In continuation with constant evolution, Google+ has come up with new notification controls. These controls let you select who can notify you on Google+ and who cannot.

What Are The New Notification Controls?

Google+ announced these changes in a blog post that the “Who can notify you” feature is being brought out as it was much in demand from the users. The post revealed that many Google+ users were expecting privacy controls on these lines. The privacy option provided by the Circles, where you could choose who you shared with whose content you wanted to see was fast becoming a limited choice for the users. They wanted to control who they heard from as in who could send them notifications.

According to Google+, “By altering these settings, you can control who you’ll get notifications from, if they:

• Share with you individually
  
• Select ‘Notify about this post’ (when sharing to a circle you’re in)
  
• +Mention your name
  
• Invite you to a hangout
  
• Invite you to play or send you messages from a game
  

You’ll still be notified if someone comments on one of your posts or adds you to a circle.”

Google+ has by default set the “Who can notify you” setting to Extended circles. However, if an user wishes, he can change it back to his Circles.

Why Was This Feature Needed?

Like any social network, Google+ also saw its share of spammers that sent out notifications to the more popular users. There was no other way to deal with the little red flags of notifications on the profile than clicking them, reading them and then deleting them. This meant a lot of unnecessary work for the users, and somehow dampened the whole social experience. Google+ received a lot of feedbacks and request regarding the same and that is why this feature was rolled. No doubt this much awaited and demanded for feature will have people waiting for further updates.

What do you think of this feature update? Do you want anything else changed? Do share your thoughts. For the other Google+ feature updates, see this.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Google+ Tips- Understanding The New Notification Controls!

With, autumn setting in, the festive fervor catches up and spreads among people all over the country. As an e-commerce site owner, the festive season is a chance to double your sales and maximize your profits as the internet traffic shoots up by more than 40% over the festive period. This means you need to get a plan ready to divert some of the increased traffic to your site, and set the cash registers ringing (not literally!).

Set You Goals:

Like any good marketing plan, you need to set up your goals. These may vary according to your site, but the general idea is:

• How Much Sales You Are Targeting?
• Any Products You Plan To Highlight?
• Want To Introduce Any Special Schemes, That May Carry In The New Year?
• Newsletters And Email Sign ups?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you need to set the game in motion by following a custom built marketing plan.

Get The Look And Spread The Cheer!

Your ecommerce site must get a festive make over. So you can add a festive header and footer to your site. Add a “Diya” for Diwali or may be a “Star” for Christmas. This not only makes your site attractive, but also is a way of informing the customers that you are ready and open for festive purchases.

• Oil the creeks- in other words, check and double check that your site works. Check it over for ease of purchase, and make sure there is no error that could hinder a buyer.
• Allow people to check in easily- this means that if you have a “sign in process” before the users can explore the site, then get rid of that for the festive season. You have to make purchasing easy, and make sure that the a browser converts into a buyer.
• Change the newsletter sign up logo – make it festive centric. Something like “Sign Up For The Best Christmas Deals.”

Stock Up For The Season With Products And Offers:

You have to remember that for some one to buy from you amidst the million other festive offers, you have to give the customer something extra. You have to give people incentives to shop with you.

• Offer free gifts- nothing gets people going like the chance to get something for free. So something on the taglines of- “Buy A Toy Car And Get Batteries Free!”
• Offer price discounts- roll out special festive offers. Give the customers a chance to buy something at 10% less the price. This will be a good incentive for many.
• Offer Free Shipping- this may seem quite a good deal to many customers, of you offer them an incentive to buy for example free shipping on orders over a certain amount during the festive period.
• Keep an option for late shoppers- work out something, how can they pick up stuff, if it is too late to ship.
• Most importantly, set up a special- Gifts Section!

Gifting Ideas Galore!

A great way to sell in the festive season is to make a gift out of your every product, so that people can buy almost anything as a gift for someone. You can offer well categorized choices for people to choose from- for instance-

• By Relationships
• By gender
• By price
• By type

This classification will seem helpful and attractive at the same time-increasing your chances for a sale!

Help people further by offering a FAQ session, so that they know what they want to buy. You can take them to the ideal gift by using a flowchart idea. This way, a woman would know what to get her 18 year old niece!

• Combine products together- this will make them more attractive for the people, while making them useful too! For instance, if you combine a cooker with a blender, people can buy it thinking to give them each to two families!
• Offer gift vouchers- gift vouchers are quite popular to catch hold of shoppers who are just browsing. A voucher is a primary choice for people who just can't make up their mind what to buy as gifts. With a voucher, they can leave the deciding up to the receiver. Gift vouchers get a lot of takers, who are into last minute shopping, if you offer to send them as email vouchers.
• Presentation-When you will deliver the gifts and other shopping items, make sure to pack them nicely for the festive season. This effort by you will be marked as a good professional touch at your part, and ensure that the shopper will return to your site again!

