SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

Google have today been sending out invitations to Google Friend Connect:

“We appreciate your interest in Google Friend Connect and would now like to invite you to try the service. You can get started by visiting our homepage and clicking the “Set up a new site” button.”

I’ve only just began to test this on SEOptimise and interested to see how this works and interacts with other social media profiles. There’s more of a write-up from Neville Hobson, but please join SEOptimise as a member or leave a comment as we’re looking quite lonely at the moment!

We’re on Twitter too if you hadn’t noticed already!

Getting, convincing, keeping and dealing with clients is an art for itself. Whether you’re a freelancer or part of a company, whether you’re a SEO, web designer, programmer or writer you will encounter the same issues again and again. You might argue that everybody is different and no client matches another one. This is true. Nonetheless the situations you will go through often match. So you can prepare yourself for those recurring situations.

After 11 years of web working as web developer, blogger and SEO both in agencies and freelance I have collected a list of 30 timeless tips to get, convince, keep and deal with clients.

How to get clients
To get clients you have to first make them contact you. Cold calling and aggressively marketing is bad for your mental health, most people do not like it and you get the wrong clients this way. You need to attract those clients who need you already. They are out there.

• Make a name for yourself, a name brand and/or a “real” brand. Do not act a one of thousands, stick out by being extraordinary in whatever way you choose.
• Be trustworthy by design, especially if you work in web design, copy writing or SEO where everybody can claim to be an expert. Prove it by showing off current working projects, having a good blog, testimonials, other people writing about you.
• Do not compete with India. Charge more instead of less and less. Most clients think what’s cheap is worthless. Indians will be cheaper anyways.
• Get clients to get more clients. If you can’t get any clients whatsoever do something for free for friends or charities to show off some work.
• Always keep your own projects alive. Clients will come and go. After a while you won’t be able to show off their work anymore. You need your own projects.
• Do not make a fancy website, show off your work on a usable website where the potential client can contact you easily.
• Be present on the main channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and whatever is industry specific. Some people do not use the overall WWW or email to find and contact you.
• Support your community. Nobody can do everything her or himself so that your “competitors” will bring you new clients.
• Specialize in rare, new and upcoming niches. Do not stick to what everybody does. Everybody offers services like web design, copy writing or SEO but who offers iPhone optimized web pages?
• Be local and proud of it. Many people prefer local businesses they can relate to or even visit.
• Offer more stuff to your existing clients or those you have already worked with and keep track of your clients with some CRM (customer relationship management) tools. There are web based CRM tools and open source ones for free.

How to convince clients
Once a potential client has contacted you doesn’t mean you’ll get him to work with you. Most people will contact several service providers and compare.

• Listen to what the client really wants and reply to exactly this demand. Do not just offer the standard package without even contemplating the specific case.
• Be quick or at least tell the potential client how long she or he has to wait. Use a template reply that has been tested and worked with previous clients of course changing the data and the text where the situation is specific.
• Do not try to teach the client everything about your trade. Concentrate on a few key issues the client has to grasp, the rest is your task and the reason why the client wants to pay you (not to bother with it her or himself).
• Do not talk about problems, speak about solutions. Do not focus on why Flash is bad but how you can use Flash to please both the client and to comply with web standards and SEO best practices.
• Be friendly and be yourself, explain why you are interested in a specic client and project based on your hobbies, family history and experiences. This way you also ensure that you really work for clients you like.

How to keep clients
Once you have convinced your clients to choose you, you want to keep them as long as possible. This may prove difficult just due to the nature of the Web and web working.

