Holistic Internet Marketing Optimization
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Rich Stokes about best practices for PPC campaign setup and management. The interview resulted after I had a chance to read his excellent book: Mastering Search Advertising – How the Top 3% of Search Advertisers Dominate Google AdWords.
This is not a focus on the basics of PPC, but rather the tricks and techniques that differentiate the most successful advertisers from the rest of the pack. Let us all know what you think about it below.
Protecting your brand on the web involves a lot of different things. One aspect of this is recognizing when others have stolen your content and are republishing in on their site as their own. When they steal your content and reuse it, you have the risk of having duplicate content problems.
Tools such as Copyscape are great for helping you detect these types of problems. You feed the tool with a URL and it determines is that page has been scraped and republished elsewhere.
But there is another aspect of copyright infringement that fewer publishers thing of – that being the possibility that they themselves are the ones guilty of infringement. Even if they conduct their business with the purest heart of gold, this can still happen, so let’s discuss how.
Who writes the content for your web site? Where are they getting their material from? Did they lift it frmo another source and make just some simple changes to it to disguise it? This happened to us recently, and fortunately we discovered it before the problem got to far. We discovered it because we had a page on a web site that should have been somewhere on the map rankings wise, but was not. We knew something was wrong.
The lesson is that you have to have a process for checking their work. This becomes even more important if you produce content in high volume. The more you produce, the more likely it becomes that one of your writers will become a little bit sloppy. Don’t let it happen to you. Remember – “People so what is inspected, not what is expected”.
Of course, I don’t attend to apply that old saying to everything that all people do, and in fact it applies only to a small minority. But if you are doing a lot of content generation, it will happen to you sooner or later. You would be wise to protect yourself from this.
The interview for this week is with Bruce Clay, one of the industry’s longest standing veterans. One of the topics we focus on right at the start is Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO, and how these are defined, and what path people should take.
It is clearly a topic that Bruce is passionate about, as am I! So it was a really fun interview to do. Check it out, and then provide your feedback below!
Link Juice, which I shall use to refer to the combined weighting of link relevance, importance, and anchor text is a finite resource. A given web site has a finite amount of this asset, and then must decide how to allocate it. To refine this statement a little bit, you can think of a site as having internal link juice (from its own pages) and external link juice (from editorial links from other web sites).
With your internal link juice, you tell the search engines which pages on the site are the most important to you. There are two major ways to do this:
Many sites have a footer navigation, with elements such as an “About Us” page, a “Privacy Policy” page, and other such general pages. Because this footer navigation appears on every page of the site, they become the most important pages to the search engine. This is the biggest example of why PageRank sculpting makes sense.
But there are other aspects to this as well. Perhaps you have heard that one parameter to be aware of is how many clicks it is from the home page to your content. In general, this is good advice. However, if you make everything one click away from the home page, and you have a 100,000 page site, you have a lousy architecture.
For one thing, the search engine will only look at the first 100 to 300 or so links, so the rest of your site will never be crawled. In addition, it’s a lousy user experience. Last, but not least, this assumes that all your pages have equal value, and they don’t.
Ultimately, one thing you just can’t be lazy about in putting together a web site – deciding what the most important pages are. These are the pages that carry the most important messaging, or make you the most money. Figuring this out, and then designing an information architecture that tells both users and search engines that is best built in to a site design from the very beginning.
You can use NoFollow to sculpt your link juice away from your Privacy Policy page, but that is not enough. You also need to proactively decide what the most important pages are on your site, and decide on a strategy on making that clear to both users and search engines. You can highlight the most important pages or sections of your site in a supplemental footer nav, sidebar nav, or on the home page.
It’s a decision you must make, unless you want to let the search engines do it for you.
Our interview this week is with Microsoft’s Nathan Buggia, the Lead Product Manager of the Live Search Webmaster Center. We go into the Live Search Webmaster Tools in depth.
It’s a great product, and provides a lot of useful diagnostics. As Nate points out early on, these diagnostics should be helpful in understanding how all search engines view your site, not just Live Search. Check it out!
I have written about Bid Management many times, and am a big fan of what it can do to help scale a PPC campaign. However, a bad bid management system can trap or limit your campaign.
Portfolio based bid management is a must. Basically, what this is, is a method for dealing with individual keywords that do not present enough data to determine their ROI on an individual basis. The classic cases are long tail keywords, such as one that has a single click, but it resulted in a conversion, or another keyword that has 10 clicks but no conversions.
Making sweeping bid price decisions based on such a small amount of data is fundamentally foolhardy. Smart bid management tools will aggregate data in larger groups. One way to do this is to take all the keywords in an ad group, and then treat them as one statistical entity and calculate their bids based on their performance as a group. If that does not work, the next step is to look at the campaign level.
But this is just the beginning of the issues you face. Here are some others:
This industry is in its infancy, and the needs of sophisticated PPC marketers are met best by some of the better bid management applications out there, such as Marin Software, and Efficient Frontier. But, boy to we have a long way to go.
For web marketers, the key is to pick the tool that most closely meets their biggest needs. Making this determination is far from an easy task. What is needed is an analysis of the marketers online business, the dynamics of its marketplace, and an assessment of which tools best meets its needs.
Order The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola.
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You can also get more info on the book here or The Art of SEO Book web site.
Eric Enge was Voted the #27 most influential marketer by readers of the Invesp blog.
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