1. Utilize keywords or key phrases for ad text – Show the world that your advertisement is relevant. Basically, the keywords or key phrases help your advertisement stand out and be more visible in a sea of advertisements. Google will bold the keywords or key phrases in your advertisement if it is present.
2. It is smart to bid high – initially – If you want your advertisement to rank high in the search engine results you should bid high initially. Simply because, Google indicates the placement of your advertisement depending on your bid and click through rate (CTR).
3. Maintain short and concise list of advertisement group keywords or key phrases – This strategy helps you realize the first tip. Several advertisement groups are preferred over one advertisement group having a huge list of keywords or key phrases.
4. Set the daily budget slightly higher than what Google requires – Setting your budget low will place your advertisement intermittently available for your target market. And you are aiming for maximum exposure for your advertisement, for that reason you need to make an extra effort to utilize negative keywords, exact matches of keywords and adjust keyword or key phrase bids.
5. Steer away from bidding wars – Bidding war is the best way to waste money for a couple of high volume keywords. The better thing to do is to expand keyword or key phrase list to include specific keywords or key phrases having low search volume. If combined, the keywords and key phrases will attain the search volume of expensive ones.
6. For exact matches, allot higher bids – To be able to control the placement of the advertisement for a specific search set the bid for an exact match higher.
7. Utilise negative keywords – As a general rule, if a search includes negative keyword an advertisement will not be displayed. Therefore, you should target to include negative keywords or key phrases at a regular interval. As the list of negative keywords or key phrases increases, the advertisement group’s CTR will grow as well.
8. Advertisement version testing – You can use Google to create multiple advertisements and be rotated in one advertisement group. Take advantage of the feature of Google to test several advertisement text and identify which of them works best.
9. Do the trackings of results yourself – Without a shadow of doubt, the Google reporting tools are very good however, you need more and specific detail. These details include information on the actual keywords or key phrases your matches are triggering.

So how far have SEO evolved through the years? If you have been in SEO for quite some time now, perhaps you’re all familiar with those days when the only measuring tool to assess SEO efforts is by a ranking report. Can you still recall picking up your top 50 keywords and put these into a rank checker? What about running a monthly report and establishing whether the 50 keywords ranked high or fell flat in the search rankings?

SEO Shows No Sign of Impeding Its Evolution

Now, what are the significant marks that SEO has truly evolved? Read on.

• Reports are incorporated on link building efforts.
• Started paying attention to conversion rates. Needs to identify what percentage of organic search visitors were filling out lead forms and/or purchasing products from your site.
• Integrating call-tracking and looking at conversion path for one goal – incorporate multi-channel conversion tracking.
• Incorporating boost in natural or organic search traffic from web analytics report.
• Categorizing branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic.

On to the Next Step—SEO Brand Building

The direction when we are heading next seems infinite and yes, promising! Well, if you witnessed the traditional marketing, you’ll get what I mean. Marketing efforts are no longer limited to television, radio and print advertising. It is indeed amusing to ponder where we are heading next. Today, SEO incorporates innovative ways to create and promote content such as video (YouTube views), blog content that goes viral, Infographics and PR relations.

Talking About Brand Building

In terms of brand building, Google makes it more interesting to build a brand in today’s digital marketplace.

Long before, brand building followed a simple formula: Reach (the number of different people who are exposed to the message at least once) X Frequency (the number of times they are exposed to the message) is equivalent to Gross Rating Points (pertains to your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and value.) You know, this formula may be considered obsolete by most marketers. However, it seems that SEO has evolved to the point where it brings us back to this basic formula of reach and frequency once again.

That’s right! Even Google AdWords has promoted reach and frequency metric for CPM-based ad products/ services. So if Google is discussing about it, well most likely, reach and frequency metric has impact in Google’s algorithm. Perhaps we should take this metric as an additional metric to evaluate our SEO efforts, and not just a mere replacement. What do you think?

In the online industry, change happens as fast as you download a web page. Updates and upgrades happen more often than you ever expected. Therefore, it is imperative to keep abreast with the fast-paced Internet world – you need to adapt so as not to be left behind.

During the late 90s and early 2000’s Google made a revolution that yielded a method to identify the most relevant web pages for a specific topic – the link building algorithm.

The Role of Search Engines

Search engines are in constant battle to ensure clients are given the best results for every query and to keep spammers away from becoming successful in ranking low quality pages. Social signals are significant weapon of search engines to win this battle.