Here is a video about the same:

E-mail Marketing-Take It Up Early!

Email special offers to your customers, well ahead of the festive season. Prepare a nice festive offers mail, and send it just as Fall sets in. Then schedule the reminders on a regular basis.

• Create Email specific landing pages- this is a very essential step, as if you have a special email offer, the link should land on that offer page only- this will give it maximum impact. But at the same time, list all your other offers running, on that landing page too. So that people are attracted to look around further.
• Send out Festive Greeting Too- you need to establish a personal contact with your buyers. So show them your human side. Do not forget to send people- Happy Diwali Or Merry Christmas emails on the day of the festival.

Send emails reminding people of the offers running, and the new ones ready for the new year. Send an email with offers for the New Year on Christmas day.

Internet Marketing And SEO:

You have to begin on your festive special SEO campaign well in advance. Start around three to four months before so that you get the maximum benefits in the festive season.

Find The Festive Keywords And Optimize Them- For the festive season, you will have to arrive at a whole new set of keywords to optimize for your ecommerce site. So, if -

“Diwali designer candles” work for you or “designer gifts for Diwali” find that out.

Think of including local too, if it applies in your case- like- “Christmas cakes Chicago”.

You can arrive at the best keywords quickly by researching your analytics from the previous festive season to judge what worked for you.

“Christmas 2011, get Christmas gifts, avail Christmas discounts at our store. Cheap Christmas goods here, with Christmas decorations.”

• Optimize Your Site- Make sure that every single festive offer rolled by you is optimized. This means working on the titles and the meta description.
• Create Content for your keywords- This is a part of optimizing, as you need to create content with your keywords. So interesting festive lore and write ups about gifting traditions are a good option. But again, do not do keyword stuffing, as this may upset the search engines, so avoid doing this-

• A good piece of content would be- “Brighten up your Diwali this year, with our custom made Diwali gifts. Available for shipping within 24 hours!”
• Write new and festive centric blogs- Articles on helping people prepare for the festivals- some festive delicacy recipe maybe? Think of what people would want to know during the festive season and write unique, informative and quality content.
• Keep and eye on the competition- Learn from your competition. See what they are doing and what can you pick up from them.

Go Social:

Social media is your sure shot way to promote your offers quite successfully. But again, keep in mind to keep it social while selling! Do not spam the social networking sites with your offers.

• Facebook- Keep updating your Facebook page with latest offers and discounts. Write interesting content as status update. Post festive and happy pictures!
• Twitter- Apart from Tweeting offers, tweet interesting festive tips and articles. Engage others in conversation frequently and occasionally push your products. Invite your followers to Retweet your offers.
• Press Releases- Do a press release outlining your offers. Link the release to your site.

Optimizing the video and photo sites too!

Additional Tips:

• Keep a track of your Analytics to know where people are coming from- what keywords driving them-what are they looking for. This way you can add the product they are looking for.
• Keep an eye on Google Trends- this will give you an idea what people are searching for and then use this information to optimize your site.

Conclusion:

This festive season, outline a marketing plan based on the pointers above. Give yourself and your design and development team some time to come up with creative plans and their neat implementations. Start in advance and see an increase in business in the last quarter of 2011 and new business in 2012.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Tips To Make Your Ecommerce Site Ready For The Festive Season!

Audits are really necessary when it comes to measuring and analyzing SEO activities. You need to know what is working for your site and what's not, so that you can focus on the “what's not” part. Audits become necessary for SEOs as they need something substantial to prove that they have been doing well and that too in the right direction.

Now, comes the next challenge. How to decide that what will be audited. Making that perfect audit checklist is not an easy task. Why? Well mainly because of these essential factors-

• Each site is unique
• Every business/company runs a site with varied goals
• Even every competition is different and unique
• SEO factors also have different impacts on the rankings.

Add to all this the ever changing nature of search engine algorithms, and you have the huge task of preparing a checklist. For those struggling to find time to do SEO audits, InMotion Hosting has posted a quick 20 minute SEO checklist.

This check list will work for you if you are running short of funds to get a formal check done. But if the client is pressurizing for results and you are unable to improve the rankings, may be you need to stop and do a quick check.

However, doing the right check is important in case you identify a problem, which is not actually a problem! The result- your fix, could lower the results, and put you two steps behind. Also, presenting the clients with their site checked against such a checklist will make them understand that you are putting in your 100% and they will give you more leverage.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Tips – Check Out The 20 Minutes Quick Audit Checklist!

In a recent interview by Eric Enge, Bing's Sr. Product Manager, Duane Forrester highlighted important pointers on how your website and pages can rank high in Bing's search results “in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order.”

