Search engine optimisation is an adversarial industry. With ‘adversarial’ I don’t mean that SEOs fight amongst themselves (though some certainly do), but that the business itself is one of conflict. Conflict between search engine optimisers on one side, and search engines on the other. Many seasoned SEOs will already know this, but many younger and inexperienced search engine optimisers may not fully grasp this particular fact yet: Google is your enemy. SEO is about making websites perform better in search engine results. At its core, SEO is an attempt at trying to do better than Google. An SEO is basically saying: “how Google has ranked these sites is not correct. Let me fix that.” Google doesn’t appreciate that. In a perfect Google world, there would be no SEO. Websites would rank because Google – and Google alone – finds them most relevant. Matt Cutts is the Google employee who most directly and visibly deals with the SEO industry. Through blog posts and comments, webmaster videos, conference appearances and interviews, Matt is spreading the Google gospel among the SEO crowd. In case you didn’t know, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s webspam team. Let that sink in for a moment. The Google guy most involved with the SEO industry is responsible for dealing with spam in Google’s web search. That right there tells you all you need to know about how Google perceives SEOs. We’re spammers. We’re evildoers who pollute Google’s immaculate search results with our vile schemes and devious tactics. Google sees us as its enemy. And in many ways we are. SEOs believe websites need to be optimised to show up for keywords that are relevant to it. Google thinks it is perfectly capable itself to determine which website should show up for which keyword. It’s a continuous struggle, a tit-for-tat that won’t end until search engines themselves cease to exist. (The engineering discipline that concerns itself with fighting spam in search engines is called AIR – Adversarial Information Retrieval, which explains the adversarial nature of the SEO business.) But, you say, what about all the help Google is giving to SEOs? Their documentation, their videos, their blog posts? They must like us, they’re actually helping SEOs! No, they’re not. What Google is trying to do through their ‘support’ – be they Matt Cutts’ webmaster videos, the SEO Starter Guide, or anything else – is trying to make SEOs build spam-free websites. Google has realised it can’t kill SEO, so it’s decided to try and convert the industry instead. Google is trying to ‘educate’ SEOs in the error of their ways and convert them to the Gospel of Google. Basically, Google wants SEOs to do the hard work for them – delivering websites that are easily crawlable and spam-free so that Google can more easily decide which is the most relevant result. And it’s working. Whole swaths of the SEO industry listen to Cutts’ every word, strictly adhere to every Google guideline ever published, and try their very best never to offend Google. These SEOs are trying to be Google’s friend. Hey, guess what? Google is not your friend. Google is your enemy. No matter how nice you try to be in your SEO practices, how strictly you adhere to the big G’s guidelines, Google will always see you as the enemy. To them you are vermin. You’re a blight on the purity of the world wide web. If Google had its way, SEOs would be eradicated from the internet. So don’t for one second think that Google is your friend. It’s not. Google hates SEOs. No matter how affable Matt Cutts is – and he seems like a genuinely nice and smart guy – he is not your friend. His role within Google is to make you obsolete. Real SEOs aren’t chummy with Google. Real SEOs aren’t invited to the Googleplex for coffee. Real SEOs don’t make cameos in Cutts’ webmaster videos. Google is too scared that somehow it’ll inadvertently reveal something which a real SEO could abuse. Don’t let the friendly façade fool you. If you engage in SEO, Google really doesn’t like you. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

At the start of 2011 I wrote a post about the relationship between Google and SEO. Specifically, I made the case that Google is not an ally of SEO, but is our enemy. I got mixed responses to that post. Many SEOs agreed, but many more said that they did not consider their relationship with Google to be adversarial. It’s 19 months later and we’ve had to endure a few heavy-hitting Google updates. First Panda, then Penguin, and a whole slew of minor changes, all aimed at reducing the effects of what Google calls ‘webspam’. Since I wrote my original post, I’ve seen a shift in attitudes in many SEOs that once considered Google their ally. Relationships definitely seem to have soured. A criticism I received – and debated hotly in several online communities such as the SEO Training Dojo – was that Google simply didn’t care about SEO and that they just went on with their business of running a search engine rather than waste energy trying to make life harder for search engine optimisers. However, I believe Google definitely devotes some of its resources to thwart SEO, making sure we’d never come to full grips with the workings of their ranking algorithms. A recent patent filing titled ‘Ranking Documents’, analysed here by Peter Da Vanzo, has proven me right: “A system determines a first rank associated with a document and determines a second rank associated with the document, where the second rank is different from the first rank. The system also changes, during a transition period that occurs during a transition from the first rank to the second rank, a transition rank associated with the document based on a rank transition function that varies the transition rank over time without any change in ranking factors associated with the document.” […] “During the transition from the old rank to the target rank, the transition rank might cause: a time-based delay response, a negative response a random response, and/or an unexpected response” In short, Google has devised specific algorithms intended to deceive SEOs, thwarting any attempt to monitor SERPs to gauge the effects of specific SEO tactics. “All war is based on deception”, Sun Tsu said over two and a half millennia ago, and Google has taken this creed to heart with its intentional