Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

The challenge for all search engine marketers is to know or be able to accurately anticipate what keywords users will enter when performing a search on their chosen search engine. We have been working recently with a small personal training business that have a fixed geographic catchment area that they will travel within for home-based training or clients to their gym will realistically travel to for regular training sessions. Therefore keyword phrases such as ‘personal trainer’ and ‘personal training’ were far too broad and generic to deliver quality traffic (and unrealistically competitive given our clients marketing resources). It was vital during the keyword discovery phase to find out how a variety of clients referred to our client’s service as (e.g. training, fitness, working-out, health etc.) and also the geographic word usage employed during searches to find our client (county, city, region etc).

Following a detailed discussion with our client and analysis of their Google Analytics account, we had a good base from which to start looking at previously used keyword phrases by searchers. As you would expect, there are a number of resources online to assist with this task, some are free, some require registration and login and others require subscription purchase. The following are all free resources that provide instant results without any logging in, registration or payment:

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – enter some base keywords and results are displayed matching your base keywords plus a wide selection of assumed matches that don’t directly match your phrase. The default information includes Adwords advertiser competition for that keyword phrase, local search volume for the previous calendar month and global monthly search average. By changing the ‘choose columns’ drop down option you can discover a variety of useful metrics such as the month when the highest search figures were recorded as well as the average cost-per-click if you were considering running a PPC campaign as well as organic search
• SEO Tools – again, enter the lead keyword phrase that you anticipate users will enter and a table of suggestions is presented. In addition to the keywords themselves, supporting information includes Google, Yahoo and MSN estimated daily searches for that keyword phrase as well as links to other research applications such as Google Trends, Google Insight (showing search volumes on a daily basis, useful to match to your own Analytics data)
• Webmaster Toolkit – enter the lead keyword phrase then select the search engine you wish to use as the research platform and then click on ‘research keywords’. The information is purely keyword driven with no supporting information on volume or seasonal variance
• Spacky – a simple to use tool returning a comprehensive list of keyword variations and suggestions. Keyword is listed on the left side of the results table with monthly search volumes relating to each word for Google, Yahoo/Overture and MSN results. You can reorder the list to any of those engines to assist with your keyword prioritising. There is also a single click feature to save all the keywords to a text file for import to applications such as Excel or directly into Adwords or other keyword tools

Client requirements differ in each case, but with clients such as our personal trainer, volume wasn’t the key to success and three word phrases with geographic references continue to provide the best targeted traffic and inbound enquiries leading to new business acquisition.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Whilst Google Analytics will allow you to isolate paid/unpaid traffic sources within core reports, there are a number of reports where you won’t be able to see your PPC traffic as a separate source. One important report is to be able to isolate goal conversions by hour for PPC traffic only. This will allow you to manage your bidding strategy according to the most productive hours for conversions (a function not offered in Adwords itself).

In order to be able to isolate your PPC traffic from other sources and determine information such as goal conversions for PPC, you will need to create an additional website profile in your Analytics account for your domain, and then filter out all traffic that isn’t PPC.

Creating the PPC only filter is relatively straightforward. Click on ‘Analytics Settings’ then on ‘+ Add New Profile’. Then choose the second option ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’. Locate the name of your new profile and click on ‘Edit’ and go to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ section and click on ‘Add filter’ option.

Choose ‘Add new Filter for Profile’ and give your filter a name such as ‘PPC Traffic Filter’. Then select ‘Custom Filter’ from the drop-down list and make sure that the second radio button is marked (this option is called: ‘include’). The ‘Filter Field’ drop down should have ‘Campaign Medium’ option selected and in the ‘Filter Pattern’ box enter: cpc|ppc. ‘Case sensitive’ should be selected as ‘No’. Then click ‘Save changes’ and that’s it!

Before you’ve finished, don’t forget to recreate the goals you had set up in your regular Analytics profile – this will allow you to track goal conversions for just PPC as well as the regular performance metrics from Adwords and Analytics. Google Analytics will now collect the same data as before, but discount every other source apart from PPC data. When you go to ‘Goals’ and ‘Total Conversions’ you can select the ‘Graph by Hour’ option and data you see will be for PPC traffic only. You can then manage your day-scheduling and bidding strategy around these

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing management service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Inclusion of your keyword phrase in both the title and body text of a PPC advert has been proven to be more effective than generic ad-copy. The fact that Google Adwords highlight search query keywords in PPC ads by making them bold is reassurance of this.

