If you’re a seasoned marketer you’ve undoubtedly experienced the five stages of grief when confronted with unexpected bounce rate or time-on-page metrics for your landing page. First there is denial: “What?! There is no way my site’s bounce rate is 90%!” Then anger: “lying piece of @#! software.” Bargaining for performance: “Hmm, maybe if I exclude the stats before October….” Depression about the content: “My blog is no good. No one but my mom cares what I have to say…” Finally, acceptance sets in: “Okay, this isn’t working. Time to start over.”

Stop being so dramatic!

Although Google’s Page Views, Time on Page, and Bounce Rate are important measures of relevance, they hide instances of quality user engagement for single page-view sessions. Google Analytics computes the Time-on-Page metric by subtracting the time stamps between page views for each page request in a user’s session. This is a scalable way to compute this statistic for your whole site, but it falls down if a visit only has one page view. This is a problem for millions of bloggers who write single page blog posts. As an example, I frequently land on an interesting tech blog, read the page for two minutes and “bounce” away to another site. Although I spent two minutes on this page, time stamp-based analytics products (like Google Analytics) records my visit as a zero second page hit. Not only does your analytics software fail to record the Time on Page for this visit, your Average Time on Page statistic is skewed by all of these zero values. Ouch, double whammy!

For those astute readers out there this is really just a specific example of how time stamp-based computations don’t give you Time-on-Page durations for the last page of a user’s session because its not possible to record the time stamp of the request leaving your site. And yes, this phenomenon also throws off your site-wide statistics as well as your cumulative averages for individual pages. So how can you overcome these problems to accurately assess the relevance of your content and the effectiveness of your PPC, SEO and landing page optimization initiatives? Enter Yield Software.

Yield Software actually records when a user unloads the page from their browser so that you get real data for the last page in a user’s session (including single page visit sessions and mutli-tab sessions). This is great news for all of those one-page bloggers out there, but this is especially great news for users of Yield Software’s PPC bid management system. Armed with accurate time-on-page metrics, the Yield Software bidding algorithm has an additional measure of relevance to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of a given keyword/match type/ad combination besides the often-scarce conversion rate statistic.

Yield Software is also smart about computing bounce rates and conversions. By default, a single-page visit is not considered a bounce if the user spends more than 20 seconds on a page. We find that this definition of bounce rate presents a much more accurate picture of your content’s relevance. Yield Software can even be configured to record conversion events when visitors spend more than a certain amount of time on a specific page, on your entire site, or if they visit more than X pages in a session.

So don’t despair if your time-on-site and bounce rate seem ridiculously low, because you probably don’t have all of the facts! This is especially true if you want to measure relevance beyond the black-and-white nature of the standard conversion rate favored by shopping cart sites (bloggers I’m looking at you).

This blog post is focused on Google AdWords advertising in the United States.  Please note that other search engines and other countries have different rules.

What you can do:

You can use your competitor’s name and other trademarks as target keywords in your ppc campaign.  Competitive ads can bring in relevant traffic that is really affordable, so it’s almost always worth exploring.

Your competitor might call you to complain about this, or send you threatening e-mails.  You should feel free to ignore these requests.

What you can’t do:

You cannot use your competitors name or trademarks in your ad copy.  Google will automatically disapprove the ad if it catches someone else’s trademark in your ad copy that you are not approved to use.  This also means you should not try using dynamic keyword insert to have your competitor’s trademark appear in your ad copy.

How to get the best results:

Since your keywords and ad copy will appear unrelated to Google, you should expect a low quality score.  But even with a low quality score, the cost per click for competitive advertising is usually significantly lower than other keywords.  Following are some tips on how to get the best results:

Ad Copy: The “usual offers” such as a free trial or free shipping won’t be effective here.  Instead, try a complementary offer that can lure in everyone – even prospects who think they have already decided to go with your competitor.  Ideas here are a kit or guide they can download, a whitepaper on a hot industry topic, or access to reviews and comparisons.  Offering substantial discounts can also be effective.  Whatever it is, in this case even more than others, your ad must stand out more and your offer and call to action must be much stronger than the trademark owner’s.

