The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) - Pay-Per-Click Advertising(PPC) - Website Traffic and Path Analysis - Optimized Press Releases - SEO Copywriting - Blogging - Article Writing - Newsletters - Everything you need to know to be successful in your Internet marketing.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 9:25 AM   0 comments

Thursday, April 10, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:53 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, March 19, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 1:10 PM   0 comments

Wednesday, February 27, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 9:49 AM   0 comments

Monday, February 11, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 6:59 AM   0 comments

Friday, February 08, 2008



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.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 9:17 AM   0 comments

Monday, February 04, 2008



Microsoft Buying Yahoo! Would Be Wonderful for Advertisers

I read over the weekend that Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo!. They are willing to pay a nice premium over where the stock is at right now (having been beaten down by disappointing earnings), so it would represent a nice profit for Yahoo! stockholders. Will the deal go through? Who knows.

As search marketers, we would like to see the deal go through. We have tried to use Microsoft's search network and marketing platform (and continue to try) but Microsoft just doesn't have enough traffic yet, and its ad serving platform sometimes just doesn't seem to work very well. There are some features of Microsoft's ad center control panel that we really like, and some that we don't like.

The same with Yahoo! There are some features of its control panel we like, and some we don't. If the merger does happen, we would hope Microsoft would combine the best features of the two platforms into something really useful. The keyword inventory of the combined companies would also come closer to rivaling Google, and would exceed Google worldwide.

Frankly, we would just rather have to only deal with two major search marketing platforms than three. We like a lot of the things Microsoft has tried to do. Combining Microsoft's technology with Yahoo!'s Web positioning would create something new that could really be a boon to search engine advertisers. It would also set up an even more competitive situation between Google and the combined company, which should result in an increased pace in innovation and a better situation for advertisers. It seems counter-intuitive to think that a decrease in competitors from three to two would result in more competition, but it would. Microsoft just does not have the search engine traffic to be a real threat to Google or Yahoo!. But the new merged Microsoft/Yahoo! would be able to give Google a real run for its money. And that would be good for all of us.

If you could use some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 8:34 AM   0 comments

Tuesday, January 08, 2008



Using Widgets and Mashups to Promote Your Business

A "widget" is a program that runs inside a browser or on a user's desktop (such as when running Google Desktop) that provides extra functionality for the user. Widget creation is a hot trend in online marketing these days. They are generally written in JavaScript, although other languages can be used as well. The advantage of a widget is that, if you can get your prospective customers to install it, it provides you with a way to keep your marketing message in front of your prospects. And as you know, repeated exposure to a marketing message is key to its success.

Widgets created for Google Desktop are called gadgets. But the concept is the same. Google provides an API for creating gadgets, which can be found at the following web address: http://www.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs-home.html.

For example, let's say you sell New York Yankees merchandise. You could create a widget that showed updated news headlines related to the Yankees. A Yankees fan could place the widget in his browser or on his desktop that would constantly feed him Yankees news, along with marketing messages to buy Yankees merchandise. Or maybe the widget would constantly display new listings on eBay for Yankees merchandise, which would be very useful for a collector.

If you lack the knowledge or internal skills to code widgets, you might try hiring a third party contractor. You could create an account on eLance.com and post details of what you are wanting to do. Chances are excellent you could find a developer who will do the work for a very affordable rate.

A mashup is something that combines content or functionality from different sources, such as a web site that contains pieces of other web sites. Microsoft has a very interesting web site called PopFly.com that lets you drag and drop functionality from different web sites to create mashups without any coding. For example, while trying it out, we combined a Microsoft Live image search with some kind of image rotater. The merged product was a screen that showed images pulled from Live.com rotating in a circle. We're not sure how useful this particular mashup is, but it was fun to create.

Widgets and mashups are definitely a hot trend in marketing, and they can help get your marketing message distributed and repeated to your target market in a way that they find entertaining or useful, which will make it easier for your message to soak in.

If you could use some guidance using widgets or mashups to promote your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:48 AM   0 comments

Friday, December 07, 2007



Importing Google Data Into Yahoo! - Things to Keep in Mind

Earlier this week I was trying to import a Google campaign into Yahoo!. Yahoo! has this tool that is supposed to convert a spreadsheet with Google campaign data into the correct format to work with Yahoo!. Well, that thing seems to be a piece of crap. We ended up having to manually move lots of columns around, change column names, and add lots of data that Yahoo! needed. It was a pain in the butt. And then it still didn't work...at first. If you are trying to do this same thing, here is what we had to do to make it work.

