Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Must-Watch videos for all search engine marketers.

Basic AdWords Optimization Strategies

Google AdWords Optimization means modifying an AdWords account to improve its quality and performance. It can involve a few minor tweaks or large-scale reorganization.

What you can do to optimize an AdWords account:

• Add, re-group, or delete keywords
• Add negative keywords
• Refine ad text
• Change landing pages or destination URLs
• Adjust maximum CPC bids
• Change campaign settings

Why do you want to optimize your AdWords account?

You optimize to optimize to improve performance and maximize profits:

• Branding: Increase visibility and traffic
• Ads Quality: Increase CTRs and lower CPC
• Return On Investment (ROI): Lower CPA or boost sale
• Manageability: Build account for scability and visibility 

Things to do before you optimize your AdWords account:

(1) Assess Your Industry

• Know where you fit in the grand scheme
• Understand the competitive landscape
• Define what differentiates your business
• Identify industry trends and the effect of seasonality

(2) Assess Your Audience

• Understand your customer base
• Know what your customers want
• Know where your customers are
• Understand your customers’ buying cycle

(3) Assess Your Website

• Know how users interact with your website
• Maximize user experience – Is your website is visually appealing? Is your website easy to use?

(4) Define Your Goals

• What are your desired results?
• How will you prioritize campaigns?

STRUCTURAL OPTIMIZATION

• Do make sure that ad groups contain a central theme
• Do be specific
• Do suggest descriptive names for ads/campaigns
• Do create ad groups for individual products or services
• Don’t be afraid to experiment with different structures
• Don’t mix keyword themes

ACCOUNT ORGANIZATION

(1) Account Level

• Contact info and password
• Billing information
• Account preferences

(2) Campaign Level

• Daily budget
• Distribution preferences
• Scheduling preferences
• Language targeting
• Regional targeting
• Start and end dates

(3) Ad Group Level

• Ad text creatives
• Landing pages
• Maximum CPC bids
• One set of keywords

(4) Keyword Level

• Individual terms
• Matching options

Structural Optimization Benefits

• Allows highly targeted ad text, resulting in higher performance and overall relevancy
• Qick expansion with new products/services
• Allows seasonal promotions
• Improves ROI and conversion tracking
• Allows indentification of high performing keywords and products

KEYWORD OPTIMIZATION

• Do add all singular/plural variations
• Do add all relevant keyword variations
• Do add negative keywords
• Do refine or eliminate non-performing keywords
• Do expand on successful keywords
• Don’t add irrelevant terms
• Don’t add very general terms
• Try to keep keywords focused on a central theme
• General tip for keyword relevancu: “Would a reasonable person searching on this keyword term find my ad potentially relevant? 

AD TEXT OPTIMIZATION

• Do think about the type of user searching on Google and write ads to catch user’s attention
• Do reflect keyword concept in the ad
• Do try to use emotional messaging
• Do use keywords in ads
• Do test multiple ads (questions, unique phone numbers, etc)
• Don’t use generic language of landing pages
• Don’t make your ads like everyone else – differentiate from other advertisers

Advanced AdWords Optimization Strategies

It is PAC-MAN’s 30th Birthday today! Doodle with PAC-MAN™ & ©1980 NAMCO BANDAI Games Inc. Pac-Man (パックマン Pakkuman) is an arcade game developed by Namco, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. To commemorate Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary today, Google has its version of Pac-Man as the logo of its homepage. Surprisingly, the logo is playable. To play, you need to press ‘Insert Coin’ button. If you want two players mode, click the “Insert Coin” button again. This is definitely the best doodle ever. Google should make the ‘Insert Coin’ button permanent as it is definitely more useful than the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button.

Today, Google introduces encrypted web search engine.  Rather than Google at the usual http://google.com/ URL,  you should search with  Google SSL Search if you want to protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. When you search with Google SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can’t be read by any intermediary party such as employers, network administrators and internet service providers (ISPs). SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, and other data transfers.

When you search on Google SSL Search, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. For example, when you search over SSL for embarassing terms like [ free dating ] in your office, Google encrypts the query “free dating” and the results that Google returns. While SSL helps prevent intermediary parties, such as ISPs, from knowing the exact search that you typed, they could still know which websites you visit once you click on the search results.

Google SSL could help improve your online privacy. However, there are a few notes to remember about Google SSL:

• Google will still maintain search data. Searching over SSL doesn’t reduce the data sent to Google. It only hides that data from third parties who seek it.
• Clicking on any of the web results, including Google universal search results for unsupported services like Google Images, could take you out of SSL mode.
• Your experience with search over Google SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience as connections to Google SSL require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server.

With Google TV you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your TV is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet on your TV, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a music player, a gaming console, a photo slideshow viewer and much more. You can watch YouTube video on your 52-inch flat screen HDTV.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to TV channels, websites, applications, shows and movies. If you already know the channel or program you want to watch, you can just type in the name of the channel and you are there. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you are looking for and Google TV will help you find it on one of your many TV channels or on the web. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you are always within reach of the content you love most.

According to Matt Cutts, currently, that is as of May 17, 2010, Google Webspam team and Google Search Quality team do not use Google Analytics to rank a website.

Do you trust Matt Cutts?

Also see Google Does Not Use Google Analytics For Ranking A Webpage.