From adding the +1 button in all Display Network Ads, to a new system that will help advertisers get more verified calls to their website.  I’ll walk you through and give you the basics on everything!

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads is Googles new system to take advantage of all the traffic that isn’t being used while helping businesses to gain more customers. Google indexes your site frequently for changes, next it looks at all the keywords from your website and generates a highly dynamic search ad.  This dynamic search ad is based on different search queries that take place on Google. The ads will be served to people that search for terms and keywords that are found on your landing pages and website.

You can open Dynamic Search Ads up to your whole site or specific pages within your site.  This will help people to not have to manage every little part and find keywords and manage your campaign.  I would however make sure that Google is bidding on keywords that you should be bidding on.  Giving any system full control over your account without checking it could mean that you are losing a lot of money every month.  Make sure that you are only promoting the pages that you want to get traffic to and feel comfortable spending money on.

This system is in beta and you can apply for yourself or your clients here.

AdWords Express Available in UK and Germany

Adwords Express was released in late July as a way for local businesses to promote their business with a Google AdWords type system that’s easy to use.  The whole setup process from start to finish takes around 10 minutes.  You can tell Google how much you want to spend and you’re set to go. Google will take care of the rest for you.  Potential customers will see your ads in the section right above the organic listings but below Google Adwords.  Your ads will also show up on maps with a blue pin instead of a red pin like all the rest.  This will help your local business stand out but will cost you money in order to do it.

One very nice thing about AdWords Express is that your business will shown in two different places for each search that a person performs if you are optimizing your Google Places account.  When people see your business in two different places on the same page, they will naturally give your business more trust.  This will help your business get more customers. Google is trying to help local business with an easy to use system that takes 10 minutes to setup and you don’t have to do much after that.

Google +1 Button Now Displaying in Google Display Network Ads

Google has now started displaying the Google +1 button in the Display Ads Network ads.  Anyone that has +1′d your website or any of your ads will now show on both your ads and your website.  This is turning social recommendations and injecting them with steroids.  Now everyone can see what you’re doing and liking across the internet.

Now you can +1 a website and it will display in the ads for the website that you have recommended to people. If a million people +1 your website, it will show up that a million people have +1 your banner ad. At the same time, if a million people +1 on your banner ads, every single one of those will show up on your site as someone +1 your website.

Bid-Per-Call

Have you ever wanted to get more phone calls to your business?  Now you can with Google’s bid-per-call system.  With bid-per-call you bid for phone calls and determine how much money you’re going to pay per phone call.  Google will give you a personalized number that will track everything.  When you put up your ads, people will be able to call the phone number listed and it will all be tracked through your Adwords tracking account.

The more you bid, the better your ad is written, and the higher your quality score, the higher your ads will be placed.  When your ads are placed towards the top, it will get you more calls and more customers.  This is a very good system for businesses that are very phone oriented and good at selling their products over the phone.  It’s important to note that you will only have to pay for the call to the phone number that Google gives you.  Your ad will also be available to click.  Whichever the person does you will have to pay Google for.

At this time Google bid-per-call system is only available in the US and UK as long as you meet certain click call requirements.

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

 Quotes:  

1. “Search engines are not as smart as people yet.”
2. “Search engine optimization can be a valid way to help people find what they are looking for via search engines.”
3. “There are many many, many valid ways people can make the world better with SEO.”

WOW! Thanks Matt Cutts! Go conquer the world my fellow SEOs!

Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal

AdWords express helps searching customers to find your website or Google Places listing. You provide basic information to Google such as business information, ad text, monthly budget and you’re good to go.

Gathering rankings is one of the most annoying and time consuming tasks of an SEO consultant’s work. Because of search personalization, it can be near impossible to find accurate rankings for keywords to report to clients or to use to gauge our work’s effectiveness.

Michael King and I have found a way to get rankings for the keywords driving traffic to your site directly into your Analytics using Custom Variables. Not only that, but we can also get international rankings based off of the keywords and the location from where the person came. And finally, this may also be a step towards identifying the identity of the (not provided) keywords we are now seeing thanks to “privacy concerns”.

How Do I Get These Rankings Into My GA?