Keywords:  Using only your competitor’s trademark may have limited effectiveness.  But, there are a couple areas where you are likely to find much better performance.  1) Keyword phrases which imply the searcher is still researching and hasn’t yet chosen to go with your competitor.  For example, if I were selling saleforce automation software, I would target the keyword “Salesforce reviews.”  2) Keyword phrases which imply the searcher is frustrated with your competitor.  For example, if I were advertising for Google Chrome, I would target the keyword phrase “IE is slow.”

Just be sure to do unto yourself as you do unto others…. so if someone out there is searching for your own trademark and expressing frustration or skepticism of a scam, be sure that you are the first ad that appears, not your competitor’s!

Are you satisfied with the click-through rate of your Google Adwords campaign?

If you’ve taken the time to target relevant keywords and feel you have a compelling offer in your ad copy, it can be incredibly frustrating when the CTR for your campaign just isn’t at an acceptable level.

If you want to give your click-through rate on Google AdWords a boost, here are five super fast moves you can make:

1)      Try out Modified Broad Match. Look for keywords with a low CTR that are on broad match.  Start using modified broad match for these keywords.  You can do this by putting a + sign before the most important words in the keyword phrase.  Here’s more on how it works from Google AdWords.

2)      Target the same geographic area, but at a lower level. Target all the individual states instead of the United States, or target all the individual cities instead of a state.  This will get you an extra line on your ad copy and make you appear more relevant to searchers.

3)      Add in Negative Keywords. Weed out irrelevant impressions by adding in negative keywords.  Go to Keywords – See Search Terms.  Identify any words that aren’t relevant and add them in as negative keywords.

4)      Fine-tune where your ads display. Change your campaign settings to show ads on Search network only (rather than Search & Content network).  Also, set your campaign device setting to show your ads on computers only instead of computers and mobile devices.

5)      Give your ad some more bold. Copy your best performing ad.  Add it to the ad group with keywords with the lowest CTR.  Put the main keywords from the ad group into the page title, once in the description lines and preceding or trailing the URL display (separated by dashes.)  After adding in this ad, pause the worst-performing ad in the ad group.

Improving your CTR has a direct impact on your quality score and therefore your ad position and cost you pay per click.  So it’s important to shoot for the moon by making regular adjustments to continually improve your performance.

We commonly hear complaints from clients that the conversion numbers reported by Google Adwords and Google Analytics are not accurate.  Most commonly we hear:  “Google AdWords conversions don’t match my transaction log” and “the conversions in Google AdWords and the conversions in Google Analytics don’t match.”  This usually leads to distrust and frustration on the part of the advertiser.  Our standard answer is “no, they won’t match, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t accurate”

Here’s a quick explanation of how conversion reporting works in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.  Once you understand what they are tracking and how they are reporting the data, you’ll be able to look at the data in a whole new light.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking:

First click attribution:  The keyword that triggers your ad the first time the searcher visits your site will be credited with the conversion (even if they converted on a subsequent visit through a different search).  The conversion date will be recorded on the first day the searcher clicked on your ad (which may be earlier than the actual day the conversion occurred.)  This is why AdWords conversions will not match your transaction log and why the data you see for previous time periods continues to change even after that time period has passed.

30-day cookie: Google AdWords tracks a visitor for 30 days after they click on your ad.

3^rd party cookie:  Google AdWords conversion tracking uses a 3^rd party cookie, which means it’s more vulnerable to being blocked and removed.

Filters invalid clicks.  If you receive invalid clicks that have associated conversions, those conversions will be removed from your AdWords reporting.

Google Analytics:

Last click attribution.  The last keyword the searcher used to access your site when they converted is given credit for the conversion.  The conversion is recorded on the actual day of the conversion event.

6 month cookie.  By default, Google Analytics tracks a visitor for 6 months after they visit your site.

^1st party cookie.  This means it’s a bit less vulnerable to being blocked or removed.

Does not filter invalid clicks.  If you have invalid clicks that led to a conversion being recorded, they are not removed from your Analytics account.

But wait, there’s more!  Knowing only the first clicks and last clicks which led to a conversion is just a small part of the story.  What about all those clicks and impressions in between?

