Basics on Quality Index and Ad Copy – Tips from Yahoo

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Your ad quality, which is based in part on how frequently people click on your ads relative to your competitors, matters a lot. High-quality ads can receive higher ranking on the search results page at a possibly lower cost-per-click. On the other hand, poor-quality ads can cost you more and are most likely not attracting customers. So it’s critical to write good ad copy that will help improve the quality of your ad and help you get more clicks.

Monitoring and Maintaining Your Quality Index
In your account, ad quality is represented by your quality index. You will see the quality index shown as one to five bars—the more bars an ad has, the higher its quality. Monitoring your ads’ quality indices, which are displayed on the Ad Group details page, can help you figure out which ads need more work.

Writing Effective Ad Copy
Well-written ads get the attention of your customers and may improve your click-through rate (CTR) and ad quality. Here are some tips for writing great ads:

•Be clear and precise – Write ads that are clear, concise, honest and, of course, grammatically correct. Don’t over-hype your business.
•Use your keywords in your ad – Use the Insert Keyword function, available when you create a new ad or edit an existing one, to automatically insert your keyword in your ad. Keywords in your title or description help your customers recognize that your ad matches their search.
•What’s in it for your customers? – Be specific as to how your service or product can benefit your customer.
•Include a call-to-action – Words like “Buy Now” in your ad may encourage customers to click. If you have a specific offer, make sure you state it.
•Set yourself apart – Let people know how you’re different from your competitors—free shipping, a money-back guarantee, many years in business and so on—and give them a reason to click your ad instead.

Find out which Ads Work Best
Make sure you use ad testing, also known as A/B testing, to test multiple ads. When you create more than one ad in an ad group, our system will automatically display the higher performing ads more frequently in search results. With different ad copy, you can see which ads attract the most customers.

Still hungry for more information? Visit our Help Center.

Good times with inbound links

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Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance. Other signals include things like our analysis of your site’s content, its relevance to a geographic location, etc. As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.

How do these signals factor into ranking?

Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking.

Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.

So how can you engage more users and potentially increase merit-based inbound links?

Many webmasters have written about their success in growing their audience. We’ve compiled several ideas and resources that can improve the web for all users.

Create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general

  • Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.If you’re interested in blogging, see our Help Center for specific tips for bloggers.
  • Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.
  • Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.
  • Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

    • For more actionable ideas, see one of my favorite interviews with Matt Cutts for no-cost tips to help increase your traffic. It’s a great primer for webmasters. (Even before this post, I forwarded the URL to many of my friends. 🙂

Pursue business development opportunities

Use Webmaster Tools for “Links > Pages with external links” to learn about others interested in your site. Expand the web community by figuring out who links to you and how they’re linking. You may have new audiences or demographics you didn’t realize were interested in your niche. For instance, if the webmasters for example.com noticed external links coming from art schools, they may start to engage with the art community — receiving new feedback and promoting their site and ideas.

Of course, be responsible when pursuing possible opportunities in this space. Don’t engage in mass link-begging; no one likes form letters, and few webmasters of quality sites are likely to respond positively to such solicitations. In general, many of the business development techniques that are successful in human relationships can also be reflected online for your site.

Now that you’ve read more information about internal links, outbound links, and inbound links (today’s post :), we’ll see you in the blog comments! Thanks for joining us for links week.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Check your rank

How important is submitting sitemap to google?

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Years ago, getting back links to a website was the most important factor in SEO, but now, that is not the only important factor. This article explains the use of sitemap in SEO as an essential factor in assisting web crawlers to navigate a website.Here are some hallmarks of a good site map, which helps visitors at finding information quickly on your web site

  • The site map should be the simplest page on your web site.
  • Do not give a fancy name to the site map link such as “Web Site Tree” – keep it as “Site map”, this way your visitors understand immediately what you mean.
  • You should always avoid “dynamic” site maps. Those in which the visitors have to “work” their way to get hold of information. Remember, the reason visitors comes to a site map page is because they are lost. To make them work again for something that you can display as a simple static link will just kill the purpose of having a site map.
  • If the site map is list of text links, be sure to use the TITLE attribute of the anchor tag and include keywords inside it.
  • It is a good idea to put a sentence describing the page contents below the link for that page on a site map.
  • A site map should not be the primary navigation on your web site it should complement it.
  • A link to the site map page is very important and all pages should carry this link. The site map link can be included with other links in the main menu on your web site or placed at a section on the web page from which is it clearly visible.
  • Other important aspects on a web site should complement site maps. For example, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non-visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have already seen and thus, save time.

