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While this is probably not your main priority, or even a priority, mobile search is growing, and while most of that growth is found in Asia, it’s about time to realize that you’ll sooner or later have to create some sort of website adaptation for Mobile Browsing.

If you search this blog in Google mobile it will display a little mobile icon beside it as the Mobile plugin allows for proper mobile spidering.

This post was inspired by this post on the Google Webmaster blog, but since this is a fairly tedious process, let me explain it breifly.

How to get your mobile website found by Google’s new Mobile spider:

• Install a Mobile Wordpress plugin to generate a mobile version of your blog automatically
• Create a Mobile Sitemap
• Make sure your mobile pages have the correct DTD declaration
• Submit your Mobile sitemap through Google’s Webmaster tools
• If you’re designing your own Mobile website, read the Mobile Site Guidelines published by W3

You can do more things to find out if Google bot mobile is crawling your mobile site, but for now, these basic steps will get you started if that’s what you’re looking to do.

This is a series, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

In this last chapter of my Adwords guide, I will finish up by talking about how to optimize your Adwords account, this can be done in several ways.

Optimizing your keyword lists:

Overtime keywords may “corrode” by not converting, or simply losing traffic due to quality score. If you have large numbers of low quality keywords, unrelated keywords or ones which are simply not converting in a single Adgroup, then deleting them will help maintain a  healthy campaign. In some cases, your good keywords may not get as much traffic due to the amount of keywords which are not running or have a low quality score. Keeping many Adgroups with only a couple of very similar keywords in each of them will really make maintaining them much easier.  This way, if you notice that one of the Adgroups is not receiving any traffic, you can simply pause the entire Adgroup without having to worry about which keywords you should turn off as all of them will be paused.

Optimizing your bids:

Bidding on keywords can be difficult if you don’t want to receive a lot of traffic. If the bids are set too high, then the daily budget will be depleted very quickly, sometimes even on just one single keyword. As previously stated in my guide, stick to starting with very low bids and increase them over time, allowing for traffic to start trickling in rather then getting a ton of unoptimized traffic. Sometimes you may want to simply focus on a few keywords because they are converting well. If you find that Google continues to raise the minimum first page bid, then simply increase it a few cents below that number. Remember that the traffic from Page 1 to page 2 drops at least 65%.

Landing page optimization:

Just because your keywords might have a poor landing score, doesn’t mean you can’t get them to run at that bid. Creating several landing pages for certain Adgroups will help bring up the quality score and you may start seeing traffic resume. To do this, write original content on the page targeting those specific keywords and remove keywords which are either found in other adgroups or are not relevant to what you’re targeting. Adjusting your landing page can reduce the price you are paying per click significantly.

This is a series, see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

While this part may not be as important as the previous parts of my Adwords guides, budgeting is critical to regulating the speed of your campaign. If you’ve got a limited budget you’ve set aside for running your Adwords campaign, then you will want to spread that budget out as wide as possible. If the daily budget is neglected, and not set correctly, your entire balance could be depleted in a matter of hours, or you could spend far more then originally planned. The best plan to take when running Adwords is stay small, and work your way up.

Many people ask: How much do I need to bid on keywords?

This can be a fairly tricky question. It truly depends on the market, your landing page, and the competition in the marketplace. A good general number would be .10 cents per click. If your bids are too low, Google will tell you they are not displaying on the first page of results and how much you need to pay to get them to display on the first page.

As you can see above, just because your keyword is not displaying on the first page, doesn’t mean it wont receive clicks. This only applies to keywords which receive a large number of search queries.

When bidding on large numbers of keywords, adjust bids individually, otherwise it will most likely get lots of traffic to one specific keyword, as many keywords will be priced differently. It’s always best to keep your keyword lists small as discussed in Adwords help part 3.

Another important question is How much should I set for my daily budget?

Setting the daily budget can be a tricky ordeal. In the past, Google used to base how much traffic it would send to you based on how much you would want to spend daily. It is no longer based on this method. A good way to determine your daily budget is to see how much marketing dollars are available for the month and then divide it by the total days of the month. That way your dollars will be spread out through the month (assuming the budget is spent every day). Another way to do it, would be to see Google’s recommended daily budget.