When you have Adwords and Google Analytics sharing data, you can see first clicks, last clicks and all the clicks and impressions in between (referred to as Assists) that resulted in a conversion on your website.  To see these reports, go to your Adwords account and select Reporting -> Conversions.  In the pane on the left-hand side click on the Search Funnels link.

There are several fantastic reports here that will show you all of the clicks and impressions, along with paths and time lags for your conversions.

Using these reports, you can easily get a picture of the role that each of your keywords play in the conversion story to make improvements that will truly improve the performance of your pay-per-click campaign.

When’s the last time you’ve reviewed the settings for your pay-per-click campaign?  There are some default settings you’ll want to modify and also some new features you don’t want to miss out on.

1)  Networks. This one is more well-known, but I mention it here because the recommendations in this blog post focus on the search network only.  No campaign should even run on both the Search and Display Networks (which is the default setting).  Check the “Let me choose…” option to target only one network per campaign.

2)  Devices. By default Google sets your campaign to run on computers and mobile devices with full internet browsers such as the iPhone.  We recommend targeting only one device type per campaign.  Set your campaign to run on desktop and laptop computers only.  If you want to target mobile devices, create a separate campaign.  Mobile behaviors are different, so mobile performance should be viewed and optimized separately.

3) Ad Extensions. Ad Extensions have made such a huge lift in the CTR of ads that AdWords has moved these settings to their own tab.  There are 4 different types of ad extensions you can have displayed with your ads:

Sitelinks Extensions. These are the extra links to your website that appear beneath your ad when you have a great quality score and appear in one of the top ad spots.  Everyone should be using these.  There is no campaign that can’t benefit from the CTR boost that Sitelinks provide.  For more information on how to make the most of your Sitelinks, check out these Sitelinks Recommendations.

Location Extensions.  This setting creates an extra address line that appears beneath your ad.  The address will appear with a link to show a map if it’s in a top ad spot.  Otherwise the address will appear as an extra line of text beneath your ad.  If you are a local business, or trying to drive people to a location, enter your addresses here, or hook to your Google Places account.  We recommend that anyone with a business address use this extension.  The address only displays when it’s within a reasonable distance of the searcher and everyone like to do business with someone close by even if you are a national company.

Phone Extensions.  If you are targeting mobile devices and want to have your phone number displayed and click-to-call enabled, add your phone number here.

Product Extensions.  This setting will enable the searcher to preview your products within your PPC ad.  If you have a product feed that can be visualized, hook up your Google Merchant account here.  We recommend thinking beyond the typical retailer here – pictures of software products, pictures of homes for sale, pictures of hotel rooms – all kinds of businesses can benefit from a Google Merchant Product Feed.

4)  Ad Scheduling.  Every campaign can benefit from Ad Scheduling.  Google Analytics has now made it super easy for you to view your campaign’s performance by day of the week and hour of the day.  Go to Google Analytics -> Traffic Sources -> AdWords -> Day Parts.

Here you will see the performance of your campaign by day of the week within the chart.

And by hour of the day within the table.

There are 2 things you are looking for here:

Any day of the week, or hours of the day that consistently underperform.  You’ll want to either turn these off or lower your bids for these times.

Any day of the week, or hours of the day that have amazing performance.  You can increase your bids for these times so you get the most exposure during the peak performing times.

Once you have top and bottom day and hour performers, go back to your AdWords campaign to the Advanced Settings Ad Scheduling option.

In the ad scheduling popup, make 2 adjustments at the top.  Select the Bid adjustment link and select the 24 hour link.

Click on any days that you want to you identified as over-achievers or under-performers in you Analytics analysis.

To turn them off, just enter the hours you don’t want them to run and select the Not Running option – you can copy them to other days of the week if you want to.

To increase bids, just enter the hours and enter the increased bid percentage for your best performing hours – for example 120%.

To decrease bids for those time periods which perform less well, but you still want your ads to run, you can enter a percentage less that 100% here for those day parts.

For example, common settings for a B2B company are turning off ads on the weekends, bumping up bids during peak hours during the day and lowering bids for off-hours in the middle of the night on week days.  Ad Scheduling is a great way to only pay a premium when you expect to get premium results.

If you’re not using one or more of these features in AdWords with your PPC campaigns, you should start immediately.  (If you’re not already using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, we can help.)