manipulation of search results to deceive SEOs. Another point I made in 2011 was that Google sees pretty much all SEO as webspam: Matt Cutts is the Google employee who most directly and visibly deals with the SEO industry. Through blog posts and comments, webmaster videos, conference appearances and interviews, Matt is spreading the Google gospel among the SEO crowd. In case you didn’t know, Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s webspam team. Let that sink in for a moment. The Google guy most involved with the SEO industry is responsible for dealing with spam in Google’s web search. That right there tells you all you need to know about how Google perceives SEOs. We’re spammers. We’re evildoers who pollute Google’s immaculate search results with our vile schemes and devious tactics. Google sees us as its enemy. For some that was a contentious statement in 2011. Nowadays, though, the evidence is piling up. In the same ‘Ranking Documents’ patent filing, Google states the following: “The systems and methods may also observe spammers’ reactions to rank changes caused by the rank transition function to identify documents that are actively being manipulated. This assists in the identification of rank-modifying spammers.” And from their 2004 IPO filing: “We are susceptible to index spammers who could harm the integrity of our web search results. There is an ongoing and increasing effort by “index spammers” to develop ways to manipulate our web search results.” In a pretty explicit way, Google equates any attempt to ‘manipulate’ their rankings to spam. Every SEO out there is trying to manipulate Google’s rankings. It’s what we do. I don’t think there can be any doubt that in Google’s eyes, we’re all spammers. The evidence is overwhelming, from Matt Cutts’ job title, the increasing contempt with which Google treats us, to the explicit language it uses to describe us in its official documents. While an attitude of cooperation towards Google might have been forgiveable at the start of 2011, you must be capable of truly astounding levels of cognitive bias to still cling to the belief that Google and SEO are on friendly terms.

In its efforts to make that happen, Google has been waging a propaganda war against SEO. A war of public perception, of risk and reward, that it’s slowly winning. This propaganda war has been going on for a while. Ever since Google started giving SEO advice on its support forums, it realised how webmasters paid close attention to anything said by Google employees on the topic of SEO. So it was easy enough to use those official statements to influence how SEO was perceived and subsequently practised. “Don’t buy links.” “Create great content.” “Add value to your users.” Meaningless mantras that Google preached relentlessly until the wider SEO community started to believe them. This wasn’t enough, of course. Many SEOs possess a faculty known as ‘critical thinking‘, which means that they could see the massive disparity between what Google said is good SEO, and what actually worked as good SEO. So Google had to make sure it upped the ante, and it’s been doing so relentlessly for years. The Panda and Penguin updates were as much about the propaganda impact they created as they were about actually attacking spam websites, which is why so much webspam still goes unpunished. The legions of unnatural link warning emails Google sends out is a similar tactic, aimed at creating panic and confusion amongst webmasters and to widely discredit the SEO industry. In a move one could only describe as sadistically brilliant, Google let companies stew in their post-warning panic for a while before offering an easy solution: its Disavow tool, which is an elaborate honeytrap to let the SEO industry do the hard work of identifying spam links. After all, why have highly paid Google engineers spend valuable time on identifying & fighting webspam, if you can crowdsource it to the SEO community with a simple carrot & stick approach? More recently, a Matt Cutts video about upcoming algorithm updates is a masterclass in corporate propaganda and doublespeak: This is the first time Google has made such a fuss about updates to its organic search algorithm that may potentially be coming in the near future. And, as with anything said by an organisation dealing in propaganda, you have to ask yourself why they’re saying what they’re saying. Like the Transition Rank patent, it seems this video is primarily aimed at generating a response from the SEO community. There are more subtle ways in which Google is attempting to make organic search – and, by extension, SEO – a less obvious channel for businesses to explore. Take for example this Google microsite, aimed at providing businesses with data to make informed decisions. Look at how they subtly omit organic search from the leading graphic: Screenshot from Google’s ‘The Customer Journey to Online Purchase’ microsite Last year I attended a Google seminar in Dublin entitled ‘Improving Search Performance’. Nowhere in the seminar’s title nor its marketing collateral was there mention of paid advertising, and the impression given beforehand seemed purely about Google search in general. One would be forgiven to expect SEO and organic search to be mentioned. The seminar was of course entirely about Google AdWords, and there was no mention of organic search. I’m sure Google staff providing similar seminars around the world are encouraged to use phrases and terminology that plants seeds in the minds of unsuspecting attendees, gently altering their perception of search to equate it to paid advertising and downgrade the importance of organic search. Such tactics are subtle and long-term, but they undoubtedly work. There are countless more examples of how Google is muddying the waters, which are obvious once you’re attuned to the propaganda war. The search engine’s intent is clear after all: to make SEO appear like a risky, unreliable, expensive, and untrustworthy tactic, and to make paid search advertising seem like the only sensible choice. When you do SEO, Google doesn’t like you. It never has and never will. But Google is smart, and they’ve managed to turn the tables quite effectively. If you do SEO the way Google prescribes it, make no mistake: you’re the tool, and Google is wielding you expertly.