In most cases, unless the daily budget is extremely small (>$5) your recommended budget should be just fine. Unless you are running very high bids on competitive keywords, you will not fill up your daily budget.

Another option to take note of is directly below the campaign Budget setting, this option is your “Delivery method”, Standard will spread out the clicks throughout the day, while Accelerated will focus on trying to deliver everything as fast as possible before using up your daily budget.

Finally, I have yet to discuss the Content Network. Google also has an absolutely massive network of websites which it runs it’s ads on. This network is called Adsense. If you find your content network traffic to be very high, set the bids very low. The content network will be lower quality traffic, though it will still be fairly targeted as Google detects keywords on the page and only displays relevant advertising. The content network may work better or worse for you, depending on your offer. You can choose placements, so your ad will only display on certain parts of people’s websites, or you can turn off the content network entirely. If you’re really focused on optimization, create separate campaigns for the content network and the search network. Keep monitoring the Content network as it may slowly eat up your budget with lower quality traffic.

That about covers it for Part 4 of my Adwords help guide. Don’t forget to read the other parts!

During the 2008 year the Mozilla Foundation reported revenues of $78 million dollars, this is surprising considering the company is running a free open source browser.

The revenue comes from various sources, though the main one is a contract with Google. As Google is the default search provider, they pay Mozilla each time someone clicks on an advertisement running through Search results. If you click on your search provider in the search bar, you will also notice Ebay and Amazon, they also both pay Mozilla through a sort of affiliate program.

Mozilla is just another great example of how to creatively earn income without actually disrupting user experience. The search bar itself is a welcome feature to the browser as you do not have to install anything extra to have a search bar on the browser menu. After Mozilla added a search bar, Internet Explorer followed suite in version 7 (I believe, not completely sure). The partnership with Google has not been a secret, as they have been posting their annual revenues for the last several years.

2004: $5.8 Million in revenue (source)

2005: $52.9 Million in revenue (source)

2006: $66.8 Million in revenue (Source)

2007: $75 Million in revenue (Source)

2008: $78.6 Million in revenue (Source)

As you can see, most of the browser’s growth was in 2004-5, though that may have been due to further implementations for Google in the browser. Firefox’s growth continues consistently, as in 2008 when Firefox 3.0 was released, it was downloaded 8 million times in 24 hours, earning them a Guinness world record.

This is a series, see Part 1, Part 2

A very important element in running any Adwords campaign is organization. Organizing your keywords in individual Ad groups will help optimize the campaign.

The structure works as Campaigns have Ad groups inside of them, you add keywords into the Ad groups. You can target different countries with the Campaign, though that will apply to all the ad groups in your campaign.

Keywords should be placed into individual Ad groups based on a general similarity between them, for example:

As you can see, the Ad groups are organized based on one “main” keyword, doing this will increase your quality score on Ad words, the less disorganized your categories are, the better your quality score will be. Being proactive when running the Ad groups is also important, if the keyword is getting a very low quality score, delete it from the Ad group altogether.

Focus most of your time on the Ad groups which are getting a decent click through rate, if you’re getting >.20% CTR, either optimize your Ad copy or delete the keywords which are not performing in your group.

A great way to optimize your Ad groups is to create unique landing pages for each Ad group. Focus your keywords on the ones in your ad group and create text based on the keywords you’re targeting in the campaign. This will improve your quality score as the landing page is now more relevant to the keywords then it was before.

If you’re running an international campaign, you’ll want to make sure that you make separate Campaigns for each country. It will make it much easier to see which countries are performing better than others.

Organization is part of creating a healthy Adwords campaign.

This is a series, see Part 1

Now if you read part one of my Adwords help guide, you would have a few lists of keywords which were collected from Google’s Keyword tool. In this part I will discuss the basic creation of an effective text Ad. Writing text ads is a fairly difficult ordeal as you’ve got to persuade people to click on the ad with very little text.

