There’s sometimes a start-up period for a new adWords campaign when ads aren’t shown for all keyword matches and so the traffic is lower than it “should” be.

I covered it in this post on what to expect from a brand new PPC campaign.

My assessment of the reasons for lower traffic has been that it’s because a new campaign has no history and therefore the keyword quality scores are predictive and probably pessimistic. Google doesn’t show all variations of broad matches for keywords (accounts?) with a low quality score hence the waiting period for the full quota of traffic due. When actual data comes into the equation a high performing campaign can have superior quality scores and traffic will start to increase when ads are shown on broader variations of keywords.

There’s another interesting theory about the adWords “sandbox” on the RevenueWire PPC super affiliate blog. This is that Google puts a “go slow” on new campaigns until they have established that the advertiser can pay the bill.

Is search engine optimisation still about rankings?

Lee Odden’s post in toprankblog is titled “Are Search Engine Rankings Are Dead?”. (I’m guessing the original title was “Search Engine Rankings Are Dead” and then he decided maybe it wasn’t so clear cut so he changed it to a question).

Anyway, The Australian had an article this week about Found Agency, a leading SEM firm in Sydney “Google slaps ‘black hat’ penalty on top search ranking”. Apparently Found Agency have plummeted in the rankings for the term “search engine optimisation”, having held a high position for this phrase for a while. Google didn’t like the fact that a good proportion of their links are coming from a hit counter that websites are using to record the number of visitors. The hit counter in question has a link to the Found Agency website. These links have been devalued by Google and the Found Agency no longer ranks for “search engine optimisation” and other relevant phrases. Actually they don’t even rank for their name any more. A search for “Found Agency” has in the number one slot the latest newsletter article from Search Engine Room “Found Agency tumbles in Google Rankings”. On page one, half of the results are about the Found Agency “penalty” for “black hat techniques”.

I doubt if the drop in rankings will have a significant impact on their business. This gets back to the points made in Lee Odden’s post about rankings having much less significance now particularly with the advent of personalisation and the growing impact of social media.

The biggest problem for the Found Agency is how they will manage their online reputation. They’ve put a notice on the home page of their website denying the rumours that they’ve been banned or blacklisted. I haven’t seen much blogging activity on the news yet despite the claim in the Australian that it has “spread like wildfire through the search marketing industry”.

I’ll conclude with a link for anyone unfortunate enough to be in this position.

Guide to Online Reputation Monitoring and Management

These are my picks from the problogger group writing project. There were some great entries and I found some new blogs I like. The first 3 are on topic for my blog. I naturally gravitated towards the seo and ppc posts and these all contain good information. The last 2 were entries unrelated to search marketing but ones I particularly liked.

It was an interesting process. I found myself analysing why I clicked some titles and not others so it drilled home some copywriting lessons.

Top 5 Top Blog Posts in SEO by Michael Jensen

Top 5 Ways Ignorant Advertisers Lose Money to Google via AdWords by Richard Ball

Top 5 Ways to Lose Your Great Search Engine Rankings Fast! by DazzlinDonna

Top 5 Ways to Become a Major Poet or Problogger (With Apologies to W. H. Auden). by Geoffrey Philp

Top 5 Things About My Ex by Katie Baird

Also, I made it on to a favourites list which felt good I’ll include the link because his picks were good ones (in addition to my entry I mean )

My Life With IT

By way of some background, Google has two indexes, the main index and a supplemental index. The supplemental index has been given the name Google Hell amongst others. There are some good reasons why you don’t want pages of your website or blog to be in the supplemental index.

• Pages from the main index show up first so if you are stuck in supplemental your pages will be way down in the rankings for anything competitive
• Google doesn’t crawl the supplemental index as often so once there it can take a long time to get back

To ascertain whether your pages are in Google Hell use the search query site:www.yourwebsite.com.au

The supplemental pages will have supplemental result after the url.

Top 5 Reasons

1. Duplicate or Similar Content

Pages with very similar or duplicated content are likely to end up in the supplemental index. Blogs can have a problem if posts are short and therefore pages are similar to each other with elements such as navigation, blogrolls etc repeated on each page. Longer posts with unique content will fix this as will comments.

2. Similar Page Titles

Give each page a unique page title. With blogs beware of generated page titles that are all very similar because the blog name is prefixed to the title. This is more of a problem with long blog names. Don’t leave these titles as they are or Google will determine that all your pages are about the same thing and will regard them as duplicates. There are plugins for wordpress blogs that allow you to customise the page title. Seo Title Tag is one.

3. Similar or Duplicated Page Descriptions

The same applies to the description metatag. Make sure that you enter a unique description for every page. The Seo Title Tag plugin has this feature for wordpress blogs.

4. Poor Quality External Linking

One of the the top reasons for a page being in the supplemental index is a lack of relevant links from quality sites. Write good quality content that is worth linking to and get trusted links. Don’t take part in link exchange programmes.

5. Poor Internal Linking Structure

It can be hard at first to get good quality external links but you do have control over links to pages from other pages on your website or blog. If a page ends up in the supplemental index a few internal links pointing to it, in addition to fixing any duplicate problems outlined above, can get it out.

