Find out about how to overcome ‘junk’ and dead links here, this is something that all SEO companies need to deal with and is a large issue regarding search engine optimisation and providing top quality and consistent search results. Removing junk from internet search results is extremely important and failure to do so can lead to frustration for the user, meaning they may possibly stop using your search engine as they struggle to find what they are looking for.

Bing, Microsoft’s successful and popular search engine has recently written how they remove bad links from their Bing search results, and also how they handle junk or empty snippets too. A blog on how this is done has been written by a member of their core search team, Dr. Richard Qian, and it is the latest in their recent efforts to give search quality insights into how their search engine works so well and so consistently. For Bing, junk links include dead links, which are described as pages that return either an error code 4xx or 5xx, they use a Bing crawler, which crawls through and detects these dead links. Also included as junk links are soft 404’s, similar to hard 404’s but without the large header, and to combat these junk links Bing uses a precise classifier and page content to detect whether it is soft or not, and therefore whether or not it should be removed from the search results.

Another form of junk links is parked domains which they do not want in their search results; these needs to be detected and removed so they use signatures. Another thing that Bing has to deal with in their search results is junky snippets and empty snippets. Junky snippets are dealt with through various strategies to enhance their garbage detector, encoding classifier and document converter; these help reduce the likelihood of junky snippets occurring. To deal with empty snippets, Bing uses a number of different classifiers to see the proper snippet for the search result and also crawlers and article processors. All of these tools and techniques used by the search engine from Microsoft are hugely important for SEO professionals who are optimising client websites, as overcoming dead link issues is a large challenge and one that needs to be dealt with if your SEO Company is to succeed.

If you are an SEO Company looking to overcome these issues then the information here should be of valuable use, and being a product of Microsoft, Bing are a hugely successful and prominent search engine that produces top quality and consistent search results.

As an IAB member we have been sent details of one of their most important annual reports, the IAB/PwC UK Online Adspend Study for 2011. The following involves a study based on data from the year 1997, consisting of figures from the Official Advertising Association and other major UK media owners.

Despite the negative economic climate in the UK online ad spend experienced its biggest increase in 5 years.

The UK Adspend Headline Results :

• Online adspend at an all time high of £4,784m in 2011

• 14.4% rise on like for like basis as compared to 2010

• Search experienced the highest increase in 2011 of 17.5%

• Search now represents 57.8% of all UK online adspend

• Last 10 years’ expenditure £197m – 2002 & £4784m – 2011.

• Total advertising market (including all other media) of £8.27bn: of which online now
has a 27% Market share in 2011 as compared to only 3% market share in 2003.

• 2011 saw online overtake TV as the biggest contributor to all media advertising

• Minor difference in the % share revenue for the digital media mix in 2010 & 2011.

• 2010: Search 57% , Display 23% & Classified 18%
2011: Search 58%, Display 24% & Classified 16%

• Increase in Format:
Online video- £54m (2010) to £109m (2011)
Social media- 75%
Banners- £585m

• Increase in Advertiser sector:
Finance in the top spending display sector.
Consumer goods – 9% (2009) & 15% (2011).
Retail in the third place.

• Brand based online advertising:
2010: £221m & 2011: £257m

Online Media mix:

The method involved in retrieving the information is based on the reported revenue, submitted by 100+ participants from the UK’s major media owners. Migration from search to display resulted the revenue of Google display to be estimated by PwC advisory Board. The companies which were included as result of their submission in both 2010 and 2011 were studied and reported on their growth figures involving total spend and categories.

Year 2010‘s study highlighted ‘online ad spend growth to £4.097 billion, 12.8% on a Like for Like basis, Display £945 million, Classified £751 million and Search £2,346 million (IAB/PwC UK Online Adspend Study Full Year 2011).

Very difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing, is the answer. Because of the high amount of competition online, many websites don’t manage to get very high up the search engine rankings pages. For this reason, most websites employ varying search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques, which are designed to increase their exposure to search engine spiders. This might include writing content for the website, which includes certain keywords and phrases designed for search engine spiders to read and match to words typed in by searching users. This also includes link building and sharing links between other websites in an effort to direct traffic towards the website. While these techniques can be employed and put into practise by people within the company, many choose to employ a specialist SEO company to handle an SEO campaign – the people that work in these companies are fully trained and highly knowledgeable, probably more so than anyone who claims to understand and be able to implement SEO at your own company.