Whilst there were many great recommendations made in the interview, the key points noted are:

A complete user friendly experience:

User friendly website and pages, which includes great content, will get you in the good books of Bing. Duane said “when you delight someone with the best user-experience possible, we pick up all those signals that person shares about their delight, and those signals will help influence our perception of your quality.” All in all this means, “The end goal of everything we do at Bing is to provide a better result set for a searcher.”

Additionally in many of Duane’s responses there is reference to how Bing makes use of click-thru-rate (CTR) and user experience on a webpage to help them determine your webpage's rankings in the search results. This suggests that it extremely vital that you develop good landing pages for your visitors to interact with. A high bounce rate will lead to Bing devaluing your page.

The Social Element:

When asked by Eric if “Social media has become an important input to search.” Duane Forrester discussed, “Yes, in my view the priorities for websites are content, social media and link building, in that order. Think of it as a three-piece pie. At some point, social could be more important than content, but that assumes you have excellent content in place.”

This asserts the massive impact of social media on the way that your website performs on Bing. Personally, I think this is the one most important aspect to be considered from the interview. So basically, as part of your SEO plan ensure your website gets more social. For example, get more Facebook Like and Shared, Tweet away, stay active on Google+ and other rather influential social networks.

RSS Feeds and XML sitemaps:

To ensure that Bing views your sites he emphasizes the importance of making use of valid XML sitemaps and RSS feeds “things like RSS are going to become a desired way for us to find content”. As for the site maps he informed that, “Your Sitemaps need to be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a Sitemap… If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap”. So if you want Bing to see your websites, ensure you update your feeds regularly and make sure it done error-free.

The page performance factor:

“Bing does not use page performance as a ranking factor.” While it would appear from what Duane first said in the interview that load time of the page does not play a role in determining the page rank. However later on in the interview he contradicts this assertion by saying, “provide the searcher with the fastest possible answer to their question.”

This suggests that there certainly is some significance on the page performance that is taken into consideration bearing in mind all other factors are equal. Consequently, we would recommend that you make sure that your website does loads quickly because if you don't you are at a risk of loosing out on your Google rankings because you followed Bing’s rather contradictory suggestion.

To learn more about Bing's tips for SEO read the full interview.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Tips and Tricks On How To Improve Rank In Bing!

The search engines are waging a never ending battle against black hat SEO techniques. They tweak their algorithms, and bring in huge changes like the Panda, to clean up black hat results from search. If you or your SEO firm have been practicing black hat SEO, then beware, or the engines' wrath may fall upon you.

Take the right road ahead- get on the White Hat SEO wagon, and see your site getting its desired position. With no risk of penalization from the engines or being whacked by the Panda.

The Best White Hat Techniques:

Explained below are the optimization techniques, that will not fail you, and take your site to the target audience and even achieve conversion goals.

Content-

Post the latest algorithm updates, content is the key to successful SEO. So you begin by having informative and relevant content on your site. And you can do these simple activities too.

Write Articles- Article Marketing is the basic and the first step to ethical SEO. Make sure you write articles that are unique, updated and highly relevant to your niche. Then submit the same to leading article sites. You must remember to have your prominent keywords in the title, description, anchor text. The anchor text must direct the reader to your site.

Post Blogs- You must write detailed and highly informative blogs on your niche, and post them on your site. You can also do guest posting on sites that are related to your niche. To find the sites looking for guest bloggers, look at place like- http://myblogguest.com/.

When you guest post, remember to leave a link back to your site for reference. Have the keywords in the title for best results. You can ask for fellow bloggers in the site to link to you, but again make sure that your site is top notch in content and the information, that you are driving people for, towards your site.

Linking- Social is the way to drive huge and targeted traffic to your site. It will work for you, if you come across as a genuine person and make a connect with your user base.

Forum Signatures- Forums are the most trusted source of information and knowledge exchange on any topic or niche. You have to find the ones in your niche that are the most influential, and post there. They allow you to have links in your signature, so you comment on a post, give an answer, and leave your signature behind with your link and keywords in the same.

Blog Commenting- Get around to the prominent and influential blogs/write ups in your niche and leave quality comments and drop your links in the comment area. Do not go overboard here. Do not spam. The comment must be informative and insightful. Something like- “Great Post” will not work. You have to gain credibility as an avid member of the niche, and hence you must sound informed.

Video Marketing- Using videos to make an instant impact on the users can be a very effective White hat SEO technique. YouTube and other popular video websites are the best place to start promoting your site. Create a few videos with your keywords in them, post them on the sites with links to your site, and keywords in your description. More on video SEO here.

Also, keep commenting on related videos as well, and contact people for guests posts etc. They may respond well as they are from your niche.