But how do you anticipate every keyword phrase that users might enter and do you create hundreds if not thousands of ad-groups with specific adverts to ensure there is a keyword-rich advert for each variation? You could do this, but fortunately there is a dynamic method of inserting specific keyword phrases into ad-copy saving you a lot of time – dynamic keyword inclusion.

Let’s suppose you sell t-shirts in a variety of styles and colours. You could create a separate ad group for each possible colour variation and group relevant keywords into this group. Alternative you could create a single advert with dynamic fields for specific keyword inclusion. Regardless of which colour a user enters, your advert will highlight the fact that you sell that colour and be more likely to receive their click.

The syntax for dynamic keyword inclusion is: {keyword:Cotton T-Shirts} with ‘Cotton T-Shirts’ being default text. Why include default text? When you have included broad-match keywords which include words other than your keyword phrase, Google will replace this with the default phrase. In our t-shirt example the search query ‘red coloured cotton t-shirts’ would show the ‘Cotton T-Shirt’ default if our target keyword on a phrase/exact match was ‘red t-shirt’. If the keyword was ‘red t-shirt’ then the dynamic advert would show ’red t-shirt’ as the title. Dynamic keyword inclusion isn’t a well known technique and dynamic inclusion within the body copy of a PPC ad is even less known. Our experience of using dynamic keyword insertion has been very successful, although it shouldn’t totally replace manual ad-copy completely but run as an integrated element to your campaign. We typically test a number of static creatives proportionally served alongside a dynamic creative to ascertain effectiveness.

There are also a number of refinements you can make to the dynamic insertion of the keyword into your advert. For example, by changing the first ‘k’ of ‘keyword’ to upper-case, this will make the first letter of the first keyword appear in upper case. By also making the ‘W’ of ‘keyword’ upper-case, this makes ALL first letters of keyword phrases upper case (i.e. modify to write as KeyWord). To make all characters appear in upper-case modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYWORD’ or for every character in just the first word modify ‘keyword’ to ‘KEYword’.

Using dynamic keyword insertion doesn’t direct improve your quality score, but through creating a more targeted advert for the user, this should improve your CTR and therefore indirectly the quality score (in turn lowering your bid).

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Keyword density is a key part of effective on-page SEO, however, if approached incorrectly it can be a hindrance to your search marketing. A content rich website should offer information that naturally contains a number of contextual keywords and phrases associated with the market/sector the site is in. There are a number of useful free resources online that allow you to assess your website keyword visibility at a page-by-page level.

SEOChat.com provide an excellent keyword density tool that allows you to define a number of parameters prior to running your check. This includes variable length of results to display, control over which elements of the code should be included such as meta data, alt attributes and title tags. You can also specify whether numeric characters should be included. You can specify the number of words per phrase that should be assessed so you can get a more accurate picture of your/your clients keyword phrases to optimise. For example when we first set up our own website we checked the density difference between the keywords ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’.

The keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ appeared 18 times on the page when we included META tags, ALT attributes and Title. This delivered a density of 8.78%. When we removed the META tags, ALT attributes and title this dropped to 9 repetitions and a keyword density of 6.04%. For the three word phrase ‘enpiem internet marketing’ the density is 3.41% with 7 repetitions. Webconfs say that the recommended density for good practice SEO is 3-7% so we removed five inclusions of the keyword phrase ‘internet marketing’ from META content and ALT attributes and this dropped the repetition to 13 uses of the keyword and a keyword density of 6.74% without changing the visible page copy or title of the page.

Another useful resource is the Webconfs keyword cloud tool. A keyword cloud is a visual representation of the keywords that appear on your web page with words appearing in a larger font where there is a higher density. Your leading keyword phrase should ideally appear at the start of the cloud in the largest font. Again, we used the two keyword phrases ‘internet marketing’ and ‘enpiem internet marketing’ from our homepage.

As you can see, the words ‘internet’ and ‘marketing’ are the most prominent with ‘enpiem’ in third position. Stuffing a page with keywords will almost certainly result in you being penalised by the major search engines so using tools like these can be very beneficial when trying to maintain the balance of engaging copy with a clear indication to search engines as to the priority of the page.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

On March 4th 2009 Google updated how Google Analytics imports AdWords data to improve security and provide greater control and convenience. If you’ve not already ‘linked’ your Adwords and Analytics accounts – you should do so to benefit from the additional information that is combined with the regular Adwords data.

