Archive for the ‘google’ category
Call a Search Engine Marketing Company Before You Buy TV Airtime!
Today’s Squidoo lens is about landing page design.
Look, I know when you think about search engine marketing companies, you are not thinking about airtime for TV commercials. But the fact is, working with Google account reps, a well-qualified search engine marketing can save you THOUSANDS on what it would cost you to purchase it directly through television stations or networks. We are finding ourselves talking to more and more people these days who have already spent a bundle buying TV airtime, when if they had come to us first, we could have used Google’s TV ad space platform to buy the airtime at a fraction of the cost.
The same goes for radio ads. Working with Google account reps, we can put together a radio promotion campaign at a much lower cost than you could do yourself.
Yes, using Google, it is generally excess airtime you are purchasing, and you have less control over when your ads air. So there may be times when using Google to manage your TV or radio spend is not appropriate. But if you are on a somewhat limited budget, then you should absolutely use Google and a search engine marketing company to purchase airtime and manage your campaigns.
So if you are thinking about investing in TV or radio ads, PLEASE call us first! We can absolutely save you a ton of money and frustration. Work Media also has a partner that is a full-service ad agency that can produce professional quality commercials for you. And while you’re at it, since we’re saving you so much money on the cost to run your ads, you might want to have us do some search engine promotion for your web site. Put those marketing dollars to use!
Call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Time to Break Out the Flash? Hell No!
Some news came out recently that Google and Adobe are working together to make Flash-based web sites indexable. So…it’s safe to start building sites in Flash now, since Google will be able to index and rank them, right?
Forget about it. Unless you already have high name recognition and receive heavy direct traffic that does not originate from search engines, then you need to stick with the basics.
Google has been able to read the text portion of Flash files for a good while. After reading about the new initiative, nothing really jumped out at me as being any different from what Google already does. They are studying Flash in-depth to better understand how it works and how to index Flash content.
Studying?…
To me, “studying” doesn’t mean much. It could still be years before Google can interpret a Flash file the way it can a standard HTML file. Do not rely on advances within Google to raise your search engine rankings. Be proactive, work hard, and stick to the fundamentals.
If you don’t know what the fundamentals are, you need to call us. Or spend some time reading through our old blog posts, or any of the free guides on our Resources page. Those are the fundamentals. Content, optimized HTML, and links. Stick with those, and avoid Flash, unless search engine rankings are not important to your business.
If you need some help optimizing your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Early AdWords Campaign Awareness
Quick Tip: For the first couple of weeks after launching a new AdWords campaign, watch your keywords every day to make sure they are still online.
It’s easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something after setting up an AdWords campaign and beginning the process of driving paid traffic to your site. But you can’t take your eyes off of the situation. Even if Google begins sending a stream of traffic to your site, it is highly likely that very soon it will begin shutting off your keywords. What seems to happen is that AFTER your account is up and running, the Google system begins an audit of your campaigns to see how closely your keywords match your ad content (and possibly even your landing pages), the kind of click rates your keywords and ads have, etc. While it’s going through this process, it will probably be shutting off many of your keywords and insisting that you bid more (MUCH more in some cases) to turn them back on.
So if you’re not paying attention, the traffic you started receiving at the beginning of your Google campaign will dry up to a trickle until you adjust your bids. So being aware of what’s going on with your campaigns early on is critical to keeping your ads running.
You can avoid this situation by bidding very high early in your campaign. The problem is you could end up paying more than you should in order to have a profitable account. It is probably best to start low and adjust your bids up as needed, rather than starting high and adjusting down.
Call us if you need some help monitoring your pay per click campaign.
Don’t be Discouraged by the Google Dance
Man, achieving a very high ranking in Google for desirable keywords can be tough. We have been heavily promoting our site for a few select keywords and are right on the cusp of positioning ourselves the way we want, but Google keeps bouncing us around. Now, I will say that these are very competitive keywords, and we’re competing against lots of other companies that all know about search engine optimization…a pretty tough situation.
We actually rocketed up the rankings fairly quickly, then Google started moving us down, down, down. But we just kept working, and eventually we started rising again. The lesson here for you is that if you want high search engine rankings, you just to be patient and keep working. Never stop promoting. Never stop distributing content, writing your blog, seeking links partners, and all the other things you do to promote your web site.
Like we’ve said before: You can’t outspend your competition, but you can outwork them. If you are intelligent in the way you go about your SEO campaign, eventually you will see results.
If you could use some professional help with your own search engine optimization campaign, call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Internet Marketing Update
We have been hard at work for weeks now on a couple of projects that are taking way longer than expected to complete…but that’s just life, I guess. We are currently finishing up our newest book, tentatively titled something like “Winning the Pay per Click Game: Scientific Strategies for Maximizing Your Paid Search Return on Investment”. How’s that for a snazzy title? Unlike our previous books, this one will be published, either on our own with the help of a publish-on-demand company, or through an established publisher, depending on circumstances.