You can also do an advanced Google search to find sites which you can contact to get links from.

One such search example is- intitle:add+url “keyword phrase”

More on Linking here.

Social- Social is the new SEO, this is the thought that is prevailing in SEO chatrooms these days. You can use the same for White Hat SEO too. The key here is to make a real connection with the users. So that they share your content of their free will, and it spreads as people tend to believe what their acquaintances say, rather than strangers.

Networking Sites- Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the latest Google+ have a huge user base, and you can use that. Set up a page here, add all your information, and keep posting the latest happenings-articles and pictures. Indulge users by putting up interesting posts. Interact with them and make a connect. You have to be social on social network.

On these networks, follow the sites/people that are in your niche and can be very influential. Get them to share your content. And see your stuff go viral. More on leveraging social media here.

The takeaways-

When it comes to White Hat SEO, in the current scenario, it boils down to one thing- Content. You have to create content that is original-interesting and relevant for the users. Also it must be search engine friendly too. Achieving the same will prove to be a fail safe formula for search engine ranking success.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Tips- White Hat SEO Techniques!

Bing's Duane Forrester emphasized that, “Bing likes quality, original content. Skip syndicated content and articles as a way forward.” on a Webmaster World.com forum.

In a discussion seeking for directions on driving more traffic to websites via Bing, Duane provided a starters guide about vital information to help SEO's create Bing friendly sites.

Following is the checklist of the areas that Bing suggest you bear in mind as you set out to build or optimize your website:

Subsequently, Bing suggests you ask yourself the following questions as you set out to create a search amicable website; “for every page you have: Is this the single best result for a searcher? Have I developed an authority page for a given query; a page that will thoroughly answer a searcher's needs?”

All in all, its main focus seems to be rewarding websites that provide an enriched user experience.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Tips & Tricks To SEO For Bing!

You are doing everything by the book, but still there is always chance of an error. So just pause. Think for a while. You might be making some mistakes, that can prove to be death traps for your site. Listed below are the Top 5 SEO Mistakes, that many commit unknowingly.

1. Not Doing The Proper Keyword Research- You may be targeting the wrong keyword. You may have picked up on a keyword that may not be what the average user will pick up. You SEO campaign can shoot up or go completely for a toss, depending on the choice of your keywords. Tip: use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool – to help you find keywords best suited for your site.

2. Lack of keywords in the URL or the content – You have done your research and know what your targeted keywords are. But, the entire effort is gone waste if your URLs are not search engine friendly and the targeted pages/urls don't have keyword rich content. Getting your keyword on your URL (the domain itself, or the file names that may be part of the URL) will rank you better with Bing, and often also with Google.  As for the content, make sure you put the keywords keeping users in mind and not the search engines alone. It is also advisable to highlighting them or making them bold.

3. Empty Title tag – The title of the page is one of the most important place to use your keyword. Having a keyword rich title tag helps you in getting better rankings. It is understood that with your keyword in your title, the search engines will show the same in the page title in SERPS

4. No use of header tags -Header tags : <h1>, <h2> — are of primary importance. Why? Because they highlights what are your web page is all about. Remember that Search engines always scan the header tags for important keywords, so always use them to highlight the main points of your text. You may also use your chosen keywords in header tags.  

5. Ignoring Social Networking – This is one of the most common mistake. Social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are huge traffic sources. Sharing your posts on these sites, will drive huge traffic to your sites. Focus on Social Media too, while optimising your site. Check out recent presentation by Navneet on Slideshare.

Stay away from too many backlinks as well, as too many of them may lead to your site being penalised or worse, banned. Remember, the real task is not getting heavy traffic only. Its the conversions. You need to focus on the kind of traffic you are getting too. Question yourself- Is this the kind of traffic I want on my site?

Keep these pointers in mind, the next time you set to work on optimising your site, and see the better results with time.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Top 5 SEO Mistakes To Avoid!

Last month, we discussed about some of the ways to find out whether your site has been penalized by Google or not. According to Search Engine Journal, Google is planning to apply few filters to those websites that fail to follow their Terms Of Services.

Above all, the biggest problem is that even some of the webmasters are completely unaware of the fact whether their site is being penalized or is under filter. There might be some duplicate content in their site or some optimization issue. The problems can be numerous. Here are 4 flags that might mean that your site is under penalty or filter:

1. Sudden Google referral traffic drop: Sometimes this sudden traffic loss is also accompanied by a sudden drop in page rankings. This may happen due to numerous reasons (may be the presence of a lot of backlinks in your site). If you are facing the same problem, think on this issue that may be, your site is being penalized.
2. If you query general search and a single database, then you may notice a lot of difference in rankings. Even a lot of webmasters are discussing about this issue in detail.
3. Your domain does not appear #1 for [yourdomain.com] search. If this is the case, then take this as a warning that your site may be under a Google filter or is under a penalty.
4. [site:yourdomain.com] returns 0 results: This is a serious issue. Try to resolve it as soon as possible.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Filters By Google- Is Your Site Being Penalized?

