Some Musings on Online PR

Online PR is continuing to expand and increasingly larger amounts of money are being invested into online press release and the companies which distribute them. So it’s not so surprising that the relatively unknown PR.com has announced several upgrades and enhancements to its press release distribution service in an attempt to compete with the more established PR Web and PR Leap.

PR.com’s changes include distribution to Yahoo News, social bookmarking, enhanced distribution via industry regional distribution channels, file attachments, and a PDF version of the press release.

While other press release distribution services offer similar features, the pricing for PR.com ranges is unusual in that they offer a yearly rates rather than per release as well as a basic free release.

It’s nice to have a wider variety of online PR services available it does seem that more recently online PR has provided quite as much bang for your buck. Since Google’s more recent algorithm change press releases aren’t ranking as highly as they were, and therefore drawing less traffic. Don’t get me wrong though online PR is still a worthwhile investment, as you may still get pickups from other blogs, news sites, or even traditional media. The releases can also help with your site’s SEO but I’d recommend using one of the less expensive services since they basically all offer the same thing.

Further Developments with Standardized Sitemaps

As you no doubt have already heard Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com have united around a common sitemaps standard to provide themselves with bulk URL submissions, making it more important for marketers to understand how sitemaps and other submission options work.

This is a critical step forward since sitemaps deliver more robust, quality results to users while simultaneously making Webmaster’s lives easier. So how can you make the best use of the standardized sitemaps?

Maile Ohye, developer support engineer at Google Inc. offers the following list of best practices:

- Always include a URL’s full path

- Remove unnecessary parameters

- Protocol and host name of the listed URLs must match the sitemap’s location

Google accepts RSS2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds.

It’s also worth noting that if your feed includes only recent URLs, Google can still use that info.

Python is an easy-to-use XML sitemap generator. All one has to do is add the site to Google Webmaster Tools, create the sitemap, upload it, log in, click “Add sitemap,” verify it is processed without errors and if it is XML then add the URL to robot.txt.

During this week’s SES conference in New York Priyank Garg, senior product manager for Web search at Yahoo Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, said that Yahoo accepts XML schema and protocol to publish a site’s URLs to search crawlers.

“You can even include crawl priority within your sites,” Mr. Garg said. “Sitemaps can only contain URLS within the path that it resides in.”

He said metadata is information for crawlers.

Mr. Garg also announced that Yahoo Site Explorer is now out of beta.

“Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to explore your sites, manage them, add your sitemaps and other site feeds, add mobile feeds, authenticate the site and even report spammy in links,” he said.

At any rate having all the major search engines agree on a standardized sitemap is definitely a big step in the right direction.

MSN adCenter to Update

News came out yesterday that a new release is planned of AdCenter for 4 to 6 weeks, but you can play with it today at the adCenter Beta site. And there is some cool stuff in it.

Here is a summary of some of the things I saw:

1. Cross campaign keyword search: This is a cool feature where you can search for a phrase at a global level, and adCenter will return all the keywords that use that phrase on a single screen. You can then work on and edit those keywords without having to go in an out of the different individual campaigns.

2. Pop-up help: Pop-up help will appear next to any item you have questions you have on a topic by hovering over a question mark icon on the screen.

3. adCenter now supports Firefox: A great improvement for those of us who use Firefox almost exclusively.

4. Expanded Bulk Upload Capabilities: Bulk uploads can now be done at an individual campaign level.

5. Tagging and Favorites: If you have a campaign or a set of keywords that need more management than others, these can be tagged so they will automatically show up and be accisble from your initial login screen.

6. Breadcrumbing: This is a neat new feature that allows you to hover over the breadcrumb bar, and then see a list of peer web pages in a drop down list right there. So if you are in a particular campaign, and want to navigate directly to another campaign, you can do that quite easily.

7. New negative keyword management options: Negative keywords can now be specified at the campaign level

Overall some good improvements in adCenter’s usability and functionality. Hopefully AdCenter will continue to grow and bring some much needed competition into the market.

Google’s 2007 April Fool’s Day Spoof

Every year Google always runs an outrageous spoof and this year is no exception. Check it out on the official Google blog.

