Search-based Adwords keywords suggestion tool

For a quite long time, it seemed that Google was uncomfortable sharing their search data, maybe afraid of giving competitors too much dope. But that is not the case anymore. Google recently is sharing more and more search data to the world. This search-based Adwords keywords suggestion tool gives data on actual Google search queries and it can even matched the keywords to specific pages of your website which makes this advertising product Adwords more and more useful.

Now, let's do a short test of this tool and see what kind of suggestions that Google can give us. Look at the picture below: we use website www.webnatics.biz as the website to be investigated and SEO as the word that we want to analysis.

Click the find keywords button, then we see that Google give us few keywords with the actual monthly searching volume, suggested bid and the page that Google recommended as the landing page etc. The quality score can be high if you take Google's suggestion, and Google is telling you that there are people who are really searching these keywords. So don't hesitate to buy the keywords if the competition is not very high and you are comfortable with the suggested bids.

How To Determine Your Optimal CPC Bids

Bidding for your Search Engine Marketing campaigns can be quite a tricky thing. The whole idea is not to bid too high or too low, but just right for your business.

Bidding too high will cause your daily budget to run out after a few clicks. Bid too low and you might not rank high enough in search result to achieve the number of clicks you want. Before you set your bid, consider what you can afford to pay for a click. Remember that the bid you set is the maximum amount you will ever pay for a click. Your actual cost-per-click (CPC) will likely end up being less than your bid.

Consider the actions that you want users to make when they are at your side and determine how much that particular action is worth to your business. Bidding is different for every business even if they are in the same industry. A completed action is called a conversion and it can be anything from signups to online purchase.

The performance metric CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) is a useful metric to determine your CPC bids. How much you should bid would be determined by how much that particular conversion is worth to the company. Think about the bids for individual keywords and their conversion rate. It is logical to bid higher for for those keywords that tend to have a higher conversion rate.

Because the market and customer behavior changes, competitive bids change, too. Constant monitoring of your clicks cost and bids will alert you to those changes. Remember that paying too much for clicks can mean losing money, but paying too little may result in your ads ranking so low that prospective customers overlook them.

Future of Advertising - Social Media

According to Wikipedia, social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.
But after you finish reading this paragraph you may be still confusing: what is it all about?
Now here it is an interesting explaination about social media in plain English. Take a look.

Oxite, another open-source blogging platform from Microsoft

Microsoft launched Oxite, another open-source blogging platform on December 8th. However, they anounced quickly that the product is not aimed to compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress, etc.

Microsoft posted the Oxite code on its CodePlex Web site made an official announcement. The software is available under the Microsoft Public License, one of Microsoft's OSI-certified open-source licenses. Oxite is a standards-compliant, extensible content management system designed to support either blogs or larger Web sites; the platform includes support for features such as pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level, Microsoft said. 

Users can create and edit a set of pages on a site, add customized HTML into pages, and support multiple blogs on a single site. Oxite is also able to integrate with Microsoft developer software such as ASP.Net MVC, Visual Studio Team Suite, and Background Services Architecture. The project began as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of ASP.Net MVC to developers as announced.

The Web site for Mix Online was built using Oxite, and Microsoft is providing the Mix Online Web site code for developers to learn from. Mix Online is the online community centered on Microsoft's Mix Web developer conference. Oxite project coordinator Erik Porter mentioned: Oxite is not a direct competitor to existing, established blogging systems, nor is it intended to challenge Microsoft's own SharePoint, which includes content-management-system capabilities. The software is intended for developers but could eventually be made suitable for the general public. "We have no plans to make this anything but a really good developer sample that should be able to run any site you want," he wrote. "That said, this is a community project now and, if the community decides to take it a different direction, we won't stop it." 

Landing Page For PPC

What's a PPC Landing Page? It is simply a page on your site that is customized to match the theme of a particular PPC ad group -- the keywords and ad message. The PPC Landing Page can, and often should, look very different from the other pages on your site.

This is often a difficult but crucial concept that's hard for many site owners to grasp. They are accustomed to thinking about their site as a bricks-and-mortar storefront: one entrance (the home page) through which all customers enter, linked to other pages where site visitors can hopefully find what they're looking for. Site owners often design their home page to satisfy the needs of casual browsers as well as visitors who are looking for specific items or information. While this may be fine if you are not looking into getting a better ROI, such site often does not work effectivetly for search engine marketing campaigns.

