Small businesses have tendency to focus only on short term results, mainly due to their budget constraints. That is also true when they are running their PPC and Adwords campaigns. They make all sort of short sighted decisions, such as suddenly reducing their bids on keywords, their daily budget, and even shutting off their PPC. In their defense, they claim to be very conversion oriented, which is a great thing, but one thing they must understand that PPC campaigns take some time to optimize, and as more data is collected, they get cheaper and more effective. So patients is a virtue.

Improving your quality score is important because it will reduce your CPC rate, and improve your ad position because more impressions for your ads, the higher your ad position will be, and that means better Click Through Rate (CTR), and hopefully better conversion.

Also improving your score means your ads show higher, and that could help you show ad extensions (site links, product images and extensions). See Adwords Ad Extensions.

Bidding high on keywords or increasing your daily budget isn’t the way you can improve your quality score. There are other factors such as using better keywords, better keyword and campaign organization, writing better ads (some refer to ad copy), more relevant landing pages, and consistent Adwords campaign in order to improve your historical data with Adwords.

I came across a case that gets into detail on how you can improve your Adwords quality score that I thought I share. The article is from back in 2007 but the tips are good till today.

Other relevant references;

Google Adwords Help; Quality Score
Testing External Factors for Quality Score

According to Bing Blog, the Yahoo and Bing merges are over and Yahoo now officially uses Bing engine to search its websites.

How will this effect your ranking?

Your ranking results will change but that does not mean it will be exactly identical of Bing. That is because number of websites and contents indexed by Yahoo is different. You must remember that Yahoo is  only using Bing’s engine but it is still searching within its own content and indexed websites.

For example when I look for for search marketing consultant in Los Angeles, I find this blog ranked secondon Google, third on Bing, but 13th on Yahoo!

As far as PPC, according to my account manager at Yahoo, the transition won’t be happening until end of September or middle of October so Yahoo is still using its own PPC platform for now. But they should move that to Bing as well around that time.

As mentioned  in my earlier post about Yahoo and Bing transition merge, it is more important than ever for a for a search engine marketer, where he or she specializes in SEO or PPC.

Page Rank Update is over 20 days late as of today. Google usually update’s it’s page rank approximately every three months give or take a few days to keep people guessing however rarely this late.

Last Pagerank update was called the Mayday update but it happened end of April. Some sites dropped ranking and traffic, and some gained ranking and traffic. Mayday update was somewhat big because it seems that it was targeting paid links and artificial links.

According to Google’s link scheme guidelines, you are not supposed to buy links other than for purpose of advertising and in that case you are supposed to put nofollow on it or prevent pagerank juice with JavaScript that way search engines know that is an advertising link and not editorial links.

But m any webmasters and SEOs continue to violate this guidelines because they find it hard to get links that are in accordance of Google guidelines. Or they lack good link building strategy and skills so they buy links.

Google has been at war with link brokers. They even dropped a few of them, such as Text Link Ads, from their SERP a few years ago in order to make an example of them to rest of the link brokers. Also I recently noticed, if you search for “paid links” or “text links” you will no longer see any PPC ads by any text link brokers whereas a couple months PPC ads were visible. It seems that Google is willing to go that far, in its war with text link sellers.

Up to this point, Google’s search quality team has been optimizing their algorithm to bring the most relevant search results and avoiding spammed websites as much as possible. And Google’s web spam team, has been in charge of writing web filters in order detect spam if it bypasses the algorithm written by the search quality team. They also do a ton of human auditing and manual work. About 3 months ago Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, call out for others to report webspam to Google. He singled out “paid links” and Google even created a separate spam report form just for reporting paid links;

But Google hasn’t stopped there. Mayday update, effected the sites that bought links heavily but they are not stopping there either. As I mentioned earlier, pagerank update is unusually late, and many SEOs suspect that Google is up to something big. And from latest patterns of Google’s behaviors and algorithm changes, it seems that paid links are on top of Google’s search quality team and web spam team agenda.

So if you are buying links, be prepared for consequences and don’t buy links unless you absolutely have to and know what you are doing.

According to Search Engine Land, Yahoo and Microsoft have begun organic transition. In that article Yahoo announced

This is an important step toward our goal of improving the overall relevance of Yahoo! organic search results and attracting a larger audience to Yahoo! Search, to ultimately put your ads in front of more potential customers. You’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change, so be sure to check out these tips and stay tuned to the Yahoo! Search blog for confirmation of when the organic search transition is complete.

Microsoft bought Yahoo last year, to boost up its share on search and compete with Google and has put heavy focus on its relevantly new search Engine Bing. We all have seen those Bing commercials haven’t we? If not you can see all Bing commercials on youtube.

Anyway back to topic

What does this mean to you?
This means, that as a search marketer, that you need to keep a closer eye on Bing. Bing has stepped up its efforts to take some market share away from Google and has improved its algorithm and it is promoting it heavily and it is working. Many users now “Bing it” when they are searching and don’t be surprised if Bing one day gets as big as Google or even bigger, considering how Google is being distracted doing a ton of other stuff. Below is what the current search engine market share;

A better visualization format of all market shared was posted on SEOMoz; SEO Powerpoint Slide Deck.

Microsoft has potential to win all Yahoo shares over, and near its shares to 1/4 of search market which is huge for search marketers.

I will start researching more about Bing SEO and write more about it on this blog. Also if you have good articles about Bing search engine optimization, please submit it and I will publish it on this blog if I find it useful for my readers.

Google and other search engines love content. Content is what drives their business and brings them their revenue. Online advertisers want relevant advertising solutions and nothing is better than relevant content. Google makes millions of dollars just from their content network advertising alone. Also they use website’s content to make their search more relevant which helps them make billon of dollars. (See Google Revenue). But the key is that they deliver high quality content. As content is their best tool promote their relevancy of search, they put a lot of emphasis on quality of content.