• Always say “yes”. Clients do not want to hear a “no”. Always say “yes, you’ll deal with it” and then do it on your own terms. A client wants a Flash intro, an all Flash site, or a bigger logo? Create a Flash intro for first time visitors which fades out on mouse movement, create an all Flash site with a HTML backup, add a layer with a huge logo that disappears when the visitor performs an action on the site.
• Document what you do and explain why. Web development, writing and SEO are often invisible. Clients do not see any changes on the outside after you spend a night on cleaning the code, a day researching for your article, a week testing on different browsers and a month on link building. Document each step.
• Be proactive in communicating issues and when being late. Clients who have the impression that you’re too slow and making too many mistakes you want to hide will quit sooner or later. Be open about issues you encounter and being late with a project.
• Do not stay the same and offer the same solutions even if “times are a changin’”. Clients are prone to buy and pay for things that worked once. They assume they’ll work again and again. The web is changing at a very fast pace. So things that worked 10, 5, 2 years or even a few months ago do not work anymore in many cases. Offer new solutions to old problems before the old solutions stop working.
• Do not keep all clients. To keep your good clients you have to drop those clients who prevent you from spending the right amount of time and effort with your good clients. When you frantically attempt to keep clients who are always discontent you will in the end loose both the bad and the good clients.

How to deal with clients
Working with clients will never be pure harmony only as your interests and those of the clients only converge partly. In many cases your own interest and that of the client differs substantially. You have to deal with that, you can’t ignore it and you can’t let your client dictate everything. Ignoring those issues will make you either insane or inefficient or both and both you and the client will end up discontent afterwards. So make sure to address these issues before they really affect your cooperation.

• Do not answer emails ten times a day. Email is an incredible time waster and very inefficient. It only works if used wisely. When a client emails you more than twice a day with issues and requests set up a todo list instead of answering each and every time. Replying to an email in most cases means that the client will rely too so you’ll end up writing emails all day instead of working. Or just call the client and sort out the issues.
• Charge by the hour and assess the number of hours you need per task beforehand. Otherwise a client won’t value your time. When a task runs out of hand you write a email that the assessed time for this task has run out and if the client wants to pay for another 2 hours.
• Send emails with protocols, todos and tasks for the client all people responsible. Then refer to your older messages.
• Contact clients who are late with answers, materials or payments telling them how it will negatively affect your project and that you might need to work for another clients in the meantime and having to set aside your project for a while due to them being late.
• Always charge upfront. Charge at least 1/3 of the sum at stake. Otherwise clients might even forget about you, hire other people to do the same work or not take your work after you’re done. Of course they just might not pay at all.
• Make sure to be allowed to show off your work. Some clients, especially in SEO tend to be paranoid. Also working clandestinely makes them assign a low value to your work. Sometimes they even tend to propose work that might compromise your integrity.
• Never depend on just one client. In this case she or he might just lay you off as if you are an employee.
• Do not meet a client more often than needed. Some local clients want to meet you several times even before the projects have begun and they paid you a Cent. keep off those clients, they will always want you to attend them in this way. Otherwise charge them the extra costs, both the time and the cost of getting there.
• Never let clients treat you like subordinates. You and the client are partners. Clients who do not grasp that will never make you happy with your work and will steal your time you could have invested in the clients who treat you right.
• Stop dealing with clients who get angry at you, shout and swear at you. Those people will always do that no matter how good you are at your work.

You can’t adhere to all these tips at the same time. Also if you just adhere to the “how to deal with clients” part without first making an effort to stick to the “get, convince and keep clients” parts it won’t work out either. The rule of thumb always must be that both you and the client are happy with your work.

“It doesn’t make sense to give up your life, integrity or self-respect for a client as it ultimately will hurt the client as well.”

That said I’m really, really happy with my current clients. SEOptmise is one of them as I’m a paid writer for their SEO blog. I even accept lower pay from those clients I am happy with which in turn of course makes them happy as well.

To work with clients be it in a SEO, writing or web development you must be eager to work on a project. You can’t be too selfish as you must be proud of the success you generated for others and you have to give the best you have.

My work for SEOptmise is proof of this. I just write once a week for the SEOptmise blog but I generate several thousands of page views with each of my bigger articles, much more than on my own blog.

