Archive for June, 2008

Google Ad Planner: Google’s Free Tool to Help You in Your Media Planning

June 28, 2008 at 7:15 am · Filed under AdWords, Google Webmaster, Online Advertising ·Tagged , , , , , ,

We all know the Google’s influence over Internet Industry. Google is just amazing!!

It provides many free tools to help advertisers & users. Recently, Google has introduced a new free tool called Google Ad Planner to potentially increase its already widespread influence.

It’s a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications.

So, with Google Ad Planner, you can:

  • Define audiences by demographics and interests.
  • Search for websites relevant to your audience.
  • Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
  • Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
  • Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

  • An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.
  • A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

With Google Ad Planner, you can choose to research sites only or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use.

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

You can then take any of the following actions in your AdWords account:

  • Create a Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
  • Edit an existing Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
  • Use Google AdWords Editor to add placements to your ad groups: You won’t need to create a new spreadsheet, because Google Ad Planner has already done it for you. Simply copy sites from your .csv file directly into AdWords Editor.

I hope this information will helps you manage all your other media planning, buying and campaign management activities.

The main source of information is http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/06/introducing-google-ad-planner.html & Google Help Center.

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Landing Page Checklist/ Guide

June 21, 2008 at 7:52 am · Filed under AdWords, Landing Page, Online Advertising, PPC ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Landing page plays a very important role in the success of online advertising efforts. This serves the ultimate objective of the website to get conversions which can be of different type as per marketing objective of the site like it can be sign up for newsletters, purchase of specific products, contact form fill up & many others. Previously I have written some posts about landing pages like importance of landing pages, quality factors, impact of landing pages on quality score of Google Adwords campaign & many others.

Today, I am trying to create a comprehensive checklist or you can say it guide about website landing page so that we can keep some basic points in to mind while working on landing page design.

I would like to define the landing page before making the checklist of effective techniques to create an influential landing/ sales page.

Landing page is the page which is highly focused & specifically designed for selling purpose like to get the leads, sales or conversions without giving any single change to visitors to loose focus.

This is the page where visitor lands after clicking on your advertisements. Squeeze pages can be defined as different version or face of landing pages. Squeeze pages are basically designed to get leads not for immediate sale, you can take the example of open source solutions selling firms, as they sale customize software solutions as per different organization needs & they don’t have any physical products, so what they actually requires…is simply the lead, means the contact details of the potential service buyers.

Now I would like to answer some questions which can come in your mind-

Is it really important to have specific landing pages?

Then my answer will be definitely, Yes. If you want maximum out of your advertising efforts then you need to have an appealing & highly focused landing page which can suggest the specific solution to the visitors for their specific needs.

The other question can be – Do we have separate landing page for visitors from SEO & visitors from PPC?

In this case my answer would be both Yes as well as No. Actually that would depend upon your objective. For example, if you have an online store with different products, free e-books & many others, then it is good for you if people are coming to reading your free books, getting reviews before buying or purchasing. But obviously you don’t want to spend lots of money on PPC for these pre sales activities. In that case marketing thru SEO would be a better option for you. If you decide to generate traffic through search engine optimization, planning your landing page will entail finding phrases within your niche which have a high demand (aggregate search value) and a low supply (small amount of competing sites) and then creating multiple landing pages, each which is optimized around a different phrase. If, on the other hand, you decide to generate traffic through pay per click (PPC) programs, such as Adwords, planning your landing page theme will again entail tuning a number of different pages to fit the keywords you are purchasing & products which you are selling.

Many people (including most of my clients) usually asked me to define the layout of landing page. Well, there is no explicit mock-up which we can work for all website or every single industry. One specific model which is very successful for one site may not work for other. Landing page depend on the marketing objective also and again testing is the best way to find out the best model for you.

