Preroll YouTube Ad Proves that Understanding your Audience Pays Off (Inspiring preroll ad examples)

Psychology is an essential science that goes hand in hand with Online marketing.

Do not you agree with me that it's almost more of a reaction now, than an actual decision. Click play on a YouTube video and our brains are programmed to automatically hit the "Skip Ad" button as soon as it appears. That's the challenge of the preroll ad—the urge to skip is so great that most people wouldn't even hear a marketer if they promised free pizza and beer in those few precious seconds.

Geico and The Martin Agency takes full advantage of those five seconds and makes sure there is some serious payoff for anyone who sticks around and doesn't hit skip.

Original Post: http://www.fastcocreate.com/3043111/whatever-you-do-dont-skip-this-five-second-geico-ad 

Google Study: PPC and SEO for Branded KWs is better than Just SEO

It used to confuse me before, why would I add my brand keywords or keywords that I am already on top of SERPs for in my PPC campaign? I was thinking that people are going to click on my links automatically because they are already on top.
But I still ran the camapigns with those KWs, just to prevent competitors taking them.
Then I found an inetresting study to justify the paid clicks on branded and organically ranked KWs:

The study which was conducted by Google concluded that 50 percent of clicks generated by paid ads are not replaced by organic clicks when the ads are absent and the website has a first position organic search ranking. The study also shows that as the organic search ranking decreases, the percentage of clicks not replaced by the paid ad increases. This implies that organic search alone cannot drive as much traffic to a website as organic search combined with paid search.
Here is the Abstract:

Impact Of Ranking Of Organic Search Results On The Incrementality Of Search Ads

Abstract: In an earlier study, we reported that on average 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from search ad clicks were incremental. In this research, we examine how the ranking of an advertiser’s organic listings on the search results page affects the incrementality of ad clicks expressed through Incremental Ad Clicks (IAC) and as estimated by Search Ads Pause models. A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlights the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when the ads are turned off. On average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic search result. We find that having an associated organic search result in rank one does not necessarily mean a low IAC. On average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental, compared to 100% of the ad clicks being incremental in the absence of an associated organic result.

To Read the The Full Study (PDF): http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37731.pdf 

9 Video Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Creating strong video content for your business is a powerful way to reach a variety of markets and engage your audience. However, when businesses have poorly produced videos they often end up doing more harm than good. Your video is a reflection of your brand so to help ensure that you get off on the right foot with your Video Marketing strategy, here are the top ten mistakes in Video Marketing for you to avoid.

1 Having No Objective

Are you making a video for the sake of it? What is the purpose of your video? Is it good branding? If you have no purpose or objective for your video, then you will never know if you have gained what you set out to achieve. Once you have an aim, you will be able to create a video that will help achieve those aims; for example, you can plan your script and storyboard in accordance with achieving your objectives.

2 Not Branding Your Video

You could create a stunning, very popular video that gets thousands of views but if you don't brand it then you have not produced a successful video. Your audience needs to know who you are so that they can remember you, search for you, purchase from you and even recommend you. If you don’t emphasise your brand or your company name in your video, how are your viewers supposed to know who you are or find you?

3 Making It Too Long

Research tells us that 20% of people click away from a video after just ten seconds if it is not engaging enough and the more time you add to a video, the less likely people are to watch it through to the end. This is really important to consider when producing a video because you will want to ensure that you get all of the messages across quickly and effectively so that your target audience are receiving the messages that you want them to. A well planned video that engages viewers will have more views right to the end.
4 Giving Out Too Many Messages

When producing a successful video you need to have a strong message that you want to convey to your audience. Having a clear objective will help you to understand what message you want to send out. If you give out too many messages in a short period of time, you risk confusing your viewers. They will not know what to take away from your video so it is best to stick to key points. This way your viewers will understand exactly what you want them to.

5 No Call To Action

What action do you want your target market to take after viewing your video? Why not tell them or ask them to perform this? Include a call to action within your video to encourage your audience to take that action. By not leaving a call to action in your video you are leaving your viewers and your target audience with no action to take, meaning they are unlikely to do anything at all. Make it clear what you want them to do and you are more likely to see results.

6 Not Using SEO

Just posting your video online and hoping your viewers will find it, is not enough. One of the foremost aims of anyone creating a video is to get it found and viewed, for this to happen, you need to optimise the video. SEO is important for boosting your search engine ranking and increasing your chances of being found. If you don’t use optimisation techniques then your video will not work for you. We have lots of videos on our You Tube channel that can give you information and tips for optimising your videos. So watch and subscribe for help!