My post about Google Analytics filters went down pretty well so I thought I’d keep the analytics bandwagon rolling and talk about how to use the new Advanced Segmentation feature to get useful data for setting advanced ad scheduling options.

For those of you who don’t know, AdWords has a feature where bids can be increased or decreased by a set multiplier based on the time and day of the week. This is really useful since for most accounts traffic at certain times and on certain days is more likely to convert so it is more valuable.

Google Analytics can tell you how conversion rates vary by hour of the day or by day of the week, but it doesn’t give you both pieces of information at the same time. This is still useful but it means you can’t take into account weekends or similar odd days. You can get AdWords reports segmented by hour of the day, but these reports do not contain conversion data so they are useless for ROI or CPA based campaigns.

In this post I will tell you how to use the new Advanced Segmentation features to get the day parting information you need so that you can bid more for the best traffic.
AdWords will let you separate a day into up to six periods so you can’t bid by the hour. In this example I’ll segment the traffic into five segments; use existing data to decide how many segments you’ll need. Here are the instructions

1. Log into Google Analytics and select your paid search profile (if you don’t have a profile that filters out organic traffic use your standard profile).
2. Click the “Advanced Segments” link in the left hand menu and then click “Create a new customised segment”
3. You are now in the customised segment interface. Click “Visitors” under the “Dimensions” label in the left hand menu. Then drag “Hour of the Day” into the box labelled “dimension or metric”
4. My first segment will be from midnight to 06:00 so I’d select “Less than or equal to” in the condition drop down box and enter “6” in the value box.
5. If you aren’t in a PPC only profile then you’ll need a PPC filter as well. Click “Add “and” statement” and then drag “Medium” from the left hand menu to the box (In the Traffic Sources category). Select “cpc” in the value box.
6. Name your segment and then move onto the next one. You’ll have to add an extra “and” condition to tell the segment to start after 0600.

Now you can view the report and select your segments. As the picture above shows that over the whole week midday traffic is the most valuable but on Friday morning traffic is better whereas on Saturday midday traffic is the best.

Google will only let you choose three segments to display at once but to see everything on a day by day, hour by hour basis use the export to .csv option and then view the graph in your favourite spreadsheet. By comparing the percentage difference between the conversion rate of a particular segment and the average conversion rate you can tell how much more that traffic is worth to you.

Many SEO practitioners still apply optimisation techniques like in 1999. Back then popular belief was that it was perfectly enough to lure Internet users to a website with whatever means it takes and then everything else would would work fine. Things like readability were far off the SEO agenda.

For a few years now the SEO industry focuses on conversions, that is converting a website visitor to a client through web design for ROI. In order to achieve that the foremost task is to keep the visitor on the page in the first place.

Still you see plenty of people who do not apply the most basic readability measures to increase their conversions. Webmasters still risk a high bounce rate due to large chunks of text which are not easily digestible by people visiting a site. It actually makes them leave instantly in most cases.

It’s known at least since 1999 that people do not read on the web, they scan pages in order to find quick clues about the subject matter they are interested in.

There are at least 10 ways to provide them with such clues. Thus I introduce to to you 10 readability measures to increase conversions. I start with the most basic, important and must use methods of making any text readable. Of course you’re advised to write an abstract, intro or teaser even before the main text starts.

1. paragraphs
Any text that is longer than a few sentences must be split into paragraphs, otherwise the human eye can’t deal with it without getting tired very quickly, espeically on the Web where screen flickering even aggravated this problem.

2. bold, italic
Bold and italic are the two most basic ways of stressing or emphasizing the most important key terms in a text. Don’t ever use underline on text online unless it’s a link. Italic works best on new terms you introduce, bold on the most important parts of a given message. You should never use bold and italic more than once in a paragraph as this takes the emphasis away and confuses the reader.

