I received the latest issue of the excellent Search Marketing Standard magazine yesterday. The theme for this issue is “International Search Markets” with articles on the search industry in the UK, Italy, Germany, Russia and China.

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This will deservedly get a lot of links especially as it’s in every blog writer’s interest to provide something which explains how RSS works and how to use RSS feeds.

Wordtracker have launched a free version of their keyword tool.

Thanks to Aaron Wall for pointing it out.

If you read a number of blogs, articles or other Internet content on a regular basis, then I recommend Netvibes if you haven’t already come across it. It’s a way of managing content so links to the content you look at are on one page. You can also see preview snippets and know what’s been updated.

Today Netvibes announced an Australian version which will make it easier to browse Australian websites of general interest such as news, sport, music etc.

Google is developing a tool that lets you test different versions of your website content. The tool determines which versions customers respond to so that you convert more of your website traffic into sales.

It’s in beta test at the moment and I’ve just been accepted as a tester. I’ll use my own website for the testing at first. Early feedback from other participants has been very positive so I’m keen to see it in action for myself.

It made me think about a hierarchy of levels particularly in relation to pay-per-click campaigns.

1. Getting traffic to the website
2. Targeting potential customers and getting them to the website
3. Avoiding unwanted traffic
4. Converting website visitors into customers
5. Continuously improving the return on investment
6. Integrating results with other marketing efforts and focusing on the lifetime value of the customer

This is a big topic so I’ll cover each level in more detail over the next couple of weeks. All pay-per-click managers will get traffic to the website but a campaign will only be successful for the business if:

• It is targeted effectively which means separate ad groups for each target group, targeted ad copy, targeted keywords for each group rather than relying on a few broad matches.
• Unwanted traffic is avoided wherever possible by using negative keywords (eg eliminating searches that contain “free” or “cheap” if this isn’t appropriate for your product or services) and qualifying people wherever possible in the ad copy.
• Landing pages convert into sales. At the very least each ad must link to the most appropriate page on the website depending on the person’s search query. This isn’t usually the website home page.
• Every aspect of the campaign is tested on an ongoing basis and the results used to improve the return on investment. This can include reorganising ad groups, removing unprofitable keywords, removing low performing ads and testing different landing pages. This is where the new website optimiser will come in.

Here’s more information about the website optimiser.

I check whether anyone is copying my website content, and that of my clients, using copyscape.

Apart from the fact that it takes a lot of time and hard work to write good quality content, and it’s unacceptable for anyone to reproduce it, Google has a duplicate content filter so you need to make sure your content is unique.

Google aims to provide a good experience for searchers. Clearly this doesn’t mean a list of websites that all have the same content which is why Google filters out duplicate results and presents just one of them to the searcher.

So, if your website is nowhere to be found for a search phrase that you’d like to be found for, it’s worth checking whether duplicate content is an issue.