1. We had to first create a campaign in Yahoo! to hold the new campaign data. Unless I'm wrong, you can't actually create a new campaign by importing the data - you can only add data to an existing campaign.

2. We had to specify our newly created campaign ID in the import spreadsheet.

We had also originally specified IDs for our new ad groups (which we made up), but Yahoo! did not like this. So...you DO specify a campaign ID in the import file, but you DO NOT specify ad group IDs.

There was a lot of work that had to be done on the import file (which was created by doing an export from Google AdWords Editor, which we have blogged extensively about), but the frustrating thing was when we got to the point of importing the file and it still didn't work. That is until we took the above steps.

If you need help managing your Google or Yahoo! campaigns (or any other search engine), feel free to contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 8:01 AM   0 comments

Tuesday, November 27, 2007



Ready, Fire, Aim - the Right Way to Launch a Paid Search Campaign

'Hope everybody had a fantastic Thanksgiving. I headed down to Memphis to spend a few days at my in-laws'. I lived in Memphis for several years. The city has gotten some bad press recently because of its' crime rate, but it's a great city with lots of interesting shops and places to eat. Nashville, where we're located, is more of a corporate city. Memphis is more "down home."

Anyway, the day before Thanksgiving we got contacted by a business needing a paid search campaign up and running the same day. We're a small firm, so we have the capability to drop whatever we're doing and change directions. But getting a complete campaign created, funded, and up and running in just a few hours is quite a task. But we got it done.

The reason we were contacted is that the search marketing firm that was originally hired (about three weeks previous) was taking way too long to get the campaign on-line and was only spending a trickle of what our client wanted.

The problem the other firm made was that they spent days and days setting up a broad, super finely targeted campaign before launching. Our client needed traffic immediately. What they should have done (and what we did) was launch the campaign with a small set of keywords, start generating traffic, and then build out and fine-tune from there. This is a strategy you should adopt if you are an aggressive user of paid search.

It's sort-of like the old "Ready, Fire, Aim" marketing maxim. In other words, launch the campaign, generate data, examine that data to see what changes you need to make, and adjust accordingly. It makes no sense to spend too much time tweaking a campaign before you have any data to examine.

If you need some help with your paid search marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 12:05 PM   0 comments

Monday, November 19, 2007



Google Changes Site-Targeted AdWords Campaigns

Google has changed the name of its "site-targeted" AdWords campaigns to "placement-targeted." We're not sure of the reason behind the name because it's the same thing it was before - a way for advertisers to advertise on specific web sites that are part of Google's content network, rather than on Google's search results pages. Perhaps the name change relates to Google's ongoing efforts to expand its advertising platform beyond just web sites, into areas such as radio and newspaper. Who knows.

The only difference, as far as we can tell, is that you are now allowed to bid on a cost per click ("CPC") basis for content ads, in addition to the existing method of bidding per thousand impressions ("CPM"). There have been occasions when our effective click cost for CPM campaigns was less than CPC, and there have been times when it was more. We like the fact that Google now gives you the option of bidding either way. It gives the advertiser more flexibility to try different bidding strategies and see what works best.

On a related note, we have noticed that Google's pay per action platform has been down for quite a few days now. We have one client using PPA (it is only available to select large advertisers), and we are beginning to see some very nice results with it. Our cost per acquisition is substantially lower than with pay per click. We aren't generating nearly as many total conversions as with pay per click, but we'll take a cheap conversion any way we can get it. But what is the deal with it not working? Is Google shutting it down already because they're not making enough money with it? We'll see.

If you need some help managing your Google paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 8:35 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, November 14, 2007



Powerful Search Engine Advice Straight from the Source

Matt Cutts is an engineer with Google who has become quite famous within the Internet marketing community for his blog posts that help online marketers better understand how Google works. A recent MediaPost article focusing on tips culled from various Cutts blog posts revealed the following strategy for optimizing a web page for a particular keyword:

Once in the title, once in the description tag, once in the heading, once in the URL, once in bold, once in italic and once high on the page.

