The Search Query Performance report in AdWords is a rich source of information that can help you hone in on the most productive phrases in your campaign.

If you were bidding on a broad term like “Marketing” the report shows all the phrases that were triggered from that term, you might see “internet marketing“, “web marketing” or “marketing on the internet.”  You can then evaluate the click thru rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and conversions on that term to determine if it’s a good fit for your business. The report also helps you identify phrases that might not be good for your business, but are generating clicks and costing you money. Using the information in the report, you can add the phrases that work into your campaign and add negatives to filter out the phrases that don’t.

The only issue with the Search Query Performance report has been that Google has always lumped lower volume quires into groups called “other unique queries.” This has been a point of contention because it obscures some number of phrases that were successful and hides terms that could be used as ‘negatives’ to remove irrelevant searches for your campaign.

Google announced that starting Tuesday, May 19, 2009 the Search Query Performance report will show all queries that resulted in a click… (Yeah!)
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/05/enhanced-search-query-performance.html

SEO Huntsville adwords, SEM Huntsville

It is often hard to tell what is a real penalty as there can be may causes for your content to drop in the search engine result pages (SERPs). There are things that should be obvious, like changes in SERPs that co-inside with changes you made to the site. However, often results don’t directly co-inside with changes and therefore it can be difficult to track back.

It can be challenging to discover if:

• You’ve got a true penalty
• You’ve been outranked according to the current algorithm
• It’s a Google bug (from algorithm tweaks)

Simple Checks Include:

1. Is your robots.text page restricting access?
2. Has an errant noindex or no-follow tag found its way to a section of your site?
3. Have you checked Google’s webmaster tools for error messages?
4. Have you checked WebmasterWorld to see if recent changes to the algorithm are effecting others?

Props to “tedster” on the webmaterworld thead, this list is an excerpt from an older posting of his:

Additional checks:

1. Do your pages show with a site:example.com search?
   If they did once and they do not now, this is most likely a ban – the most extreme kind of penalty. It’s becoming quite rare to be completely banned rather than penalized – usually those who are banned know what they’ve been doing. Technical problems with your site, or some times Google may be at fault.
2. Does your site still rank #1 for a search on your domain name example.com?
   If so, but your other important search rankings ALL slipped badly, this is often a sign of a penalty. Study up on the posts in our Hot Topics area for ideas.
3. Does a search for relatively unique phrases taken from your title tags return your URL relatively high?
   If so, but your principle search rankings have dropped out the bottom, you may have lost the power of a good number of your backlinks. This is not necessarily a true penalty, but if you have been a part of some backlink scheme, even unwittingly, you may have been penalized for it.

Also, check any outbound links on your pages to be sure that the site they point to is still what you intended. Other domains can change ownership (or just change their conduct) and become part of a “bad neighborhood”. If others also have access to your site, be sure that no hidden content has been added without your knowledge, especially hidden links.

Other good posts on the subject:

• Do I Have a Google Penalty?
• Am I penalized? What type of penalty do I have?
• Diagnosing a possible penalty

SEO Huntsville google penalty, SEO Huntsville, webmaster tools

Carrie Hill just published a summary of directories that should be on every one’s link building list. These are credible sources that the search engines use to help determine the relevancy of your site for things like products, services, or locality.

See Carrie’s list of  Must Have List of Directories

Related:

• Building Incoming Links
• Directories and Incoming Links

SEO Huntsville directory listings, incoming links, Link Building, SEO Huntsville

I have written before about never deleting or renaming a page, but there are times when it is unavoidable. Restructuring a site, removing obsolete products and changing scripting languages (moving to shtml from php, or php from html) make this a common problem.

I am in the middle of two large projects that will involve changing the names of many pages. These are both Joomla-based sites, so I am mitigating some of the problems by using sh404sef. It does a great job of helping you control page names, maintain legacy extensions, etc. But there are still pathing and page name changes that will need to be addressed, for these mod-rewrite is the tool.

Stephan Spencer has recently posted an excellent two-part article on the subject, see:

• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 1)
• URL Rewrites & Redirects: The Gory Details (Part 2)

Past articles on the subject include:

• Launching a new Website / Changing an existing one
• Mod Rewrite Rules for Uniform Spidering
• Never delete or rename a page…
• To www or not to www, that is in the URL …

SEO Huntsville 301 redirects, delete page, Joomla, rename page, SEO Huntsville, sh404sef

There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).