Here’s a quick idea of what this year’s spoof is all about:

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Yeah it’s a bit gross, and clearly over the top.

While there’s been several spoofs thorught Google’s history for my money Google Romance was the best.

Yahoo Expands into the Mobile Market

In a further attempt to gain some of Google’s search enigne market share Yahoo has just launched the Yahoo Mobile Publisher Services site designed to offer one-stop shopping for publishers that want to get mobile content into Yahoo in various ways. In particular, the services offered will be:

• Yahoo Mobile Ad Network: Will put ads out through Yahoo’s mobile network. Includes display ads, sponsored links and oddly, “video or in-game placements.”
• Yahoo Mobile Content Engine: A special search engine designed to carry mobile-specific material, which will power the Yahoo oneSearch service.
• Yahoo Mobile Media Directory: A directory of mobile content, compiled by human editors.
• Yahoo Mobile Site Submit: The ability to submit presumably to Yahoo’s mobile content engine.

The new Yahoo Mobile Ad Network includes launch partners MobiTV (announcement here), Opera and go2. From the Yahoo press release:

Launch partners in the Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network include MobiTV, the global leader in mobile and broadband television and music services, Opera, the leading provider of Web browsers for mobile devices, and go2, the leading location-enabled mobile content network in the U.S. The first advertisements will go live in the second quarter of 2007. Yahoo! plans to expand the number of partners in the Yahoo! Mobile Ad Network over the coming months.

The New York Times has a few more details in their article Yahoo to Offer a Network for Web Ads on Cellphones, and Techmeme has related coverage here.

All in all Yahoo’s new mobile offerings may help further boost their market share and close the gap between themselves and Google, but ultimately only time will tell.

10 Classic AdWords Blunders

1.) Long List of Less Than Targeted Keywords

When you first set out to create your AdWords campaign it is of utmost importance that you do not go “keyword crazy”, what this means is that you must not create long lists of irrelevant and generic keywords. For example, if you were an toy company then it would not be in your best interest to target the keyword “toys”. The reason being is that the cost per click (CPC) for such a generic keyword would be incredibly high when compared to a more descriptive relevant keyword such as “handmade wooden toys”. An example of an irrelevant keyword which would not produce conversions if you sold only the toys themselves would be “toy chests.”  While, the phrase may bring visitors to your website they’ll bounce after not finding what they are looking for on the site.

2.) Not Identifying Unique Aspects of Your Product or Service

Before implementing your AdWords campaign you must first understand exactly what it is that makes you stand out from your competition.By identifying your unique products or services you will have a lot more clarity on how to rise above your competitors and zone in on the keywords or phrases that are unique to your business.I would recommend that you perform an analysis of your competition, have a look and see what they are doing and which phrases they are using.After conducting a competition analysis and after understanding what makes your products or services unique you will be able to come up with a strategy that will topple your competitors.

3.) Lack of Keywords in Your Ad Text

When creating your descriptive ad copy it is imperative that you find a means to inject your keywords in to your title and description while maintaining the delicate balance of clarity and relevance.Your ad copy should be tailored in such a way that when read by a visitor they know exactly what they are getting in to when they click on your ad, which brings me to my next point.

4.) Directing Users Solely to Your Home Page

Taking the time to decide on which destination URL should be designated to which ad instead of pointing all ads in a campaign to your homepage is an oversight that I come across far too often.When you finish with compiling your list of relevant keywords that describe unique products or services of your business, why on earth would you then send everyone to your homepage and let them navigate through your site in hopes of finding what it is that they are looking for.Instead why not send them straight to the page that contains exactly what was described to them within your ad copy.As an example if you were an widget manufacturer and your ad contains the keyword “blue widgets” instead of sending them to www.widgets.com send them to www.widgets.com/blue-widgets.html.

5.) Creation of Single Ad Groups

By categorizing ads that are targeting related keywords into a common ad-group will create a much higher level of control that you have over your entire campaign.Let’s say that you were a sporting goods store, start by grouping all ads targeted towards hockey skates into a single Ad Group.You would then create another ad-group which would be targeting hockey sticks and another containing hockey gloves and so on.By organizing your ad-group structure in this manner gives you the ability to create in-depth reports on the performance of each ad-group.

