Google have this week announced the BETA release of their new tool, ACE.  The ‘Adwords Campaign Experiments’ tool allows advertisers to compare the effectiveness of campaign changes in real-time.

This is great news for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers.  Currently the drill is to make a change, test it for a set period of time and then look at the post test analysis.  This has inherent problems, firstly a PPC auction is dynamic, do on any given day at and given time the auction looks different.  Advertisers run out of budget, use automated bidding tools and optimise to position amongst other things.  So, the auction landscape is never static making any test less than ideal – if nothing ever changed in the search landscape then there wouldn’t be such a problem.

So what does Googles new ACE tool do?  Simple, it allows you to do an A/B test, this allows you to test two different criteria simultaneously to see which one benefits your campaign the most.  So an example might be that you’re bidding on ‘iphone 4′, your registrations are consistent and CPA is on target but you want to see what happens if you reduce your CPC by 50%.  ACE can help you here, you can test the two criteria side by side and then measure the effectiveness of each, i.e. did volume remain consistent but your CPA fell by half or did it simply not meet either of your KPI targets.  Ultimately this new tool will help eliminate some of the guess work of making changes and enable us to accurately report the differences.

ACE will rotate the two variables evenly over time to ensure they both get equal exposure.  For more information you can visit Googles Ad Innovations site.  Currently this is limited to a US beta only, as it always is, however it’s certainly going to provide a good test bed when it does arrive in the UK.

There is one potential problem I can see agencies having however and that is tracking.  If you’re testing X vs Y to see what happens to CPA when your CPC’s are decreased then you will likely only be able to see conversions if you are using Google conversion tracking.  Either that or you’ll need to create a work around in your tracking tool of choice, i.e. dummy test links etc – this will be one to work on when we see how it works in principle.

Watch Googles demo:

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In April this year I attended Internet World 2010.  This was thoroughly worthwhile with some excellent seminars given by some of the leading experts in their fields.  Yes, there was a lot of teaching to suck eggs but then there were many presenters who gave an insight into their own methodologies whether thats in Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media or Affiliate Marketing.

As hard as you try to make notes and invariably miss all the good stuff in the process, its hard to keep on top of things – no worries, all the seminars are up online for you to watch.  If like me you had to try and decide which ones to go to in sacrifice of another then this is great news, I can catch up on the others.  You do need to register to view but its free and very quick.

• Advertising, Affiliate and Search Seminars
• Social Networking, Usability, Design & Build
• Ecommerce
• Email, Mobile & Analytics Theatre

There are other seminars up on the site, including hosting, cms and keynotes.

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Another great infographic based on YouTube facts and figures since birth.  Thanks to Vojtech (@Bobby_D_) for tweeting this and thanks to website monitoring for compiling this graphic.

This YouTube infographic show stats such as Video Stats, top channels, history and milestones…

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So, either im miles behind the times or this is a relatively recent development from Google.  Gig listings in the search results when you search for a specific band.  I’ve just been out and bought a couple of CD’s on my lunch break, one of which being the Foals.  Having sat at my laptop and started listening to the album I thought I’d have a quick look to see if there were any gigs coming up in London, to my surprise I saw that Google has been inserting deep links into dates and venues for gigs, have a look at the screenshot I took:

Now, I’ve obviously seen numerous examples of universal search for various different queries, but I’ve never seen it appear on gig tickets and this is something I look for pretty frequently.  Either im miles behind the times and just overlooked this or its a recent feature in the Google SERPS.  I love it, just making my search process quicker still, deep linking me straight into the page for that specific date and venue.  There are however a couple of links that didn’t work, i.e. they just took me to the homepage and im assuming that’s where the site owners aren’t aware of this and are moving content in their site and Google isn’t indexing it.

Nice feature all the same, I look forward to seeing this more often.

Anyone else seen this, interested to hear from anyone who’s site has actually been effected by this and if you’ve done anything specifically to modify these links?  Does it show in webmasters?

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I often end up having an awkward and lengthy conversation with friends about what I do, sometimes although it sounds simple to me it’s usually hard to convey to the less technically minded.  Yesterday I had this exact question from an old uni friend who I hadn’t seen for years.  Following my simple explanation of ‘you know Google (and others), well….’ he asked how I got into it and how I learnt what I know today.

