Is Your Company at Risk?
Posted in: Gadget & Techonology | Comments Off
Does she owe you money?
The changes that Google has made with the Panda and Penguin updates has caused quite a furor. Even the Wall Street Journal on 17 May 2012 ran an article about how businesses are taking a severe hit in their ranking on the search engine results from the Silicon Valley firm.
The issue stems from Google getting wise to formally successful ‘black hat tricks’ such as keyword stuffing. This is a technique of writing articles designed to attract the search engine spiders, yet not being very useful to a human reader.
Other former tricks that are no longer working is having links to and from other sites, a technique known as ‘link farms’.
While I have read comments from businesses that have felt unfairly being punished with a severe drop in revenue because these dirty SEO tricks are no longer working, I cannot fault Google. Their goal is to make sure the user gets the data they are looking for, without tricks.
The white hat answer to this would appear to be to post articles on your webpages that are of genuine value to real humans. And there is a hidden danger in this.
There are less than honest brokers out there that sell articles created by authors and fail to pay the author for their work. A prime example would be Marlo Colston (mec_content on Skype) or http://www.linkedin.com/pub/marlo-colston/1b/a09/390
While doing research on ghostwriting, I know I personally delivered work to this broker and was never paid for it. I appear to be fortunate. I have heard from others whom she owes thousands of dollars per person.
Attempts to get paid for now approaching one year have been in vain.
If you have purchased work from Marlo Colston or others that operate in such an unscrupulous fashion, I have some bad news for you. The original work still belongs to the author who wrote the work. Even if you paid in good faith for stolen property, case law says the property is owned by the author. You will have to take your issue up with Marlo Colston.
It is very easy for an author who was not been paid to post a paragraph or two into a Google search and find that work. You as the website owner are then guilty of copyright violation. Yes, it is not a pretty thought to find out you have paid for something and do not own it.
And it might be a really good time to find out if you had been working with a reputable company or person, before you get slapped by an author that has not been compensated for their work.
I would certainly be happy to turn over to any legal entity the correspondence of my attempts to be paid. The excuses I have heard are beyond belief. The claim the stuff was never run is the simplest to prove false.
Even if the claim was true it holds no water that a contract to deliver goods has nothing to do with the author. They did their part and deserve to have the contract honored.
Marlo Colston not the only person that steals from authors. My suggestion to those who have been cheated out of their work is to track your work down with search engines and put these firms on notice for copyright violation.
You might be lazy and start looking at http://www.wikipeers.com/author/IcatchingContent/ for your work that has not been paid for.
As legitimate research and writing are only going to become more valuable with the changes at Google it only creates a larger opportunity for the thieves to operate. It’s time to clean up the writing industry. This is my new mission in life and I hope you join me.
I also hope the IRS is listening. Someone that cheats authors out of their work may be prone to steal from the government as well.
Short URL: http://www.trcbnews.com/?p=8191
admin @ May 20, 2012
Uppidy: Put text messages into the cloud
Posted in: Traveling | Comments Off
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admin @ May 20, 2012
Accelerating Revenue Growth With Keyword Parity
Posted in: Traveling | Comments Off
As campaigns mature, keywords evolve from experiments to proven revenue drivers. Remembering to add a keyword to Bing after a successful trial in Google or remembering to expand a new top performing keyword across its other match types is easier said than done.
With so much focus these days on the next best thing — generating the most compelling creative or discovering the next diamond-in-the-rough keyword — search marketers often ignore the keyword gaps that slowly accumulate over time.
Maintaining publisher and match type keyword parity is one of the most important campaign management strategies available to a search marketer. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult strategies to scale and implement successfully. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of keywords and toggling between multiple publishers to identify keyword disparities can prove to be a daunting task.
Today, we’ll discuss several best practices for maintaining keyword parity across match types and publishers. We’ll also help identify where potential keyword gaps reside in your account and provide the necessary tools for filling them.
Publisher Parity
Imagine you’ve just added a new keyword into your Google account that’s expected to acquire more revenue for your business. Now two weeks, 100 clicks and 10 conversions later, your keyword is a hit. In the fog of excitement, you’ve decided to research additional keyword expansion opportunities, neglecting to explore the full potential of your newly discovered revenue driver.
Adding your new, proven keyword into your Bing accounts has slipped your mind. As day-to-day optimization strategies take your account forward, this and other keyword gaps continue to accumulate. Unfortunately, many search marketers fail to maintain keyword parity across publishers, even when the failure to do so can result in missed revenue opportunities.
Locating publisher keyword gaps can prove to be a daunting task. Implementing tracking prior to tackling keyword expansion addresses the parity issue at its core. (Third-party solutions, like Marin Software, can help track and report on these keywords at scale.) Take detailed notes on when, where and why these keywords were added to an account. These notes are essential to assessing performance and critical for locating revenue driving keywords to copy across publishers.
In order to retroactively assess publisher parity, download a keyword performance report and apply an Excel pivot table to compare publisher keyword sets by key performance indicators.
Once you’ve identified the gaps, add these keywords to the appropriate publisher on a weekly or monthly basis. Remember to set competitive bids, generate compelling creative and deploy proper negative keywords. Missing out on an important negative keyword when achieving parity can result in reduced effectiveness for the keywords you add.
Match Type Parity
Ensuring match type parity by adding keywords across all three match types is a common best practice. This can be approached in two different directions—expanding from broad to phrase to exact match type or from exact to phrase to broad match type.