What You Should Know

Being familiar with your audience or target market is the most important thing that you should master prior to any other strategy. Familiarity means, finding out what sites do they frequently visit, what videos they take time to watch or what articles are they interested to read. You should think like an Internet marketer, which means you have to take advantage of what is potentially beneficial to you.

Prospect clients will generate signals by:

• Paying visit to your website.
• Searching your brand name on search engines.
• Word of mouth – whenever your clients talk about your website.
• Discussing your brand name in comments in the Internet’s forums or blogs.

Strive To Be An Authority

Focusing on the authority and striving to become an authority is the single most effective way to ensure a slot in the top ranks of search engines. As you are in your quest to be branded as an authority, you may take these simple steps to build visibility.

• Create a Blog – Great articles create awesome traffic. It draws clients to your site, therefore, produce high quality, interesting and unique blogs regularly. Make sure not to mistake quality as quantity. One high quality article will yield more benefits than 10 crappy articles do.
• Create a Campaign in Social Media – Being socially involved and becoming active member of the community means more exposure and visibility for you.
• Press Release – When there are topics that are worth talking about in the web, generate press releases.
• Advertise – Where? The best places to put your advertisements are the most visited sites of your target market. Take time to do extensive research about your target market. Or better yet, advertise in search engines itself for maximum exposure.
• Create Relevant News – If you will do something newsworthy, people will talk about you and will benefit your popularity.

Bottom line is that, you should always find ways to attract positive publicity towards your business – if not you will be left behind.

AdMob was first established in 2006 but in 2009, Google bought it for $750 million. To put it briefly, AdMob is a vast advertising network that focuses merely on mobile advertising. Before we sum up the pros and cons of Google AdMob, let’s discuss first how it works?

Getting Started

It’s not at all expensive to get started on AdMob. First you must top up your account with a minimum of $50, and the rest needs to be prepaid. You must deposit funds in your account using Google Checkout. Ads will continue to run provided that you replenish your account when used up. To keep you from running out of balance, you may set an alert to receive a warning when your funds are running low.

Continuing the process, campaigns permit managing budgets and settings when you come across adCenter and adWords. Here you can set the start date, end date and delivery options.

Moving on to Ad Group

Once you reach Group section, you will be presented with four options:

• Website – To draw traffic to your site
• Application – This permits you to drive downloads of your app for Windows Phone 7, Android or iOs.
• Media – To promote a Kindle book, videos, or iTunes Store listing such as movies, music and television.
• Location and Utilities – Here you can market a local business using click-to-maps and click-to-call options.

Digging into Details

What do you think? As a performance marketer, which of the four options could help you deliver performance marketing campaigns using a mobile advertising space? Let’s say at this point, seemingly the most effective choice is website.

Website gives you the following forms of targeting to tap the right people to spread a message:

1. Target Devices
2. Target Geography
3. Target Wifi vs. mobile operator traffic
4. Target Demographics – Criteria: Men vs. Women and Age Group

Conclusion

Based on the selections available, there is no way to target a more specific market, say prospective buyers near a specific store location. Target Geography does not offer “city targeting”. In terms of granularity, this option is not very impressive. It only offers provincial level for Canada and regional level for U.S.

You probably think it’s best to go back and choose other types of ad group. Location and Utilities ad group and the rest were all the same—poor granularity means ineffective targeting. Try it yourself. This points out to one conclusion. AdMob is a product not targeted for performance marketers rather it is more suitable for brand advertisers.

So here’s the bottom line, there is no competitive way to leverage AdMob successfully for performance marketing, unless you are selling mobile downloads such as music, books, video or apps. It’s also safe to say that you can make use of AdMob as an effective marketing tool if you are offering products with very broad appeal. AdMob drives interest on items that need no targeting. Plus, it prohibits advertisiers to buy ads in real time using data.

Are you a fan of social networking media? It is not a surprise to know that almost all people in all parts of the world are avid fans of the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and now the Google Plus which has only been available in the past months. Social networking sites definitely help in a lot of ways to its users.

However, there are also some drawbacks on being so much into these sites. Evident to this are the growing numbers of crime being linked or associated with the use of social networking sites. Hence, the people behind these social media are constantly emphasizing their continuous drive to tighten whatever safety and security measures they have towards their users.