7 Expecting Instant Results

In an age where most things are quick and instant, it is important to remember that some things you have to be patient with, video is one of those things. It is unlikely that your video will gain thousands of views in just a few days and you do have to work at views by optimising your video and marketing it. If you are patient and work to achieve views and popularity, your video will work well for you.

8 Unsuitable Placement Of Selling Points

You need to ensure that you place your selling points and your call to action suitably in your video. As previously mentioned, viewer engagement tends to drop towards the end of your video, if your audience click off before seeing your call to action or selling point then they will not know what action to take after viewing the video and you may not achieve your objectives.

9 Failing To Speak To Your Target Audience

Focus your messages on your target market. Trying to appeal to everyone won’t work as different people have different interests. By not focusing on just your target audience, you run the risk that your message won’t be received or acted upon by anyone. You will already know who your target market is and what they want, use that information to adapt messages and develop a script.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140627095904-12932152-10-video-marketing-mistakes-to-avoid?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST 

Top Free Essential SEO Tools For Mobiles

Top Free Essential SEO Tools For Mobiles 

by Mina Adly Younan 

The growth in mobile browsing has been incredible over the past year. With nearly half of UK smartphone owners using their mobiles to browse and research products and Mobile Search accounting for an impressive 12% of all UK search clicks in December 2011 (Marin Software, 2012). Morgan Stanley Corp. have also found in a recent study that Mobile traffic is expected to surpass desktop traffic by 2015 as shown in the graph below.  For a website to remain its high ranking on search engines (Google) should do all needed efforts to make their mobile versions as friendly and functional as possible.

In doing so, webmasters will need the following Top Free Essential SEO Tools for Mobiles:

1- Mobilize your Site () : see how your current site looks in mobile, and find resources for building your mobile site.

2- Our Mobile Planet ():  View data about mobile users that Google has gathered. Select your key demographic and other potential customers, and view key differences.

3- Mobile Meter () gives an overview of how your site looks and performs on a mobile.

4- Google Adwords for Mobiles:  It is the same Adwords tool used for desktop searches. It gives a guideline on the monthly volume in searches. The tool can also show data for searches on mobile devices.  To do so, select ‘advanced options’ > ‘show ideas and statistics for’ > and select ‘mobile’.

Local search trends can be added to see seasonal fluctuations or if keyword searches are increasing in volume. Select columns and ‘local search trends’. This will show a simple bar graph, but if you download the data it will give some figures over time.

5-PageSpeed Insights (): test speed from both a desktop and mobile perspective. Very useful to see where the easiest performance improvements can be gained in terms of download speed. As site speed is considered part of Google’s algorithm, fixing issues could result in a real impact on mobile search positions.

6- Google Webmaster Tools for Mobiles:  It is the same Google Webmaster tool as it can also check mobile sites setup and investigate any performance issues or poor search results. Additionally, if you redirect mobile users to specific mobile versions of your URLs, then Mobile Sitemaps can be added in Google Webmaster Tools.

7- Mobilize your Business with Google Sites (): Build a test or mock up and see how it performs. The tool have different templates for several types of landing pages.

8- Google Mobile Ads (http://www.google.com/ads/mobile/): Although it is a PPC tool, it can be used to find a lot of potential methods to look at that can drive traffic to your mobile landing pages using mobile ads like:

·         Phone numbers in ads using ‘click-to-call’,
·         click-to-download
·         Mobile Ad Sitelinks
·         Seller Ratings
·         Location Extensions (Multiple Addresses too!)
·         Location Targeting

9- Speeking of PPC, there is of course there the AdMob that is now owned by Google 

10- Google Analytics for Mobiles (): The same Google Analytics for Desktop could be used for mobile browsers so that you can easily find out which mobile devices are working well, and which need optimization by asking the right questions like: Is some content getting a lot of mobile traffic but performing relatively badly? Can a page be optimized to generate more phone call leads? Which content drives more local mobile users? It is even possible to hook Analytics up to track downloads of mobile apps.

Free SEO Tools to Monitor Your Brand Reputation

Basic (Free) Tools to Monitor your Brand (name):

1- Google Alerts: are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your choice of query or topic. You can subscribe to each alert through email and RSS. The alerts track blog posts, news articles, videos and even groups. Set a “comprehensive alert,” which will notify you of stories, as they happen, for your name, your topic, and even your company.

