Author Archive
PPC Management: Helping You Win the Traffic Competition Cost-Effectively
Posted by Garry in Paid Advertising on January 12th, 2011
If you are close to any car racing enthusiast, you then know that they can do anything to win a race and would go as far as spending a little cash if that will get them to the finishing line before everyone else. They will go for the best car, keep it well maintained and even do an overhaul of the car if it gets to that. The cost isn’t quite a matter if it will get them the medal.
That is exactly what happens with website owners. They can employ just any tactic that promises them to get their websites a high ranking in the search engines. Talk about social media marketing, back linking, article and video submission and a world of other such techniques that can help a website get better rankings. Like the racers, website owners don’t mind spending money to get that hard sort for position on the result pages. They even don’t mind paying for Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns to get visitors to their sites. Through PPC marketing the website owners pay for every click that result in a visitor from the PPC company.
This is where PPC management becomes important. PPC management helps you benefit from the PPC campaign. Without sound PPC management it is very easy to lose your money through click fraud, low CTR, etc. It gets you an advantage above the competitors, that looks rather unfair, but not quite so since you pay for it. Think of a car race where the racers were allowed to bring in more powerful cars if they can afford it. Would you not spend a little more cash than your competitors do just to get a powerful car that will catapult you to the win even if the competitors applied all their skills?
With Pay per Click, you pay for every click leading to your website. A PPC management then helps you not lose money in the process, by paying more than you intended to. A good management will allow you to specify the amount of money you want to spend every day or monthly on the PPC account. Once this limit is reached, your ads will stop running and when someone searches for the keywords relating to your PPC campaign you are not billed any further.
With good PPC management, the website owner can leave their ads to run until when they feel that they have attained the desired visitors. They then suspend the ads until the need to revive the campaign arises. This keeps one from spending on driving traffic to their website when there is no pressing need to do that. After all, why trouble yourself to add turbo charge to your 2000cc engine while all your competitors have below 1200cc?
SEO Copywriting: More Than Just High Page Rank
Posted by Garry in Uncategorized on January 10th, 2011
How would you feel to win a race but get no reward? Would there even be any need to participate in a racing event if you will not be recognized or rewarded for your winning? This is the sad thing that is happening to most of the website owners. The moment they register their website, they join their counterparts on the race field, set by the internet search engines, competing for high page ranks.
The main aim of entering the now rather difficult race is to drive more traffic to their website using search engine optimization. However, the underlying purpose of racing for the high page rank is to make more sales from the increased traffic thus more money. That is the real price for winning the race. Sadly, SEO only, does little to help website owners achieve this, and that is where SEO Copywriting becomes important.
Search engine optimization will definitely help the website owner achieve that high page rank for their website, which in turn will translate to high traffic. Once this is achieved, the efforts you put to optimize your website end there. They do not guarantee you that the numerous people visiting your website will be making purchases. In other words, what the SEO process concentrates on is key-wording your website for the search engines and not framing the language to turn the site visitors into the potential customers.
The additional advantage of SEO copywriting is that it first focuses on the message on your website content before turning attention to appropriately using the keywords for search engines. While this technique overlooks not the importance of correct key-wording, the resultant high page rank and increased traffic, it puts more emphasis on customer-centric language. With SEO copywriting, the website will still rank high but also will have a captivating style and language to its visitors.
SEO Copywriting provides the website visitor the product description they so much need without compromising the keyword density that Google and the other internet search engines need to rank the website high. This technique strikes a professional balance between promotional material and the important keyword density. What lies at the back of good SEO copywriting is that the website should not have a huge number of visitors but who will click the back button within the first minute of visiting the website.
So SEO copywriting experts understand that the website owners are in a race. These experts will help them not only win the race, but also get the reward. They provide the visitors with good product description and add that promotional tone to the website content aimed at turning the visitors into customers.
Page Speed: An Important Factor in Winning the Page Rank Race
Posted by Garry in Search Engine Optimization on January 3rd, 2011
A moment that I always anxiously wait for when I am out to watch the F1 races is the point when the cars get to the finishing line. It has never stopped amusing me how close the cars usually get to each other making it so difficult to determine who just won the race. The interesting thing is that difference between the first two cars can be as small as 0.007 second but the car that finishes 0.007 seconds ahead of the other wins.
What amuses me most is that my two passions, the F1 races and Search Engine Optimization, have this feature in common. I was thinking about what SEO techniques I have been applying to websites and thought it was very much like what the F1 car manufacturers are doing to their cars. Cars of the same engine capacity are equipped with several high-tech features aimed at making the cars have a competitive advantage, yet you find that one will always be the winner.
On the other hand, SEO experts will customize websites of the same niche using all available tools such that you will find two or more websites that seem to vie for the same position on the search engine result pages. But there is always a small difference between the websites. One thing that search engines have been looking for to determine that small difference is Page Speed.
A website’s Page Speed is determined by the time that website takes to load pages. The websites that take a shorter time are said to have a higher Page Speed. This is a fairly new way of ranking websites but it has now become very important since there are websites that have good content and are equally well customized but have low Page Speed. Since the search engines are determined to give the best to their users, they are now giving preference to those pages that load faster.
This consideration of Page Speed by search engines has made the page rank race for websites more challenging. Like in the F1 race, you may reach the finishing line in what, to you, may seem to be the first position only to realize that your opponent was ahead of you by a very small fraction of a second. This time cannot be overlooked and will eventually determine the winner.
There are many things that determine a website’s Page Speed like the HTML coding, the order of scripts, and efficiency of java script among others. The most important factor is the kind of graphics you use in your page. If you use photos that are not compressed, the website will take more time to load. So to ensure that you win the race, ensure that in addition to all the search engine optimization techniques, you also take care of you website’s Page Speed.