Not a week goes by when I don’t read a SEO blog or status update or tweet claiming that good SEO is all about ‘building a strong online brand’, or ‘using personas to target specific audience needs’, or ‘improving your website UX to deliver lasting customer value’, or any of those other vaguely worded phrases that make the author seem enlightened and operating on a higher level of SEO awareness. It’s all a load of bollocks, of course. At its core SEO is about one thing, and one thing only: drive traffic to a website through organic search. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but in the end the primary means to achieve this are to rank the website highly in search results for a range of relevant keywords. That’s it. It’s as simple as that. But admitting this means admitting that SEO is inherently an antagonistic enterprise that pits SEO practitioners against search engines. And increasingly, for a host of reasons, SEOs are unwilling to do this. Instead SEOs, increasingly calling themselves something else entirely (inbound marketers?) to disguise the fact they actually do SEO, are wallowing in Google-approved marketing waffle to give the public perception that they’re all on board with this ‘legit’ way of making websites successful. Because pinning your colours to the SEO mast and admitting, honestly and openly, that you build links to improve a website’s rankings in Google, feels a lot like waving a red flag in the faces of Google’s spam hunters. And that is a terrifying thought for many, especially those who have bought in to Google’s anti-SEO propaganda. But it’s a cowardly stance to take, one that has a range of negative repercussions for our entire industry. If we as SEOs want to escape the negative public perception of our craft, we would do well to be clear and open about what we actually do. Because if we can’t be honest to ourselves about the service we provide, how can we ever expect anyone to trust us? I don’t deny that SEO crosses over with a lot of other aspects of digital marketing, including social media, UX & conversion optimisation, web analytics, and so forth. But these peripheral aspects of SEO are exactly that: peripheral. We shouldn’t muddy the waters to such an extent that SEO becomes unrecognisable for ourselves as well as for our clients. Our fear of the Google penalty hammer should not lead us down a path of ambiguity and obtuseness. If anything, our fear of Google’s wrath should encourage us to be smarter, to work harder, and to be clearer and more transparent to our clients as well as among ourselves. Only by making it very clear what we do and how we do it can we hope to win over clients and dispel the shadows surrounding our industry. Only then can we take the fight to Google, instead of living in fear. I don’t want to be one of those SEOs that cowers in the corner, hiding what they do and pretending it’s not really SEO. And I reckon you don’t either.

