A large part of any process that involves getting good at something is the ability to still hone the basics. This is particularly relevant if you want to become an expert. Think of guitarists practicing scales, football players practising free kicks, etc. Even though their ability level has far exceeded these elementary drills, the need to perform them never goes away.

With this is mind watch this video. It will make you remember some fundemental parts of the Google pay per click system that you may of been taking for granted.

Enjoy…

A quick one that (if I get the time) I will expand upon and do some research on, etc.

I was running a ‘site:’ query in Google a moment ago and accidentally pressed the return key after I had typed in ‘site’. Try typing in ‘site’ into Google (I was using google.co.uk ‘the web’) yourself.

As you will see (well, for most of you I guess) the ‘Banksy’ site comes up as number one with some other sites like the ‘Keane’ and ‘Franz Ferdinand’ also appearing in the top 10. Now this is obviously because of the anchor text of the links coming into the site, but why these sites? Each site is popular in it’s own right, but I really can’t think of why the anchor text would naturally include the word ‘site’ to take them to such a high position for this word above many others sites.

Anyone got any ideas?

The link profile for these sites (particularly the Banksy one) is too deep to meaningfully go through. Also, the term ‘site’ is too generic to use many of the other ways that this result could be distilled.

So, I think I will pick some lower placed results and see if I can see a pattern.

All of the ‘top of the head’ stuff like ‘official site’, ‘web site (two words)’, etc. doesn’t really explain anything about these results for these sites (i.e. there are many other sites that out rank them for these terms).

One to ponder… I don’t think it is a Google glitch and these must I be some basis for it. But, why that anchor text particularly for those sites?

This update was named after the guy who worked on it. So ‘Vince’ it is…

Anyway, ‘Vince’ is a tweak to Google’s results that affects some pretty big terms like ‘mortgage’, ‘loan’, etc. The update seems to favour bigger brands and has pushed some of these sites further up the rankings.

The upshot is that in most regions you will now get delivered a set of results that will act as more of a roll call of all the ‘top of the head’ companies you can think of related to that particular keyword.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts about the change where for the first time ever he looks (very very slightly) sheepish.

Is this good? Well, certainly this isn’t good if you run a well positioned site that is about these subjects. So, if you run a comparison site, etc. in these areas you will probably already know if this has affected your traffic.

From what Matt has said this update is probably looking at the overall weight and trust of a site (and the big brands have spent enough marketing pounds to win here) and the theme of the site. This now looks like it will win for these keywords over anchor text based SEO work. Is this fair? Probably not.

I think the missing element here is ‘quality’. What I mean is that just because you go to a big brand site, it doesn’t mean that you are going to get what you want as a web viewer. I guess Google are working on the basis that if you type in the word ‘mortgage’ you probably want a mortgage and they are looking to deliver results like a phone directory would. Where as if you type ‘mortgage research’ you are browsing and want to see the full gamut of web pages that might help you.

Let’s see how this one develops. I think Google are (slightly) playing with fire here.

P.S. can you imagine the smile on the faces of the SEO companies who are looking after the major brands that have got the ranking jump? Claim that glory now boys and girls! Don’t let anyone tell you that it was just a Google update!

As a rule, changing any element of an established URL and URL structure on your site is a no no. I can’t think of any reason for this to be a good idea. However, sometimes this does become necessary.

I had an occasion today to change one of the URLs on one of my affiliate sites, buy bags, wallets, purses, luggage (shameless plug and keyword crazy anchor text… sorry). I noticed that in my link to Wheeled Luggage & Bags (sorry again, I will stop now) I had only put ‘wheeled’ in the query string and this was only bringing up about a third of the results that it could. So I needed to add ‘wheel’ to the query string too, which also meant that the URL would change.

The site hasn’t been up that long so it wasn’t an agonising decision to change the URL (if you are even thinking of changing a URL for a long established and search engine traffic generating page, think again). However, using the usual 301 redirect rule (redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm) in the .htaccess file didn’t work.