One of the major touted benefits of Google AdWords’ Quality Score system for advertisers is that the “little guys” should be able to compete with the “big guys” on a level playing field.

However, 99 percent of the small and medium-sized business that we work with come to us with such low quality scores, they are the ones being punished by the very system that is supposed to help them out.

Many small businesses don’t even know about Quality Score.  Of the businesses that do know about it, most are only familiar with the high-level requirements that keywords, ads and landing pages should all be relevant.  In the mind of the small advertiser, they have created a relevant ad campaign.  Small advertisers lack the time and resources to figure out quality score on their own, and also lack the budget to pay an expert to get them a great quality score.

Big advertisers know about Quality Score, and pay someone to take care of it for them.  So the big advertisers end up with the winning combination of great quality scores and large budgets.

So: how much does Quality Score matter? A ton. Quality Score is a direct factor in determining:

If your ad is eligible to be shown. Keyword / ad combinations with very low quality scores are not always shown.

What position your ad will appear in. Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

How much you pay per click. Actual CPC = (Ad Rank to beat ÷ Quality Score) + $0.01

What’s Quality Score should advertisers be striving for?

First, make sure you are keeping track of your quality score.  Quality Score are actually based on keyword and ad combinations, but in AdWords they are shown at the keyword level   The Quality Score column is hidden by default, so you’ll need to click on the columns option and to add it in.

Google shows a simplified score within AdWords based on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the worst rating and 10 being the best.  They do add some qualitative descriptors to the scores “Poor”, “OK” and “Great.”

You should strive to have all of your keywords show a quality score between 7-10.

For any keywords with a quality score of 1-3.  You’ll need to give some long, hard thought as to how important these are to your advertising campaign.  Most of the time it’s easiest to just delete these and start fresh with new variations.  Keywords with quality scores of 4-6 are usually pretty easily repaired.

The Fastest, Easiest Way to Improve Your Quality Score

Don’t advertise on any single-word keywords. These are too vague, get them out of your account.

Create super small ad groups, so that you can repeat the keywords inside of your ad copy multiple times. Here’s an example:

Getting the picture?  It’s not rocket science, but it is a data entry nightmare.

Check the call out button next to your quality score within AdWords to see if it says anything about your landing page.  If it does, the landing page issue (often speed) needs to be fixed.  If not, don’t worry about your landing page.

Start to use negative keywords.  This will weed out unwanted ad impressions.  Here are two great resources for getting started:

In AdWords, select the Keywords tab, set the date range to view a couple months worth of data.  In the menu select to sell all of the search terms.  Look through this list and add any words that aren’t relevant to your website as negative keywords.

Think about all of the basic types of searches done that include your target keywords, but aren’t relevant: (1) People hunting for jobs (job, jobs, employment, resume, salaries, etc.); people hunting for pictures or presentations (pic, pics, pictures, ppt, etc.); or people hunting for reading material (news, industry, market, blog, blogs, forum, forums, etc.)

So if you are a “little guy” we recommend you start to monitor your quality score and make steps towards having a great quality score to help level your playing field.

First off, just in case you are not yet using them, Sitelinks ad extensions are now available to all AdWords advertisers.   These extra links to your website display with your ad when 1) your keyword and ad combo has an awesome quality score and 2) your ad appears in the top positions of the search page.

Google, and many others have seen CTRs increase an average of 30% with Sitelinks, so they are really an incredible opportunity to boost the performance of your AdWords advertising.

AdWords allows you to enter up to 10 additional Sitelinks.  When creating your Sitelinks, it’s important to be mindful of the order in which you enter them.  The first two that you enter will get the most impressions, so be sure to make those your most compelling.  It’s also quite rare to see more than 4-6 display with an ad, so there’s no need to spend much effort going beyond six links.

In analyzing how Sitelinks are being used, many advertisers have started out by just including category type links highlighting different sections of their website.

These ads still stand out more than the average ad due to their increased size and coloring.  But, we are advertisers after all, so why miss out on an additional opportunity to advertise and sell, sell, sell!

