Archive for April, 2008

Does your Advertising & Web Appearance irritating the other people??

April 30, 2008 at 6:53 am · Filed under Online Advertising ·Tagged , , , ,

Don’t upset your visitors!!

Are you sure that your advertising & web appearance is appealing to your viewers or targeted visitors?

Not Sure???

Then this post is highly recommended to you.

Day by day People are inventing new tricks & techniques to capture the viewer’s attention. Obviously, everyone wants to beat this tough competition to stay alive in this dynamic World. Nothing is wrong in that. In fact if we take a look at past few years then we will found many great inventions which actually revolutionized the whole marketing scenario like the concept of PPC, Online Affiliate Marketing, and search engine Marketing & many others.

But beware!! Some tricky techniques may take your visitors or viewers away from your site.

Some of them are as follows:

Interstitials: The contextual meaning of Interstitial is “In Between”. On the web Interstitials are the web pages that are displayed before an expected content page. This is a sort of reference page between two pages. This can be of any type like it can be an Advertisement, User’s information page & others.

If this is an advertisement then it can irritate your visitors as they won’t expect it in between their important surfing activities.

Interstitial can also be very helpful to the visitors by alerting the user that the next page requires a login, or has some other requirement which the user should know about before proceeding. Intelligent and cautious use of interstitial pages can avoid confusion and aid usability.

Pop Ups: Pop ups are small windows that comes out in the foreground of an Internet browser when using the Web. This is a form of online advertising intended to capture the attention or to attract traffic. In this a new browser window opens to display the advertisements when something on the screen is clicked upon or the mouse is moved over an element of a web page. These are usually generated by JavaScript or by other means as well.

The other different form of these kinds of advertisement is Pop- Under; which opens in a new browser window hidden under the active window.

Studies reveals that these forms of advertisements are annoying to users by delivering the commercial or other type of information without the permission; hence violating the user’s web experience. So we should avoid them. However, they can be integrated into some websites for other more practical purposes.

Also, Hover ad web advertisement can be a creative approach to Popup advertisements.

Electronic Messaging Spamming: Spamming is the unethical technique to send unsolicited bulk messages. Advertisers are using this technique profoundly because of low or no operating cost. Other popular types of spamming are Chat Spam, Mobile Phone spam, Blog spam & many others. We should evade these spamming techniques to advertise our products or services, as these might create a negative impression for the respective brands.

Unfavorable Redirects: Some webmasters redirect their visitors to altogether a different landing page then what they have shown earlier. Many time to a different domain also to support their affiliate’s advertisements. This activity compels users to leave your site. These are again very annoying to users. Some times users might not realize that a new browser window has opened & he might have struggle for switching the window.

Links that open in a new window: This is a very common mistake doing by the webmasters. They make the site’s internal links opened in a new browser window. This is not good for users & site owners as well. It actually resets the back button of the new window which may creates a big problem for users who want to go back to their previous page. We should not force then to open a new window without knowing them about this fact.

Splash Pages: Splash page is an introductory page (or very first page with some graphics or images like “Enter in Site”) of the website with eye-catching graphics (Flash, animations & more) and with no actual content (Sometimes very less content).

These splash pages with fancy designing techniques increase the load time of the site, which can push visitors away from the website. Visitors need the required information very fast without wasting their time.

Also, a Splash page keeps your site away from Search Engine indexing as usually these pages include flash animation, javaScript & other fancy techniques. Search Engines are not very friendly with these techniques.

Similarly there are many other things which can hamper your website or advertising growth.
Anything which might get your visitors away from you is always a bad thought!!

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Landing Page & Landing Page Quality Factors: For success of your advertising efforts

April 25, 2008 at 5:57 am · Filed under AdWords, Landing Page, PPC ·Tagged , ,

Recently, I had a discussion with my colleagues about the qualities of best landing page, why landing page is so important & factors which should be considered before designing a landing page. We have discussed a lot of things & I am trying to summarize it in this post.

What is Landing Page & Why is it important?

Landing page is the page where visitors land immediately after clicking on your Ad. Therefore, it is most important that your landing page must be in correlation with your ad text. Landing page instantly capture the visitor’s attention & persuade them to take the required action; so basically it is a call-to-action page (this way it is the most important concern for the advertisers). It is very helpful for the success of any advertising program.