Whilst Adwords will provide you with a range or reports relating to the immediate click activity such as word, advert and placement performance, click-through rates, cost-per-click etc. it doesn’t provide information about the subsequent visit to the target website (what happened next). Adwords takes up the baton and provides this information by adding additional metrics as well as combining the core Adwords metrics along with the on-site data.

Linking the two accounts is relatively easy. To do this go to the ‘my account’ tab in Google Adwords and in the ‘Account Preferences’ section, ensure that ‘Auto-Tagging’ is checked. Now click on the ‘Analytics’ tab in Google Adwords and click on ‘Analytics Settings’. Next to your account name, click on the link ‘edit account settings’ and on the following page check the box to ‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google Products’ (in this case Google Analytics). Your account will now communicate with Google Analytics and share information to enrich Analytics reports’

To view your Adwords data in Google Analytics, click on the ‘Traffic Sources’ tab then ‘Adwords’ option. This will expand to show two further options ‘Adwords Campaigns’ and ‘Keyword Positions’. The keyword position option is very useful at evaluating the most effective advertising positions on a number of user-defined metrics and we covered this in an earlier blog entry Analysing Adwords Positions in Google Analytics.

The Adwords Campaigns tab initially shows the campaigns you have in your Adwords account. The default metrics shown are visits, pages-per-visit, average time-on-site, percentage of new visitors and bounce rate. Note the three tabs above the table containing the campaign names, the default data you are looking at is ‘site usage’. Clicking on the ‘goal conversion’ tab will show you the results for your Analytics defined conversions (not to be confused with Adwords conversions). You will be able to see which campaign drives the best performance on 1-4 goals defined in Analytics as a percentage as well as a per-goal-value if you defined goal values at set-up. Clicking on the ‘clicks tab’ shows you the familiar Adwords metrics such as impressions, clicks, CTR, CPC, revenue-per-click and margins if you have this configured in Adwords. You can also assess the hourly breakdown for Goal Conversions such as sales or lead generation (details in our earlier blog entry: Analysing Hourly Traffic and Google Adwords Conversions)

Clicking on a ‘campaign’ will drill down to the ‘ad groups’ within that campaign, showing the same default metrics and again, the goal and click data is available at an ad-group level. Clicking on an ad-group drills down to the individual keywords, again with the default metrics plus goal conversions and click data from Adwords.

As you can see, combining the data from both Google Adwords and Google Analytics provides a very powerful picture of the effectiveness of your PPC activity allowing you to not only determine the most effective words for driving quality traffic to your site, but also for determining which is the optimal position for advertising and the times too.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full Paid Search Marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting, integrating with Google Analytics. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

We were asked earlier this week about the ‘nofollow’ META attribute and the difference between that and a rel=”nofollow” hyperlinks attribute, so let’s have a look at each of them and their respective impact on SEO.

Both NoFollow tag instructs visiting search engine crawlers to still index the page they are on, but not to attribute any credibility to a subsequent outbound link. The difference between the two tags is the level of inclusion that is made. The META NoFollow attribute is a page-level command that is the same as putting rel=”nofollow” on ALL the links on that particular page (not site-wide). You can use the rel=”nofollow” more selectively if you only want to block a certain outbound link from gaining any credibility from your page’s PR.

Whilst this has been effective at curbing the volume of unwelcome spam comments made on blogs, it has also caused legitimate link building to suffer (i.e. useful and context relevant links referenced within blog comments). The NoFollow attribute has been adopted by Wikipedia and Google recommends paid links are tagged with NoFollow attributes. However, it has been criticised that a blog with efficient human comment editing should not need to use NoFollow because those spam comments will simply be deleted.

The choice of attribute is up to the individual webmaster and their specific circumstances. We would recommend addressing this on a page-by-page basis and not being too heavy-handed unless necessary. Links are still the lifeblood of the Internet and taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut isn’t a good thing to do.

Enpiem Internet Marketing provide a full Search Engine Optimisation service including on-page and off-page optimisation, link building and copywriting. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Determining the most effective times of the day for website traffic is an enormous help to website owners. From determining staffing levels for inbound customer service/sales to advertising schedules for paid search marketing, hourly data provides invaluable insight into the popularity of your site throughout the day that can help you manage your business and promotional budgets.