Each of the Sitelinks can include up to 35 characters, so this is not an advertising opportunity to take lightly.  Here are some tips on how to put those Sitelinks to strong advertising use:

Incorporate offers.   Not only does it make the offers and ads stand out, but it’s also super easy to maintain.  Be sure when the searcher clicks on link they are taken to a page that includes the promotional offer.

Include your phone number. Numbers always stand out in ads and on search pages, so why not have your phone number in bright blue directly underneath your ad?  This is a good opportunity to link to your contact us page.

• Offers with numbers. While we are on the subject of numbers, incorporating the details of your offer in numbers can really stand out.  Here we see some repetition that makes the ad stand out quite a bit.

• Incorporate all ad best practices.  Initial caps, strong calls to action, exclamation points, numbers… this is just another place to use all those pieces of flair that have been successful in your text ads in the past.

A few words of caution:

• Less can be more. While advertisers jump at the chance for all this extra ad text, going overboard can end up making your ad be too hard to digest in the split second that a searcher wants to dedicate to deciphering if it’s worth a click.

• Stay current. Keep Sitelinks up to date for the season and current offers.

While in the beginning of summer grills, patio furniture and air conditioners were hot items, as fall approaches these might be what the searcher is most interested in.

Start getting crafty with your Sitelinks today and watch your CTRs climb.

Most companies we talk to spend their time coming up with keyword lists and writing ads.  But when it comes time to setting bids, they either don’t have the time or knowledge to come up with the best bids.

A typical account we look at has set the same bid for almost all of their keywords (with maybe a handful of higher bids for super important keywords).  They randomly pick how much they think a click should cost and then wait for Google to perform.  Usually anger ensues if performance does not occur immediately.

Let’s analyze what happens to accounts that don’t have an optimal bid established for their keywords.

What is the cost of a bid that is too low?

Interestingly enough, a bid that is below its optimum is much more detrimental to your account than a bid that is too high.  Bidding too low can actually end up sabotaging your entire account if you let it.

Here are the negative repercussions of a bid that’s too low:

Lost impressions due to rank. If your bid can’t get you into a reasonable rank on the first page, your ad won’t appear every time a searcher is looking for what you have to offer.  You can add this column to your Campaigns view in Google AdWords to see if you are losing impressions due to rank.

Quality Score Death Spiral. Your ongoing CTR is one of the biggest drivers of your quality score.  While Google technically says it tempers its expectations by ad position, we find that it can have pretty outrageous expectations for lower positions.  Almost every time we see a campaign with keyword running in the lower ad positions for a length of period of time, we usually see quality scores of 2-4 throughout the account.  Which is a truly horrible hole to dig yourself out of.  Quality scores this low, make it almost impossible for an advertiser to get into the higher ad positions without forking over a lot more money.

Not the best position for conversions. When thinking about your bid, think about the ad position that gets you the best results.  This is where you want your ad to appear.  For most advertisers we work with, this is above the fold on the first page of the results.

Losing leads to competition. When your bid is too low, odds are your competition is out there with higher bids.  So, not only are you not getting found, but you are losing business to your competition.

What is the cost of a big that’s too high?

While a bid that is too low is quite damaging, we are not by any means suggesting that you overspend!

Paying for unnecessary clicks. Lots of searchers are known to just click on the top result if it looks anywhere near relevant.  If your ad position is too high, especially for broad head terms, you are likely to pay for a bunch of clicks that will just turn into bounces.

Not the best position for conversions. Same story as with a bid that’s too low, you need to determine the ad positions where you perform best as related to your bottom line.  That might not be ad position #1.

Double high presence. We usually find that having a double presence (a paid and natural search listing) on a page has a strong benefit.  However, if you have a very high natural search presence, you might not need to be bidding for the very top paid search position as well.

Paying too much per click. Do you get as good of performance (CTR and conversions) in ad position 3 as you do in ad position 1?  Then no need to overpay!

Lost impressions due to budget. If you have all of your bids set too high, many times your budget won’t be able to support all the possible clicks your campaign might receive.  In this case, your ad won’t be able to appear all the time for your keywords since it will be limited by the budget.  You don’t want to miss out on impressions for top performing keywords, so it’s not good to lose impressions due to your budget.