As promised in the previous post an Insight into Microsoft adCenter here is the second follow up. Here we give you a deeper look into adCenter ad campaigns with tips to exploit it and get the maximum out of it.

Budgeting is very essential

A PPC has to be well planned. Moreover, budgeting with adCenter has become easier than before with campaign budget setting, "Divide across the month,".

The adcenter blog informs, “We have good news: The campaign budget setting, "Divide across the month," now better predicts how many impressions your ad should receive when spreading your delivery across the month. We've also added a new column to your Budget Summary reports, called Average Participation Rate (Average PR) to help you gauge how your ad delivery is filtered throughout the month.

Budget dividing can give you greater control over your expenditures, help give you consistent ad coverage throughout the month, and reduce the impact of click surges—which can deplete your budget and stop ad exposure before your campaign end date.”

Moreover, if you click on 'billing reports' tab in adCenter you will come across a feature which will inform an advertiser about the percentage of search ads are indicating and what exactly one may need to be in view at all times.

Know your campaigns well

The start of a campaign is just the beginning. Setup the campaigns based on objectives and the orders by topic.

Make use of demographic profiling

This feature gives Microsoft adCenter an edge over Google's and Yahoo!s ad serving platforms. So if you are not making full use of it you are missing out on a lot. Understanding the demographic profiling of the traffic that you wish to target is essential and also easy with adCenter demographics prediction. The reviews show that by setting demographics one is more likely to get clicks from those demographic profiles. Read about a case study conducted by webmetricsguru. which clearly shows that adCenter's demographic profiling works wonders.

Using Dynamic Text in adCenter

Microsoft adCenter permits marketers to indicate dynamic parameters in their ads. Use of upto three parameters is allowed.

Keyword insertion- place it in the ad copy title. The keyword the user used would automatically replace it.-
param1-is used to dynamically insert a keyword-level tracking code and landing page so you can report and analyze on a keyword level rather than just the ad or order level. 
param2-is a word or phrase that can be unique to each keyword and dynamically inserted in the ad text to make the ad more relevant, have correct formatting/capitalization, or replace a misspelled word.
Read more about it at the adCenter blog.

AdLabs tools
There are good numbers of tools at the Microsoft adCenter labs. These can help a marketer optimize the campaigns better than ever. Moreover they are also very helpful with the SEO. SEObook has a good account of all the tools available. Read more about them. These tools will not only enable a user to grab the right keywords but will also indicate the most favorable times to make use of them.

A/B split testing of ad copy and landing page

A/B testing is also commonly known as split testing. Split testing enables you to run several ads parallel and decide which one performs better than the other. Split testing is a powerful PPC technique.it is also not a one time process. It should be done repeatedly and repeatedly. Read more about Split testing at Marketing Experiments.

Microsoft reports!
Microsoft actually reports! They give updates of your campaign statistics on daily basis. It is very important to the check how the campaigns are performing. Keep checking the reports to avoid overspending or even underspending. Their reports are most comprehensive and very useful.

Landing page
This one is not just for adCenter advertisers but for all. During one of the session Ads In A Quality Score World at the ongoing SES New York most of the speakers stressed on the relevance of landing pages. Bruce Clay has given the highlights of the indepth discussion where at many places the experts stressed upon the relevance of landing pages. Bruce says, Search marketers need to continue to study landing pages to find out what works best for them. As Joshua says, it’s what puts the ‘M’ in search engine marketing. 

What sets adCenter apart from other ad serving platforms are the new level of analytics it offers the advertisers. The conversion rate is very good when compared with Google Adwords and Yahoo! Panama. If you follow the above pointers well there is almost nothing that can stop you from scoring well in adCenter.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

How To Exploit Microsoft AdCenter To Your Advantage!

Over the past one year of its launch Microsoft adCenter has grown a lot. Won't say that it matches up with Google's adWords and Yahoo's ad serving system but still it is doing a remarkable job.

A brief history, Microsoft adCenter was launched in March 2006 in US. It became live in UK in August and in February this year in Canada.

Some of the features that MSN offers its advertisers are remarkable as compared to the ones offered by Google and Yahoo! Joe Griffin at Search Engine Journal informs about the 'day parting' feature. Joe explains it as, “ Day parting is when you select the time and days you want your ad displayed. As an example if you sell B2B software you might want to run your ads from 8:00-6:00PM, whereas a real estate agent might be better served running ads from 5:00-10:00PM.”