Brilliant. The above sentence masterfully and simply summarizes how to optimize a web page, at least from a content perspective. Now, certainly there is more to on-page optimization. For example, the way a page is coded can have a significant impact on its ranking. But if you combine clean coding with the above copy writing strategy, your web pages should be very well optimized.

Possibly the hardest part of this strategy is getting the keyword in the URL. The ideal solution is to have a domain name that contains one or two critical keywords. This is often in conflict with a company's branding strategy, however. I mean, we (Work Media) might possibly generate more search engine rankings if we had the domain name "internet-marketing-search-engine-optimization.com", but it just doesn't flow as well as "workmedia.net". It would definitely be harder for people to remember.

Fortunately, blogging provides a way to generate web pages with keywords in the URL. We use Blogger, but most blogging platforms probably work in very similar ways, in that pages are automatically created based on the content of the blog posts. If you use important keywords early in your blog posts, and use keyword-rich tags to describe your posts, then your blogging platform should create archive pages that contain those keywords in the URL.

As for the other parts of the strategy, it's easy. Just figure out the best keywords for which to optimize your site (we've discussed keyword research in previous blog posts) and use those keywords often in your pages, spread out exactly as recommended above.

If you need some help implementing a search engine marketing strategy for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We're here to help!

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:52 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, November 07, 2007



Fight the Power - Dealing with the Search Engine Ranking Shakeup

Recent search engine updates are causing havoc. They are completely wrecking people's lives and causing babies to starve in third world countries. They are probably responsible for the draught in the Southeast U.S. as well as the California wildfires.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But a lot of people are doing a lot of hand wringing because of changes happening in the search engine indexes. In Google, for example, many sites have experienced a drop in their PageRank, which, as you know, is a measure of the value Google places on a web site. Work Media has experienced our own drop in PageRank. So if your PageRank has fallen does that mean you are going to lose your rankings?

Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, it is completely out of your hands. So don't worry about it. Rather than worrying, get aggressive with your promotion. One of the main reasons for Google's current update is to devalue sites that have a lot of purchased inbound links. Google does not want you buying links. It wants you to get them the old fashioned way - by having interesting content that people want to link to. So do it! Write articles. Do press releases. Add your site to directories. If you don't have time, hire someone to do it.

Another way to fight the effects of search ranking shuffling is to fill your site with new, constantly changing content. Search engines still love content. You can't have too much of it. A blog is an excellent vehicle for doing this. A technique we really like is to use our own blog RSS feed to place content on our site that changes every time we update our blog.

You may also have to be strategic with your optimization in terms of keywords. Don't automatically assumed that the keywords that are most used are the best. If you can uncover some keywords that people use that have little competition, then those may be better keywords to target.

If you keep on creating new content, are strategic with your keyword selection and optimization, and adding new non-purchased links to your site, you will be fine. Google won't be able to deny you.

If you have lost search engine rankings and need help getting them back, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:52 AM   0 comments

Friday, November 02, 2007



Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 5

Yes, yes, development of our proprietary Google AdWords application is still ongoing. We just finished a section of the application that I am excited about it because it will be a major time saver in setting up Google campaigns. What we've done is give our keyword research page the functionality to create multiple ad groups at once. The list of keywords returned from a keyword search has a textbox next to each keyword where you can specify the name of an ad group for that keyword. Keywords for which you type the same ad group name will be added to the same ad group. This is a continuation of our plan to break away from the 1.2.3. approach to setting up ad groups that is used in the AdWords interface.

The next step will be finding some way to add some automation to the ad creation process. This may involve setting up a global ad template that will apply to all ad groups within a campaign. We're still trying to work out the logic in our heads and haven't really coded any of that yet.

We are running up a decent bill in Google API fees. We learned too late about using Google's sandbox AdWords API classes, which would have let us do our testing for free. But I did not want to go back and have to recompile all of our classes again. We had to add some custom code to the classes to get them to work anyway because of a bug (not really a bug, just a bad feature) of the .NET platform involving the way it communicates with Web Services. So it just seemed easier to pay the Google API fees than go back and have to re-do a bunch of work. Dealing with the API fees just from our testing certainly has shown us that we will need to be careful to price use of the application to cover the fees we'll run up once we open the application up to our clients. By the way, the trick to using Google's sandbox API is that you use a different URL for each Web Service when compiling your classes that make the Web Service calls.

Development of the application has slowed the last couple of weeks due to client demands. The thing has come a long ways - but it has a long way to go. We hope to be ready to launch by January.

