Get Best 3 Ways to Begin Aligning Your PPC & SEO Strategies

Paid and organic search are the peanut butter and chocolate of the digital marketing world. One is good without the other, but when you put them together the combination is incredible. However, many search marketers, and brands today never create that powerful combination (at least on purpose).

For the third year in a row I took a look at a set of keywords to understand how many brands have listings in both paid and organic search. They keyword set has remained the same all three years across the various verticals.

In a year that had a significant amount of search marketing evolution (think Google Panda/Penguin and the Knowledge Graph) the amount of overlap between paid and organic search didn't change much.

PPC/SEO Brand Overlap Ratio Year Over Year Change

The data below looks at what brands appear in the paid and organic space. The key highlights indicate:

• Only consumer travel has consistently increased their overlap for three years in a row. Travel has been a sector that has seen some pressure over the last few years as the economy struggles. It has potentially led to fewer players, as well as a more coordinated strategy.

• Retail took its first drop. We noticed a lot more Google shopping results for this keyword set than ever before. This has a lot to do with the change in Google shopping to paid service, as well as continued proof that brands need to be found in various channels vs. being reliant on a few.

• Overall the amount of brands that appear in both paid and organic search has remained consistent over the past three years around 17 percent.

Google Pushing Out Panda Update 3.9 Tonight

Google says it will roll out the latest update to its Panda algorithm later tonight.

The company posted the news a few minutes ago on Twitter, saying this update will affect about one percent of search results.

New data refresh of Panda starts rolling out tonight. ~1% of search results change enough to notice. More context: goo.gl/huekf

— A Googler (@google) July 24, 2012

By our count, this is Panda Update 3.9. The previous update, 3.8, occurred just about a month ago — on June 25th.

Panda rolled out initially in February 2011 and was designed to remove low-quality/thin content from Google’s search results.

For more background on the Panda algorithm, see our Panda Update News archive.

How To Solve The Alan Turing Google Logo Puzzle

Alan Turing’s 100th birthday is today and to honor his life, Google has one of the geekiest and mathematical logos, aka Doodles, I’ve ever seen.

The logo is a representation of the look and functionality of the Turing machine, a machine that was the stepping stone for modern computing. This Doodle asks you to solve the puzzle by completing the Google logo in a pattern of 0s and 1s.

Martin from TagSEO has an outstanding video taking you through the six steps to solve the equation. Here it is:

Turing worked for Britain’s Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) responsible for German naval cryptanalysis and breaking German codes to help beat them in the war. In 1952, at the age of 39 he was criminally prosecuted in the UK for homosexual acts, which was illegal in United Kingdom at that time. In 1954, just two weeks prior to his 42nd birthday, he died from cyanide poisoning. They said it was a suicide, maybe due to the hormone treatments or depression over the persecution.

Google in November 2010 backed a bid with $100,000 to help purchase some of his papers, so they can be returned to Bletchley Park. Google called Turing “a hero” that was a “pioneer” in the work of algorithms and the development of computer science.

Optimize Your Blog for SEO and Get Top Search Rankings

Understanding SEO Techniques

You have to understand how search engine optimization (SEO) works if you want to get loads of visitors to your blog or website. When people enter a search term into the worldwide web, the search engine robots crawl every site looking for the most relevant information. Without an understanding of how to make the most of SEO techniques on your blog, people searching for the kind of information, product or service you have, will not even know you exist.

What is SEO/Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is often referred to as SEO. The principle behind good SEO is that it will maximize the chances for your webpage to be listed high in the search engine results. This means your webpage is more likely to get a bigger slice of any traffic searching for a particular term or ‘keyword phrase.’ You can easily increase the chances of your web page ranking high by focusing on good use of keywords, links and relevant content.

Why? Because web pages that contain high quality content based on the search term are considered relevant. Search engines also look favorably on pages that other domains link to (search engine robots believe your site must be relevant if other similar web pages link back to yours). This is called Back Linking.

Getting to understand SEO can seem overwhelming with all the information that is out there so I’ve tried to provide you with some of the fastest and easiest things you can implement immediately to improve your blog’s search engine rankings.

Keyword Checklist for SEO

1. Your article or blog title must have the keyword in the title. It’s best if the keyword shows up near the beginning of the title and the title should be at least three words long, but no longer than six to seven words.

