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Posts tagged ‘optimization’

23
Mar

Is Quality Score Killing your Budget?

Quality Score might not be oblivious as many think. In the past, all the marketing Gurus were influenced by it. But somewhere along the road Quality Score got dethroned.

Quality Scores are one of the most important factors that decide your cost-per-click CPC and the position of your ads. Unless you wish to pay more for your campaign, increasing Quality Score should be your priority.

Before we can take a tour of how to increase your Quality Score, let us dive into the advantages of it.

Pros of High Quality Score

The Quality Score ranges from one and ten which is the lowest and the highest respectively. Greater the Quality Score, better the below mentioned benefits:

1. Higher position on SERPs: A high Quality Score provides the placement of your ads on the first page of SERP. This eventually leads to more visitors and finally higher conversion rate.

2. Low cost-per-click (CPC): You will have to spend less on your CPC with Higher Quality Score (QS). Lowering of your CPC results in more ads to be shown and finally more sales.

These two benefits are enough to provide your entire attention to the Quality Score of your ad campaign. Now, that the advantage of QS is known let us consider the ways to increase it.

Various factors are involved when the increase of QS is considered. Google, on the other hand measures QS every time your ad is clicked; which is to say your QS is updated frequently. Fortunately QS can be increased by following the ideas mentioned below:

Focused Ad Groups

Group of keywords sharing an ad text is known as ‘Ad Groups’. Focusing the ad group on a single theme will allow the written copy to be more relevant increasing the CTR. Luckily this isn’t as tough as you imagine. Create an ad text that relates to various keywords and there you have taken the first step to increase QS.

Include Keyword in your ad

Keyword(s) related searches will be attracted to your ads only if the keyword is included in your ad copy. Remember, Google’s aim is to create a better user experience and relevancy is the key for them. If the keyword is included in your ad, the user will find it enticing and result in a click. Google will be alerted of this action and your QS will be updated.

Let’ say you would like to take a vacation to a place where you can feast on wine. Therefore you search over Google for the term ‘Relaxing hotel Napa Valley’

Various searches are displayed.

Among one of the searches, an ad displays all the terms you had searched for. Naturally that would be the ad which you would click. This is how other users will prefer your ad if the description contains the keyword that has been searched.

Split testing

The overall goal is to increase the click-through-rate (CTR) of your ad campaign. Split testing is the perfect method to find out which campaign gets the highest CTR. Create two ad groups for the same product and run them for a month. Depending upon the CTR, find the campaign that shows more promise and slash the other.

Landing Page Optimization

Optimization seems to be important with respect to Quality Score. Upon clicking an ad, a user is generally directed to a landing page for conversion. If the landing page is deficient in important elements and loads slower, then your Quality Score is seriously at trouble.

Landing page optimization is a vast subject. However, for faster loading of landing page follow these tips:

1. A faster landing page is necessary unless you wish your users to get annoyed. Using too many images can be one of the prominent reasons. Cut down the images which seem to be unnecessary.

2. Secondly is the design of the page. If it’s too flashy and the graphical elements are more than necessary then the loading speed of the page can be seriously hindered. Reduce the usage of graphical elements and keep it plain and simple

3. In some cases your hosting provider might be responsible. Get a decent hosting provider.

About the Author: Richie Richardson is passionate about Social Media Marketing, SEO& SEM and Internet Marketing. He also writes for vodafone voucher codes and asda voucher codes. He recommends you to check them as their usage can provide huge discounts.

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12
Dec

6 Quick Tips to Optimize your Website Using Social Media

Social media, a social instrument of communication is a phrase which is very popular nowadays in search engine marketing world. It changes the way of communication between individuals, organization and communities. Social media unlike the regular media is a two way street which allows you to communicate in response to the content in the media. Using social media determines the level of your website reach to people. In this blog let us look at those different types of social media which will aid you in optimizing your website for maximum results.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking websites help companies on a long term basis as they find the opportunity of getting a fan, follower or subscriber on a social media platform. On Twitter you get someone to follow you or connect with you in LinkedIn or subscribe to your YouTube channel- all these help to keep lines of communication open for a long time even after they are away form your website. To achieve maximum communication, make sure you set up an interactive profile page. You need to have a strong social media profile which shows in the top results for your name, website and blog. This will increase your brand’s visibility and yours too. If you intend to create a fan page in Facebook, let it be unique and content fresh. Add the social media buttons or the plugins (as we call them) in the home page of  your website. These will help you interact, comment and build relationship. Also, you need to plan much ahead for the logo to be added in the Facebook page for a power brand.

Include the Facebook Like Box

Facebook Like Box is a social plugin through which you can attract a lot of visitors and get likes for your website from them. By adding a like box you create a page for your website and invite likes. People tend to believe when their friends like, support or promote something. Your visitors can “Like” your website with just one click and from the Like Box you’ll get to see how many people liked your website.

Add Facebook Like Button to Share

You can add the Facebook Like button or the Retweet button of Twitter in your website to help your visitors share the content in other networks easily. 

Link Your Blog With Your Website

You can integrate your blog into your website and pull the recent posts as links to your Home page. Many businesses choose to build their website on a blogging platform like WordPress. By doing this you can improve the interactivity of your website by pulling your blog posts from your Home page.

Fix a Video

Add a video which tells about your products or services explaining how customers felt after using your products. You may also add a “How to” which would give instructions on how to use your products and the source to get assistance if required.

Social Bookmarking

Make use of the bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Delicious to add your new content and bookmark them. These websites have the potential to drive a  lot of traffic to your website in a short time.