With the volume of content I’m generating that can be interpreted as attacks on Google, it may appear I’m on an anti-Google crusade. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say that’s really not the case. I’m just concerned about the future of the internet and the power large corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Apple wield over it. There has been a lot of publicity recently about the concept of search neutrality: the idea that search engines should provide neutral, unbiased results and not favour their own properties or those they have beneficial relationships with. This debate has been raging for years, but it received a recent boost when Ben Edelman, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a survey which appears to show that Google does tend to prefer its own properties in its search results. Since the publication of the Edelman survey a growing mountain of criticism has emerged, with many claiming the study was deeply flawed. The consensus amongst my SEO peers does seem to be that the study is misleading and inaccurate. However the study focuses solely on the organic search results provided by Google, and that is only part of the picture. There are other aspects of the search result pages – such as the OneBox – where Google is blatantly promoting its own services, which might require proper scrutiny. Adding to the search neutrality debate Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, published a blog post yesterday in which he refers to an essay by James Grimmelman, associate professor at New York Law School, which seems to dissect the concept of search neutrality. I’ve left two comments on Matt’s blog – both ‘awaiting moderation’ at the time of writing this now approved and visible for all – but I felt my rebuttal of the essay as well as the points Matt makes deserve a separate blog post. First, I don’t think the search neutrality debate is one about webspam as Matt seems to suggest. I think we can all agree that spammy websites are bad and need to be ousted from the SERPs. Nor do I think the debate is about making the search algorithms public. These algos are Google’s intellectual property and thus deserve full protection. Making the search algorithms public will only play in to the hands of spammers and are likely to ensure the search results will be dominated by spam shortly afterwards, so that is definitely not a solution. In my opinion the search neutrality debate is about Google and other search engines giving preference to their own properties over those of their rivals, and I think it expands beyond the listing of organic results and should encompass other elements on the SERPs, such as the OneBox and paid ads. Having read Grimmelman’s essay I have to admit I’m not terribly impressed by it. The author starts off with his 8 principles of search neutrality, which I think should be labelled ‘elements’ instead – search neutrality encompasses several of the listed principles (though not all eight in my opinion) and by defining each individually I think Grimmelman is muddying the waters somewhat. It also makes it much easier for him to subsequently shoot them all down, having narrowed each down to easily falsifiable premises. Additionally Grimmelman erects straw men arguments for some of the definitions. For example for the objectivity principle the author states: “The unvoiced assumption here is that search queries can have objectively right and wrong answers.” This is a weasel phrase and is a misrepresentation of the objectivity principle. Also, by ignoring the interplay of the eight principles – and by including principles which are at best circumstantially applicable to search neutrality but should not form part of a serious debate (equality and transparency) – the author distorts the actual issue at the core of the matter. Search neutrality is an important and topical issue. There are genuine concerns about dominant corporations abusing their power to consolidate their positions in the marketplace, and these concerns deserve proper investigation and debate. In my opinion Google is abusing its power and does not have the best interests of its users in mind all the time. After all, Google is a publicly traded corporation and as such has one overruling legal imperative: to maximise shareholder value. Users don’t necessarily factor in to that.

Often when you do a site-wide update of your design, your content and/or your site structure, it can affect your website’s rankings in search engines negatively. Facing a huge site update project myself, I recently spent some time doing research on how to prepare for a big site update and ensure your high rankings stay high. I wanted to share my findings with you here. My research soon lead me to an article on the popular Dutch blog Marketingfacts.nl, providing a site migration checklist. The key takeaways from this article are: Try to keep your URL’s the same. Use 301 redirects for URL’s that have to change and ensure you redirect all changed URL’s to the content’s new location. Don’t change too much too quickly. If you do a redesign, content update and rebrand all in one, too many changes are happening and you’re likely to lose rankings on many keywords. Don’t change your domain’s WhoIs information. A changed WhoIs can give search engines the impression your website has changed owners, and they could reset all your rankings across the board. An article from Jennifer Osborne on SearchEnginePeople.com added several considerations: Do a phased change-over: start with a small section of your site and evaluate, then proceed with the rest. Keep your internal link structure in mind when doing a redesign. Internal link juice is important as it tells search engine spiders which pages on your site are important. Don’t divert attention from your key pages with a poor structure. Track your web analytics and pay extra attention to 404 errors after the migration. This may indicate broken links, both internal and external, pointing to moved or deleted content. Denver SEO adds the following point: Expect to see your rankings drop regardless of your preparations. A 25 to 30 day drop in search engine rankings is normal before levels return to normal or better. Of course we can’t skip Google’s own recommendations: Add and verify your site on Google’s Webmaster Tools. Update your submitted Sitemap XML file to reflect the updated site. Keep track of crawling errors to detect 301 redirect problems and 404 errors. And here are a few other tips I came across on various sites and blogs: Create a custom 404 error page to try and minimize the impact of broken links. If your site update is significant enough, publish a press release. Use search engine marketing to supplement your (temporary) drop in rankings. Update your robots.txt file to reflect any changes in off-limits content. After this research I feel well-equipped to handle the SEO aspect of my own site migration project. If you have any further tips or ideas, please leave them in the comments.

