PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski

Identifying Areas of Improvement

Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter.  If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability.  There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.
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It was bound to happen, both Google and Bing have been targeting social media and real-time search since the launch of Google caffeine back in August 2009, roughly the same time that Google started to index tweets from Twitter.com.

On October 21st during the Web 2.0 Summit, Yusuf Mehdi of Bing officially confirmed partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to integrate public tweets and Facebook updates into its search results.

A few hours later Marrisa Mayer of Google also announced  a partnership with Twitter in her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Wow, what a day! Two massive partnerships announced in 1 day and only a few hours apart. However, those of you that have been following the two search engines will understand that both Google and Bing have been working on real-time search facilities for quite sometime now and have been trading blow by blow with each other.

Lets take a quick look at the scores

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top search queries - Google webmaster tools

Checking the Google webmaster tools today we noticed the keyword sorting feature appearing in the ‘ Top Search Queries’ dashboard.

The three drop down menus will allow webmaster tool users to segment the top search queries by;
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FTC announces guidelines for disclosures

What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.

In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;

Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF

Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF

A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .

While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.

Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.

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yahoo site explorer

Looking for an alternative to Google Webmaster tools? Yahoo’s site explorer might just be the answer. Yahoo recently announced 2 new features to site explorer which should add even more appeal.

Keyterms are available for individual pages and site-wide , this will help you nail down how your pages and entire site in search engines eyes related to your target terms. To read more about the technology behind how the keyterms are generated check out this post on the yahoo blog.

Delicious bookmarks is also a handy way to find out how your content is spreading. Clicking on each tag will give you some additional data from the delicious website.

These new features are certainly not ground-breaking, but add to the value of Yahoo site explorer which makes it an attractive alternative to Google webmaster tools.

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competition research using bit.ly service

URL shorteners are sweet, they help turn those really long URLs into nice neat URLs, but besides from this basic service, some URL shorteners also provide great data services.

Have you ever wanted to find out how your viral content is spreading? or how many times your blog post was retweeted, emailed or IM’ed?
Even better, what if you could see this data for your competitors shortened URLs and not just your own? Would this give you an extra advantage above your competitors? Yes I would think so.

So now that I have your attention, lets introduce Bit.ly into the picture.
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Guest Post by DejanSEO

When the topic is SEO secrets or PageRank algorithms, mum’s the word from Google — most of the time. Yet it seems even the king of search engines will unzip its lips with the right amount of coaxing. In an interview with Google’s Senior Support Engineer Maile Ohye, Jen Lopez from SEO Moz gained the juicy scoop on two critical topics: do low-quality backlinks influence rankings, and do they incur a risk for penalties?
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2 new Google webmaster labs tools

Breaking news, Google announced 2 great new additions to the Google webmaster tools.

• Fetch as Googlebot - The ability now to see how any page on your domain appears to Googlebot
• Malware details – Another great source to check if you think your website has been penalized.

The tools are located under the new ‘Labs’ menu heading in your webmaster tools console.
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Li’l Engine’s exclusive FREE SEO tool – Google blogs live feeds

Like you and most SEO’s around the world, we are constantly scouring the web for information and news regarding Google’s activities and updates. Some of your favorite sources may include websites such as SE Roundtable and SEO Journal. But do you ever wonder where these great sites source their information?

You may not realize this, but Google has over 30 official blogs that it regularly updates by Google employees, these blogs cover news and information on most of Google’s products, such as Google Search, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Analytics and so forth.
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