We are still working on our Google AdWords management application. That has definitely turned into a complex, difficult project. We are working with off-shore developers, but the development process is taking quite a bit longer than anticipated. We may end up taking over development and finishing it ourselves. But hopefully it won’t come to that.
In the world of Internet marketing, the big news this week is Microsoft pulling its offer to purchase Yahoo!. Yahoo! stock has tumbled significantly on the news. Yahoo!’s largest shareholder, Capital Research Global Investors, says he thinks Yahoo!’s board of directors should be embarrassed. We at Work Media are disappointed at the failure of the merger. A combined Yahoo!/Google search network would give Google some real competition, which would be good for advertisers. As it stands, Google’s marketshare just continues to grow, strengthening its dominance. No good ever comes from one company owning a market.
We are scheduled to speak at an upcoming search engine marketing conference in Nashville in August. That should be fun. Hopefully we’ll have published copies of our book to give away by then.
If you need some help with your company’s search engine optimization or pay per click management, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Exciting New Blogger Features that Will Bring Your Boring Blog to Life
Google has been working on some new features of the Blogger blogging platform which are really cool. To try them out, you just need a Blogger account. Then, rather than logging into blogger.com like you normally do, you log into draft.blogger.com. The new features include blog post scheduling, which lets you specify a particular date when a post should go live, and a blog list feature to display information about other blogs you recommend.
The coolest new feature we see is the ability to add Google Gadgets to your blog. This now GREATLY expands how dynamic your blog can be. For instance, I am considering starting a new financial blog. Lucky for me, there are already hundreds of Google Gadgets in the Finance category that can do things like display financial market information or stock tickers. So just like that…bam!…my new blog will be able to display information related to stocks that I talk about in the blog.
There are lots of different categories of gadgets that can be added to a blog. Some more examples include sports gadgets that can do things like feed sports news or photos to your blog, and games that you can add to your blog. Another category of gadgets with a ton of useful potential is Communication. This includes gadgets like Google Talk and Skype, which facilitate communication with your readers and friends. There are currently over 1,300 available gadgets in the Communications category, so you have lots of options to choose from.
Google seems to be working hard to make its blogging platform competitive with other platforms, especially by leveraging Google Gadgets, of which there are many, to add excitement and interactivity to Blogger-hosted blogs. We have recommended Blogger on many occasions and continue to do so. We certainly like the fact that it is owned by Google, so maybe, just maybe, you gain a slight advantage in getting your content indexed for inclusion in Google search results.
If you need some help using your blog for marketing purposes, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
The Latest Things You Should Know About Google
Here are a couple of items of news from the Google camp that we thought were interesting, and that you should know about.
First off, Google now takes the loading time of your landing pages into consideration when determining relevance for AdWords ads. Google requires advertisers to pay more for clicks if it determines that there is low relevancy between the keywords, ads, and landing pages. It wants to make sure that there is a strong sense of congruency – that everything relates and is relevant. But now they have gone a step further and are measuring the loading speed of your landing pages. Advertisers who have pages that load too slowly will be punished by being forced to pay more for clicks.
We don’t agree with this move by Google. Economics takes care of this kind of problem. If an advertiser’s keywords are not appropriate, or if its ads are not effective, or if its landing pages take too long to load, the economics of the situation will drive the advertiser away. The business will lose too much money to keep doing it. Google’s micromanagement continues.
The other Google news item is that an ad purchasing system similar to what Google offers for newspaper and radio is now in beta testing for TV. The new platform lets advertisers purchase TV ad time on the Echostar satellite system. It is currently being tested by a few select advertisers, but early feedback seems to be very positive. The day is fast approaching when Google’s advertising platform can be used to manage a completely integrated marketing campaign incorporating search, online content, print, radio, and TV.
Speaking of Google, we are still finishing up the first iteration of our AdWords management tool. We’ve been fixing bugs for weeks, but hopefully it will be ready to try out next month.
If you could use some help with Google pay per click management or any other online marketing activity, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 of Info@WorkMedia.net.
Cool New Google Feature: WebCall
Google has a new feature in beta testing that is very cool. It places a button on your web site that lets visitors instantly connect to you on the phone, without showing your phone number. Calls are routed through an online interface and you have the option of answering it or letting your voice mail catch the call. You can even prevent specific numbers from calling you. The feature is called WebCall, and it’s actually made available through a service called GrandCentral.
GrandCentral is a service that was recently acquired by Google. It promotes itself as “the new way to use your phones.” It provides you with one phone number that rings all your phones and one voicemail box that can store all your messages. It also lets you record calls on the fly. This could be a very useful feature for recording audio testimonials for a web site.