Different people have come up with different ways to get rankings directly into GA. One tactic is to create a custom profile using directions from this post by Chris Abernethy. This strategy works fairly well, but requires a lot of setup and requires you to be able to create another profile on your account. It also requires many steps and custom filters to clean the data.

Mike and I decided that a custom variable would be a better way to go. In order to make this strategy work, you need to be able to do the following (or know someone who can):

1) Insert the Javascript custom variable that I will provide you below into your section of your website below your normal GA code;

2) Insert a parameter into your <body> tag;

3) Be able to slice/dice your data in Analytics; and

4) Use some Excel wizardry to present the data.

The Code

Here’s the code that you need to use to send the data from your site into GA. Put this code in the section of your site, directly under your normal GA code:

Get the code here

Now you need to put this code into the <body> tag of your site. Yes, directly within the body tag. This code:

onLoad=”rankingsPush();

Your <body> tag will end up looking something like this:

<body onLoad=”rankingsPush();”>

Now sit back and let the data collect!

Where Do I Find This Data?

You find the data that is collecting under your Custom Variables tab in GA. I’ll show you some screenshots. Click on Visitors > Demographics > Custom Variables, like so:

Then you’ll see this screen:

Click through that and make your Secondary Dimension “Keywords”. Boom! You get rankings and keywords!

What Can We Do With This Data?

Now we’ve got the rankings of the keywords driving traffic (which is what we really care about, right?). Data is worthless without applications, so let’s come up with a few. Endless possibilities exist for slicing and dicing the data.

International Rankings

One cool thing that I did was match up the keywords and their positions with the country from which the visit came. You get the average ranking of the keyword driving traffic (which you also get in Webmaster Tools), but now you can break this down by country! Like so:

We could guess at what the (not provided) keywords are

We may also be able to guess at what the keywords coming up as (not provided) are now. As you can see in the screenshot below, I know that my visits from (not provided) are ranking #1 and #2. Based off of this, I can narrow it down to only my keywords ranking #1 and #2. If I do this for the data set I am working off of, I get these keywords:

Now that I’ve narrowed this down, I can take the landing pages for these rankings (set secondary dimension to “Landing Page”):

And I can see the landing page for my (not provided) keywords (Traffic > Sources > Search > Organic):

So, we can guess that most of the (not provided) keywords probably have something to with my name, since the majority went to my homepage where my name ranks #1 or #2.

*note* I am sure that someone with some mad Excel skills could automate this. If someone wants to take a crack at it, feel free and I’ll link to it.

*edit* I need to give a shout out to Mike Pantoliano’s post from last September where he details a very similar process. He also has some great applications in that post.

What other applications can you think of? How could we make this data sing even more?

I welcome your comments below!

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Every SEO eventually gets fixated on a tactic. Maybe you read 100 blog posts about how to build the “perfectly” optimized URL, and you keep tweaking and tweaking until you get it just right. Fast-forward 2 months – you’re sitting on 17 layers of 301-redirects, you haven’t done any link-building, you haven’t written any content, you’re eating taco shells with mayonnaise for lunch, and your cat is dead.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit extreme. I do see a lot of questions about the “ideal” URL structure in Q&A, though. Most of them boil down to going from pretty good URLs to slightly more pretty good URLs.

All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.

More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk. So, when should you change your URLs? I’m going to dive into 5 specific scenarios to help you answer that question…

(1) Dynamic URLs

A dynamic URL creates content from code and data and carries parameters, like this:

It’s a common SEO misconception that Google can’t read these URLs or gets cut off after 2 or 3 parameters. In 2011, that’s just not true – although there are reasonable limits on URL length. The real problems with dynamic URLs are usually more complex:

• They don’t contain relevant keywords.
• They’re more prone to creating duplicate content.
• They tend to be less user-friendly (lower click-through).
• They tend to be longer.

So, when are your URLs too dynamic? The example above definitely needs help. It’s long, it has no relevant keywords, the color and size parameters are likely creating tons of near-duplicates, and the session ID is creating virtually unlimited true duplicates. If you don’t want to be mauled by Panda, it’s time for a change.

In other cases, though, it’s not so simple. What if you have a blog post URL like this?