The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same?  Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www  issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.

The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:

• www.mywebsite.com/january 2009/search-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/seo-tag/serach-engine-optimization
• www.mywebsite.com/author-allen/serach-engine-optimization

 Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:

• www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization/sessionid=123

Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.  

Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relavency than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each. 

To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.

So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/serach-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.

Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox  at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537 

Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.

SEO Huntsville Canonical, google, incoming links, microsoft, SEO Huntsville, Yahoo

One of the cornerstones of improving any business is referrals. Nothing promotes a product or service better than positive comments from someone you know and respect or from an authority in the field. The same is true for your website.

To explain the importance of  incoming links to grow traffic to your website, I often use a metaphor of selecting a roofer. You don’t know a roofer, but you have a friend that builds houses, so you ask who he would use. The answer provides not only who to call, but provides immediate credibility for that roofer. If you asked another contractor, and he recommended the same roofer, it increases the credibility of that roofer ten fold. However, if some anonymous bystander overheard you asking about a roofer and said “hey I know this guy”, it probably wouldn’t carry a lot of carry a lot of weight in your selection process.

The message here is that both the quality and the quality of the referral matter.

Likewise, one of the cornerstones for improving Search Engine traffic is by growing referral links from credible websites. The larger and more credible the referring website, the better. Likewise, the greater the number of referring websites the better.  However, this can be overdone and, like the anonymous guy who overheard your conversation and offered a name, if the referring websites have little or no credibility in the Search Engine, they will have little or no influence on your traffic. 

You may remember or have heard about “link exchanges”, essentially an “I’ll link to yours if you link to mine” strategy. These use to be very popular and were a good way to grow incoming links. However, the Search Engines algorithms have evolved making it doubtful that sites of equal rank linking to each other would provide any benefit. Paying people to post in blogs has also become popular in recent years, but just like finding an ad for “loans” posted in a Laundromat, would make you question the credibility of the loan company, links sprinkled in unrelated blogs across the web can cause the Search Engine Algorithm to question the credibility of  those links.

So how do you grow links? My answer would be slowly my friend, one at a time.

There is an interesting discussion the Search Engine Land website that asks the question “Who Owns Link Building” and my earlier discussion on Directories and Incoming Links that may be of interest.

SEO Huntsville incoming links, SEO Huntsville

It is beneficial to separate and track your Pay Per Click traffic from Organic in Google Analytics. If you don’t make the effort, PPC and Organic traffic will be lumped together, making it difficult to know how your SEO efforts are progressing.

Once you make the link between Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, the tracking will occur automatically. To set this up, simply access the Analytics tab in your AdWords account and then either select Create New or Link to Existing.  Once you have done this, all your campaign information, keyword information et cetera will be nicely broken out in your Google Analytics account.

If you previously messed up and selected Create New (when you had an existing account) this can be corrected. You use to have contact Google to have this done manually. This recently changed with this AdWords announcement explaining how you can now un-link and link AdWords and Google Analytics.

In addition to seeing Google (CPC) broken out, you can also have Yahoo (CPC), MSN (CPC), and others broken out in Google Analytics.  While tracking additional marketing campaigns in Google Analytics requires a little extra work when you set the campaign up, it’s definitely worth the effort.  

Tracking other campaigns is accomplished by editing and adding a tracking code to the end of each of the URLs used in your ads. While adding this “tracking code” stuff may sound complicated or technical, it’s not. But just in case, Google has created a tool that simplifies things. To set these up go to the Google Analytic URL builder , enter the URL of your landing page with the associated campaign information and the tool will generate  an updated URL complete with the code . The codes can be placed on any incoming links you wish to track enabling you to track banner ads, paid placements, and so on with your Google Analytics  account.

Note: AdWords will automatically appear in your Analytics account as “Google (CPC)”, so using “CPC” (cost per click) as the “Campaign Medium” setting for other Pay Per Click marketing campaigns will make them appear in like fashion, Yahoo (CPC), MSN (CPC).

SEM Huntsville, SEO Huntsville, Web Analytics adwords, incoming links, ppc, SEM Huntsville, tracking campaigns, Web Analytics

Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but that have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not… this is a great place to find out.

SEO Huntsville google, SEO Huntsville, webmaster tools