Happy Friday! As usual, please find to follow my picks of the top articles in search this week.

News

You can’t fail to have heard about the Microsoft – Yahoo deal which was struck on 29th July which will see Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ power Yahoo’s searches. Will it threaten Google’s dominance? In the UK it’s unlikely to, but it may mean that some advertisers elect trial advertising on Yahoo/Bing – time will tell.

 

SEO

Over at SEOmoz Rand’s written a fantastic summary on the implications of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal for SEO.

Meanwhile, a month on since Google’s ‘Vince’ Update, Richard from SEOgadget takes a gander at the results for the search term ‘car insurance’ – and asks brand or no brand?

Social Media

Matt Churchill talks about ‘Auntie’ getting all social media savvy with the launch of Shownar; a great post about how the BBC have been embracing social media.

Lisa Barone asks if Social Media is Becoming a Weapon - and how you might try to handle an attack on your brand. As usual, it’s facinating reading – and the comments are well worth a read too.

PPC

Thinking about outsourcing your PPC activity to an agency? Over at PPCHero Amber’s written a great post on the 10 questions you should ask when looking for a new agency.

Media

Matthew Robson caused a stir when he wrote a memo for Morgan Stanley on How Teenagers Consume Media, interesting reading, but I much preferred Dan Wilson’s response: How 31 Year Olds Consume Media :)

 Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

 Simon’s Cat

 

 

Image credit Unhindered by Talent

Today Gravytrain is 10 years old!

We’ll be celebrating with Gravytrain employees past and present at what will undoubtedly be a decidedly boozy company barbecue. We’re chuffed to bits to have got here, and of course would like to thank our wonderful clients, friends and families without whom none of this would have been possible.

Cheers!

 

Image credit Sheriff of Nothing

They say Thursday is the new Friday (or they did once, around 2005 – is Wednesday the new Friday now?) anyhow this week’s round up is a day early, for reasons which will be revealed tomorrow – so Happy Thursday! Here are my picks of the best blog posts in search for the week ending 24/7/09.

SEO

If like me, you think link building is the toughest part of any SEO project, you’d do well to read Garrett French’s post via Search Engine Land on how to research, create and distribute highly linkable content.

Still focusing on the link building theme, Shaun Anderson of Hobo-Web talks about reciprocal links, and whether or not they should be avoided.

PPC

Get some great tips from PPC Hero on PPC landing page optimisation - sterling work from Amber there.

Social Media

Over at Econsultancy, Patricio Robles asks does social media lead to better financial results for companies? As he quite rightly points out, correlation is not necessarily causation – essential reading.

Also well worth a look is the A-B-C’s of Social Media - not least because as Dr Pete said, they’ve come up with an ‘x’ which isn’t xylophone

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Thursday’s Funny

This brilliant picture is from passiveaggressivenotes (click the link to see it in it’s full glory). Hat tip to Rob - genius  

 

 

‘Thursday’ image credit adamwilson

Competitor analysis ordinarily forms a key part of any marketing activity, however seemingly, when it comes too PPC, it sometimes gets forgotten. 

All too often I see campaigns with impeccable structure, great keyword selection, judicious use of match types and negative matches and yet; they stumble at the final hurdle. Their ads just aren’t standing up (or standing out) versus the competition.

Consequently, as their click through rates are poor, their quality score is suffering and they’re paying over the odds for their clicks. Bad times.

So, just how good are your ads?

Check out the competition:

So you need to look at your ads in situ – here you’ll be able to see what the competition are doing, and indeed how your ads stack up. Now, you don’t want to look at them live, as you’ll be generating impressions and no clicks, which might hurt your quality score even more. Google have a handy solution – the ad preview tool.

So check you’ve selected the correct geo-targeting options so you can see your ads alongside your competitors, pop in your search query and you’re good to go. Here are some things to look out for:

Offers:
 

Click to enlarge

I’ve chosen to use ‘double glazing’ to illustrate my point as it’s a very competitive ‘offer driven’ sector. On the page you’ll see ads featuring 40% off, 35% off, 70% off, 65% off, buy one get one free, etc, etc.

Now, imagine that you’re offering 35% off – I’m guessing that your click through rates might just suffer in the face of such competition.

So what do you do? Assuming you can’t offer 70% off to stay ahead of the competition, what should you say instead?

