Does your website exist to sell more products? Or does it exist to help your customers? Do you force the sales message down the throat of your visitors? Or do you guide them to solutions for their problems? A website that merely sells can help you make money. But a website that helps its users will help you become great. Amazon doesn’t sell books. Amazon helps people find interesting books. Google doesn’t sell advertising space. Google helps people find stuff on the internet. Users instantly recognize a website that merely sells. They might actually buy something from that site. But they’re unlikely to come back. They’ve been sold to. They haven’t been helped. SEOmoz has become one of the best-known search engine optimization companies in the world. They haven’t done that by selling SEO services. They’ve done it by helping webmasters and competing SEO professionals (!) become better at SEO. Seth Godin is a very successful author of marketing books. He didn’t become successful by selling books. He’s done so by helping his readers, in his books and through his blog. Don’t just sell to your customers. Help your customers, and they will reward you with their money and their loyalty.

I was invited to join presenters Bas van den Beld and Roy Huiskes on their regular State of Search radioshow on WebmasterRadio.fm, and apparently they liked me as I was invited straight back for their next episode! In my first guest appearance we chatted about SEO in 2010 and 2011, the Goldman Sachs investment in Facebook and the potential of a new dotcom bubble. In the second show we discussed Google and their stance towards affiliate marketing as well as some odd google.com pages popping up in search results. You can listen to the shows and download them as mp3 files here: State of Search radio – ep39: Bubble coming up, 2010 and and the future State of Search radio – ep40: Google testings, Google the affiliate and Twitter transparancy

Part 1 – Choosing your keywords Part 2 – Writing good ads Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert In part 1 of this guide to search engine advertising we discussed how to choose the right keywords to advertise on. This second part will talk about making effective ads for your PPC campaign. Search Engine Advertising – Step 2: Writing Good Ads Now that you have a good set of keywords to advertise on, it’s time to write the actual ads themselves. Most search engine advertising is done with text-based ads, so I will focus on those. You can also do more visual ads such as banners, but they’re more difficult to make and you have much less freedom to experiment and fine-tune them. With text ads you can make as many changes as you want, tweaking and optimizing them until you get the best results. Use The Keyword In The Ad The first and most important tip for writing good text ads is that your ad should contain the actual keyword you are advertising on. Having the keyword in your ad indicates to a user that your ad is relevant to their search query. This means the user is much more likely to actually click on your ad. Using the keyword in your ad is a vital aspect of writing successful ads. As a consequence you’ll find yourself writing many different ads, one or more for every set of similar keywords. Sometimes you’ll write ads specifically for one keyword. This isn’t a bad thing – on the contrary, it’s the key to a successful PPC campaign. If you want to save time by writing generic ads, you’ll appeal to no one and your ads will get very few clicks. It’s important to stand out and be relevant, and that means writing ads that contain the keyword you are advertising on. An example: say you have a furniture company and you advertise on many furniture-related keywords. One of those keywords is the word ‘sofa’. What ad do you think a user is more likely to click on when he’s doing a search for sofas? This one: High Quality Furniture Many Different Styles, Very Affordable Or this one: High Quality Sofas Sofas from $99, Many Different Styles The second one is a more relevant, appealing ad and will attract more attention and generate more clicks. So divide your keywords into small sets (Google AdWords calls them ad groups) and write ads for each ad group that contain the actual keyword itself. Sometimes you’ll find yourself writing ads for one single keyword – this is not a bad thing. In fact, especially for high profile keywords that get a lot of traffic, it’s a very good thing! Write Compelling Ads Using the exact keyword in your ad doesn’t just make your ad more relevant, you can also be much more specific in what you offer. That’s  the second aspect of writing good ads: make it compelling. In your ad you have limited space to make an impact on a search engine user, so you need to draw them in with a compelling offer or call to action. If your business is cost-competitive, try to include a low price in your ad. This will serve two purposes: it will filter out users who aren’t even willing to pay the low price, and it will compel users who are willing to pay that amount to click on your ad and look at what exactly you’re offering. This means the traffic you generate through this ad is more likely to yield actual customers. Another way to compel users to click on your ad is to include a call to action. Urge users to “learn more”, “act now”, “free download”, or make use of your “limited one-time offer”. These are all classic marketing phrases that work well in search engine ads. Don’t be afraid to use them, as long as you keep one thing in mind: never deceive. Always deliver what you promise. Proper Use of Language and Punctuation Few things can lower a user’s opinion of a company more quickly than errors in spelling and grammar. Always make sure your ads are properly written, both in spelling and grammar, and don’t contain any errors. This shows a basic level of professionalism you need to project in order to win the confidence of your prospective customers. Sometimes you may be tempted to use bad grammar or punctuation to make your ads stand out more. You may want to ad exclamation marks or special symbols to emphasize your text. Don’t. Ads that contain these tricks come across as amateurish, and many search engines like Google maintain strict editorial policies that forbids these practices. Your ad will get deleted and after repeat offenses you may even suffer penalties on your account. One exception: capitalization of words. Even though technically it may be incorrect, it’s still a good idea to Capitalize Every First Letter in your ad. This makes your text stand out more and helps boost the success of your ads. Only capitalize the focus words, the smaller words like “the”, “and”, “in”, “up” and so on shouldn’t be capitalized. Test, Test, Test Once you’ve written a good ad, write another one for the same keyword. And another one. Vary your ads with different headlines, different offers, and different calls to action. The best way of doing this is to duplicate an ad and change only one aspect of it. Then keep a sharp eye on how these ads perform. After you’ve gotten several hundred clicks on your ads you can see which ad performed the best. Take this ad and use it as the basis for a new set of variations. Take the best ad from this new set and use that for new versions. Once in a while throw in an entirely new ad with an entirely different setup and see how its performance compares. Never stop testing. Always seek to squeeze that extra bit of performance out of an ad. Sometimes a small change, one different word in the headline or a minor variation in your call to action, can have a huge impact on the success of your ad. Test methodically and consistently and soon you will know exactly which ingredients work and which don’t. In the next part of this guide we’ll go into creating effective landing pages for your PPC campaign.

