June 11th, 2008
Sometimes you need to move a site from one domain to another, or you might have one or more domains that you want to all forward to another, such as variations on your primary domain. For example, your main site might be “www.example.com” and you want anyone who types in or follows a link to […]
June 6th, 2008
Yesterday we helped a client recover their domain after it expired, apparently without any prior notification emails from the registrar warning them of the impending need to extend their contract. Recovery was greatly complicated by the fact that they had used an email address from that domain in their administrative contact information. In other words, […]
April 14th, 2008
Firefox allows you to specify default styles so that you can alter the appearance of all web pages that use a particular element or combination of elements. For example, I like to know see when links have nofollow applied to them instead of having to check them manually. The CSS file for doing this is […]
March 26th, 2008
We recently made some changes to a client’s AdWords account that reduced clicks, traffic, and spending. Several days later we reversed those changes. Over the next several days, AdWords spending exceeding our daily budget by 20%. This came as a surprise to us as we are used to seeing some slight overage some days, but […]
March 6th, 2008
AdWords just announced that they will soon factor in landing page load times into the quality score that helps determine your ad’s position. The reasons for this are, in effect, to reward site owners who provide responsive sites and punish those that make users wait.
We have no idea yet how much of an impact this […]
February 29th, 2008
In a previous post on keyword competitiveness, we described a long list of factors that help determine how difficult it would be to achieve top search engine ranking on a keyword based upon competing websites. The process of thoroughly examining the situation is usually unrealistically involved, and the effort would not substantially change the tactics […]
February 1st, 2008
Should you advertise on keywords for which you already have top rankings?
This question came up recently with a client seeking to improve advertising ROI and redeploy budget to other, less successful keywords. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you have plenty of budget so that the core question is whether such advertising brings […]
January 29th, 2008
Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: […]
January 18th, 2008
If you’re running a national SEM campaign, it may be desirable to exclude all local queries so that you can optimize the ad language for non-geographic queries and users. To target specific locales, you could setup additional campaigns that are better optimized for those sets of keywords. The best way to exclude location-based queries is […]
January 8th, 2008
Sorry, but it’s just terrible. With all the press and hoopla — almost all of it free — we’d expect better than the following example search results (which may change / be manipulated by the time you try them):
#1 result for “Seattle” is a site that is supposed to list events, bars, restaurants, etc. but […]