Have you noticed the CPCs in your paid search content campaigns surpassing the CPCs of your sponsored search on Google? It shouldn’t be the case, since implementing content is usually a method used to drive traffic to your site more efficiently than search, but it can happen from time to time.

One possible reason for this phenomenon could be your content quality score. Turns out that quality score is determined differently for content than for search in Google AdWords. While in a search campaign each individual keyword has its own quality score, a quality score for content is determined by all the keywords in an ad group. Therefore, AdWords is essentially compiling all ad group keywords together and creating a theme, then determining part of your content quality score from that. If keywords in an ad group do not follow a cohesive theme, or have outliers, AdWords may not be able to decipher what the themes of the ad groups are. The result is that you are charged a higher CPC. This can be problematic if you have common misspellings of your brand because AdWords might view these as irrelevant.

A best practice would be to select only the most specific keywords from your search account and group those accordingly for content. Don’t worry about multiple variations or misspellings of a keyword for content – like you would in search – because the purpose is to create themes and not to purchase keywords. Additionally, landing page relevancy has more significance when determining content quality score than search.

Article by Emily Orrell

Last month, Nielsen’s analysts reported that, in the last 5 years, the web traffic to Wikipedia.org has grown about 8,000 percent.   Referrals are being led by Google.com searches; four of the top five referral points are search engines, and the fifth top referral point is visitors who typed Wikipedia.org into their browser.  Google had 61 percent of visitor referrals to the site clicking through while at home and 66 percent of visitors visiting from work in April.  Yahoo was responsible for 19 percent of the at home visitors and 16 percent of the at work visitors,   followed by MSN (search.msn.com) with 5 percent at home and 6 percent at work visitor referrals.  Based on its performance and successes, is Wikipedia the standard we should measure our own sites against?

An 8,000 percent traffic growth for Wikipedia from April 2003 to April 2008 is a tremendous achievement.  Nielsen Online’s media analyst, Michael Pond, noted that “Wikipedia content is inherently conversational, driving buzz in the blogosphere… Bloggers refer to and link to Wikipedia content, potentially driving additional traffic and interest in the site with their readers.”

The networked encyclopedia is seen by many as a definitive and factual source despite the drawbacks of being a community with user-created content.  This solid brand growth has paralleled its online growth since its launch in 2001.  The Wikipedia English landing page has a Google PageRank of 9 out of 10, with 377,000 backlinks, according to Google.  

Based on the innate organic search advantages Wikipedia has, constantly changing and new content for every interest group and numerous site referrals, is Wikipedia the true benchmark for organic development and marketing?  Wikipedia does not participate in the common marketing efforts such as paid ads, banner placements, etc.  So should other sites try to achieve similar organic search indicators?  

As a rule of thumb, your percentage of traffic from organic search should fall in line with the engines respective marketshares..   As you can see, Wikipedia’s traffic  follows this breakout.  Reviewing the percentage of search engine referrals is also important because it can indicate where you may have a specific challenge with one engine.  If 70% of your organic traffic comes from Yahoo!, then you are clearly having a Google-specific challenge that you should focus your efforts on.   

While the success of Wikipedia can’t be ignored, there are lots of reasons why your site may not be able to mirror their success.  However, what can be mirrored is the analysis of traffic vs. marketshare to better understand where your challenges are.

Article by Joel Collymore

While online marketing evolves, we are better able to understand what works well when transitioning from offline to online. One marketing effort that has consistently brought successful results online and has helped brand recognition has also worked offline for many years: press release distribution.

As press releases have moved online, they have maintained their purpose in regards to what their traditional offline goals were. They still maintain effectiveness as a media channel that can widely distribute a news story to generate publicity. The only thing that has changed from offline to online is that you have added a larger distribution list to the mix, which means many more distribution channels to consider. Of course, there’s more to the process than just writing a press release and adding it to your website or sending it out through a distribution service. Also crucial is knowledge of how to optimize that news story you’ve just created, as well as how to create a buzz around it.

By properly optimizing your press release for search engines, and knowing how to properly distribute it online, you can create an effective online visibility tool. Online press releases are a great tool that will provide fast results – in terms of both site traffic and rankings – if done correctly. Think of it almost like a 30 minute meal – a little bit of prep work, some quick cooking, and after 30 minutes you have a delicious meal that you and your family will enjoy and benefit from. But, of course, there are tricks for how to make a great meal in 30 minutes, just like there are tricks to gaining a fast online buzz with your press release.

Why is it important to optimize press releases?
• Increase High Distribution and Reach
• Great link building opportunities
• Adds more listings in the search engine results, from reputable sources, as compared to competitors
• Improve Reputation Management
• Increase traffic to your site

There are several methods you can take when creating an online press release, depending upon your budget, time and resources. You can create a traditional press release, or you can get a little fancier and create a Multimedia press release. Regardless of the method you chose, there are still some subtle nuances to making PR Optimization a success for your brand. One thing is for certain - as the engines present more options to users (news, image, video, etc.) it will be important to look at PR as more than just words on a page.

Article by Lisa Pena

Carl Icahn has a $2.5 billion dollar question for Yahoo!

While we are at it, imagine if Yahoo! had been offered $40.00 per share…oh wait…they were (if you listen closely you can hear Jerry Yang’s head exploding).

At this week’s SMX Advanced conference, Kevin Johnson, President, Platform & Services Division, for Microsoft had a great Q&A with Danny Sullivan.

John Battelle has an interesting take on Microsoft Cashback being the future of search.