The title of a page, included in your web page’s HTML code between the tags, is an important yet often overlooked part of your website. The title isn’t an obvious and clearly visible part of a page, so it’s easy to think it’s not something you need to put a lot of effort in to. That would be a wrong assumption to make, because the titles of the pages on your website are very important: – The title determines how your page is listed on search engine results. – The title is the name a page is saved under when someone bookmarks it. – The title is the first thing a search engine spider looks at. So page titles are important and you need to make sure every page on your website has a good title. What makes a good title? There are many different ways of writing good titles for your pages. Here are my tips: Be descriptive and meaningful. Make sure a page’s title is a reflection of its content. When that page shows up in a search engine results list, a user needs to be able to quickly see if your page’s content is relevant. A good, meaningful title will encourage users to click on that result and you’ll get additional visitors on your site. Write your title in the form of a short sentence that accurately describes what that page’s content is. Keep it short. Search engines limit the amount of text they show in a search result page, and long titles also get cut off in bookmark lists. Try to keep your title at 63 characters or less, as Google will cut off the text there in the search result list. Include your site name at the end of the title if there’s space for it. By making your site’s name a part of the title you help visitors who bookmark your site to find that bookmark again. However if your title becomes too long with your site name included, leave it out. Capitalize Your Words. Make sure every new word starts with a capital letter. This helps with readability and makes your title stand out a little bit more in a long list of search engine results. DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS as that is the internet-equivalent of screaming, and people don’t like being screamed at. Segment your title. You can use your title to reflect the structure of your site, and this helps in giving that page proper context and relevancy. An example: Linear Retail Scanner – Handheld Barcode Scanners – BarcodeShop The first part of the title shows that this page is about linear scanners for retail, and the second part makes clear it falls under the category of handheld barcode scanners. The title finishes with the website’s name (which is fictional by the way). All this takes up no more than 63 characters, so it won’t be cut off in search engine results. Don’t overuse special characters like asterisks, hashes, dots or exclamation marks. This trick is often used to attract attention to a page, but it usually ends up annoying your users and risks making your site look like an amateurish spam site. Writing good titles for every page of your website takes some effort, but it definitely pays off in the end. It will help you get found through search engines, and that traffic will be relevant for your site.