2- Yahoo! Pipes: is also a good tool for aggregating and combining feeds into one central repository.

3-Technorati: is the largest blog search engine in the world. They say that if you don’t claim your blog in Technorati, then you don’t own it! When you register with it, Technorati tracks “blog reactions,” or blogs that link to yours. Search for your brand on Technorati, and subscribe to RSS alerts so that when someone blogs about you, you find out.

4-Backtype: is a tool for monitoring blog comments. If people commented on various blog posts, citing your name, you never used to have a way of tracking it, until now. Backtype is a service that lets you find, follow, and share comments from across the web. Whenever you write a comment with a link to your Web site, Backtype attributes it to you.

5- Yacktrack: lets you search for comments on your content from various sources, such as Blogger, Digg, FriendFeed, Stumbleupon, and WordPress blogs. If you comment on a blog, you can locate other people who are commenting on that same blog post and rejoin the conversation.

6- Commentful: used to track your social comments on the web.

7- co.mments: Also used to track your social comments on the web. 

8-  boardtracker.com to get instant alerts from discussion boards threads citing your name (brand).

9- Boardreader Also used to get instant alerts from discussion boards threads citing your name (brand).

10- Big Boards The same as the above it is used to get instant alerts from discussion boards threads citing your name (brand).

11- Twitter search where you can locate any instances of your name and decide whether you want to tweet back or ignore them. It really depends on the context and meaning of the tweet.

12-  Twilert used to receive email alerts about tweets mentioning you

13- TweetBeep additional tool you can use to receive email alerts.

14- FriendFeed is a social aggregator. You have the ability to take all of your social accounts, such as YouTube, Delicious, Twitter, blog, and Flickr, and pull them together into a single (Friend) feed. You can conduct searches on your brand throughout all social networks at once using this search engine.

15- Alert Thingy. very helpful if you want to receive alerts straight to your desktop

16- Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. It allows you to track mentions of your brand across all of these areas.

17- Serph social search engine

19- Keotag.Other social search engine

20-  Filtrbox only delivers the most relevant, credible mentions of things you need to track.

Microsites Creation Strategy for SEO and Link Building

By +Mina Adly Younan

Introduction:

A Microsite is an individual web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. Their main aim is to direct traffic and increase page rank through back linking to official websites and/or to act as editorial support towards a specific product or service. A Microsite should have a unique value proposition that is indirectly related to the industry of the official website.

Since Microsites’ main objective is to drive traffic, they need fresh and updated content to maintain a continuous stream of visitors that a portion of them are filtered to the official websites.  Sometimes Microsites gain a great success that they become eventually a brand by themselves with thousands and millions of frequent loyal visitors like P&G’s HomeMadeSimple.com and BeingGirl.com

What Microsite Strategists and Copywriters should put in mind when creating a Microsite?

1- Defining the target audience

2- Orient the Content to be about the customer, not the brand. 

3- Consistent content

4- Frequently Steady Update: Remember! A Microsite is a content promised to your customers

Objectives:

Any Microsite strategy, either written to be presented to a client, upper management, or creators, should have a clear and simple objective opening summarizing its purpose and the value proposition it is presenting.   

Processes of Microsite Workflow:

Step 1: Brainstorming for the Microsite idea
Duration: 4 Hours
Tools Used:  Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Google SERP, MindTools

The first step is to brainstorm all possible suggestions for the new Microsite idea. In this process, any concerns about staying organized should be suspended. The goal is to pour all thoughts outside without worrying about whether they make sense or how they fit together.

The time consumed in the brainstorming process is consumed scientifically in methods such as Mind Mapping, Venn diagramming, competition observation, Searching, focus groups, and using Mind Tools

  

Step 2: Breaking Down the Ideas:

Duration: 2 hours
Tools Used:  Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Google SERP, SEMRush

After collecting no less than 10 applicable ideas from brainstorming, comes the next step of expanding the list of ideas to a list of keywords. After that, filtering them all based on the following factors:

1. Keywords Research for Search Traffic Volume both globally and locally
2. Competition analysis: if there are similar sites offering the same Value Proposition or dominating specific short-tail keywords  
3. Content Resources Research in terms of availability and update rate
4. Relevancy to the main Site’s industry: It might be a good idea but has nothing to do with the official website. After all the purpose of the Microsite is to drive traffic to the main website so It should be indirectly related to it.  
5. Feasibility: the idea should not have specific preparations or expensive investments or resources and can be easily executed by designers, developers, and content curators.