This definitely sounds like a helpful feature. Even Joe sounds pretty hopeful in terms of Paid Search Technology. Joe also informs about other benefits of opting for MSN adCenter model. The beginners benefits starts with lower bid prices. Microsoft has lower bid prices as of now because of the less number of advertisers. The support offered by Microsoft is also commendable.  MSN asCenter also offers an excellent way to target demographically.

Also, 'it has just rolled out a new Quick Launch program designed for marketers spending $30 a day or more.' Adcenter representative on WebmasterWorld informs, “it's a program where a media specialist can help you get your campaigns migrated over to adcenter. You can fill out this form, and you should be contacted about 48 hours after they receive it."

Read more about user reviews on Quick Launch here.

Just recently Microsoft upgraded adCenter beta site. Joe gives an overview of some neat features. 

• Turning conversion tracking on and off at the campaign level is easy
• The interface as a whole is fast, but you may want to upgrade to IE7, as it pretty heavy on javascript.
• You don’t have to generate reports to export data. It’s real easy to export any type of date with MSN adCenter.
• You can turn on demographic targeting at the campaign level. Here you can select if you want male or female and you can target specific age groups. 
• MSN also offers a budget spread, so you can easily set a monthly budget, turn on the option to evenly spread your ad over the month, and sit back and watch your money go away evenly over the month and not all at once.

Mark Barrera also informs about some more interesting features of the beta site upgrades.

• Directly import your campaign structure from other search advertising programs into adCenter. Update your existing campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keyword bids and match types using a single Microsoft Excel or CSV file.
• Preview your ads on Live Search. Visualize how your ads will show up on Live Search with Ad Preview in the ad list.
• Search within your campaigns. Full text search allows you to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, accounts, or campaigns that contain all or part of a query string.
• Edit keywords in bulk to simultaneously change settings for all keywords or delete poor-performing keywords from your campaigns.
• Download your adCenter datasets into Excel with one click—making campaign management that much simpler.

Microsoft is actually trying very hard to catch up with Google's AdWords and Yahoo!'s Panama upgrade. The campaigns with AdCenter are easy and time saving. Moreover, they are cost effective as well. Infact, Microsoft enthusiasts claim that if you start right now you will gain a lot from it. Though many people complain of a lack of clarity and response with AdCenter. It also took Microsoft six months to make AdCenter compatible with Firefox. However, if for a moment we stop comparing it with Google and Yahoo! the kind of features AdCenter has introduced in the past few months have been appreciable.  

Microsoft AdCenter says:
Microsoft adCenter allows you to pay for your product to appear at the top of those searches. It offers advanced targeting capabilities, enabling you to reach the audience you want, based on the keywords you choose. This means your product gets seen by the people who want to see it – delivering cost-effective online marketing and an increased return on your investment. 

Microsoft is definitely putting in a lot of efforts to live upto the claims. If you are a newbie, it might just do you wonders to start your campaigns with Microsoft Adcenter.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Microsoft AdCenter: An Insight (Part I)

Brandon Hopkins has compiled a list of 66 Ways to Build Links in 2007. Though this list contains some tips which are known to all, however, there are some other relevant tips as well. In all a great compilation and worth going over.

Brandon Hopkins says:
If “Content is King“, then links are what put that king on the throne. Build links and you’ll be able to display your content to the world. Don’t build links, and your King won’t have a kingdom.
Hopefully you already use most of these, but if only 5 of these tips get you a new link, that is 5 links you didn’t have yesterday!

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Link Building Tips For 2007

With the end of 2006 Yahoo! officially uncovered the commonly known Panama Update. Since that time the accounts are being upgraded from the older systems to this fresh system. Not all the accounts have been upgraded, however, it is expected the task would be full and finally accomplished by the end of march, approximately. Yahoo! Panama is definitely a welcome change.

Yahoo! Panama is surely a great improvement as compared to the previous one. A higher quality of searchers is unquestionably what Yahoo! Panama aims at. The new interface and ranking algorithm may involve a little bit of adjusting on the advertisers side. Scott on SEO blog has written an article, Yahoo Panama – Pros and Cons where he explains the benefits of Yahoo! Panama update:

• Previously you were stuck with only one live ad for any given phrase; now you can create multiple ads for a given ad group.
• Ad approval is now instant for most ads and keywords. While there is still a “pending approval” process for some sets of phrases, in many cases your ad changes and keyword additions are now instant.
• Under the new Yahoo Panama the options are much more sophisticated. For example, there is an option for blocking entire continents for your ad campaigns.
• The geo targeting options have also expanded to allow for more specific ad targeting. Advertisers now have the ability to target specific states and provinces – a feature previously unavailable.