Arguably the most pervasive a phenomenon mankind has ever invented, advertising permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Almost every moment of your waking lives you will be bombarded by some company’s brand. And yet, advertising adds no value to our cultural lives. In fact, it extracts value. Advertising demands our attention when we want to focus on something else. When we want to watch a TV show, advertising interrupts us. When we listen to the radio, advertising breaks the flow. Almost everywhere we go advertising disrupts up the landscape and intrudes in our visual field. Advertising interrupts our lives without asking, and urges us in to buying stuff we don’t need. It has only negative value and contributes nothing worthwhile to our lives. Advertising Is In Your Head Increasingly, as marketers become skilled in manipulating the subconscious mind, advertising affects our very thoughts. We are ‘primed’ for specific behaviours through advertising. It ‘triggers’ us to perform an action desired by the advertiser. We are guinea pigs obediently walking through the advertisers’ consumerist maze. Even here advertisement is not satisfied. It wants to extract even more from us, and does so by harvesting our data. Everything we do that can be measured, is being measured, and subsequently sold to advertisers to ensure their ads are even more effective in making us buy stuff. Our vision, our hearing, our attention, our thoughts, and our actions – all are increasingly intruded upon, manipulated, and harvested, so that we can be optimised to become more efficient consumers and buy more stuff that we don’t need. Advertising has been tacked on to everything, everywhere, becoming an omnipresent form of cultural pollution. And in the past decade advertising has become the driving force behind one of the most important inventions humankind has ever achieved: the internet. The Web as an Advertising Engine The internet is, at its core, the most egalitarian system ever devised. In theory anyone can use it to their own advantage and help improve their lives. However, due to the encroachment of advertising, the internet is now just another value-extractor in our day to day existence. Every article we read online, every app we use, every website we visit – advertising is there, waiting for us, ready to extract our attention, manipulate our thoughts, and harvest our data. The continued development and usefulness of the internet is fully at the mercy of this foul commercial noise, ensuring that everything that comes next will be optimised for maximum advertising value. The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. – Jeff Hammerbacher Just look at the tools and platforms you use the most in your daily internet lives. When you Google something, ads are the first results you see. Catch up with your friends on Facebook, ads interrupt your stream. Reading the news, you truggle to ignore the ads above, below, beside, and increasingly right in the middle of the content you’re trying to absorb. Advertising is everywhere online, and ads are designed in such a way that you simply cannot ignore them. Real content is obscured by manipulative advertising and, increasingly, the boundaries between advertising and content are blurred. The Alternative Approach There are precious few exceptions. But those exceptions are worth pointing out. Invariably, where ads are absent, you pay yourself. Content behind paywalls rarely feature ads. Tools that require a paid subscription almost never dare show you an ad. A platform that treats you as its customer doesn’t want to annoy you, so advertising is out of the question. If something is ‘free to use’ it comes with a price of its own, and increasingly I find myself unwilling to pay that price. I’m tired of being interrupted, subconsciously primed, and data-mined. I want to be in control of my own mind, my own thoughts, my own actions. Maybe it’s time we stop being the product that’s being sold to advertisers, and start being the customer that get treated accordingly. Maybe then we can exert some control over the direction the internet is heading in. Instead of helplessly standing by as more platforms emerge to extract value from our lives, we can ensure the internet starts producing more systems and tools that actually add value. The downside is, we’ll have to part with some of our hard-earned money. This would then ensure the internet becomes more elitist, as the ‘haves’ would be able to buy their way in, and the ‘have-nots’ would be left out in the cold. Data Has Value But that doesn’t have to be the case. In his book “Who Owns The Future” Jaron Lanier proposes that the data currently extracted from us by the platforms we use, to sell to advertisers, should come at a cost for the extractors. Lanier argues that because it is intrinsically our data that is being harvested, we should be compensated for it. Our behavioural and demographical data has value, so we should be rewarded for sharing that data. Free use of a valuable platform counts as a form of compensation. If you want to use a platform for free, you can do so, in exchange for your personal data. If you want to keep your data private, you should be allowed to do so, in exchange for a usage fee. Those who can afford to, can pay for advertising-free use of the internet. Those who can’t are, unfortunately, free to be bombarded with precisely targeted advertising that will manipulate them in to buying stuff. It’s still a two-tier system, but a slightly less exclusionary one. Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. At least until the very foundations of our economic model come crumbling down, and we’ll have to rethink the whole thing.

