When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, there are many things that you can optimize for, one of which includes ROI or Return on Investment. As an agency, we come across clients whose main goal is to optimize for such. So what are some of the ways you can go about this?
Planning
First, you’ll want to create an ROI Strategy. The main things to do in creating one are as follows:
- Get a definition of what the advertiser’s ROI goal is
You can’t really start strategizing for something unless you know what it is.
- Get existing ROI data from the advertiser or an existing account
You have to benchmark it against something.
- Review the account
Take a look over the account and identify any problem areas
- Plan a Strategy and Optimize
Read the rest of this entry »
Landing pages are often the neglected parts of an online advertising campaign, but are an essential part of the conversion process. In fact, it is arguable that the landing page could be the most important element in helping conversion rates because no matter how good the outbound campaign is, once a user lands on the page, if there is a disconnect or if they do not find the sought after information in a timely manner, they are likely to abandon the process.
There are many factors to consider when designing a landing page. Some of them include:
1. Headline
This is the most important factor to a landing page. The headline is the first thing a viewer sees when coming to the landing page. As such, it needs to do the following in a concise manner:
- Tell the user that they are either at the right or wrong place
- If it is the right place, compel the user to continue the process
Try to keep the headline short, concise, and to the point, while at the same time, informative enough to keep the user within the funnel. Using keywords within the headline can help in both cases.
2. Call to Action
The Call to Action is anything on the landing page that tells the user to take action. Call to Actions should be obvious (if something looks clickable, it should be clickable) and visible above the fold and below the fold. The phrase used within the Call to Action should be active and concise.
Example: instead of “more info”, use, “get a free consultation today!”
It is also important to keep the number of Call to Actions to a minimum. If there are too many Call to Actions, it may become confusing for the user.
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve touched upon How to Optimize a Blog for Search Engines before, but that was mainly general information. There are specifics that can be done if you run a blog in various CMS or blog software, in this case, specifically, WordPress. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging software available. It’s open-source and acts as a relatively robust CMS.
One of the key ways to optimize WordPress is a built-in feature referred to as permalinks. Permalinks is what WordPress generates as the permanent URL for your blog posts. By default, it’s set to be a number, which is based on the id of the post and when it is created. To set your permalinks to something more SEO-friendly, do the following:
Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction:
For the last few years, most developers and site designers have been aware of the increased risk of using complex URLs. A complex URL tends to look something like:
http://www.somewebsite.com/pages/search.asp?id=21f&c=9clr&y=true.
This URL is a problem for both search engine spiders and, in some cases, the user of the site . Complex, non-user friendly URLs, also known as dirty URLs, are very common throughout the internet. Dirty URLs pose an array of problems. The most common problems with dirty URLs are:
- they are hard to remember
- they are not SEO friendly
- they can be a security risk
- they can just be a problem for ease of usability
Read the rest of this entry »
Why should someone who “blogs” worry about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? One of the most common myths about utilizing SEO in blog postings is that the text will appear to be written more for automated engines rather than for human beings. While this is possible, the proper use of SEO will help to increase readership by letting you reach more people, as well as improve your writing technique by requiring more creative ways to work with text.
Off-Site Techniques for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Off-Site techniques, also known as off page factors, are SEO techniques based on factors outside of your website that have a strong effect on search engines rankings. It’s good to know what these factors are, even if only to be aware of their effect, as it is possible to perform some simple action based on these factors that may push a website/blog up in the rankings.
Read the rest of this entry »
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines have come a long way in terms of indexing duplicate content. Although detected duplicate content doesn’t necessarily penalize your site in terms of how the search engines perceive the content, it can penalize your site by dividing users who access your site. Search engines will most likely still index your duplicate content, and thus, when a search is termed up, it could be directed towards any version of the duplicate content.
There are several ways of fixing duplicate content issues. We’ll create a scenario to determine how to fix it.
Read the rest of this entry »
How to Optimize a Blog in Blogger for Search Engines (Blogger SEO 101)
We’ve covered the general aspects of How to Optimize a Blog for Search Engines before, but this time, we will be focusing on how to optimize a blog within Blogger. Blogger is a blogging service owned by Google and publishes most of the blogs via subdomains of blogspot.com. Blogger also allows for other domains by using Custom URLs.
In regards to search engine optimization (SEO) for Blogger, there are two modifications to the HTML mark-up of the main template that can be done to optimize all posts. They are:
- Add a Meta tag for the content writer’s name.
- Add Meta tags for as many SEO keywords as you want to add.
Read the rest of this entry »
