This past week, Yahoo! announced that they were moving forward with a deal that would outsource a portion of their search to Google.  This all but kills any chance of a Microsoft merger, but will likely not be the last we hear about this subject.  We will be providing a detailed POV soon on this topic.

We all know that, at times, tracking website visits, conversions, and SEO performance is harder than we’d like.  At the recent SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, one session was called “Analytics Every SEO Needs to Know.”  This session was focused on identifying key SEO metrics, other than traffic and keyword rankings, which can be used to measure organic health and success.   

One measure which was discussed was the indexation rate of a site.  This ratio measures the number of pages crawled versus the number of pages indexed.  If a portion of a site is being crawled, but not indexed, this may be a red flag that something is wrong, such as a problem with the robots.txt file on the site, or even larger worries.

Another factor that can indicate site health is how search engines crawl a site.   Both the frequency and depth with which a search engine crawls a site indicates how valuable the engine finds the site to be.  Crawl depth and frequency is determined by the freshness of content on the site, the number of inbound links to the site, the quality of those links, and how the sitemap is set up.  Additionally, it’s important to track any pages that aren’t being crawled because these pages may have problems, such as broken links or an incorrect robots.txt file, which prevents the page from being crawled.  Some conference panelists even alluded that the crawlability of a site is the new “Google Page Rank,” meaning the more frequently and deeply a site is crawled, the more valuable Google finds the site to be.

Keyword-based success metrics were also discussed during this session.  One metric brought up was the ratio of branded to non-branded keywords driving traffic to the site.  While it’s very important for a site to rank well for their branded terms, there is a huge opportunity to use unbranded keyword phrases to attract searchers who may have lower awareness levels of your products.  Long-tail, more specific keyword phrases work best because they drive targeted traffic, yet can bring in searchers who are not yet aware of your product.  
Whatever the metric, the common theme of this session was to be aware of how well both search engines and users are able to find and navigate your site.

By Jenny Popov

Have you ever wondered how to make Content Image ads work for you? Well, within this article you will learn how; from how to set them up with a tracking solution to optimizing each ad. When looking at this in more depth, there are some guidelines that I have found will work.

Creative Assets / Image Ads
Utilize the existing creative assets that are being used by your Display team. Since Google will accept all of the same sizes and file types as Display, you should make the most of it. Note that all ad units must be 50K or under in size.

Tracking
You might ask, how are we going to track? Since Google has only just moved to 3rd party ad serving (AA|RF is working on getting this into their T&C’s), how would we track the ad? Great question. First, each ad is unique and has a specific size, theme and file type. For example, one client was running a 160x600, sarg theme as a .jpeg. Because each of these elements makes the creative unique, we can create a unique keyword within your tracking solution in the same way that you can put keywords into your system. The keywords would like this:

Unique Keyword / Creative Ad
Client Name_Size_Theme_FileType
ABC_160x600_sarg_jpg
Remember, when you traffic your keyword / creative ad, you will need to assign a landing page for the ad (the same way that you would for keywords). When the consumer clicks on the ad, they are then redirected to your client’s website. You could even do A/B landing page testing to see which page converts better.

Optimization
Once you have loaded each of your keywords into your AdWords Editor, remember that the tracking URLs need to be placed on each image ad (NOT Content Keywords). The keywords will be used to theme the adgroup to allow your client to show up on relevant content.
Content appropriates cost by the adgroup, but how do you assign cost to the image ads? Most 3rd party tracking solutions have the ability to track clicks, and Google provides you with cost by adgroup. I have found this solution for optimization (this can work the same way for Content Keywords): if you take the average CPC of the adgroup and apply this to the images ads within the adgroup, and multiply these by the number of clicks by keyword / creative ad, it will give you the cost of each unique image ad.

Results
Lastly, why should you go through all of this hard work? Well, after running this strategy for a few clients in the Content Image Ad network, the results have been fantastic. In some cases, the Content Image Ads have performed better than the Search program.

Conclusion? Image ads do work if you are able to track and optimize. I would highly recommend testing image ads if you want to expand your programs.

Article by Emma Cockburn 

When searching, maybe you should ask a better question?

Is there such a thing as too much landing page testing?

SEO Issues with global expansion.  When a U.S.-based company expands globally, they typically spend little or no time with their expansion plans overseas. Big business is commonly lost with their overseas Web sites.