Social Bookmarking is away of organising information on the internet by users. Its a great way to share information you find on the Internet. To get sharing check out Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us
1upSearch have achieved Google Adwords Qualified Company status! In order to achieve this status (only around 45 companies in the UK have it) you have to reach and maintain all of the following criteria.
1) Employ at least two Qualified Individuals in the programme. Individuals must be qualified under the main company-registered My Client Centre account and not their own account. See the requirements to become a Qualified Individual.
2) Build and maintain at least
Welcome to Part 3 of my Guide to Google Adwords. I finally managed to find some time to write this part. In part two we talked about keyword research, now we move on to Adwords Advert design.
Ad Copy Design & Structure
Google Adwords Adverts are similar in many ways to the small adverts you find in Newspapers, Magazines and in Shop Windows
I’ve just noticed that you can now add tabs to your Google Homepage. This is great news as my homepage was starting to look a little overcrowded.
If you still not using Google customised Homepage I suggest you check it out!
EDIT I’ve just noticed its only on Google.com. Homefully be on google.co.uk soon…
Related Article
The del.icio.us web site is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but since it came part of Yahoo! in December 2005 it has gotten a lot bigger. It has been suggested that the site was sold for somewhere between $15-30 million US dollars
It is mouth-watering using del.icio.us and at the same time its is also turning back the clock to the early days of Yahoo. In the early days of the internet, around 1996, Yahoo was an online directory with the editors reviewing sites for free. Yahoo is now a portal with a directory where you can get a listing for free or for a fee.
Why pay people to review site when you can get people to vote for sites? This concept is not new - that’s what the Open Directory does. However the open directory is Web 1.0 slow and run by, and in the nicest possible way, geeks. del.icio.us is Web 2.0 fun, fast(er) and Firefox based
Google PageRank or PR as its otherwise known is a term that’s frequently used when talking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but what does it actually mean and how important is it when using SEO to market your site?
PageRank according to Google :
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Wikipedia says:
PageRank is a patented method to assign a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank [Vise and Malseed, 2005]) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine.
So to summarise its your pages popularity on the web based on the number of quality inward links your page has.
I wanted some more information on how important page rank was so I did some futher research. Below is a summary of the most important points I found.
Internal Links
Most webmasters think that its only External Inbound links that have any effect on PageRank. This is not however the whole truth. Internal links within your sites structure are also equally important !
I discovered that your PageRank has a maximum value that is calculated from both your External Links and your Internal Links. This means that you can increase you maximum page rank by adding more pages to your site! This sounds great doesn’t it ? However be warned. New pages must contain fresh relevant content not simply content copied from elsewhere on the site. This could set alarm bells ringing at Google as this practice known as "Cookie Cutting" (not sure why) is classed as Spam. If you a detected as using any spamming techniques you risk your pages and possibly your entire site being removed from the Google index..
Outbound Links
Outbound links are links from your site to other places on the Internet. Whilst this can be a bad idea from a visitor conversion point of view as they are essentially an exit from your site they can also leak PageRank. It is therefore essential that when linking to other sites you ensure the link is reciprocated.
This begs the questions - "Which page should I place my External Links?". If they cause your PageRank to literally drain away you probably don’t want them on your highest ranking pages. Or do you ? It appears there is no way of knowing but the general rule seems to suggest you should place your external links on your lowest ranking page.
Inbound Links
Inbound Links are like injections of PageRank from other sites on the Internet. Anyone involved in SEO or Internet Marketing will tell you how important it is to ask for and swap links with other high ranking sites.
But where should we ask for the link to ? Should we accept links from everyone?
The answer to the first question is quite simple. You inbound link should point to the page you want to achieve the highest rank usually your homepage as that way the internal pages should gain a good rank through internal linking. A point to note is that Search Engine Spiders see www.site.com, http://site.com and www.site.com/ as three separate pages it is therefore vital that you standardise your domain and how you ask for you links.
The answer to the second is probably yes. Google is aware that webmasters don’t have any control over other peoples websites therefore it would be unreasonable to punish them. So carry on collecting as many links as you can but keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity,.