However, because SEO has become widely known as a way of increasing traffic and, subsequently, sales, many companies have taken advantage of it and there is a current over-saturation of SEO on the internet. Some companies litter their content with keywords so, while their traffic will be high, their website will actually be of poor quality, as opposed to a company that hasn’t spent much on SEO but does have a very good site in terms of image and content. For this reason, search engine giant Google (as well as a couple of others) is starting to introduce over-optimisation penalties (as confirmed by the company’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts, in a panel at the SXSW festival in Texas recently) which aim to level the playing field. This will not affect those that use SEO correctly, only those that are unfairly abusing the technique and taking traffic away from those that aren’t.

Therefore, if you’re intending to employ an SEO company to implement and manage an SEO campaign on your behalf, make sure that they use “white hat” as opposed to “black hat” techniques to get your company up search engine rankings. Otherwise, Google’s new penalties may see your company’s website plummet in the opposite direction to the land of Results Page 21, where nobody ever goes.

Discover the most effective form of feedback to your clients and the importance of storytelling in pay per click (or PPC) marketing as opposed to just using statistics and graphs to demonstrate results with this website. PPC marketing  is a model of marketing that directs online traffic towards websites, and when an advert is clicked on the advertisers will pay the publisher (hence ‘pay per click’), this is often a keyword or phrase which will relate to their target audience, and therefore direct them to their webpage. This is becoming an increasingly popular and effective form of marketing which, if done correctly, can be extremely effective and profitable.

There are many companies that provide this service, but it is apparent that reporting back to the client can be unsatisfactory through only using graphs and statistics to demonstrate results; this is not particularly helpful or professional and does not help either party. It is vital for a PPC consultant makes sure that the client understands not only the statistics and what they mean, but also how this marketing model works and how they can possibly improve their results. As with most forms of business, face to face human interaction is the best possible course of action so that targets can be understood and questions easily answered, as well as building a trusting client and consultant relationship.

A PPC consultant will understand the technical jargon and what is working and what isn’t, but the client will not as it is not their job to understand this, and is why they have decided to pay for this marketing model. Therefore it is vital for the consultant to brief the customer and tell the whole story as opposed to bombarding them with statistics and technical language. The most effective form of feedback will involve teaching the client the difference between the statistics and which are the most important stats, using web analysis to demonstrate how it is working, and presenting the facts and data in a logical and straight forward format. Providing all of this in a well organized and though out story will help the client understand and built a trusting relationship with your PPC marketing company.

Find out more about the best form of constructing feedback for clients with this website, there are also comments, blogs and other pages to read all relating to providing the best possible pay per click marketing possible. Find out more about this popular and effective marketing model today.

Pretty much all websites will have crawl errors of one kind or another. These are errors with your site that Google spotted when they crawled it. Not only should you be aware of what these errors are, you should also know how to fix the most common of them.

Errors can easily creep into the thousands if your site is reasonably large. They can fall into the following areas:

• Errors in sitemaps
• Restricted by robots.txt
• Soft 404 errors
• Timed out
• Not found, i.e. the page someone was trying to reach simply wasn’t there

Some webmasters either aren’t aware of the myriad of crawl errors that can occur, or they don’t know how to fix them. Depending on the range and depth of errors that appear, it may be prudent to hire an SEO company to fix them instead of trying to figure out how to do them all on your own. It can take some considerable time to fix them all and if you have thousands you might wonder if you will ever complete them. SEO services have the experience required to get the job done – very likely to a much better spec than you would do on your own.

One important area to tackle is your sitemap. Old ones should generate a 404 message for Google to see, so it can tell the difference between the old and the new. Once Google has seen the 404 message a few times it will get the message and know that this sitemap is an old one.

Obviously this is just one area you need to focus on, which is why it can be better to turn this essential work over to an SEO company to handle for you. They can also look at handling your 404s and soft 404s. Most people are aware that a 404 page generally means the page cannot be found. The latter will often be a page that doesn’t have much content on it at all. This is an easy fix and can be avoided in the future simply by fleshing out all the pages on your site.