6.) Utilizing Single Campaigns

Once you have your Ad Groups sorted out into easy to identify categories you may then move on to the next step of creating relevant campaigns.From the example above you have created Ad Groups containing separate products of hockey skates, sticks, gloves etc.Now it is time to create a container for all of the Ad Groups into one campaign entitled “hockey equipment”.You would then repeat the process creating Ad Groups for tennis, one group for shoes one for racquets etc and then once again you drop them all into a single campaign entitle “tennis equipment”.Having highly organized campaigns is the key to determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions.

7.) Using Broad Match Only

When you do not take advantage of the phrase matching options that are available to you chances are you are missing out on potential customers and creating a higher CPC. Broad matches are usually less targeted than exact and phrase matching.Broad matching is the default option your ads will appear for expanded matches such as plurals or relevant keyword variations.When utilizing phrase match your ad will appear for search terms in the order that you specify and sometimes for other terms. Exact matching is by far the most targeted option to use.You will appear for the exact keyword specified.Negative keyword is also a fantastic option to utilize in order to specify which keywords you do not want to appear for.

Broad match

Default option:

• blue widget

Phrase match

Surround the keyword in quotes:

• “blue widget”

Exact match

Surround the keyword in square brackets:

• [blue widget]

Negative match

Place a negative character before the keyword:

• -blue widget

8.) Failure To Optimize Ad Serving For Your Ads

When you take advantage of AdWords Ad Serving service basically what you will be doing is showing your most popular ads more often.The AdWords platform will give weight to ads with the highest click through rates (CTRs) and display them more often then keywords with lower (CTRs) within the same ad-group.

9.) Not Tracking Results

In order to have any idea on your AdWords campaign performance you must be able to see the keywords that work as well as those that do not. Google AdWords supplies a vast array of very useful tracking tools.Google has also built in to the user interface Google Analytics which is a marvellous web analytics tool that provides you with in-depth reporting on all aspects of your campaign performance.I can not stress enough the importance of creating goals for your AdWords campaign to measure your success by.

10.) Entering The Content Network Without Modifying Bids

Within the AdWords platform you have recently been given the ability to set different bids for the content network compared to that of the search network.If you do not set different bids on the content network for certain keywords, you will be paying more per click than you should be.After lowering the prices on certain keywords you will notice that the amount of click throughs that you will be attaining will remain the same as they were at the higher bids.

More Cool Mozilla Firefox Extentions

Sure I’ve already done a list of cool Mozilla Extentions but I figured I’d share a few more useful extension gems I’ve come across:

GUtil: For anyone using Gmail, GReader and other Google products this plugin is invaluable. It adds a dropdown menu to the Firefox chrome, so enabling you to access all of your Google accounts and applications.

Install GUtil Extension

Web Developer Extension

This extention has been out for a long time but it’s one of the handiest web developer tools you’ll find. It is so feature packed that I am still finding new things that it does think of it as the swiss army knife of developer extentions.

This extension has dozens of reports, each one geared toward diagnosing a particular kind of problem. Some of them are external, such as sending your URL to a validation service. Some are internal, such as showing a dump of all of the page’s active cookies. Unfortunately, many of these option open up in a new tab, taking the focus off of the page that you are trying to work with. It can be hard to tell which options do this. There is an option for having the tabs open in the background, but this is not the default.

The View Style Information option is particularly nice. You can point to any element on the page and the extension will display the element tree along with ids and classes. If you click on an element, it will display only the style rules that apply to that element.

The web developer extension can change things as well as inspect them. You can go into a mode where you can edit your CSS or HTML in real time for immediate feedback. This is great for testing out small changes. For the PHP developer, the extension has a variety of options for manipulating cookies and forms. There are also a variety of ways to enable or disable certain elements on the page.

Install Web Developer Extension

FireBug

FireBug lets you explore the inner workings of Web pages. All of the tools you need to debug and perfect your JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including HTML and CSS inspectors, a debugger, error console, and command line.

If you haven’t tried this one yet, seriously, go get it right now.