If you could use some help with pay per click management or search engine optimization, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:21 AM   0 comments

Monday, October 22, 2007



Google Site Links Expansion Gives Marketers More Control

If you don't currently have a Google WebMaster account that you use to submit XML sitemap files to Google, get one! The URL is:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview

This allows you to directly tell Google about the structure and indexable content of your site, rather than passively waiting for Google to find it on its own. As a bonus, Google will sometimes display multiple links from a sitemap-submitted web site in the site's listing in a Google search engine results page (SERP).

And now Google is expanding the number of links that it will show in your listing, up to eight. Think about that: your SINGLE Google search listing could have nine different links into your site. We're all about shelfspace expansion (meaning maximizing the number of times your site appears on a SERP via natural and paid search), so this is a very good development.

It is also possible to now indicate to Google in your XML sitemap file what pages, if any, you would NOT like to show up in the site links listings for your site.

Google Sitemaps give you the opportunity to more easily get your site content indexed AND increase the total number of links you have on a page of search engine results. So do it today!

If you need help maximizing your search engine marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:25 AM   0 comments

Thursday, October 18, 2007



Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Google AdWords Ads

We are perplexed by how mysterious Google tends to make things. Certainly, the company does everything it can to hide the intricacies of its search algorithms so as to disallow anyone taking advantage of it for artificial gains in search rankings. Fair enough. But Google goes far beyond that in hiding its secrets.

We recently ranted a bit about Google's sparse documentation related to its AdWords API and about the lack of logic behind ad Quality Scores. We're just as perplexed about Google's failure to give full disclosure about all of the features of AdWords. We are Google certified, having studied all of Google's exam material, but we had never read anything about dynamic keyword insertion until we stumbled upon it by accident.

That's right. Just like Yahoo! and MSN, Google allows you to dynamically insert keywords into an ad. The reason for doing this is that the closer the ad matches the intentions of the viewer, the greater the likelihood of generating a click to your site. By inserting the exact keyword that triggered the ad into the title or ad copy, you more closely match that user's intentions.

To dynamically insert a keyword, place the following code where you want the keyword to appear: {keyword: default keyword}. Replace "default keyword" with the keyword that should appear if the trigger keyword is too long in characters for the ad. For example, if the dynamic variable is used in the title, but the keyword triggering the ad is more than 25 characters, then the default keyword will be used.

Don't overuse dynamic keyword insertion or your ads will all become very generic and boring. But it is a powerful tool to use in moderation.

For help managing your paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:18 AM   0 comments

Tuesday, October 16, 2007



Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 4

We're big on gaining as much Google "shelf space" as possible. In other words, for any particular keyword we are targeting, we want to have a paid search listing on the search results page as well as at least one natural search ranking. We think it greatly increases your chance of getting a click to your site, and it is a strong branding move. To make this happen, you need to create landing pages specific to certain keywords. This improves your chances of converting the visitor into a customer AND gives you the opportunity to heavily optimize a page for natural search listings.

Keeping all this in mind, we've decided we would like our AdWords management application to also be useful in optimizing landing pages for natural search rankings. The first part of this is providing the natural Google search rankings for each keyword. In other words, I don't want to just know what my ad position is for a keyword - I also want to know what my natural rank for that keyword is. This information will help me generate shelf space.

Unfortunately, as usual, Google makes things much more difficult than it should be. Google used to have a search API that would return search results and related information. But that API is no longer available. There is a new search API, but it is an AJAX JavaScript-based control, which really doesn't help us in our situation because we need that data on the server side, not the client side. We also need ranking data, which doesn't seem to be available in any fashion via any Google API.

But we've figured out a way to do it. It's much more processor intensive than if we could just request the information directly from Google, but that's alright. We're getting it done, even though it's a lot more work than it should be. Why Google is intent on making its vendors and customers jump through hoops is beyond me, but the situation is what it is. We'll deal with it. We can't wait for the day when Microsoft catches up with Google in terms of natural search traffic and keyword inventory, because we know Microsoft would make it easier to plug into their backend to get the data we need.

So we carry on, fighting one battle after another. When we're done, we will have an application that will make it much easier for us to manage our own clients' paid and natural search campaigns. The next step would be to open it up to others who might want to use it for their own campaigns.