Geo-targeting is one of the most preferred feature update of Yahoo Panama. PPC Advertising blog explains this as, “works by locating a user by his/her IP address or geo-specific terms in his/her search query. It applies both to the content network and the regular search network. Advertisers can choose to target an entire market region (the US and English speaking Canada) or regions. Regional targeting is broken further into either state/province/territory targeting or targeting by DMA”

Every coin has a flipside and so does Yahoo! Panama update. Most of the issues are relatively minor and should not be a major cause of concern for advertisers on top of their campaigns. The chief flaws occurs when one account is transferred from the previous system into the newly updated system. Scott gives an insight on the flipsides of Yahoo! Panama Update.

• Once your account has been transferred, the new system will not log any of the old system historical data. While this information is still accessible by logging into the old interface (which is made read only), it would certainly make more sense if stats were available under the new account login.
• Another issue campaign tracking. After the switch has been made, as long as you do not change any tracking settings everything should continue to work as normal; once you adjust the analytics or tracking options, you will need to replace your tracking code with a new piece of code provided by Yahoo.
• There have been some reports that after the account transition some ad titles, descriptions, and even keywords, have been disrupted.

PPC Marketing Guide says that though the ability to have multiple ads in Yahoo! Panama is the best feature, but Yahoo! has not included conversion rate into their ad statistics.
 The fields Yahoo currently reports on are:

• Ad Name
• Editorial Status
• Display Rate (%)
• Quality Index
• Impressions
• CTR (%)
• Clicks

Although you can tell which message is more appealing to your audience, has a higher click through rate, you don’t know if that message is costing you more that another message with a lower click through rate.

Yahoo! would now be able match upto Google's AdWords. Beanstalk says, “this is a great step forward for Yahoo! (at least until Google and Microsoft upgrade their engines and once again move ahead). More importantly, this is a great step for advertisers who were, until now, frustrated with the differences in capabilities between what they should do with Ad Words vs. what they could do with Yahoo! Search Marketing.”

Steps required in each campaign in Yahoo!
1.Log into your account. You will be presented with your account dashboard.
2.Click on the name of the campaign you wish to change
3.Click on “Edit Campaign” in the top right.
4.Click “Edit” at the top right of the “Campaign General Information” box.
5.Change the account name.
6.Click “Save Changes”.
7.Then click “Dashboard” to return to where you were.
Google AdWords:
1.Log into your account. You will be presented with the “All campaigns” view.
2.Click the checkbox beside the campaign you wish to rename and click “Edit Campaign”.
3.Enter a new campaign name.
4.Click “Save Changes” (also brings you back to where you were).

Not trying to project a negative image of Yahoo! Panama update, it is a job well performed. However, take a closer look! It takes seven step to perform a campaign in yahoo! And it takes Google just four. The multiple campaign edits might just frustrate the advertisers. Renaming the Google campaigns at one stance takes three step and one additional step for each campaign. But in Yahoo! These seven steps are required for each and every campaign.

The procedure might still be long but Yahoo! Panama update is attracting a lot of prospective advertisers. Getting around the new interface is a big improvement. The daily chore of managing a Yahoo! Search campaign will not be such a chore anymore. 

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Yahoo! Panama: What Everybody Ought To Know About It

Guillaume on SEOmoz has written a interesting post on 24 On-site SEO Checkups For Clueless Developers/Marketers.

The list of SEO on-site tips touches up the basics. However, Guillaume has rightly said that manty SEO consultants and web developers forget these basics at the time of launching a site. The twenty four tips will for sure ensure that any link building or link baiting effort gives maximum results.

Some of the tips are:

1. Run a $100 Adwords test campaign after your initial keyword research, helping you do the best themed/relevant keywords on-site optimisation.
2. Ensure there is a well written, non-duplicated attractive Title / Description tags on every page.
3. Verify that almost every single piece of relevant content on your site is somehow static to the page it was written for and is not a text image (double check that with a text browser).
4. Revise the On-page content to be sure there is a minimum presence of your themed keywords on every page. Don't try to go overboard, just think as if you'd be the user.
5. Double check your code to make sure you've got your content titles and subtitles under H1 / H2 tags.

Take a look at the complete list.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

On-Site Search Engine Optimization Checkups/Tips

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post "Tips on using feeds and information on subscriber counts in Reader." The post talks not just about the blog feeds, it talks about many sites, which have frequently updated content, resorting to feeds. If you have a feedreader for your site, you can get the number of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers.

We crawl feeds with the user-agent Feedfetcher-Google, so simply look for this user-agent in your logs to find the subscriber number. If multiple URLs point to the same feed, we may crawl each separately, so in this case, just count up the subscriber numbers listed for each unique feed-id.

