations. We can't control the actions of others, or what they choose to believe, but we can look at what is within our control, and make wise decisions. It's important to respect the boundaries of the people we're angry with (for our own good), and to fortify our own personal boundaries i.e. once the damage is done, we need to resist taking revenge, and we need to protect ourselves from further unwarranted attacks.

3. Brainstorm ideas of what should happen next. While it seems confusing, every cloud has a silver lining. There is something good that will come out of the situation. It's important to switch our focus to new pursuits.

4. Prioritize our next steps. Some steps are more urgent than others, like getting our finances under control, or seeing a specialist about a health need. Instead of dwelling on the bitterness, regret or fear we feel, we can take a rest, go somewhere to get a change of scenery, and make a list of plans and steps to be taken towards the changes we need to make.

5. Draw on healthy relationships. When we're down and confused, it can help to mingle with people who are positive, happy people whose lives are stable. Look to them for support, and also look for role models. Study what other leaders or those in similar situations did to pull themselves out of a crisis.

Life has ebbs and flows. It's what we do with those crashing waves that makes the difference between seeing life as unfair, or merely a challenge. Being resilient may not be our initial recourse when faced with difficulty it may be a new concept but it's one that has been proven by successful leaders. A resilient attitude can be practiced by us all.

What is Click Fraud? in Search Engine

What is Click Fraud?

Most search advertising uses a PPC model, which means the advertiser is charged every time someone clicks on one of their ads. Click fraud is the term used to describe clicks that aren't legitimate for some reason.

This could happen when someone places content ads on their own site and then clicks on them to get the affiliate revenue, or when a competitor purposely clicks on your ads to waste your ad budget. Most often, click fraud is the result of high tech bots or scripts that run in the background and click on ads without a user's knowledge.

This a concern for advertisers and the search engines, which are interested in delivering qualified traffic to advertisers' sites. If click fraud is detected and identified, then the engines generally end up with the short end of the stick. Yahoo Search Marketing's Click Fraud FAQ explains click fraud and their click protection system.

Click Forensics just released some industry-wide PPC click fraud statistics for the first quarter of 2009. The overall industry average was 13.8 percent for Q1 2009, down from 17.1 percent for Q4 2008. The drop is mainly credited to search engines' efforts to detect fraudulent clicks on their networks.

Who Would Do Such a Thing?

Some click fraud is associated with the advertisers' competitors. Most advertisers have a daily budget, and when that budget is gone they will no longer display ads the remainder of the day. Enough fraudulent clicks can eat up that budget and keep them from displaying their ads while the competitor runs their ads free and clear.

Another facet of click fraud comes from publishers who self-click ads on their own sites to drive up revenue. Even more sophisticated are the programmers and hackers who create bots or scripts that spread via a virus or spyware that attempt to automatically click on ads without any user interaction or knowledge.

What Can You Do About It?

The first line of defense is to use a reputable search engine for your paid search campaigns. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are actively looking at ways to detect and deter click fraud. These search engines often detect fraudulent clicks and never charge advertisers for them.

Publishers who self-click on ads or abuse the system are often detected and removed from the network. Search engines have a vested interest in providing users with good, qualified traffic, and are therefore committed to eliminating as much click fraud as possible in their networks.

The next thing you can do is regularly monitor your paid search clicks and site traffic using good analytics tools. In general, you want to look for patterns or spikes that are outside the normal traffic pattern for your site. Here are some specific symptoms that might indicate click fraud:

What Does Google Social Search Mean for SEO?

Surprise, surprise, they've done it again. That's right, the genius minds over at Google have come out with an interesting service called Social Search.

In a nutshell, it takes a logged in user's personal connections and searches through them to find whatever they're looking for. The results are incorporated right into the results of a normal Web search in the way universal search incorporates images, videos, and other content.

This is Google's response to the hyped vertical of social search, already started by companies like Aardvark (which is now owned by Google). The idea behind social search is basically to get the input of your friends, rather than anonymous Web sites. This tends to fit into certain types of searches, such as "What's a good restaurant to take my wife for our anniversary?" rather than "How many light years away is Alpha Centauri?"

Google can search through several social areas, including Gmail accounts, Google Talk transcripts, subscribed RSS feeds, Picasa, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Twitter profiles you follow.

Social Search essentially ramps up the impact that personalized search or search wiki has had. Like those services, results are tailored to your specific profile. However, unlike those services, one can likely expect this to have a bigger impact on search listings.

There may be a sizable number of users who see social results above your top 10 listing. Social Search results are usually placed toward the bottom of page one, but that will probably depend on relevance.

For SEO, consider implementing the following to expand your real estate in search results:

* As if you hadn't heard about it enough, you need to have your Twitter account actively posting updates. Use keywords just like on your site, and boost your subscribers as much as possible.

* Your company's other social profiles also need to be highly subscribed, actively updated sites with good content. Long-term, consider everything from Google Buzz to Facebook.

* With the inclusion of Gmail, it makes sense to start thinking about optimizing e-mail newsletters. Newsletters can be posted online, or found through desktop search, so optimizing them has multiple benefits. This means no more newsletters that are one giant image.

* Here's another case for full-text RSS feeds: a subscribed feed containing just the first paragraph or so of complete articles will have fewer opportunities to rank and drive traffic.

Not to sound like a spokesperson for Google, but you can sign up for this experiment in Google Labs and start trying it out today. It's simple to use, which means this service should take off.

There's no need to tell Google anything if you use Google Reader, Gmail, Profiles or other Google services. Also, there's no need to use a separate search service to do social searches – the results will simply start showing up one day in your old standby Google. With a little effort, hopefully some of these results will belong to your sites.