If you could use some help managing your own search engine marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:22 AM   0 comments

Thursday, October 11, 2007



A Rant About Google Quality Score

We don't do a whole lot of complaining in this blog. We like to stay on the positive side. But Google is really getting on our nerves with its keyword "Quality Score". A representative from Google described Quality Score thusly:

"Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated from various factors, including the relevance of your ad and keyword, your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and your landing page quality.

Quality Score is used to determine your ads' position on Google and the Google Network. It's also used to determine your keywords' minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids."

Okay, no problem. Only...from what we are experiencing first-hand in many instances, Quality Score works very poorly.

We have ad groups running in which a keyword perfectly matches the text used in the ad and on the landing page, and that have a reasonable click-through rate (or no click-through rate because it's brand new)...and Google is still giving us a low quality score!

Basically, Google can assign a low Quality Score to any keyword and mandate that the advertiser pay an outrageous price for clicks, even if there is not a single other advertiser for the keyword. As far as we can tell, the logic for determining Quality Score has some serious problems. Google is forcing advertisers to overpay when it should not be necessary.

Is this good for Google? It might make them a few more bucks in the short-term, but long-term they are going to hurt advertisers and force them to go elsewhere. It's simple economics. If advertisers are forced into paying so much for clicks that it makes it impossible to generate a positive return on investment, then they will stop advertising there. Is Google so big and powerful that it can afford to have its customers start leaving? I don't think so.

Hey Google, how about letting the market determine what advertisers are successful and stop meddling in every little detail of everything that happens? Control freaks...

If you are experiencing your own Google frustration and need some help managing your AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:20 AM   0 comments

Monday, October 08, 2007



Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 3

Today we will continue with our series of posts chronicling the development of our proprietary Google AdWords management application.

One thing that's a little unwieldy about using the Google AdWords API via its various Web Services is that every time a Web Service is called, you have to pass in a number of variables, such as the account email and password, the client email, and the developer and application tokens. And it's not as simple as setting properties of an object to these values. The values have to be set as arrays, so I have to create a variable to hold each value, then pass that value into a single element array, etc. etc. This can result in a lot of code just that doesn't really DO anything. To get around this, all of the code that actually involves using the Web Services is placed in separate classes that my web user controls call.

Which brings us to another key development strategy, which is breaking major chunks of user interface and functionality into their own web user controls. This way, those same elements can be easily reused on other web pages. It takes more time early in the development process to set things up this way, but it will save us a lot of time down the road.

One thing that seems odd about the way the Google AdWords API works is that it has a service called Criterion Service that is used to do things like add or remove keywords or web sites from a campaign, or add new keywords. To me, it seems like it would make more sense for there to be a function provided by the Ad Group Web Service that would return the keywords for a particular ad group. A lot of the AdWords API functionality seems counter-intuitive.

We have quite a few working components of the system, so this week we will probably begin tying everything together into a cohesive unit. This is going to be exciting.

If there is anything we can do to help you manage your paid search or natural search campaigns, feel free to contact us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 6:52 AM   0 comments

Thursday, October 04, 2007



Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 2

I had a good day yesterday working on our Google AdWords management application. I started implementing keyword research functionality. I created a .NET user control and class that lets the user perform keyword research, using Google's keyword data, which is returned in the form of a datatable with checkboxes that allow the user to specify the particular keywords he wants to use. Then we added a couple of functions which we think gives the user a lot more flexibility than when using Google's AdWords interface. After selecting his keywords, the user can either add them to any existing ad group in the campaign or use them to create a new ad group. Essentially, we have broken keyword research/addition out of the ad group creation process and made it a standalone process. We feel that this will greatly speed up the process of creating new ad groups or adding keywords to existing ad groups.

Speed is going to be a critical aspect of our application. The online Google AdWords interface seems like it is tailored toward users who need a step-by-step, "take me by the hand" approach. Google is probably right in designing its interface for the inexperienced user. But for the experienced user, the interface is slow and clumsy, and often not very practical.

Google does provide a much quicker, leaner AdWords management tool, the Google AdWords Editor, which we have blogged about extensively. The AdWords Editor is an offline, client-side application that can be used to create ad groups and other account elements, and move things around quickly. However, since it is completely disconnected from the Internet, it has no research functionality. We feel that our application, which will run on-line, bridges the gap between the off-line tool and the default online AdWords interface. It won't be as quick to use as AdWords Editor, since it will still have to move data back and fourth from Google's servers, but it will be a more complete management environment.