Some people don’t have the confidence to tackle their crawl errors on their own. Even if you understand how certain errors are generated – including a robot.txt timeout and a URL timeout for example – it can still be difficult to resolve them with limited knowledge. It certainly becomes more understandable that many people hire SEO services to handle these issues on their behalf. Most webmasters will benefit from focusing on other areas of their business while the experts get on with whittling down the huge lists of crawl errors for their sites.

What is Impression Share?

One question I get asked a lot by my clients is: What is the overall number of all searches made on my keywords, and how many of those searches am I appearing for? Up until recently there was no quick and easy way of answering this question; thankfully Google introduced the Impression Share metrics into the Adwords Interface.

Impression share is the percentage of impressions that you received divided by the estimated number of impressions that you were eligible to receive. In simple terms; what percentage of all searches made on your keywords did you actually appear for?

To understand the value of impression share, you can picture the online advertising landscape as a pizza. You and your competitors are trying to grab the biggest slice of that pizza. By watching your impression share metrics, you can keep an eye on the size of your slice compared to the rest of the pizza, which is being shared and eaten by your competition!

Other available impression share metrics include:

• Lost IS (budget): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown due to insufficient budget.
• Lost IS (rank): The percentage of time that your ads weren’t shown due to poor Ad Rank.
• Exact match IS: The percentage of impressions that you received for searches that exactly matched your keyword divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions that you were eligible to receive.

Knowing these metrics can help you determine how to optimise your account, and may make you consider getting in some outside help to achieve your advertising goals.

What do the stats mean, and how can I improve them?

If your Impression Share percentage is low this shows that you are missing out on a large chunk of people that are searching for you. For example, if your Impression Share is 30%, this means that 70% of people looking for your services/products don’t even know you exist! You are missing out on lots of potential customers, and are limiting the reach your adverts have.

If your Lost IS (budget) percentage is high this shows that you are limiting the audience you are reaching by not assigning a large enough budget. This may also be an indication that you have generic keywords that are eating up the budget; match types and negative keywords along with keyword level bid management would help in most cases, but if you are already utilising these features, you may simply need to put more money in.

If your Lost IS (rank) percentage is high this shows you that you need to work on your positioning. You need to improve your CTR by adding new match types (phrase, exact, BMM), adding keyword variations, excluding irrelevant traffic and adjusting your Max CPC bids. Currently your ad isn’t appearing high enough in the results for people to be able to see it. However, if you have a good selection of match types with good Quality Scores, and your positioning is still low, it may be the case that you have to increase your bids. Increased bid prices with a budget constraint may lead to a drop off in clicks and impressions; you would need to up your bids, and increase your daily budget in order to cope with it. Positions 1-3 generally convert better than Position 4 and below as a rule.

If your Impression Share percentage is high then it may be the case that the targeting on your account is too narrow, and you need to expand your keyword list in order to cast your net wider. What’s the point of having 90% Impression Share if you have 10 keywords on Exact match, you’re geographically targeting one town, and your Ad Scheduling is set to show ads 2 hours a day? You have a great share of the impressions you are eligible to show for, but the search volume you are targeting is very low.

If your Exact Match IS percentage is low then you probably have a lot of broad match keywords that are triggering ads on a wide variety of search terms. Add your Broad match keywords in BMM, Phrase and Exact. Go through your Search Query Reports (See search terms- All option on the Keywords tab) and discover what people are typing in to see your advert. Add relevant keyword variations in Phrase and Exact match type, and exclude irrelevant terms by adding them as Negative keywords. You will probably start to see your Exact Match IS improve, along with all the other IS metrics.

Well Chris, that all sounds great! Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the stats in my account…

This is generally the view that you will have when you sign into your account:

Make sure you have a decent date range selected (top right of the account): at least 30 days. Making sure you’re on the Campaigns tab, look for the Columns drop down menu (you can see it directly under the Ads tab). Click on Columns, then on Customise columns.

Underneath Select metrics, click on Competitive metrics; click on Add next to Impr. Share, Exact Match IS, Lost IS (Budget) and Lost IS (Rank). Click on Save.