 After filling the above requirements and filtering the suggested ideas we will come up with 2 outcomes:

1. The main Idea of the Website
2. The target Audience

Step 3: Domain Name Selection

 Duration: 1 hour
Tools used: Name Station, Google AdWords Keyword Tool, NameChk, GoDaddy  

The Domain name is the Microsite’s image. So it needs a lot of effort trying to find the most appropriate and relevant domain name. Also, the selected domain name will define the name of the Microsite and consequently its logo and design.  

The Process will depend mainly on Keywords search volume and Domain Names Availability.

Step 4: Design

Duration:  
Tools Needed:

The Design Should be simple and expressing the main purpose of the Microsite putting in mind the target audience and the industry of the main website.

The development should also incorporate Interlinking strategy and references to similar topics based on Keywords

Step 5: Content Development Strategy

Duration:
Tools Needed:

A team of Copywriters (Content Curators) should be assigned and have a portion of their time dedicated for updating the content of the Microsite through creating or curating editorials. Update rate should also be defined based on available resources and available content online.

The Microsite Strategy should provide examples of Content Topics to give everybody involved in the process with a clear vision of what the new site will be about.  

Keywords ideas with traffic volume should also be added to help the writers create tehri content with SEO in mind to keep in-page KeyWords density and to select topics with a high serch volume and low competition.

Step 6: Maintenance and Running

Duration:
Tools Needed:

1. Frequent SEO audit
2. Keywords Rank Tracker
3. Impact on the main (official) website
4. Social Media integration and optimization. 

Best Tool for Adwords Audit: WordStream Videos

WordStream's AdWords Performance Grader

 

 Keyword Management - Internet Marketing, Quality Score, Google AdWords, Web Analytics

 

 WordStream PPC Advisor

 

Advanced Free and Paid PPC Tools for Adwords

WordStream’s Google AdWords Performance Grader

WordStream's Google AdWords Performance Grader is a free AdWords tool to help AdWords advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing compared to PPC best practices. The AdWords Performance Grader uses a proprietary grading algorithm based on more than 60 different factors, including ad spend data, Quality Score, ranking, impressions and other variables.

Certified Knowledge REPORT ANALYZER

The Report Analyzer allows you to easily find where you are making and losing money. Stop wasting time in Excel, this tool will do much of the work for you.

Certified Knowledge QUALITY SCORE ANALYZER

Determine exactly where you need Quality Score help. We'll give you an ordered list (and help) of where you need to improve your Quality Scores.

Certified Knowledge MASS AD COPY CREATOR

Easily create hundreds of ad copies across many ad groups. Perfect for creating ads for testing purposes or just building (or rebuilding) an account.

Certified Knowledge KEYWORD MIXER

The tool is perfect for when you want to expand your keyword list; especially using long tail methods. Easily create thousands of keywords.

Certified Knowledge CONFIDENCE CALCULATOR

This tool will let you compare tests against the control group and let you know if any of your tests have reached statistical significance.

Certified Knowledge GEOGRAPHIC KEYWORD FINDER

Get a list of the major geographic keywords available for your area. Find zip codes, cities, metros, counties, and more. Currently available on for the United States.

Certified Knowledge BROKEN LINK FINDER

Use this tool to make sure your URLs work.

Certified Knowledge SERVER HEADER CHECKER

This tool will tell you the server status of any URL. Check to see if you are using redirects, have error pages, or see other server information.

UberSuggest Keywords Suggestions Tool:

A great tool that makes good use of Google Suggest and other suggest services.

QueryMiner Free Negative Keyword Tool

Here is what they say: Most AdWords accounts have anywhere from 2%-35% of their budgets being wasted on irrelevant search queries.  Get your FREE analysis and see if queryminer is right for you.  It's not unusual for the free negative keywords we give you to easily cover the cost of your queryminer subscription.

Ultimate Guide to Microsites Strategy Creation

There are lots of WordPress guides around, teaching you more than you’ll ever need to know.
But what if you don’t want to become a web developer?
What if you just want to build a website and get it out there?
This step-by-step guide takes the guesswork out, so you'll be up and running in no time.

Click image to open interactive version.