A final word of warning on Inbound Links. Avoid Link Farms and some paid for links as these can have a disastrous effect on your sites Rank and could possibly lead to you being removed from the Google Index.
I hope this gave you an overview into PageRank. I’m sure i’ll be coming back to this subject soon so keep informed via our RSS feed.
Google Search Shortcuts are commands that can be entered into Google to find out information regarding the indexing of a particular site. A useful one I have already mentioned is "link:" which shows all of the indexed inward links to your site. I had a look round the web and come up with this list :-
There are loads more relating to the calculators and phonebooks etc. Take a look here.
I’ve often wondered when investigating how many inward links our clients have why Google always shows less than MSN & Yahoo. You can check how many links a site has by using a link: command.
e.g. link:www.bbc.co.uk
Yahoo uses a linkdomain: command.
If you run the commands on all 3 search engines you’ll probably find quite a difference in the results. I decided to do a little research to find out what was going on..
If Googles main criteria for a good search result is links isn’t it a little weird that it doesn’t index all your precious inward links?
It turns out that Google purposely doesn’t list all links pointing to a particular page. They do this because they feel by giving webmasters this information they may be able to use it to manipulate search results. This implies that Google still know they’re there and includes them while calculating page rank.
Another discovery is that Google unlike the others only shows the links to a particular page so running a “link:” on your domain will only includes sites point at the homepage. The others show all links to all pages.
So keep an eye on your inward links but don’t be disappointed if they don’t all show up in Google. They’re probably being counted, just not being acknowledged.
One of the most important components of your Adwords Campaign is the keyword lists your use to promote your ads. Your keyword list is going to give you the power over your competition and as most people spend very little time on their keywords you can work this to your advantage.
Adwords Best Practice number 2:
Research, Research, Research.
The extra time you spend planning your campaign will pay dividends in the future by providing targeted visitors at a fraction of the price.
3 Steps to Great Keyword Research.
Step 1 : Brainstorming.
This step is the ONLY step most people carry out and even then they don’t spend the time it needs. Get a pen & paper and try to think of all the words people may use to search for your product and service.
For example one of our clients sells sweets online. During brainstorming some of the ideas we came up with were “sweets”, “traditional sweets”, “old fashioned sweets” and “jars of sweets”.
Don’t stop at the general terms however. By breaking it down even more you can break it down to categories e.g. “Sugar Free Sweets” and “Chocolate Sweets” or even down to product “Sherbert Lemons” etc.
Once you get going you should be able to think of a healthy looking list full of variations.
Step 2 : Keyword Tools.
Brainstorming is a great start but you need to carry out research to find out exactly how many people are using certain terms and more importantly how much competition is attached to your terms (more on this in future articles).
The Google Keywords tool can be accessed from with your AdWords account and you can find the Yahoo! Search Marketing tool here:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/
One of the best research tools available is Wordtracker. Wordtracker not only shows you the number of people searching but also offer data regarding growth, competion and much more. I would recommend you invest in Wordtracker if you’re serious about Internet Marketing and PPC.
Wordtracker - Take your Free Trial
Get all these tools in your Internet Marketers Toolbox.
Step 3 : Beating the Competition
There are many tactics to get 1 UP over your competition. One of the most common is spelling mistakes. By bidding on spelling mistakes you can achieve clicks for far less than the correctly spelt terms that all your Competition is bidding on. People do make typos all the time while browsing.
We’ll go through all the tactics in future posts. Keep working on your keyword research and you’ll get a refined list of words that really works for you and your business.
Keep informed via RSS as number 3 will be here soon.
An article on ZDNET into the number of searches confirms that searching is still going strong and the small decline is simply down to seasons.
The most interesting figures in the article relate to the number of searches on the major search engines.
June 2006
Google 2.9 Billion
Yahoo! 1.8 Billion
MSN 818 Million
This confirms that around 95% of searches are carried out either on Google or Yahoo! making them the first port of call in any online marketing strategy.
Original Article..
6.4 bln searches in June 2006 by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — Americans conducted 6.4 bln searches in June 2006, a 6% decline from May 2006 (6.8 bln searches), but a 29-percent increase over June 2005 (5.0 bln searches), comScore says. The decline in search volume from May is considered to be mainly a seasonal effect [...]
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