So, let’s start creating the Landing Page Checklist ;)

  • First & the most important thing is to define your focus or objective before designing the landing page. Identify what action exactly you want from your visitors on your page. You should have some goal like you want your contact form filled or you want newsletter sign ups or the final purchase of product. Your lading page should have the accurate action point which can lead to the achievement of marketing objective. For example, if your marketing objective is to sale some products then your objective would be the “Immediate Sale” and in that case you should highlight the special offerings (if you have any), your USP, any free offer with your products, any discount or guarantee etc. These things will help you to persuade visitors to take the required actions like sigh ups, purchase etc. and at this stage the action point will be a “Buying Button”, so your page must have shopping cart, checkout service or any quick buying buttons on that sales page. All of these services will allow you to make transactions quickly. Agree?

  • Don’t forget to define yourself. When a visitor first comes to the website, chances are they want to find out a little more about you. Information about you adds instant credibility to the site. You can create a separate About Us page on your site. It will put a face to your site through profiling your company, business policies, and partners. It will humanize your site to your visitors. It will help visitors to understand the site as a whole. It will work as a way for your readers to know you on a personal level. Otherwise many times it is difficult for visitors to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

  • Try to highlight the undeniable sales points with powerful psychological triggers. This means you should have content a mix of sales points & what visitors will gain from your offering & what they might loose if they don’t. Say for example, if you are selling some cosmetics which cure the acne. Then you should highlight your best selling points like discounts, guarantee, money back guarantee etc. etc., but simultaneously don’t forget to highlight acne as the biggest issue which can harm overall look & personality & what might be the benefits/ results once someone get rid of this problem. These psychological factors are very helpful in getting the conversions or the required actions. You can miss the final sale if you miss any of these 2 things.

  • Take care of the information flow. Don’t put information randomly on landing page. All information should be in right context & in an appropriate manner. Visitor should not loose interest or focus …anyhow.

  • Also, don’t forget to highlight the alert factor which instantly create the urge for visitors to act immediately like if you have a specific offer for limited period then you can highlight this as “Offer is valid till…” . But don’t create unnecessary hype with misleading or false information otherwise you will loose credibility very soon.

  • Try to generate maximum trust as much as you can. Users or visitors normally hesitate to give their personal contact information & other details. Try to show your authenticity to them by defining your secure transactions policy, any authoritative seal etc. You should always define them the purpose of asking for specific details with the guarantee of not selling/ reveling these information to others like spammers & hackers.

  • Refine your landing page by eliminating unwanted or unnecessary elements. Unneeded baffled information can distract the visitors. It should have very specific & relevant information as people expect it & they can be disappointed by not getting the same.

  • Don’t overlook the layout & design of page. It is very helpful to catch the user’s attention. Mostly visitors leave the site with in 7 seconds because of the unprofessional & catchy look. So, now you can understand the importance of looks ;)

  • Be precise or to the point while asking for information. Don’t put a lengthy fill up form by making all the fields mandatory. Keep the form as short as you can. Don’t expect to fill all unnecessary information. They may leave your site as they might not have too much time to fill a big form.

  • Don’t forget the “Thank You” page. Thank you page basically appears when required action has been completed on your site. We should optimize this page. We can optimize it by placing some important links of the site (which can be useful for visitors) on this page, we can ask for our free newsletters (if this is a thank you page of sales or sign ups etc), joining mailing list, we can offer free E-Books etc. which opens up more means through which you can up-sell.

  • 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 allow visitors to find what they want in the shortest time available.

  • You can find some important points in one of my previous posts- Landing Page Quality Factors. Here, you can find other information also like how landing page effect the quality score of Google AdWords PPC campaign.

In this guide I have tried to highlight all important factors, though there is always a scope of elaboration.

Hope this post is making sense to readers who really want to work on their landing pages to get the maximum output from their advertising efforts.

Your comments & suggestions are always welcome. In fact comments really help me to research more on the subject matter. Also, let me know if you want me to answer any query related to your online advertising (SEO & PPC) issues. I would like to solve them by writing post on those specific topics.