The guide to social media success

How to use the guide:

1) Click here 
2) Go to 'Start'
3) Move through each of the questions and follow the 'yes' or 'no' arrows as appropriate
4) Want to learn more about a particular topic? The bullet points are links to resources. Simply click on whatever takes your fancy and the resource will open in a new tab.

If you've any thoughts or feedback on the step by step guide we'd love to hear them - do let us know via the comments.

* Simply Business commissioned the UK SME Trends survey in October 2011. 374 UK SMEs took part.

.

Click image to open interactive version.

Google AdWords Guide for Small Businesses

Source: Simply Business

The Guide to Google Analytics

Click image to open interactive version.

The First Online Banner Ad

The pioneer of online advertising was Prodigy, a company owned by IBM and Sears at the time. Prodigy used online advertising first to promote Sears products in the 1980s, and then other advertisers, including AOL, one of Prodigy's direct competitors. Prodigy was unable to capitalize on any of its first mover advantage in online advertising. (From Wikipedia)

The first clickable web ad (which later came to be known by the term "banner ad") was sold by Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993 to Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe, a now defunct law firm with a Silicon Valley office. GNN was the first commercially supported web publication and one of the very first commercial web sites ever.

HotWired was the first web site to sell banner ads in large quantities to a wide range of major corporate advertisers. Andrew Anker was HotWired's first CEO. Rick Boyce, a former media buyer with San Francisco advertising agency Hal Riney & Partners, spearheaded the sales effort for the company.

 HotWired coined the term "banner ad" and was the first company to provide click through rate reports to its customers.

The first web banner sold by HotWired was paid for by AT&T Corp. and was put online on October 27, 1994.

Another source also credits Hotwired and October 1994, but has Coors' "Zima" campaign as the first web banner.

In May 1994, Ken McCarthy mentored Boyce in his transition from traditional to online advertising and first introduced the concept of a clickable/trackable ad. 

He stated that he believed that only a direct response model—in which the return on investment of individual ads was measured—would prove sustainable over the long run for online advertising. In spite of this prediction, banner ads were valued and sold based on the number of impressions they generated.

The first central ad server was released in July 1995 by Focalink Communications, which enabled the management, targeting, and tracking of online ads. A local ad server quickly followed from NetGravity in January 1996.

 The technology innovation of the ad server, together with the sale of online ads on an impression basis, fueled a dramatic rise in the proliferation of web advertising and provided the economic foundation for the web industry from the period of 1994 to 2000.

The new online advertising model that emerged in the early years of the 21st century, introduced by GoTo.com (later Overture, then Yahoo! and mass marketed by Google's AdWords program), relies heavily on tracking ad response rather than impressions.

SEO Services Proposal (Presentation) Your Company Can Offer to its clients?

Here is a Professional SEO Services proposal I created. You can use it and tailored it to your objectives and use it as a sales material or SEO Proposal for your clients.

Microsites or Microblogs Strategies

Microsites or weblets are a web page or cluster of pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. Microsites may be used for purely commercial purposes to create in-depth information about a particular product, service or as editorial support towards a specific product, such as describing a new technology.”Directories Submissions

Microblogs are blogs that target a specific theme and have a frequently updated content on it that is related to the main website. This microblog is not intended to be related to the main website but to mention it in SEO links from time to time as well as acting as a managed placement to advertise the main site on.

Sitemap creation

Sitemaps is way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. By creating and submitting Sitemaps to search engines, you are more likely to get better freshness and coverage in search engines as well as indexing your pages in a comprehensive manner. Most webmasters create a site map once and forget it. However, a successful website should always have a fresh content and new pages added from time to time. Here we come to create these updated site maps to submit to your website or we can submit it for you regularly so you do not have to worry about it anymore.

Traffic monitoring and reporting

Where does most of your traffic come from? What is the percentage of your organic traffic compared to your paid listings? Who are your audience? Which countries and cities drive more traffic to you? What is the percentage of the traffic you have that are coming from smart phones or tablets? All these questions and a lot more will be tackled and answered in a periodically report with recommendations on how to use such valuable information to increase your traffic and conversions for example by optimizing your site (or special pages) for specific platforms, or by increasing your presence in specific cities, etc.

Competition tracking

Competition plays an important role in your online success. So understanding your competitors techniques and strategies will definitely gives you a lot of ideas an opportunities. You need to know what keywords your competitors are using and targeting, where their traffic come from, which websites are enriching them with inbound links, and many more valuable information that we will prepare and send you on regular basis.