So, I had to do some digging around and realised I had to go deeper into mastering regular expressions (great article, but pour yourself a cup of tea first). After some playing I found that something like this worked:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=wheeled$
RewriteRule ^search6.php$ http://www.walletandpurse.co.uk/search6.php?q=wheel+wheeled [L,R=301]

As you can guess you can also use something like this to redirect a whole pile of dynamic URLs too (only for a fresh site though please!).

As a word of warning, please only play with this in a safe environment or with expert advice. Don’t mess with all this stuff unless you are completely sure of what you are doing. However, done correctly and in the right circumstances being able to redirect a pre-existing dynamic URL is a good tool to have in your armoury.

Well, free as in you don’t need to buy any software, etc. Or anything in fact.

Here it is…

1. Pick one of your competitors on the web who are doing better than you for your chosen search term (better to choose one of your less competitive terms/competitors for this tip).
2. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and input their URL and hit ‘Explore URL’.
3. Choose the ‘inlinks’ tab.
4. In the ‘show inlinks’ on the first drop down menu choose ‘except from this domain’ and on the second choose ‘entire site’.
5. Now click ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ (you may have more than 1000 in your list, but Yahoo will only give you access this way to the first 1000. You can play around with some different search parameters to distill this some more. However, as mentioned before a more ‘niche’ area and picking a competitor with less than a 1000 results would be better).
6. Once you have the TSV file you can open it in Excel or the spreadsheet programme of your choice.
7. Now have a play around. Use your imagination! Think about what you can do with this data. As an example you could do a search for the competitors name and this will find the page titles and pages that mention (and are usually dedicated) to that company. This is usually either a directory you could assess the worth of or even better it might be a website that takes outside content and will be prepared to give you a page.

There are a lot of programmes out there that help you do things like this too. However, I just thought that if you are sitting there wondering what you could devote half an hour of link building time to and is FREE, then this could get you going.

Good linking…

Apart from being wonderfully creative with your title, and two lines of ad copy, the display URL is the only other place available to tweak your AdWords adverts in your favour.

As we all know ‘deep level’ split testing your adverts is a key element to maximising your results, and playing your keywords in the best way. What I mean by ‘deep level’ is looking at the whole picture with each advert and related keyword being looked at with all factors that affects your ROI. You don’t need me to tell you that, unless you are doing purely an awareness exercise or gathering data, wasted clicks are in the main – wasted money.

However, lets say that you have all of your key metrics (landing pages, keywords, ROI, PPC, ad position, etc.)under control and your campaign is running well; the display URL is a nice place to play with.

Don’t get me wrong you can mess up here, but in my experience, as long as your not stupid, you can play a little bit with this line and really only affect your click through rate. Hey (you ask), don’t you just affect your click through rate with all the other lines? Well, yes you do, but you also affect the dead clicks, the wasted clicks, etc. much, much more. Whereas the display URL (with all of its constraints) is just a pure let’s see if I can tweak my click through rate and get more of the good stuff (if your AdWords campaign is giving you ‘good stuff’ in the first place… yep, I obviously swallowed the thesaurus today… ‘good stuff’… I ask you…).

With Google rules of destination domain having to match display domain, you have three choices when it come to the display URL, which are:

1. Buy a keyword rich domain name and use this instead of your main site (not always an option)
2. Use words in the sub directory (e.g. after the last /)
3. Use words in the sub domain (e.g. before the first . or 2nd/3rd/etc. as well if you go deeper)
4. Various character and capitalisation things that you can do

So you can play with the above to see if some different combinations give your adverts a bit or an edge on all of those around you. The key here is the ‘all of those around you’ bit. If everyone is stuffing the display URL with keywords, then it may be better to go down the ‘neutral’ route and just display your naked URL (does anyone do that anymore?).

As said, in my opinion, this is a good ‘play’ area within any form of PPC that uses this structure and can help you to tweak that extra few percent of click through rate in your favour.