Google announced today that AdSense for Domains is now using optional keyword hints more often. Keyword hints are provided by the user, who enters keywords into a field to assist Google in the targeting of ads for potentially ambiguous domains. Google’s Randy Heath explains:

These keywords are suggestions supplied to Google by domain owners about the types of content users are looking for when they arrive on an undeveloped domain. They are used to help our system determine the best ads to place on these domains. For example, with the domain www.rockstarsand.com, a publisher might suggest the keywords "bitumen" and "mining" so that ads may appear from advertisers offering oil extraction products.

Keyword hints remain optional. When keyword hints are provided by the publisher, our ad-matching systems will use them more often. As always, we aim to provide the most relevant ads for the user, the best value for advertisers, and the best returns for publishers. This means in some cases, keyword hints will be ignored when we have evidence that other targeting approaches perform better.

Keyword hints have to adhere to Google’s policy guidelines for AdSense for Domains. The company also recommends the following guidelines to maximize effectiveness:

- Limit your keywords to 3-5 phrases
- Ensure your keywords/phrases are separated by commas
- Ensure your hints are relevant to the domain
- Stick to one theme for potentially ambiguous domains.

Google says it is working on additional product improvements for AdSense for Domains, and these will be announced in the coming months.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches AdSense Product Ideas Page

> Google Makes Risky AdSense For Domains Expansion

> YouTube Videos in AdSense Could Drive Clicks

Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns’ effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

"New ideas are usually generated for campaigns and ad groups every few weeks, but you may miss ideas that can expand your coverage and boost your traffic if you don’t check the Opportunities tab regularly," explains Google’s Dan Friedman. "Now, when there are new ideas available for your review, you’ll see them highlighted along with the rest of your campaign alerts."

Google has also added the ability to create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for users using AdWords conversion tracking.

"By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you’re quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics," says Friedman.

Google says it is still working on bringing custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users, but until then, you can just set custom alerts for individual accounts if you can log into them directly.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives AdWords Advertisers New Comparison Option

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

As you’re probably aware, the plan for the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that dominated many of the headlines this summer, is for Bing to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically, Bing will handle the back-end, while Yahoo will handle the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. That should be happening next year sometime. Are you ready for Yahoo’s switch to Bing? Share your thoughts.

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, webmasters are going to need to evaluate their need to address their own sites with regards to optimizing for Bing. While optimizing for Bing is generally a good idea anyway, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give this some special attention.

Presumably, it doesn’t matter if you rank well in Yahoo now, if you don’t rank well in Bing. At least it won’t matter when the change comes. If you’re ranked number 1 in Yahoo, but you’re on the 7th page in Bing, you’ve got some work to do.

iCrossing Search Strategist David Shapiro gave some good advice in a recent blog post. To summarize, he said if Yahoo is driving a significant amount of traffic to your site, you need to determine what keywords you rank well for in Yahoo, but not in Bing, and before next year, you need to work on raising these rankings. He also said you need to determine which Yahoo terms you rank 6-10 for that may return "Quick Tabs". 

"With the way Bing displays search results for these queries, ranking 6-10 is significantly less valuable," says Shapiro. "Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select."

"If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs, especially considering these terms are more targeted and likely convert better," he adds. 

There are differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft’s stance on SEO isn’t all that different than Google’s. There are different algorithms at play, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you’ve optimized for Live Search in the past, you should be happy to know that Bing’s not that different from that either.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper (pdf) for webmasters. "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBot."

Do yourself a favor and read that white paper. As Shapiro says, you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. He also suggests that in some cases, it may be a good idea to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.

There is a good chance you are getting a lot more traffic from Google than from Yahoo, so if that’s the case, luckily you still have that going for you. In addition, social networks like Twitter and Facebook (not to mention blogs) are driving a lot of traffic to websites as well.

Read this for more tips on optimizing for Bing. On a semi-related note, you may also find this article on getting more traffic from Bing’s Image Search useful.

Are you concerned about losing Yahoo traffic once it switches to Bing? Tell us.

One of the three major pillars of Search Engine Optimization is a website’s content, and onsite content optimization. All of the major search engine ranking algorithms have components that relate to the content that is contained on the website. Typically these components relate to Keyword Densities, number of words, content location, and sometimes age of content. In regards to the code that the content is contained in that falls under the topic of structure and not content, and will not be discussed in this article.