3. background colors
Text marker like emphasis by background colors (think yellow!) can be very powerful to capture readers attention. It’s also a little annoying to the eye so use it wisely, like once per page. Also you could use very modest colors to prevent eye strain. Sometimes a grey backgropund color is perfectly enough.

4. citation
A very intriguing tidbit which also works without reading the whol etext is often great to get attention of the raeder. Thus I most often use at least one citation in my posts. Use blockquote for this purpose.

5. subheadlines
It is not coincidence that HTML has as many as 6 headline tags, the h1 - h6. Most people do not use more than 2 of them while at least 4 make sense. h1 as headline of the page (SEO blog), h2 as the headline of the article “12 Readability Measures to Increase Conversions”, h3 could be abstract. h4 can be used for long texts as headlines for each paragraph.

6. unordered (bulleted) lists
Unordered lists using the ul-tag are a very simple means to make a text readable. Any list of items that is no longer than 6 is best fitted into a simple bulleted list.

7. ordered (numbered) lists
Nothing makes a post more readable than a numbered list. Be it a top 7, 8, 10 or top 100 list. People reading on the web rely on lists to quickly find the relevant part of a text. You notice in an instant which items you already know or do not interest you and skip them, while perusing a page and jump to those most relevant to you.

8. tables
More complex data can’t be fitted into a simple list be it bulleted or numbered. Once you have to compare data you need a table with columns. tables provide a quick overview and comparison of numbers or factors. I love the our product vs the competition features tables and always stick to analyze them.

9. charts, pie charts e.g.
Humans can better grasp visual information than information hidden in a text. So whenever there are numbers, especially percentage numbers or date over time a chart is the best way to display them in a meaningful way. Pie charts are great for percentage numbers and bar graphs for data colected and compared over time.

10. images (photos)
Most main stream media employ illustrators for their feature articles. In SEO most people do not use images. Either they can’t afford illustrators or due to lack of SEO images, you just don’t see much of SEO you could photograph. Instead you can use real life stock images to illustrate your points metaphorically. Beware of SEO stock image cliches though. Nobody wants to see an ugly spider on a SEO company page or a magnifying glass like on all others.

11. pagination
Pagination is a method of making test readable we know from books and magazines. On the web pagination is often annoying and requires several clicks on tiny icons to see more images or read a whole text. Sometimes pagination can also result in duplicate content issues that hamper SEO efforts. On the other hand scrolling huge pages and loading them in the first place is annoying as well and makes people run away before the page is full loaded. You can connect both worlds by using CSS pagination.

12. borders
Ever since CSS was introduced you do not have to stick to bold and italic anymore, you can use background colors and borders as well. A border around a large piece of tect makes it appear like a painting. This very much magnifies the importance of such a text part.

I assume most people already know that you should place a text of approx. 200 words to not be considered an empty page by Google. This number has been contested but it’s common sense that you need content to get found in most cases. Also most of these measures have a direct positive impact on search engine visibility. For instance keyword repetition in lists is regarded as natural and is not perceived as keyword stuffing like elsewhere on a page.

As shown in my last blog post, now that Google are using expanded broad match to trigger ads from “travel ppc” for a search query on “shooting holidays USA”, getting a comprehensive list of negative keywords is a good idea. In this post I list five good resources for finding negative keywords; some of them are not intended to be used in this way but they still give useful information about possible negative keywords.

1. SEO Book Forums
Most campaigns will want a generic list of negative keywords. Things like “free” or “reviews” are good examples of negative keywords for any sort of campaign that sells a service or product online. The SEO Book has a huge list of negative keywords on their SEO Community Forums. You need a subscription to access the forum; I don’t think it’s worth getting one just for this but if you have one already then make use of this resource which is a great negative keyword starting point.

2. Google Keyword Tool
This is an obvious one but it’s still worth mentioning. When you’re using the tool to look for keyword ideas and you see something that isn’t relevant to your ad group then select “negative” from the drop down menu and prevent your ads from showing.  You can also use any other keyword tool in a similar way.