Today we’ll look at two popular website statistical packages and how they can help you measure hourly performance - Google Analytics and AWStats. A popular gripe with Google Analytics is that it doesn’t (by default) provide hourly figures for metrics such as page visits and bandwidth. For that information you will need a logfile analysis application, hence our interest in AWStats. We’ll look at the logfile analysis tool first then see how Google Analytics can enrich the picture painted by AWStats.

Like Google Analytics, AWStats is a free statistical analysis package, but unlike Google Analytics it analyses logfiles from your web server. AWStats is compatible with the main web servers such as Apache, WebStar, IIS and many others. Whilst it provides many useful top-line metrics such as visits, pages, hits and bandwidth by day of the month, days of the week and location by country, we are interested in the hourly data it provides. AWStats shows an hourly profile chart displaying page visits, hits and bandwidth along with a table detailing the actual numbers. Whilst it doesn’t break this down into traffic sources or keywords, it does give you a useful indication as to what the popular hours are for general traffic.

Whilst traffic by hour is all well and good, how can you determine the most effective hours for your PPC activity? Adwords only shows total conversion volumes and day-average metrics. With a scheduling tool like the one provided by Adwords, if you could determine when the ‘junk’ clicks were occurring you could more effectively deploy your advertising spend to those peak hours to maximise conversion potential.

The answer to this problem lies in your goals in Analytics. The goal conversion metric is very useful on other reports provided by Analytics such as ‘referring sites’ or ‘search engines’ but the charting options here are by ‘day’ at the most granular level. The Goal Conversion sub-menu items all provide a ‘by hour’ option on the ’graph by’ section. This includes total conversions, conversion rate, goal verification etc. By configuring your goals you can then interrogate Analytics to show the hourly performance. If you set a goal for your PPC traffic landing page, this will provide an hourly assessment of click traffic (if you filter out non-ppc traffic sources from your Analytics profile), whilst enquiry forms or purchases tagged as ‘goals’ will isolate their popular hours and you can determine the most effective hours from there.

Enpiem Internet Marketing use Google Analytics and logfile applications including AWStats as part of our website data analytics service. Contact us to discuss your website data analytics requirements and how we can help you make more from your website traffic.

Much is said about ‘social networking’ and ‘social bookmarking’ as cornerstones of web 2.0, today we’ll look at social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us.

Social bookmarking sites have two primary functions, firstly they allow a registered user to save a number of bookmarks from their local PC onto the bookmarking site where they can access them from any PC (for example in an Internet cafe or at a friend’s house). The second benefit that makes it ‘social’ is that your bookmarks are available for other users to access and benefit from the research you have already done to locate the website in the first place.

The filing and organisation of bookmarks in Del.icio.us is done by ‘tags’ which are keywords that you assign to your linked page. We entered ‘dining in New York’ as a search query on Del.icio.us and that returned 486 results. ‘Dining in New York’ was the tag that returned the best results.

The following video we found on Youtube is a good introduction to the concept…

So can your SEO benefit from social bookmarking? This is a thorny question, whilst they allow for the creation of one-way inbound links from relevant sites and blogs, the ethics of doing this has been questioned as the following story back in late 2006 on CNET highlighted. Blogs that provide tips and techniques for using social bookmarking sites for traffic generation often question the stability of the traffic that is driven and the effectiveness. For example, as blogs pick-up popular stories from the social bookmarking sites (searched on specific queries based on tags) their referencing the content host’s website drives targeted traffic to the site hosting the content. However as articles gain/lose popularity both on the bookmarking site as well as lesser visibility on the bloggers site, traffic drops. The ‘follow’ status of the social bookmarking site is also scrutinised as this can render the bookmarking site’s inbound link as non-beneficial to the content site.

If you have unique and compelling content then social bookmarking can be an effective way of disseminating that information, however, if you are planning to use it as a method of link building then tread carefully.

Enpiem Internet Marketing are experienced at working with social bookmarking and social bookmarking websites. Contact us for more information about how we can help you expand your online reach through reseller and affiliate programmes.

It was once argued that the content network on Google Adwords was unfocused and would simply burn budget whilst skewing your CTR figures with high impression counts and low click activity. Until relatively recently we rarely used the content network for our client PPC campaigns, preferring to direct our attention to Google search and search partner channels. But things have changed for the better and Google have introduced content network Placements giving the advertiser the ability to hand-pick specific sites that have signed up to the content network for advertising.