For me the learning process started with building sites when I was at school doing my GCSE’s/A-levels.  I was always fascinated with the internet and spent most of my evenings after school jamming my parents phone line with our delightfully slow 56k modem, very much to their frustration. I started to build websites with a friend off the back of a management consultancy that his father owned, it worked a treat and we were making quite a lot for our age.  During this process I started to learn the basics of SEO by reading and implementing.  Bear in mind that these were the days when people jammed the meta tags full of keywords, it was a tough time and for me not as rewarding as it it these days.  At this point it was far more about ranking than it is today, todays model for me is more about the ROI of all traffic.

At university I studied Computer Science and again this was fueled by my interest for building things and understanding how programs and systems worked.

After university I fell into a role as a PPC specialist for a media agency in London.  I really enjoyed the role and still enjoy working with PPC, but I hankered after SEO, that seemed like more of a challenge to me.  I learnt a lot at this agency and the lure of affiliates was enough to get me building my own sites.  These sites were the real fuel for my SEO learning.  I didn’t want to pay for adwords to drive traffic to my sites, I wanted it all for free.  Now, this isn’t to say that PPC isn’t/hasn’t been useful, because it has, I just wanted the challenge.

So how did I learn?  By experimenting.  This has to be my best advice, build a site and test what you read, there is no better experience.  You can read a LOT of great material online and that will give you a fantastic learning experience but until you build a site and try it then you don’t have the experience of it first hand.  Don’t go and build a website about ‘credit cards’, that’s not my point, or at least not unless you’re extremely ambitious, it will almost certainly be demoralizing.  Pick a niche area to target, something that doesn’t have millions of sites ranking for the key terms, then get started – test and learn.

Clearly you need to read a lot online/offline to help you get started and luckily there is a ton of content online.  But, its heavily diluted, so how do you find the best of the best?  Simple, try these guys, they all run up to date seo blogs:

Michael Gray

SEOmoz

Aaron Wall of SEO Book

SEO is one of those things where you need to keep on top of the latest developments, these guys will help you do that.  I could list 20 blogs that all have valuable content but im sure you’ll start to come across these as you start exploring.

SEOmoz and SEO Book both have a subscription service which you can sign up to and get a wealth of tools and assistance in return.  Don’t be put off by a paid subscription, it’s worth it.  The best SEO’s from around the world converge in these places and they share lots of very valuable information.  Why wouldn’t you want to talk and collaborate with these guys?

Start going to conferences if you get a chance.  There are numerous conferences around the world that talk about internet marketing and they usually have some of the best speakers from the best agencies, learn from them.  Learning from other peoples mistakes will help you to progress faster.

You could buy a book, but personally I find they can be out of date pretty quick, however they give a great grounding of the basics.  The Art of SEO is one book I can recommend and written in late 2009 if I remember correctly, worth a read for the beginner and experience SEO alike.  You learn something new everyday…

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I often get asked about the easiest ways to start building links to your website.  This is a fundamental aspect of search engine optimisation and one that should never be underestimated, it’s key for you to start ranking highly on your targeted keywords.

Often I see people build websites, get excited, and then find out that when they install Google analytics they’re getting no traffic.  This is pretty obvious really, without people knowing about your site then they’re not going to link to it nor is Google likely to index/rank much of the content.

Link building is important to build your rankings in the search engines but it’s also important that you don’t get carried away too quickly.  We should always build links naturally, that’s to say that 22k new backlinks in a month is clearly not natural.  A small trickle of backlinks is what you want, slowly but surely.  It is easy to get carried away when you find potential linking partners and sign 50 up in the first day, just go steady and spread them out – it’s worth the wait in the long run.

So what are the Top 10 link building strategies?Friends, Your Own Sites and Family Members

Start by looking in your own back yard, you know these people already and most likely they all have a site or blog of some sort – utilise it.  Give them a call or drop them an email and request a link.  It couldn’t be simpler than that.  If you can get these links then it’s going to make your life a lot easier in the long run, these will be the easiest links to obtain.  If you have your own sites then link from these also.  Backlinks in the long run should ideally come from similar interest based content, i.e. if your site is about SEO then ideally links from SEO content are more worth while, as a general rule of thumb, but a few links to get you going is a good start.

Add a blog to your site

It’s a fact that Google loves a blog.  Google loves fresh content over sites that can stay stagnant for some time.  Setting up a blog is a relatively simple affair and can be done by a complete beginner in a matter of minutes.  Adding a blog to your domain is a great way to start adding fresh content to your site, make sure you internally link to relevant pages on your site though, this is also very important in Googles eyes, it helps the spider understand how two pages can be related.