Currently, only select people are being allowed to use the service. Select people, that is, and users of Blogger. We’ve stated before that we think there may be an advantage to using Google’s own blogging platform, and this is another one: preferential treatment from Google with regard to new tools and gadgets.
We will be trying out the new call button. Why not? It may turn out that users who would not otherwise have contacted us will do so just because of the convenience. It is definitely worth trying. You never know what little extra convenience will cause the phones to start ringing.
If you don’t blog, start. If you do blog, use Blogger.
If you could use some help with your company’s content or blogging strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application – Trying to Finish
Yes, after all these months, we are still trying to finish the Google AdWords management application. Some time in late November, I decided that it was just going to take me too long to finish and stabilize the program myself. So I decided it was time to seek some help. The vehicle for finding that help is http://elance.com.
Elance.com, if you don’t know, is an online resource for finding developers, writers, and other skilled individuals for hire on a project-by-project basis. We don’t really need a full-time programmer right now, and don’t want to deal with an I.T. staffing firm, so finding an off-site resource on our own is the best option.
Using elance, is pretty easy. You just create an account and then describe what you are looking for. You can also upload documents for prospects to get more detail about the project. I think that’s a critical part of the process – making sure you have created documentation that thoroughly details what you are trying to accomplish. I spent a few weeks working on a Word document that contained specs for the project. My specs are probably not up to par with what a real developer expects, so I also created a static HTML mockup of the site. This allows potential hires to get a better idea of how the application should work, beyond trying to interpret my specs.
We have been contacted by a number of developers since posting on elance. Bids are all over the place. One of the bids is so low that we don’t believe the bidder understands what we are doing. But there are a couple of bids that are very much in the ballpark of what we were looking to spend, and those developer seem to have a good understanding of what we need. So we are very confident that we will be able to hire a quality developer within our budget (which ain’t much).
We also posted on http://craigslist.com, but did not receive much of a response to that. We did get contacted by one local developer who was between gigs. That would have been perfect, but he really didn’t have the skillset we needed.
If this project goes well, I have a feeling we will be using elance for more projects in the near future, to get things done quicker and free us from having to do them ourselves.
If you need help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Do Not Fear the Missing Google Rankings
We have recently begun being more aggressive promoting our own web site. We have very strong rankings for search engine marketing related keywords that contain the word “Nashville”, which is generally where we advise businesses with a brick-and-mortar location to begin. It is often very difficult to achieve high search engine rankings for broad, non-geographically targeted keywords. So generating rankings for keywords specific to your home market is a great way to begin driving traffic to your site that consists of very strong prospects for your service. It has definitely been beneficial to Work Media to be near the top of the rankings in Google for search terms like “Nashville search engine marketing firm”. In fact, just out of curiosity, I just typed exactly that search term into Google and we have the top-ranked natural listing and the number one paid search listing. Now that’s good shelfspace.
Anyway, we’ve decided it’s time to start promoting our site for more broad terms, not specifically related to Nashville. We have a ton of content on our site and the site is reasonably well optimized, so the main thing we’re concentrating on is off-site optimization (i.e., getting links pointing to our site). We’ve been working on it for a few weeks and have already begun seeing results. But one odd thing happened which we have seen happen a lot. So we thought we would tell you about it so if it happens to you, you don’t freak out.
There is one keyword in particular we are keen on ranking for, so it is the main one we have concentrated on in our linking campaign. When we started, we ranked a little past 100 for the keyword. A few weeks after beginning our new efforts to rank for this keyword, we disappeared altogether from the Google results. But we were not worried – we’ve seen this before.
Sure enough, after a few days, we were back in Google’s results for the keyword, this time ranked in the 60′s. Nowhere near where we hope to be, but a real nice jump from where we started.
When a web page suddendly begins to have lots of new links pointing to it, that page tends to disappear from the rankings, only to reappear later, higher ranked. Our theory is that when Google picks up on a lot of new rankings for a page, it temporarily removes it from the rankings in order to do some additional analysis on the page. This analysis probably includes Google asking questions like: Are the links relevant to the site? Is the site strong in content? What do we know about the site?
Since our site is very strong in content, well-aged, and has been indexed for a long time, we think Google performed the analysis and made the determination that we were not trying to spam our way into its index. It then re-ranked our site accordingly, taking into account the new links we have.
This is all just a theory, really. But we’ve never been ones to stress out over trying to figure out exactly how Google’s algorithm works. We just follow the basics…and it works every time. So if you undertake a linking campaign and find your site suddenly disappearing from the rankings, don’t worry about it. Unless your site is junk, in which case it may not make it out of limbo. So make sure your site is strong on content.
If you need some help with your own site’s search engine optimization or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.