Join us for Search Engine Strategies New York from March 22-26, 2010. Approximately 5,000 marketers and search engine optimization professionals attend SES New York each year to network and learn about topics such as PPC management, keyword research, SEO, social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability and more. SES New York will be packed with 70+ sessions, multiple keynotes, 100+ exhibitors, networking events and parties. Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance – will you?

Tips for Headlines of Search Engine Watch

Tips for Headlines

This is where you can have the most impact. With a limited amount of space for your ads, you need to make each character count. You only have 25 characters for your headline and 35 characters for each of two lines of description.

* Using Keywords in your Headlines: Manually placing your keywords into the headline is a good way to create relevance from the original search query. People are more likely to click on a headline that reflects more closely what they were searching for. So if a searcher typed in "Carbonville Mountain Bike" as a search query, then the headline for the ad would be "Carbonville Mountain Bike." This is an easier task to set up if you have an ad group containing a smaller set of keywords and that are very similar to your headline.

Carbonville Mountain Bike
Your Best Price & Value Guaranteed!
Suspension Mt Bike From Top Brands.
www.example.com

* Dynamic Keyword Insertion (Warning: Advanced Topic): DKI is an advanced method that allows you to dynamically insert a keyword from your ad group into your ad copy, if triggered from a search query. To learn more about DKI, visit Google's help page. You need to be very careful when using this method because it can get you into trouble if done incorrectly.
* Ask the Question: Another way to set up your headline is to simply ask a question that gets the searcher thinking. You might be surprised if you ask a compelling question and then follow up in your description with some compelling answers. This can also help make your headline stick out especially if your competition is employing the keyword insertion method.

Need a New Mountain Bike?
Your Best Price & Value Guaranteed!
Suspension Mt Bike From Top Brands.
www.example.com

Mountain Bike Cheap
Save on Mountain Bikes Cheap
Compare Prices. Save up to 60%!
www.example.com/Bikes

Effective PPC Ad Copy 101

One of the most important factors of a successful PPC campaign is writing successful ad copy. You can spend a good deal of time on other aspects of your campaign but skimp on the ad copy and you might not get the results you're looking for. This two-part article will review several tips for crafting high performing ad copy and methods for testing its effectiveness.

Ads, Searcher Behavior, Quality Score

First, you need to understand how ads fit in the process of the searcher behavior funnel. A searcher expects to see a site (in the natural results) or an ad that is relevant to their search query. The more relevant the ad is, the better.

Once they click on your ad, you need to take them to a relevant landing page that contains rich content, including the searchers query and elements of the ad copy -- especially any promises you made.

This sets the proper expectation for the searcher, and is more likely to result in an action, which translates to a higher CTR and higher conversions. These factors, along with relevant ad copy and relevant landing pages, will increase your quality score. The benefits of a higher quality score are better keyword ranking and lower CPC.

The challenge is to create ad groups with less keywords that are centered around a strong theme. This will help you write ads relevant to your keywords.

Many people create only one or two ad groups and put hundreds or thousands of keywords in them. This scenario makes it difficult to write effective ad copy that will represent all of those keywords. This will force you to write generic ad copy that won't stand out, and will get lost among competing ads.

Search Marketing Applications

For comparison shopping engines, product feeds are obviously needed to display all your products and prices. Whether you send these directly to the engines, or to a third party to optimize and manage, they have an impact on the revenue driven to you through shopping engines. Consider all of these issues:

* Do the data feeds contain all the attributes possible?

* How well optimized is the copy?

* How well categorized are the products?

For search engine optimization (SEO), a product feed can be used to find new products to optimize, and monitor the total volume of products and trends by category. An SEO specialist can look for better ways to dynamically build the page titles and meta descriptions across the site, or optimize products on an individual basis. Product names, copy for bullets, and other information can be improved more quickly with a feed.

Pay-per-click (PPC) search ads can also benefit from utilizing product feeds. Depending on their capabilities, paid search teams may be able to dynamically create, update, or delete product-specific ads as inventories change. Your team may even be able to feed newly optimized data back into your system, improving your on-site search and product pages.

And that's just your products. You may have databases on store locations and other data of interest to marketers and vendors.

To start, look at what you've got available, how your data is really put together, where you can improve what you send, and talk to your search team about how they can improve on what you have.

Product Feeds Offer Untapped SEO, PPC Opportunities

Talking about product feeds definitely isn't the best conversation icebreaker. Even among online marketers, discussing product feeds will likely get you a lot of one word answers and checking of sports scores on iPhones. However, the value of feeds is often overlooked.

Product feeds are so imperative because, quite often, these are the source of data for your Web site, shopping engines, search ads, and more. By thinking of these feeds as a representation of everything you're trying to sell, rather than a geeky issue for IT departments, you may find many untapped opportunities. Or, if this helps, you can even think of your product database as the nourishing spring from which the woodland creatures of search marketing drink -- just don't admit that to anyone.

Check Your Data

If you send your product feed off to an agency, make sure it contains product attributes that might be of interest to a marketer. If your customers are searching by color, or size, then by all means include that data.

One big stumbling block to keep in mind is the limitations of your database. Your IT team may come back with complications, such as data being stuck in legacy systems, data not broken out into useable parts, size limitations, or other issues.

Database problems can be major fixes, so push hard to get IT support on these issues. Your Web site may be plagued by the same issues, doubling the need for improvements. Alternatively, you might be able to get a partner to help with workarounds, for example by combining files from multiple sources.