My view would be to create a new ad to test. Avoid the whole x% off messaging altogether as it looks like you can’t compete. Instead make a general mention of low pricing, or a sale, then focus on another key benefit – e.g. interest free credit; no quibble guarantees; lower energy bills; etc. Test it versus the current ad, and see what happens.

Humour:

 

Click to enlarge

Alternatively, you might look for other ways to make your ad stand out versus the competition. Above I’ve shown an example of a search for ppc agencies. Now to my mind, whilst the ads shown are fine, they’re a little bit dry for my taste. Therefore, when I was creating a campaign for Gravytrain I elected to inject a little humour into the mix. Now clearly, depending on the product or service you’re promoting that might not be the way to go, but we’ve seen some success, so I would suggest a test.

Be Topical:

Again here this won’t necessarily be applicable to all products and services, however sometimes mentioning something topical can make your ad stand out versus the competition. We tested a set of ads which referenced the credit crunch for one of our insurance clients, which saw significantly higher click through rates than their previous best performing ad. Interestingly conversion rates also held up well.

 

Whatever you decide to do, we wouldn’t recommend making wholesale changes to your ads – instead leave your best performer live and create an alternative and see how it works for you. In order to give your new ad some exposure you’ll need to select: ‘Rotate – show ads more evenly’ within the ad serving options of your campaign settings.

Hopefully you’ve found this useful – if you’ve some additional tips you’d care to share please let me know in the comments.

Within this post I’ll be explaining what a redirect is, the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect and how to set up redirects yourself. Right, let’s go:

What is a redirect?

A redirect is a command which automatically sends visitors to an alternative web page rather than the one they typed into their browser.

Why do you need to use redirects?

From time to time you may need to either delete a page, or change it’s URL. If you just go ahead and do this without a redirect, any visitor to the page will get a 404 which can be bad for users and for SEO (see our really rather good guide to managing broken links and 404’s and  for more information).

Why are they important?

Redirects help users by automatically taking them to an alternative page, or indeed the same page if you’ve simply changed the URL. Likewise, redirect also tells search engines that the page has moved.

Plain English Definitions of those Pesky Numerical Wotsits

What’s the difference between a 301 and a 302? What’s a 404? How’s a 404 differ from a 500? Be confused no longer:

301 – Permanent Redirect: This tells the search engines that the page has moved permanently. Over time authority from the old page will pass to the new version.

302 – Temporary Redirect: This tells the search engine that the page has moved temporarily. As such no authority from the old page will pass to the new version.

404 - Error Page/File Not Found: This tells the search engine that the web page cannot be found

500 – Internal Server Error: This means there is a problem with the code which is affecting the server. This may have been caused by incorrect coding or command set up. 

 

To 301 or 302… Which Redirect Should I Use?

1. 301 – A permanent redirect should be used if you’ve changed the URL permanently. For SEO purposes it rocks as it helps maintain your natural search listing and indexing by the search engines (NB you might see a drop in rankings initially, but they should recover).
2. 302 – A temporary redirect should be used only in the event that it’s a temporarily URL change. For SEO purposes it sucks as it passes no authority – therefore you might find that your lose rankings.

 

How do you set up redirects?

1. Open Notepad to create a new document.

2. Insert one of the following commands into notepad with your website URL address.

Temporary redirect
redirect 302 /old-webpage.html http://www.website.co.uk/new-webpage.html

Permanent redirect
redirect 301 /old-webpage.html http://www.website.co.uk/new-webpage.html

 

3. Save the notepad file as an HTACCESS file. You can do this by saving the file with the name .htaccess.

 

 4. Make sure to select ‘All files’ in ‘Save as type’.

 

5. Open your FTP for your website. (Note: You will need to open the file in SFTP to be able to upload your HTACCESS file. You may need to enter a password to be able to log into the server.)

6. Upload the HTACCESS file to the root of your server. This is usually in the www folder on the server.

7. Test the web page to see that it is redirecting. (If the web page redirects from the old address to the new address, then the redirect is working.)

 

Having problems?

I’m still seeing the same web page even though I have uploaded the htaccess file. Have I done something wrong?

The redirect to the web page is probably incorrect. Check that you have put in the correct web page address. Also check your slashes ‘/’ and the web page language extension – htm, html, php, asp, aspx etc.

I’m receiving a 500 internal server error. What did I do wrong?

There is probably incorrect formatting in the HTACCESS file. Check the file for spacing and typing errors.

 

Hopefully now you’re good to go, but of course if you do have any queries please let me know via the comments.

 

 

Image source: Lumaxart