A blog is also a great way for you to interact with your customers if you have a consumer facing product.  Ask them questions, get them to interact with your brand.

Submit your site to local and industry specific directories

It’s important that you find directories relevant to your industry, don’t just go crazy and start listing yourself in every directory you come across, some could be deemed of low quality by Google.  Fill out all of the information required correctly and accurately.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can be beneficial to your rankings but also detriment if you let your linking profile look a bit spammy.  For example if I only ever bookmark my own/clients sites and no one else ranks those sites it starts to look a bit artificial.  So, when you start bookmarking sites also bookmark those that you generally like anyway like BBC news, sky news etc, make it look like you’re using it for your own benefit.

Bookmark your blog posts, things related to your website and anything else that’s of interest.

Article Submission

This is an excellent way of getting back links.  They key here is to submit your articles to good article directories such as ezinearticles, GoArticles and Article City.  The more unique and relevant your article the better.  Don’t just re-write something you’ve read, make it unique.  If you have something really unique to offer such as a white paper that you’ve written on your industry then that’s even better, write it up in an article.  If you’ve filled out your bio/author properties fully then you will start getting backlinks based on the quality of your submission.

Submit a press release

This is a relatively difficult way of getting backlinks, not because your average Joe can’t submit and article, it just has to be of a very high standard to get accepted and distributed.  You can often employ someone for a nominal fee to write a press release for you, make the most of this and the chances of your submission being entered are much greater.

Make a hub page or Squidoo lens

Another great way of generating not only backlinks but traffic also is to build a Squidoo Lens or a Hub Page.  These are free and easy ways of generating a new access channel to your website.

You simply need to write 500 words or so about your topic of choice and then you can add pretty much anything, including videos, pictures, polls and widgets.  Make the pages interactive so that users keep coming back, and make sure you provide value to them.

Local News

Become your local newspapers first point of contact on your chosen topic.  Befriend them and try and build a relationship to help build on your brand.  It’s not the easiest way to get a backlink but getting those conversations started is relatively simple.

Local Organisations and Non profit Charities

This is really two in one, sorry about that.  The same principle applies to both though.  There will be lots of non profit organisations in your local area that need help from experts in their field.  If you’re a web designer for example, then are you able to offer your services for free and then request a link back from their website?  If you’re giving your services away for free than a backlink should be no problem what so ever – especially if you built the website!

So there are a few ways to get your website off the ground with regards to building backlinks.  Remember go slow, don’t start building all these links in the first day/week/month.  Unfortunately building backlinks is a long process that takes time and can very easily be overlooked.  One thing you do need to remember is that your competitors will also be building links (or they should be) so you need to be making progress with your SEO also.  Don’t go for cheap low quality backlinks, 30 high quality links are worth a lot more than 200 poor links.

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You need to put a lot of work into designing a website and it needs to be designed and programmed correctly for it to benefit your business.  To design and create a good website you need to have knowledge of SEO and what is/isn’t going to work in a website design build.  It can be difficult to design a site that is not only going to be appealing to your users visually but also readable to a search engine spider.  The design needs to make it easy for the user to find what they’re looking, this is a fundamental in SEO, a flatter navigation structure is much more useful to the user and search engine spiders than one that just gets deeper and deeper.

So what are the fundamentals in creating an SEO friendly website?

• Create your site using a simple design.  Creating a website is great, it’s a blank canvas that allows you to build something visually acceptable to your users.  But, it needs to be functional from an SEO point of view.  Using AJAX for example, the spiders have a tough time reading this so it’s best avoided where possible, same goes for flash.  It’s important to make sure that you have the right amount of content relevant to your subject matter, nice graphics are lovely to look at but provide little in the way of optimisation benefit.   It’s important to focus on the website and how it is working before you start to spend too much time making it look pretty, you can add these aesthetic elements at a later date.

• Navigation is Key.  Navigation is very important for users, its their only way of navigating your site to find what they need.  If your navigation is poor then you’re just losing customers, simple as that.  Titles and buttons should be easy to read and not blend in too much with the rest of the page.  It sounds obvious but label buttons with a clear message as to where the user is going to end up when they click on it.  Some people try and cram as much info as possible on one page, this isn’t necessarily correct, you should have a clear layout which makes the information easily accesible.