To begin using the Placement option, click on the ‘Placements’ tab that is located between the ‘Keywords’ and ‘Ad Variations’ tabs. There you will see a brief explanation of the Placement process. Click on the ‘Find and add Placements’ button. Placements work on your existing campaign keyword and phrase portfolio, although you can vary the CPC for the placements separate from your primary search and content network bids.

There are three ways to locate appropriate placements for your requirements – ‘browse categories’, ‘describe topics’ and ‘list URLs’. The browse categories option allows you to select a broad topic such as ‘animals’ or ‘automotive’ and then it drills down to a number of sub-sets with corresponding placements. There are in total 361 topics listed. With the ‘List URLs’ option you enter a URL to see if it is participating in the Adsense programme. Describe topics is our favourite option, as this allows you to immediately narrow the search to your chosen keyword phrases.

As an example if we were running a campaign for a client that sold model railway products we would enter keyword phrases such as ‘model railway’ and ’model trains’. This returns a number of placement options that sound perfect for our campaign such as ‘newrailwaymodellers.co.uk’, ‘ukmodelshops.co.uk’ and ‘modelr.co.uk’. Next to the URL of the placement you can see the ad formats available. It should be noted here that you aren’t limited to just text adverts, on many sites you can also choose display advertising formats or even video ads. You can also see the impressions per day figure for each site so you can gauge traffic volumes. When you have selected the placements most appropriate to your product or service, click ‘add’ for each site and then click ‘save and continue’. In our case we are just planning to show text adverts and we are asked to set a CPC for the placement portfolio. At this stage you just enter a single figure and can change this site-by-site later. Then return to the campaign and click on the ‘Placements’ tab and you will see your chosen sites displayed in alphabetical order.

To change the bid amount and also the destination URL for your placements click on ‘edit placements and bids’ and then modify your campaigns to the following format shown with our three model train sites. We have assumed a £1 generic bid for placements but we want to modify two Placements above this and change the landing page for the third site:

modelr.co.uk ** 1.20
newrailwaymodellers.co.uk ** 1.35
ukmodelshops.co.uk ** http:// www.youdomain.co.uk/yourpage.htm

The bid is changed by entering a space followed by two asterisks then another space and then bid amount without a currency symbol. The destination URL also follows a space and then the full http prefixed URL.

You can run placements as well as general content network sites determined automatically by the Adwords system. However, if you want to limit your content network exposure to just those sites that you have selected as Placements then go to the Campaigns screen and select Edit campaign settings near the top of the screen and go to the ‘Network and Bidding’ section and ‘Content’ subsection where you can select the radio button for ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full paid search marketing service from keyword discovery to ongoing management, optimisation and reporting. Contact us to discuss your paid search requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

Having a visitor sitemap is a core piece of website content, helping your visitors to find sections, directories and specific content not readily available from prominent links. In the same way, having a sitemap file for search engines to locate content on your site is just as important. Producing a sitemap.xml file allows search crawlers to ascertain information such as which pages you have on your website, the importance you have assigned to them as well as the change frequency of these pages. We covered the production of XML sitemaps in an earlier blog entry (http://www.enpiem.co.uk/blog/xml-sitemaps).

With a sitemap.xml file in place you ‘hope’ that the search crawler will visit your site, find the file and index your whole site for search engine inclusion. There are several ways of aiding the search engines in finding your sitemap – these include registration with webmaster tool applications such as Google Webmaster Tools and MSN Webmaster Tools which provide a sitemap upload function. But now you can reference your sitemap in the robots.txt file which is the first piece of content a search crawler interrogates on arrival at your website.

The ‘big four’ search engines (Google, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo and Ask.com) collaborated on a standard protocol for recognising the source location of a sitemap.xml file from within a robots.txt file that their crawlers would use to navigation to the sitemap(s) and thereby conduct their indexing from the sitemap. This is a process known as autodiscovery.

Referencing your sitemap.xml file from a robots.txt file is very easy to do, simply enter the following code (replacing the example URL with your own domain):

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It is still essential that you maintain a regularly updated sitemap.xml file so new pages are indexed and changes to existing pages are reflected in the change frequency parameter. But this robots.txt inclusion of the sitemap location is a useful aid to assisting search crawlers finding your sitemap.

Enpiem Internet Marketing develop robots.txt files containing sitemap.xml locations as a standard part of our website development service and search engine optimisation service. Contact us to see how we can help you promote your business online.