You will then see the additional columns as shown below:

You can quickly identify in the example above that some campaigns are performing better than others; overall the whole account has a less than 10% Impression Share, and the reason for this is that they don’t have the budget to cope. Another indicator of this is the Limited by budget status on most of the campaigns; the IS metrics back this up. They also do not appear for many terms that they are exactly bidding on; expanding their keyword lists and match types would help improve things.

I would recommend keeping an eye on these metrics along with the more common KPI’s (Clicks, CTR, Conversions etc). If you have a poor CTR or a high Cost per Conversion (compared to the value of your product/service), I would suggest focusing on these metrics first; it would probably be unwise to try and get more visitors if the ones you currently have don’t engage with your site in the way you hoped they would.

A low IS percentage could show that need to optimise and refine your account further and spend your money more wisely; it could also be the indicator that you need to pour more money into the account to achieve better results. If you can reach more people that are looking for you, you can improve your chance of achieving conversions and gaining new customers (preventing your competitors from getting to them first).

Chris Davenport-Smith

GCP Qualified Client Management Executive at Broadplace Advertising

Millions of people surf the internet every day, and whether that be for research while at work or for fun when at home, the chances of an advert catching your eye are extremely high no matter where you are.

Google is a well-known and well utilised medium when it comes to advertising. By implementing Google AdWords into your marketing strategy there is a great wealth of potential clients for you and your business to tap into. The process is simple: you create new adverts, your adverts appear on Google, and new customers are attracted to your website where they buy your products and services.

The fantastic thing about Google AdWords is that you only pay for results; this is undoubtedly a feature you will recognise when commonly referred to as Pay Per Click or PPC.

Ever searching for new means of bringing in customers and increasing your ROI, Google can now offer businesses based in the USA and UK the ability to bid for phone calls. Similar to PPC, your business can also Bid-Per-Call online as well as for clicks. By setting up this feature, it can be monitored by your existing account manager at Broadplace, or by your newly designated professional when you join as a new customer.

This is something well worth thinking about, as any bid-per-call and phone call Quality Score may also directly factor into your online Ad Rank too! We all know the benefits of this; higher ranked adverts have an increased chance of being seen and can subsequently generate more phone calls, as well as maintaining the potential for even more clicks.

Integrating the Bid-Per-Call application into your account is easy, and can be done quickly as you simply select to have a Google forwarding number when you set up Call Extensions in your account. This will allow Google’s systems to record when a call is placed to your business through your adverts.

Then you and your Broadplace account manager can keep an eye on the call progress through AdWords in the same way that you would for your clicks. After all, a phone call can lead to more relevant enquiries and potentially more business, therefore as an organisation you may be more willing to pay for a phone call rather than for a click.

What’s more, your account manager will forward regular reports that could share details so specific as to include call duration, caller area code, and call type such as from a mobile or a manually dialled call as well as even pin-pointing the keywords/ad groups that triggered the calls.

“This can really help your business in terms of generating more enquiries and also help you measure the returns more effectively.” – Dave Bhargav, Account Manager.

If you would like to find out more about Bid-Per-Call, and how it can enhance your marketing campaign, don’t hesitate to contact us. At Broadplace Advertising Ltd. this feature is included in your existing management fee, and this applies to both new and existing customers alike.

Contact Details:

Dave Bhargav

dave.b@broadplace.com

020 3167 4622

You might think that, once your business has a website, it’s relatively easy to start making money from people visiting it and purchasing whatever it is you’re providing. However, there’s no guarantee that anyone will visit your site at all – it has to be visible when potential customers search for your services or products on Google, otherwise nobody will be able to find it. For this reason, there are a great deal of companies offering ways of optimising your website so it can be easily found on search engines. While there are a number of methods available to use under the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) banner, link building services are probably the most important next to choosing and using keywords.

Link building is a major part of ensuring that your website begins to rise up the Google rankings when people enter your chosen keywords into search engines. Inbound links (or backlinks) direct users back towards your website and therefore increase the traffic that search engine software examines when deciding where to place a website within its listings. While most SEO companies will offer link building packages as part of an overall service, there are also companies that exclusively offer the same packages.