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) is an advanced web development method which can be used to create more responsive and interactive dynamic websites. AJAX accomplishes this by making object request calls back to the web server without having to refresh your browser, these object calls are then processed and are typically used to update the content of the page on your website that is currently being viewed. For the sake of this Article I’m going to ignore the XML component of AJAX as the search engines never view any of the XML data. Websites that use Javascript to manipulate content without using AJAX will also suffer from the issues described.

When a search engine sends out a robot / spider to visit your website with the goal of indexing your content it is only looking at what is being presented in the Markup Language. Generally a search engine does not behave like a user when indexing your website, it doesn’t click buttons or links it simply makes note of URLs associated with each page then individually then visits these pages to index them. This largely goes against the goal of AJAX which is to have as few pages as possible by interacting with the web server in a smarter method as the users interact with the website.

To put the last paragraph simply any content that is changed via AJAX or Javascript on a webpage that is not hardcoded in a page won’t be cached by the search engines. This essentially means that if you have great content that the search engines may love but you’re using AJAX you may be missing out on traffic. There are two approaches to rectifying these which may even give you an advantage over sites that don’t utilize Javascript / AJAX.

The first approach is to make sure that your website degrades to normal flat markup language for non javascript capable browsers and search engines. Essentially every time you would have used an AJAX call make sure you have a page with the same content. Unfortunately for a lot of people this could mean a lot of work, for those individual using a database with PHP or ASP it is not too hard to build a site that builds itself with some effective web programming.

The second approach is to use AJAX in a more minimalist fashion. The goal here is to present the search engines with your optimized content while making sure that any AJAX calls a user would do has no bearing on what you want the search engines to see. In fact this can be used to remove content from your website which may negatively affect your rankings such as testimonials. I’ve seen very few testimonials that actually do good things for a sites keyword density, I’ve even been known to optimize testimonials on client’s websites. With Javascript / AJAX you could insert a random testimonial into a page and therefore not affecting that pages keyword density. The only downside to this approach is that some offsite keyword density tools actually use Web Browser rendering engines so they may get false results as it takes the Javascript into account.

Now you may think that I’m anti AJAX from everything that I’ve said, but there are times and places for AJAX, provided it doesn’t affect how the search engines see your beautiful relevant content your trying to rank. AJAX is great to use for Member sections of your website, interactive forms, slideshows, and a lot more it just needs to be leveraged correctly to avoid missing out on search engine visitors. The final thing to keep in mind is that most search engines like to see more than a single page website which many AJAX website appear to be, always strive for at least 5 or more indexable pages as internal links and anchor text can have a lot of value.

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Daryl Quenet is the Director of SEO Services at Beanstalk SEO. Beanstalk offers performance-based SEO services, consulting, training, copywriting and link building. To keep up-to-date on the latest going’s-on in the SEO real be sure to visit Beanstalk’s SEO blog regularly and read other SEO articles on their site.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Search Engine Optimize (SEO) an AJAX or Web 2.0 Site

Are your search engine rankings depending too much on one page (like your homepage) or one sub folder of your website? If so, here are a few tips to spread the link flow around to hedge your SEO efforts. Chances are, unless you are employing a tiered SEO strategy that you are overly dependent on your websites home page or similar pages in your website.

Link flow pools into different pages of a website and learning how to harness this ebb and flow is crucial for long term and short term ranking objectives. The most common cause of this is excessive linking to a page without using a “nofollow” tag within the structure of the link.

For example, each time you link to a page you are creating a type of reference /citation that is essentially voting to escalate the keywords in the anchor text (the text in the link) for the page that it links to.

Each link indexed in a search engine is impacting your link profile either intentionally or inadvertently. The premise of links as a metric for relevance is nothing new; in fact it predates search engines and is one reason why they built many of their algorithmic calculations around the value of citation.

By understanding this metric, the bottom line is, any link that you can control (either internal or external links to your website) is a strategic advantage when coupled with optimal site architecture and topical content.

If you inadvertently link to your contact page for example and do not link from any other area in the body text of your documents the page with the highest percentage of anchor text will start to take on the ranking factors from the linked page to the destination page.

The pages with the strongest desired rankings should have a high percentage of internal links for those keywords from relevant pages within the site. If there are not enough supporting pages, then that should be the first priority to cross the tipping point for the keyword in question. Although this is an aspect of internal linking, you should combine this strategy with a high percentage of deep links (links to specific pages rather than just linking to the homepage) to spread the ranking factors to the most suitable page.