If you have any query about your landing page or need any suggestions, do let me know.

Thanks for your time.

Happy Reading!!

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Google AdWords Update

June 19, 2008 at 12:54 pm · Filed under AdWords, Google Webmaster, Landing Page, PPC ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Starting from today, landing page load time factor will be incorporated into keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores and thus higher minimum bids. On the other hand, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

Google has done this because it believes “Fast is better than slow” & Google wants to give better user experience to its visitors. When a user clicks an ad, a landing page that loads quickly provides a better user experience than a landing page that loads slowly. In fact, fast load times benefit advertisers as well & advertisers needs to be more focused on page loading factors as users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt advertiser’s conversion rate.

Your Quality Score may change/increase gradually over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.

Factors Contributing to a slow load time:

Below are common causes of a slow load time. If you don’t directly upkeep your site, you might want to pass this information along to your webmaster.

Multi-second Meta refreshes
Redirects that use multi-second meta refreshes are a common culprit. If you have a redirect set to occur after several seconds, change it to zero seconds so that the redirect happens immediately.

Slow redirects
To check the speed of your redirects, copy and paste your destination URL into a web browser to see how long the browser spends on each redirect URL. You can get more precise values using a tool like Fiddler (English only).

Multiple redirects
Each redirect increases your landing page load time. If you have more than one redirect, consider eliminating unnecessary ones.

Interstitial pages
If you employ an interstitial page (where the user waits for a few seconds before being taken to the landing page), you should consider removing it.

Slow server
Your site may be hosted by a slow server. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to see how long your site takes to fetch. If it’s slow, contact your web hosting provider.

Large page size
If your page’s HTML document is very large, try compressing it with gzip or DEFLATE.

How is my load time graded?

Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.

Two things to note:

  • When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.
  • If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.

Google evaluate page load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.

You can see a keyword’s load time grade on the Keyword Analysis page:

  • If your keyword is graded This page loads slowly, your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected.
  • If your keyword is graded No problems found, your landing page quality and Quality Score will not be affected. The one exception is if your keyword is graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region. In this case, your landing page quality and Quality Score may be positively affected.

Original resource of this article is http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116

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On Page Optimization Factors

June 13, 2008 at 5:02 pm · Filed under SEO, SEO Updates ·Tagged , , , ,

Today i am writing about some important on page optimization factors. I hope it would be helpful for you….

Some most important On Page Optimization Factors:

Title Tags:

  • Place the targeted keyword or Phrase in the Title Tag of the Web Page.
  • It is very important factor to get rankings; it is undoubtedly your BEST chance to convert a searcher to a visitor within the SERPS.
  • Ideally, Title Tag should have up to 65 characters but can go up to 90 to 100 (if required). Use the most important keyword in the beginning.
  • Title Tag should be relevant to the page. It should reflect the message of the page to the visitors & SE also.
  • Do not stuff the keyword only in Title Tag. It should make the sense. Try to make it grammatically correct.
  • Title Tag should be different for each page.

Description Tags:

  • The description is still used as the site description for many smaller directories and engines.
  • Need to be unique for each page and contain target keywords to encourage search engines to pull snippets from it. A good description can help influence users to click on a listing.
  • Description should have around 180-200 characters.
  • Try to incorporate relevant keywords in to description. But again not keyword stuffing. It should compel visitors to click on the site.
  • It should make sense & should be grammatically correct.

Keyword Tags:

  • Use misspell, relevant, LSI based keywords for this, though it has no impact on search ranking.
  • Do not use same keyword again & again in the same keyword tag.

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.):

  • It has lost its importance in major search engine ranking factors for many search engines; still it is advisable to use header tags for the page if required as some search engines are considering them for their search results.
  • Use only one H1 tag for each page.
  • You can use other header tags also like H2, H3 etc.
  • It should be relevant to the page & should have targeted keyword.

Alt/ Image Tags:

  • Major search engines can’t read the images, so it is important to use to alternative text which they can read i.e. Image Tag.