In summary, it’s a little like what poor Goldilocks struggled with: how to find that bowl of porridge that is just right.  In terms of your PPC bids, too low is very bad and too high is no good either.  You literally need a bid that is just right.  Having bids that are just right can be a key determining factor in whether or not your PPC campaigns deliver ROI.  How to manage that?  You can start to review your analytics and adjust bids yourself, you can try out some of the bid optimization capabilities built directly into the search engines, or you can sign-up for a third-party bid management software like Yield Software, which does all the work for you.

But don’t stop there.  It’s very easy these days to set up advanced bidding, especially with the much better AdWords reporting now available inside of Google Analytics.  You can very quickly get a feel for days of the week and day part performance without having to create custom reports.

In AdWords, pause or lower your bids for lesser performing segments and increase your bids for the days and times that bring you the most benefit.  Give it a try – you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to set up!

If you have some positions that you know work to bring you the best results, you can also use the campaign position preference settings to fine-tune where your ads will appear.

Happy Just Right Bidding!

One of the best ways to ensure your website ranks well for your most important keywords in natural search results is through in-bound links to your site.  But how do you attract them (short of begging other website owners to link to you)?  We’ve got some tips and tricks below that will help you build links to your website.

Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about links, link juice and the social etiquette of linking:

First, not all links are created equal.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all evaluate links to your website relative to the quality of the source of the link.  So, for instance, if you get a link from The New York Times it’s vastly more important to the search engines than if Yield Software links to you (we hope one day soon we’ll be in the same league!)  In practical terms, what this means is that the NYT link has more juice than the Yield link, and when the algorithm is determining what your page rank should be, it’s weighing the link juice of each individual link.  Other types of sites that provide powerful link juice are links from .gov sites and links from .edu sites, in addition to links from mainstream media source sites or very popular blogs such as BoingBoing or ReadWriteWeb.

Second, link unto others as you would have the link to you.  If you hope to generate lots of great links to your site, you must also be someone who sensibly links regularly.  The social etiquette of the Web dictates that website and blog owners conscientiously link to the sources of news, information, reference material or other sources of content; this, in turn, will inspire web publishers to link to you.  By declaring you’re a good netizen, people will want to engage you more.

Now, on to those recommendations!

“Top” Lists

One of the all-time best ways to get people to link to your content is through lists.  For instance, the top 10 best ways to evaluate a purchase.  Or three things to consider when making a purchasing.  Remember that your “Top” lists should have some relevance to what your site is all about, but SHOULD NOT be an overt promotion of or commercial about your products and services.  These should be objectively helpful lists that people would intuitive want to share with friends or colleagues or family members (for instance, in their own blogs or via a tweet on Twitter or in a post on Facebook.)

Video

After social networks, like Facebook, video is the hottest segment of the Web.  People can’t get enough of video!  So a good way to get people to link to your site or your blog is use video.  It’s super easy to embed a video in your site (especially if you’re publishing your website or blog on a content management system like WordPress).  As with “Top” lists, be sure to choose videos that relevant to what you do, sell or serve.  If you produce and publish your own videos (which you should!), again, make sure you’re doing something that is going to be useful to people.  How-to videos are hugely popular on the Web, particularly if it’s about something emerging that people want to do but don’t yet understand.

Photos

Believe it or not, photos are still very popular and capture people’s eye.  Photos that capture an amazing moment, or are somehow instructional in nature can always drive interest, links and traffic to your site.

Downloadable Content

Publish content on your site that is new, unique or unlike something folks can get elsewhere.  Perhaps it’s a how-to guide relating to your industry or the services you provide.  If you have the budget, commission a white paper or a study on some important aspect of the work you do.  Or maybe you’ve been doing a great job with your blog over the last few years and have a collection of blog posts that, when taken together, make a terrific e-book on a subject relating to your business or work.  There are a whole number of online e-book publishing sites that enable fast and easy production, and which you can then offer for free download on your site.  It’s easy to say, “oh, no one cares as much as I do about the thing I do” — but guess what: you’re NOT that unique!  If you love what you do, chances are there are a whole bunch of people (potentially tens of thousands, even) who share your interests and passion.