What is a high quality content?

In theory, quality content is what users like and find helpful and useful. But since Google cannot read people’s mind, about whether they like a particular content on a website or not, Google has a few methods to determine the usefulness and quality of content in their algorithm;

Some of these are factors such as proper spelling and grammar, relevant information to the site, natural position of keywords (Google doesn’t like keyword stuffed content), content and webpage load time, number of words,  and whether it carries any useful picture or graph.  Some search experts even suspect Google looks at analytics information or information from webmaster tool looking at things like time spent reading content, bounce rate, etc.

But the most important factor is back links to your content. If you content has natural back links to it, then Google values that content more. The more relevant and high quality links you have to your content, the more important the content becomes to Google.

The question is that with so much content on the net, how do you make your content stand out in order to get links to it?  Below are some of the ways I have been successful submitting my website content

• Write Unique and informative Content: The idea is that if content is unique and informative, users will find it easier and will link to it.
• Promote Your Content: You can do some self promotion by submitting an excerpt of it to article submission sites, press releases, and other blogs linking back to it. You can also participate with your online community such as forums, blogs, to promote yourself and your website or blog.
• Encourage Users: Act as an online sales person who is selling his content. Find ways to ask your users to link to you or to subscribe to your blog rss feed. (Email marketing has been an effective way for that)
• Be creative: People do creative things to get links and traffic to their websites. Vblogging, embedded videos, audios, nice catchy pictures, very unique headlines can help.

Effective Search Engine Optimization will not be possible without having effective SEO tools. As an SEO consultant I rely on various SEO tools to help me with my keyword research, competitors back links, link popularity, blog pingers, duplicate content checker, keyword density tools, and other SEO and PPC tools.

You can check out SEO tools page of this blog for a very incomplete list of SEO tools I use on day to day bases.

Please forgive me for the lack of organization in that page, I usually just dump a link there once I find it. I will soon organize them and update that page with all the tools I use frequently.

In addition to SEO tools, I have also put list of other SEO and PPC resources such as blogs and other relevant search marketing  resources.

In last Google Webmaster Video Marathon, about a few months ago, Matt Cutts from Google was asked what would be the best way to make new links that didn’t violate Google’s guidelines.  And Matt said “write quality content for your website”.

Of course he probably meant write great content and people will link to you but well know that is not very likely specially if you are a brand new website and not that many people know about you. If you wait for links to come, they may never come. So that is why you need to build links yourself but how do you engage in a link building campaign that doesn’t violate Google’s guidelines and also helps you improve your ranking?

Let’s look at Matt’s advice again. He said “write good content for your website” but did he really say you have to put that great content on your website?  I like to think there is a subconscious hidden message there;

The hidden message points to contextual links. If these links come from non spammed or trusted websites, are the best links you can possibly get because they boost traffic to your website and improve your ranking. Contextual links boost traffic to your website, because unlike the links on side navigation or footers that are often ignored by the users, contextual links are followed because users like to read good content and follow the links in them. The tip is for both content and the links in them to be relevant and favorable for the user. And if user likes it, then Google tend to link it because Google is striving to improved search quality by improving user experience. So if you write content that user likes, then Google will love that content.

So back to Matt’s advice; “write great content for your website”. And I like to add, submit that great content, and the relevant links in them, and promote them to self promoting sites; whether you have written articles, news and press releases, manuals,  or videos. There are a plenty of both free and paid version of such sites available.

For example, whenever my client has some press releases, I submit them to PRNewswire, which is my favorite.  They blast your press release to hundreds of online. Or they make great articles that I help submit to various article sites. But that is not the only places where you can submit your content. There are many blogs that allow guest posts because they want more quality content on their websites and they are tolerant for contextual links so as long as they are relevant and useful to their users. Just search for blogs within your industry and see if they allow guest posts with relevant links on them. And of course there is Youtube and other online videos where you can promote yourself which helps build traffic and bait for links.

So Matt Cutts gave the best link building advice there is when he said to focus on quality content for your website and I like to add, that quality content that was made for your website doesn’t have to be on your website.

Have fun link building.

We all know links are what make our websites popular. And active website owners and webmasters spend (or should spend) good portion of their time building links to their websites to increase their websites popularity and ranking.

So most search engine optimization consultants, put much of their focus on two major factors
1. Quantity of links
2. Quality of links

It is observed that a well ranked website needs to have good number of good quality links but also as part of natural link building strategy, each good quality link should naturally go with a few low quality links. And with low quality I do not mean spam links I mean links from low PR websites or sites with few or no back links including a few nofollow links.

But another important factor that unfortunately doesn’t get enough attention from SEO consultants is link age;

Link age is important for two main reason:

1. It can show Google (and other search engines) the freshness of your content; It makes perfect logical sense that new links could mean new fresh content. So if you have a website that you update content often, you want to make sure you match your fresh content with fresh links.

2. Link age shows trust: Search engines in particular Google care about age of links to your website because that shows the links are legitimate and it is editorial rather than artificial.

Google in particular puts good focus on website trust and authority hence the longer age of a link the better trust ranking you get from that link.  Keep in mind that currently trust ranking is not public by Google but you can try to figure out your websites trust ranking by checking your keywords ranking. If your ranking is relevantly stable, with exception of a few drops, then Google trusts your website. But if you your ranking keeps dancing, then you need to keep working on establishing trust with Google. I wrote an article on Google authority and trust rank back in May you may find interesting.

So don’t forget to take link age into an account when you are optimizing your website. Yes you do need links, because fresh links mean freshness of your content and vote for those content but you also need to consider link age so put your link building efforts into links that last.