SECOND SIGHTING

An Easy Way to Improve Keyword Quality Score

Tom — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:40:25 +0000

A low keyword quality score is obviously a bad thing. It can lead to an increase in the keyword’s minimum bid, meaning it is no longer profitable. The method outlined below should give you a slightly higher quality score. It could be enough to make the keyword profitable again. It is best used in the following circumstances:

Where your ad already seems highly relevant to the keyword, but for whatever reason AdWords still gives it a poor score.
You are targetting a word or phrase that is not allowed to appear in your ad e.g. it is trademarked.

Imagine your keyword is monkey widgets but the word monkey is trademarked. To increase your score you need to mention widgets as often as possible in your ad. A good ad would be:

Cheap Widgets
Widgets, widgets & more widgets.
Get your widget today.

Its important to stuff that keyword in a few times. And a good idea too to mention both plural & singular variations of the word. In testing I have increased quality score from 2 out of 10 to 4 & 5 out of 10 for several keywords. 5 out of 10 means your keyword is listed as OK instead of Poor and the minimum bid can be reduced.

Extensionless URIs

Tom — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:11:45 +0000

if you want your URI format to be website.com/about/ instead of website.com/about.php then put the following line in a .htaccess file in your websites root folder.

RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.php [nc] 

The php part refers to the extension your web pages have. If you had a file called about.html then the line would be

RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1.html [nc] 

The [nc] at the end means the pattern is case-insensitive so would match both about.html and about.HTML

Testing Websites in IE 6 On Vista

Tom — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:02:40 +0000

IETester is some great software for testing websites on Vista. You can currently see how sites look in Internet Explorer versions 5.5, 6, 7 & 8 beta 1. VERY useful when you consider you can’t just download the IE6 browser itself and install it on Vista.

Can You Get Something For Free Just By Asking?

Tom — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:08:55 +0000

http://seoblackhat.com/2008/05/19/to-make-a-fortune-cookie/

Sending HTTP Post Data Without Using a Form

Tom — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:51:50 +0000

I always forget how to do this and it’s really useful… http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/12039/fid/51

11 Killer PPC Tips

Tom — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 12:41:44 +0000

Add keywords till your brain is numb! You should be aiming for thousands of keywords, not just hundreds. It is boring as hell, but vital to a strong PPC campaign. Your competitor may be able to beat you on bid price, but you can beat them for free on keyword volume.
Keywords in an ad group should be very closely related. As a general rule of thumb I keep it to regional varations and where the words are in a different order e.g. blue widgets & widgets blue. This will help keep your keyword’s Quality Score high and your CPC low.
Be aggressive with your choice of keywords, bid on whatever you can get away with. These are often some of the best converting terms.
Do not bid too high on new campaigns just to quickly find keywords that convert. Your aim should be to run a profitable campaign right from the start.
Spot trends amongst your keywords. If a keyword performs really well, are there variations or synonyms of this keyword that you could add to your campaign? Also consider bidding higher for this keyword and closely related terms.
Only delete keywords if they do not convert at all. If a term converts very occasionally, but not enough to justify its current bid price, just lower your maximum bid. It’s better to have keywords show on page 2 or 3 than not show at all. You won’t get many conversions, but they are better than none!
When adding new keywords, consider stepping your bid amounts according to match type. Broad match should have the lowest bids, then phrase match, then exact match. See my post on match type ROI for more information.
Keyword research tools help you get a campaign off the ground quickly. Copyblogger has a few nice reviews on keyword research tools.
When you consider that 25% of search engine queries are new, its worth spending some time coming up with your own keywords. To help me do this I often think in themes - how would a poor person search for this product? what would someone type in if they were in urgent need of a service? Then I set myself a target of say 20 keywords for each theme.
Be wary of bidding on keywords that are too generic, for example loans. Bids will be hugely competitive and such terms are frequently targeted by click fraud. You are unlikely to make any money on these.
When deciding how much to bid or when to delete a keyword, bear in mind that only around 85% of your PPC traffic will be from valid searches. Some clicks on your ads will be accidental, a few will be click fraud, some will be competitors trying to lose you money [but conversely helping your CTR!].