Search Engine Optimization. A lot of people are clamoring to know exactly what it is. SEO is the process of enhancing the presence and visibility of a website on search engine listings. Not only is it a process, it is about the tool required to make the enhancement happen. There are two main types of search engine optimization:

  • On page Optimization
  • Off Page Optimization

When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

After search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists became aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

In On page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in OFF page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In OFF page optimization, only back links were created.

Today, optimization is a little bit different. While usimg the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemapcan be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.

A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

  • Has dynamic content
  • Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX
  • Is new and doesn’t have many links
  • Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

SitemapDoc – Google Sitemap Generator and Editor
RSS Feed generator

Top Strategies and Intelligence…

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Foundational Link Building Part II- Article Marketing

Last week we talked about building links through directories. Now we turn our attention to article marketing which is about more than just mere links. At least this is the mind set one needs when approaching it. You see, ultimately one must go beyond links. Think about the actual value of the placement as far as potential traffic, branding and reach. You will find that when you do so, that the links are of better quality and the benefits greater. As we learned last week once again quality supersedes quantity.

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Google Learns Flash

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Since Flash was created SEO’s have had nothing but trouble with people whose sites are made purely of flash or if the site in question included a lot of flash content. The reason the trouble arises is due to Adobe Flash’s inability to be properly indexed by search engines but to the joy of web-designers this problem may be finally (or at least in part) coming to end.

Google have recently been working closely with Adobe to create a cleaner and more in-depth search algorithm that utilises Adobe’s Flash Player so that it can Index all the textual content and links in a Flash app (yes so that means flash menu’s will work! *gasps*). The immediate problems SEO’s have always had when it comes to flash menu’s in particular is that the site’s other pages don’t get indexed, since the menu doesn’t get indexed the links to the rest of the site won’t get indexed so in essence Google doesn’t know there is any more to the site than the homepage. But thanks to this advancement in the search Spiders website owners will now be able to keep their flashy shiny menu bars and boxes (although the images won’t be indexed, yet) but of course this hasn’t solved everyone’s problems. Unfortunately for people who have completely flash-driven sites you’re still unfortunately going to be kicking and screaming for website rankings, maybe not as much as you where before, but still screaming.

The main problem with completely flash driven sites is that flash is still one application, on one page, on one site; Google simply can’t determine links within a flash application. For example, if you have a flash site which has a menu with say, Home, About Us and Contact Us on it. If you click the About Us Link on the app the application will change its display to the ‘About Us’ page, you’ll also notice that the URL in your browser is still the same. This is essentially because in the eyes of the web you haven’t gone anywhere, all you’ve done is tell a program to change what it’s currently displaying.

This is what creates the problem for Google, the spider sees that page as a single entity the only difference is that Google will now read every piece of text that’s in that flash file and consider everything it finds the content of that sole page. Which means if you’ve got an enormous flash site with a lot of text then you’re going to have one seriously over-packed and unfocussed page which isn’t particularly good for SEO on it’s own unless you’re trying to rank for one of those unbearable ‘get rich quick’ schemes.

Summary, this is definitely going to make designers lives easier and ensure that people with flash navigation will actually be spidered properly which will benefit a lot of sites. I’m just hoping that these new advancements in flash-indexing continue and advise everyone to wait before going flash crazy.

(I decided to do a couple of searches for .swf files on Google and it seems to be working in a relatively ordered manner. Unfortunately people’s programs often haven’t got the best text to start off on such as ‘video title here’ and such but it’s good to see it working.)