(This post is part of the problogger group writing project. I’d like to welcome any first time visitors who clicked through from problogger).

There’s a new version of Google Analytics out and all accounts will be upgraded over the next few weeks. Most of the analytics bloggers on my list wrote about it yesterday.

My accounts haven’t been upgraded yet so I can’t see the changes first hand but this is a great write up on Google Analytics V2 from Avinash Kaushik with screen shots.

I read about 20 blogs each day and there are others that I look at on occasion. This is one of my favourites at the moment so here’s a link. It’s relatively new and there have been some good posts. Also check out their keyword manager. I’ve been a big fan of Aaron Wall’s keyword tool for a while and this is similar with a couple more features.

Here’s the link:

PPC Super Affiliate Blog

I missed Andy Beal’s post about online advertising in Australia. It’s worth a read as he links to an emarketer study saying that Australian advertisers plan to allocate 22% of their marketing budgets to online advertising.

I particularly like Andy’s last paragraph:

“Anyway, having recently returned from Sydney, I can tell you that the Australian SEM industry is getting ready to explode. There are a few smart SEMs down there, that can watch their American SEM cousins for the latest practices and bury their competition.”

It’s a definite advantage being able to watch what is happening in America. We have to wait a bit for the latest tools and research in Australia but it’s less competitive and there’s a lot to be gained from seeing what is about to happen before it hits with full force.

PPC advertisers learn how to target their ad copy to get qualified clicks. There are recognised principles such as repeating the keywords in the headline, using words your target customers respond to and inserting a call to action. In addition, good advertisers test different ads on an ongoing basis to improve the ROI. Good click through rates are rewarded with a higher quality score which means cheaper costs per click. The incentives are there to put the work into targeted, compelling ad copy.

So do the same principles apply to the organic listings? More people click on the organic listings anyway and there is no cost per click but there is still competition for each click. There’s no point having a good ranking and then not capitalising on the opportunity to then attract targeted visitors in the same way that paid advertisers do.

If you take a look at this listing from Wotif in the organic listings, it has a lot in common with the paid ads. The search query is for “mooloolaba accommodation”.

Compare this with another unpaid listing for the same search query.

In both cases the two lines of text after the title is from the description meta tag for the web page. Wotif have worded their description to state their offer and attract clicks. The second example is a throw back to when meta tags were important for good rankings and were stuffed with keywords in order to help this aim. Now Google ignores the meta tags for ranking purposes so its time to optimise them for targeted clicks and not for the search engines.

1. Every web page should have a unique description designed to attract targeted visitors.
2. Keep the description short enough so that all the information is displayed. Google displays about 155 characters including spaces.
3. Be aware of how the title and description work together in order to maximum the available space.
4. You don’t have complete control over whether Google uses the description meta tag or uses something else instead such as text from the web page itself. If the keywords from the users search query are in the description meta tag then it is likely that this is what will be used. Therefore, even though keywords in the description are unimportant from a ranking point of view, it does affect when the description is displayed.
5. Test to see what gets the best results.

Sophie Wegat, the owner of Think Prospect in Melbourne, answers a question on search marketing in Australia as part of an interview series profiling women in Internet marketing.

“What differences do you see between optimizing for Australia and optimizing for the US?”

I hadn’t seen Sophie’s blog before but just subscribed.

The “reasons why I blog” meme has been doing the rounds lately and even though the same themes keep coming up it’s still interesting to read the perspectives of fellow bloggers. Randfish at seomoz wrote one of the best responses.

Here are my top 5 reasons for blogging:

1. Establish Credibility

Writing about search engine marketing topics, and pay-per-click in particular, gives me the opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and attitude / enthusiasm. It’s a good way to show experience, particularly to prospective clients.

2. Explore Topics and Clarify My Thoughts

Often when I’m writing a post I’ll combine my own experience with some further research into the topic. I find that this process, and the discipline required to try and write something of value, and write it clearly, gives me a better insight into whatever topic I’m covering. If I get comments, positive or negative, which make me think further then so much the better.

3. Marketing and New Business Opportunities

This is connected with my first reason “establish credibility”. Blogs are a great way to get noticed, get more website traffic and establish a brand. One of the things that has happened since I started blogging is an invitation to have posts from my blog syndicated on the ientry network. Blogging is a good way to get this kind of recognition.

4. Feel Part of a Community

I mostly work by myself and it suits me to do so. I like the focus and concentration that comes with a quiet, solitary work environment. However I’m not entirely anti-social :). Online communities are a good place to form peer relationships, share ideas, have the occasional spat and generally avoid the feeling that you’re in a vacuum.

5. Improve Skills

I’ve already mentioned that I believe blogging improves my industry skills. There’s also a whole lot to learn in order to blog effectively. It can be frustrating at times and I’m definitely still learning but I like the idea of improving skills in this area. I bought this book a few weeks ago and really recommend it. There are also some great blogs on blogging.

What about you? If you blog I’d really like to hear your reasons. Or anything that’s stopping you from blogging if you don’t have a blog.