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. In part 2 we showed how to make effective ads. Now in the final part we’ll tackle landing pages. Search Engine Advertising – Step 3: Create Landing Pages That Convert You’re targeting the right keywords and your ads generate a lot of clicks, so now you have all these extra visitors coming to your website. You’re paying for these visitors, so you want to turn as many of them into customers. The best way to do this is not to send them to your website’s homepage, but to a custom-built landing page. Image you’re an average internet user. You’re looking for a new sofa for your living room, and you do a Google search for sofa’s. You see an ad on the search results page which appeals to you, so you click on it. You end up on a general furniture website’s homepage and now you have to look for their sofa’s section. Chances are you don’t have the patience for this, and you use the back-button to return to the search results and try a different website. So you click on a second ad that seems interesting, and this time you land on a webpage that talks only about sofa’s. It shows you pictures of sofa’s, it has a nice offer for a discounted sofa on it, and there are many links from this page to various different categories of sofa’s. This site appeals much more to you, and you’re likely to stick around longer and maybe even order a sofa from these guys. The first advertiser you clicked on made the classic mistake of sending PPC traffic to the website’s homepage. From the homepage a web user needs to start his search all over again, navigating your website until he finds what he was looking for in the first place. The user has to go through more clicks and has to invest additional effort, something internet users are notoriously unwilling to do. It’s much better to send the user straight to what they want to see, which the second advertiser does. This way the user doesn’t have to find his way through your website. He immediately sees content that is relevant to his search query. Elements of a good landing page 1. Relevance: First and foremost the page you link to from a search engine advertisement needs to be relevant. Just like the ad needs to contain the keyword you advertise on, so does the landing page. If you advertise on the sofa keyword, your ad contains the word sofa, you can’t send users to a landing page discussing kitchens or chairs. You need to send them to a page that talks about sofa’s. Be sure to include the actual keyword you advertise on clearly visible on the landing page, preferably in a headline. This tells a visitor that the landing page is relevant to the search query they typed in to start the whole process. If you use several different phrases to say the same thing, you’ll probably have to make different landing pages for each or use dynamic HTML code to show the exact keyword the user searched for. When you advertise on many different types of keywords, you will have to create a lot of different landing pages. It’s a lot of work, but it will always pay itself back in a higher conversion rate, higher revenue, and more return on your advertising investment. 2. Clickpath: Sometimes the landing page can be the conversion page. If you offer a downloadable ebook or small specialized item, your landing page can also be the page where users can place an order. But often you’ll need to give your users additional information to guide them to a conversion – product options, specifications, accessories, etc. Guide them through the sales funnel, from general overview to detailed information to actual conversion. An important aspect of the clickpath is that you shouldn’t make it too easy for users to diverge from it. Take away your regular site navigation if you can, try to keep the visitors of your landing page in a clickflow that guides them to a conversion. If users sidestep your clickpath and instead go to your site’s homepage or another page, chances are you’ll lose them there. 3. Calls to action: Once you get a user to click on an ad and arrive on your landing page, don’t leave them hanging. You need to take them by the hand as it were, show them where to go and what to do. Use action words like ‘learn more, ‘click here’, ‘order now’ in your content and in your links to additional pages. 4. Easy conversion: It should be as easy as possible for a user to place an order. Don’t ask them for information they don’t really want to give up. Keep your forms short and simple and only ask for the very basic information you need to complete the order. 5. Persuade: Selling is the art of persuasion. Employ tried-and-proven persuasion methods such as testimonials, special offers, guarantees, authorative sources, instilling confidence, and more. Include them on the landing page itself and on every subsequent page you send your users to. 6. Fast loading: Your landing page should load very quickly. If a user has to wait for a bit before your landing page is displayed properly, the urge to click that back-button will grow. Make your landing pages lean and efficient to optimize loading times. 7. Measure: It’s not as simple as putting your landing page out there and waiting for the money to come pouring in. It’s imperative that you know what users are doing on your landing page. Do they stay and read your content or do they leave? What links do they click on? Do they convert into customers right away or do they bookmark the page and come back later? Do they follow the whole clickpath or do they leave prematurely? If so, where do they tend to leave your site the most? All these things and more can be measured and analyzed with a good web analytics package. A good place to start is Google Analytics, a free service that contains all the web analytics functionality you’ll need. Use the data you gather to make informed decisions about what to improve on your landing page (and your website as a whole). 8. Experiment: Creating good landing pages is never an exact science. All aspects of a landing page, from the headline to the color of the buttons, can have an impact on the conversion rate. Experiment freely, but do it in a controlled manner. Tools like Google’s free Website Optimizer allow you to perform extensive tests with all kinds of different aspects of your landing page to optimize your conversions. Don’t test too many things at once – experiment with one or two changes at a time, no more. Allow your test to run for enough time before you make up your mind. And once you find a landing page setup that works well, use that as the basis for a new round of further tests. Never stop testing and improving. 9. Conform to the guidelines: Last but certainly not least, be sure to read the editorial policies and guidelines of the search engine you advertise on. Google, Yahoo and Live all have strict policies about advertising on their search results pages. There are guidelines you’ll need to conform to for your ads and your landing pages, or you’ll risk paying more for each click or worse, not getting your ads shown at all. Conclusion Creating good landing pages for your Pay Per Click campaign is not an easy and straightforward task. To do it well you’ll need to invest a lot of time and effort in building and perfecting your landing pages. But it’s never a wasted effort. Again and again the results show that good landing pages turn many more visitors into paying customers, and help earn back the money you invest in seach advertising several times over.