Graphs and Graphics

Another great, link-worthy strategy for your website and blog is the use of graphs and graphics.  From simple charts and graphs created by Excel to timeline graphics, tag cloud graphics and workflow illustrations, folks love great visuals that bring into specific relief that which may be difficult to imagine.  There are many free or low-cost graphic creation tools across the Web (do a search!) that enable you to simply plug in a number of data points and return a beautiful illustration that you can copy and publish.  If you have a little budget, you can also always hire graphic artists to create stunning visualizations of either data or workflow or technology stacks (among many other options.)

At the end of the day, content, even in the 21st century, is still king.  If you consistently publish good stuff on your website and blog, it will be link-worthy.  And when you do publish, don’t be shy about publicizing that fact.  You should copy the URL of your new content and paste it into tweets on Twitter, your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn updates and any other sites where you can provide updates of what you’re working on.

Once you’ve gotten into a rhythm, be sure to see how your site is ranking for your keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you’re a Yield Software customer, you can do this quickly and conveniently by clicking on the Natural Search tab in the Yield Web Marketing Suite and checking your link counts.  You’ll also be able to see the sources of those links so you can evaluate how well you’re doing in terms of link juice / link source quality.

Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms, which determine what websites appear in their natural search results and in what order they appear. Most changes do not have significant impacts, but Google’s recent change made between April 28th and May 3rd — called the “May Day Update” because it happened mostly on May 1st, but also “Mayday Update” because of its potential adverse impacts on websites — has resulted in the following for many websites:

• Rank of deeper individual pages within websites
• Rank for long tail keyword searches (three-plus words in the search query)

In a nutshell, Google has cracked down on quality for longer-tail keywords – making its evaluation of deeper individual website pages more similar to how it conducts natural search rankings for keyword searches with one-to-two words.

This is probably due to the fact that more and more searches these days contain more than three words, so it’s necessary for Google to ensure that its search results for these searches bring back the most relevant and highest quality results possible.

You can think of the change this way: your homepage is like the parent and it used to be able to boost up its children (the individual page on its website) just by having great authority itself — similar to how a parent’s reputation can often help children get a leg up in the world. But now, your individual pages have all grown up and are standing on their own two feet. Google is evaluating each of your website pages individually – for their own unique relevancy and individual page quality.

This individual evaluation will help Google ensure that even for the long-tail searches it is always providing a great set of search results.

What this means for websites:

• No more free rides for any of your individual pages based on your overall domain authority.
• All individual website pages must include unique and truly useful content.
• All individual website pages must have a strong back-link profile.

Who is typically “negatively” impacted by Google’s Mayday… er… May Day update?

• Deeper internal pages with duplicate content and no links
• Automatically-generated pages and content farms

Were you impacted?

Review your stats from around April 28th to May 3rd with an eye out on the following:

• Natural search traffic volumes coming to your deeper internal website pages
• Volume of natural search traffic you are received from long tail searches (three-plus keywords)

Google says the May Day change is here to stay, so what do you need to focus on?

There is nothing new here – just the same basic SEO principles, but now it’s imperative that your focus extends across all pages of your website, not just your home page and a few other top-level pages.

Here’s what you need to focus on for all individual pages of your website:

• Make sure you have unique, valuable and truly useful content on all of your individual pages within your site. How do you do this? Put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and think about what would truly help them in their quest for information that no one else is currently doing a great job of providing. Some examples include:

1. Reviews, videos, images, comments, etc. are all great ways to help make your content both unique and valuable to searchers. Leverage user generated content as much as possible so the workload is not so daunting.
2. If you have any copied or duplicate content (like from a manufacturer), replace it with your own unique content.

• Get lots of links for every single page. Ensure your link building campaigns focus on all of the individual pages for your site and not just your homepage and first tier pages. How do you do this?

1. Make it easy to link to your individual pages and encourage others to do this.
2. Link out to others in your blogs, forums, comments, etc to encourage others to link back to you.
3. Promote all of your content pieces individually.
4. Produce very unique and valuable content that others will want to link to.
5. Create a strong internal linking structure within the pages of your own website with long tail variations on anchor text.
6. Leverage social media to help get links tweets, or promoting specific pages with promotional offers and other incentives.

If you’ve been neglecting the deeper individual pages of your site, you can thank Google’s May Day for lighting a fire under your butt to give those pages some love.