Brand monitoring (Reputation Tracking)

Brand monitoring is an essential task for any company. By tracking what people are saying about your brand, and how often they’re saying it, you can ensure the right message is getting out there. Your brand (or the owner himself) may be mentioned in the news, or in a press release, or any online entry. Whether this mention is positive or negative, it is your right to know if somebody is talking about you, using your name, or published a feedback or review about it, and where and when was that mention.

Social Media Monitoring

With Social monitoring tools, we will search different type of online content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services and track mentions of your brand across all of these areas. The results are aggregated from the top social media sources, such as Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more.

Indexing and crawling new pages

For a new page to be visible to search engines, they need to crawl your website from time to time and index new pages. This is a process that may take a long time if not managed by professionals.

Performance Tracking

Tracking your website performance is an essential always-on task. You need to be aware of many factors happening on your website all the time. How many vistors visit you, where do they come from? Which articles have more traffic? Which pages convert more than the others? What are the actual values of specific pages? Bounce and exit rates, time on site, and many other metrics that we will summarize to you and provide you with one report having all the data you need without dedicating time, effort, and money to understand your site’s performance. 

Industry-related Keywords Trends and insights

Search engines are all about keywords. And a strategic keyword is that that has a traffic volume related to your industry, interested in your business, and is missed by your competitors. It is our job to find these trendy and strategic keywords and provide you with a list every period of time with suggestions and ideas to write about or implement in your website.

Fixing Google’s Penguin and Panda Penalties or other negative SEO

Google Penguin is a code name for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Before Penguin, Google released a series of algorithm updates called Panda with the first appearing in February 2011. Panda aimed at downranking websites that provided poor user experience. The algorithm follows the logic by which Google’s human quality raters determine a website’s quality. In January 2012, so-called page layout algorithm update was released, which targeted websites with little content above the fold. These algorithms have harmed many websites and are still.

By working on your website we will make sure it will not be penalized and if it was already harmed, we will fix what has been broken.

Content Suggestions

In SEO, there is a famous saying that says; content is the King. However, content should be created with SEO in mind to know exactly what people are interested in and searching for, and more important to select trending topics with less competition to rank higher on SERPs.  

Microformats and rich snippets suggestions

Microformats (AKA rich snippets or Schema) are semantic markups or structured data that helps Google understand the content on your site, which can be used to display rich snippets in search results. So if the nature of your site’s content is apparels, a user could classify results by color, price, size, etc. or if it is a recipes website, the search engine can let users search by ingredients, cooking duration, or even the name of the cook. Microformats is now considered a very important trend on search engines and is highly recommended on all types of websites

Local Places Optimization

If your business or company is doing a Local Business, We will list your website on the Local Map & Places listings on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook.

Free Advertising Coupons Adwords Bing

Free Advertising Coupons for Google Adwords, Microsoft's Bing, and Yahoo Search

Google AdWords: 

Official Coupons Page for Adwords 

http://www.google.com/ads/adwords-coupon.html 

• get a free $75 AdWords coupon here (or here or here or here or here or here orhere) ... many options linked because some of their coupon offers expire over time & we update this page periodically
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Microsoft AdCenter: for Bing and Yahoo! Search 

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Top CPCs on Adwords Google (Most expensive Keywords)

Source: wordpress 

What to Do if your campaign is targeting these niche expensive keywords? 

1- Enhance Quality Score with More relevant ads to landing pages
2- Create Long-Tail-Keywords that has low competition and high search volume 


How to Benefit from that and have your share from Google?

By Targeting these keywords in your Adsense 
:) Smart huh? 

Subdomains or Subfolders? which is better for SEO

A colleague of mine asked me yesterday which is better to have her company's blog as a subdomain entry or as a subfolder.

i.e. to be "Blog.company.com (Subdomain)
or "www.company.com/blog" (Subfolder) 

The first thing that may pop up to your mind is to have them both for maximizing direct traffic to either of the pages. Then you will think of duplication issues and will consider Canonicalization (having one URL for duplicate content). Google is already doing that if you noticed (webmasters.google.com AND analytics.google.com) automatically redirects to subfolders www.google.com/webmasters AND www.google.com/analytics. The same happens for adwords website but in an opposite manner.



But what are the Search engines opinion about Domains and folders? 

Search engines have metrics that they apply to pages, such as PageRank, and metrics they apply to subdomains and root domains (including things like TrustRank, various quality scores, domain level link metrics like Domain mozRank, etc.). 