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.

Part 1 – Choosing your keywords Part 2 – Writing good ads Part 3 – Create landing pages that convert Sometimes, no matter how you try, it’s just not possible to get your website listed high in the natural search results. Your competition is too fierce, you’re new in the market, you have a new product launch and you can’t wait until search engines index your new content – there are a thousand reasons why regular search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t the right thing for you. That’s not to say your website shouldn’t be optimized for search engines. Doing good SEO is never a bad thing, and will help your website in many different ways. But when SEO isn’t enough, you can choose to invest in search engine advertising – also known as Pay Per Click (PPC). Advertising on search engines can act as a supplement to (or even replacement of) SEO, as it gives you high listings in search engines for relevant keywords. The downside is that these are sponsored results, and as such will yield significantly lower clickthrough rates than high ‘organic’ search rankings. Nonetheless search engine advertising, as done through Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter, can be a very efficient and cost-effective marketing channel to generate more traffic and business for your website. In this series of articles I’ll walk you through the necessary steps to create and perfect a PPC advertising campaign. I won’t use any single search engine as an example and so my tips and advice will be generic enough that you can apply them to any search engine marketing campaign. Search Engine Advertising – Step 1: Choosing Your Keywords I’ll start with what is arguably the most important step of your search engine marketing campaign: selecting the right keywords to advertise on. Picking the right keywords isn’t as easy and straightforward as it might initially seem. You probably know your own business inside and out and have a solid grasp of the lingo and terminology used in your industry. But do your customers share that lingo? As I’ve blogged about before, there are dangers to using business jargon. When your customers search for ‘barcode scanners’, advertising on ‘imaging device’ is probably not a good idea. It’s important to do good research into the search words your potential customers are using to find your website and those of your competitors. One tool you can use for this is Google’s Keyword Suggestion tool. Just select your language and region, type in one or more keywords, and get a list of related and alternative keywords that people are using in Google’s search engine. You can sort the suggested keywords by popularity, expected traffic and competition. Another way of using the same tool is to let it do a quick scan of your website or product page and find relevant keywords itself. Instead of using the ‘Descriptive words or phrases’ option you select the ‘Website content’ option and put in the URL of your website or product page. Google will then look at the content, determine what keywords fit the best with this, and give you a list of suggested keywords. A possible problem here is that you may not use the right keywords on your website. (Why not?) It’s smart not to simply accept Google’s suggestions at face value, but to decide for yourself what the right words are that you want to advertise on. Google’s tool isn’t the only one. There are many tools out there that can help you with finding the best keywords to advertise on. Each search engine has its own tool for finding the best keywords, and there are other free and paid tools around to help you get the best list of keywords for your search engine marketing campaign. Do a search for ‘keyword discovery‘ or ‘keyword suggestion‘ and you’ll come across dozens of websites and tools to help you further. The initial list of keywords you get this way probably isn’t sufficient to start your campaign with. PPC is a popular means of advertising, and in most search engines the position of your ad is determined by, among other factors, how much money you can spend on it. With a limited budget it’s not smart to focus on big, popular keywords where all your competitors also advertise on. Because of the popularity of those words there will be plenty of competition and that means you’ll have to pay a high price to get your ad to the top of the search results. And getting to the top is important. The lower your ad is shown, the less users are inclined to click on it. It’s important to get your ad high in the sponsored results list. This means you either need to spend a lot of money getting your ad high on search results pages for popular keywords, or you can choose to focus on more specialized, less popular search words. These more specialized keywords are called ‘long-tail’ keywords. They’re usually a bit longer than regular keywords, consisting of two, three or even four seperate words. They’re not the words that users tend to start with when they search, but users who do use these longer keywords tend to have a pretty clear idea of what they’re looking for. That means the traffic you get from these long-tail keywords is more likely to actually buy from you. And because these long-tail keywords aren’t used as much, you’ll have to spend less money to get your ad listed high. So while you may get less traffic, you might end up with much more bang for your buck. An example: say you have an online furniture store. You sell a lot of different furniture, but you specialize in colonial-style wooden furniture. You can choose to advertise on keywords such as ‘furniture’, ‘sofa’, ‘cabinet’, ‘chair’, and so on, but these are all big, popular search words with a lot of competing advertisers. A smarter strategy would be to focus on more specialized long-tail keywords such as ‘colonial furniture’, ‘modern antique cabinet’, ‘classic style sofa’, etc. These words are less popular, which means less traffic but also much lower cost to advertise on. And people using those search words already know approximately what they want, so if you send them to the right offer on your website you’re much more likely to turn them into customers. The next article in this series focuses on writing good advertisements for your PPC campaign.

