"Generating Traffic" Archive

12 Best Practices for URLs

Few things matter to your rankings as much as links, and the vast majority of those who link to your site do so by copying the URL from the address bar when they’re on your page. Because of that, and for other reasons as well, it’s crucial to make sure that your URLs are as well-formed as possible.

Thankfully, randfish did the hard work for me by posting his 11 Best Practices for URLs. He hits so many of the most common errors and things to watch out for. Definitely worth a read and a bookmark to refer back to later if you’re interested in your site ranking better in search engines.

One practice that he forgot, though, is one that I see most often and one that has as much impact as anything he listed.

Don’t link to your homepage with index.htm or index.asp in the URL.

It’s redundant and, most importantly, it confused the search engines. As noted in The Three Basics for Achieving Great Search Engine Rankings, search engines see www.yourdomain.com/ and www.yourdomain.com/index.htm as two completely different URLs. When some pages link to one URL and others link to the other, you end up splitting your link weight between two URLs that are actually the same page.

There’s no reason to include the default document (e.g. index.htm) in the URL and plenty of reasons not to. Take a spin through your site today and make sure you’re not using index.htm in your “home” links. (Don’t forget the links in your main navigation.)

Check Your Daily Budgets

The first step in setting up a pay-per-click advertising program is setting your daily budget — how much you want to spend per day. Daily budgets are great because they allow you to allocate your spend evenly through the month to get consistent coverage, rather than just blowing it all in the first couple of days.

You then begin the process of adding keywords, refining keywords, and perfecting your ads to get the best performance possible. That’s an iterative process, and it often takes several months to get your campaigns really running on all cylinders.

During that time, though, the daily budget is forgotten. You “set it and forget it.” That can often be a problem, though, if all the new keywords you’ve added over the months have caused your campaigns to have much more potential traffic than they had in the beginning. In other words, where you may have been running at 75% of potential in the beginning (i.e. giving up 25% of potential impressions), that may have dropped to 50%, 25% or even lower with all your new keywords. At that point, you’re foregoing a much more significant portion of potential traffic than you were before.

The worst case, though, is when you originally set your budget high enough to capture all available impressions because you wanted to run full speed. Over time, you don’t realize that more and more often you’ve been bumping up against that cap, and you’ve been foregoing more and more impressions as you add more keywords. You’re happy with your performance, but are completely unaware that it could be even better.

So take a few minutes today to check your daily budgets against your biggest days of the week. If you find that you’re hitting your budgets every day, you may want to make some adjustments to allow more traffic to get to your site.

Email is Dead

As I contemplated how best to communicate a new advice series that I’m writing, my first thought (as a result of reading lots of different posts and blogs and books on the topic) was to do it as an email series. Get the user to sign up for the series, and they then get the series via email. You also then have their (very valuable) email address for future marketing purposes — a win-win for everyone. As I thought it through, though, it seemed like there were lots of problems with this approach.

So, because I think this topic is important and because I haven’t found an intelligent discussion on its pros and cons, I have invited Internet marketer Eric Giguere to have a cross-blog discussion with me.

In this first post, I will outline the problems I see with delivering information via email and why I think it may be dead as a serious business communication tool. Eric will then respond with a post on his site, and we’ll keep going back and forth as long as necessary. Be sure to include your comments as well, and we can introduce those into the discussion.

So, without further ado, why email is dead…

Instantly Out of Date

As soon as you send an email, it’s gone. There’s no way to update the information in the email without sending another email, but in most cases you’re definitely going to want to update that information at some point. Doing that with email is cumbersome at best.

Restricted Readership

As you well know, getting someone to give out their email address is extremely difficult. As a result, making your information available only via email will severely limit your readership. I have a very hard time believing that the significant number of potential readers you lose is offset by the increased value of those you capture.

Limited Control Over Presentation

If you think designing for all the different combinations of web browers and operating systems is tough, try multiplying that many times over when you design for an email client. Not only that, but email clients often don’t have near the capability as a web browser. The result is information communicated in a much more limited form than it can be communicated online.

So What’s the Alternative?

I think the next time I need to communicate a large amount of information, I’ll do it with a blog platform like WordPress. Readers can subscribe to updates in a wide variety of ways, including via email, and you can make changes to the content in real-time. Not only that, it’s probably even easier than publishing the content via email. If you still want to restrict access to those who have signed up with an email address, you can do that as well.

So, unless it’s just a one-time or customized mailing, I don’t know why you would choose to communicate information to your customers via email. However, that’s (intentionally) a gross generalization. I hope I’ve included enough of those in my analysis to give Eric some good counterpoints.

Over to you, Eric!

Strange New AdSense Format

I ran across a brand new AdSense format this morning on Plenty of Tee Times:

Now I would have argued that this was some other contextual ad unit, not AdSense, but it definitely is. Take a look at the code behind it. It’s your standard 728×90 ad unit, but it’s very different than any version that I’ve ever seen.