You can also submit your feed as a Sitemap in webmaster tools. This informs Google about the URLs listed in the feed and heightens the chances of it getting crawled.

if you want to make sure your feed shows up in the list of available feeds for Google products, simply add a <link> tag with the feed URL to the section of your page. For instance:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.example.com/atom.xml" />

You can read the full post here and view the tips for publishers by Google Reader team here.   

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Tips On Using Feeds And Subscriber Data From Google

Lately, Michael Gray is busy  interviewing search engine experts on local search tips, tricks and secrets. Twenty interviews have been scheduled over a period of 5 days of which 8 are already done. The ones already done are that with Aaron Wall, Dean Bloomfield, Bill Slawski, Scott Smith, George Kepnick, Rich Skrenta, RC Jordan and Matt McGee. 

The schedule of coming interviews is as follows:

Rae Hoffman – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Justilien Gaspard – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Merrick Lozano – Local Search interview 2/7/2007
Carolyn Shelby – Local Search Interview 2/7/2007
Greg Hartnett – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Brad Geddes – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Mike Belasco – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Lyndon Antcliff – Local Search Interview 2/8/2007
Jeremy Schoemaker – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
John Andrews – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
Rebecca Kelley – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007
Lee Odden – Local Search Interview 2/9/2007

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Local Search Tips From Top 20 Practitioners

Chris Silver Smith of SuperPages.com  has given some extreme local SEO methods which one can use for SEO of local business. Here are a few tips:

Your business should have some top keywords which are used by the users in the search engines when looking for business of your kind. Business can have informal names with keywords which would help new customers find them easily. Name your business having first alphabets as some local search engines show search results in alphabetical order. This means that persons who uses letter 'A'  to start their business names may get more prominence in search results than businesses names starting with lower letters.

Have your business near to the center of the city as some local search engines show local results according to the center point of the city area. If the business address is near to center point than local search engines may rank you higher in the results. Change your street address that have keywords relating to your business. If you are a big businessmen or has heavy political clout than you can have the street address changed that have keywords of your business and can be beneficial to you.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Tips For Local Business

There are several pitfalls you may come across while using Microsoft adCenter. WebmasterWorld adCenter moderator, Receptional gives tips for 'making the most out of AdCenter and avoiding some of the common pitfalls.' He writes, " My team went for a tutorial in London last week on making AdCenter work. I thought the notes that they came back with as to what they found relevent might be of help to people – especially those that suddenly find their ads in limbo, offline or entirely ineffectual."

The post talks about the Editorial Process; Acceptance Policy; Trademarks; Improving Your Campaign Management; Demographics; Reporting; and other basic tips. You can expect following developments in 2007:

• Behavioural targeting being researched
• Adcenter Accreditation (level grading)
• Management on campaigns
• Doing a photo version of Google Earth it seems. Not sure if this will be ready next year but it ables you to search your photo and find other people’s photos of that same object (ie Tower Bridge) which can even have a 3D map of it.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Tips For Enhancing Microsoft adCenter Experience

Want to improve your page rankings on Live.com of Microsoft Search? A WebmasterWorld thread gives some tips to get good ranks for your pages on Live.com. The thread gave tips ranging from subjects like importance of content, page size and weight issues to importance of freshness and basic SEO principles. These tips are being debated at the WebmasterWorld thread.

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

SEO Tips For Good Ranks On Live.com

SEO Egghead has compiled 21 top SEO tips given by Matt Cutts over the last year. The concise list includes links to all the tips by Matt Cutts on the subject of SEO in Google. According to Matt Cutts the tips will help you rank better.
The list of the links also include a summary which is a time saver. Some of the the tips are :

1. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Matt recommends using dashes over underscores to delimit words in urls. 2005. Google does not algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url despite the fact that some have raised it as a possible heuristic for spam detection. I think WordPress pretty much precludes this anyway. 2005.

2. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-mistakes-sneaky-javascript/
Google takes action on individual instances of spam when they find it, but they focus on creating better algorithmic solutions. He states that he would not recommend using sneaky JavaScript redirects because your sites may get nailed in the near future. 2005.

3. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whats-an-update/
Google updates their index data — including backlinks and PageRank all the time. However, they export and publish new backlinks and PageRank data approximately every three months. New backlinks and PageRank are meaningless — it is not an update.  The information is likely already factored in for awhile before you see it. 2005.

4.  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-link-follow-up/
Google’s is against selling/buying links, and Matt indicates they are good at spotting them — both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines. 2006.

5. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/
External (domainA -> domainB) 302 redirects are largely treated as 301s now. 2006.

Matt Cutts corrected this (number 17 in the list) advising to "use a 302 for temporary moves, and if a move is permanent, use a 301."

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Quick Fix : 21 SEO Tips from Google's Matt Cutts