It’s technically a “dynamic” URL, so should you change it to something like:

I doubt you’d see much SEO benefit, or that the rewards would outweigh the risks. In a perfect world, the second URL is better, and if I was starting a blog from scratch I’d choose that one, no question. On an established site with 1000s of pages, though, I’d probably sit tight.

(2) Unstructured URLs

Another common worry people have is that their URLs don’t match their site structure. For example, they have a URL like this one:

…and they think they should add folders to represent their site architecture, like:

There’s a false belief in play here – people often think that URL structure signals site structure. Just because your URL is 3 levels deep doesn’t mean the crawlers will treat the page as being 3 levels deep. If the first URL is 6 steps from the home-page and the second URL is 1 step away, the second URL is going to get a lot more internal link-juice (all else being equal).

You could argue that the second URL carries more meaning for visitors, but, unfortunately, it’s also longer, and the most unique keywords are pushed to the end. In most cases, I’d lean toward the first version.

Of course, the reverse also applies. Just because a URL structure is “flat” and every page is one level deep, that doesn’t mean that you’ve created a flat site architecture. Google still has to crawl your pages through the paths you’ve built. The flatter URL may have some minor advantages, but it’s not going to change the way that link-juice flows through your site.

Structural URLs can also create duplicate content problems. Let’s say that you allow visitors to reach the same page via 3 different paths:

Now, you’ve created 2 pieces of duplicate content – Google is going to see 3 pages that look exactly the same. This is more of a crawl issue than a URL issue, and there are ways to control how these URLs get indexed, but an overly structured URL can exacerbate these problems.

(3) Long URLs

How long of a URL is too long? Technically, a URL should be able to be as long as it needs to be. Some browsers and servers may have limits, but those limits are well beyond anything we’d consider sane by SEO or usability standards. For example, IE8 can support a URL of up to 2,083 characters.

Practically speaking, though, long URLs can run into trouble. Very long URLs:

• Dilute the ranking power of any given URL keyword
• May hurt usability and click-through rates
• May get cut off when people copy-and-paste
• May get cut off by social media applications
• Are a lot harder to remember

How long is too long is a bit more art than science. One of the key issues, in my mind, is redundancy. Good URLs are like good copy – if there’s something that adds no meaning, you should probably lose it. For example, here’s a URL with a lot of redundancy:

If you have a “/store” subfolder, do you also need a “/products” layer? If we know you’re in the store/products layer, does your category have to be tagged as “featured-products” (why not just “featured”)? Is the “featured” layer necessary at all? Does each product have to also be tagged with “product-“? Are the waffles so tasty you need to say it twice?

In reality, I’ve seen much longer and even more redundant URLs, but that example represents some of the most common problems. Again, you have to consider the trade-offs. Fixing a URL like that one will probably have SEO benefits. Stripping “/blog” out of all your blog post URLs might be a nice-to-have, but it isn’t going to make much practical difference.

(4) Keyword Stuffing

Scenarios (3)-(5) have a bit of overlap. Keyword-stuffed URLs also tend to be long and may cannibalize other pages. Typically, though a keyword-stuffed URL has either a lot of repetition or tries to tackle every variant of the target phrase. For example:

It’s pretty rare to see a penalty based solely on keyword-stuffed URLs, but usually, if your URLs are spammy, it’s a telltale sign that your title tags, <h1>’s, copy, etc. are spammy. Even if Google doesn’t slap you around a little, it’s just a matter of focus. If you target the same phrase 14 different ways, you may get more coverage, but each phrase will also get less attention. Prioritize and focus – not just with URLs, but all keyword targeting. If you throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, you usually just end up with a dirty wall.

(5) Keyword Cannibalization

This is probably the toughest problem to spot, as it happens over an entire site – you can’t spot it in a single URL (and, practically speaking, it’s not just a URL problem). Keyword cannibalization results when you try to target the same keywords with too many URLs.

There’s no one right answer to this problem, as any site with a strong focus is naturally going to have pages and URLs with overlapping keywords. That’s perfectly reasonable. Where you get into trouble is splitting off pages into a lot of sub-pages just to sweep up every long-tail variant. Once you carry that too far, without the unique content to support it, you’re going to start to dilute your index and make your site look “thin”.