Anyone else seen this? I checked JenSense this morning, but she hasn’t mentioned it yet.

Update:
Leave it to Jen. I knew she’d know the answer:

That actually isn’t a new ad format, that is the AdSense ad unit that will appear if a publisher has screwed up the ad javascript - if you look in the source, the publisher went and put the entire ad unit javascript into a single line which can cause that type of ad unit to appear. It can also appear when you just include the second part of the javascript on a page when you have already included the entire javascript elsewhere on a page.
So nothing new, just the publisher got it wrong when adding the javascript to a website… and now that it’s gone public, he very likely will be getting a warning from Google, because this time of thing has been posted on DigitalPoint, and the webmaster then got a warning from Google about not pasting the javascript exactly how it appears in the control panel.

There you have it: screw up your AdSense code, and Google shows that odd format so that it’s easier to see that it’s wrong.

Thanks, Jen!

Site Targeting is an Outstanding Invention

If they’re still running it, you’ll see an ad for the Mazda CX-7 EarthSearch Sweepstakes running at the bottom of this post. As much as I would like to be in good with Mazda’s ad agency, though, I didn’t sell them that ad. Google did. With Google’s Site Targeting, any advertiser can target ads to websites running AdSense ads.

I haven’t noticed a lot of advertisers doing this, though, despite the fact that it’s both very easy and, potentially, very effective. You simply find a site you want to advertise on and click the the “Advertise on this site” link somewhere around the AdSense slot. You enter a CPM amount and then track clicks, conversions, etc. just like you would from a normal AdWords campaign — the only difference being that you pay based on impressions, not clicks.

I, personally, have had a lot of success with it, and obviously Mazda’s agency sees the beauty in being able to get very wide coverage for their CX-7 on niche sites across the Internet.

You should definitely check out Site Targeting if you haven’t already. Find a site you’d like to advertise on and go for it. You’ll probably be very surprised at how cheap it is.

MSN adCenter: Initial Impressions

I’ve had three days to play around with MSN adCenter since getting into the beta during the open period on Monday, so I wanted to post my initial impressions for any of you who might not have had a chance to get in yet.

What I Like

AdCenter adds some nice features that weren’t previously available elsewhere, like demographic targeting. There are sites who will definitely benefit from being able to target a particular demographic, so this is a great feature. Google obviously thought so, too, as they just announced their own demographic targeting.

My favorite feature not available elsewhere, though, is day- and date-parting. That’s the ability to run your ads only at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. Every site I’ve ever worked on saw higher conversion rates at certain times of the day and certain days of the week, so this will be a huge benefit to those running on limited budgets.

What I Don’t

The first, most annoying problem was that the site didn’t work in Firefox at all. I wasn’t the only one who found it annoying, either. Complaints were flying all over at Internet speed very early on. It doesn’t help any that Firefox usage is much more prevalent among those with Internet voices than with the Internet population as a whole. And of course, those who don’t use Firefox use a Mac, which didn’t work either. Firefox users already have a filter available that blocks MSN and Overture ads by default (but not Google) so this is just another black eye for MSN.

Turns out, the site doesn’t even work in the latest version of IE — Microsoft’s own product. Those IE faithful who had already downloaded IE7 were forced to find a way to drop back to IE6 if they wanted to get into adCenter.

More frustrating, when I finally got in, was that I couldn’t figure out how to import keywords. I uploaded a simple text file several times, and it kept telling me I was missing the max bid data but never told me where it was supposed to go. I looked and looked for a sample import file, but never could find one. I ultimately just ended up inputting my keywords by hand.

After I got through my list and submitted, I had entered some keywords twice (not surprisingly). I fixed those and entered again. More errors. Another fix, another submit. More errors. I went through that loop four or five times before my small list of 30 or so keywords was finally in. Why didn’t all the errors show up at one time?

Then I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

This morning, two and a half days later, my small list of keywords still had not been approved. Unbelievable. This is one of my biggest problems with Overture, too. Why in the world does it take two days (or more) for me to make a keyword change? When Google makes the change within minutes, taking almost 1,500 times longer really isn’t a good thing.

Around lunch, I see that a rush of leads has come in from MSN. Finally! I hustle on over to adCenter (after opening IE, the only thing I ever have to open it for) and find … nothing. It still says that my keywords are awaiting approval, so I assume the data just hasn’t been updated yet. Several hours later, though, it’s still showing the same thing. Disappointing.

(Another minor annoyance: I have to type my username and password every time I go to the site. There’s no way to remember my info or even for my browser to remember it, because of the way they do the form.)