About the Author: Linda has been writing on latest technlogy for quite sometime. Her interests include mobiles, gaming seo and more. She has written many articles on airbnb clone, etsy clone, yipit clone and many more.

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3
Oct

The 9 Best SEO Tools for Small Businesses

Ranking high on the search engine results page is essential for driving traffic to your site; however performing search engine optimization (SEO) in-house can be a difficult task, especially when you don’t have a large budget to buy the top SEO tools out there. Good thing there are some awesome tools out there that cost little to nothing to use and provide you with the resources to perform offsite and onsite optimization.

Offsite Optimization Tools

Optimizing your page using offsite techniques can involve searching out link opportunities through providing content, getting on resource lists, and taking advantage of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Great tools for offsite optimization include:

  • Rank Checker is a great tool for checking multiple rankings at once when you have little time. Rank Checker provides a user-friendly interface and the ability to run directly from your browser, which makes for complete ease of use. The downside to running directly off your browser is Google will localize your search results and if you are signed into a Google account, your results can be skewed from Google’s social media network Google+. Negatives aside, Rank Checker does a great job of seeing where you stack up against your competitors.
  • Google Insights for Search easily allows you to input a keyword or keyword phrase and you can see the distribution of how heavily that keyword or phrase is searched. Results can be narrowed down all the way from worldwide to city level.Insights for Search gives you the ability to find terms related to your products or services that you should try to rank for.
  • Open Site Explorer allows you to see whose linking to a certain page as well as providing social metrics, such as Facebook shares, Facebook likes, and tweets. This tool is great for competitor analysis and finding linking opportunities within other websites.
  • MozBar from SEOmoz is hands down my favorite offsite tool. The Mozbar is great for analyzing pages for link opportunities. This toolbar provides an instant look at page authority, domain authority and provides easy access to Open Site Explorer, Rank Checker, and other tools all from the toolbar itself.
  • Shared Count gives you the statistics for the number of Facebook likes, Google +1’s, Tweets, Diggs, Google Buzz’s, Stumbles from StubleUpon, and LinkedIn shares.Shared Count was built with on open API to give you the ability to build tools over the open space to assist your social media efforts.

At first, social media may not seem like a strong factor, but be sure not to count it out; a study performed by Jen Lopez of SEOmoz showed that tweets and retweets affects traditional organic SEO as much as a link coming from a guest post.

Onsite Optimization Tools

Onsite optimization encounters factors such as site structure, internal linking, website crawlability, content, and overall quality. Performing site audits to assess your onsite factors is nearly impossible without a strong set of tools. Take a look at these tools before performing your next site audit:

  • Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great for performing site audits. Link Sleuthis a desktop tool that provides a simple design that translates into a very simple user interface. Link Sleuth analyzes the URL you input and produces a report containing any broken links, lost servers (including mail servers), and sleuth will even provide what type of code is being written on each page.
  • URI Valet is the multi-tool of onsite SEO. URI Valet performs technical audits that give statistics on over ten areas including page download time, internal links, external links, text to HTML ratio, and object details.
  • SEO Browser is a tool that can break down a web page into a text file to show an easily readable layout of the page. SEO Browser gives the layout from the title tags to headers and so on. This tool is great for quick reports on site structure and deciding if all your meta tags and headers are properly optimized.
  • Google WebMaster Tools showcase statistics on keyword visibility, impressions, time spent on your website, click through rate, average position of your keywords, and indexing issues. Webmaster tools offer a wide variety of tools that can be used easily for both onsite and offsite optimization.

Optimizing your site not only involves onsite metrics, but also finding great offsite opportunities. With these amazing tools and some practice, you can optimize your site to the fullest and build awareness through reaching the top of the search engine results pages.

About the Author: Matt Polsky is the Search Marketing Manager for VA Mortgage Center, the nation’s number one dedicated provider of VA home loans. You can connect with Matt on Twitter @mattpolsky.

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14
Dec

Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Social Media ROIUsing social media as a marketing tool for small business can be a very cost effective, and rewarding way to reach your target audiences. Not only will you be able to reach a extremely large group of potential consumers, you will also be building a relationship with them making it easier to turn them into buyers of your products.

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However many small business owners are missing out on this form of marketing because frankly they just don’t know where to start, or lack a strategy to best leverage the medium once they begin using it.===

For those who have dipped their toes into the social media pool the rewards sometimes don’t immediately pan out, and the return on the time investment gets called into question. This causes frustration and usually abandonment of social media as a marketing option.
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Essentially there are two main components to any social media campaign from a business perspective (and a personal one to some extent):

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1. Content

2. Community

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As a business owner those two components are all you need to understand to get maximum mileage out of your social media interactions and marketing for it to be a successful return on your time investment.

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But how do you tie content and community together using social media?

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Fortunately the answer to that question is fully explained in the following presentation on Social Media Optimization and Marketing 101. If your business has begun using social media as a marketing tool, yet you still find yourself asking questions like “am I doing this right?”,  “is my message reaching my target audience effectively?”, or “I have the content, and the community, why isn’t this working!” I would highly suggest taking a few minutes to go through this presentation.

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Here’s What’s Covered?

  • 5 Steps to Free Social Media Traffic
  • 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization
  • Using Social Media to increase search visibility
  • How to participate without coming across as overbearing
  • What content does well in social media
  • How to make your content “pop”
  • What is high impact content?
Tip: View as a full screen presentation to make readability better