The URLs here are almost always just a symptom of a broader disease. Ultimately, if you’ve gotten too ambitious with your scope, you’re going to need to consolidate those pages, not just change a few URLs. This is even more important post-Panda. It used to be that thin content would only impact that content – at worst, it might get ignored. Now, thin content can jeopardize the rankings of your entire site.

Proceed With Caution

If you do decide a sitewide URL change is worth the risk, plan and execute it carefully. How to implement a sitewide URL change is beyond the scope of this post, but keep in mind a couple of high-level points:

1. Use proper 301-redirects.
2. Redirect URL-to-URL, for every page you want to keep.
3. Update all on-page links.
4. Don’t chain redirects, if you can avoid it.
5. Add a new XML sitemap.
6. Leave the old sitemap up temporarily.

Point (3) bears repeating. More than once, I’ve seen someone make a sitewide technical SEO change, implement perfect 301 redirects, but then not update all of their navigation. Your crawl paths are still the most important signal to the spiders – make sure you’re 100% internally consistent with the new URLs.

That last point (6) is a bit counterintuitive, but I know a number of SEOs who insist on it. The problem is simple – if crawlers stop seeing the old URLs, they might not crawl them to process the 301-redirects. Eventually, they’ll discover the new URLs, but it might take longer. By leaving the old sitemap up temporarily, you encourage crawlers to process the redirects. If those 301-redirects are working, this won’t create duplicate content. Usually, you can remove the old sitemap after a few weeks.

Even done properly and for the right reasons, measure carefully and expect some rankings bounce over the first couple of weeks. Sometimes, Google just needs time to evaluate the new structure.

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There has been an outcry today after Google announced that they would no longer be supplying keyword information for organic search terms where the user is logged in. This will have a big impact on Google Analytics, with this blog already getting visits for keyword “(not provided)”. It was announced on a number of Google [...]

Outcry From SEO’s As Google Hide Keyword Info is a post from: Dave Naylor’s SEO Blog.

The slides are below. Any questions drop me a line.

Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation

How to SEO Like a Super Affiliate A4U Expo Presentation

Most people look for ways to “succeed” by investing the least amount of effort possible. That’s why the lottery makes so much money for the government. One dollar can make you extremely rich. If you’re extremely lucky……..

read more of this very good article at the link below….

Seven (Non-SEO) Tips to Having a Successful SEO Campaign » (EMP) E-Marketing Performance.

If you are one of those mobile internet enthusiasts you should be thrilled that Google AdWords has clickable phone numbers displayed with their ads (href=”http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-click-to-call-phone-numbers-in.html”>launched in January). Since the change you have had the option to allow users to call you directly just the same way as if they were to click on your ad to go to your site. By setting this up in a separate part of your Google AdWords account, you can give the option for the system to make this functional.

How will this Affect your AdWords Account?

The easiest way of allowing users to connect mobile users to your phone number is to setup a Location Extension, which ensures that the user is shown the nearest location to them. Be sure to add your telephone number as this is what the mobile users will be able to call directly. The most important thing to enable clickable phone numbers for mobile users is to make sure you are opted into the Mobile Network within your campaign settings.

Since this option is still relatively new for small businesses, many webmasters are unsure whether the users will be forced to click-to-call the telephone number as opposed to still going to the website. Well this is not the case because the users will still have the option to click on the ad and go to the website as well as click the phone number to call directly.

One of the first questions AdWords users had was, ‘What is the cost of the phone calls made?’ Each phone call is billed just as if it were a click to your website. You get to specify the bid for your position just like a normal ad, with the only difference is the user has the option of calling your directly.

“I’m expecting exponential growth, something like 20X the traffic that I’m currently getting,” he told me. “If we can get a number 1 ranking for this one keyword, that should be enough to get us there, don’t you think?”

One Top Ranking Isn’t Enough

Your goal can’t be to rank number 1 on one keyword. That’s not a goal.

What happens if you get the top ranking for your keyword and something happens, such as a major algorithm tweak by Google?

Read full Article here>>>>Justifying the Value of SEO – Search Engine Watch (#SEW).