Copying successful exact and phrase match keywords to broad match type is a quick and easy approach for reaching a broader audience and discovering new keyword opportunities. However, the resulting increase in traffic doesn’t always correspond to an increase in performance. Be cautious when expanding keywords to broad match type and aggressively mine for negative keywords.
Improving keyword efficiency often requires the expansion of broad match keywords to phrase and exact match type. This strategy is an effective means of segmenting keyword performance. Keep in mind that broad match keywords already capture the traffic for its phrase and exact match counterparts. Consequently, cost and conversion metrics are attributed to a single keyword.
Maintaining match type parity is a simple way of segmenting keyword performance by match type, allowing for the implementation of match type specific bids, creative or both.
Match Type Silos
Consider this common scenario. A keyword on Google is active across all three match types. However, the broad match bid is set higher than the phrase and exact match bids.
As a result, the broad match keyword cannibalizes impressions and clicks that might best be served on and captured by the phrase and exact match keyword. This undesired behavior creates a reporting and optimization nightmare; performance data for the phrase and exact match queries is attributed to the broad match keyword.
To properly expand keywords across broad, phrase and exact match types, and segment performance based on match type, match type silos must be deployed. To implement match type silos, start by creating a separate group for each keyword match type. Within the broad match group, add the phrase match negative keyword. Within the phrase match group, add the exact match negative keyword.
Match type silos are not only easy to implement, but ensure that publishers properly match your keywords to user search queries. Furthermore, the segmentation of keywords by match type provides greater visibility into performance, resulting in a more effective reporting and bidding strategy.
As you work through keyword expansion opportunities, be mindful of keyword gaps and maintain publisher and match type parity. Once you’ve filled these gaps, remember to optimize. Setting appropriate keyword bids, generating relevant creative and researching negative keywords are just a few strategies to in mind.
What has and hasn’t worked for your campaigns when it comes to maintaining parity across publishers and match types? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Enterprise SEM
admin @ May 20, 2012
Link Building on Partial Keyword Combinations
Posted in: Traveling | Comments Off
Say you want to rank on search engines for keyword combinations with every city in the U.S. – maybe even combined with a large range of services. Do you then start your link building by focusing on each individual combined query?
For websites like job boards, business listings, tour operators and price comparison sites this is their main dilemma in search engine optimization (SEO). Acquiring links for the individual recurring parts of your keyword combinations is the best solution, but how does it work?
Keyword Combinations
Industries like travel have millions of potential keyword combinations and they are all quite similar. Most of them contain a travel service (like last minute, all inclusive, tickets, hotels, holiday, cruise or rental car) combined with a locality (like Jamaica, Iceland, New York, Europe, Grand Canyon or Alps).
Job portals combine industries or job descriptions, with localities and employment terminology. Once certain words reappear in multiple combinations, they can be plotted into a matrix like the one below.
Hub Pages
The elements of a keyword combination aren’t always important keywords themselves. Only combined do they get their true meaning.
Elements that are part of multiple combinations do however require a dedicated page. This so-called hub page should receive relevant links to it and in turn link to all important combinations with it. A keyword combination can have two or more parents which both list that page.
“All jobs in Houston TX” will contain a list of important industries in that region and “All IT jobs” will contain a list of important tech cities. Combined they link to “All IT jobs in Houston TX”.
As you can see the structure of your website is key to get this done effectively, but getting the right links directed at the right place is even more important.
Link Building on Partial Relevance
Exact Relevance
Link partners can be found by looking at the search terms they rank for themselves. The better they rank for your exact keyword combination, the more effect they could have on that ranking. This exact relevance is stronger, but it it also very labor intensive. If you do however find an easy way to get many local businesses to link to their respective keyword combination please use it, but keep keyword ROI in mind.
Partial Relevance
Links with partial relevance can for instance be attracted by partnering with local authorities for your most important localities. Giving a large discount for local governments and the official city website (e.g., for listings on your job portal to which they in turn should link) get you extremely relevant links. These pages in turn link to “All jobs in [city name]” and “All government jobs”. Organizing a local event get you great local links (e.g., “[city name] job fair”) but should only be done for important cities.
Broad Partial Relevance
Partnering with seemingly irrelevant link partners can be more effective than it seems. Websites in different industries can aid your ranking just by covering the same cities. This way a job portal can help a business directory and an airline can help a car rental company. Sites like Wunderground.com are related to every city, but are seldom in a competitive industry. With broad partial relevant links it is harder to predict which exact combinations will benefit the most, but it requires less partners and (probably) effort.
Generic Authority
Generic authority is a weird ranking factor, but is best gained by partnering with generic authorities. A search for “www” will give some indication of the types of websites you need to get a link from.
Sites with generic authority can rank for things that they don’t have extremely relevant links for. Although the Wikipedia level of authority is out of your reach, some domain authority is always a welcome addition to your link profile.
Relevance comes in many shades. As long as your partnerships are natural, all these links are important. Depending on the level of competition you might already rank with just some generic links or you’ll need extremely relevant links for those top search queries.
Ranking on a large spectrum of queries
- Create internal navigation with routes focused on relevance and priority.
- Direct the right external links at the right relevance hub within your site.
- Find out what works and try to see patterns in underscoring queries to fix this with just a few link partners.
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admin @ May 20, 2012