3. Google Analytics
Once you’ve implemented the Google Analytics filters I talked about last week you’ll have a list of the search queries people used when they clicked your ads. Not only is this a great for finding new keyword variants it’s also a good source of possible negative keywords.

4. SpyFu
Get a SpyFu report on your own domain name. SpyFu works by doings its own Google searches and scraping the results. If it says you’re bidding on “Price searches” then an ad with your domain as a display URL is showing an ad for that term. You can also have fun trying to guess what broad match terms your competitors are using based on their paid keywords.

5. The Google SERPs
Everyone knows that when you do a Google search the search query appears in bold whenever it is written on the results page. What people may not have noticed is that Google also emboldens (is that even a word?) related terms that it thinks are semantically linked to the search query. For example if you search “SEO” then “search engine optimisation” also appears in bold. If you see something in bold that isn’t relevant then add it as a negative.

6. Google Search Based Keyword Tool
As you’ve probably read yesterday, the new Google Search Based Keyword Tool is designed to help you spot missed opportunities in your AdWords campaign. Like most keyword tools it can also be used to find good negative keywords. This one is worth mentioning in its own point because it also gives you suggested landing pages for each new keyword. If one of your existing PPC landing pages is appearing as a suggestion for a lot of negative keywords then this suggests that the page should be more tightly optimised to prevent Google matching it with other PPC search terms.

Another useful thing to remember is to keep thinking in terms of your ad groups when adding negative keywords; if you have an ad group for “red cars” and an ad group for “blue cars” you should add “blue” as a negative in the “red cars” ad group. Otherwise expanded broad match might decide that since your “red cars” ad group has such a great quality score it might display that ad on the query “blue cars” even if you have [blue cars] as an exact match in your other ad group.

There is also a useful summary of a discussion on how negative keywords are matched over at seroundtable which is definately worth a look if you’re adding negative key phrases rather than just keywords.

With Twitter the phase of “do we really need it?” is over. The “how do we use it?” phase is right now. There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to bull**** and even clients come up to me and ask me about Twitter after reading one of those Twitter articles in the main stream media.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for SEO and overall business users?

We see at least a dozen new Twiter tools every other day. So I selected just 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Some of these tools have been around for a few months some have sprung up just recently. They have one thing in common: You must be aware of these tools in case you’re serious about Twitter participation.

Twitter Clients

TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

twhirl | the social software client
One of the more popular Twitter clients.

Spaz: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
Cross platform open source Twitter client.

Hahlo
Web based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimized Twitter app.

Twinkle - New iPhone Twitter Client Uses Locate Me Features! | Just Another iPhone Blog
Twitter client for the iPhone that allows you to socialize with people near you. Great for conferences it seems.

Twobile: A Twitter client for Windows Mobile - Download Squad
Twitter client for Windows mobile powered mobile phones. Most smartphones other than iPhone, Blackberry and Google Phone use Widows Mobile.

Misc. Twitter Tools

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet 2 : Web
This is an alternative web based interface for Twitter and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one, for instance it offers one click retweets and makes bio links clickable etc.

TwitterCounter: How popular is @photojojo
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Magpie: Make Money on Twitter
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boast that users can make something like 50 to 200$ a month just by tweeting.

About crowdstatus :: Crowdstatus.com
This tool allows you to create address groups of people at Twitter and notify all of them at once.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter for WordPress - Rick’s HideOut
Very basic but unobtrusive way of including your Tweets in your WordPress blog.

Wordpress Twitter Widget
Clean and simple Twitter widget for the WordPress sidebar.

WP to Twitter | Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
Twitter updater plugin using the Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Adnan`s Crazy Blogging World » Blog Archive » My blog gets twitterized
Basic and quite ugly but very popular Twitter plugin many bloggers use, even TechCrunch.

