I spent a good portion of my morning cleaning house in an Adwords campaign that I’ve recently begun to manage. Besides being terribly disorganized (a pet peeve of mine), the campaign was missing something essential: Negative Keywords. There are a lot of internet marketing novices out there today that manage Adwords campaigns and never take advantage of this crucial tool.

Let’s imagine you’re a business owner that sells pencils. Sadly for you, the majority of people that type the word “pencils” into a Google search are not looking to purchase. Many will be typing things like: “how to draw with pencils,” “test taking pencils,” “how to stop chewing on pencils,” etc. Obviously, you don’t want your ads showing up on those searches because they will not result in desired conversions.

To solve this problem, you must incorporate negative keywords into your campaign. So in this example, you might add negative keywords in the following manner (one per line, preceded with a dash):

-how to

-draw

-test

-chewing

This will ensure that you get a lower cost per conversion because you are weeding out potential “clickers” that aren’t really interested in purchasing your product.

Low cost/click=happy camper. Go rock those campaigns.

I get all kinds of people asking me about whether they should create a Flash or HTML-based website, whether Flash is SEO friendly, whether I would I ever create a Flash website, etc.

So in response to these questions, my answer is collective no…for the most part. Though flash certainly can be cool and aesthetically pleasing, it just simply can’t compare to the SEO compatibility of HTML. Each designer must consider the pro’s and con’s of Flash and HTML when creating a site. To learn how, where, and when to use flash, check out this great post on the Best Uses of Flash. I think it breaks down the concepts pretty well. Enjoy!

It’s amazing how often Yahoo! Answers Q’s and A’s are popping up on SERP’s these days. I’ve become (admittedly) a little addicted to this service. They do a good job motivating you to post quality answers by using a points-based system for those who have the best answers selected. I don’t know how it would help you to be rated highly as an answerer, but I do know that once a “best answer” is chosen, it is archived as the sole response to that question. For all of you who would like to use Yahoo! Answers as a SEO or internet marketing resource, this is an important point. If you manage to write a “best answer” to a question that includes a link to your site, your post will have considerable weight and staying power. Try having some fun with it this weekend!

Let’s say you’re the owner of a company that provides great services or products on the internet. Wouldn’t you want an internet audience to know about your site and trust it enough to buy items from it? One way to accomplish both of these goals is by setting up and promoting affiliate and feeder sites. Here’s a great affiliate site idea for clever internet marketing:

Purchase a new domain name that is relevant to the area of your product or service (i.e. if you sell sponges, try something like”spongeinfo.com”). Develop this site with information about your product/service, as well as like information about your competitors. Maintain an objective tone while subtly highlighting the positive differences between you and your competitors. Make sure to provide contact info for not only your site, but your competitors sites as well. If you do a good enough job highlighting the positive differences about your product/service, it will sell itself and people will click through to your site over the sites of your competitors. So no, people won’t know that you–the owner of the site you’re trying to drive people to–created this affiliate/feeder site, but if you’re honest, it won’t matter. To the average consumer it looks like one more credible source attesting to the quality products/services that you promote on your business site.

Remember three things:

1) Be honest. Don’t deceive people and use this as a tool to trick consumers. I guarantee that it will come back to bite you. Besides, it’s bad karma.

2) I’ll say it again, be objective. If you’re too subjective or biased, people will sense it and your affiliate site’s credibility will be compromised. Consumers are smarter than you think.

3) Create original content for your affiliate site! There was a post recently about Yahoo! penalizing affiliate sites. If you read further, however, it was only because people were filling them with duplicate content that they copied and pasted from their other sites (yes, even their own). I can’t say it enough, duplicate content=trip to Google hell (a.k.a  the supplemental index).

A quick break from internet marketing posts to recognize the great country we live in. God bless the USA.

I can’t help wishing I was back home on the banks of the Charles listening to and watching the annual Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular with Keith Lockhart.

Why must the west feature fireworks shows with country artists instead? The east-coast in me can’t handle it.

There’s a reason that SEOBook’s 100 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 post started with lists…they’re perfect for internet marketing.

People like lists. Lists can present a great deal of information in a crisp, clean and easy to follow format. And due to the fact that people love them, they also make good link bait material and content for online article submissions. The key to turning lists into good SEO linkbuilding tools is simple. Somewhere in your list include a relevant hyperlink with good anchor text to the site you’re trying to rank. The more your list gets circulated, the better your site will fare. So make ‘em fun, make them clever and make them interesting.

If you’re a good great list-maker, you can become a great link builder. You just need to be creative.

Have you ever tried to do SEO for a client with a terribly designed website? It can be a disheartening waste of skills and resources. What often happens is that even if a site ranks well, customers fail to see an increase in conversions. You feel like you’re just throwing yourself against a wall.