The landing page has to convince the user that they have come to the correct page and motivate them to complete a conversion, be it registration or sales transaction. This bring us back to the point earlier on, a landing page should look very different from the other pages on your site. Great search engine marketers would spend alot of time testing, optimizing and customizing every single page of the conversion process.

If you wish to optimize your landing page, contact us at Webnatics.

Google published 101 SEO guide

While SEO becoming more and more popular, people start to ask more questions about it on Google webmaster blog or at Google's conferences. Questions like: "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?", "How do I improve my site?" spread everywhere into Google's forums.
In order to satisfy people's curiosity, Google announced what the search engine really like and published their 101 SEO Starter Guide. 

For your convenience, you can download it here.
Within the document, Google also gives the tips to choose SEO professionals.
This document really describes the basic theory of doing SEO and it could remove the mystique of doing it. And Google helps to eliminate all the myths that are mis-leading the consumers.
Some client asked us: "So what do you actually do to optimize our website?". It's not easy to explain in one or few sentences. Now, we can show this document to our clients: the method of doing SEO is not our invention, we are following what Google announced. What we do is to configure your website to be Google friendly and try to increase the online visibility, not to just targeting some keywords and try to make your website ranking higher.
Although Google's SEO guide is written in very easy-to-understand English. There's still some technical terms or methods which are hard to be understood by people who never touched HTML. Anyhow, feel free to contact WebNatics if you have any questions with this document. We'll see what we can do to help as a Google's Agency.

SEO Methodology – Use humour for link building

Many times, we are trying to get links from people, but put yourself as others, why must they link to your site? (of course, one of the reasons is to have a link exchange) In this case, using humour could be one of the reasons for people to link to your site. The strategy could include all kinds of humour, including cartoons, animations, videos, jokes, confessions, or even things overheard.

But the challenge is not everybody is humorous or funny. Here are some recommendations:
· Getting staff to be involved in such activities, note down every funny contents they encounter, I’m sure everyone has such encounters in life.
· Rewards : reward those who contribute good contents; the fact is everybody or the majority buys rewards.
· Customers involvements, who is in a better positions to poke fun of their own industries?
· Viral the contents to maximize results.

While all search marketers trying to outsmart competitors in SEO deliverables, Humour can be a good approach.

The Fundamentals of Quality Score in Search Engine Marketing

Search Engines, (Google, Yahoo, MSN) have common goals
· They want users to find exactly what they are searching for
· They want advertisers to offer what the searchers are looking for.

In return
· Satisfied users return to engines to depend on search results
· Advertisers see return on advertising spent and advertising more money on engines.

Years ago, engines deployed on purely auction system to decide on advertisers’ position. This may sound fair to advertisers with budget and willing to invest but making difficult for users to find exactly what they are searching for. E.g. HP could bid very high for Dell keywords. Resulting users do not find exactly what they want at the top of the page, and relevant advertisers do not appear on Top.

So Search Engines decided to reward relevant advertisers with a Scoring systems; starting with Google, and Yahoo to follow on 28th April 2008 for South East Asia, and MSN. In this case, relevant advertisers rewarded with better positions and lower cost per click, and competitors get to pay a higher cost per click; relevant advertisers benefit from more click as position is higher, and better ROI since cost is lower.

So Quality Score is important, but how do advertisers get good quality scoring on SEM campaigns? Search Engines do not reveal the full algorithm of Quality Score, but in general, we could
· Build small adgroups consist of small number of keywords closely related to each other
· Write relevant ad copies that contains the keyword, dynamic keyword insertions, or DKI can be a good approach
· Contain searched keywords in the landing pages

Marketing Mix of Search Engine Marketing & SEO

So how do you define Search? Today’s Search is getting more complicated, social media, local, universal all has Search Components, but no matter what, it’s still Search. Despite all these changes, the principals of SEM & SEO still apply, organic listing or PPC.

· Paid Listing and organic listings work hand in hand, and they must be balanced carefully. Before you maximize your Paid & Organic listings, make sure your research data is correct. Conversion is the key, and if your paid listing is converting well, it will be foolish to withdraw if if your site is ranked well organically; and do not assume organic listing converts the same as well as SEM listing as paid listing is more tactical that it creates conversion mindset to audience.
· The interaction between SEM and SEO is extremely important too, because if your site requires revamping, and this is when SEM is able to continue the visibility of your site.
· According to sources, SEO contributes 75% of all search traffic, and acquires only 15% of Search Marketing budget. As PPC becomes more competitive, the cost of investment become very expensive, and this is where SEO come to lessen the investment budget, and this is when Web Analytics comes in useful, because ultimately, SEM or SEO, still conversion or ROI counts.