AJAX Twitter plugin for Wordpress
Advanced AJAX powered widget for your blog not only displaying tweets but letting you send updates from your blog.

Twitter Updater » Fireside Media Development Blog
This tool lets you tweet your blog posts automatically.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

TwitterFox – naan studio
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add on.

TwitBin - twitter your browser - twitbin.com
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

TwitKit
Another Twitter Firefox client with more features though.

TwitterBar :: Firefox Add-ons
Let’s you post from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Twitturly - Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
Digg-like interface for the currently hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzzes of the last 24 hours
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls - Popular Twitter Links Tweeted err Twittered err Twhatever
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

ReadBurner: What’s Shared on the Web
Lets you monitor the buzz around Twitter elsewhere among many other memes.

POPrl.com / Shrinking popular URLs since 1973 / What’s POPular
Short URL service like TinyURL but better. Offers not only stats but also a Digg-like interface for the most popular URLs shared.

Twitter Analytics

TweetStats :: Graphin’ Your Stats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twitstat.com - Twitter Analytics
Both a Twitter search engine and popularity stats at the same time (e.g: showing most active users).

Twitterverse
A Twitter keyword tag cloud for quick overview on what’s going on.

Twist - see trends in twitter
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com - Who’s not following you back? Who aren’t you following?
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

Twitter Twerp Scan
Gives you a quick overview about your followers so that you don’t have to click each one.

These 30+ Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine but make sure you know what you doing on Twitter and have some business objectives. There is a new blog by problogger Darren Rowse called Twitip to help you out with that.

The Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday posted about it’s new SEO Starter Guide, available for free PDF download.

This is excellent news for small business owners, especially during a recession, as many companies will be looking to push their search rankings/traffic forward but without the budget for SEO consulting.

“Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.”

There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there if you’re looking to learn SEO yourself from forums so the guide is great to provide a common-sense approach to understanding on-site search engine optimisation. It’s also good news for the search industry that Google are providing information like this. By educating webmasters about SEO best practices this will hopefully clear-up any false impressions or concerns some may have about the industry as a whole.

For more information there’s a write-up over on Search Engine Land.

It can be very difficult at times to find the actual search terms your PPC traffic arrives from, so this is a Google Analytics trick all advertisers should know. Google’s search query report can be useful but for high-traffic phrase or broad match keywords being told that 8 of your clicks arrived on “85 unique queries” doesn’t really give you the complete picture!

Since the introduction of expanded broad match Google can (and does) match your broad match keywords to just about anything vaguely relevant; knowing these queries is important, either to negative match them or to reduce CPCs by using an exact match. The image below really does highlight this point, notice the extremely irrelevant term “shooting holidays USA” was triggered by a broad match of travel PPC!

This report was setup last week and shows the AdWords keywords (either exact, phrase or broad match) followed by the actual search term which triggered the clickthrough in brackets:

(Click for full-size image)

Step by step guide on how to setup a Search Query report in Google Analytics
This information can easily be found in Google Analytics but, although the method is simple, it is not obvious; to be able to access this PPC goldmine you have to use filters. Until last week I didn’t even know the filters feature existed and even if I had I wouldn’t have been able to do the regular expressions stuff that our filters will need. For this reason I’d like to thank the Google Analytics Experts and the linklove blog for giving me some simple step by step instructions.

