Good news today for those of you who’d like to research what keywords to optimize your website for. The industry’s most popular keyword research tool, Wordtracker, is now offering a free version of their service.
Get started here.
[via SEOBook]
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Advertising your small business on search engines has always been much more complicated then placing an ad in your local yellow pages. Yahoo however is hoping to change that with their recently announced product called Local Featured Listings.
A Featured Listing is a top-of-page listing that is available at a flat, monthly rate starting at $29.95/month, depending on the business category and location. (A bottom-of-page listing is also available at a discount.) These limited advertising slots are available on a first come, first serve basis.
Here’s an example of what the listings look like. Notice the highlighted positions at the top and bottom of the page?
This is an easy, affordable way to attract customers whenever they are searching for businesses like yours in your area.
Note: Yahoo Local is currently available in the US only.
When it comes to search engines, it doesn’t matter who you are. If you use any SPAMMY techniques chances are you’re going to get booted.
Don’t believe me? Ask BMW. This week Google removed their German site BMW.de from its index for presenting “different content to search engines than you display to users.??? This and many other web design no-no’s are clearly laid out in Google’s quality guidelines.
Moral of the story - don’t cheat. Follow the guidelines.
John Battelle points to a paper on Pay Per Click search. It’s a quick read (6 pages) offering an overview of the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engine market and ideas on how to optimize campaigns for maximum results.
You can download the PDF here.
And… if you want to learn more about Pay Per Click advertising (Google Adwords in particular), be sure to check out Andrew Goodman’s book, Winning Results with Google AdWords.
Better late then never. If you’re a user of Google’s content match network on Adsense, you can now apply a “site exclusion feature.” This allows you to control which of Google’s content partners you’d like your ads to be displayed on.
Up until now I’ve avoided Google’s content match. With the exclusion feature now available however, its time to start experimenting again. I’ll keep you posted on the success.
Bit of a shocking prediction by Rishad Tobaccowala during his keynote at the OMMA conference on Monday. Rishad said:
“At some stage it becomes more expensive to buy Google than to buy network television.”
Tobaccowala predicted that interactive advertising will go up by 20 to 30% a year for several years thanks to things like the rising costs of pay-per-click and the need to make creative more attention-getting.
[via Marketer Today]
Mental Note: Pay-Per-Click advertising network FindWhat.com said today they’ll change their name to Miva.
c|net takes a look at paid inclusion services and says search engines are rethinking the controversial practice.”
A new search engine designed for business professionals lauched this week. The engine, called Find.com, delivers search results from three different sources.
According to ClickZ, “Results from business sites that charge for their content, such as Gallup and Frost & Sullivan, appear at the top of the search results pages. Users can then buy the content. Results from a list of 3,000 business sites appear in the free organic listings, along with results from a variety of search engines.”
iMedia Connection: Write Search Copy that Gets Clicks
You can buy great placement, but great copy is what really drives users to click on your search ad. This article offers some great tips on how to write your ads for maximum effect.