I would be fibbing if I said that we had this application completely laid out and designed before we started coding. We needed to get a feel for what we could with the AdWords API in order to know what we could do. And the best way to do that was just to start coding. So the application is very organic - growing as we program it, right before our eyes.

If you have some particular features you would like to see in such an application, feel free to email your ideas to us at Info@WorkMedia.net. And as we always say, please contact us if you need some help managing your Google AdWords or other paid search campaign. You can email or call us at 888-299-4837.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 6:46 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, October 03, 2007



Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application

Jerry Work here. I think I never commented on my daughter. She had surgery last week to fix a kidney reflux problem, which basically caused her urine to flow the wrong way. The surgery went well, although there will probably be some additional future treatment required. So that's the update there.

I mentioned in our last blog post that we have begun programming our own Google paid search management application. I thought I would spend the next couple of blog posts discussing that process. This may turn into a whole series of posts chronicling the development process. We'll see.

First off, Google does not make it easy to figure out how to use its Google AdWords API and Web Services. There is an API reference, although one critical page of information didn't seem to be linked to from anywhere (that I could find) and was only discovered by searching the API reference web site. And the code samples are very sparse. It almost seems as if Google wants to make things difficult.

I have also searched online for code samples or tutorials that discuss using the AdWords API and have found next to nothing. So we're having to do things the hard way - by trying things out to see what works. We are building the application on the .NET 2.0 platform. At one time I was a certified .NET C# developer. That was several years ago, but once I got into the development process it all (well, maybe not ALL) started coming back to me.

So the main hat I am wearing in the company right now is that of application developer. Chris is really keeping the company going for the most part, while I spend as much time as I possibly can programming. I am using Microsoft's free Visual Web Developer software to build the application. I have to say, I am impressed by the little program. It is barebones but much simpler to use that full-blown Visual Studio. And since our application is meant to run on-line, it works just fine for our purposes. One thing that I love about it is that I can easily run the application on my development workstation without placing the code on a server. I just click the run button and it launches the site in my browser, running on its own built-in server.

So far, the application is communicating with the Google server, returning data related to ad groups, bids, and so fourth. The very first time I actually made that work, I was thrilled, even though all it was was a text string with the name of an ad group. We've already come a long way since that point, with nicely formatted data grids that contain all kinds of data, including performance data.

In our next blog post, we'll talk more about the challenges of pulling this off and where we're going with it. Until then, if you need some help managing your paid or natural search marketing campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 6:57 AM   0 comments

Thursday, September 13, 2007



Using Google's Ad Preview Tool to Verify Your Geographically-Targeted Ads

One technique for fine tuning your Google AdWords campaign is to use Google's geographic targeting options to only run your ads specific markets. One very good reason for this is if you only do business in certain markets. In this case, you will be wasting money if you run your ads nationwide. It just makes sense to only run your ads in markets where you do business.

Another reason for using geographic targeting is if you have reason to believe that your products or services may sell better in certain markets. In this case, you would want to set up a separate campaign for each market in order to generate separate performance data for each market. By doing this, you can learn exactly what markets are more receptive to your marketing message and concentrate your budget in those markets. If you already know that your products or services will sell better in certain markets, then you should just run your ads in those markets to start with. For instance, it is a pretty good bet that snow blowers will sell better in Minnesota than Arizona.

Google's geographic targeting works by examining the IP address of the Web browser and making a determination of the location of the user. It's not a perfect system, but it seems to work fairly well. The negative for you, if you are running geographic-targeted ads, is that you can only see yours ads in Google if you are actually sitting in the market in which your ads are running.

But Google provides a way for you to test your geo-targeted ads:

Visit Google.com/adpreview

This page will let you select a specific market in which to view search results pages and ads. Just type your search phrase (one of your campaign keywords), select a market, and then do the search. This will let you actually verify for yourself that your ads are running in your target markets.

If you could use some help managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 6:55 AM   0 comments

Wednesday, September 12, 2007



Advanced Bid Changes in Google AdWords Editor

In Google AdWords Editor, when you are on the Ad Groups screen/tab, there are two options for making bulk bid changes: Advanced Bid Changes and Advanced Content Bid Changes. They accomplish exactly the same thing for search and content bids, respectively.