2. Break your article or blog post up with headings. Include your keywords in these headings.

3. Your content should have two to four-percent key word presence. However, don’t be tempted to overload your content with your keywords. If you do, the search engine robots may think your site is a fraud and your rankings can be heavily penalized. These little robots will think you are more concerned with driving traffic than providing high quality content to readers.

4. Write content that is at least 300 words, and even better if it is closer to 500 words.

5. Use your keyword right away in the content. It should show-up within the first 50-100 words and then again in the last 50-100 words.

6. Include an image that has the keywords added into the ALT attribute.

7. Only focus on one keyword or keyword phrase within one article or blog post.

8. Be mindful of keyword proximity. If you’re writing about how to optimize your blog, it’s more valuable if you use the keywords ‘attraction marketing’ without any additional words in-between them than if you use the word ‘attraction’ in the first paragraph then use ‘marketing’ in paragraph two.

9. If your domain name includes your keyword – that’s a bonus.

Avoid These SEO Pitfalls

1. Do not use excessive amounts of unrelated keywords in your text. Doing this tampers with content relevance in search engine results. This activity can demote you in search engine rankings.

2. Don’t use keywords or phrases out of context. This will severely push your web page down in the rankings.

3. Search engine robots severely penalize keyword stuffing (more than 10% of your content is keyword-rich). In fact, this can get you banned from posting online.

How to Use Links to Enhance Your Blog

1. Link your keyword within at least one sentence, to another page within your website

2. Get other websites with relevant high quality content to add your link on their webpage (Remember, this gives search engine robots confidence that your site is relevant).

3. Try to get links to your site from .edu and .gov pages. These are considered more reputable by search engines than .net, .info, .biz and .com websites.

4. The more backlinks the better as long as the sites are similar to yours and reputable.

5. Create new links to your page gradually. If you get more than about 10 links leading to your website at once, the search engines will think you bought them. Remember, search engines want authenticity.

6. Choose websites to link to your page that have a limited number of existing outgoing links. This tells the search engine that your link is most important to the host website.

How NOT to Use Links in SEO

1. Limit Your Links. Google especially, will frown upon too many links in your content. Keep it to less than 100 links.

2. Relationships. Make sure all of the websites you link to remain relevant, up-to-date, and have a good reputation. You don’t want to appear connected to “bad” sites by search engines.

3. Do Not Enter Into Link Exchanges. You may get approached to do ‘link exchanges.’ Avoid these at all costs. This will appear to be a paid relationship and work against you.

What Content Will Optimize Your Blog?

1. Keep your content unique. Don’t copy other people’s articles onto your own site.

2. Post regularly. Search engines LOVE new and regular updates.

3. Where appropriate bold, underline or italicize your keywords. Don’t overdo this or you’ll get penalized but, if done tastefully, it will improve your rankings.

4. When using headings in your article, select the ‘headings’ font.

5. Articles around 500-700 words are ideal. If you have lots more than this to write, think about breaking it up over two or three posts as a series.

Final Thoughts

Most of these tips will help to improve your rankings across all the major search engines – Google, Bing, and Yahoo! SEO can sometimes seem hard to understand at first, but it’s not difficult. The great thing is that when you implement these small changes, you will see an improvement in your rankings and the traffic your site receives.

So there you go. The strategies I use every day to get my blog posts ranking high in the search engines.

Google’s Penguin Update Makes The Wall Street Journal

The Google Penguin Update is now mainstream after The Wall Street Journal covered it in a feature story named As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web.

The story interviews a few small business owners who were hit hard by the update. One business owner saw his sales drop to $25,000 this month, down from $68,000 the previous month. Another small website owner saw roughly 30% of his traffic disappear over night. And another lost 20% of their traffic. Most of the article goes through small business owners who lives have changed for the worse due to this update. But there are some stories that lead me to believe they are not directly related to Penguin.

Again, there were several updates last month – Penguin was happened on the 24th. But there were two Panda refreshes, link network penalties, bugs and many more updates.

Even if all those cases were not Penguin related, Penguin is now main stream after hitting a major publication like the Wall Street Journal.

The Advantages and Benefits of Contextual Links

Manytimes, it happens that, one is putting all kinds of efforts to help his or her web site get noticed by the google but all efforts go down the drain. In this connection, it can be said that Contextual links are the best way to get ones website noticed by Google. It is a well tried and tested way of increasing the rank of the web sites and bringing the great traffic to the site. Apart from them, it helps the webmaster raise his or her online profile and there is no two opinions about this fact.

Below are some of the outstanding benefits of the purchasing contextual links for one's company web sites.