By this time you should have signed up for a Google Adwords account, if not, do so here.

Here is the basic Adwords text ad creation page:

As you can see there are multiple parts to creating a text ad. The headline allows room for 25 characters, the 2 desciption lines allow for 35 characters and the display URL allows for domains up to 35 characters in length. A big challenge of ad creation is getting your message to fit in such a limited amount of words.

Writing your ads:

• Present what you are offering as clearly as possible
• Write the message positively, encouraging users to click
• Make sure you write as close to the character limit as possible, otherwise the text will look incomplete
• Don’t use superlatives (best, number one) – Google does not allow that
• Don’t use brand names in your text ad
• Don’t steal others ad text
• Try your best to be persuasive and brief
• Capitalizing The First Letter of Every Large Word Is Also An Effective Way To Get Your Attention

Always stay focused on why you’re trying to get people to your website, ad text has to basically make the user want to click on the link.

Try an experiment: Search a random keyword. Look at the ads, think to yourself which one stands out the most for you, and why. When writing your ad, take into consideration the reasons why you wanted to click on the ad, and represent that in your text.

One of the most important points is to make sure that every last character has filled the text ad, you will want to be as close as you can to the maximum amount of characters in the ad. While there are no studies to prove that more complete ads will perform better then ones with less text, you will find that most ads have almost all the characters.

If you’re using Google Analytics, you can join it with your Adwords account and track your CPC traffic. By default, your Analytics account will register the traffic as CPC but the keywords will also appear in your “Keywords” list, thus making it more difficult to track the clicks.

If you’d like to track each ad seperately, you can add “?gclid=yourtexthere” at the end of your URL. This is useful if you’re trying to see how effective each text ad is.

That’s it for part two. Stay tuned for part three. Don’t forget to look at Part one of my Adwords help guide.

BONUS: WANT a FREE $75 Adwords Voucher? Shoot me an email and it’s yours – justin (at) mintedblogs.com

Another great way to get traffic to your blog is by buying it. This is the most direct way to get visitors to your website, though it is also fairly difficult to manage and optimize ad campaigns. I have a fair bit of experience running Adwords campaigns, in the past year alone I’ve purchased over $50,000 of ads through Google.

Since Adwords is a fairly complex advertising system I will break this guide out into several sections:

• Keywords
• Ad Copy
• Organization
• Budgeting
• Optimization

Before I get started, Google already has a bunch of PDF’s readily available to help you:

• Building successful Adwords Campaigns
• Insiders Guide to Adwords
• Getting Started with the New Adwords interface
• Adwords Editor Guide

I’ve decided to write an Adwords Guide as I feel that while there is sufficient information available, it is not always clearly presented. In this guide I will try to organize it in a different way, so that it’s easier to understand the development process which comes when creating Ad campaigns.

Part one: Keywords

AdWords is basically a keywords based bidding system. You pay per click (CPM also available) on only the keywords which you’re bidding on. To find out what Keywords you should bid on, take a look at your landing page and what you’re trying to sell or promote. Find about 5 keywords which you would like people to be searching for when they find your website.

Next go to Google’s Keyword tool and search one of your keywords.

You will be presented with a fairly large list of keywords (depending on what you’re searching for)

There are 2 columns to make note of:

• Advertiser competition: The higher it is, the more you should expect to pay per click. It’s not very easy to find low competition keywords which get decent monthly traffic.

• Local/Global Monthly search volume: If you’re doing local search, look at the local, global, global. Local volume is compiled from the last month of data, while Global is a monthly average from the last 12 months.

Compiling Keyword lists

When developing your campaign, you’ll want to organize it based on the keywords you’re running. Work on separating keywords by specific differences in the lists. For example if you’re trying to target bloggers looking to make money, try creating a list for “make money blogging” related keywords as well as “blog advertising” keywords.

When going through the keywords, click “Add” and they will be added to a list on the right hand toolbar.

Now you can either start a campaign with Adwords right now, or simply save them to a text file.

Organize yourself a keyword folder, and create several keyword lists, based on your organization. You will later use these keywords once you create a campaign.