The real premise behind SEO is to (a) cultivate the ideal page to link from and (b) increase topical relevance for the page being linked to so that they create a dynamic synergy.

In an ideal scenario, the website providing the link for off page factors should have (1) the use of a relevant title featuring the keyword or a synonym of the keyword to match the keyword /anchor text in the link (2) relevant meta tags that incorporate the phrase, so search engines determine the page providing the link is relevant to the search term and the target page.

One of the most fundamental tactics for search engine optimization is to anchor multiple landing pages or categories in a website to funnel a specific type of consumer to each page.

For example, pricing queries go to the pricing page, product queries go to a specific product page based on make, model, etc. (not a general catch all page). By creating each type of page with a specific ranking objective and then holistically funneling the ranking factors from secondary pages, sitemaps and other websites, you can essentially provide an optimized profile for the given website.

Based on the content, internal linking, age and chronology of the topical content and inbound links from other websites contribute to how much authority each page or segment gains.

Here are a few tactics you can use to accomplish this feat:

• Control the amount of links leaving or linking to a page from within your website
• Implement static pages as hub pages to tie together important themed pages of your website
• Use sitemaps to blend ranking factors
• The proper use of deep links

Aside from the methods suggested above, the final ingredient for any SEO campaign is time (giving the results time to rise to the top by building authority). Even though you can implement 80% of the techniques, each website has its own rate of assimilation though osmosis and mitosis before it goes through the chrysalis state and emerges as a true SEO champion.

The real value is (a) understanding the dynamic and being able to reproduce the effect and (b) knowing that it is better to start with a range of objectives to use as a blueprint vs. working after the fact to produce tangible results.

Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company http://www.seodesignsolutions.com. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

SEO Dependency – Do Your Rankings Rely Too Much on The Home Page?

If you own a website and are heavily involved in trying to promote your website you need to be very careful about how you operate your advertising campaign and how your website is designed as you may be preaching Googles webmaster guidelines and could get your website penilised and even get banned from Google

I recently had one of my websites hit by Google and i had page 1 listings for all my keywords and then one day i logged on and found out i was on page 6 for all my keywords.  When this happens its impossible to find out what caused the penalty as Google keep this information out of the public domain as to keep the spammers guessing.

A number of things you need to avoid on your website are the following to avoid getting your website banned or experience the page 6 penalty:

Web design Guidelines

• Ensure that on your website you have no hidden text
• Do not sell any links on your website.  If you do have out going links on your homepage make sure they have the “nofollow” tag
• Add a sitemap to your website
• Do not fill your website with keywords (keyword spamming)
• Check your website has no broken links
• Make sure you have less than 100 links on each page

Technical Guidelines

• Make sure your web server supports the “If modified Since HTTP header.  This tells Google that your website content has changed since it was last crawled
• Set up a Robots.txt file on your webserver which tells search engine what pages to crawl and what not to index
• Make sure your website can be viewed in different browsers
• Make sure your website loads in a reasonable speed, check your server isn’t over loaded

Quality Guidelines

•  Try to design your website for users and not primarly for search engines.  Do not cloak any links
• Avoid any black hat methods to help improve your search engine rankings quickly
• Dont exchange links with other websites
• Try to avoid linking to spammy websites and “Bad neighbourhoods”
• Dont use software that sends automated queries from your website to Google
• Dont load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Try to avoide duplicate content on your web pages
• Dont have web pages that have hidden programs as phishing, viruses, trojans or other badware
• Dont create doorway pages for search engines or any other “cookie cutter” such as affiliate programs that redirect a user from a page with little or no content
• If your website is participating in an affiliate program make sure your website provides good relevant content for the user in mind and not just a doorway page
• Try not to build up your backlinks too quickly and make sure your anchor text backlink is not all the same as to look like spam

When building up your backlinks keep the following in mind:

• Build up slowly and steady
• Use as many different anchor texts, as using the same will be classed as spam
• Try to avoid having your link on a site that is known as a spammer or part of a “Bad Neighbourhood” (e.g FFA Link Farms)
• Try to avoid linking from duplicate content (e.g article website submission services, that will submit 1 article to 1,000’s of websites.
• Try to avoid buying PR links on other websites, if you do have the “nofollow” tag associated with your link
• Avoid any type of link exchange with another website
• Dont advertise the fact that you sell links on your website
• If you have a links page on your website, make sure all your outgoing links have the “nofollow” tag associated with any links, as Google may think your selling links

I hope you find these article useful, please subscribe to our website for more tips on internet marketing

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