SEO Cheat Sheat for Web Developers

I have worked with a number of web developers and I am pretty sure a number of them will find this SEO cheat sheet useful if they want to build more than just the usual web page.

SEOMoz or now known as just Moz used to have the first version released a few years back and this latest 2013 edition has been updated by Danny Dover. By the way Danny Dover is the author of Search Engine Optimization Secrets, one of the few good SEO books around (in my opinion).

The SEO Cheat sheet can be downloaded here.

Print it out or placed them in your favorite folders after downloading it for a good reference.

New Filter in Search Term Report

The Search Term report is really great for looking for new keywords that you might not have thought of before and also for discovering invalid keywords that you can exclude from your campaigns.

Google recently added a new filter called “search term” as one of the filter options in the Search Term report. It’s useful when you want to analyze the huge amount of data gathered and you would like to develop a specific strategy. The example provided by Google was a florist trying to discover the search terms related to “valentine” weeks before it leads to February 14.

Check out the Search Term report which can be found on the Keywords Tab.

How to Improve Your Click-Through Rates

A click-through rate is the number of times that your ads get clicked on over the number of times that is shown to the visitors. In short, it’s total clicks divided by the number of impressions.

If you have ever wondered why are there so many people looking at your ads but the number of people clicking on them is so low, here’s a posting at WordStream outlining some strategies that you can use to improve your CTR.

And why should we bother on improving our campaign’s CTR? Well an improved CTR can help improve the Quality Score of the related keyword and in turn improve the ad position associated to the keyword.

Once you understand some of these techniques on how to improve your CTR, go try them out in your campaigns!

7 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Bid Optimization Platform

Managing a campaign manually is possible when the campaign is relatively small. But when campaigns start to scale to a size where it becomes complicated and harder to be managed manually, bid optimization software will come into play.

DoubleClick Search recently came up with 7 factors to consider if you are looking for a bid optimization platform to work on.

The 7 factors:

  1. Meeting objectives with flexible goals
  2. Fresh and reliable data to make smarter decisions
  3. Smart algorithms for smart decisions
  4. Fast response of the tool to take opportunities
  5. Frequency of algorithm change and updates
  6. The amount of control while automating
  7. Service from the team

Accompanying the blog post is also an infographic and white paper on it.

The 2013 Digital Marketer Report

According to an excerpt in the 2013 Digital Marketer Report, 5 websites captured 20% of all search activity in the last quarter of 2012. The 5 websites are:

  1. Facebook – 8.48%
  2. YouTube – 5.55 %
  3. Yahoo! – 2.63%
  4. Wikipedia – 2.01%
  5. Amazon.com – 1.4%

Discover the amount of traffic captured by the top 10 to top 1000 websites in this excerpt at Experian

Considering that we now know the top 5 websites that captured search traffic, how are you making use of these 5 websites to promote your products and services?

Making Changes With Bulk Editing Features in AdWords

Google has recently released the bulk editing features globally and you can now perform actions on the AdWords interface that you could previously perform only on the AdWords Editor.

Let Alistair Dent show you 4 examples using the bulk editing features that can be useful in your campaigns.

You can find the glossary for Bulk Edits here and the blog post announcing this feature here.

Automating Google Analytics Reports with Apps Scripts (Video)

Google Analytics is great in providing insights to your website with more than 200 touch points. Combine that with Apps Scripts, you can now automate some of your usual process flows easily with just a few lines of codes.

Watch Nick Mihailovski and Ikai Lan from the Analytics and Apps team on how they integrate Google Analytics with Google Apps Script.

 

Learning Resources From Google

Google provides some great resources to learn AdWords, analytics and SEO online.

Here are 3 great sites where you can do some self-learning in these 3 areas.

  • Webmaster Academy – Not exactly the typical SEO course that you can find online but this is still a source of information right from the search engine themselves on what Google looks for in websites to perform well in Google search results.

In the event that you need any assistance in preparing yourselves for the Google Certification Program, we do provide in-house training program to facilitate that. Just contact us for more details.

 

Disavow Links Tool

Got the wrong advice when you started out doing SEO and built the type of links that may seemed “unnatural” to Google?

And your requests to removed these links from the website owners are going to deaf ears?

Well, Google came up with the disavow links tool to help you sort that out. You can find the disavow links tool in Google Webmaster Tools.

You can learn more about the disavow link tool in this blog post and also refer to Matt Cutt’s slides on this tool in his PubCon 2012 Las Vegas presentation.

How to Generate Dynamically Changing Sitelink Destination URLs On An E-Commerce Site

If you have an e-commerce website and would like to have ad copies to show unique sitelink destination urls for each of these ad copies, you can make use of the ValueTrack function to achieve this

This is useful if you have loads of branded products and would like to create an ad copy that can direct visitors to a specific page related to each of the product via sitelinks.

Here is how this can be done.