[Tip for SEO entrepreneurs and firms: web design companies make great SEO referral partners. Send them your clients with terrible websites and they can send your their clients with new websites that need SEO. Everyone wins]

It’s fine when the site arrives to you without good title tags, permalinks, etc. because that’s the SEO’s job to fix. It’s not good, however, when the graphic design is unappealing and navigation is dismal. Sometimes, to accomplish the end goal of helping a client be successful, a little web design consulting may be necessary.

Take this for example. I’ve worked with clients who have homepages that aren’t very engaging. Visitors tend to have a high bounce rate when they don’t find some significant call to action on the first page. Conversion can go through the roof by changing a button from this:

to this:

It’s a simple fix, but it can significantly boost the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. IMHO, improving a website will improve your ability to show your clients the results they’re looking for.

Make sure you get your ducks in a row. Whatever that means.

Here’s an on-page optimization tip for your Wordpress driven blog. Click on one of your posts…is your blog’s name the first thing listed? If so, that probably isn’t optimal for internet marketing purposes. But no fear, changing the title tag to something more SEO-friendly is simple. In your WP backend go to Presentation->Theme Editor-> and select the “header” theme file. (Just so you don’t nuke your site, I’d make and save a backup copy in notepad or something)

Here you can change the information (and its order of appearance) between <title> and </title>.

*Note: Sometimes you cannot edit these theme files because they are locked. In this case you’ll need to FTP a copy to your hard drive, edit it there, and FTP overwrite it back on the server.

As far as what to include and how to order it, I’d suggest the following:

1) Make your blog post name show up first. That way you are spitting out all kinds of new information (hopefully) relevant to the theme of your blog. The search engines weigh the information closest to the beginning of the title tag the most, so make your titles count.

2) Next, add a phrase with keywords relevant to your site or theme. This is totally optional but it’s nice to have your targeted keywords included in the title tag. For example, if your site is designed to help people find truck driving jobs, set it up like: “Blog Post Name Here - Truck Driving Jobs - Blog Name Here”

3) Finally, include the Blog name. Gotta give some love to your site, right?

This method of on-page optimization for your WP blog ensures that the information at the beginning of your title tag (which, again, is weighted most heavily) is new for each post. Otherwise you are wasting that precious space by filling it with something static in every post, like your blog’s title.

Do you use a Wordpress blog as an internet marketing tool? If not, go start one and come back later, and if you do, read on. How would you like to bump up your page rank on that Wordpress blog with a simple plugin?

I can’t guarantee results, but here’s the logic behind it. Oftentimes people will link to a domain name by typing something like “turnsharp.com” instead of “www.turnsharp.com“. Wordpress is smart enough to accept both. But, you want to make sure that a singular domain is getting credit from the search engines for both www and non-www backlinks. If it isn’t, your domain may be treated as two sites and your page rank will be split between the two. Which is, obviously, not good.

Some argue that Google has fixed this problem, but I’m not convinced. And anyways, it’s better to be safe than sorry, right? One solution is a Wordpress Redirection plugin created by the foul-mouthed genius, Dax “the Hammer” Herrera, found on the WebGuerrilla site. This will redirect traffic and ensure that you won’t have a split page rank problem.

There seems to be a lot of confusion amongst internet marketing newbies about meta tags and title tags. Just browsing the web I can sense their anxiety…so with that in mind I’d like to take a moment to clarify matters. Hopefully this will help some people sleep better at night.

There are actually quite a few types of meta tags (for a pretty comprehensive list see SubmitCorner’s Guide). But no fear, there are really only two meta tags that 95% of people need to concern themselves with anyways. Theses are the Meta Description and the Meta Keywords. Even more important than these, however, are the Title Tags…so despite the fact that they aren’t technically meta tags, they do serve a similar function. Here we go, from least to most important.

META KEYWORDS: This is the less important of the two meta tags. Years ago, webmasters were able to add meta keywords to their sites that supposedly had relevance to the content. Problems arose when cunning individuals learned to abuse the system by adding numerous, irrelevant keywords to their meta description tags to drawing all kinds of traffic. (It got ugly when porn sites stuffed Disney themed keywords into their meta tags, etc.) So as a result, Google got wise and doesn’t give much (if any) weight to Meta Keywords. Other engines may, however, which makes them worth adding. It certainly won’t hurt, but don’t expect it to really help.

META DESCRIPTIONS: Meta description’s are designed to allow you to give a brief summary of your site’s content for the search engines to crawl. These can help you rank on keywords that you’re targeting. Don’t expect Google to gather and present theses descriptions word for word however in its results, however. Sometimes Google does its own thing and creates its own results descriptions from the content on your page. Adding meta descriptions is certainly worthwhile however.

TITLE TAGS: Besides original content on a site, this is perhaps the most important part of on-page optimization. Having static title tags will hurt your chances of ranking well. An easy way to test if your title tags are static is to do a Google search for site:yoursitehere.com. If each of the titles are unique, great! If not, this is good news as well, because with a little work you can help your site become more visible and better optimized for engine searches. Ensuring that each page on your site has unique title tags that include target keywords will really pay off.