Install FireBug Extension

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is a lifesaver when it comes to matching web colors. It adds a small eyedropper tool to the bottom left corner of the window. You can use this tool to inspect colors on the current web site. Double clicking it brings up a color picker and some other color related tool. Awesome!
Install ColorZilla Extension

IETab: This plugin means I never have to use IE. It enables me to view pages that are only IE compatible such as the “Windows Update” whilst still using only Firefox.

Install IETab Extension

SEO Tips – Keyword Strategy

SEO is a long process, and while there are many important steps and factors the first phase of any SEO project should be the keyword strategy. Of course, there’s a lot of research that needs to be done in order to find the opitimal words and phrases for any campaign.

Keyword Discovery

The easiest way to get started is to brainstorm and create a list of words that relate to your business, because even with the best keyword research tools you’ll need to start somewhere.

Identify a list of key competitors and check out what keywords they’re optimizing for by checking their page titles, links, headines and tags.

While brainstorming is a great way to start you probably will still only scratch the surface of possible keywords. That’s were keyword reasearch tools come in.

So, here are a few tools you can use to help you find more and better keywords, and help you get your campaign kickstarted.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Keyword Variations tool allows you to enter numerous keywords and Google will suggest relevant keyowords that you might like to use. They also offer an estimate of how many competitors are bidding on that keyword and approximately how many people are searching for that keyword. While they don’t give exact numbers, they provide a helpful green bar that allows you to gauge results. Their Site-Related Keywords tool lets you enter any webpage URL and they’ll tell you what keywords are used most frequently, as well as providing gauges for advertiser competition and search volume.

Keyword Cloud
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/

SEOChat.com’s Keyword Cloud is a pretty useful tool which works by showing which words are used the most frequently – both in “cloud” format and in a numerical table. A keyword cloud is a visual representation of the keywords on a page. Keywords used more frequently are displayed in larger fonts so you can easily see which words they consider to be important.

Keyword Difficulty Check
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/

This is another great tool from SEOChat.com. SEO Chat’s Difficulty Checker estimates how difficult it will be to rank for a given keyword. For example, a term like “Britney Spears,” has a difficulty ranking of 65.32 % and “search engine” has a ranking of 82.15% meaning you’ll face a fair a great deal of competition.

Myriad Search Authority Finder
http://www.myriadsearch.com

If you’re trying to find out which sites considered the authorities for a specific keyword in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves? Type in a keyword and choose between each of the search engines or a compilation of all of them. You’ll receive a list of the top 10 in each search engine. If you don’t like one search engine, you can assign it a bias or exclude it from the compilation. Cool right?

SpyFu
http://www.spyfu.com

SpyFu.com is a free competitive search research tool that allows you to uncover what keywords your competitors are bidding on and rank for. Simply type in the url and you’ll learn stats like their daily ad budget, average clicks/day, average cost per click, their alexa rank, number of incoming links and how long it takes to load the page. It will also reveal what keywords the site ranks for in organic search, their top 100 organic competitors, and any categories in the Open Directory that the site is listed under. Although you should keep in mind that SpyFu’s data isn’t always up to date.

WordTracker
http://wordtracker.com/

The first and only paid tool on the list, Wordtracker offers all sorts of tools to research keywords including various types of searches and misspellings. They offer a free trial and prices as low as a one day pass for about $8, but it’s well worth it for uncovering niche keywords you’d never think of on your own.

SES New York Coupon!?!

If you are thinking of going to the SES NY from April 10-13 we have some good news. It seems that Google Analytics is offering a 20% discount on your choice of a full conference or 1-day pass. Take a look at the coupon (click for a larger view):

To get the discount you simply need to register and enter the priority code: 20GOOA (to be clear, that’s “two zero golf oscar oscar alpha”). If you register by March 23rd, you also get $150 off for their early bird pricing.  SWEET!

YouTube Finally Gets Sued

It was only a matter of time before YouTube would get sued by someone, and Reuters reports that someone is Viacom.  Google’s purchase of YouTube just highlighted how much online video is worth, and companies like Viacom see it as money being stolen from them.  So, they’re suing Google over “massive intentional copyright infringement” for $1 billion. The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, after claiming “a great deal of unproductive negotiation” with Google lead them to this action.

Google has released the following statement concerning the lawsuit:

We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.

You can check out Viacom’s official release for the suit on their site.