Finish In First Place with Search Engine Optimization
Posted by Garry in Uncategorized on December 21st, 2010
A Race to the Finish Line…
I’ve done a lot of racing recently and one of the things I’ve realized is that business is a lot like it. When I think of the business world today, what comes into my mind is tough competition, say something like an event where a one second delay may cost you the gold medal. Every serious competitor in a race knows the importance of having the right gear for the event. Every serious business person today, on the other hand, acknowledges that business is a tough race in which the competitors have to adequately equip themselves.
Such business people invest in the right gear in the name of good customer relations, quality service production tools and such. One part of that gear that everyone will attest to is a business website. Every company today that doesn’t want to risk being left behind has its website and this is where the race becomes tough.
With so many websites being created on a daily basis, companies now compete for the first pages in the search engine results. This is the only way to ensure that you win the attention of potential customers over your competitors. When you think of getting a high ranking for your business website, you will probably think about search engine optimization (SEO) as what you need to do. That is right but is it as simple as it may sound?
The truth is, SEO is becoming a more challenging race by the day. The racers are discovering new ways of practicing, improving their skills, employing new techniques and setting new records. This is the trend and every company needs to adopt it if they are to get to the top.
In the past, all you needed to do to get your website ranking highly on the search engine result pages was getting the right keywords and knowing how to use them correctly in your content. That is still a necessary thing to do but there are many other aspects that you need to take care off today so as to get the best results. The SEO race has new records and you need the latest tools and knowhow if you are to break the records.
The new techniques in the search engine optimization arena include SEO blogging, submitting articles to article directories, using RSS feeds, video submissions, setting up Google Places accounts and many more. However, the most powerful tool that experts are now using is social media marketing. This is a technique that enables you to tap the potential of having visitors from the more than five hundred million people who visit social websites daily. A SEO expert who is serious about getting the gold medal in this race will surely have to find a way of tapping into this enormous resource.
Top 10 Most Googled Celebrities
Posted by Garry in Google and SEO on September 13th, 2010
Alright, here we have it—the past year’s top 10 most Google’d celebrities. Whether gifted with real talent or just really good at creating controversies, these (mostly) pretty people have an allure about them that keeps us interested. In descending order—with some ties—here are the stars that need to give their search engine marketing team a raise.
Google Global Monthly Searches
- Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga – 151,000,000
- Beyonce, Miley Cyrus – 68,000,000
- Taylor Swift – 45,500,000
- Britney Spears – 37,200,000
- Madonna, Chris Brown – 30,400,000
- Kanye West – 20,400,000
- Angelina Jolie, Adam Lambert, Paris Hilton – 11,100,000
- Kelly Clarkson, Lindsay Lohan – 9,140,000
- Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Alba – 6,120,000
- Brad Pitt – 5,000,000
Bet you could have guessed that—I mean of course the death of the King of Pop Michael Jackson would rank first, and who can resist the shock value of Lady Gaga’s latest stunt? It seems clear why Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Angelina Jolie made the list with their never-ending “Team Aniston” vs.” Team Jolie” feud. And of course everyone wants to know what the heck is going on with Lindsay Lohan—is she in jail? Out of jail? Did she really give the big “F*** you” in court? Clearly there are issues we just can’t resist knowing about.
Then there’s Kanye West, infamous for the stunt he pulled with Taylor Swift. No one will ever know whether the incident was staged or not, but regardless of its authenticity, it made for some great TV. Madonna—enough said, but surprising that she’s still in the top ten (top five actually) most Google’d celebrities. She either has some quality search engine optimization going on, or she’s just really really popular and will continue to be for quite awhile (I vote for the latter).
So we’ve made it to the top, with ties for 1st and 2nd place. But Beyonce and Miley Cyrus at number two? There’s no denying that Beyonce has talent, but Miley Cyrus? I guess we’ll see when she makes it through this “I’m not a little girl anymore” phase. Then again, sprouting out of Disney gives you a bit of a following, especially when lap dance videos clash with your “innocent little girl” character.
Speaking of characters, it is absolutely no surprise that Lady Gaga is the number one most Google’d celebrity alive. She’s always in the headlines, and I have to admit that her music is quite catchy. So this begs the question: is she just weird or is her unusual and flat out bizarre appearance pure marketing genius?
New Google Message Center notifications for detecting an increase in Crawl Errors
Posted by Garry in Google and SEO on July 27th, 2010
New Message Center notifications for detecting an increase in Crawl Errors
Posted: 26 Jul 2010 02:58 PM PDT
Webmaster Level: All (Credits from Google Webmaster Blog)
When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we’re now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.
A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:
google message center notifications
We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don’t want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon
The Hudosn Hotel (Hell) in NYC – DONT STAY at this Hotel!
Posted by Garry in Uncategorized on July 14th, 2010
One of the worst experiences I have encountered. We had reservations 2 months in advance, yet it took over 2.5 hours to check in. They didn’t get us the correct room. After waiting for them to finally get us a room, we found that the phone didn’t work in the living room area. We also found that both TV sets were not working. I used the bedroom phone to call at least 5 times to the front desk for assistance before they answered on the 5th call. After finally getting through, nothing ever got fixed. Oh and if you want something to eat, their are only 3 things on the menu. So we ordered 2 hamburgers and a roasted chicken salad that came to $106.00. I was worth about $10.00 at the most. They couldn’t even get the burgers correct. Salad greens were old and the sprouts for the burger were old, soggy and brown. Keep clear of staying here, never again!
A Nice shot of the outside terrace