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.

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.

Since it is New Year, predictions are popping out like mushrooms everywhere. The following are things that should happen in 2012, although there’s a greater chance that it won’t.

Bing Increases Its Search Market Share By 15%

Bing ideally should increase its search market share that will help big companies to be more honest. Apparently, Google is the strongest search engine and will remain without a strong competitor in the years to come.

Social-Assisted Search Crack by Bing and Facebook

The effectiveness of search engines in marketing and advertising has been proven many years ago. Though word of mouth is still the best, a combination of the two can be the most effective means of marketing ever. Facebook and Bing have the potential of cracking this and they would make a good competition over Google.

Yahoo Bounces Back

Yahoo once the Internet pioneer is lacking a CEO and obviously way behind Google. Though it is subject of speculations time after time, a bouncing back Yahoo in 2012 would be great news. After all Yahoo still has amazing services in store for the market.

Specialists Should Deliver Worth Paying and Better Campaigns

Recession along with the cut-throat competition in the business industry has led some clients to settle for a single all-service agency. Even if it means lower quality services in ad exchanges, digital areas like search engine optimization and conversion optimization. Because of cost cutting reasons, many are choosing cheaper deal only to be caught in an unfavorable situation – they are spending less but getting less as well. As Steve Center, Honda CMO once said “If you grind the margin out of your agency you will get a marginal agency.”
Lack of funds to hire the best people or enough people in a certain department becomes the situation most of the time.

Clients tend to spend more by hiring other specialist agencies. And more often than not, they are the ones caught in a situation where they have to start from scratch or to achieve great results in a short span of time.

The Digital Age For CEOs and CMOs

Senior Executives are kind of hard to persuade when it comes to digital changes. They’d rather spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns than spend for page optimization – although there are concrete benefits for sales improvements. Apparently, there’s a lot more persuasions to take place before top executives get digital and budgets get properly allocated.

A little while back, it was very easy to trick search engines into believing that your site was useful. All you had to do was publish content that is rich in keywords and your site will be considered very useful and have good rankings. Now, all of the top search engines have more considerable algorithms that make this scenario almost impossible.
Here are other reasons why you shouldn’t have rehashed content in your website:

Considerably High Bounce Rate
Even if your site performs very well in search engine results thanks to your useless but keyword-rich content, you also need to follow up or make sales. Cramming keywords will usually repel potential customers. Also, high bounce rate is now a very important factor that affects rankings negatively. Significantly increasing traffic is obviously useless if it doesn’t result to more sales.

Because Google Says So
Use some common sense and it’s very obvious that in order to perform well online, you have to do whatever Google says. There is no possible way to succeed in your online ventures if you go against the search engine giant. The Google Webmasters Tools should be like your online Bible. Use it as reference regarding what content you should and shouldn’t have in your website. One of the top rules according to Google is to have high quality content. This will usually result to higher rankings.

No/Very Small Number of Links
Having “thin” or low quality content will usually result to a very low (or zero) number of links to your website. Inbound links are a very important factor when it comes to search engines and deciding on the importance of a page. Having high quality and useful content will almost guarantee higher rankings and a very high number of links to your site.

Duplicated Content Filtering
Google is very sensitive to scraped content. Usually if they decide that your site has a very high amount of copied content, you will not be visible in the search results page. This means that potential customers will have a lower chance of finding you and your online efforts will be useless.

Summary
In short, you really need to generate useful and original content in order for your website to perform well. You can no longer get away with low quality and rehashed content. You have to work hard in order to be competitive nowadays. There really is no shortcut anymore when it comes to good content.

Web analytics is basically a tool that measures traffic to your website. It also provides a wide array of data. However, for most people, they just use this tool to monitor how many visitors come to their website not knowing the important data that is very useful to them. If used correctly and smartly, the benefits of analytics is endless. Here are analytics data that you need to regularly look at:

Bounce Rate

This is the number of people that visit your website and leave without browsing other pages. This is usually expressed as a percentage of the total number of visitors to the website. The most common reasons for high bounce rate are broken links, uninteresting content, incorrectly targeted ads, erroneous pages and pages that are not well-made. A good analytics tool can help you identify pages that have high bounce rates and help you understand problem pages on your site.

Conversion Rate

If you are clear about the goal of your website, you need to at least have one goal page. For example, in the case of online businesses, it is usually a completed check out page. Conversion rate refers to the percentage of the amount of people that don’t end doing what you want them to do such as click ads or make a purchase. These are usually very low wherein 3% is already considered a good conversion rate. If you have a very low conversion rate then you need to determine the reason for this.

Target Pages

Target pages are a little similar to goal pages. These pages are the first step to completing your goal. After all, visitors need to know more about the product by visiting the product pages before making a purchase. Analytics tools allow you to determine the exact number of visitors that go to your target pages and the percentage of these visitors who end up on your goal page. If the rate is not satisfactory, then you might need to work on your target pages and check for problem areas.

Site Search Analytics

Tracing site search is very useful in determining what your visitors are searching for. Do they find the page they are looking for? If this is not the case, there is a problem with your site search engine. You need to know what this problem is and correct it. Otherwise, you will be losing a lot of possible customers due to frustration.