* There is no gainsaying of this fact that contextual links are all the time regarded as wonderful and natural links by search engines, and by dint of the contextual links within content, one can get great ranking.

* One can get the contextual links for the whole life. This means till the end of the blogs. Most of the companies who sell contextual link guarantee the blogs' life for at least some years. In addition, one can get links for particular niches which one wants and to which one's the web sites of the company belong.

* Actually, when the contextual link is within the post, it is possible that the readers will be keen to browse through the targeted sites within the post instead of those given in the footer or sidebar of a page and this way one can get benefits with some minimal amount of traffic as well.

* Since, it has been seen that there are a number of contextual links that are basically from blogs, these blogs if pinged at blog services, this will beyond any doubt raise the authority rank of the website in that blog services. Apart from, them, this also goes a long way in getting the best page strength to one's web site.

Therefore, if one is having an online company and is in the need of the permanent contextual links of one's preferred niche, then one is recommended to look for some of the contextual advertising services. Apart from them, last but not least, it is always a better idea to bring a group of one mind people together to form reciprocal contextual links and the best part of this reciprocal contextual is that there is no cost involved in this.

Author is an expert in all SEO activities with latest technology methods for link building and has been writing articles and reviews for SEO Services, Contextual Links & Other SEO for many years. He has written many useful articles such as for Online Marketing and much more.

Discover The Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most promising ways to make money online. It has so much potential that every one of us is fascinated about affiliate marketing. Moreover as it is free to join in, many affiliate marketers are enthusiastic in joining the affiliate programs to earn money through internet.

As the affiliate marketing programs offer and pay a regular commission more and more people are attracted to it. Work at home moms and students are the main takers of the affiliate marketing as their part-time job. Even some of the people are taking this affiliate marketing as a full fledged profession thereby saying good-bye to their day jobs due to its high income generating potential.

It is true that Affiliate Marketing has a good potential to leave the day jobs, but it has some downfalls too. One should check all the positives and the negatives before joining affiliate marketing business. If one cannot assess the negatives he will instead of making profits may end at losing. That is why it is better to identify the common mistakes and to evade them than to repent in the end.

Conduct A Basic Research: 

Many people want to make a big money through affiliate marketing as fast as possible. So they are attracted towards the banners like HOT. They join the so called HOT affiliate programs and try to promote it. But in reality it doesn't work. You should join the affiliate program which appeals you. The selection should be in accordance to your taste and preferences not for the sake of earnings alone. You should conduct a basic research on that affiliate program and check whether the program is really HOT. You should also check the demand and supply of that product. Making a basic research on selection of the affiliate program will be definitely rewarding.

Joining Multiple Affiliate Programs:

Desire to earn money at a fast pace tempts you to join in multiple affiliate programs. But it is advisable to concentrate on a single affiliate program and to excel in it rather than joining in too many programs and unable to do full justice to them. Concentrate your best efforts in promoting a single affiliate program/product where you can enjoy the better results. Later on, If you think that you are confident enough to handle the multiple affiliate program then you can do that so as to earn multiple sources of income.

Test The Product Before You Promote:

Most affiliates don't test the product before they start promoting. This leads to exaggeration and over selling by which the visitors simply skip it. It is therefore essential to use the product/service for an effective promotion. You should be a live testimonial providing both the pros and cons of that affiliate program thereby you induce the feeling of unbiased ness.

Spending Hundreds of Dollars On eBooks:

Many aspiring affiliate marketers are not aware of the basic concepts of affiliate marketing and purchase many affiliate internet marketing ebooks wasting hundreds of dollars. If you want to get started with affiliate marketing don't worry too much about which ebook you choose. Most of the information you will find on the internet for free, but if you do not have time for it, get any affiliate marketing ebook. The more important part is that you grasp the concept of what affiliate internet marketing is all about and any of the ebook will be able to provide you with that.

Burning Your Fingers With PPC:

PPC may be one of the fastest methods to make money online. If you get things right, pay per click works brilliantly. If you get things wrong, you can lose lots of money fast. So for a newbie it is a difficult task to manage that. First of all get acquainted with the Google Adwords and then use it. Reading the experiences will stop you from making costly errors.

These are the 5 common mistakes many of the affiliate marketers do and are paying greatly for their actions. So one should be very careful and avoid these mistakes and gain the exposure of what the real affiliate marketing is all about. Affiliate Marketing is easy and it really works if done properly.