Individual pages benefit from being on powerful subdomains & root domains. This is why if someone copies your personal blog post on the best way to microwave burritos into Wikipedia, that page will rank far better than yours, even with the exact same content (ignoring the duplicate content issues).

Subdomains DO NOT always inherit all of the positive metrics and ranking ability of other subdomains on a given root domain.

Some subdomains GET NO BENEFIT from the root domain they're on. These include sites like Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com, Typepad.com, and many others where anyone can create their own subdomain to begin publishing.

Subfolders DO appear to receive all the benefits of the subdomain they're on and content/pages behave remarkably similarly no matter what subfolder under a given subdomain they're put in.

Good internal and cross linking CAN HELP to give share the positive metrics from one subdomain to another (but not always and not perfectly).

For these reasons, if you're seeking to maximize your ranking ability for a given piece of content, you should, most of the time, keep it on 1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). 

Want to link your blog?  or add a Press Release? 

Simply put in in a subfolder like that 

company.com/blog  

But when to use When to Use a Subdomain for SEO purposes? 

Subdomains can sometimes make sense when:

• You already have two pages from your main domain ranking for a particular search query (and are trying to saturate the search results with your listings). This works because Google will show a maximum of two URLs on a given search results pages from a given subdomain, but may show more from a given root domain if there are multiple subdomains. 
• You have a particular keyword you want to rank for that you're using in the subdomain (or a combination keyword phrase that the subdomain + root domain tie together perfectly) and you're doing specific targeting with the tactic of letting the copy/paste of the URL serve as ideal anchor text. For example, if I owned watch-reviews.com and used subdomains for specific brands like rolex.watch-reviews.com knowing that many people would link using the subdomain URL and give my page that perfect anchor text.
• You already have a subdomain that's working well, ranking well and would be a pain to move. In the past, we've done some work to redirect subdomains back to subfolders on a root domain and seen considerable rises in traffic & rankings, but this is almost universally for root domains with large numbers of subdomains. If you just have 1-5 subdomains and they're performing well, it's not a huge concern (though it might warrant testing a redirect on one just to see).

The top 10 free PPC tools for SEM Paid Advertising

Although it may look simple to run a PPC campaign on Google Adwords, Microsoft Bing, or even Facebook, it is actually a more complicated task than it may look. (and it is not even enough to be certified by Google or Microsoft as an advertising professional) 

A professional SEM specialist is a person who thinks PPC, and knows how to use the right PPC tools. 

In fact, if you search you will find numerous PPC tools, some are free, some are not. 

Hereunder are the top 10 free PPC tools

1. Google: There are 11 resources included in it.  

• Google Ad Words Editor – This is a great time saver for building and setting up huge campaigns.
• Google Website Optimizer – This tool allows you to test and optimize site content and design.
• Google Analytics – Provides much of what an expensive analytics package can for free.
• Google Insights for Search – A great keyword tool for determining seasonality and trends.
• Google Mobile Ad Preview Tool – Offers a quick way to see your ads on mobile devices.
• Other Google tools include: Google traffic estimator, Google Alerts, Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, Google URL Builder and most recently the competitive tools through the Ad Words dashboard.

2. Keyword Map: A keyword generation tool. It displays the results visually and showcase areas of possible expansion.

3. Ad Words Wrapper: This is a great tool for creating match types.

4. Compete: Provides competitive intelligence for keywords and ad copy. This is a great tool to identify any keyword gaps you might have with your competitors.  

5. MSN Ad Lab: A full range of tools ranging from audience intelligence to keyword research. I also recommend adding the free Excel plug in.

6. Keyword Mixer: A quick way to build out a long-tail keyword list.

7. Niche Keyword Finder: This is a great resource to ensure your bases are covered with your keyword portfolio. This often picks up themes that would normally go unnoticed.

8. Typo Generator: This tool quickly produces common misspellings and typos of the desired search term.

9. Geo Keyword List Generator: This is a great tool for building out geo modified keyword list. Just add a zip code and radius and this tool will pull in all cities, zip codes and abbreviations of relevant geo in that area.

10. Spyfu: Spyfu provides competitive intelligence for keywords and ad copy. This is a great tool to identify any keyword gaps you might have with your competitors. There is a pro version, but the free version gives you the big picture overview.

resource: The-top-10-free-ppc-tools