Keyword Spy is Bad

Tom — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:48:05 +0000

Been hearing a lot about Keyword Spy recently, and also been getting hits from their site to some of my domains. Apparently you can use it to get a list of your competitors keywords, which of course sounds amazing. So i ran a test on one of my domains to see how accurate it is. The results are pretty poor, have a look at this image and see if you can guess what the site advertises.

From their site - “KeywordSpy gives you the key to their success: a good ad-campaign with the right keywords.” Think you’d run a profitable campaign with results like these?

Using Stored Values With Select Elements

Tom — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:02:18 +0000

Heres how to use regular expressions to transform a plain HTML select element into one that autoselects based on a previous choice. You could use this to retrieve a value from a database and automatically select the correct option in a dropdown menu. The select element in the example below is called occupation and it is stored in an array called $user_data.

search for:

replace with:

Make sure to rename the fields accordingly for your situation.

Apostrophes & PPC Ads

Tom — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:12:54 +0000

The apostrophe is handled differently by Google, Yahoo! & Microsoft when showing your PPC ads. It’s not something thats really mentioned in any of the help documentation but i’ve had problems with it, so hopefully this quick tip will be of help to some people. Lets say you want to add a keyphrase including a word that should have an apostrophe e.g. the word can’t. Here is how it will be handled by:

Google & Microsoft - you must add the apostrophe to show for searches with an apostrophe, and leave it out to show for searches without one.
Yahoo! - you must add the apostrophe otherwise your ad will not show at all. It will then show for searches with or without an apostrophe.

AdWords Quality Score Cracked

Tom — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:52:37 +0000

In short, who bids highest wins, which is of course how it’s always going to be - for Google, Yahoo! & everybody else. But here’s how the process works in detail. Firstly, we know that Quality Score is used in two stages when showing your ads on the search network. Google themselves say:

“The formula behind Quality Score varies depending on whether it is calculating minimum bids or assigning ad position.”

Stage 1 - The Minimum Bid

This stage is used to calculate the keywords Quality Score, which Google shows to you at least in part via the keywords minimum bid. Google mostly uses keyword CTR, keyword relevance to its ad group & your landing page to calculate this Quality Score.

Stage 2- Ad Position

Ad Quality Score is used to determine an ads position on the page. The ad Quality Score is very heavily influenced by maximum CPC compared to CTR & other factors. Unless your keyword has been given a really good Quality Score, then if you want to be in #1 position you pretty much have to bid yourself there. The result is that ads are ranked mostly in order of maximum CPC, with perhaps one or two positions on a page changing due to the effects of keyword Quality Score.

The Result? To Rank #1 You Have to Bid #1

You might have an amazing keyword Quality Score, but you’re still not going to get the traffic unless you bid high. You may only ever get charged Â£5 a click on a keyword with a maximum CPC of Â£10, but you still have to put in that Â£10 bid to stay in your position. Try it yourself, find a keyword that has a really good Quality Score (signified by a low minimum bid) and an average CPC quite a bit lower than your maximum. Drop the maximum bid so its somewhere between the average CPC and what it’s currently set to. Theres a very good chance that even though you pay exactly the same for a click, your ads position will drop.

Google Wins Every Time

Google profits in so many ways from doing things like this. Think about it:

The onus is always on the advertiser to do all the work. Want to rank higher? Then bid higher. Want to pay less per click? Optimize your ad.
Higher bids are encouraged by Google, both explicitly & implicitly by scenarios such as the one described above. Higher bids of course means more money for Google.
Google only charges a proportion of each advertisers bid. Google not making enough money? Tweak the formula so it relies even more on CPC, and take a bigger chunk of the bid. More money in an instant, without needing to wait for the advertisers to do anything.
There is enough emphasis on keyword Quality Score to keep advertisers optimizing their ads, thus constantly improving the quality of ads on Google. Google gets a better advertising network thanks to other peoples hard work.

In my opinion this is something Yahoo! and Microsoft still don’t fully understand, and one of the reasons why Google is way ahead of them in the advertising world.