One of the hottest topics that have ever been talked about in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is whether to allow its users to use pseudonyms. In any online social networking site you patronize, determining whether the people behind a certain profile is true or not would definitely be just like finding a needle in a haystack. What more if these people are only using nicknames and not their true names?

In line with this, Google+ move to allow pseudonyms online has garnered a lot more issues as this move is contradicting to their original policy.

Here’s the catch…

People could stop worrying about security or safety issues tagged on the recent permission of Google+ to its users to use pseudonyms as Google would not be too easy on people who want to use pseudonyms. According to Horowitz from Google, they would allow users to use maiden names, nicknames and pseudonyms only if he or she could substantiate that the name that will be use has already been used to other social networking sites. This way Google can assure that there is a real person behind this pseudonym or nickname and this pseudonym is not being used for scam.

In line with this, Horowitz assured the public that Google employees will review the name changes made by its user manually. Moreover, for security purposes Google will ask for legal documents from its user like driver’s license or published material and link to social networking sites before approving.

Do pseudonyms help or not?

People differ when it comes to their preferences. It goes the same about names. Some people just don’t want to represent themselves using their own name and is fonder of using nicknames and pseudonyms. But the question is do pseudonyms help or not? The answer is its case to case basis. Like for instance, pseudonyms can definitely help those who are victims of abuse since they need to hide their identity while scammers can use fake names to fool people.

In spite of all the intrigues about this issue, there’s one thing that Google+ users can definitely be assured of. It is that Google has only good intentions for its decision to permit pseudonyms.

Today, social media plays a major role in SEO. With this in mind, why not tweak your social media profiles for search engines? Believe me, it’s a must. Search engines utilized links from social media sites, including Facebook, Google+1 and Twitter for ranking purposes. Moreover, Twitter streams are also being indexed by search engines in real-time. So here are 5 easy-to-do steps to use one of the social media giants—Twitter, for SEO.

1. Regard Your Twitter Username as a Domain Address


Do you still remember the rules for choosing an effective domain name? Let’s do a recap. Avoid using underscores between words. Make your domain address short and easy to remember. These rules also apply to choosing a good Twitter username.

Additionally, Twitter username must not exceed 15 characters but you know, it’s best to actually not exceed 10 characters, if possible. Now, if you want to use your company name for your brand name, abbreviate and combine it with keywords. For instance, let’s say your company, Prime Movers Corporation, provides shipping services, you may use @PMCShipping as your Twitter username.

2. Do not Use URL shorteners. Link to Your Real URL


If you make use of URL shorteners on your Twitter profile URL section, your profile visitors are more likely to doubt your account. Build up the credibility of your profile and further the trust of your profile visitors in your brand by using your real site or blog URL. This will encourage them to visit your actual website.

3. Optimized Your Twitter Bio


Your Twitter Bio content also functions as the meta-description of your Twitter profile on Google search results. With regard to this, you have to maximize the 160 characters limit to craft a keyword-rich Twitter bio. Always make use of good content and keywords that represent your field of expertise or industry. This is a perfect recipe to rank high in search results. Good content means compelling, relevant, informative and catchy.

4. Optimized Your Twitter Profile Photo


In order to have a keyword-based name for your Twitter profile photo, separate the filename using dashes before uploading. For example: paris-clothing.jpg. Keep your image limited to 250×250 pixels for best page loading speed.

5. Use Keyword Phrases and Hastags on Your Tweets

This will assure better visibility on search results. In fact, many studies have shown that including keywords in tweets regularly can significantly increase search engine rankings. Moreover, save the important tweets in category favorites.

You can also boost your social authority by receiving numerous retweets, hence will help give your ranking a kick.

6. Link Your Twitter Profile from Every Source Possible


You name it, you can link your Twitter profile from your Facebook page, Newsletter, Blog posts, Forums, LinkedIn profile, etc. Popular Twitter directories like WeFollow, TwitterHolic, TrackingTwitter, and more will also improve visibility and link building.

In 1996, an idea was brought into mind, which is to use links to determine the importance of individual web pages, and in 1998, this was substantialized emerging into a company we now know as Google. Even up to date, Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful, which it has maintained. However, on the 10th of January, 2012, Google moved up the trend to include personalized and seemingly a social search engine as it launched a new SEO, “Google Search Plus Your World”.