Other Keyword Tools

While Google’s Keyword tool will help you with your Adwords campaign, you may also want to try one of the many alternatives available. Unlike Google, these are mostly paid products, but free versions are available online.

Wordtracker

Keyword Spy

Keyword Discovery

Wordze

The benefits of using these paid tools is mostly because they’re grabbing keywords from many different sources and usually contain a larger variety in keyword phrases. The catch is that they may not actually improve your Google Adword campaigns.

Keyword Tracking/trending

There are a few other tools available to research more keywords as well as capture trends as they’re happening.

• Google Trends – Displays trending keywords for the Day, allows you to search for websites as well as keywords
• Google Insights – A more in depth version of Trends allowing more verticals as well as Countries, and time periods
• Google News search – Searches trends throughout news agencies
• Trendistic – Twitter trends and trending hashtags
• Facebook’s Lexicon – Lets you search users wall by displaying keyword volume

There are certainly more tools available out there, but the one’s I’ve listed are the most reputable ones available online.

Stay tuned for the second part of my Google Adwords guide. I will be covering Ad text and ways to create effective copy for your ads.

I was reading through SEO book’s blog feed (because their website is god awful) and noticed this excellent article showing the pollution on SERPs. When I first read through the post, I didn’t think much of it, because honestly whenever I search, I see nothing which looks similar to this. After trying a few random terms which I wouldn’t normally search for, I find this problem is most relevant when trying local searches.

From what I can see, Google is fairly incapable of actually determining correct results for local search, or maybe its business owners who are not able to understand the way of SEO works?

It’s one of the two, from one perspective, Google is allowing small business owners to add their own local listings to their search results. In most cases the business listings and the Map should be supplemental to the search results, that is, if there are not enough “relevant” local results then Google will display the map and local business listings.

I certainly hope that Google will not continue to pollute their results with more marketing related items… Well I spoke too soon, Google announced their Product listing ads. Well it’s nice to know Google finally is offering a CPA product but damn does it frustrate me knowing more stuff is going to pollute more search results.

Being me, I have to say, is this a chance that a new search engine can come up? The inclusion of more and more advertising will certainly open some sort of opportunity for someone.

After running this blog a little over a month, I’ve started to get some search traffic. It boggles my mind that people even discuss Google “sandbox” as an actual topic.

Google “Sandbox” could be interpreted as  punishment for promoting and linkbuilding too quickly after you buy a new domain and hosting.

This is what happens (hypothetically):

• You purchase a domain and hosting
• Quickly develop a blog/website
• Begin linkbuilding and promotion
• Google detects you have too many inbound links on a domain which is only a few days/weeks old
• They see this as spamming (probably because you actually are spamming)
• Your site is dumped into a list of other websites which are of low quality
• It is kept there until you develop proper backlinks or your “penalty time” has expired
• Patience is key, eventually you will be ranked (unless you really just spam)

If your website does not start to rank after about a month and a half, you are certainly in the “sandbox” – to check if your website is in or not, simply search “site:yourdomain.com” in Google. To check your keyword rank, search allinanchor:”keyword you want to rank on”

The sandbox mostly applies to competitive keywords, this means, if you’re out of the “sandbox”, you probably still won’t rank very well for those keywords regardless. Getting that better ranking takes months, if not years of work.

The Google “Dance” is another interesting effect which almost everyone will go through. If your website is new then you’ll notice you’re getting some traffic for certain keywords, but from day to day your individual rankings constantly move up and down. While it’s not known exactly why this happens, it’s based usually on the age of your website as well as the authority it has. For almost anyone with a new website, it’s almost impossible to consistently rank on even lightly competitive keywords.

The only thing I can add to this is, keep working on getting your keyword rankings increased, it takes time and focus but will most certainly pay off in the long run.

Hey everyone, I’ve just created a forum for bloggers and webmasters!

It’s got forums on Wordpress and Promoting your blog. Sign up, post your blog in your sig for some free backlinks!

Check out the forums now!

Register here!

Have a nice weekend.