If the landing page is of good quality then it creates the positive user experience which actually increases the chance of getting conversions or sales. So, ultimately it is an important contributing factor in increasing ROI.

Landing page has its contribution/impact on the quality score (in AdWords campaign) as it decreases the minimum cost-per-click bids (CPC bids) for ads, increases the ad’s position on search pages (in sponsored links; obviously ;) ) and improves the chances that your placement-targeted ads will win a position on your targeted placements. So beware, poor quality will reduce the chances of top placements of ads.

Here, I would like to mention one more important point which one of my colleagues has raised i.e. is it mandatory to create a separate landing page instead of pushing the visitors directly to the home page of the site?

I personally believe that we should avoid sending the visitors (from PPC advertising efforts specially) to the home page as it is designed for the wider audiences not for highly targeted or specific one & when a visitor clicks on a PPC ad then he/she expects to land on the very relevant & specific page to his/her keyword. Generally, home page represents our entire product range & service vectors & it is very unlikely for visitors to further navigate the entire site for their relevant search. Therefore, relevancy is very important for an effective advertising program.

Landing Page Quality Factors:

The first impression of a website by a user occurs in less than 10 seconds, in this very small duration visitor generally decide whether to stay on a website or move to another.

So, we have a very less time to convey the relevancy, importance, quality of our company through the page design.

When visitors click on the ad, then they should land at a page clearly displaying the information or product/service offered in the ad. If users do not immediately find what prompted them to click on your ad, they’re more likely to leave your site without converting.

We should try different version of text, image and layout on our landing page to find out the most effective page. Here, we should try Website Optimizer. The results will show what’s most effective in increasing conversions on your page and boosting your return on investment.

The landing page should be easy to navigate so that visitors can easily find what they are searching for. We should create a simple process for users to complete transactions. The final page where visitor can complete the transactions should be easily approachable from the landing page.

Landing page should not be a splash page as it can confuse a visitor. We should avoid using flash, animation & other fancy code to fascinate the visitors as all these increases the loading time of the page. We should focus on simple & clear layout that allows visitors to find what they want in the shortest time available.

Landing page should not use pop-ups & pop under as they result in to negative user experience.

Landing page should have relevant & original content. We should also take care of the transparency.

For more information you can view quality guidelines defined by Google for Landing Pages.

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Quick Summery of the Domain Roundtable discussion with Matt

April 23, 2008 at 12:31 pm · Filed under SEO Updates ·Tagged , ,

Matt Cutts has recently attended the Domain Roundtable conference at San Francisco.

He spent his most of the time in answering the questions asked by audiences..as usual ;)

Quick summary of that discussion:

  • Domain will be valuable if it has enough unique content which is useful to users.
  • Nofollow link doesn’t flow page rank & flow anchor text.
  • Directories should give a real value to its users. we don’t have to worry about every single link, but do some due diligence and try to nofollow any that we’re worried about.
  • Google Don’t wants to index parked domains.
  • It’s good to have the Keyword in the domain as it affects the ranking.
  • Geo-targeting and IP delivery is completely different from cloaking and Google don’t penalize for it, so long as we treat Google like any other user.
  • Google tries to reset page rank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links.
  • A Page gets page rank because of back links.
  • TLD don’t have impact on Google Algorithm.
  • He talked about how there are lots of great reasons to buy domains.
  • Google keeps track of when/where they first find content, and they do a pretty good job of rewarding the original source of the content and not the thieves’ version of the content.
  • Read http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html to know the best practice of moving your site.

Reference sites:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-from-the-domain-roundtable

http://www.seo.com/blog/google/matt-cutts-does-domain-roundtable/

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

April 23, 2008 at 10:05 am · Filed under SEO ·Tagged , ,

Yesterday, someone asked me the basics of SEO, like what is SEO, why do SEO, Which are the important factors of SEO etc…So, I decided to write a post Basic SEO.

Although, this topic has become very exhaustive now a days, as many people have already written various things about SEO, still I am trying to cover all the basic things in a simpler manner.

What is a Search Engine?