Accordingly, Google opt to expand its original search from “universal” feeds, to “personalized” information, that would include photos, blogs, and profiles of people connected to or whom the user follows. Technically speaking, Google search engine is entering the world of social networking sites garnering several complaints from most critics and even social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Google taking in the “bait” from Critics

It is a fact, social networking companies are at the brink of outranking the use of search engines. This might have been seen by the owners of Google, and might have threatened the company so it ought to establish its own social networking SEO. Since launching of Google Plus Your World, Google harvested a lot of criticisms. Facebook posted, and Twitter twitted, fighting Google’s way to social networking quoting this step as “doing away with Evil”. It was even marked “ridiculous” by Facebook bloggers, saying that “Google is facing a dire situation with competition, which led them to take a stupid decision.” Well, Google’s supporters have their own say, claiming that, “Google is just taking in a new step and going with the trend, and logging in with Goggle+ is optional, and users have the choice.”

Summing up the arguments, critics are vigilant on the fact that Google is losing its best feature that made it the world’s best search engine. And that is, RELEVANCE. Originally speaking, all the results that appear on top of the ranks once a query is entered on the search engine are greatly relying on the “keywords” entered. That is, the more relevant they are with the query, the higher they are ranked. With the launch of “personalized” search, users will find their way to having results that are lacking relevance since the results that will appear are highly related to facts they only related to.

Another important point of argument is CONTEXT. Accordingly, there are three types of queries; first is Navigational which seeks to locate a specific webpage. Second is Informational queries which tracks information sought, and lastly, Transactional queries, which is ought to download, purchase a marketed product. With the use of Google Search Plus Your World, the results regarding all of these 3 types of queries are lacking Substance. For instance, a user claimed that when he/she used Google + for an item, the results that topped the ranks were mostly blogs and posts from persons he/she knows of. This turned the tables for more contextual searches. Accordingly, the results with Google Search Plus aren’t improving the search query intent, instead their relevance is more connected to whom the user is connected to. For most part, the results ignore the query type and erase the fulfillment of the searcher’s intent.

Concluding the Issue

As imagined, Google Plus’ personalized search engine is continuously being tweaked and has a lot of room for improvements. But as of the moment, the current version is a way stripped down the version of search engines people have foreseen ten years ago. Nonetheless, Google’s intention and idea of going with the trend doesn’t sound that bad at all, as supported even by Facebook and Twitter users. Google might want to add considerations regarding this new SEO.

If you are a dedicated online marketer then you may already know how important it is to rank in the highest spot in the search engine result pages which is most popularly known as the SERP. The reason for this is the SEOs hunger to high traffic which can deliberately increase income or profit to anyone’s website or business. Because of the needs to traffic by SEOs or online marketers, sometimes the search results are being compromised.

Search results play a very important role to the users. It is where they would base their research and things like that. But how influential can search results be for people?

Decision Making

What is search results’ role in people’s decision making? You go to your favorite search engine let’s say Google or Bing. Then you key in your search and look for the cheapest furniture for instance. You get a lot of furniture stores but you will definitely click on the number one link you see. Then you will be delighted at what’s inside the website that you’ll settle in buying furniture from the site. This is how search results affect most people’s decision making.

Search results are definitely influential especially to people who wants to find answers and who’s looking for products online. The best SEOs can without a doubt direct you to their pages and will ensure conversion rates at your disposal. Not to mention that they will manipulate you by convincing you that they have the best product and information you can get while searching online.

Research Studies

Search results definitely plays an important part to peoples’ research studies as well. People always rely and depend on the most clicked or the highest ranking links they can see on SERPs which is not a very good idea at all as if you really want your search to be comprehensive, you would not settle in 1 or 2 or 3 links or the first page in SERPs as sometimes you can find important stuffs and well written discussions even on the next pages in SERPs.

Can you trust the search results?

Generally, the answer would definitely be yes. Why? Because search engines like Google is dedicated and is working hard to give you the freshest and most relevant search results to your searches as much as possible. However, because all SEOs want the breads, you cannot simply trust the search results and fully rely on what’s being offered to you in your plain sight. Great SEOs have the power to manipulate your searches so they will be benefited. You cannot avoid stumbling on biased search results from time to time. The most ideal thing to do when you found yourself in this situation is to key in the best keywords or keyword phrases relevant to your searches and do not rely simply on the top of the list.

Allot more time to browse deeper for you to ensure high quality research. After all, everything you’re looking for are in those pages. You just have to extend more effort to finding them!