July 2008 Archives
Today, a colleague asked me what I know about external links. Rather than simply e-mail her back I decided to sit down and answer this like I might if I were taking a college course exam. In other words a time limited brain dump. Let’s see how much I remember. :) A Little Foundation InLink = Inbound Link - A link from another page or document on the Web to the page being examined. OutLink = Outbound Link - A link from the page being examined to another page or document on the Web. Internal Links - Links between pages
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Continue reading Everything You Wanted to Know About Inbound External Links
If you were a creative writing or English major, you may think your job prospects include pouring coffee in a cafe while scrawling poems on napkins, burying yourself in manuscripts as an editorial assistant in a publishing house, working as a journalist for a local publication, or of course writing the Great American Novel. But there is one wee writing career that doesn’t really cross the average English major radar (and least it didn’t cross mine) and that’s copywriting. If the muse hasn’t been in lately, why not give marketing writing, aka copywriting, a try? Below, I cover the
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Continue reading Copywriting is better than other writing careers
Not everyone has the ability to work with Yahoo and receive the occasional free optimization help from their “experts.” If you do, carefully review the ads that come back. Several times, I sent in existing ad groups for help with ad optimization (who knows what will get a better quality index score than the search engine itself, right?) or requested help to build a new ad group to save time, only to have to tear down the ads returned. It wasn’t that the PPC advertisements were unrelated or made no sense, but they were still wrong in that the
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Continue reading Yahoo Outsources Your PPC Ads to India
Google just updated their Toolbar PageRank, also known as the little green bar. Once again I am seeing a lot of web sites losing PageRank, so I want to re-share what I have counseled people in the past. If your rankings and traffic have not recently fallen, do not worry about your diminished PageRank. Visible Toolbar PageRank is only a snapshot that Google updates every four to eight months. The real PageRank, the one you never see, is continuously calculated. Google uses real PageRank in its ranking algorithm. As the Internet gets bigger it becomes more difficult to achieve
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Continue reading Google Updates Visible Toolbar PageRank
It’s the tiredest of icebreakers. And yet, at lease once a month, someone asks me what I do. After I say I’m a copywriter, I am usually treated to one of three sparkling remarks: “So, you just copy what other people write?” “So, you make copies of other people’s writing?” “So, you make copyrights?” Har, har. While these comments get a little tedious, I don’t blame people for not knowing much about copywriting. It isn’t a well-known career, really. In fact, even spellchecker doesn’t seem to know what copywriting is, since it keeps underlining it like a misspelling as
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Continue reading Part 1: What is copywriting
The economy is rocky. Resources are tight. It's the perfect time to run out and hire a creative services firm to do your Internet marketing, right? Right! While resources must be considered carefully in a rocky economy, I am here to explain why investing in professional creative development is one of the soundest business decisions you can make. You have it forever. Unlike other maintenance-driven services like PPC and SEO, which require constant upkeep, a bells-and-whistles web site design or some truly keen copywriting have endless charms that don't depreciate. A timelessly great design or some especially astute written
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Continue reading Why You Need Creative Services
The internet today is filled with tutorials on how to design your web site 'web 2.0' style. I thought it would be fun to teach you some of the horrible design trends from the past. So I invite you to return to a simpler time, a time when people still listened to TLC's 'No Scrubs' (not me) and terrorism was something that only happened in Steven Seagal movies. Here's how to design your website like it's 1999. Use a lot of Stock Photography This is a website convention that never seems to go out of style. The idea seems to
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Continue reading How to Design Your Site Like It's 1999
The display URL in any PPC ad is a great place to stuff additional keywords, attract attention to your ad and/or increase branding. So it is definitely not a space to be wasted or ignored. Next time instead of simply putting “www.yoursite.com” as the display URL, try some of these simple tests and see if you can’t increase click through rates! 1st Display URL Vs. 2nd Display URL Test http://www.examplesite.com www.examplesite.com No “http” www.examplesite.com examplesite.com No “www” www.examplesite.com www.Examplesite.com Capitalize first word www.examplesite.com www.ExampleSite.com Capitalize first letter in all words www.examplesite.com www.examplesite.com/product Adding keyword to
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Continue reading Do Not Waste PPC Display URLs
When you read that paid search and organic search require separate content strategies you might think, “Duh! That’s obvious.” Except that something happened to me last week, and this was not the first time. A Portent’s client earned a top ten ranking for an important keyword, one right near the top of the keyword chart. Time to cheer, right? Except, Google selected a different “landing page” than the one we optimized and targeted for this particular search query. Instead of celebrating a profitable new top ten ranking I found myself asked how to move the ranking result away from
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Continue reading Paid Search & Organic Search Require Different Content Strategies
When someone orders iced tea, don’t serve them maple syrup It’s no secret that pouring it on too thick will make consumers suspicious and distrusting of your advertising. It’s no secret that advertisers continue to do it anyway. But there is a quiet uprising occurring, an anti-movement springing up in the form of sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Yahoo Answers. Such user-based sites aren’t new, but due to the bombardment of glitzy, insincere ads, flash banners and billboards, they are taking on a momentum of their own. Consider their influence. I’d argue that TripAdvisor reviews supersede “star” ratings when booking
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Continue reading The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing: The Truest Best
“Do you guarantee a top ranking?” I hear this a lot. The answer is “If I did, I’d be lying to you.” Google today published revised guidelines for hiring a search engine optimization firm. I think the single most valuable quote is: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a ‘special relationship’ with Google, or advertise a ‘priority submit’ to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting
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Continue reading In Search Engine Optimization, There Are No Guarantees
When I first started in pay per click marketing the content network was considered a dark, black hole where clicks went to die and impressions soared. Nowadays there is a lot more success, a lot more transparency and a lot more of control that an advertisers can exert over their campaigns. So, when starting a pay per click account and building new campaigns and ad groups, here’s a checklist of how to get a solid start on the content network. First of all, be sure you understand what the content network is: these are websites & blogs that are
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Continue reading Get Started with the Google Content Network