Keyword Density, Type & Style:

I personally don’t feel that it has higher importance. While writing the content we should take care of the quality instead of unnecessary keyword stuffing, as sometimes it can make the content very irritating. But many people consider them important for SE ranking. So, we should take care of it also. As such there is not any defined set of criteria of the percentage, but we should try to keep it 3-4%. It can go up to 4-5% also. Also, remove all invisible text (if any).

You can bold some relevant keywords in body content. But that should not be high in frequency.

Internal Anchor Links:

  • Always check the internal linking of the page with the other pages of the site. Every page should be 2 clicks away from the home page. This is good for site accessibility to both Search Engines & Users.
  • Try to use relevant targeted keyword for anchor text of the link. It will help to get good ranking.

There are other factors also, for which I will update you on regular basis.

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Technical SEO Issues: Sub-domain Vs. Sub-Directory

June 6, 2008 at 3:39 pm · Filed under SEO, Technical SEO ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Many clients have asked me about various technical SEO issues. These issues are related with domains, use of sub-domains, sub-directories, canonicalization, 301 redirects, 404 error pages, hyphen Vs. underscores in URLs, doorway pages any many others.

I want to discuss all these issues (in subsequent posts) with all of you to find out the best SEO practices in technical terms.

Today, I am discussing about one very common issue i.e. use of Sub-Domain or Sub-Directory.

Before going further I would like to define: Top Level Domain (TLD), Subdomain and Subdirectory.

Top Level Domain Name (TLDN): In www.google.com URL, com is the TLDN i.e. the last part of internet domain name (here, domain name is google.com). In case of www.google.co.uk your TLD would be uk. The uk domain is also referred to as a country-code top-level domain or ccTLD.

Subdomain: Subdomains are basically parts of the main domain. You can define it as a part of domain name hierarchy. For example:

In video.google.com, video is the subdomain.

Subdirectory: Subdirectories are basically defined as the folders in the root directory. For example: In http://desktop.google.com/plugins/ , plugins is the directory.

So, http://desktop.google.com/plugins/ in this URL:

Com is the TLD

Desktop is the subdomain

Plugins is the directory or subfolder

Now, we come to our main discussion i.e. why subdomains & why subdirectories?

Subdomains are used as separate domains by major search engines. See the results below for the search query seochat:

(You might know that Google shows 2 relevant results from a single domain)

Here, you can clearly view that Google is showing 2 results from forums.seochat.com/.

Subdomain should be used when your site is very large and you want to market some of your unique product or content thru different URL. For example: if your site has 1500 pages and you want to market your content/services/products thru different URLs with an appealing & relevant subdomain to popularize it, as in case of seochat. In forums.seochat.com; it is clearly understood that forums is a part of SEOchat which is used to discuss SEO related things.

So you can devise a subdomain strategy that would help focus certain areas of the site to help them market or compete individually.

For example:

Google uses many subdomains for its different product & services like maps.google.com/, video.google.com/, earth.google.com/ and many others.

Once any of your subdomains get enough link popularity, you can transfer it to other domains or main domain of your site to get them benefited by this.

Now, we will discuss directories. Directories are always the best choice for all as it has all the functionality & flexibility of subdomains and it is easy to manage. Subfolders are considered as the part of the domain as a whole. Search engines treat them as the content is coming from the same domain. But beware!! Don’t use lots of subdirectories in to directories because content that resides in subfolders is given a lower priority that content that resides in the root of a website. The deeper down in subfolders e.g. ‘example.com/google/website/seo/link/oneway/…’ that content resides the lower priority it gets from the major search engines. Do not go deeper than 1 or 2 sub folder from the root folder of your website.

This is according to my experience so far; however you might know something else which I did not mention or you feel should be included, so have your saying by leaving the comment. Even your opinion is also welcome. I will appreciate your response as this will also help others to solve their SEO dilemmas.

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