Social media is a catch-all phrase that encompasses all websites that offer interactive functionality and user-generated content. Social media ranges from social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn) to video sharing sites (YouTube, Vimeo), social news sites (Digg, Reddit), social bookmarking (Delicious, StumbleUpon) and everything else that claims the tag ‘social’. Social media is often hyped as a means of generating a lot of buzz for little money. And part of the hype is certainly founded in truth. Every company of respectable size needs to have a profile or group on social networks, and if you do anything with video at all you’ll need to upload it to YouTube at the very least. But social media is not a replacement for a good website. On the contrary, your presence on social media sites should stimulate visits to your website, not replace them. If your website isn’t as good as it can be, you should invest your time and money into making it better first before you start experimenting with online projects. The core foundation of all your online activities should be your own website. A social media project isn’t something you should just jump in either. A successful entry into social media requires a solid grasp of what social media is and what it isn’t, and realistic expectations of what you can achieve with it. Generally speaking, social media doesn’t lend itself very well to commercial exploitation, as the very nature of the phenomenon is non-commercial. Don’t expect users to come flocking to your social media presence unless you’re willing to throw some serious incentives at it. A recent blogpost from B.L. Ochman about social media myths delivers some much-needed realism – read it and consider if you’re willing and able to step into social media just yet. If you’re in doubt, it’s probably better to spend your efforts on improving your website and gaining traffic the old-fashioned way: SEO, SEM and good content.

SEO agencies is W3C compliance. I’ve written about the benefits of W3C compliant code before, but my perspective has changed a bit over time and I feel it’s important to point out that full W3C compliance is not a definitive requirement for an effective website. W3C compliance basically means that the HTML and CSS code that a website is built with is fully compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C for short). The W3C is an international standards organization, founded by the inventor of the web. They develop the standards on which the world wide web is run. You’d think that making sure your website’s code complies fully with these standards is pretty important. And it is, up to a certain point. You can easily find out if your website’s code is W3C compliant – simply submit your website URL to the W3C Validator tool and you’ll get an overview of all the ‘errors’ in your code. And you’ll almost certainly get a lot of ‘errors’. It’s very unlikely your website’s code complies to all of the W3C’s standards. I say ‘errors’ because often they’re not really errors. The W3C standards are extremely strict, with no room for interpretation. So every little niggle in your code, every small deviation from the W3C’s strict standards, will generate an error in this validation tool. W3C compliance for browsers But most web browsers are flexible pieces of software that are built to deal with a wide range of different sorts of HTML and CSS code, and will probably render your website perfectly regardless of how many errors the validation tool shows. Often web developers have to use shortcuts and non-compliant code to make something work in a particular way on a website, and while this results in validation errors it doesn’t hinder a website’s functionality at all. Quite the contrary, sometimes you have to break the rules of the W3C to get something to work exactly how you want it in every web browser. W3C compliance for SEO There is also the misconception that search engine crawlers require a website’s code to be 100% W3C compliant, or else they will rank your site lower in the SERPs. A lot of SEO agencies recommend you make every webpage on your site fully W3C compliant. This is often a costly endeavour, and quite unnecessary. Search engine crawlers, like browsers, are sturdy and flexible pieces of software that can index almost any type of code, regardless of the errors it contains. For proper crawling and indexing, a search engine will need to be able to distinguish the different elements of a webpage – style, navigation, and content – and will need to be able to interpret the meaning of the content, which it does through analysing the content itself and the mark-up code that is used to style the content. Clean, compliant HTML and CSS code help in this process. Compliant code makes it easier for search engine crawlers to identify what the content on a webpage is, and what that content means. But 100% compliance, meaning zero errors in the W3C validation tool, is not only often hard to achieve (especially if your website has advanced functionality) but is unnecessary as well. The code just needs to be sufficiently well-structured and tidy enough for search engines to be able to distinguish style, navigation, and content. So bad code is OK? No, bad code is not OK. It’s still a good idea to strive towards compliant code. A website with hundreds of W3C validation errors is not a good thing. It’s likely that these errors cause the site to display differently in some web browsers (or worse, not work at all) and can cause all sorts of trouble for both users and search engines. But if your website’s code only shows a couple of handfuls of non-critical errors, especially if they’re only small warnings, there really is little need to fix them. For on-site optimisation your time and resources are better spent on making sure your website’s title tags, content, and other factors are fully optimised.