However, the reality of the matter is that there’s a great deal of difference in quality between web hosting providers. While many of the hosting packages most companies offer are similar in terms of specifications and pricing, the real differentiator is the service you get. It pays to do a little investigation before you select a hosting company. Moving from one hosting company to another can be a difficult and complicated process, so you want to select the right hosting provider from the start. The first thing you want to select on is the features and specifications you’ll require for your hosting package. Do justice to your ambition and don’t go for a cheap, simple package just because it’ll save you some money. Upgrading your package when your site becomes a success may be difficult, and often more elaborate packages aren’t outrageously expensive, so it’s a good idea to think big. Storage space, bandwidth, databases and email accounts should all be sufficiently spacious to accommodate your ambitions. Now that you’ve found a few hosting providers that offer the packages you’re interested in, you should see if they go the extra mile. Do they offer extra tools like pre-installed web statistics software? if you want to start a blog, do they offer support for blogging software like WordPress? Is their helpdesk reachable by phone? Don’t make it easy for yourself here but invest time and effort to read through their service offerings and ensure they overdeliver. This will leave you with a few companies that have the right goods. All of them will say they’re the best choice, but there’s only one type of opinion that really matters: that of their existing customers. There are several independent websites that gather reviews of hosting providers, and this is a valuable resource to further narrow down your decision. Do a Google-search on “hosting reviews” and you’ll find abundant resources to help you find opinions and reviews from real customers of your selection of hosting companies. Don’t let your guard down though, some savvy hosting marketeers will game these websites by inserting fake positive reviews that raise the score for their company. What you’re looking for are negative reviews. If a company has a lot of them, regardless of the number of positive reviews they might also get, it’s probably not a good idea to do business with them. But if they have only a few negative reviews, or if the negative feedback is from a while ago and lately mostly good things are being said, they might be the right hosting provider that’s got their business in order. Once you’ve selected the hosting company that you think best suits your needs and can deliver quality support, it should be an aspect of your website that’s invisible. If the services delivered by your hosting provider are a recurring source of trouble and worries, it’s time to consider moving to a different provider.

Some weeks ago, when I submitted a number of  our digital client projects to the European Search Awards for consideration, I fully expected nothing to come of it.  We are, after all, just a wee agency in Belfast. We think we’re doing a pretty fine job for our clients, as evidenced by the results we achieve and the awards we occasionally scoop up. But we also know we’re a small player in Europe, where some truly great digital agencies are doing absolutely magnificent work for a host of global brands. Almost as an afterthought I also submitted us to the Best Agency category, with an even lower expectation of any sort of recognition. So when the shortlist for the Search Awards was published and I went through the nominations, I was not particularly disappointed to see our projects missing from the various campaign categories. The agencies and projects that did make those shortlists are, each and every one of them, prime examples of all that is great about this industry. Imagine my surprise when the very last name in the last category on the shortlist – that for the Best Agency award – was none other than Pierce Communications. I mean, whoa. The names shortlisted for that award are some of the largest and finest digital agencies operating in Europe today: Latitude, Performics, Branded3, AKM3, and Bluerank. And, yes, my eyes did not deceive me, Pierce Communications. I rate our changes of actually winning the award as being so close to zero as makes no difference. But that doesn’t matter – just to see our wee Belfast agency listed in such fantastic company on the shortlist already feels pretty damn epic. We must be doing something right to have sufficiently impressed the rather distinguished panel of judges, for them to place us on the shortlist. So come early July we’ll be sending a delegation to Amsterdam, sporting our 8-bit ties and keyboard bowties, if only to show Europe that a wee agency in Northern Ireland can be a force to be reckoned with. And, of course, to show those Europeans how to properly party, Belfast-style. ;)

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the granddaddy of internet codes. It describes the basic markup of your content. From bold and italics text to displaying images and laying out tables, HTML does it all. HTML does have its limitations, which is why CSS was invented. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it does a lot of what HTML does, and then some. The main advantage of CSS is that you can use it to separate the content of the site from the look & feel. This means that with a proper implementation of CSS you can change the way your website looks without having to make any changes in the content. Having good code is an important aspect of a good website. The HTML and CSS codes that generate your website’s look and feel need to work properly. If they don’t, several things might happen: Some visitors using different web browsers might not be able to use your website. Different web browsers handle code differently and can show a user very different things based on the same HTML and CSS code. With shoddy code your website might look fine in one browser, but might be hideous in another. Or worse, it might not work at all. Search engines like Google that visit your site to look at your content might stumble over bad code. Search engines use little automatic programs called web crawlers or spiders that roam around on the internet to supply the search engines with data. This is called indexing and it happens all the time. If your website uses poor HTML code, web crawlers might not index all your website’s content. This will harm your rankings in search engine results. So how do you know when your website uses bad code? Fortunately there are many ways to check your HTML and CSS code. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short), the international organization that sets the standards for the Internet, has online validation tools that check your website’s code for potential problems. For your HTML code you can use the W3C Markup validator: http://validator.w3.org/ For your CSS code you can use the W3C CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ These validators are very thorough and will almost always give you a list of errors. Don’t worry, not all of these errors are critical. Errors indicated by yellow or blue exclamation marks (Errors shown with red crosses) Good HTML and CSS code for your site has many benefits, but most of all it will help your visitors receive the website experience you want them to.