• Spread your content out.  If you have a lot of content on your site then its better to create more pages than to dump it all on a few pages.  That way its far more targeted than if it were in silo with lots of other content.  Try to think of your website as an educational book made up of lots of components.   If you want to learn something you will find that subject in the index of the book and skip straight to it, you don’t just want to read the entire book to find that one piece of information.  Your website should accept the same principles.  If you need to expand then just do so, the benefits to SEO are rewarding.  Likewise when relating to inbound links, the more spread out your content is, the more those inbound links will count towards that content.  For example, if I were to write a article about indian curries but put it all on the same page then an inbound link about a ‘jalfrezi’ is going to get lost.  If however I write a separate article about ‘jalfrezi curries’ and link internally from curries, then an inbound link ‘jalfrezis’ to ‘jalfrezi curries’ is going to carry far more weight to that page in the eyes of the engine spiders.

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Infographics are an excellent way of visually describing a concept which otherwise can be quite difficult to grasp.  These can be especially useful when describing SEO concepts.

These SEO infographics are very useful for trying to describe some of the fundamentals of search engine optimisation.

1. SEO Spider Trap Infographic

2. Google Pagerank Infographic

3. SEO Checklist Infographic

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I went to Internet World 2010 yesterday and spent the day listening to various SEO practitioners.  There were some pretty obvious speeches about what SEO was and how to make the most out of your optimisation strategies but then there were some about more detailed strategies.

One speech I liked in particular was by Rahmon Coupe, CEO of YourAmigo (they could do with a site revamp, urgh).  The talk was about their strategies in the SEO marketplace and how they differ from other SEO services.  Now, im not entirely sure that they differ that greatly from other agencies apart from some of the AI tools they said they were using.  One thing that Rahmon was talking about that should be at the top of everyones agenda should be optimising for the longtail keyword.  A lot of people can get caught up in the optimisation of the pure generic such as ‘insurance’ and ‘credit card’ for example.  This is all very well if that’s your target market but it only makes up a relatively small proportion of your overall site traffic when looking at all keywords.

I spent a while thinking about some of the points made during the talk and although I agree its important for established sites to optimise their longtail terms I feel that it’s more important for new sites entering the market place.

A new site has lots to compete with, current competition will most likely have built up over many years building good domain authority, lots of content and hundreds if not thousands of inbound links.  How do you compete with this?  The short answer is with great difficulty.  If you were to try and beat these competitors straight out of the traps then you will most likely fail.  There is arguably no point in sitting on page two or three of Google, the traffic is going to be minimal at best, so what do you do?  You optimise for the long tail keywords straight from the start.  Your competitors won’t see you coming.

The longtail keyword is easier to rank for, period.  If you’re trying to rank for ‘digital camera’ from day one then you’re likely to struggle, a lot.  But, if you optimise for ‘canon ixus200 digital camera’ then you’ll have better luck at ranking highly, this is also a far more purchase orientated keyword, the user is ready to potentially purchase at this stage.  If you can start building revenue from these terms then you can start to re-invest that in your more generic terms and the strategy that surrounds that.

The best way to do this is using a well structured and optimised site.  Make sure that the internal link structure is sound and utilising some of the mid to low tier keywords in the anchor text.  Create deeper pages, these are great for you to build your content on, make sure you’re using variations of these longtails to optimise for as many iterations as possible.

Look at this table I’ve knocked up below, it shows that on page optimisation for longtail keywords is very important and makes up the biggest proportion of ranking importance.  For a competitive keyword 5% is optimisation compared with 50% for the longtail, that’s quite a substantial difference and an area you can now see as an opportunity.

But what about the competitive keywords?  You want to rank well for those too right?  Well you will, that’s the good news.  When you start ranking for the longtail terms you will be building authority with Google and gaining inbound links as you go, then when you can invest in the generic term optimisation you will have the other components required to start ranking highly.

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Sometimes its hard understanding what makes a good landing page and often it can take many iterations of an optimisation to really reap the rewards that you’re looking for.  Not every optimisation will get the desired effect and that’s why you should always try many different versions until you’ve really found the optimal solution.  Where do you start, well the Conversion Rate Experts released an excellent live website guide based on real optimisations made to the SEOmoz website to help sell their services. This is great stuff – read and learn.

Read Million Dollar Landing page for some excellent useable tips!

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