When it comes to blogging, a good headline is surely the most important part. You don’t believe me? Just think about it. This is the only thing that viewers look at before deciding to click on your article or move on to the next one on the list. It takes only about 2-3 seconds to sell your whole blog through your headline. This is a window of opportunity that is vital to increasing the number of visitors. The problem is that most bloggers don’t give enough attention to writing good headlines. They look at this as just another afterthought once the article is finished. If you want to succeed in blogging by creating better headlines, here are tips that you can use:

Target your Headline Specifically for your Intended Audience

Your headline should accurately reflect the particular topic you are writing about and at the same time show your readers how useful this is for them. Your main goal as a blogger is to catch the attention of people who are searching for the topic you are writing about. However, be very careful of misleading visitors just to increase traffic. Your headline should always reflect its contents. If you don’t deliver to what the headline promised, your visitors will only become part of the bounce statistics in your analytics report.

Include Keywords in you Headlines

SEO should be in mind when you are writing your headline and your article. Using the most common search terms will help searchers find your blog by helping with search engine rankings. This is often overlooked by most blogger which causes them to suffer the consequences of very low traffic. However, you should remember that the keywords should fit in naturally and not appear like it was just squeezed in for the sake of including keywords. If it can’t fit in naturally, it is better not to do so.

Be Creative and Use Special Selling Words

According to studies, most internet searchers are more interested in clicking once they see special works like guaranteed results, the best, top, solutions, problem-free, etc. Just make a simple search online for special selling or “hypnotic” words that should be included in article headlines. Another effective technique is to use numbers in the headline to convey a list of tips, ideas or suggestions. For example: “10 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Blog”. The reason behind this style of writing headlines is because of the nature of people to quantize data into smaller chunks which makes it easier to understand.

Google is already ruling the search engine world. Almost every person in the planet equate online search with Google. However, many people are still unaware of the other products from Google aside from the excellent search engine they offer. If used properly, these products can considerably improve efficiency and productivity. Here are the best Google products that might be useful to you:

Google AdWords

This is the advertising platform of Google. Google AdWords offer a pay-per-click (PPC) type of advertising along with site-targeted advertising that is not just for text ads but also for banner ads. If you have an online business or just want to advertise online, this is definitely a program you should use. This will help a lot of people find you or at least know about you.

Gmail

This free webmail service from Google uses POP3 which gets rid of the problem of having to refresh constantly to check for new mail. Another one of Gmail’s strong points is its excellent spam protection that is definitely above other webmail providers. This will help save a lot of time in sorting which emails are important and which are spam. Gmail also offers many other very useful and helpful features that can help save time and make things more efficient.

Google Bookmarks

This online service enables you to save the sites that you visit often and lets you attach labels and annotations. This will prevent having to search for the website or looking where you wrote down the website. This is really a great tool for efficiency and saving precious time during work.

Google Docs

The best thing about this product is that it is free. It is not just a web-based word processor but also a spreadsheet and presentation program. You can easily share and collaborate with other people online. You will have access to you online documents using any computer in any place at any time. What more could you ask for? There is no more need for sending documents to yourself or carrying a USB stick everywhere you go.

YouTube

You’re probably an alien from another solar system if you haven’t heard of YouTube. This video sharing website was purchased by Google in 2006. This is excellent not just for video sharing but also for many other purposes such as product awareness, advertising, learning, etc. YouTube is definitely the biggest and most popular video sharing website today.

Google Analytics is divided into 5 main categories namely visitors, advertising, traffic sources, content and conversions. In this article, we will cover important topics about the content category. I will not cover all the reports available and just focus on the ones that are frequently used.

Overview
This gives you an overall view of your content. You will be able to see metrics like pageviews, average time on page, unique pageviews and bounce rate. You have the option of selecting your date range by using the date range option on the upper right corner. You can also easily compare with past dates. In the overview you have several options. You can click on page, page title, event category, search term or Adsense page. You will initially get a short summary of the report but you can also look at the full report.

Site Content
The site content reports include pages, content drilldown, landing pages and exit pages. Pages is when you want to know the most visited pages on your site. Here is a screenshot of the top bar in Google Analytics if you click on Pages.

There is an option to change the appearance of the data using the view option. There are five different views available namely data, percentage, comparison performance and pivot. It depends on your particular preference. In my opinion, I like the comparison view because it makes comparing page performance against the site average very easy.

Landing Pages
In this option, you will be able to see the most popular landing pages for your website and their respective performance. It is very easy to navigate. Here is a screenshot:

Site Speed
Sometime in May 2011, the site speed option was introduced by Google in their new Google Analytics interface. Using this report, you will be able to determine the page load time of your webpages. This is very important since Google officially announced that site speed is one of the signals they use for their search ranking algorithms. Obviously, slow page load time is a turnoff that can ward off visitors to your site.

Site Search
This is when you have a search engine on your website for searching your site. This is used to measure the usage of your search engine feature. This includes an overview, usage, search terms and pages. The overview enables you to see the percentage of visits that use the search feature of your website. Other metrics like %search exits, time after search, search depth, etc. are also available. I often just use the overview and rarely use the others.