• In the above case we’ve set up a new profile before messing around, just to ensure that if a mistake was made none of the data is affected. There’s an “Add a Website Profile” option on the Analytics settings page; you want to add a profile for an existing site and then name it.
• Then you want to write the two filters; click the “Filter Manager” button and then add a filter.
• This first filter will get the search query and place it in a user defined field. I call it “Get Search Query” but you can name it whatever you want to. Select “Custom Filter” from the filter type drop down menu and select the “Advanced” radio button. You should see some input fields named “Field A -> Extract A” and similar.
• In the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down menu select “Referral”; this will pull out the SERP’s URL on which the ad was shown. In the box to the left on the drop down menu write “(\?|&)(q|p)=([^&]*)” without the quotation marks. This is a regular expression which extracts the search query from the SERP’s URL.
• In the “Field B -> Extract B” drop down menu select “Campaign Medium” and write “ppc|cpc” in the box. This filters out all the organic clicks.
• In the “Output To -> Constructor” drop down choose “Customized Field 1” and enter “$A3” in the box. This just tells Google Analytics where to store the data. Finally you need to click the button to make field B required and the one to turn off case sensitivity. Then apply the filter to your new profile.
• The 2nd filter includes this new data in the keyword report. Again, you want to set up an advanced custom filter but this time choose “Customized Field 1” from the “Field A -> Extract A” drop down. In the box write “(.*)”
• For “Field B -> Extract B” select “Campaign Term” to find out which of your keywords the search query matched and enter “(.*)” again in the box.
• Finally in the “Output To -> Constructor” menu choose “Campaign Term” or wherever you want your data to go and then enter “$B1, $A1” The space after the comma means that you can export your data to a .csv and have a separate field for the actual search term.
• If you’ve followed the steps as I’ve laid them out then the filters should be applied in the right order; if you want to check the information is there when you click to edit the new profile from the “Analytics Settings” page.

As always, it’ll be a little while before Google Analytics starts to register the new data so don’t be too impatient. Unfortunately the filters can’t be applied retrospectively so you can’t start using them on all your old data but as far as I’m concerned this is the only downside. Set up the filters and start refining your AdWords campaigns!

Brand or product plus alternative

• iphone alternative
• iphone competitor
• iphone rival
• better than iphone
• like iphone

I see a lot of searches like that where people know only one brand but don’t want to stick with it.

Entering the market late means you’re a “mom and pop shop” opening in the vicinity of a huge WalMart or Tesco store so you can’t compete by offering exactly what the huge chain offers. You got specialise and be different.

Choose several of these modifiers, the most apt ones for your business and start optimising for them right away. Using modifiers brings SEO results much quicker. Later on you still can rank for the most competitive terms.

I’ve been blogging for the last three years now and one of the most important things I’ve learnt is readers don’t have the time (or attention span) to read through long detailed posts. Concise, attractive looking posts grab the attention of readers and performs far more effectively almost every time.

I figured this out the hard way, spending hours writing up long posts which I perceived as quality content. Unfortunately no-one else agreed! Surprisingly the short and very quick posts which I didn’t think were anywhere near as interesting, seemed to grab the attention of readers, commenter’s and social media audiences.

5 reasons why you should forget about writing the perfect piece of quality content

Image Credit: Flickr

1) Ditch the long paragraphs - no-one reads them!
Is it worth describing point 1 in detail here? Chances are that readers will skim over the title and skip to point 2! So off to point 2…

2) A diagram paints a thousand words
An informative diagram will be quicker to understand and instantly provide an overview of the post. Additional content can be added to back-up the post for users who are looking for more detail, without the need for reading through everything for those who aren’t so interested.

3) A picture doesn’t even need to paint three words!
Images make the page look attractive and can be the difference between a StumbleUpon thumbs up or a user leaving the site before the browser even loads.

4) Spend your time researching a large number of bullet points instead of copywriting
As interesting as the post might be, if it looks long-winded it will probably get ignored. If you have a bullet-pointed list full of useful information or links, for example, users are likely to scan through each item and bookmark to finish later.

5) A boring headline = no-one reads your post
You might have thousands of website visitors or RSS subscribers, but no matter how good the post is, it’s likely to get skipped if the headline is dull. Put more of your copywriting effort into considering the headline and the reward should be far greater.

So there you have it, it’s simple - blogging’s all about headlines, lists & images! Maybe you should try it yourself, drop the hours of copywriting and watch the social media votes roll in!