Clicking one of the buttons brings up the Advanced Bid Changes popup screen. The tool allows you to increase or decrease bids for the selected ad groups by a particular percentage or dollar amount. You can also set a ceiling or floor for bids.

For instance, if you want to raise all of your bids by 10% but bid no more than $2 in any particular ad group, you would select the "Increase bids by:" radio button, type "10" in the text box, and set the dropdown list to "percent". Then you would click the checkbox labeled "Set bids no higher than:" and type "2" in the text box. Then click the "Change Bids" button.

Alternately, if you want to decrease all bids by $.50 but want to maintain a minimum bid of $1, you would click the "Decrease bids by:" radio button, type ".50" in the text box, and set the dropdown list to "USD". Then you would click the "Set bids no lower than:" radio button and type "1" in the text box.

If you are on the Keywords screen, you have a similar option (also labeled "Advanced Bid Changes") that does the same thing for keyword bids, but it also has a couple of extra options. One option is to raise the minimum cost per click for selected keywords that are inactive to the minimum for activation. The other option is to remove keyword-level maximum CPCs and use the default ad group bid. There is also an additional constraint option to disallow setting keyword maximum CPCs to values lower than their minimum CPC bids.

If you could use some help actively managing your Google AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 10:20 AM   0 comments

Monday, September 10, 2007



Google AdWords Editor: Replace Text & Advanced URL Changes

When working with text ads (in the Text Ads tab) in Google AdWords Editor, at the very bottom of the screen are two very handy functions - Replace Text and Advanced URL Changes.

Replace Text does just what it says - it replaces text. It works just like find/replace functionality in word processing software. First you select an ad or a group of ads, then click the "Replace Text" link. In the box that appears, type the text you want to replace in the "Find text" text box and the text you would like to replace it with in the "Replace with" text box. You can specify whether to replace text in all of the ad fields, or in a particular one such as the headline, display URL, or one of the description lines. When you are ready to run the replace function, just click the "Find Matches" button. A popup box will appear that will require you to confirm the replace if any matches are found.

The Advanced URL Changes function allows you to do the following for a single ad or a group of selected ads:

Change the URL. To do this, type the desired URL in the "Set each URL to:" box.

Append a text string to each URL. To do this, type the string in the text box labeled "Append this text to each URL:". This is a very handy function if you want to append a parameter to a set of ads for tracking purposes. For instance, if you want to append a parameter to each URL so that you can identify the source ad group that generated traffic to your site, you could set the string to something like "?Source=Google-Ad_Group_Name". Then when you look at the analytics for your site, you can identify the traffic that originated from the ad group because it will have the ad group name appended to the end of the URL.

Remove a parameter from each URL. To do this, type the parameter name in the text box labeled "Remove URL parameter with this name". Continuing with the example above, if each URL already has the Source parameter but you want to remove it, you could type "Source" into the text box to remove it from a set of ads at once. To remove it from all ads, you would need to make sure that all ads were selected.

These functions let you make changes to your destination URL in bulk, which can save you a lot of time. Play around with them and see what uses you can come up with.

For help making the most of your Google AdWords campaign, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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posted by Jerry Work / Chris Work @ 7:56 AM   0 comments

Friday, September 07, 2007



Making Use of the Google AdWords Editor Tools Menu

The Google AdWords Editor has a Tools link on the main menu that has four options: Find Duplicate Keywords, Keyword Grouper, Show Ads with Selected Images, and Settings.

Find Duplicate Keywords is a very useful function for making sure you are not duplicating keywords across ad groups. To use it, select Tools/Find Duplicate Keywords, then select strict or loose word order (whether or not the separate words in the keyword have to be in the same order), whether to search for duplicates account-wide or within a specific campaign or ad group, and whether or not the keywords have to have the same match type to qualify as duplicates. Then click the "Find Duplicate Keywords" button.

The keywords found to be duplicate are listed in the Keywords screen/tab, grouped together by ad group. To eliminate any duplicates, you can select the keyword, then delete it, or right-click/cut, or set its status to Paused. We recommend pausing them, just in case you decide to use it again later.

The Keyword Grouper tool will automatically divide a set of keywords in an ad group into many smaller, more specific groups. One of the keys to successful pay-per-click campaign management is having ad groups devoted to a specific, finite set of keywords so there is tight congruency between the keywords and ads. The Keyword Grouper tool makes this easy becaus