So, high hopes but a very inauspicious start for adCenter. If they had the network to rival Overture and Google, you could overlook it. But they’re still in a distant third, so they have some real catching up to do if they hope to steal customers from the big two. It’s going to be interesting to watch.

MSN adCenter Registration Open for 3 Hours

As reported at JenSense two hours ago:

If you are wanting an AdCenter account, yet haven’t received an invite yet, they are having a three hour open call period today where you will be guaranteed a shiny new account. The sign up period has just opened up and will be open until noon PST (3pm EST).

Now, it does frustrate me that they don’t support Firefox. (How do you not support Firefox?!) But that definitely won’t stop me for signing up for an account.

P.S. Jen, I got blocked from leaving a comment on your blog again–the old “questionable content” error like last time.

Google Making It Easy to Advertise in Print

From Google’s Inside AdWords blog yesterday:

Last week, we told you about a special test we were running to place ads from our AdWords advertisers in select print publications. The auction allows you to bid for ad space in well-known magazines. Since the auction is a new process for many, we are providing some extra time for you to get your bids in; the auction will now close on February 24th. So for those of you who are reading about this for the first time, and for those who are interested but have been procrastinating, be sure to visit http://www.google.com/printadsauction and name your price.

Really interesting concept. If you’ve ever wanted to get into print, this could be your chance. Check out the list of magazines:

Automotive
Car and Driver
Import Tuner
Motor Trend
Road & Track
Sport Compact Car

Lifestyle
Dwell
Ellegirl
Entrepreneur
Home
Martha Stewart Kids
Martha Stewart Living
Outdoor Photographer
Pregnancy
Women’s Health
Women’s Health & Fitness

Technology
Computer Shopper
Computerworld
CRN
Information Week
InfoWorld
MacAddict
Network Computing
PC Magazine
PC Photo
PC World
OXM - Official Xbox Magazine

Give a Valentine to Google

In his book, The Five Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman says that there are five ways that people show love to others: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. The really important point is that that’s also how they feel love from others. So if the love language of your significant other is Quality Time, for example, but you continually show your love through Acts of Service, it’s not having the full effect—despite your most heart-felt efforts. By discovering their love language (or languages) you can ensure that your efforts are truly being appreciated for what they are.

In the same way, your website may be a thing of beauty. Anyone looking at it would stare in amazement at how great it is, call their friends over, email it to others, write about it own their on sites. But when a search engine spider looks at it, they see something completely different—something like:

You don’t have the latest version of Macromedia Flash Player. This web site makes use of Macromedia®Flash™ software. You have an old version of Macromedia Flash Player that cannot play the content we’ve created.

Nothing says “I hate you. Go away.” faster than a cryptic message like that, and all your fantastic work leads to no search engine traffic at all because you didn’t speak their love language.

Thankfully, that’s easy to fix. There are three basic search engine optimization principles that, when implemented, will ensure that you and the search engines enjoy a fantastic relationship for years to come.

So show the search engines how much you love them today, and start speaking their love language. You’ll be glad you did.

Yahoo Search Marketing (née Overture) vs. Google AdWords

Greg Boser (aka WebGuerrilla) commented yesterday on a recent Media Post article. It was an interesting article, but I disagree about one of the major conclusions they drew from it.

According to the study of 1,200 PPC advertisers, those with larger budgets preferred Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, née Overture) and MSN over Google:

[W]hen Outsell looked more closely at the results, it found that the most enthusiastic Google fans also had the smallest marketing budgets. The average marketing budget of respondents who rated Google “extremely” effective totaled $3.7 million. But average budgets for those who considered Yahoo and MSN extremely effective came to $4.6 million.

Be careful before taking that as proof that YSM or MSN is actually better than Google, though. For one thing, is there really a material difference between budgets of $3.7 million and $4.6 million? As “a” writes in over the comments on Greg’s blog: Those who spend 3 or 4 million will not care…but suddenly, those who spend 5 million turn out to be coldly rational? I could see there being a big difference in preference between $37,000 and $4.6 million, or even $370,000 and $4.6 million, but $3.7 and $4.6 don’t seem statistically different.

Second, my experience tells me just the opposite. AdWords gives you much more ability to fine-tune your bids to really dial-in optimal conversion costs. YSM doesn’t give you anywhere near the same level of control. It’s like comparing a shotgun with a sniper rifle.

That said, that may in fact be the reason that many people prefer YSM. While a sniper rifle gives you much more accurate results, a shotgun is obviously much easier to use. Even for those without great PPC skills, YSM gives them ability to get good results without worrying too much about what they’re doing, and those who have never gotten down into the level of control AdWords provides might not even notice a difference between the two.

I’m just guessing on that, though, as I very much prefer AdWords. It’s not even close. And I’m looking forward to trying out MSN as soon as possible.

In the meantime, what do you think? Do you prefer YSM over Google, or the other way around? Why?