Search Engines are handy & comprehensive search tools designed for convenience to all internet surfers worldwide. Search engines collect the information, structure it & save (index) the same in their database and make the information universally accessible as per the search request.

What is SEO?

SEO is an abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is the process for improving web pages so that it can rank higher in search engines for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more & targeted traffic to the website.

Why Does a Websites Need SEO?

SEO is the most important & inevitable activity for any website because:

  • About 85-90% of internet users find or search new websites thru search engines; so it is very important to have good visibility on search engines to get traffic.
  • Researches show that optimized sites get 5-6 times more clients/conversions then any other affiliate or banner advertising. When an average web surfer finds the site on the top positions in the search engines, he/she considered it to be one of the best sites available over the internet.
  • About 80-85% of Search engine users stop browsing search results on the first two pages. Therefore, only the top (10-20) positions bring significant amount of traffic to the site.

Though, it is very tough to get top 10 positions because of very high competition & dynamic nature of the web.

*Click to know more about initial website analysis.

Which are important SEO Factors?

Many activities come into SEO Techniques, however in general these techniques can be categorized in to 3 segments:

On-Page Optimization: On-page factors includes

Keywords (Search, placement, density, type etc.)

HTML Tags (Title Tags, Meta Tags, Alt Tags etc.)

Content

CSS

URLs

On-Site Optimization: It includes complete site wide optimization as per the theme of the site. It revolves around organizing the whole site and placing the keywords as per the site structure. It also includes the semantic optimization of the site.

Off-Site/Off-Page Optimization: It includes

Link Building/ Link popularity

Google Page Rank

Anchor Text Optimization

(I will discuss these in detail in the subsequent posts)

Have I missed on any important factor? Have your say by leaving me a comment.

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Quality Score: The Key to Success for AdWords (PPC) Campaign

April 22, 2008 at 6:45 am · Filed under AdWords, PPC, Quality Score ·Tagged , ,

I have seen many people running their PPC campaign without giving any concern to keywords’ quality score. They simply pay more to increase their Ads position. This methodology actually reduces the ROI of the campaign.

Everyone wants to make his/ her campaign to be more successful that too by paying less.

Quality Score is definitely the key for success as it helps us to lower the keywords’ minimum bid & increase the Ad Position.

Quality Score measures an Ad’s relevance & define the minimum CPC bid required for keywords to get activated or an

Ad to enter the auction.

Ads with higher quality score are likely to:

*Get more clicks

*Higher position on Search Result pages; which brings more clicks & business.

Quality Score influences your Ads’ position on Google and the Google Network.

It ensures that only the most relevant Ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network.

I personally believe that this variable (QS) makes the entire AdWords system fair for everyone including advertisers, users and publishers.

Quality Score is based on various factors, such as -

  • Clickthrough Rate (CTR): if CTR is good then it will increase your quality score.
  • Keyword relevance to the Ad: QS can be increased by relevant keywords. Too general keywords can display the ad for less relevant search query. Anyways it bring irrelevant traffic to site
  • Quality of Ad text: Writing quality ad text can boost up your QS as it increases the chances of getting more clicks. So here again CTR comes into picture ;)
  • Landing Page Quality: Landing page should be the most relevant page for the product or services you are offering. Landing page should have relevant & original content, along with transparency & navigability.
  • Account History: The past performance of Ads is measured by the CTR of all the ads & keywords in the account.
  • Relevance of the keywords & ad to the search query: This factor is also important in deciding the Ad’s position.

Conclusion: The higher the Quality Score better would be your Ad position and lower the minimum bids.

Therefore, an advertiser can boost the performance and Quality Score by picking and refining relevant keywords, writing powerful Ad text, creating high-quality landing pages, and constantly testing and monitoring techniques that work best.

Suggestions: To increase the quality score we should:

Use most refined & related keywords (Specific keywords not too general).

  • Use different keywords matching options as per the requirements.
  • Take care of the keyword grouping as per the theme of the ad group
  • Create clear, relevant, convincing & appealing ad text
  • Try to include call to action phrase (esp. when we are targeting the visitors in buying phase)
  • Send users to the best possible & relevant landing page where visitors can easily find what they are looking for.

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