There are a number of different link building techniques that businesses can utilise in order to create a more diverse range of links and increase their online visibility. For instance, by linking to as many places as possible, like blogs and comment sections, there is a higher chance that people will visit your website. Social media is a highly effective way of increasing traffic through links – because of the rise of social networking, search engines like Google and Yahoo now consider ‘social signals’. This means that, if you regularly link to content on your website through your Facebook page or Twitter account and formulate relationships with customers, fans and followers, any Like or Retweet connected to a webpage will be flagged as a sign of that webpage’s popularity. In addition, you might consider deeplinks, which are links to internal pages of your website, rather than just the homepage. As well as these techniques, companies that offer link building services will inevitably use many more methods to increase website traffic.

In addition to link building, the improvement of keywords and phrases is another area that an SEO company will look to work on, as these are the search terms that potential customers will type into Google and (hopefully) find your website – for this reason, the more specific the keywords are, the better. Sprinkling them throughout the content within the site will ensure that it is more visible to search engine spiders.

By combining one of the many available link building packages with keyword improvement and other SEO techniques, your business will begin to rise up the search engine rankings, ultimately gaining you more customers and increasing your revenue streams. You’ll be the new Amazon or iTunes in no time!

Google is constantly changing the way its search engine works and it is also offering new features that will change the way we use it. One recent example of this comes in the form of Google Instant Preview. You may already have seen this in action if you use the Google search engine a lot, because it will appear when you look at your search results. It only happens when you click on the small magnifying glass symbol when you first see it next to the results.

Once this has been done, hover your cursor over each search result you will see an arrow on the right hand side. Hover over that and you will get a preview of the website on the right side of the page. This gives you an instant preview of how the site looks and it can help you to decide whether you will visit it or not.

But while this can be good for searchers, how will it affect webmasters from an SEO point of view?

You will notice that your search term may be highlighted in this portion of the preview. You might be able to read a sentence or two appearing on the page without actually visiting the website. It has been said that you don’t need to worry about this new feature affecting your position in the search engines. But there is no doubt that this new visual element to SEO makes it even more important to ensure you get it just right.

If you are in any doubt over how to make sure your website ranks well in this sense, consult SEO services to get the professional advice you need. They need to stay ahead of the curve in order to offer the best possible service, so they will know more about SEO and Google Instant Preview than you might do.

One of the key lessons to take away from Instant Preview is that the best performing sites in this sense are those that do not have pop up ads on them. If you see a website with one of these appearing in the screenshot, you won’t see much information because it doesn’t appear easy to see. We could be about to see a return to basics – a good solid web page design with good information that is worthwhile to the audience it appeals to. If these pages do well in Google Instant Preview viewings, they might get more traffic as a result. The more uncluttered and appealing your pages look, the better they are likely to perform.

If you are in any doubt over how to do this, consult a good SEO Company services to make sure you give the right impression.

Google reconsideration requests are tricky to understand but it relates to a number of guidelines that you need to comply to.

If you are not in agreement you can always email the customer service team or webmasters at Google who will be able to run you through how to form a reconsideration request.

The first aspect is to ensure your site is up to speed and complies with all the webmaster rules. You may want to employ an SEO Company to tackle these issues in the first instance.

You also need to inform Google of any relevant changes when filing reconsideration. In addition, Google will be able to let you know if there are any viruses in your system or for some reason, you may have been hacked into online.

This may involve in certain cases where spammers have put viruses on your site. This also links to whether your search results are affected or the search traffic has been diminished. Again this might link to a spam issue.

Therefore it is essential you clean up your site and file a reconsideration request. It is imperative that you explain what type of spam issues you have been experiencing and what measures you have taken in order to resolve the issue.

There is no point in not saying anything as the issue might spiral and your site could be down for a number of days. If you know the exact violation that was caused then this will be even more helpful when processing a request.

This may include receiving misinformation from an SEO Company. They also have web spam experts on hand that will have the chance to look at your site and find out what is wrong. They will have access to all the latest data and when you filed the report as well as checking out your site to spot any other outstanding issues.

Once the problems have been revoked and resolved there involves if given the choice communication back from Google. This involves any resolutions after a request has been processed and successful.

In some cases Google will able to report if an outcome has been successful or if the problem is still within violation, they will be able to let you. Furthermore you can be informed if there was no spam threat in the first place.

You can have the chance to access a number of forums in order to solve your questions or queries as well as access to a lot more information. In most cases Google have improved their user feedback and ensures you will be able to clarify problems in a quicker way.