While doing a search for my last blog post Google displayed part of it’s page source code, mainly the stylesheet, instead of the actual results.
Here’s the screenshot (click image for full-size) of the page shown instead of the Google SERPs:
I also noticed this appear for a search yesterday but haven’t seen it appear before this, has anyone else found this error appearing recently?
This is a feature in the new version of Blogger I find quite annoying, when editing an old post it is marked as new and re-added back into the RSS feed. This has happened today when correcting a spelling mistake in my Aviva Directory post.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to prevent this from occurring for edited posts?
Last month Shoemoney posted a tip to increase CTR by placing the keywords searched for in the shape of an arrow in the AdWords ad text.
Shoemoney has now backed this up with an example using the arrow trick for a ringtones AdWords ad and this shows a 100% CTR increase over the regular ad. For more information and a screenshot of the ads performance please read Shoemoney’s Google AdWords arrow trick to increase click through rate post.
Google Webmaster Central now provides a backlink tool for site owners. Matt Cutts posted about this yesterday to make sure users understand that “the backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet” and “do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.”.
When logging into my own Google Webmaster Central account, and clicking on the new links tab, I saw that 2,189 were recognised to this blog, while this still has a way to go before showing as many links as Yahoo! Site Explorer (currently 5,146) this is a great improvement over the sampling of results using a Google link: command search (98 links).
Yahoo! are upgrading U.S. accounts to Panama tomorrow and the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog have posted 5 best practices to make sure users are ready for the new ranking model.
“Here are five practices that you, if you have upgraded to the new platform, should put in place right away in order to get the most out of the new ranking model, and out of your account:
1. Include keywords in your ad (use our Insert Keyword feature).
2. Carefully determine keywords for your ad group.
3. Use ad testing to learn which messages are performing best for you, based on click-through rate normalized for position
4. Use our Excluded Keyword feature to help optimize your Advanced match type.
5. Review your current bids and set a campaign budget to meet your business goals.”
Panama will not be available until later this year in the UK, so far I have only seen screenshots of the new interface but I do manage a couple of American Yahoo! Search Marketing clients so I’m looking forward to seeing the new system in action!
This has been an important week for free keyword research tools, Overture’s tool has been unavailable for the last few days (now back online) while Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery have both released free versions of their own keyword research tools. So now there seems to be much more choice to find the best keywords, but which tool is best to use?
Overture
I’ve been using the Overture keyword tool for over a year and while the responsiveness has sometimes been very slow I have generally been quite pleased with the results. The search count has been lower than I expected as these figures are only based upon Yahoo! queries from the previous month and occasionally some strange long-tail results appear, such as the “beer college college…” result above but overall this gives a good idea about the popularity of keywords. Another advantage I like is how you can search to find the popular keywords in the UK using the Overture UK tool.
Wordtracker
My first impression of using the Wordtracker keyword tool is that I’ve found the search figures to be very low for most terms, this is calculated using Netapplications.com which only account for 0.63% of searches and as a result this gives a rough idea of the popular keyword searches but really needs to be based upon a wider range of searches to provide more accurate results.
KeywordDiscovery
I’ve only briefly used Trellian’s KeywordDiscovery tool but I have been very impressed with the results returned. The accuracy of search figures looks to be much greater than both the Overture and Wordtracker keyword tools, mainly because search data is collected from all major search engines.
Overall I find KeywordDiscovery to provide the most accurate results and search terms but would also suggest comparing results over a couple of keyword tools to make sure your not missing out on some valuable long-tail keywords. Personally I would probably compare the KeywordDiscovery results with the Overture UK list to check that the British have the same search trends.
Google Trends or the AdWords keyword tool could also be useful options, but I’d prefer to use tools which combine keyword suggestions with search stats (although the AdWords does display a search volume indicator) so I normally wouldn’t use these as regularly. What does everyone else think, which keyword tools do you prefer to use?
During January I tested some different ad text variations to find the difference in CTR, conversion rates and CPC’s for each ad. The AdGroup focused on a range of SEO keywords, geo-targeted to the UK and an SEO enquiry would be classed as a conversion. This campaign bids upon the content network and broad match traffic, using a lower maximum bid, which is the main reason why the CTR’s are quite low.
The first ad used a general title “Search Engine Marketing”:
61 Clicks | 0.06% CTR | £0.48 CPC | Conv Rate 8.2% | Cost/Conv £5.96
A second ad used the same ad text but with a title more targeted to SEO. While this ad had a large increase in CTR, the cost per click and per conversion was also higher: 
11 Clicks | 0.21% CTR | £0.60 | Conv Rate 9.1% | Cost/Conv £6.66
Improving on this was a third ad, targeted more to the UK using “SEO Services UK” as the title.
31 Clicks | 0.43% CTR | £0.62 CPC | Conv Rate 16.1% | Cost/Conv £3.80
I expected to see an increase in CTR when targeting the UK more specifically but adding UK to the SEO Services title increased the CTR by 100% which is much larger than I would have originally anticipated.
Over the last week I have also began a new test, now running just the SEO Services UK ad, which is being rotated with the ad below. The only difference with this is the display URL, the new ad uses seoptimise.co.uk (which redirects to .com) as I’m interested in seeing if UK users will be more likely to click upon a .co.uk ad rather than a .com address.
9 Clicks | 0.43% CTR | £0.59 CPC | Conv Rate 11.1% | Cost/Conv £5.28
So far the results have shown it’s unimportant, with an identical CTR but a lower converion rate, although the new ad only has 9 clicks so far. I will leave these running for a while longer as I am keen to see the results based upon a higher amount of clicks and impressions. In addition to this I’ve setup a similar campaign targeted to the Oxfordshire region but at the moment this hasn’t been receiving too many impressions but I hope this will improve over the next week.
www.seoptimise.com has also began ranking in Google’s top 10 for SEO Services UK so I plan on tracking the difference between organic and paid traffic using Google Analytics and posting the results later in the month.
The Inside AdWords blog has posted that you can now customise the columns in your account.
“Are there certain statistics in your account that you don’t need to see each time you log in? Now, you can use our Customizable Columns feature to choose the columns you’d like to view. Simply select the new ‘Customize Columns’ link from the Campaign Summary, Campaign Detail, and/or Ad Group Detail page, and indicate which column you’d like to hide. The column selected will immediately stop showing and will remain hidden until you choose to unhide it.”
Aaron Wall has just posted that Wordtracker have launched new free version of their keyword tool.
Mike Mindel from Wordtracker commented about this to confirm that “We’re offering 100 results free, adult filtered with drill down into the long tail.”
This is excellent timing as the Overture keyword tool has been regularly unavailable for the last couple of days, although Yahoo! have confirmed that this has not gone but “the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.”
Here is the Wordtracker keyword tool, this looks to be an excellent way to quickly find the popularity of search terms, based upon Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com figures, and I especially like the way you can easily drilldown to the long tail results, as Mike said.
While checking Google’s recommended daily budget for my AdWords account today I noticed a message saying that a new, more detailed budget recommendation will be available in 15 days.
Clicking the question mark shows an updated version of the How does Google come up with a recommended daily budget? AdWords help page, showing how the recommendation will show either a detailed budget analysis or basic recommendation:
